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  As futile as it obviously was, Sam went ahead and blind-mailed the script to the agents of the twenty-nine living members of Patch and Wassel’s list (changing Merlin to Guinevere for Ms. Strep’s copy), fully expecting to receive zero responses. It was a good-faith effort. He planned to return to Patch and Wassel in a month’s time, tell them he’d tried, and plead for them to forget about getting An Actor, and just to fork over their money.

  And then, incredibly, three weeks after the mailing, Rick Savini’s agents notified Sam of the actor’s interest in the part.

  ■ ■ ■

  Savini had played the barfly in the Tarantino movie about all the different gangs simultaneously attempting to break into Capone’s vault; he’d starred in Clunkers, the Coen brothers film about the harassed generator salesman with the sick wife and the sociopathic son and the house with a haunted bomb shelter; Savini had fallen in love with a madwoman in a Soderbergh film; and he’d played an alcoholic dentist for Jane Campion. Rick Savini made Sam think of Jack Lemmon—sensitive, funny, small—but more stepped on, somehow. He was good. He was really good.

  In The Dirt Nap, a somewhat obscure indie Sam particularly liked, Savini played a doomed numbers runner. Right before Savini is executed by his best friend, the best friend attempts to comfort the numbers runner by explaining that they’re going to bury him in a nice place, in the concrete of a brand-new public swimming pool. A lot of people remembered Savini’s semi-famous response—“Aw, man. Kids are going to be peeing on me for eternity, Lester”—the last words before his friend pulls the trigger. What remained with Sam was the actor’s face, the glum hook at the right corner of Savini’s mouth as he ponders the ice-crusted mud of the yawning rectangular hole in the ground. That look was so smart, and so hurt, that it made the dialogue redundant. You could tell what he was seeing: a murky, eternal view of sky through green water and kicking legs.

  Savini had given remarkable performances as conmen, streetwise losers, and ordinary men harried to the brink. The kind of ragged self-awareness that defined the morose, ageless drug dealer was his specialty. Rick Savini wasn’t simply An Actor; he was ideal.

  It was a tricky part. Merlin not only spent the entire film in the remote bathroom stall, but he had just one set of lines, which he spoke with slight variations to everyone who knocked on his door.

  INT. FERRER MEMORIAL LIBRARY—BASEMENT LEVEL FIVE RESTROOM

  Brunson, jonesing, stands outside Merlin’s stall. He gives the door a sharp rap.

  CUT TO:

  INSIDE THE STALL: Merlin sits on the toilet lid, perusing The Economist.

  MERLIN

  I’m in here.

  BRUNSON

  I really have to go.

  MERLIN

  Well, you’ll just have to wait your turn. I’m going to be a while. I ate Peruvian last night. And some Haitian. And some of whatever that stuff is they eat in Seattle. I stuffed my fucking face.

  BRUNSON

  Peruvian is good.

  MERLIN

  Indeed it is.

  BRUNSON

  How long are you going to be? Ten minutes?

  MERLIN

  Better make it twenty. I got a ten-turd pileup on the intestinal freeway.

  Merlin stands. He sets down his Economist and removes the cap from the toilet tank. Inside are several rolls of bills, a plastic bag of drugs, and an automatic pistol. From the bag he fishes out a vial of powder.

  BACK TO:

  OUTSIDE THE STALL: Brunson slips a twenty-dollar bill under the door.

  MERLIN (O.S.)

  I’m telling you, though, buddy. The Peruvian stuff is good, but it’s serious. I’m not slagging on Peru here. I’m just saying you need to consume in moderation. Take it from one who knows. It goes down a hell of a lot easier than it comes out.

  The vial comes rolling out from the under the door. Brunson snatches it and dashes from the restroom.

  CUT TO:

  INSIDE THE STALL: The drug dealer resumes his seat, opens his magazine.

  MERLIN

  Can’t say I didn’t warn him.

  (It was notable, perhaps, that Merlin was the only specific element in the script that Booth singled out for praise. “The fellow who lives in the restroom stall, the drug dealer, him I did find quite amusing.”)

