This summer, everyone is drinking Aperol spritzes, and Simon orders one now. I would love an Aperol spritz, he says to the waitress, emphasizing that word—love—in a manner he never does with Andrew, his ostensible boyfriend, who is sitting across from him on the patio of the Moroccan restaurant. Between the heat and the cadaveric reek of New York City in July, Andrew is already sour and sweaty, and when the waitress turns to him, pen hovering over her black notebook, he is tempted to note that the current Aperol craze is, in fact, the product of a multimillion-dollar marketing campaign, with free spritzes doled out in the Hamptons and Palm Springs; he knows this because he recently wrote an article about it, or rather half-plagiarized a Times article about it for the news aggregator where he is forced to work. But experience has taught Andrew that nobody, Simon least of all, appreciates it when he points this sort of thing out, and so he holds his tongue. In a fit of selflessness, he even orders an Aperol spritz for himself, too.
They are meant to be celebrating the sale of Simon’s first screenplay. An up-and-coming production company has optioned the script, but there is no guarantee it will be made, and Simon, giddy with proximity to success, once again walks Andrew through the next steps. We need a name attached, Simon says, as if he has not said this very thing nine hundred times before. Someone famous enough to bring in some financing, but not too famous. Not famous enough to expect a real payday. The film is a corporate drama, a genre not presently in vogue, although Simon has complicated it—given the story currency, so to speak—by making its protagonist gay, a secret the character grows more and more desperate to keep the higher he rises in the ranks of Wall Street. This, Simon says the production company says, is what makes the story pop. It has festival-buzz potential, awards-show potential. Andrew read an early draft of the script and gave Simon notes; the story seemed a little obvious, and he had a hard time believing the nice liberal stewards of capital would mind a homo in their midst. But when he pointed this out, Simon simply accused him of being in one of his moods. Don’t take your creative shit out on me, Simon said—an imputation that struck Andrew as both below-the-belt and probably fair, since his short-story collection, the fruit of many years’ toil, had yet to find a publisher. At the Moroccan restaurant—even with Simon across from him, even amid the happy din of the citizens of New York City—Andrew feels an incongruous surge of loneliness. When their drinks arrive, and they touch glasses, the clink seems to echo up and down the little corridor of St. Mark’s Place. L’chaim, Andrew says, although neither he nor Simon are Jewish.
Andrew’s phone, face down on the table, vibrates. He turns it over; it’s his agent. He lifts the screen to show Simon, who nods, and Andrew steps onto the sidewalk for privacy.
Andrew, Leah says. How are you? I’m afraid I have some bad news.
Yet another publisher, Leah tells him, has passed on his short-story collection. The big houses already declined, long ago, as did the better-known indies. This latest rejection is from a small Midwestern press, respected but obscure. You know how it goes, Leah says, addressing both Andrew and the second-person plural of received wisdom.
By now, Andrew is standing at the curb. The streetlamps come on, bathing the block in the odd half-light of metropolitan dusk. Across the street, a stray cat—very small, perhaps a kitten—slinks along the sidewalk, hugging the shadows.
What did they say? Andrew asks. About the stories.
Leah sighs. She is competent, brusque, one more ambitious woman in the highly feminized field of literary representation. Nothing you haven’t heard already, she says. The publisher admired the writing. But short-story collections are a tough sell, especially when the stories in question are full of miserable people who go nowhere and do nothing—members of the downwardly mobile professional class, lascivious and faithless, unfashionably privileged, still children even if they are nominal adults.
I see, Andrew says, although he isn’t sure he does.
It might be time, Leah says, to think about a new approach. During the small Midwestern press’s polite rejection, one of the editors made an interesting offhand remark. What if, this editor wondered, the stories in the collection were linked—the chance encounters and adulteries spun into a web of connections, the seclusion of each character tempered by narrative communion? In isolation, the characters have a certain coldness, but if the collection did more to bridge the gap between them, their alienation might feel more poignant—the acuteness of the city-dweller’s solitude in a crowd. We could also, Leah suggests, take this one step further. A linked short-story collection is basically a novel. And a novel is an easier sell.
Leah pauses, as if weighing her next words carefully. Finally, she adds, If the stories were linked, I could even imagine this getting picked up as an anthology TV series. You know—the sad and horny singles of New York. There’s always a market for that.
On the opposite sidewalk, the stray cat leaps for a sparrow and misses. By Andrew’s count, this is his collection’s twenty-sixth rejection; he keeps a spreadsheet of them, a wall of red blaring from his laptop screen. He picks at his t-shirt, damp with sweat. Then he hears a voice, which it takes him a moment to understand is his own, doing its best imitation of Leah’s clipped professionalism.
