War Dances

Fearful Symmetry

WHEN HE WAS EIGHTEEN and a senior in high school, Sherwin Polatkin and a GROUP of his schoolmates jumped into two cars and drove into Spokane to see The Breakfast Club. Sherwin sat next to Karen, a smart and confident sophomore — a farm-town white girl with the sun-bleached hair and tanned skin of a harvest truck driver. She’d never been of romantic interest, so Sherwin slouched in his seat and munched on popcorn. It was just the random draw of a dozen friends choosing seats.

But near the end of the movie, as Molly Ringwald and Judd Nelson were making out in a supply closet, Sherwin was surprised to discover that Karen was holding his hand and even more surprised when she started playing with his fingers. Their friends had no idea this was happening. Karen lightly ran her fingertips along Sherwin’s palm, the backs of his fingers, and his wrist. It was simple — and nearly innocent — but it still felt like sex.

Sherwin was not a virgin — he’d had sex with three girls — but this was the first time a girl had been so indirect with her desires. He’d touched naked women, but this hand-holding — this skin against skin — seemed far more intimate. He loved it. He was a Spokane Indian, the lead singer for his drum group, and had a sudden urge to sing an honor song for Karen — for her tenderness. He was nervous they’d be discovered. He knew their friends would be both titillated and slightly offended by this contact. It seemed like a betrayal of what was otherwise a platonic gathering. But Sherwin could not stop it. And Karen certainly didn’t want to stop it. He would never touch her again, and they would never speak of the moment and would not see each other again after high school, but Sherwin always considered it one of the best moments of his life.

So, years later, when he became a professional writer, Sherwin would tell curious journalists that he loved movies and his favorite movie of all time was The Breakfast Club, but he would never tell them why. He knew that the best defense against fame was keeping certain secrets. He hoped that Karen, wherever she was, would someday read an interview with him and smile when she read about his cinematic preference.

On August 11, 1948, sixteen smoke jumpers, led by a taciturn man named Wayne Ford, parachuted into Sirois Canyon, a remote area near Wenatchee, Washington, to fight a small wildfire. However, the fire, unpredictable as such fires can be, exploded into a fifty-foot-tall wall of flame, jumped the canyon, and chased the smoke jumpers up a steep and grassy hillside. Fifteen smoke jumpers tried to outrun the fire, an impossible race to win, but Wayne Ford didn’t run. Instead, he did something that was new and crazy: He built the first U.S. Forest Service escape fire.

Did you know that you can escape a fire by setting another fire at your feet? You might seem to be building a funeral pyre, but you’re creating a circle of safety. In order to save your endangered ass, all you have to do is burn down the grass surrounding you, lie facedown in the ash, and pray that the bigger fire will pass over you like a flock of blind and burning angels.

I know you’re thinking, You’re crazy. There’s no way I’m going to set a fire when another fire is already chasing me. And that’s exactly what Wayne Ford’s men thought. They had never seen any firefighter set one fire to escape another. It was unprecedented — for white folks. Indians had set many such escape fires before white men had arrived in the Americas, but Wayne Ford and his men had no way of knowing this.

Wise Wayne Ford — who before the fire had the same color and sinewy bite as one hundred and fifty pounds of deer jerky — could never fully explain why he set his escape fire. All he ever said is that it just made sense. Ford’s men tried to outrun the murderous flames, but one by one they all succumbed to the fire and smoke. Ford calmly lay down in the ash, in his circle of safety, and lived.

Thirty years after the Sirois Canyon fire, Harris Tolkin, a former smoke jumper, began to write a nonfiction chronicle of the tragedy, Fearful Symmetry: The True Story of the Sirois Canyon Fire. Tolkin borrowed the title of his book from the first and last stanzas of William Blake’s most famous poem:

Tyger! Tyger! burning bright

In the forests of the night,

What immortal hand or eye

Could frame thy fearful symmetry?

In exploring the meanings of the Sirois Canyon fire and its aftermath, Tolkin relied heavily on William Blake’s notions of innocence and experience and on the dichotomies of joy and sorrow, childhood and adulthood, religious faith and doubt, and good and evil. Tolkin died before completing the book, but it was edited by his daughter, Diane Tolkin, and was posthumously published in 2002 and was a surprise New York Times best seller for twenty-six weeks. In 2003, Tesla Studios, fresh off a Best Picture Oscar for their Civil War epic, Leaves of Grass, approached a hot young short-story writer, poet and first-time screenwriter, Sherwin Polatkin, to adapt Fearful Symmetry for the big screen.