  ■ ■ ■

  That the agents presented Rick’s participation in the context of his usual salary—a fee well in excess of the forty thousand Bummer City had promised—was irrelevant. Sam didn’t hesitate to respond that it was no problem. It didn’t matter that he had tapped everyone he knew or that it was too risky to press Wassel and Patch for more. (To request additional funding from Brooks was a last, last resort. Dealing with the AD made Sam feel like he was sticking his bare hand in a dark, mossy hole—the guy was just off—and he preferred not to unless there was no other choice.)

  He’d figure something out.

  5.

  Occasionally, Sam allowed himself the release of an evening on campus, where, between sips of frothy beer in plastic cups, he tried to impress girls (usually freshmen, sometimes sophomores) with the details of his endeavor. A (very) few were stirred to invite him back to their vanilla-scented dorm rooms. More often the young women of Russell seemed to find his approach transparent. One comely sophomore, an artfully cracked iron-on of Germaine Greer stretched across her braless and forthrightly nippled chest, told Sam that he made “the art of cinema sound like bomb defusal.” He said that was exactly what it was, “but only if you know what you’re doing.” She smirked and said, “Nope. Nopety-nope-nope-nope.” The result was, that night, and most others like it, too drunk or too stoned to make his way home to the apartment, he crashed in Brooks Hartwig, Jr.’s, dorm room/lair.

  These drop-ins, no matter how late after midnight Sam knocked on the door, were always welcomed by Brooks, who was nocturnal.

  “Sleepover!” he said the first time Sam showed up. “Yay!”

  Shitfaced, Sam clung to the doorknob and put his finger to his lips. “Down to a dull roar, please, Brooks.”

  “You can make a bed out of my laundry, okay?”

  “No.” Sam lurched to Brooks’s mattress and flopped down. “You can make a bed out of your laundry.”

  “Oh.” Brooks gave an appreciative nod, as if some long-puzzled-over concept had finally clicked. “Right.”

  The AD never complained about Sam’s visits—not about the discomfort, or the distraction from his studies, or the intrusion on a potential booty call. Though in Sam’s defense, it became clear that he wasn’t hindering the other man in any way. Brooks was apparently undeterred in his nightly procedure, which did not in any case include studying, sleeping, or amorous appointments.

  If he awakened before morning, Sam would inevitably open his eyes to see Brooks, hunched Indian-style on the floor while something foreign and esoteric and creepy played on his laptop: a Dutch movie where everyone moved backward, talked backward, and the subtitles appeared backward; a dubbed Portuguese movie that was a single seventy-two-minute take of an eerily upbeat chef matter-of-factly guiding the viewer through an old family recipe for making soup out of a lonely person. While he watched, the AD rocked continuously, like some kind of holy man. The behavior disturbed Sam but also intrigued him. Where did Brooks find these things? Did he actually enjoy them? What were the names of the drugs that Brooks consumed, and what quantities?

  The semiotics of these films, and of Brooks’s own film, struck Sam as baldly psychiatric. He could understand why someone might want to make one—to see if it could be done, as a strange joke, maybe—but he had no earthly idea why someone would want to watch them.

  “Brooks,” he demanded one night, “what is the point of this shit?”

  Sam lay in the bed, his bladder very full, watching Brooks watch the soup movie, which took place entirely in a large, dingy kitchen with checkered tiles.

  Off to one side of the kitchen there is a bathtub, and in the bathtub there is the lonely person, a young
woman in a one-piece purple bathing suit, persuasively glum with her straight-ahead stare. The chef, though his dubbed patter is as ebullient and seamless as that of any real television chef and his smiles and flourishes are also in keeping with the genre, evinces a criminal dissipation. Half-shaved, he claps around in ragged flip-flops, and wears a dingy unexplained bandage at the side of his neck. After filling a bucket with water, the chef returns to the bathtub and the lonely person, soles snapping against the linoleum, and explains, “I’m using water. But if you would prefer broth, that is fine, too.”

  It was February, a new year. Predawn light limned the edges of the sheet hung over the window.

  Seated on the rug a few feet away from his open laptop, Brooks stopped rocking back and forth. He swiveled around to squint at Sam with bloodshot eyes. “Oh, like. Like . . . What do you mean?”

