He sat on the deck, a tall man in wrinkled cotton trousers of landmark status. He went barechested much of the day, slathered with sunblock even in the shade, and his silvery hair, as always, was braided down into a short ponytail.

"Day ten," I told him.

In the morning he braved the sun. He needed to enrich his supply of vitamin D and raised his arms sunward, petitioning gods, he said, even if it meant the stealthy genesis of abnormal tissue.

"It's healthier to reject certain cautions than fall in line. I assume you know that," he said.

His face was long and florid, flesh drooping slightly at the sides of the jaw. He had a large pocked nose, eyes maybe grayish green, brows flaring. The braided hair should have seemed incongruous but didn't. It wasn't styled in sections but only woven into broad strands at the back of the head and it gave him a kind of cultural identity, a flair of distinction, the intellectual as tribal elder.

"Is this exile? Are you in exile here?"

"Wolfowitz went to the World Bank. That was exile," he said. "This is different, a spiritual retreat. The house used to be owned by someone in my first wife's family. I came here on and off for years. Came to write, to think. Elsewhere, everywhere, my day begins in conflict, every step I take on a city street is conflict, other people are conflict. Different here."

"But no writing this time."

"I've had offers to do a book. Portrait of the war room from the viewpoint of a privileged outsider. But I don't want to do a book, any kind of book."

"You want to sit here."

"The house is mine now and it's rotting away but let it. Time slows down when I'm here. Time becomes blind. I feel the landscape more than see it. I never know what day it is. I never know if a minute has passed or an hour. I don't get old here."

"I wish I could say the same."

"You need an answer. Is that what you're saying?"

"I need an answer."

"You have a life back there."

"A life. That may be too strong a word."

He sat head back, eyes shut, face to the sun. "You're not married, am I right?"

"Separated. We separated," I said.

"Separated. How familiar that sounds. Do you have a job, something you do between projects?"

Maybe he tried not to dose the word projects with fatal irony.

"Sporadic jobs. Production work, some editing."

He looked at me now. Possibly he was wondering who I was.

"Did I ask you once before how you got so scrawny? You eat. You throw down food same as I do."

"I seem to eat. I do eat. But all the energy, all the nourishment gets sucked up by the film," I told him. "The body gets nothing."

He closed his eyes again and I watched the sweat and sun lotion runneling slowly down his forehead. I waited for him to ask about filmwork I'd done on my own, the question I'd been hoping not to hear. But he'd lost interest in the conversation or simply had the kind of teeming ego that forgets to attend to such details. He would say yes or no based not on my qualifications but on the play of his mood, in his good time. I went inside to check my laptop for e-mail, needing outside contact but feeling corrupt, as if I were breaking an unstated pact of creative withdrawal.

He was reading poetry mostly, rereading his youth, he said, Zukofsky and Pound, sometimes aloud, and also Rilke in the original, whispering a line or two only, now and then, from the Elegies. He was working on his German.

I'd done one film only, an idea for a film, some people said. I did it, I finished it, people saw it but what did they see? An idea, they said, that remains an idea.

I didn't want to call it a documentary, although it was assembled completely from documents, old film footage, kinescopes of TV shows from the 1950s. This was social and historical material but edited well beyond the limits of information and objectivity and not itself a document. I found something religious in it, maybe I was the only one, religious, rapturous, a man transported.

The man was the one individual on-screen throughout, the comedian Jerry Lewis. This was Jerry Lewis of the early telethons, the TV shows broadcast once a year to benefit people suffering from muscular dystrophy, Jerry Lewis day and night and into the following day, heroic, tragicomic, surreal.

I looked at kinescopes of the early years, every distant minute, it was another civilization, midcentury America, the footage resembling some deviant technological lifeform struggling out of the irradiated dust of the atomic age. I edited out all the guest appearances, the lounge acts, movie stars, dancers, disabled children, the studio audience, the band. The film was all Jerry, pure performance, Jerry talking, singing, weeping, Jerry with his ruffled shirt open at the collar, bow tie undone, a raccoon flung over his shoulders, Jerry inviting the nation's love and wonder at four in the morning, in closeup, a crew-cut sweating man in semidelirium, a disease artist, begging us to send money to cure his afflicted children.

I had him babbling in unsequential edits, one year shading into another, or Jerry soundless, clowning, he is knock-kneed and bucktoothed, bouncing on a trampoline in slow motion, the old flawed footage, the disturbed signals, random noise on the soundtrack, streaky patterns on the screen. He inserts drumsticks in his nostrils, he sticks the handmike in his mouth. I added intervals of modern music to the track, rows of tones, the sound of a certain re-echoing drone. There was an element of austere drama in the music, it placed Jerry outside the moment, in some larger surround, ahistorical, a man on a mission from God.

I tormented myself over the running time, settling finally on a freakish fifty-seven-minute movie that was screened at a couple of documentary festivals. It could have been a hundred and fifty-seven minutes, could have been four hours, six hours. It wore me out, beat me down, I became Jerry's frenzied double, eyeballs popping out of my head. Sometimes a thing that's hard is hard because you're doing it wrong. This was not wrong. But I didn't want Elster to know about it. Because how would it make him feel, being a successor, a straight man to a rampaging comic.

My wife said to me once, "Film, film, film. If you were any more intense, you'd be a black hole. A singularity," she said. "No light escapes."

I said, "I have the wall, I know the wall, it's in a loft in Brooklyn, big messy industrial loft. I have access pretty much any time day or night. Wall is mostly pale gray, some cracks, some stains, but these are not distractions, they're not self-conscious design elements. The wall is right, I think about it, dream about it, I open my eyes and see it, I close my eyes it's there."

"You feel a deep need to do this thing. Tell me why," he said.

"You're the answer to that question. What you say, what you'll tell us about these last years, what you know that no one knows."

We were inside, it was late, he wore the old rumpled trousers, a cruddy sweatshirt, his big dumb feet in dressy leather sandals.

"I'll tell you this much. War creates a closed world and not only for those in combat but for the plotters, the strategists. Except their war is acronyms, projections, contingencies, methodologies."

He chanted the words, he intoned liturgically.

"They become paralyzed by the systems at their disposal. Their war is abstract. They think they're sending an army into a place on a map."

He was not one of the strategists, he said unnecessarily. I knew what he was, or what he was supposed to be, a defense intellectual, without the usual credentials, and when I used the term it made him tense his jaw with a proud longing for the early weeks and months, before he began to understand that he was occupying an empty seat.