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  Then his fever broke, and he checked himself out to finish the movie.

  ■ ■ ■

  They had shot chronologically as much as possible, and Who We Are’s last scene was the last thing they filmed. It was shot at sunrise, leaving them time for only two takes.

  The scene finds Roger as he slouches, hungover, back out to the meadow. All around him, the revelers lie in the grass, passed out. From another part of the field, a figure walks to meet him. It’s Florence-Diana-Aurora-Divinity-Florence.

  “Hey,” calls Roger.

  “Is that you?” She raises a hand to her eyes.

  “Yeah,” he says. “Who are you today, anyway?”

  Florence-Diana-Aurora-Divinity-Florence shrugs. “It doesn’t matter.” She steps over a mound in a sleeping bag, and they stand face-to-face. They stopped being friends back in the midafternoon, forty minutes and two years ago.

  Breaking the stare first, Florence-Diana-Aurora-Divinity-Florence casts a gaze around the field. The sleepers are motionless. They’re sprawled here and there at all angles, as if shaken out on the ground from high above. In the moments before full dawn, everything—the pine trees crowding the field, the discarded wrappers and crushed cups, the sneakers pointed at the sky—is coated in a hard glaze.

  “Everyone looks like they’re dead, don’t they?” she says.

  Roger yawns. “Maybe they are.”

  The shot reverses, and the two characters are aflame in the first light, as they were in the beginning, dressed in their freshman clothes and with their freshman haircuts and soft freshman faces.

  8.

  The wrap party was held at the local Hoe Bowl. In Sam’s one game, he rolled an ignominious 72. A couple of times, the director dozed off at his lane’s scorer’s table, and he spent the entire night nursing a ginger ale. He remained unwell, though not unhappy.

  Olivia Das sat with him for a while. Her best aspect was a narrow, half-flirty, half-threatening gaze that suggested she was sizing you for filets. “I had such a lovely experience doing this,” she said. “I just wish that Brooks had blown off when you stuck him out in that hurricane.”

  “That’s a mean thing to say,” said Sam.

  “He’s a firebug, Sam! He’s the most horrible, dangerous geek I’ve ever met, and you’re very lucky he didn’t kill a bunch of us for his collection.”

  “Brooks is not a serial murderer. He’s an eccentric. He took me to the hospital when I was sick.”

  “Did you know he filmed a porn when you were in the hospital? One of the tech guys saw. He said it was bestial.” Olivia regarded Sam with her predatory look. “Barf, barf, barf.”

  “I don’t care. And if you offer me a single detail”—he made a snipping gesture—“I’ll edit you right out of the movie.”

  The actress called him a prude, smacked him in the side of the face with a peppermint-scented kiss, rose, and twisted off in a drunken drama-girl pirouette, bob flipping.

  Eighties music blasted from the alley’s overhead speakers. A group of blitzed crew members slid Julian down a lane clattering into the pins, where he lay for some time, like a discarded doll—a passed-out old professor doll, accessorized with urine-stained corduroys. Shards of green and pink light dripped off the mirrored ball, smearing colors over the walls, floors, and faces. Although he was seated, Sam felt wobbly. Dozens of people embraced him, kissed him, clapped him on the back. To the director’s sore ears, the voices of these well-wishers sounded distant, as though they were coming from one end of a long hall, and he was at the opposite end. He felt like he could fall asleep any time he wanted.

  Anthony was in a quizzical mood. The DP kept coming over and sitting down beside Sam, gazing at him soulfully. This was off-putting, not only because Anthony was a man but because of his protruding eyeball.

  “What’s up?”

  Anthony yawned. “Tie-id.”

  Sam said he could relate.

  “You know something?” The DP scrunched his bugeye nearly closed. It made him look ancient and wise, like a sea captain. “You don’t have to be such a cun-ed all the time.”

  “Anthony, I don’t understand what that means.”

  Anthony gave him a friendly pat in the chest. “I think you do dare. I think you do.”

  ■ ■ ■

  A while later Brooks passed through, dressed as if he had just wandered away from a community theater production of Guys and Dolls in a pin-striped vest and a porkpie hat. He pulled on the seven or eight gruesome long hairs sprouting from his chin, saying, “Yay, man, yay! We did it, right?” to anyone he could corner. When he made his way around to Sam, he inquired if the director needed anything.

  “Just a couple hundred bucks,” said Sam.

  Brooks reached to get his wallet.

  Sam put out a hand. “Kidding.”

  “Oh,” said Brooks.

  “Thank you,” said Sam, “for everything. All your help.” He wanted to be more specific, to give the AD his due, express what an essential contribution he truly had made. Gratitude was not an easy thing to articulate, though, not if you didn’t want to be honest. And if Sam were honest, he’d have to say, “The shared unease we felt toward you saved the movie, Brooks. If you were not such a rich weirdo, I couldn’t have pulled it off.”

  Instead, he said, knowing it was inadequate but wanting to be kind, “It would have been really hard to do this without you.”

  The little blond man laughed, nodded several times. He said, “Likewise,” and shuffled away.

  A few others visited the table. The Eskimo offered Sam pot. “I want to ease your suffering,” the grip said. Sam declined. Another person asked, “Wasn’t your father in some movies back in the seventies? Why didn’t you cast him?”

  “It never even occurred to me,” Sam said, not lying.

  A flash came: had Anthony called him a cunt-head? Was that it? Sam couldn’t deny it, and in his weakness, he momentarily forgot his immunity to such charges. For those few seconds he allowed himself to ponder absently whether it had all been necessary, if maybe he could have relaxed a bit, loosened his hold, enjoyed himself more . . . but the idea drifted off like a chunk of flotsam. He was too sick, and anyway, it was too late.

  Wyatt Smithson dropped into the booth beside him. “A question.”

  Of all the actors, Wyatt had been most difficult. Confused by the script, frustrated by basic blocking, he was the only actor to whom Sam occasionally resorted to giving line readings. His guilelessness was why Sam had cast him in the role of Brunson, a character who spends the entire story trying and failing to keep pace with his own evolving emotions. He had done a damned fine job with the part, too.

  But now that the production was complete, Wyatt was simply himself, in no way a bad guy but definitely something of a knob. The actor exhaled breath of beer and popcorn into Sam’s face. “A question. For you, my man.”

  Sam slid down the padded bench to stand. “I’m leaving, Wyatt. I’m exhausted, and you’re wasted. What’s your question?”

  Wyatt scanned around, searching for something. His eyes were shiny, and his nose was drippy. “I think I have the clap,” he said.

  “That’s not a question,” said Sam. “But I wouldn’t be surprised if you do.”

  Wyatt had settled on a bowling scorecard. The stiff square of paper crinkled around his nose, and he honked. “Yeah?”