Dan still ran into some of the people from the old days. They popped up here and there. Tim Deller, for instance, had made it quite big. His second feature, about a family of meth addicts, was going into production in the spring. Dan had given him notes on the script. Julie Moore had also been successful. She practically lived on the festival circuit, receiving fawning attention from certain quadrants of academia for her odd documentaries. The doors had opened easily for both of them, and for good reason. Their talent had been so obvious from the start.

For Dan, the doors had opened, but less grandly. Five years ago—was it that long?—on borrowed money, using heads and tails of used film rolls, he had managed to complete an experimental feature, but the project had failed to land a distribution deal. No big surprise, considering its content. The movie had no characters, five elliptical dream sequences in a row, and voice-overs drawn from the dialogue of daily newspaper cartoons, all of which made for tough viewing, to say the least. Following that debacle came numerous aborted projects: a unicorn movie, a double-screen gunfighter epic, an improvised, single-set romance, none of which had gained any traction. At a certain point, his parents, previously supportive, had begun subtly to encourage him to find other avenues for his creative energies.

Dan sometimes reassured himself that everyone was a failure in some way. The great paint er was a failed dancer, the professional baseball player a failed basketball star. He could see that in some ways he had done all right, achieving his dreams in the most bare-bones fashion. But the fact was, the failure was bitter. He put zero stock in his success as a father, a husband, a friend, a commercial director, all of which came too easily to command any real pride. Only filmmaking was meaningful, and his failure in that realm threatened his very inner glue. He had arrived at the perimeter of his selfhood, and sadly it was not as far out as he had hoped.