The theater was on a miserable minor highway in Pennsylvania, packed with chain restaurants and banks and aging non-chain restaurants, the neon signs of which were in various stages of disassembly, intentional or otherwise. The deep sadness of this place, on a sunless afternoon in deep winter, almost started me crying again, as I had been doing more or less continually for months. I held it together. The repetitive contemporary R&B on the radio soothed me.

The theater was distinguished by the presence of a large brick tower in the parking lot, left over from something, I suppose, a prison, or maybe a castle-themed family fun center. There were only a couple of cars in the lot, so I pulled into a spot near the entrance and hurried through the cold to the theater. I was a solid twenty minutes late, which was a little excessive even by the loose standards I held for myself. The skinny kid in the ticket window seemed pleasantly engrossed by his phone, so I decided not to bother him. I told a touch screen what I wanted and it buzzed out a ticket for me. In the lobby there was no one to take the ticket, so I pocketed it for future use. The carpeted hallway was densely coated with smashed popcorn. I followed the trail to my dark, exploding, completely empty theater and took a seat in what I thought to be the dead center.

From what I could gather, a revolution was being fomented, and, naturally, opposed by the oligarchic state. The beautiful young movie star was the chosen one. She had initially been reluctant to join the movement, but she soon saw the need for large-scale armed insurrection and indiscriminate killing. It was better to kill, she learned, than to abandon one’s principles, which were not, in this episode at least, explicitly articulated. A famous actor who had recently died appeared in his final role as a conflicted villain—or villainous hero? It was unclear the degree to which his ambivalence was in the script, since it was mostly in his eyebrows.

Attempting to make sense of the on-screen goings-on did not distract me from thinking about my mother. As with classical music, the gulf between my understanding and what I was experiencing was so great that my mind had no choice but to travel elsewhere.

I’d had an emergency appendectomy over the summer, a small opening in my gut through which it seemed an eager passel of physical and mental ailments was allowed to enter. I’d surprised myself with my calm before the surgery: They have to cut you open, I thought, so that’s what they’ll do. When it came time for the uncomfortable parts before and after, the prodding and inserting and injecting, I looked away, pretended it was happening to someone else, thought about sex. It wasn’t terrifically different from how I got through most things.