When I got to the wharf, I ran into three Aleut cousins, who sat on a wooden bench and stared out at the bay and cried. Most of the homeless Indians in Seattle come from Alaska. One by one, each of them hopped a big working boat in Anchorage or Barrow or Juneau, fished his way south to Seattle, jumped off the boat with a pocketful of cash to party hard at one of the highly sacred and traditional Indian bars, went broke and broker, and has been trying to find his way back to the boat and the frozen North ever since.

These Aleuts smelled like salmon, I thought, and they told me they were going to sit on that wooden bench until their boat came back.

“How long has your boat been gone?” I asked.

“Eleven years,” the elder Aleut said.

I cried with them for a while.

“Hey,” I said. “Do you guys have any money I can borrow?”

They didn’t.

I was so intent on watching her eat that I barely touched my own food. After a while, I got up and turned on the radio and there was that song again, the one we’d heard coming home the night before, and we both listened to it all the way through without saying a word. When the d.j. came on with his gasping juvenile voice and lame jokes, she got up and went to the bathroom, passing right by the bedroom door without a thought for the cat. She was in the bathroom a long while, running water, flushing, showering, and I felt lost without her. I wanted to tell her that I loved her, wanted to extend a whole list of invitations to her: she could move in with me, stay here indefinitely, bring her cats with her, no problem, and we could both look after the big cat together, see to its needs, tame it, and make it happy in its new home—no more cages, and meat, plenty of meat. I was scrubbing the frying pan when she emerged, her hair wrapped in one of the new towels. She was wearing makeup and she was dressed in her Daggett’s outfit. “Hey,” I said.

It wasn't until high school that all of this unfulfilled potential was discovered; up until then, she had been simply great: great kid, great student. A pleasure to have in class. But beginning in the ninth grade, she felt her greatness gently ebbing away, retreating to a cool, deep cistern hidden somewhere inside her. I think it's there! her teachers hollered down into the darkness. It is there! her father insisted. But where? she felt like asking. Because there was something faintly suspicious, faintly cajoling, about the way they spoke to her, as if she alone knew the location, and was refusing to tell them for the sake of being contrary.

After a month on the p-ward you don’t get telegrams or get-well cards or stuffed animals anymore, and the petals fall off your flowers and curl like dead skin on the dresser top while the stems go soft and rot in their vases. That’s a bad stretch, that Sargasso in the psych ward when the last winds of your old life die out. In the real world I was still legally married—my wife was a film producer, but she’d left me for a more glamorous opportunity, the star of our most recent movie. The script I’d written was somewhat autobiographical and the character he played was modelled after my dead father. So now my wife was banging Dad’s doppelgänger and I hadn’t talked to her in I don’t know how long. In between therapy sessions and the administration of the usual battery of tests (Thematic Apperception, Rorschach, M.M.P.I.), as well as blood-draws and vitals, I sat on the sofa in the lounge, hoping for a certain zazen zeroness—serene and stupid—but mostly getting hung up on cravings for tobacco. One night after dinner I sat on the sofa and moved my finger to different locations around my head—below the ear, right in the ear, above the eyeball, against the roof of my mouth—experimenting with places to put the gun. I tried filling the dreary hours with poetry—my first love—but I’d been a script doctor too long. I hadn’t futzed with an iamb in ages, and the words just dog-paddled around the page, senselessly. I was desperate enough for a nicotine high to harvest some of the more smokable butts out of the Folgers coffee cans the staff filled with kitty litter and set out on the patio. The pickings were slim, though; in the p-ward people tend to smoke their cigarettes ravenously. You look around, and everybody’s got burnt, scabby fingers just like the Devil.

After that, I came to see her every night. I totally dug her broken bohemian thing, it was so the opposite of my trajectory, my silly success. I’d made a million dollars each of the last four years running and never felt worse in my life. I’m not whining—I’m not one of those whiners. One of those affluent crybabies. But I’d lost the plot and was afraid that if my life improved any more I’d vanish. By contrast a woman setting herself on fire seemed very real; on doctor’s orders, she was strapped in at nine o’clock sharp, pinned to the flat board of her bed like a specimen. At first it was unnerving to talk to a woman who was lashed to her bed with a contraption of leather belts and heavy brass buckles, so I angled my seat away from her face and spoke to her knees, which looked, in the faint blue light, as though they’d been carved by water from a bar of soap.

For ten years I’d been dutiful and hardworking, cranking out those big-time Hollywood screenplays in order to bankroll a lifestyle that broke the silly-meter. Now it was like, Bring on the degradation! Let’s break through the bullshit and get real! I wished I’d brought another bottle of wine, to help lower me back into the bohemian hopes I’d had at twenty-five—literature and pussy. Baudelaire and women that stank like Gruyère! I’d never really wanted to write screenplays. I’d wanted to be a poet. And here I was, in poetry central. There were candles on the shelves, on the floor, fat and thin candles, tall and short, red and green and all the gradients of soft pastel, scented with the sweet and cloying flavors of guava, pomegranate, mango. Everything here was luxe, calme, and volupté, all right. In his Tahitian diary Gauguin wrote, “Life being what it is, we dream of revenge,” a phrase whose ruthlessness used to be right up my alley. But what kind of revenge did I need when last year I’d managed to enjoy three summers, two springs, and four falls—one in Moscow, another in Florence, two more in Cairo and Burma? I was a touch manic, and after I walked off the set of my last movie, winter just didn’t make it onto the itinerary. I was like a god, laughing at the weather. Who needed Gauguin and his gaudy painted paradise? For me, now, the most extreme, remote, Polynesian corner of the globe was inside the ballerina’s skull.

Weddings had lapsed entirely, birthdays were a phone call at the most, and at Christmas, Otto and William sent lavish gifts of out-of-season fruits, in the wake of which would arrive recriminatory little thank-you notes. From mid-December to mid-January they would absent themselves, not merely from the perilous vicinity of Otto's family, but from the entire country, to frolic in blue water under sunny skies.

When he was speaking with people, he found himself in a state of apprehension, of nervous excitement, lest he be profoundly offended by what they said or did. For nearly a year, he had dated a girl who did such neck cycles at moments he deemed inappropriate. After completing one she had done in a bar they frequented, she had asked him, "Didn't I look like a kitty cat?" "No!" he replied, his voice acid with distaste. At once he regretted it. They spent the night lying in her bed like wooden planks. The next morning she dressed in silence, her face grim. He had tried to assuage her with boyish gaiety. She had broken her silence with one sentence: "I don't want to see you anymore."

When regret threatened to sink him, he made efforts to count his blessings. He had a passable job with an accounting firm, an affectionate older sister living in Boston with whom he spoke once a month, and a rent-controlled apartment. He still took pleasure in books. He had been a comparative literature major in college before taking a business degree, judging that comp lit would get him nowhere. His health was good. He was only thirty-six.

Only! Would he tell himself on his next birthday that he was only thirty-seven, and try to comfort himself with a word that mediated between hope and dread?

Yet was it possible that his evasions, his lies, were transparent to others? And they chose not to see through them because the truth might be so much more burdensome?