CHAPTER 1

      I died typing midsentence in a T-shirt and boxer shorts in front of my computer. I was about halfway into the second act of a screenplay. I had taken the job to buy me the time to write the novel I had been thinking about for a year. I also thought the money could sustain me while I tried looking for a producer to bring my latest play into production.

      The screenplay I was writing was a job for hire. It wasn’t much of a challenge, though I was trying my best to make sense out of the story. It was a typical writing assignment my agent would get me: idiosyncratic characters and quirky dialogue that nearly everyone with Final Draft believed they could mimic just by watching Goodfellas.

      However, the professionals knew I did it better than the hacks. I lived it, and the sounds of that life resonated in my brain. I had a sincere ear for the music in the dialogue without spoiling it with irony; I tackled each rewrite, each project with a silent passion knowing I was the best.

      I wish I’d been working on the novel in my head when I died. I hadn’t worked out the details, but wanted it to be about why I had become a writer in a family in which my father and mother hardly spoke to each other. Yes, it was another novel about a dysfunctional family—but that was what was expected of a contemporary novel that hoped to be taken seriously. I wish I’d been working on anything other than that stupid movie. Right before I died, my last thought was, I wonder who they are going to get to rewrite me. I was pretty sure it was going to be Warren Fabrizi.

      Fabrizi was also represented by my agent, whose name was Claudia Wilson, and he always seemed too happy to get the assignment by a film producer to rewrite me. His personal life was much like mine: born-and-raised New Yorker, single, and also just like me, wrote novels, plays, and television scripts.

      Though we shared many similar traits, in my eyes Warren had no backbone as a human being, no original artistic vision, and no interesting literary style. However, he had won some major theatrical and television awards and was paid better than I was.

      He was short and slightly built, quick-witted, charming, and pretended to be erudite, though like me, he was from humble beginnings. He had a mass of curly black hair, very tiny dark brown eyes, and a melodious voice.

      If you liked him, he appeared to be a sweet-natured cherub with a wiggle in his walk; if you didn’t like him, he was more like an eyeless, underground mole who dealt with the dirt producers threw at writers by eating it with a hearty appetite. I was his competition and he was mine, so despite any charm he might have possessed, I saw him and knew him as the latter.

      I never trusted Warren Fabrizi; Sarah, my longtime thirty-five year old girlfriend who lived in a small apartment on Grove Street in the West Village and was an editor at a fashion magazine, sometimes remarked that I was jealous of him. Actually, I felt he was jealous of me, but then again, we were both writers competing for the attention of our agent, an audience, and studio producers. In another time and another world, we would have been sworn enemies fighting each other with rocks and swords. But he didn’t have to worry about me anymore. I died.

      It was a stroke that killed me a little before noon. People have them all the time without any reaction, but mine just happened in the wrong place when an artery in my neck got clogged by a piece of cholesterol that broke off the artery wall. I felt pain for a few seconds on the right side of my body but