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.