Great idea, Andrew’s voice is saying. And why stop there? I’m thinking merchandise. I’m thinking video game adaptation. An animated spinoff series down the line. How about product placement? Right now, for example, I’m about to enjoy a cool, refreshing Aperol spritz. Maybe we can work that in somehow. Can you get on the horn with the Aperol people? What time is it in Italy right now?
Andrew stops, panting slightly in the heat. His rant has given him a satisfying buzz adjacent to intoxication. He waits for a reaction from Leah, who, for a moment, is silent. When she speaks, she doesn’t sound angry. She’s just an exhausted woman at the end of a long day, ready to take off her shoes and zone out in front of some prestige cable drama.
Andrew, she says, you’re a real dick, you know that?
◆
Back at the table, their mezze and lamb tagines have arrived, but to Andrew it all looks coagulated, clotted, the meat likely raised and slaughtered in conditions of unfathomable cruelty. As he sits back down, the future unfolds before him. He will have to keep grinding away in the content mines, but Simon, if his film is green-lit, will be able to quit his job at the commercial studio—maybe even wean himself off his parents’ wealth, which pays the extortionate rent at the East Village apartment he and Andrew share. Simon’s star will rise, Andrew’s fall. Andrew reaches for his Aperol spritz, by now lukewarm. After he drains it, wincing at the sweetness, he notices that Simon is staring at him.
Everything okay with Leah? Simon asks. He really is a beautiful boy, especially right now: his skin bronze, his cheeks rosy from the warmth and the drink, the streetlights casting a corona around his blond curls. For once, Andrew would like to avoid spoiling the mood—or, at least, avoid being accused of doing so. He tries to rearrange the hateful expression on his face into something more neutral.
Sure, yeah, he says. Just a check-in.
Simon raises a single golden eyebrow. Still, smearing his naan with a gob of matbucha, he picks up where he left off, worrying now that he agreed to the option too quickly. The joke in the industry, he says, is that this production company is really just an advertising agency, better at branding films than making them. His agent had pushed him to take the deal, but should he have waited for a safer bet, a production house with a longer track record? Andrew tries to listen, but he can’t; his mind is elsewhere, consumed by his conversation—or rather his argument, his falling-out—with Leah. He feels some pride in the stand he’s taken against the commodification of his work, confirming as it does his status as a real artist, a paladin rather than a mercenary. But as he sits on the patio, chewing on Leah’s words, an unwelcome thought creeps up on him: she and the unnamed editor at the small Midwestern press are onto something. Whether the motivations are creative or commercial, intertwining the stories is a good idea. It hardly matters if the result is called a novel or a collection. Either way, it would be more like life, or rather the experience of it—a jumble of contingent entities and events, assembled post-hoc into something that resembled meaning. Even a television adaptation, he has to admit, might not be the worst thing in the world.
Babe? Simon says. Anyone there? He cocks his head, a curious parakeet.
Sorry, Andrew says. He gropes around for an excuse. I’m just…
But nothing comes out of his mouth, and Simon’s face falls. Looking at his plate, Simon says, I wish you could be happy for me.
They sit in silence, picking at the lamb. For a moment, Andrew sees himself the way Simon must: older but less accomplished, thirty-eight and already a failure. Estranged from his conservative evangelical family, alone in the world, a drag to be jettisoned at the next opportunity. It’s only a matter of time before Simon ends things. Andrew considers the possibility—not for the first time—that Simon is still sleeping with his ex-boyfriend, although he supposedly called that arrangement off when they moved in together some months ago.
Feeling guilty for ruining their celebration—or is he only seeking to rehabilitate himself in Simon’s eyes?—Andrew glances up in search of a topic of conversation. There, on the sidewalk, he sees someone he thinks he knows, maybe an old acquaintance, and briefly searches for this acquaintance’s name before realizing the man is actually a minor celebrity whose name he still, nevertheless, can’t recall. The celebrity had a role in a prestige cable drama that Simon insisted they watch. He played a gangster, ruthless and roguish, a man who committed unspeakable acts of violence but was redeemed by his love for his disabled younger brother. Here, however, he seems somehow diminished, very short, wearing a ridiculous newsboy cap, a cigarette in his hand, pacing up and down the block as if waiting to be recognized, the way celebrities often do in New York. There is something sad about him, something tragic. It dawns on Andrew that this is just the sort of figure Simon’s film needs.