Sitting in the Tesla offices, Sherwin stared through a glass desk at the bare feet of the executive producer, a short thin man who was otherwise completely dressed in a gorgeous bespoke suit.

“So, Sherwin,” the producer said, “why are you here?”

That was a strange question, considering that Sherwin had been invited. He decided that it must be an existential query. Or no, maybe it was just the first question of a job interview. This was Hollywood, yes, but Sherwin was really just a typist — a creative typist — trying to get a job.

“Well, number one,” Sherwin said, “I know fire like no other screenwriter in this town. I was a hotshot, a forest firefighter, for ten summers. It’s how I paid for college.”

That was a lie. Sherwin had only fought one fire in his life — a burning hay bale — and he’d only had to pour ten buckets of water on it. But this executive had no way of knowing Sherwin was a liar. Wasn’t everybody in Hollywood a liar? Maybe Sherwin could only distinguish himself by the quality of his lies and not their quantity.

“And number two, I’m a Native American,” Sherwin said. “I’m indigenous to the West, to the idea of the West, and you’re not going to find that sort of experience in film school.”

That couldn’t be true. Wasn’t Hollywood filled with small-town folks from the West — hell, from everywhere? Wasn’t Hollywood filled with nomads? Yes, Jewish folks, those original nomads, created the movie business, and it had not really changed in all the decades since, had it? Wasn’t Sherwin really just one more nomad in a business filled with nomads? How could he really distinguish himself?

“Listen,” Sherwin said to the executive, “I’m nervous and I’m exaggerating, and I’m sounding like an arrogant bastard, so let’s just start over. Is that okay? Can we call cut and start this scene over? Can we do a reshoot?”

The executive smiled and tugged at his toes. Yes, they were well-manicured toes, but it was still disconcerting, in the context of a business meeting, to see something — ten things — so naked and — well, toelike.

“We’ve had about a dozen screenwriters work on this project,” the executive said. “And had three different directors attached. And none of them could crack this thing. So tell me, how are you going to crack it?”

Sherwin didn’t quite understand the terminology. He assumed it had something to do with secret codes and languages. So he went with that.

“Well, the book itself is a tragedy,” Sherwin said.

“Tragedies are fucked at the box office,” the executive said.

Sherwin didn’t know if that was true. It didn’t feel true. Or maybe it was truer than Sherwin wanted to believe. Weren’t Americans afraid of tragedy? As a Native American, Sherwin was, by definition, trapped in a difficult but lustful marriage with tragedy. But that cultural fact wouldn’t get him this job.

“I think there’s redemption in this story,” Sherwin said. “I know I can find the redemption.”

“Redemption,” the executive said. “Yes, that’s exactly what we need.”

Thus hired on the basis of one word — one universal concept — Sherwin tried to transform a tragedy into a redemptive action-adventure movie. How did he go about his task? First he pulled the story out of the past and reset it in the present. Why? Because the studio thought the audience wouldn’t watch another period piece, and because the director — an old studio pro who was rumored to have had sex with at least three of the actresses who’d starred in Dallas, the TV series — wanted his Chinese girlfriend to play the female lead. Ah, the things one does for diversity!

But in changing the time frame of the Sirois Canyon fire at the behest of the capitalistic studio and the love-struck director, Polatkin was confronted with a logical problem. If the fictional Wayne Ford were to set an escape fire in 2003 and still be ignored by his crew members for such a crazy idea, Polatkin would have to pretend that forest-fire fighters still didn’t know about escape fires. This, of course, was a nasty insult to the intelligence of firefighters. So Polatkin only had one option. He had to change the narrative and eliminate Wayne Ford’s escape fire — or, rather, the concept of a man setting the first escape fire in U.S. Forest Service history. But Harris Tolkin’s book revolves around the revolutionary nature of this escape fire. Thus, by eliminating the escape fire and its aftermath, Polatkin created a screenplay that had little connection to the narrative and moral concerns of the sourcebook.

Such are the dangers of creating art based on other art. Such are the dangers of Hollywood, where it is contractually understood that screenwriters will write first drafts with verve, and then, with each revision, lose more nerve and individuality. It’s fucked, but Polatkin got paid five hundred thousand bucks to write a first draft where the killing fire burned as brightly as William Blake’s tygers. In fact, Wayne Ford, younger and renamed for the film, saw tygers inside the flames as they chased his team up the steep slope. The others lost all innocence and hope and died before they reached the summit. But Ford reached the top and made the mad plummet down the back slope with the fire tygers in pursuit. He didn’t build an escape fire — no time for that old tactic — he just ran, and he survived because he was so damn fast.

