[...] I got into Harvard on a film criticism scholarship. At the time, it was a big thing in the Ivy Leagues. A moneymaker for the university. We competed in criticism decathlons against the other Ivies to packed auditoriums. Film was of major cultural import in the seventies, that magical decade for American filmmaking. Now, of course, it has fallen by the wayside. Now everyone loves virology. Now my virologist nemesis is revered, doing important work in the development of a hookworm vaccine, a vaccine that will help hundreds of millions of people and hurt hundreds of millions of hookworms.

She is the kind of woman whose absence in my waking life as the novelizer—if I the novelizer were to be waking from a dream in the dreams—leaves me in despair. She looks at me the way lovers in movies look at each other. That beautiful fake way I desperately crave. I know this is a lie that movies perpetuate, but it does its work on me in movies and in dreams. Also all other times.

NOT MUCH OF note in my waking life. People get sick or don’t, people die or don’t, I watch TV or don’t. Sometimes I smoke without remembering lighting up. I continue to go to a deranged hypnotist and try to recall a film by a deceased African American gentleman. I sell collapsible clown shoes. I eat Slammy burgers. In my waking life, I am not a novelizer. Nor will I be many other people, as I will in the dreams. I am, while awake, in fact, not even fully me. I believe if I had the courage to be completely me, I would be a somewhat more interesting person. I believe people would be drawn to me. I believe I would not be lonely. I cannot bear to believe that what I am while awake is the entirety of me. I unstrap myself from my sleeping chair and perform my morning ablutions. Then head for Barassini’s.

[...] I theorize Rush had experienced some sort of transfer of information from my brain to his. I am not clear on the science of this, but there is no other explanation. I notice he received his PhD from Columbia, where I am often on campus carrying my ally mattress. The thought transfer could’ve happened any one of those times.

There was a lovely woman with whom, as a young man, I was smitten. She seemed to have similar feelings for me. We flirted in a harmless way at work (we were concierges at a well-known upscale New York boutique hotel, I won’t say the name but you’d have heard of it). I was married at the time, too young and unhappily, but we’d had an accidental child and I was doing the responsible thing. This is me in a nutshell. I am responsible. I am a good man. I always do the right thing. But is doing the right thing the right thing? Or is doing the right thing the cowardly thing? The thing that doesn’t make waves? The thing with which others cannot find fault? If romantic films have taught us anything, it is that by being responsible we are being irresponsible—to ourselves. To the cosmos. To the narrative. Even to those we need to wrong terribly by leaving them. Because is not it better to be honest with her, him, thon? I think perhaps it is. In the end, my marriage fell apart anyway. She became smitten with an art critic, a mediocre one at that. But it was too late. My Concierge to Merge (as we once jokingly referred to each other) also married an art critic. A separate art critic, although equally mediocre. One marvels at the accidental symmetry of life. And she was happy, ecstatically so, she told me, although I always felt she sounded a tad defensive. And my life was ruined. And I aged. And I look unhappy, ecstatically unhappy. And I don’t sleep at night. And I take pills to help me cope. And it’s not only her, although if I had her, I feel certain I would be fine with every other disappointment, but I don’t, so my professional failures come to the fore. In a sense, the same brand of cowardice that kept me from pursuing my true love kept me from pursuing my true chosen profession. Oh, I made one movie. I made it on a shoestring with money I had borrowed from my wealthy-by-marriage sister. It didn’t do for my career what I had imagined it would, what to this day I believe it should have. It is, and I say this as an objective professional critic with a PhD in the cinema of postwar Europe, perhaps the single most brilliant film of the last twenty years. Certainly, there were problems with it. I won’t say there weren’t. For one thing, it was decades ahead of its time. For another, I concede, it was perhaps too emotionally draining for audiences. Most goers are not looking for an experience that unrelentingly intense, that devastatingly heartbreaking, an experience that will change them forever. And then there were the critics, who were, in a word, jealous. They all want to be filmmakers themselves but do not have the talent, so they expressed their rage with a slew of moderately negative reviews. In some cases, they refused to review it at all.

AT BARASSINI’S, THE annoying, overbearingly concerned Tsai hovers and clucks on and on about my poor head. It’s unbearable. No, I don’t need an ice pack. No, I don’t need her to take me to the emergency room. No, I don’t need two aspirin. Or some tea. Or water. No, I like the cheese in my beard. Good God, woman, leave me be.

AND SO IT goes. He lies and lies and lies about the film for well over an hour. Clearly, he has not seen it. He has made up a film that is by definition antithetical to Ingo’s concept, antithetical to Ingo’s artistic mission. I have been thrust into a waking nightmare, but I hold my tongue until the question-and-answer period. After a series of softball questions and inane answers, after my constantly raised hand is ignored again and again and again, the yarmulked doppelgänger finally calls on me.

“Yes, you, the clown in the fourth row.”

“Which one of us is the clown here?” I say cuttingly.

“You are,” he says, clearly confused by my question.

I fall into an open personhole.

As I am climbing out, a car parks on top of the hole. I call up to the driver, explain my predicament. He hears me but refuses to give up the spot, even briefly. He’d been driving around for a half an hour looking for a place to park, he yells down to me. I do understand his predicament as I’m sure he understands mine. And I tell him so. We understand each other’s predicament, we conclude. There is something about the yarmulke on my head that does remind me to put myself in the other fellow’s shoes. That is a good thing. He says he is heading downtown and I should do the same. If he spots another manhole, he will pry it open for me with the crowbar he keeps in his hollow leg. I nod, which serves no purpose, as he cannot see me, and begin to make my way south, sloshing through the fetid water. There should be more kindness in the world. I do have a bit of time till I’m due at Charlie Rose’s studio and I need to head south anyway. And, really, when it comes down to it, the fact that the fellow was so honest about his predicament and also seemed sympathetic to my predicament, which I was honest about, encourages me to not make a stink (ha ha!), and the truth is, I’m down here already anyway, so why not continue on my way down here? And the truth is, when I think about it, if I’m down here, I can’t fall down here because I’m already down here. So there’s that.

It is exceedingly dark though. I have the flashlight on my new iPhone, but it produces an odd, diffuse, almost useless light. When I was a young man, flashlights did their jobs and illuminated the dark, not just small-print menus in dimly lit restaurants. It was a different and heady time. I point the phone toward the floor to use what little light it gives to avoid tripping over anything fecal, not to mention rats. The rats are the thing I dislike most about my sewer forays, as I’ve come to call them. There are rumors of rats down here as big as German shepherds, the people not the dogs. I learned this from what I consider a reliable source, a sewer worker who had appeared in the Frederick Wiseman documentary Effluence (1978). I had interviewed him for a monograph I was writing entitled Pipe Dreams about sewers in dreams in film. It was the first sewer-centric film study since Mark Kermode’s 1993 essay on the C.H.U.D. series, which I believe was entitled I, Mark Kermode, Am an Asshole. I cannot be certain though; several of his essays have been similarly titled.

“Where’s your God now?” pitches Marjorie, selling past the close. “Slammy’s. We never claimed we’re divine. Except, of course, for our hot apple pies. Mmm-mmm. Slammy’s.”

“Hypno Joe’s coffee is delicious with hot apple pie,” Hypno Joe’s voice injects into my hypnotic trance.

I try to ignore him, but in this state, I find myself highly suggestible.

“All right, one bag,” I say.

“Great. I’ll ring it up. It’ll be ready to go when you awaken.”