Andrew is about to point the minor celebrity out to Simon, to ask if he can recall the man’s name, when he stops. What is Simon going to do—approach him on the street, like a tourist asking for a photo? It’s silly to imagine a meeting like this could occur so serendipitously; that Simon will walk up to this man and pitch his film, that the man will agree to the role on the spot. Andrew suspects, though, that he is dithering for a different reason: he does not want this rendezvous to take place. He does not want Simon’s film to be made.
Then Simon—who is, of course, sitting across from Andrew, looking in the opposite direction, toward or past or through him—rises, abandoning his fork on his plate, and walks down the street. Andrew twists around, annoyed, watching over his shoulder as Simon drifts along the sidewalk. Finally, Simon stops by a parked car, a white Mercedes, getting down on his hands and knees to peer beneath it. Andrew stands up and trudges toward the car, turning back to see if the minor celebrity is still pacing the block, but he has disappeared.
When Andrew reaches the car, he asks Simon—more testily than might be necessary—what he thinks he’s doing.
There’s a kitten under the car, Simon answers, and beckons Andrew down to look.
Sighing, Andrew crouches, getting as low as he can without touching the ground. Following Simon’s line of sight, he sees a pair of eyes glint in the surrounding darkness. Simon extends his hand under the car, making the sort of childlike coos to which even grown men revert when in the presence of small animals. But the cat doesn’t move, and Simon, bringing his arm back out, collapses cross-legged on the sidewalk, as if fatigued.
What should we do? he asks.
Andrew replies that there’s nothing to do—this is just a stray cat, one of hundreds or thousands or millions in New York City. It isn’t a cat but a kitten, Simon says, lost and afraid. He suggests they capture the kitten and bring it back to the apartment. They don’t have to keep it forever—just until they find it a more permanent home. Andrew points out that he’s allergic to cats, which is true, but at this Simon scoffs. What’s the big deal, he asks, if they just keep it for a few days? Andrew notes that their lease explicitly forbids animals, and at this Simon looks up, his eyes bright and cold.
It’s my lease, Simon says. I signed it. I pay the rent.
Your parents pay the rent, Andrew responds.
Ignoring him, Simon once more reaches beneath the Mercedes, calling out to the kitten. Andrew considers his options. He could help Simon retrieve the cat; he could slink back to the Moroccan restaurant and sulk; he could storm off into the night. Instead, he remains standing on the sidewalk, resolving to feel no pity for the cat, for Simon, for their strange little threesome. Back on the patio, their mezze and lamb sit uneaten.
Wondering whether the waitress might think they had skipped out on the bill, Andrew looks down the street. The minor celebrity has now reappeared, this time in the company of a taller, considerably more glamorous woman. She is walking a large dog, maybe a mastiff or a pit bull, with cartoonishly pendulous jowls and sad red eyes; Andrew has a flash of foreboding as he remembers the cat under the car. The minor celebrity is entreating the woman, or it may only look that way, since he is by necessity gazing up at her, his arms outstretched, a cigarette still clenched near the meat of his palm. Andrew becomes aware that he is inventing a familiar story, one that may or may not be true, about these two people he doesn’t know: a romantic rift, a plea for absolution, an animal as proxy or mediator.
Perhaps because she is distracted by the celebrity’s groveling, the woman fails to notice as her dog takes a violent interest in the goings-on beneath the Mercedes. The dog lunges toward Simon, saliva exploding torrentially from its jaws, its bark morose and high-pitched, like a whale’s song. Startled, Simon jerks back his arm, falling to the sidewalk with a look of queasy shock on his face, in the process hitting the car’s undercarriage and setting off a whooping alarm. This only further encourages the dog, which the tall woman is now struggling to get under control. The minor celebrity grabs the dog’s chain and tries to help pull, but he’s dwarfed by both the woman and the animal, and so looks more like a toddler pretending to assist an adult in some grown-up task. Andrew feels the eyes of the entire block—the restaurant patio, the passersby, the invisible residents of the apartments looming above St. Mark’s place; all fixed on the noisy little tableau unfolding by the white Mercedes. He tries to raise his voice above the din.
Can you please get that animal under control? he shouts.
I’m sorry, the woman says, I’m trying. She looks flustered, as well as unaccustomed to looking flustered—fashionably bobbed hair askew, face burning red. The dog goes on baying.
There ought to be a muzzle on that thing, Andrew says.
Now the minor celebrity speaks. She said she was sorry, he snaps.