There is real inspiration for this fictional flight from fiery death. On July 3, 1999, near Boulder, Colorado, another relatively small wildfire exploded into a conflagration and chased sixteen firefighters up a steep slope and killed fifteen of them. Only Richard McPhee, an experienced smoke jumper out of Bonners Ferry, Idaho, was able to outrun the flames. Later, when researchers did the math, they estimated that McPhee ran the equivalent of a hundred-yard dash in nine seconds. That would be a world-record speed on a flat surface, but McPhee ran it while carrying a forty-pound backpack up a heavily forested sixty-degree slope. The man wanted to live. It gives one pleasure to take the measure of a man’s fight to survive. Ask yourself: Could I have run that fast and won the right to live? This might be glib, but certain men are born to be stars — to be at their best when faced with death. Richard McPhee only believes he was lucky.

“Yeah, I’ve got speed,” he said. “But hell, what if I had fallen or tripped or just hit some bad luck? What if I had started in back and had to run past everyone? I lived because nobody was running slowly in front of me.”

Richard McPhee refuses to be called a hero, which makes him the perfect real-life model for a cinematic star. So, in writing his first-draft screenplay, Polatkin blended aspects of Wayne Ford and Richard McPhee’s heroism and created an entirely fictional smoke jumper, now named Joseph Adams, who survived a murderous inferno but was emotionally and spiritually crippled by survivor’s guilt. Angry and drinking alcoholically, Joseph Adams falls apart in the first act, staggers his way through the second act, and finds redemption in the third act when he again faces a monster fire but sacrifices his own life to save his entire team, including the love of his life, a Vietnamese-American smoke jumper named Grace. Yes, Sherwin decided that the director’s Chinese girlfriend would cross over racial borders and play a Vietnamese-American woman, a first-generation immigrant, who had fled the Vietnam War and was adopted and raised by a white American family. And yes, Polatkin, the possessor of a reservation-inspired messiah complex (“I am the smartest Indian in the universe and I will save all you other Indians!”), decided that the hero, Joseph Adams, should die so that others might live.

Okay, Polatkin wasn’t writing Shakespeare, but he did write an interesting screenplay, maybe even a good one. But as he’d feared, the studio had notes. They wanted to change a few things so Polatkin flew to Hollywood, met his town-car driver, and was driven to a meeting room in L.A. Sherwin kept thinking of Survivor’s eighties hit, “Eye of the Tiger,” as twenty studio executives shuttled into the room. The director, angry because his other project had been scuttled, rolled in late, stuffed his face with a muffin, and said, while spewing food, “This screenplay is seriously flawed, but it’s nothing we can’t fix.”

The director was wearing cargo shorts. Sherwin was convinced that nobody over the age of thirty-three should ever wear cargo shorts.

For the rest of the day, the director and the executives made suggestions and demands: “The hero can’t die. Get rid of the William Blake shit. And you need more action, more fistfights and fucking. Maybe you could write a scene where the hero fucks his girl in the ash after a fire. The hero could leave ashy handprints on his girl’s back — on her whole body. That would be primal and hot. Jesus, it would be poetry.”

Polatkin fought for his screenplay’s survival, but it was a pathetic and lonely battle. He was a writer-for-hire and was contractually bound to follow studio orders or he would be fired and replaced. So, feeling hollow and violated, he took careful notes as a roomful of businessmen wrested art into commodity. He thought of how much he had always loved movies and how, for most his life, he’d had no idea how they were made. He thought of the boy he had been, sitting in that dark theater with Karen, the girl from high school, and how innocent it was. Not perfect, not at all, but better — cleaner — than this meeting. How had the boy who loved movies become so different from this man who wrote them?

And then Sherwin saw the latest issue of The New Yorker, crisp and unread, on the table. He had just published his first short story in the magazine. It’s every fiction writer’s wish to be published in the same magazine that has published Cheever, Munro, Yates, and ten thousand other greats and near-greats and goods.

“Hey,” Sherwin said. “I’ve got a short story in that New Yorker.”

The director flipped through the magazine, coughed and sighed, and said, “You should let me be your editor because you would win the fucking Pulitzer if I were in charge of your career.”

The room went cold and silent. The professionally cold studio executives couldn’t believe that any human being, even a film director, had said something so deluded and imperial.

