The doctor prescribed a mode of treatment that was short-term sustentative and long-term palliative. Hearing this, I looked to my mother, whose eyes were closed; who her whole life had never changed, until she did change; who since babyhood I had known as the worldly portal for all of life’s other-worldly grace to emerge through; her skin now roughened, turned to rind; her prematurely gaunt face desaturated of colour and cross-hatched with lines. It felt as though too illogically short a period had passed between her initial diagnosis and present state of ill health, as though the full duration of her sickness had been time-lapsed.

Wending my way through the indistinguishably grand culs-de-sac, I considered my position adrift on the map’s endless beige grid. Since graduating, I had taken up and quit a succession of entry-level jobs at both independent and corporate workplaces, each as weightless and unengaging as the last, monetising only my inborn ability to tolerate high measures of stress without ever showing it.

I had passed the last five years like this, occupied in drone positions I didn’t want to occupy that forced me to act like a person I didn’t want to be. The autogenerated recruitment emails I received on Mondays only solicited the same kind of unskilled, layperson work I already performed, just in different, occasionally more design-conscious, environments. I did not hesitate to lie to people when they asked what I did for a living.

I had no illusions about the arc of my future. I would never come close to affording a home inside or nearby the city, and sometime in the next year my mother would die of a natural cause. I wondered how my father and I would manage when that happened; whether he’d up and die the way some broken-hearted widowers do, and to which compensatory short-term pleasures I would have to turn to alleviate such unendurable pain.

Most of the guests were Benny’s dynastically wealthy high-school friends, whose parents cushioned their salaries with passive incomes, affording them the means to fill exciting, sub-living-wage positions at magazines and non-profits; invest in quality homeware from the windows of boutique stores; and, when they eventually met their timely, old-person deaths, to expire in the same private healthcare practices whence they’d long ago been born. I lived on minus money, in an overdraft that was almost overdrawn. On my mother’s deathbed, my main non-existential concern would still be rent.

What are you talkin’ about? Gunner said. What about my foot?

Mom and Daddy are talking adult-talk. Sometimes adults have to talk adult-talk, Sharon said.

Then he began to pressure and pry and make us both deeply uncomfortable but also – it seems to me now, sitting here alone with my drink, watching the water – even more eager to find a language that might, without exposing our plight, also prove magically useful. We had to blur the details and speak in code and we ended up speaking in a kind of neo-biblical lingo.

I’m not sure we can make it up this hill.

The hill is made of your frickin’ ardor.

No, no, the hill is a big-shot banker in Manhattan. We both climbed hills. We’re both equally guilty.

What hill can’t be climbed? I want to climb the hill with you, Gunner said, and in-between our words there would appear a hint of solace, of the reconciliation that would arrive if we simply continued speaking in code for the rest of our lives with our son between us, asking suspicious questions, redirecting our pain into his pale blue eyes, his tiny ears.

hat night, somewhere in the sixties, or perhaps farther south in the fifties, we glanced to the right and saw what remained of the sunset, framed by the length of the street all the way to the Hudson, a slab of pure lavender light, gloriously perfect, combining with the cold, concrete edges.

That’s as beautiful as anything Rothko painted, I said to Sharon.

(Oh dear, wonderful Sharon. Oh Sharon, love of my life. Oh beloved sharer of a million eternal moments. Oh secret lover of secret situations. Oh you who day by day shared a million intricate conversations.)

That vision has stayed with me. It illustrates how the window looks right now as I sit here with my drink, with the hazy deep blue light edged with the serene, pure black of the window frame, as I sit alone in a room, a year after that night in the hospital, thinking about my wife, about our life together while the river out beyond the window quivers and shakes with the last sunlight of the day. I have come to believe, in this time of mourning, that only in such moments, purely quiet, subsumed in the cusp of daily life, can one – in the terrible incivility of our times – begin to locate a semblance of complete, honest, pure grace.

In an average life lived by a relatively average soul, what else remains but singular moments of astonishingly framed light?

