Eventually the only step left in his grand plan was the suicide itself. And because he was too frightened to use a gun, or jump from a great height, Seth was left with poison. But an overdose of prescription pills might leave him brain damaged but alive. And after watching a YouTube video of a criminal investment banker writhing in agony on a courtroom floor, the idea of death by cyanide went out the window as well.
That left him carbon monoxide, which was easy to arrange once he learned how to disable his Acura’s catalytic converter. You could learn all sorts of interesting things on YouTube if you knew where to look.
So here Seth was, on a sunny Friday morning, hands resting on his soft beer gut, thumbing through pictures of Ben and Brandon and Natalie on his phone, ears listening to the low rumble of his damaged engine exhaust. He’d chosen to die in a Dallas Cowboys T-shirt and a pair of khaki cargo shorts, and every so often he took another drink of whiskey. Drugging himself was the only way he would get through this, and even then he wasn’t sure he would make it. He wanted to drive to the daycare and see his boys in person, hug them again, hold them tight and promise nothing bad would ever happen to them. He wanted to kiss Natalie one more time.
Over and over Seth had watched the video of Michael Marin swallowing capsules of cyanide when his guilty verdict was announced. Drowning in debt, Marin had been caught trying to burn down his own house to generate an insurance payout, and courtroom cameras happened to capture his response. Sometimes Seth watched the video one frame at a time to better scrutinize a face that was flush with the reality of impending doom. Marin had contemplated darkness while monotone voices orchestrated the minutiae of a prison sentence that would never be carried out, and the look in his eyes still haunted Seth. It was the gaze of a man who had stepped into the infinity of nothing, who was forced to endure moment after horrifying moment as poison strangled cells by the billions. In all, seven long minutes elapsed before Marin’s body finally succumbed to the cyanide, and Seth had a pretty good idea what had been going through the guy’s mind:
Nothing in death could be worse than a wasted life.
TWO
Two hundred and fifty miles to the south, as the morning sun climbed into a cloudless sky, Thomas Phillips was on his way to meet actress Skylar Stover at Dallas/Fort Worth International Airport. Yet so far this exercise had been plagued by problems. His iPhone refused to download new messages (The mail server at imap.gmail.com is not responding), and all the way to the airport on crowded freeways he found himself trapped behind morons who intentionally clogged the leftmost lanes to enforce impractical speed limits.
The real source of his anxiety, though, was the actress herself. Skylar Stover was a worldwide celebrity attached to his second picture who wanted to discuss possible changes to the script and her character in particular. Thomas should have been floored by her interest, by her willingness to stop in Dallas on her way to L.A., since by any reasonable measure she was one of the most alluring women in Hollywood and honestly the entire planet of women. If her turn as a disaffected college student in the acclaimed Life…Unexpected hadn’t won over every human male on the earth, her blonde hair extensions and ample cleavage in the action thriller Darkest Energy surely had. In fact, when his agent first told him about the requested meeting, Thomas assumed he was joking.
The project in question was The Pulse, a post-apocalyptic story so brutal it had frightened him even as he wrote it. But now that the film had been greenlit (primarily because Skylar was attached to it) her power over the project vastly exceeded his own. Which wasn’t the worst outcome Thomas could imagine. Skylar had studied philosophy at Yale. She was one of a few actors who could bounce between independent films and glossy comic-book thrillers and somehow remain both credible and bankable. Depending on the project, she was paid scale or eight figures, and her compact, buxom figure was the standard by which other women were judged. Thomas was nervous as hell to meet her.
All morning he’d been deliberating on how to demonstrate respect for Skylar without appearing too earnest. Thomas had been paid a staggering $6 million for the screenplay, which compelled the trades to label him “Scribe of the Moment,” but no amount of money or favorable press could overcome Skylar’s towering influence in the film industry. Which meant the only way to keep her fingerprints off the script would be to earn her respect, and the way to do that, Thomas felt sure, was to impress her with his wit and charm and intelligence. Easier said than done.
Eventually his phone connected to Gmail, and a few minutes later he was standing in a special terminal designated for chartered flights, feeling out of place. Several women had gathered in front of an elevator door and kept looking at Thomas as if they should know who he was. He resisted the urge to look at his phone again and tried to imagine the scene of their meeting. He would shake hands with Skylar. Introduce himself. And then what? Thank her for agreeing to star in the film? He didn’t want to come across as a fan. This was his idea, after all. His story. And still he didn’t understand why she had bothered to come all this way to talk to him in person. The only reason that seemed to make any sense was that she wanted to take the plot in a different direction, that she planned to hire another writer. She was here to break the news to him gently. That had to be it. Anything else could have been handled through email.
Then the elevator doors opened and chattering flight attendants parted like a Biblical sea. Skylar looked smaller than he had imagined. Thinner. Her eyes were a bug’s eyes, black and round, at least until she flipped a pair of sunglasses over her forehead and used them to pin back her thick, blonde hair. By the time she reached Thomas, he could see her actual eyes were human-sized and an electric shade of green.
“Thomas!” she said and threw her arms around him. Her hair was shoulder length and smelled vaguely of coconut. Her skin was soft. Her arms were toned but feminine. Everything about her was feminine.
“It’s so good to finally meet you,” said Skylar. “Thomas World was awesome. And I have some ideas for this new project I hope you’ll really like. If you’re open to that sort of thing, I mean.”
Their encounter had begun so differently from what Thomas expected that his only answer was a burst of nervous laughter. He realized he was smiling at her. And not a confident smile, either, but an earnest, goofy grin that would send exactly the opposite message he hoped to convey.
“I’m glad to meet you, Skylar. I honestly couldn’t believe it when you agreed to do the film. Your talent and screen presence will—”
“Don’t do that. Don’t blow that industry sunshine up my ass. And please don’t call me Skylar, either.”
“No?”
“Call me ‘Sky.’ Everyone does.”
“Sky?”
“That’s me.”
It was strange how the world worked. Two years ago, Thomas had agreed to end a marriage that had never been a real marriage in the first place. He spent his days toiling in a cubicle and his nights alone, agonizing over past relationships and what had gone wrong with them. Naturally Thomas assumed the problems were his, because everything he touched turned to shit—including his own screenwriting career. But then one evening, while he sat drunk in front of his computer, a story idea so basic and absurd occurred to him that he couldn’t help but open Final Draft and start banging away. Six hours later he’d written twenty-five pages and felt energized in a way he hadn’t known in years. He slept until noon, got up to write again, and by midnight had completed Thomas World, the story of a man so unhappy with life that he built an improved reality inside his computer. On first read, Thomas realized he’d written a screenplay transparently about himself, had saddled the protagonist with his own problems and burdened him with the dreams he had chased for years. It was the sort of amateur exercise that should never have been exposed to the outside world, but instead of burying the document in an archive folder, he got drunk again and emailed it to his agent. The next morning, as Thomas suffered under the hot glare of a hangover, his agent called to say how much he loved the script. He loved it so much he got four producers to feel the same way, each who tried to outbid the other until the property sold for an even three million dollars. Eighteen months later the completed film was branded the “thinking person’s thriller” about “an ordinary man in extraordinary circumstances,” and went on to become the second-highest grossing movie of the year. His agent had leveraged the equity of that success to sell The Pulse, and now Skylar Stover wanted him to call her Sky, and the whole scene felt unstable. Like any minute he would wake up and find himself in front of the computer, having awakened from a two-year dream.