Polatkin was baffled. No, it was worse than that. At that moment, something broke inside him. He didn’t know it at the time, but he’d fractured some part of his soul. He only realized the extent of his spiritual injuries a few months later. While writing nine drafts of the screenplay, Sherwin — who had already taken out the concept of the first escape fire set in U.S. Forest Service history — discovered that he could not take the William Blake out of a book whose title and themes were based on Blake’s poetry.

“I can’t do it,” he said to the director. “The book is about Blake. How can you take Blake out if the book is about Blake?”

“Fuck Blake,” the director said. “And fuck this book. Do you think this book is the fucking Bible? Do you think it’s sacred? Jesus, we’re making a movie, and that’s more fucking important than this book. I’m going to make a movie that’s ten times — a hundred times — greater than this fucking book. So are you going to take out the fucking Blake or what?”

“I can’t do it,” Sherwin said.

“Then fuck you. You’re fired.”

It was easy to fire screenwriters. But Sherwin was not just a screenwriter. He was also the author of a book of short stories and two volumes of poetry, and he still wanted to explore the notion of heroic self-sacrifice, so he decided to write a series of sonnets dedicated to smoke jumpers. At his home in San Francisco, he sat at his computer and stared at the blank screen. He sat, silent and unworking, for hours, for weeks, for months. Every time he tried to write a word, a metaphor, a line of poetry, he could only hear the critical voices of the studio executives and the director: The hero can’t die. Get rid of the William Blake shit. Sherwin had fallen victim to his own imagination. He couldn’t create anything on the page, but he was fully capable of creating fictional and aural ghosts who prevented him from writing.

Desperate, he decided the computer’s advanced technology was creating the impediment. He decided to go back to the beginning — to the Adam and Eve of writing — the pen and paper. Yes, he tried to write by hand. He reasoned that if Herman Melville could write Moby-fucking-Dick with an inky feather, he could write one measly goddamn sonnet with a felt tip pen and graph paper. But he could still hear the executives and director talking. The hero can’t die. Get rid of the William Blake shit. He was suffering from Hollywood-induced schizophrenia and couldn’t produce a word. Polatkin had always mocked those folks who’d claimed to suffer from writer’s block. But now, he was a writer …

Who could not produce one goddamn word.

The poems had migrated like goddamn birds.

And no matter what you may have heard,

Writer’s block causes physical hurt.

The fool couldn’t wear a goddamn shirt

Because the cotton scratched, bruised, and burned

His skin. His stomach ached; his vision blurred.

What happens to a soul that’s shaken and stirred?

What happens to a writer who can’t write?

Who flees his office and drives through the night,

In search of some solace, some goddamn streetlight

That will illuminate and give back his life,

His odes and lyrics? The desperate fool tried

Every workshop trick. The agnostic fool cried

To God for relief. God, can a man die

Of writer’s block? Well, the fool did survive

… the early and most painful stages of his creative disease.

Sherwin grew numb. He became strangely complacent with the idea that he would never write again. Oh, Sherwin still loved words, but he found other ways to play with them. He discovered the magic and terror of crossword puzzles. He read dictionaries and encyclopedias that promised to help him solve the most difficult ones. He soon became good at crossword puzzles. By testing himself using the same crosswords the best puzzlers solved in competition, Sherwin learned that he was probably one of the best five hundred crossword puzzle solvers in the English-speaking world.

He’d become that good after only six months of part-time work. How good could he become if he dedicated himself fully to the task? He figured that by living even more frugally than he had for the last decade, he had enough cash to survive for one more decade. So he decided to become, for lack of a better term, a crossword monk. But instead of praying, instead of keeping a diary, instead of transcribing by hand every page of some holy book, Sherwin made lists of words, the most common crossword-puzzle answers:

AREA

OLE

ERA

IRE

ERE

ESE

ELI

ENE

ALE

ARE

ALOE

ATE

EDEN

NEE

ALI

ALA

ETA

AGE

ESS

IRA

ERIE

ACE

ANTE

ELSE

ARIA

ODE

ERR

EVE

ADO

ETNA

IDEA

ASEA

EEL

ASH

END

ANTI

ANT

EAR

APE

ARI

ACRE

ETAL

EST

That was just the short list. There were a thousand or more common answers. They were the building blocks of crossword puzzles. But the quality — the comedy and tragedy — of a puzzle often had less to do with the answers than with the clues. A great solver understood the poetry of the clues. The most difficult puzzles used puns, misdirection, verb-noun elision, and camouflage in their clueing.

Sherwin believed himself to be a great solver, so he traveled to the American Crossword Puzzle Championship in Stamford, Connecticut.