He’s a rescue, the woman says, and the dog, as if cowed by this disclosure of its past, stops barking and stands still.
Good boy, the woman says, bending down to pet the dog’s massive head. She apologizes again, more curtly this time, as if the entire incident were Andrew’s fault, and walks on, tugging the dog’s chain. The minor celebrity trails them both. As he rounds the corner, he looks over his shoulder at Andrew and glares, his mouth moving in some silent insult, lower lip curled beneath his teeth to form a hard, percussive f. It may or may not be faggot.
The car’s alarm continues, and Andrew looks around, in case the owner materializes to shut it off. He turns to Simon, intending to ask whether he’s all right, but Simon is facing away, eyes on the road. The cat has come out from underneath the Mercedes and is trotting casually across the street, unfazed. In the gloaming, the cat is almost an apparition, an inkblot spreading across a page.
◆
As they walk the few blocks back to their apartment—the night now dark, the heat still unbroken—Andrew stews over the encounter with the dog and the glamorous woman and the minor celebrity. He assumes Simon shares his anger. But when Simon opens his mouth, he only asks if Andrew has ever heard of something called Save the Cat.
Save the Cat, Simon says, is a basic principle of screenwriting. If you have a protagonist who is flawed or unlikeable, he must save a cat early in the film, to establish, for the audience, his basic decency and capacity for redemption. Of course, saving a cat might not literally involve saving a cat—this was just shorthand for some universal display of kindness or vulnerability. Once you understand this law of storytelling, you see it everywhere: the hit man pining for his dead wife, the suburban mother who sells drugs to provide for her family, the mob boss obsessed with the ducks in his backyard pool. It’s such an ironclad rule in the medium, Simon says, that there’s a whole line of books called Save the Cat.
Andrew digests this. Simon isn’t upset about the out-of-control dog or the possibly homophobic minor celebrity; he’s upset because Andrew, in declining to save the kitten at the Moroccan restaurant, has failed a test of metaphor. Andrew has never had many friends, and he sometimes wonders whether anyone likes him at all, but now he realizes he might be an unlikeable character in someone else’s story, or the unlikeable protagonist of his own. Maybe this, too, is why his collection has yet to find a publisher. His indifference to the cat points to some defect as both a person and an artist; if he’s unable to feel sympathy himself, then how could he hope to impart it to a fictional being? Even the homicidal gangster portrayed by the minor celebrity in the prestige cable drama is, thanks to his devotion to his brother, a more relatable character than Andrew; so too is the closeted, ladder-climbing antihero of Simon’s screenplay.
Once again, Andrew hears his own voice coming out of his mouth, and once again it’s weighty with sarcasm. What else do the Save the Cat books have to say? the voice is asking, and Simon, whether out of innocence or spite, proceeds to answer. It isn’t only about creating sympathetic characters, Simon says. Every story must also employ the structure of the hero’s journey, the ancient monomyth from which all narratives flow. This means every story must have fifteen beats—the Call to Adventure, Supernatural Aid, the Gift of the Goddess, et cetera—and must fit into one of ten genres. He begins ticking these genres off on his fingers: Dude with a Problem, Fool Triumphant, Golden Fleece, Monster in the House. Andrew feels himself bristle. When he asks Simon which genre he’s living in right now, Simon responds—without hesitation, staring straight ahead—Institutionalized.
At Tompkins Square Park, they walk past the Hare Krishnas chanting beneath the elm trees, the ghost of Ginsberg howling alongside them. Simon’s implication, obviously, is that he feels trapped by their relationship, but right then Andrew feels trapped as well, albeit in his case by storytelling, by his assigned position in the bureaucracy of fiction. The way Simon talks about narrative has always struck Andrew as rote, pitched like a fastball at the catcher’s mitt of the market. Now, though, Andrew wonders whether the writerly lessons he’s absorbed over the years are any different. The books he reads, the television shows Simon forces him to watch—if they’re all so easy to categorize, to tell and retell, to reshape and recycle, then they can’t be very different from children’s cartoons, or from the clickbait article summaries Andrew churns out at the news aggregator. The over-the-top third act of a sci-fi movie, the artfully deflected resolution at the end of a short story—it’s all so predictable, an animal’s involuntary response to external stimulus. What’s the point? What have all these stories achieved? A planet on fire, a world at war. Rama Rama, the Krishnas drone, tapping away at their hand drums. Hare Hare.