  Intoxication tended to inflame Sam’s incredulity. “I mean, if I have to listen to this—whoever—warlock, necromancer—person—explain why the miserable soul should be allowed to soak in a quart of vinegar poured from a chipped pitcher, then you might at least tell me why.”

  “Why? Uh . . . why not?” Brooks blinked.

  “No, Brooks. That is not a satisfactory answer.”

  Brooks blinked some more. He scratched at his forehead. “Well, it’s not like anything else, is it?”

  “No. Still not satisfactory. Go again.”

  “It’s about soup, making soup. What other movie is about making soup, Sam?” The AD scratched his chin and rubbed his nose. For no real reason, he swept a hand through the empty air. “And the main ingredient is a person!” he blurted, as if Sam might have forgotten.

  “Let’s add some onion!” The chef dumps a fistful of diced onions into the water at the lonely person’s feet, then makes a show of wiping his hands. “Optimally, the onion should be from the garden of a man who has cancer. At the very least—the very, very least—you should rub your onion on a cancer person.”

  Either Brooks was brainless, or he was hiding something, or he was a complete madman. Sam wanted to poke him with a sharp pole for being so unfathomable. “Let’s try this another way, Brooks. Name one normal movie that you like.”

  “What do you mean by normal?”

  “A movie you saw in a goddamn theater. And not a theater where everyone had their hands inside their raincoats.”

  The younger man dropped his head into his hands and made a noise as if a doctor were sticking a tongue depressor down his throat. A minute or two elapsed. The gagging noise continued. Sam reached his arm out from under the blanket to fish around on the floor near Brooks’s bed. He found a balled-up white sock and hurled it at him. The sock sailed over the AD’s head to strike the wall with a soft thud. Sam fished again and came up with a box of kitchen matches.

  Brooks glanced up. “I’m sorry. I’m blanking. I mean, you know, like—I like pretty much all of them. You know? Because it’s just—It takes you away. They take you away. The movies do.”

  Sam, arm cocked, box of matches in hand, hesitated.

  ■ ■ ■

  In a film theory class, Sam could sit at a seminar table and highlight the intertextual fatuousness of E.T. with the best of them—could chortle at Spielberg’s (frankly colonial) infantilizing of his spaceman, who is dressed and bathed and plied with candy and even jammed into a mound of stuffed animals—but what truly bothered Sam about the movie was that it was simply dishonest. No living being, in this galaxy or any other, was entirely good. E.T. was as fake as Jesus.

  His own cinematic predilections began—and nearly ended—with that single negative criterion: dishonesty.

  Of course, fraudulence abounded across cinema. Anyone who had ever been privy to a relationship between truly opposite personalities, for instance, had to be aware that most romantic comedies were utter horseshit; and if you’d ever spent more than a layover in Europe, you recognized that behind every “prestige” picture set in the golden French countryside or on the verdant Italian coast was hidden the actuality of rank plumbing, apathetic service, ambient anti-Semitism, and very few nonsmoking oases.

  B movies, however, were the worst. These beacons of untruth—not only the stock and trade of Booth Dolan but also the breeding ground for Spielberg, Lucas, and other brokers of the meretricious—were composed of everything that Sam abhorred: characters who are absolutely good; characters who are mindlessly evil; otherwise retiring female characters who turn into unstoppable killing machines whenever children are endangered; black characters whose sole attribute is nobility; characters who say funny things while being held at knifepoint or gunpoint or facing some other existential threat; characters who are wholly defined by their sexual traits—like horny females deserving of death and impotent venal males; brilliant preadolescents; brilliant serial killers; attractive streetwalkers; tanned scientists; God and heaven; the devil and hell; people with magic powers—“superheroes”—who dress up in costumes and fight crime but never use their magic in a sexual context, which would be the first thing that a normal person would do (and definitely the first thing Sam would do); spaceship control panels of unlabeled, colored lights; canted—“dutched”—shots used to suggest the presence of the supernatural; extreme wide-angle lenses—“fish-eyes”—to suggest first-person intoxication or disorientation; shots that dive, swoop, tornado, or otherwise behave as though the viewer is a fussy toddler in a high chair who needs distracting, and the camera is a spoonful of mashed peas coming in for a landing; and (excluding a handful of special cases) sequels.

