“Scene two, I will agree to do another revision,” I said, “because it is in the contract, but, scene one, you have to explain to me why the director wants to make this particular movie, instead of the one we already wrote, or the one before that.”

“Because this one is true.”

“How? What’s the mirror to life in this version?”

“What mirror?”

“The one that suggests to us, at each point, another possible reality, and, in that slippery depth, challenges what we think we know about ourselves and the world.”

“There isn’t one,” he said. “It is not about making meaning. It is about when there is no meaning, and just trying to hear and follow what comes from the gut so you can find meaning again. It’s finding a way forward, when we lose ourselves or get divorced from the meaning in our lives.”

“But the way forward has a meaning too,” I argued.

“Why? Isn’t forward meaning enough?” He tapped his finger impatiently. “Forward because you cannot go back.”

“You’re using a postmodern device, so you have to consider its implications whether you want to or not.”

“What does that mean? Besides theories I buried in the desert.”

“Nothing, I suppose. But what if we do it in four panels? He’s rich, she’s poor, the country is poor. He’s rich, she’s poor, the country is rich. He’s poor, she’s rich, the country is rich, and so on. Color as you will. It tells on how local conditions influence character, possibility, choice. The aspects of ourselves visible in different circumstances. What is truly the gut, and what is from outside, and the different narratives available for us to follow to make sense of it.”

“That sounds like theory. Do you think it will make a good picture?”

“It will make good art, which is what you really want.”

“Just as long as we stay away from modernity. There’s no purpose to it anymore, and I am not interested in anything I went to the Sahara to forget, or the Gobi to unlearn, or Sonora to burn and bury in the sand.”

I shook my head. “They did not have the kind I am talking about then. It is why you had to go to the desert.”

“Okay,” he nodded slowly. “Let’s make it like that, then.”

“Four stories to square the ocean.”

“Four dimensions. Four Gospels.”

“In the book,” I replied.

“What do you mean, in the book?”

“There are four Gospels in the book. In them Christ points to the Father. In the other gospels Christ points to the self. Christ goes back to you.”

“Why did they leave them out of the book, then?”

“The fathers did not like it.”

“Let’s just stick to four.”

“Fine, but you still have not told me why you want to move the action to New York?”

“Simple.” He held open his hands. “I want to go home.”

I returned to my hotel, where I spent the rest of the day in the cool darkness of the shadows cast from the courtyard, trying to work. But I could only think about our conversation and the differences between living and creation it had brought to mind. I decided to break for the next day, and removed a copy of a novel from a pile of books on my desk, then went to the balcony to read awhile. The book turned out to be about a white South African professor who loses his job for taking advantage of one of his black students, then retreats to live with his daughter in the country, where they are viciously attacked in a robbery. As I registered its cold struggle, with violence and postmodernity, I could only think how much the question of redemption for its unsympathetic narrator was the same as that faced by the liberal readers it was meant for, who always believed that by extending compassion to such a character they were demonstrating their humanism rather than the moral vanity of people who have an easier time extending sympathy to those like them, no matter how flawed, than they do giving empathy to those who are not like them in life, whose inner worlds they cannot imagine at all. He is exactly like them. It is only his transgressions are easier to see and condemn. Beyond that there is a false equation of heartless violence perpetuated by and against individuals — placing the narrator’s disenfranchisement on the same plane as the African masses — with the systemic violence of the state.

As much as I enjoyed the philosophical inquisition of identity and violence, when all was said and done its concerns were still white and male. Even if they were about unlearning white male constructs, its imagination ended an inch above the author’s skin. The question of his salvation was valid, of course, but he was only able to reconcile himself to the country on Western liberal terms, making the ending a false redemption, because it was the same as the answer to all problems liberals face; not reconciliation to the difficulty of life, but release from its muddy depths.

As brutality layered on brutality, and the characters found solace within the constructs of the book’s underlying theories, offering their benevolent forgiveness to each other, it became clear why one would not wish to look outside its theoretical framework into the sucking mud of the world. Because reconciliation and redemption there was too bleak to ponder; would take five hundred years.

By evening, when I left to meet Genevieve, I had frittered away the whole day, beyond a single line of direction:

INT. Darkness

“You should quit,” Genevieve said, when she saw my angst over deciphering Davidson. “Forget him. Go and make what you want. Let Davidson figure out his own movie.”

“It’s a collaboration. We’ll figure it out.”

“How?” she demanded to know.

“It will happen.”

“Yes, if you still believe in it,” she said. “It will show itself to you. But you should make your own things.”

“What do you mean?”

“The film is for the auteur and actor. Write a novel,” she said. “That is your form.”

“Why do you say that?”

She shrugged. “Everyone has to create; it is the only thing that makes us human. For some people it is enough to build a shed in their backyard, or watch a television show. Others have to invent whole worlds,” she said. “And some have to reinvent this one. Maybe we have come at the end of when people cared, but it simply means we did not come too late.”

We changed the subject, but I was unburdened by the worry that had weighed on me.

“How was your day?” I asked.

“Superb. I quit my job.”

“Why?”

“To make my own things.”

“That is fine,” I said.

“Yes, it is,” she replied, setting a pot on the stove to boil. “Are we not free?”

“We are free,” I said. “But free has a cost, too.”

“Do not be so bourgeois. It is why the world is so miserable. Everybody does false things their whole life, for money or whatever else, but they do not understand it means they then have to live in a false world. We have shelter, and we have good food to eat, and we have each other. What else do we need that we do not have?”

I was struck by her liquid intensity. “Nothing at all.”

“I am so happy with you.”

When I awoke the next morning she had already gone out, leaving me a note to say she wanted to be alone with her thoughts before the rest of the city arose.

She had left a loaf of fresh bread and pastries, and I made coffee, then dressed, folding her note into my pocket, like a talisman, as I went to hole up in my room.

By the time I sat down, the answer to the previous day’s silence was there with me, and I hummed with inspiration all afternoon. By evening I had made enough progress to ring Davidson, who suggested we meet for dinner to discuss the revision.

“In the framing story the director has made three films on three continents in twenty-four months, all for money,” I started, “but has spent his first fuel and is exhausted. He is isolated from society, which to him seems to have traded its soul for material things. He is sick in himself to know how close he has come to doing the same, but finally accepts he does not value what it values, does not think as it thinks, or love what it loves, and yet he loves it. He disappears, hoping to discover a new energy and recover himself, not understanding that the him he thought he knew before no longer exists. He walks the streets of old Europe, streets he knows and streets foreign to him, rummaging the pockets of his life, thinking of his parents, who were split up by the time he was born.”