◆
When they arrive at their apartment building, Andrew pauses, eyeing the bar on the first floor. I’m going to get a drink, he says. He considers asking Simon to join him—an effort to make amends—but Simon wordlessly continues through the foyer. As the elevator doors close, Andrew catches a glimpse of him, head down, looking at something on his phone. It might be the ex-boyfriend.
In the frigid air-conditioning of the bar, Andrew sits down and orders a Painkiller. The bar is tiki-themed, serving winkingly tropical cocktails in winkingly racist cups: bones in noses, shrunken heads. Ezra, the bartender, once informed Andrew that tiki culture was created whole cloth in the nineteen-thirties, when a handful of enterprising restaurateurs recognized the desperate Depression-era need for escapism and decided to create an imaginary South Pacific right here in America. The fact that Polynesia and its neighbors had no cocktail tradition to speak of was hardly an impediment. Instead, bartenders conjured drinks on the spot, naming them like Adam and the animals: the Mai Tai, the Fog Cutter, the Cobra Fang, the Missionary’s Downfall. Ezra prided himself, he’d told Andrew, on employing the original mid-century recipes for these drinks, not the bastardized, saccharine iterations found in so many resorts and fast-casual dining chains. As Andrew hunches over his ridiculous drink, mint leaves in his nose, Easter Island moai regarding him from the side of his oversized novelty mug, he suggests to Ezra—who is standing behind the bar, fiddling with his phone—that tiki culture, inauthentic to begin with, has been watered down, so to speak, to the extent that most people who have consumed a Mai Tai have, in fact, had nothing close to the real thing, if the real thing exists, which it obviously doesn’t. Ezra’s drinks, that is, are false idols, replicas of nothing.
When Andrew finishes, Ezra looks up. Andrew, he says, I love all my regulars. But has anyone ever told you that you can be a bit of a dick?
Andrew is the only one at the bar; it’s a Monday. Ezra—loquacious, bearded, recently and happily divorced—goes back to his phone. After a while, he asks, How’s the writing going?
Not very well, Andrew says. Ezra occasionally inquires about his work; Andrew recalls him mentioning that he dropped out of a comp lit PhD some years earlier.
Hey, Ezra says, that’s great. He holds his phone out. On the screen is a woman’s photo, framed by a dating app.
Do you think she’s hot? Ezra asks.
Sure, Andrew says, to which Ezra replies that she is indeed hot, as if reassuring himself. He looks at the photo again before putting his phone down and drumming his fingers idly. Then he raps the bar with his knuckles.
Hey, you know what? he says. I’ve got something you should use in one of your stories. A few weeks ago, I messaged this woman. She wasn’t particularly good-looking, Ezra notes, but he messages almost all his matches. So he and the woman started chatting. At one point, she asked if he was Jewish, which he affirmed, not thinking much of it. To this, she replied—and here Ezra puts a hand on his heart, swearing he’s telling the truth—she replied that she was Hasidic, and married, and that she and her husband used the dating app to enlist Jewish men in acts of cuckoldry. At first, Ezra didn’t believe her, but he looked around online and found that there is, in fact, a small community of Hasidim who use the internet to trawl for illicit sex. The woman asked Ezra if he wanted to come over. He said he did. How many chances do you get to fuck a Hasidic chick, right? he asks Andrew.
Ezra took the train out to New Jersey and found himself at the couple’s house. When he arrived, the woman ushered him in. She was pretty enough in person, he says, although he was a little put out by the wig and the dress and everything else. Andrew asks why she was wearing the wig at home, if this is something Hasidic women do, but Ezra frowns at the interruption, and Andrew takes an apologetic sip of his Painkiller.
Ezra sat with the wife and the husband at their little kitchen table, he continues, drinking kosher wine. At this point, he and the couple started to discuss G-d. As if assuming his prophet’s mantle, Ezra now becomes uncharacteristically serious. The words out of his mouth begin to sound loftier, like they’re being delivered from the side of Mount Horeb, and Andrew has no choice but to listen.
The husband, Ezra says, spoke about the doubts that had arisen in his mind when he was young, observing the goyim on the train and on the other side of Eastern Parkway, their lives unfolding in such proximity, or in parallel, to his own. The husband wondered why, if G-d was immanent, He did not exist in the world of the goyim, or, if He did, why they could not tell; he wondered why G-d conspired to make one man a child of Jacob and another a child of Esau. When he was a young man, the husband said, these questions began to acquire an erotic cast. The sexuality of the secular world was all around him, and he imagined, in a vague and fitful way, what it might be like for that sexuality to move from the other world into his own. When he married his wife, at eighteen, his fantasies continued. In fact, he found that she shared them.
