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only at me. At first, I felt flattered, then after a while, I felt less than that.
    Jon-Luc kept right on talking. He was being dark and playing Genius. Maybe he was a Genius. I didn’t want to get bitter about it. But I had had Genius pushed at me all through school: Shakespeare, Tolstoy, Ibsen, G.B. Shaw, Chekov, all those dullards. And worse, Mark Twain, Hawthorne, the Bronte sisters, Dreiser, Sinclair Lewis, it all just laid on you like a slab of cement, and you wanted to get out and away, they were like heavy stupid parents insisting upon regulations and ways that would make even the dead cringe.
    Jon-Luc just kept right on talking. That’s all I remember. Except now and then, my good Sarah saying, “Hank, you shouldn’t drink so much. Slow down a little. I don’t want you dead in the morning.”
    But Jon-Luc was on a roll.
    I no longer understood what he was saying. I saw lips moving. He was not unpleasant, he was just there. He needed a shave. And we were in this strange Beverly Hills hotel where you walked on peacocks. A magic world. I liked it because I hadn’t seen anything like it before. It was senseless and perfect and safe.
    The wine poured and Jon-Luc kept going.
    I lapsed into my pathetic cut-off period. Often with humans, both good and bad, my senses simply shut off, they get tired, I give up. I am polite. I nod. I pretend to understand because I don’t want anybody to be hurt. That is the one weakness that has lead me into the most trouble. Trying to be kind to others I often get my soul shredded into a kind of spiritual pasta.
    No matter. My brain shuts off. I listen. I respond. And they are too dumb to know that I am not there.
    The drinks poured and Jon-Luc kept on talking. I’m sure that he said many astonishing things. I simply focused on his eyebrows...

    The next morning in my own place, in Sarah’s and my bed, the phone rang about 11 a.m.
    “Hello?”
    It was Pinchot.
    “Listen, I have to tell you something!”
    “Yes?”
    “Modard NEVER TALKS. There has been NOBODY, NOBODY WHO HAS EVER CAUSED HIM TO TALK LIKE YOU DID! HE TALKED FOR HOURS! EVERYBODY WAS ASTONISHED!”
    “Oh, O.K.”
    “YOU DON’T UNDERSTAND! HE NEVER TALKS! HE TALKED TO YOU FOR HOURS!”
    “Listen, Jon, I’m sorry but I’m sick, I have to sleep.”
    “All right. But I must tell you one more thing.”
    “Shoot.”
    “It’s about Jean-Paul Sanrah.”
    “Yes?”
    “He says that I must suffer, that I haven’t suffered enough and that when I have suffered more he will get me the money.”
    “All right.”
    “He’s strange, isn’t he? A real genius.”
    “Yes,” I answered, “I think that he is.”
    I hung it up.
    Sarah was still asleep. I turned on my right side, toward the window, because sometimes I snored and I wanted to direct the sound away from her.
    I had just fallen into that gentle dark, that last rest given to us before death, when Sarah’s favorite cat, Beauty, stepped off her own special pillow by Sarah’s head and walked across my face. One clawed foot tore into my left ear, then she jumped to the floor, walked across, and leaped up onto the sill of the open window facing east. As the bloody sun moved up I was not gripped by entrancing thoughts.

7

    That night, sitting at the typer, I poured two drinks, I drank two drinks, I smoked 3 cigarettes and listened to Brahms’ Third on the radio, and then I realized that I needed something to help me get into the screenplay. I punched Pinchot’s number. He was in.
    “Allo?”
    “Jon, it’s Hank.”
    “Hank, how are you?”
    “Fine. Listen, I’ll take the ten.”
    “But you said it might hinder your creative process to take it in advance.”
    “I’ve changed my mind. There hasn’t been a creative process.”
    “You mean...?”
    “I mean, I’ve worked it out in my mind but there is nothing yet on paper.”
    “What do you have in mind?”
    “It’s about a drunk. He just sits on this barstool night and day.”
    “Do you think the