When he stepped into the conference room, crowded with solvers who all seemed to know one another, Sherwin was nervous and vaguely ashamed of himself. Was this what his life had come to? He’d been flying first class to Hollywood, and now he was paying too much for a king bed nonsmoking in a Hilton in Connecticut? Yes, it was a wealthy, lovely, and privileged part of the state, but it still felt like a descent.

But wait, Sherwin thought, stop judging people. These solvers were a group of people who had to be clever. These people were thinkers. Yes, there had to be plenty of eccentrics — compulsive hand-washers, functioning autistics, encyclopedia readers, and compulsive cat collectors — but didn’t that actually make them a highly attractive group of people? When had Sherwin been anything other than a weird fucker? Didn’t he get paid to be a weird fucker?

“Hello,” he said to the woman at the registration desk. She wore a name tag with her name, Sue, spelled out on a crossword grid.

“Hello,” Sue said. “Welcome to the tournament. Are you a contestant or a journalist?”

“A contestant.”

“So this must be your first time here?” she asked.

“How do you know that?”

“Oh, this is a family, really, a highly dysfunctional family.” She laughed. “I know everybody. But I don’t know you. So that makes you new.”

“You’ve got me.”

“Okay, I’ll sign you up for the C Group.”

“C? What’s that?”

“It’s for new solvers.”

“I’m new,” Sherwin said, “but I’m good.”

“Oh, first-timers are always C Group. If you do well enough on the first few puzzles, they’ll consider moving you up right away, but that rarely happens.”

“Why not?”

“Because the puzzles are always more difficult than you’d expect. And because the pressure — well, first-timers have no idea how much pressure there is. And — well, they tend to choke a bit.”

Sue laughed again.

“Are you laughing at me?” Sherwin asked.

“Oh, no,” she said. “I’m sorry. I’m laughing at myself. I’ve been coming to this tournament for seventeen years and I’m still a C Group. I keep choking year after year.”

“I’m used to pressure.”

“Oh, I’m not judging you. It’s all supposed to be fun. It is fun. Just sign up with the C Group and have fun. This is your first time. You have years of fun ahead of you.”

Years of fun? When had anybody ever said such a thing and meant it? Sue meant it. Sherwin shrugged and signed up for C Group.

Later that afternoon, he sat at a long table in a room filled with long tables. He had four pencils and a good eraser. He sat beside an elderly Korean woman who looked as if she’d been born in her sweater.

“Hello,” she said. “You must be new?”

She had a slight accent, so she was probably a first-generation immigrant. She’d probably been in the United States for twenty-five years. She’d been here long enough to become a crossword solver. Sherwin realized that he had no idea if crossword puzzles were written in other languages. Were other languages flexible enough?

“Are you new?” the Korean woman asked again. She was missing a lower front tooth. This made her look somehow younger, even impish. Don’t be condescending, Sherwin chastised himself.

“Yes, I’m new,” he said. “C Group.”

“Welcome, welcome,” she said. “We’re like a family here.”

“So I’ve heard.”

“Yes, just like a family. Like my family. My big sister is a legendary bitch. Just like that bitch over there.”

She pointed a pencil at another elderly woman, a white woman wearing thick glasses. Didn’t she know that one could purchase plastic lenses these days?

“Why is she a bitch?” Sherwin asked.

“Because she always beats me. And because she always apologizes for beating me. Young man, you must never apologize for being good. It makes the rest of us feel worse about ourselves.”

“Okay, good advice,” Sherwin said. “So I guess I should tell you that I really don’t belong in Group C. I’m better than that.”

“So you think you can beat me?”

“I’ve timed myself with puzzles. I’m fast.”

“I’m sure you are.”

A volunteer set the first puzzle — freshly printed on fine cotton paper — facedown on the table in front of Sherwin.

“So what happens now?” Sherwin asked.

“When they say go, you turn over the paper and do your puzzle. When you’re finished, raise your hand, and somebody will mark your time, and then they’ll collect your puzzle and check it for accuracy. And they’ll measure your score against all the other C Group puzzlers.”

“The woman said they’d move me up to B if I did well enough.”

“Why don’t you just do the first puzzle and see what happens? What’s your name anyway?”

“Sherwin.”

“I’m Mai. What do you do when you aren’t solving puzzles?”

“I’m a writer.”

“Oh. Have you written anything I might have heard of?”

“Doubtful. I wrote poems and short stories. I never sold much. And never won any awards. I wrote a couple of movies, too. But they never got made.”

