When Weber came over for dinner one night, he said we felt like a couple. "Some people live together for years, but you never get the feeling they fit very well. It feels like they live on separate floors of their house. Not you two."

We agreed. What was odd was going to my office every day and working on something as vile as Midnight Kills, then home to Sasha and Flea at night and a life that had become so full and good.

In retrospect, I realize it couldn't have lasted a long time. I knew Midnight hadn't gotten me this good luck. Sasha admired my Esquire column about life in Hollywood, not Bloodstone. Yet, like it or not, he was my bread and butter and I spent a good part of my life thinking about him.

In bed one night as we watched Flea walk around on top of us, looking for a place to lie down, Sasha asked where Bloodstone came from.

"You mean really, or in the film?"

"Really. Where did he come from in you?"

Flea plumped down and, coincidentally, looked straight at me, as if she too were waiting for the answer. My two girls.

"Rock and Roll."

"Music?"

"No, not exactly. When I was a boy, my father took us on the first and last vacation we ever had: to Browns Mills, New Jersey. The only distinguishing things about it were it had a muddy lake and was near Fort Dix, one of the big military bases on the East Coast. We had a bungalow in the middle of the woods and were surrounded by army families from the base. One of them was named Masello, and the father was in the military police. My sister and I spent a lot of time in their house that month because they had – kids around our ages.

"One day after swimming we were out on their back porch eating brownies and listening to the radio. It was a station in Trenton. Remember the song 'Monkey Time' by Major Lance? That was on when it was cut off by a news bulletin. A man had walked up to a military police car on the base, leaned down, and shot the two policemen inside, point-blank. One of them was Mr. Masello.

"All of us kids looked at each other. I remember that very well, because we all had brownies in our mouth and were chewing."

"You used that scene in one of the Midnights!"

"Right, Midnight Too. I shot it exactly the way it happened: The oldest Masello kid's mouth dropped open and big chunks of brownie fell out. He closed his eyes and started screaming 'Rock and Roll! Rock and Roll!'and kept screaming until his mother came and dragged him on his knees back into the house."

"How could you use that, Phil? What if one of those kids saw your film?"

"They did. One wrote a letter and called me a motherfucker."

"Why did you do it?"

"Let me finish the story. My parents got so scared that this killer might come and get us that they packed us up that night and drove home. In the car I fell asleep and had a dream where a man with a silvery, featureless face chased me, screaming 'Rock and roll!' I've had that dream all my life. It still scares the bloody shit out of me.

"After that I was traumatized by Rock and Roll. Every time I heard of a murder on the radio or read about one, I thought of Rock and Roll. That was his name, and he must have done it. My mother read The National Enquirer, and every crime in there, brains on the floor, blood on the walls, was done by him. Everyone has their vision of evil, and he was mine. A war in Africa? Rock and Roll did it. A baby disappeared in Darien? Rock and Roll. He was everything bad. He covered the field. And every time I had that dream again, he got bloodier and more frightening because I'd given him credit for something else."

Sasha sighed. "How much of your films is from your life?"

"More than I like."

"Does it help to film it? Is it a catharsis?"

"Sometimes. Sometimes it's too far down. Like those glass-bottom boats you ride in Florida that let you see the big fish below? Sometimes doing this brings me close to the things, but I can only see them, their dark shapes. I can't get them out."

There are nights in a relationship when you come as close as you're ever going to get to another person. It usually begins with a few doses of wonderfully all-out sex, but then it blossoms into something much more profound and transcendent. You start by doing things to each other physically you'd only fantasized before. Then, when it's calm again, you start telling secrets about yourself or your life you never thought would come out. Weber called them "Holy Nights," which is an apt description. To him, there are few times in our adult life when we are "simply " honest. It is either unnecessary or detrimental to tell the truth in our everyday life, so we don't.

That is one of the reasons religion suffers so in our century: To really find God, you must be honest. To be honest you must begin by looking clearly at yourself, but that's too distressing. So we learn to worship material things instead, because not only are they attainable but how we attain them doesn't require virtue or virtuous behavior, as some higher goals do. We don't want goodness, we want a Mercedes. Who needs a relationship when you can have all the fun of one without making any of the commitments? In the end, even AIDS is the perfect consumer's disease: It comes from either bad sex or bad needles. None of this "wrath of God" stuff in our time. Plagues are for the Dark Ages.

I'm rambling. But why are we so honest on Holy Nights? Because we're so close to death then. That night Sasha and I discussed death. We spoke of how we imagined it to be (we were wrong), how we imagined we'd die (I was wrong), of how we wanted to be buried. We spoke as if the other would be there at our end to see to these last wishes. After that we made love again, because talk of death always makes you feel more fragile and hungry.

Look, I can say this: Death is the minimum. The minimum of anything. In those hours when you're so dose to another person, you go from being two to almost one. The minimum. Love is death: the death of the individual, the death of distance, the death of time. The delightful thing about holding a girl's hand is after a while you forget which is yours. You forget there are two instead of one big one. Death. It is not a morbid thing.

Let me tell you one more story. When I was twelve, my friend Geoff Pierson and I were down at the river in our town, fooling around. We'd smoked all the cigarettes we had and gotten bored enough to be in the middle of a stone-throwing contest. It was a hot July day, and the only sounds around were a lawn mower somewhere off in a far distance and the ker-plunk of our stones hitting the water. He threw one. I threw one farther. He threw one farther. I threw one that hit something.

Slowly, languorously, the thing turned and became an elbow, a crooked elbow sticking like an inverted V out of the water. It stayed there a few seconds and then, just as languorously (as if tired), turned back over into the water.

I told Geoff to go call the cops while I leapt wildly into the water, like a dog jumping off a boat. Nothing more had surfaced there, but where that elbow had appeared was so burned into my consciousness I didn't need any landmarks to find the place again. Thirty feet out, I saw something light, something dark, something large in front of me. There was the elbow just under the surface! Taking it, I started swimming with one hand back to shore. It took a long time and the thing in my hand was hard and cold. I didn't look back until I could put my feet on the bottom and pull it in to shore.

It was a woman. She was almost naked. Only bra and underpants. Both were white, and I could see her dark nipples and pubic hair through the thin material. The body was frozen in rigor mortis – one hand cupped under a breast (thus the crooked elbow), the other held rigidly against her side. Her face was completely covered with what looked like mucus. After pulling her up onto the grass, I bent down and tried to wipe some of the scum from her face. It all came off in one big shiny piece.