The Book of Air and Shadows

has asked me for help for the first time in our entire lives. Twice. I want to encourage this. Jake needs a lot of help. And I owe him. He was very good to me when I was in prison and for a period afterward, although he utterly despised me. It was an act of real charity, and I want to pay him back if I can.”
    “Why were you in prison?” asked Crosetti. But the other man smiled, gave a short, low laugh, shook his head, took a thick paperback out of his flight bag, and slipped on reading glasses. Curious Crosetti glommed the title: Hans Küng’s
Does God Exist?
, which struck Crosetti as an odd choice for an airplane book, but what did he know about the man? He slid his laptop out of his briefcase, placed it on the solid table provided, and turned it on. To his surprise, the little icon that announced the availability of an Internet connection lit up, but of course the sort of people who flew in private jets could not bear to be cut off from the Internet while airborne. Cell phones probably worked too. He put the headphones on and slid a copy of
Electric Shadows
into the drive. Oh, of course, the seat had an A/C plug in too, God forbid the rich would ever have to depend on laptop batteries! He watched the movie with the usual critical discontent he felt when watching debut features by someone of his generation. And a woman, too. And a
Chinese
woman. Xiao Jiang was pretty good, and he tried to give her credit for it and not think bad thoughts about what she had done to get the chance. It was
Cinema Paradiso
against the background of the Cultural Revolution and the point seemed to be that no amount of bad art and state control could keep movies from being glamorous. The thirty-year time shifts were handled well, and the film had the typical aesthetic grace of all Chinese films, but the plot and the emotions generated by the cast seemed soap opera-ish, he thought, writing the review, a good debut from a talented director, not to be compared with Albert Crosetti, of course, who would
never
get a chance to write and direct a feature…
    When the film ended he brought up the Final Cut scriptwriting word-processor and started a fresh script. It wanted a title. He typed in
Carolyn Rolly
, and thought about films named after women:
Stella Dallas. Mildred Pierce. Erin Brockovich. Annie Hall.
Yes, but…He deleted it and typed
The Bookbinder
, an original screenplay by A. P. Crosetti. A. Patrick Crosetti. Albert P. Crosetti.
    Crosetti was a slow writer ordinarily, a big deleter, a pacer, a procrastinator, but now it wrote, as the silly expression went, itself. He had nearly the whole first act done, from the bookshop fire through the first night in the bookbinder’s loft, and the discovery of the manuscript, including the first flashback, a short scene from Carolyn’s childhood and its horrors. He read it over and found it good, suspiciously good, better than anything he’d done before, deep and dark and European, but with a higher tempo than the general run of serious Eurofilms. He checked his watch: nearly two hours had passed. Outside the window it was growing dark; the plane flew over a clotted field of Arctic clouds. He stretched, yawned, saved his work, and got up to visit the toilet. When he returned he found Mishkin in his seat in what seemed like urgent conversation with his brother.
    “Could you give us a moment?” asked Mishkin.
    “It’s your plane, boss,” said Crosetti. He retrieved his laptop and walked forward to occupy the seat vacated by Mishkin, across the narrow aisle from Mrs. M. Or ex-Mrs., he hadn’t figured out the relationship there yet. He had to pass the two children and could not help noticing that they were both supplied with the latest Apple PowerBooks. Crosetti had never known a really rich kid and wondered what their lives were like, whether they were spoiled rotten and whether they pretended to be less rich than they were, like their daddy, or whether they were so embedded in the life that they no longer gave a damn. The girl was watching a music video, rappers living out a dream of sex and violence. The boy was shooting monsters in Warcraft. Crosetti sat down in the seat vacated by Mishkin, across the aisle from the wife-or-ex, who seemed to be sleeping, with her face pressed against the window, nothing showing but the curve of a blond head and a white neck emerging from a gray sweater. He set up his machine and plunged back into the fictive universe.
    The attendant came by and