Sex, the husband said, became a way to transport himself to the forbidden planet on his doorstep, and the fantasies he created soon came to resemble stories, with recurring characters and dramatic arcs. He felt emotionally invested in these erotic landscapes—the mailman with a zayin like a horse’s, the bodega clerk who needed every hole filled in order to achieve orgasm, the Hasidic couple down the block who, like he and his wife, had a secret sexual existence of their own, treif among their people yet also disgusting and objectionable to the goyim. His narrative fantasies felt like an act of empathy, he said, an attempt to enter the hearts and minds of the strangers all around him, which is perhaps why he felt shame about them but no guilt—shame being the operative of a community, a society, whereas guilt was a matter of a man’s alienation from G-d.
Now the wife spoke. There is a Hasidic tale, she said, that she told herself during difficult times, when she felt caught between the claustrophobia of her community and the unfamiliarity of the world outside. The tale went like this:
Many centuries ago, a famous rabbi wanted to save the life of a sick child. The rabbi made a candle, brought it to the woods, attached it to a tree, and lit the wick. As the candle burned through the night, the rabbi sat in secret prayer, and by morning the child was healed.
A generation later, another great rabbi, a disciple of the first, was asked to heal another child. This rabbi went into the same woods, and although he did not know the prayer his master had spoken, he lit a candle and prayed and called on his master’s name, and when morning came this child, too, was healed.
Finally, another generation later, a third great rabbi, a disciple of the second, was also called upon to heal a child. The secret prayer was long gone, and so too were the woods. The third rabbi said: We cannot light the fire, we cannot speak the prayers, we do not know the place. But we can tell the story of how it was done, and G-d will help. And so they told the story, and G-d helped, and the third child was healed, too.
Here, Ezra stops. He has never struck Andrew as an introspective man, but something seems to catch in his throat. Briefly, Andrew wonders whether Ezra is messing with him, inventing a tall tale the way his tiki-bar predecessors invented drinks. More urgent than this mystery, though, is another. Despite himself—despite everything—Andrew wants to know how the story ends.
So, he asks, what happened? Did Ezra have sex with the Hasidic woman as her husband watched? But even as Andrew speaks, he understands that he has broken the prophet’s spell, and Ezra looks at him with an air of paternal disappointment. Whether Ezra is insulted by the suggestion that he might have gone through with it, or insulted by the suggestion that he might have backed out, Andrew can’t tell, and he doesn’t ask.
◆
Upstairs, the apartment is empty. In the bedroom, Simon’s laptop is open on the side table, its screen black, but when I—I mean, when Andrew presses the spacebar, it lights up. Simon had been browsing Petfinder, looking up kittens in need of adoption; maybe he left the website open deliberately, hoping Andrew would see it. Andrew scrolls through the photos, waiting for some twinge of regret in his heart, but it doesn’t come, and so he floats back through the apartment, touching the walls in the cool, quiet dark. Soon he will have to find another place to live, seek shelter elsewhere; nothing here is his.
In the living room, Andrew sits down on Simon’s large sectional couch and turns on Simon’s large flatscreen television. Flipping through the hundreds, thousands, millions of on-demand channels at his fingertips, he hunts for the prestige cable drama featuring the possibly homophobic minor celebrity and, when he finds it, presses play on an episode at random. The gangster, at the end of the previous installment, had once again committed an act of unspeakable violence, and now he discards a corpse in a body of water, probably a tank on some soundstage in Hollywood or, perhaps, in the vast invisible New York City that stretches all around Andrew, humming with life. After the false corpse plummets to the depths of the false body of water, the minor celebrity’s face fills the screen, covered in blood, and suddenly Andrew is reminded of an image, a creation of his childhood mind, the amalgam of countless sermons and Sunday-school stories and megachurch movie nights: another face covered in blood; a crown of thorns. Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani? Ridiculously, Andrew had said those very words to himself, when he left home—or rather had been kicked out—as a teenager, whispering them again and again on the long bus ride from Minneapolis to New York. But he doesn’t quite feel forsaken, not right now. Instead, he remembers the strange, pleasant tingling that he experienced at the back of his skull, sometimes, during all those interminable sermons, the moments of surprising poetry: my brother’s keeper, Bathsheba bathing on the roof, thirty pieces of silver. Tell the mountain to throw itself into the sea. On the television, the show’s theme song starts. The credits flash. Andrew leans forward, waiting to learn the minor celebrity’s name.