He thought about this as he drove. He’d always believed that endings should be quiet and full of champagne, assemblies as awkward and giddily meaningless as what had come before. But even on a speculative level he couldn’t summon up a list of those who’d come to commemorate his. Lena Ozova would fly in from New York maybe, if she wasn’t stuck in a love-in with some hot new memoirist, and perhaps one or two of his former editors, if their fond memories outnumbered their foul ones. He had no siblings, no close living relatives that he could name, and he couldn’t imagine any of his former lovers being sentimental. What about his neighbor Kate, that strange, elusive soul? Not likely—they weren’t real drinking buddies. This left only his faceless fans—with their depressing single-use cameras—and his energy-vampire father.

From the beginning, his father never had the inclination to understand him, and had never made any effort to feign it. It wasn’t Raymond’s sexuality that was the problem, though it did have its problems. His father had a congenital mistrust of anyone who toiled only with his fingertips. He was the original enemy of fiction.

The on-ramp was fast approaching. He accelerated and merged. Zen driving.

In high school, Raymond had to justify why he’d skip dinner for an Ingmar Bergman marathon at the film society. “Don’t get artsy,” his father warned him. And Raymond would say: “Swedish movies, Dad. Blondes. Titties.” He used to be good at that kind of doubletalk. But what euphemisms were there for limb-tearing, butt-fucking, heart-eating zombies? How did you explain that blood wasn’t blood?

He wished he’d had the clarity to write his father into his fiction as the ultimate monster, whose special power was spiritual Chinese water torture. Drip, drip, drip. To my Dad, without whom I would never have gained such insight into one man’s ability to drain the life out of another.

He glanced at the clock. Seven minutes late. He cut into the carpool lane and a glossy Latina in a Lexus SUV gave him the finger. He knew, he knew—to younger people he registered as a seedy old creep. But he did his best against the merciless wear of gravity; that woman driver would know it too in a few years, when her arms grew thick as jamon and her boobs sank like papayas. If she could see through to his true self, the one underneath all the wrinkles and balm, she might feel pity for him instead of spite—she’d be moved, for instance, that he was a man who kept a prescription for Cialis just so he could have sex with himself.