“What are you working on now?”

“Oh, I don’t write anymore.”

“Why not?”

“My talent dried up and blew away in the wind,” Sherwin said. “I am the Dust Bowl.”

“I’m sorry to hear that.”

“I’m sorry to say it.”

Sherwin had never before confessed aloud his fears that his talent was gone forever. And now that he had, he realized that he would never write again. Not like he had. Was that so bad? He’d written two decent books and two bad ones. How many people in the world had written and published anything? Because he’d stopped writing, Sherwin had been thinking of himself as a failure. But perhaps that wasn’t it. Perhaps he had only been destined to be a writer for that brief period of time. After all, there must be at least one person in the world who had loved his books — who still loved his work — so perhaps that made it all worthwhile. Wasn’t everything temporary anyway?

“Okay, wait, Sherwin, enough of the biography,” the Korean woman said. “Here we go.”

“Puzzlers,” the emcee said, “start your puzzles.”

Sherwin and the Korean woman, and a few hundred other puzzlers, flipped over their papers and started working. Sherwin quickly filled three Across answers and one Down, but then stalled. He read through the clues and found that he didn’t know any of them offhand. He was stuck already. Thirty seconds into his first puzzle and he was frozen. Words were failing him. Again and again, they failed him. He stared blankly at his mostly empty grid for one minute and three seconds and was shocked when the Korean woman raised her hand.

“You’re done?” he asked.

“You’re not supposed to talk,” she said.

“But you’re really done that fast?”

“Yes, but that bitch up there beat me again.”

Sherwin checked out of the hotel, caught a taxi to the airport, and the flight to Chicago that would connect him to the flight back home to San Francisco.

On the second leg, somewhere over Wyoming, Sherwin pulled out the New York Times and found the crossword. It was Saturday, so this puzzle would probably be difficult to solve. Sherwin vowed to solve it, quickly and accurately. He wanted redemption. Here, in the airplane, he was able to fill in a few boxes, but not many. The puzzle remained mostly unsolved.

He was ready to crumple the paper into a ball and stuff it into the seat pocket in front of him when he became aware that he was being watched. One row behind him, to the left and across the aisle, a man was simultaneously working the airline magazine crossword puzzle and watching Sherwin work his New York Times puzzle. The airline magazine puzzles were embarrassingly easy. But the man was obviously struggling and was embarrassed by his struggles.

“I’ll figure this out,” he said to Sherwin, “but you, man, you’re working the Times puzzle. You must be a genius.”

“Maybe,” Sherwin said.

Wanting to confirm the man’s opinion, Sherwin again studied the puzzle. He tentatively filled in one answer. It was wrong, surely it was wrong; ALPINE could not be the right answer. It made no sense. But it fit the squares. It put ink on the page. Sherwin felt good about that, so he filled in another answer with the wrong word. And then he filled in another. In a minute, he finished the puzzle. He’d filled nearly all the boxes with incorrect and random words like music and screenwriter and fear but the man behind him could not tell that Sherwin was faking it. He could only see Sherwin finishing the difficult puzzle in record time. Wow, the man thought, he’s barely even reading the clues. He’s a crossword machine. He’s a crossword cyborg. He’s a crossword killer. He’s a crossword Terminator.

When Sherwin filled in the last blank, he sighed with satisfaction, folded the paper in half, and slid it into the seat pocket in front of him. Then he looked back at the man behind him and smiled. The man gave him a thumbs-up. It was such an eager and innocent gesture that Sherwin felt guilty for his deception. But then he laughed at himself, at his gift for lying.

I am a lying genius, Sherwin thought. And what is lying but a form of storytelling? Sherwin realized that he’d told a story, the first story he’d told in public for any kind of audience since he left Hollywood. But wait, did this really count as storytelling? Well, he’d entertained one man, right? And then Sherwin realized what he’d truly just done. And he roared with laughter and startled a few of his fellow passengers with the volume of his joy.

Sherwin realized that, for years, he’d been running away from a wildfire, an all-consuming inferno that had turned his words into cinder and ash, but he’d just now set an escape fire; he’d told a lie, a story, that convinced him he might be capable of putting a story on the page. Or was this all delusion? Sherwin knew there was a pen in his left inside coat pocket. He could feel it there. And there was paper everywhere on this airplane. He had ink; he could get paper. Oh, he wondered, oh, do I have the strength to begin again? Do I have the courage to step into a dark theater, hold hands with a beautiful woman, and fall back in love with my innocence?