  By the opposite token, the movies that Sam considered exceptional were varied, artful, and—centrally—true. There was the icily beautiful and terrible childhood of Bergman’s Fanny and Alexander; there was Truffaut’s The 400 Blows and the meticulous hearing it gives to the existence of a resoundingly unspecial boy; there was Lumet’s Dog Day Afternoon, a tragedy about two hopeless men—the first hopeless in love, the second hopeless in his loyalty to the first—that was disguised as a bank robbery caper.

  The single take in all of cinema that Sam loved best was in Dog Day Afternoon, when Al Pacino’s Sonny asks John Cazale’s Sal if there’s a country where he wants to escape. Sal replies, “Wyoming.” It’s a simple two-shot: Sal to the left, Sonny to the right. Lumet doesn’t try to highlight the moment with a cutaway to a close-up. The line should be a gut-buster, but the laughter never slips past your lips. Because, as the two men look at each other, as the viewer sees that Sonny sees that Sal doesn’t understand, we realize that these criminals threatening murder are basically children, and there’s nothing amusing about that, it’s heartrending and awful. Sam could remember, at age fourteen, watching a rented DVD of Dog Day Afternoon, alone in the house—Allie out, Booth far away—the pitch black of a northeastern winter night pulled over the living room window, the pulsing, weeping bullet hole of a zit on his neck forgotten in the rapture of the film. When Sal said “Wyoming,” Sam—all by himself—cried out to the empty house, “Oh, God! Will you guys please just give up? They’re going to kill you!”

  And it was just a two-shot. The director hadn’t intruded, the actors hadn’t seemed like actors, and it was so authentic, so recognizable; the exchange was the sum of every dismayed realization ever shared between two men throughout history. It wasn’t too much to say that until he saw that moment in that film, Sam had never come close to comprehending how agonizingly difficult it was to explain yourself to another person, to make him see you as you really were. It was like trying to explain Wyoming.

  The few films Sam loved were the antithesis of dishonest. There was often humor in them, and sometimes romance and adventure, but in each case the directors steered them to a conclusion that was resonant—undeniable—and spared no one, certainly not the audience.

  ■ ■ ■

  “You can help yourself,” said Brooks. “I’ve got, you know, a whole box of boxes under the bed.”

  Sam was still holding the box of matches, pulled back to his ear, ready to throw at
the AD. “You really can’t think of a movie you dislike?” It was a genuinely mystifying notion. Even Booth proclaimed some perverse standards.

  The AD seemed to sense what Sam was thinking. “Sorry,” Brooks said. He scratched his cheek, wrinkled his nose, scratched his nose, and rubbed the top of his head. He made another swipe at the air again, as if to ward off a fly, but there was no fly.

  “Whatever, Brooks. It doesn’t matter. Forget I asked.” If the AD wasn’t on something, he should get on something. Sam dropped the matchbox on the floor and pulled the blankets tight to his chin.

  On the laptop, the half-shaved chef drags a hot plate the size of a truck tire over to the bathtub and slides it underneath. The lonely person, the young woman in the purple bathing suit, does nothing, just lies in the tub. “And now,” says the chef, the dubbed voice becoming slightly wistful, “there is nothing left but to wait until you have brought the mixture to a great boil. There will be a stink. Sorry about that. And do not be surprised when the pitiful creature commences to beg. That is the most regular thing of all, essential to the flavoring of my dear grandmother’s soup. Okay. I’ve had a nice time cooking with you.”

  Brooks rocked back and forth.

  The coils of the giant hot plate begin to glow brighter and brighter, and the credits begin to roll. The chef sits on the edge of the tub, crosses his legs, and digs at his neck bandage. The lonely person stares ahead.

  Sam dragged the blanket higher, over his head.

  ■ ■ ■

  Other nights, from the apartment, Sam called Polly at her parents’ condo in Florida. Once he thought he heard her shush someone in the background. He didn’t say anything about it, but after that he called her less.

  ■ ■ ■

  For months he relentlessly revised the script, paring away dialogue, simplifying transitions, doing everything he could to make the film operate like a flip-book moving forward on smooth dual tracks of narrative and time. Sam’s personal shooting script was spliced with hand-drawn diagrams of the camera angles and movements that he wanted. He knew precisely how it would go—each day, each setup, each scene.