I tell the kids that the most important thing in screenwriting is to have a character that wants something. And I tell them this is harder than it sounds. The amateur tendency is to write characters that sit around on couches, talking to other characters on couches. Everyone loves writing dialogue because you can fill up the page so fast, the rising black like smoke signals in the middle of a whiteout blizzard. I love it too, I admit, but at a certain point, you have to get your protag (as I call it, horribly) off the couch and have them do something, something motivated by their desires. It sounds like the easiest thing in the world, but it’s one of the hardest, like most things that sound like the easiest thing in the world: falling in love, staying in love, not ODing at your husband’s parents’ fiftieth anniversary party.

On the whiteboard, I diagram plot arcs loosely cribbed from Save the Cat and Story. I tell them each scene needs to have a positive and negative charge – that, in other words, something has to change. I tell them that this is true of scenes, and true of sequences as well, a progression of linked scenes. Sequences have to change, and so do acts, which sequences build, and so do screenplays, which are made of three to five acts, depending. I tell them that story is really about change, from the macro to micro level, and that, in this sense, a screenplay is like one of those images made from smaller constituent images of the same thing: a face, for example, but when you get closer you see the features are made of the same face, and closer still, that elements of the features – the shadow of a nostril, for example – is made of very small faces, and when you press your eyeballs up to those faces, you see a pixelated constellation of a thousand more faces. I tell them there’s a word for this that has escaped me and that I’ll give extra credit to anyone who tracks it down, which is ridiculous, as this is a talented and gifted summer camp, and there are no grades.

ou asked me once, toward the end, after you’d discovered the withdrawals – the ones from our bank account, and the ones I was going through in that hotel room during one of my ‘business trips’ – why I did drugs. I told you that growing up in a loud and alcoholic household, I liked to enter the storage cubbyhole under our kitchen floor, where it was earthy and cool and dark and still, and pretend that everything outside had vanished, though I could hear the distant yelling, and that as an adult narcotics held a tremendous instinctive appeal, in the way it offered a quiet place to hide, though it was better than that cubby since you could take the still place with you wherever you went. But this was false. Oh, it may have been true years ago, but the need had long since become its own truth, the only truth that mattered.

Because the other truth, I guess, is that I don’t see the point of all this, however you define this. From the outside, the drugs may seem to take away meaning, to confer a dead pointlessness to the proceedings; from the inside, however, it is just the opposite. They provide a titanium-grade purpose to my days, one that is knowable and achievable. Far from meaningless, dope is the greatest possible meaning, an absolutely defined value and good in a world of rumors and wraiths, fleeting desires and disappointments flickering incandescent against the void. It is nothing, but it is something. It is the somethingest nothing there is.

Did I want children, David? I know I always told you I didn’t, but did I, secretly? If not, why did I continue sobbing all the way back to the hotel, all the way through the dose, to the point of addressing the question to you, imaginary you? Are you glad we didn’t? Are you going to do it with . . . Philippa? Can that really be her name? Are you going to have a little Silverlake family? Are you going to wear a Baby Bjorn at the co-op? Are you going to name the girl Hyacinth and the boy Elderflower? Is there any way to reclaim the time we’ve lost? Is there a place where our days aren’t numbered? What is your worst fear? What is mine? And are you even reading this?

Leonard showed me his screenplay-in-progress. It is about an ill man, who keeps getting sicker and the doctors can’t figure out why. He’s at death’s door (the title: At Death’s Door), when they discover a small alien being that has burrowed into his abdomen. That’s all Leonard had so far.

‘What’s next,’ I said.

‘That depends,’ he said.

‘On what,’ I said.

‘On if he decides to have it removed.’

‘Why wouldn’t he have it removed?’

‘I don’t know, maybe he’s gotten used to it. Maybe he likes it,’ he said, and looked at me meaningfully. We were working outside today, or ‘working’, the students spread out here and there with their laptops on the long, sloping lawn. A breeze shivered the grass down the hill, and I thought how strange it is that you can see the movement of this great, invisible thing, although maybe that’s not strange at all, and I just haven’t been paying attention to things like that. I am suddenly, horribly, alive, although that might be not having slept in almost a week. Colors assault me like loud sounds. I feel everything.