"I don't know. I never thought about it."

"Think about it. I'm going to the toilet."

The scene must be set here because of what happened next. The two of us were sitting outside. It was twilight. The air was full of the heavy perfume of flowers and the high dynamo sounds of insects. It was warm enough to have my shirt off. As I reached for a Coke I had under the seat, the question of whether I wanted to be Weber moved through my mind.

In an instant, less, I answered out loud, "I don't want to be anybody else. I'm all right."

Almost as soon as I said it, I felt something like sticks on my back. Lots of little sticks moving on me. Half straightening, half turning, I came face to face with a small black bird that was just standing on my shoulder. It was such a shock that I lurched and the bird flicked off and flew away. The direction I'd turned was facing the door, and when I calmed a bit, I realized Venasque had been standing there with his hands in his pockets.

"Hey, did you see that? The bird on my back?"

"Did you see your tattoo? Take a look."

It was gone, of course. My tattoo had flown away.

"Weber's still got his, Phil, in case you're interested."

"What does it mean?"

"It means you know who you are. You just said it – you're all right."

If only it had been that simple.

Time passed. Midnight was a hit. Weber met and fell in love with Cullen fames. She said no. He dreamt of Rondua. She still said no. He came back to California to prepare Wonderful but couldn't stop talking about this woman. When I met her she was very nice and in some ways special, but not the end of the rainbow. I liked her tall husband and child more.

Venasque died during the filming of Wonderful. A stroke in a motel room outside Santa Barbara. The last time I saw him we'd watched Miami Vice on television, his favorite show, and then taken the animals for a long walk. I already knew he was going away for a week of training with one of his students. He had no school and never taught classes as such, but there were students, and I assumed they learned from him the same way I did.

"Are you going to the ocean?"

"First to the ocean and then the mountains. Maybe just the ocean. Maybe it won't take that long. I don't know yet."

"Have you ever failed with a student? Not given them what they needed?"

"Sure. I wanted to work with Weber but he wasn't interested."

"Will he be all right?"

"I don't know, Phil. He's still got a bird on his back."

He was dead a couple of days later. One strange thing was the pig died very soon after Venasque. Harry Radcliffe kept Big Top at his house in Santa Barbara afterward because there was a yard for the dog to enjoy. I guess it's still there, the last living magic of the great Venasque.

Have I ever seen the man here? No.

The earthquake came, Weber finished Wonderful, I began Midnight Always Comes. He left for Europe as soon as post-production was done, saying he'd be back when there was reason to come back. That turned out to be over a year later and only long enough to pack boxes for his move east.

You've heard the rest. You've heard most of this story from Weber, but as you can see, there were small details to be filled in. And what of Pinsleepe, vis a vis the gospel according to Strayhorn? Or Sasha? Even little Flea? Later.

I will tell you one thing – I didn't kill the dog.

"Yes, you did!"

"The fuck I did!"

"Okay, Sean, James, that's enough. B.D., you wanted to say something?"

"I wanted to say this discussion is bullshit and boring."

I don't know what it was about the man, but whenever he said anything, the room went silent for a few beats before the noise picked up again. Maybe it was his reputation. Or else all of us kept sizing him up. This was the strongest thing he'd said since we began work.

"Go on."

"There's nothing else. All this about what is the 'real evil.' You sound like Jehovah's Witnesses. We've been here two days bullshitting around and getting nowhere. You want to know what evil is? Evil's a gun. Evil's a creep who puts bullets in it. Evil's a tree that's been split in half by lightning.

"It isn't some thing. It's everything, turned bad. A kid's bicycle is okay, but when you see it turned over and blood on the ground nearby then it's something else."

Sean, angry at having been interrupted in her yelling bout with James, asked aggressively, "What was the worst thing you ever did?"

B.D. sneered. "I wouldn't tell you, even if I knew you. Because something that bad, I don't want anyone to know."

Wyatt leaned over and said quietly in my ear, "This is going nowhere fast."

I nodded and stood up. "Let's break for the day."

No one needed urging. The room emptied in about twenty-five seconds.

"What am I doing wrong, Finky Linky?"

"B.D. is right – we are boring ourselves with so much talk. It sounds like kids sitting around a campfire telling their best gross-out stories. 'What's the worst thing you ever did?' Who cares? I'm sure Blow Dry has the most hideous tale, but even if he does, we'd react to it like kids, say 'That's really gross,' and wait for someone else to one-up him."

Walking out of the rehearsal room, I thought for the hundredth time of what I was trying to do. Was our purpose to make a couple of frightening, black scenes which, when slipped cleverly into the greater context of Midnight Kills, would finish the picture satisfactorily? Or did "they" want a clearly moral statement, something saying Bloodstone and anything he stood for was sick and rotten?

What Phil had succeeded in doing in three films was to make a monster into a kind of perverse antihero. Kids loved Bloodstone. They wore T-shirts of him holding a magnifying glass. Over a hundred thousand posters were sold. People magazine did a cover story on him. According to the article, Midnight was one of the most popular films in Beirut. Soldiers on both sides would go into theaters with their guns and, when favorite parts came on, wave them and shout his name.

Cullen believed we should make an anti-Bloodstone, anti-Midnight statement.

Wyatt was convinced that if Phil had touched some heart of darkness, it was by lucky mistake. Whatever he'd created to do, it had since been destroyed. As a result, our job was to finish a film that, without those special Strayhorn scenes, would just be another silly horror film destined to go nowhere a few months after it came out and thus effectively defused.

There were other possibilities that only added to the confusion. One of them, which was seductive, came from a literary critic I'd recently been reading. According to him, "The genre to which a story belongs can be changed just by adding or subtracting a few lines." Before leaving for New York, I'd told Wyatt to try taking Midnight Kills in a humorous direction, just to see what he'd do with it. What he came up with was funny and surreal, but inappropriate and too much like his old television show. Yet the idea of changing the whole direction by "adding or subtracting a few lines" stayed with me and kept coming up in my thoughts.

I still believed that by sitting around and throwing out ideas with the people who'd be involved in the scenes, we'd find something important. So far, we'd come up with nothing.

Wyatt asked if I wanted to go to dinner, but the worthless afternoon had taken away any appetite I might have had.

"Then let's go to a movie. What do you want to see?"

"No, thanks."

"You want to go dancing? We can go to Jack Nicholson's –"

"Wyatt, don't worry about me. I'm all right. Discouraged, but all right. Thank you for your concern."

He dropped me off at the house and took the car to visit a friend. I let myself in and, without thinking, walked to the kitchen for something to eat. Not that I wanted it, but it was something to do until I could come up with something better.