Beautiful Ruins

But recently, fissures have appeared in this philosophy—faith proving to be not nearly enough—and it was in the run-up to his divorce that his soon-to-be ex-wife (So tired of your shit, Shane . . .) dropped a bombshell: the Bible phrase he and his father endlessly quoted, “Act as if ye have faith . . . ,” never actually appears in the Bible. Rather, as far as she could tell, it came from the closing argument given by the Paul Newman character in the film The Verdict.

This revelation didn’t cause Shane’s trouble, but the news did seem to explain it somehow. This is what happens when your life is authored not by God but by David Mamet: you can’t find a teaching job and your marriage dissolves just as your student loans come due and the project you’ve worked on for six years, your MFA thesis—a book of linked short stories called Linked—is rejected by the literary agent you’ve secured (Agent: This book doesn’t work. Shane: You mean, in your opinion. Agent: I mean in English). Divorced, jobless, and broke, his literary ambition scuttled, Shane saw his decision to become a writer as a six-year detour to nowhere. He was in the first funk of his life, unable to even get out of bed without ACT to spur him on. It fell to his mother to yank him out of it, convincing him to go on antidepressants and hopefully rescuing the blithely confident young man she and his father had raised.

“Look, it’s not like we were a religious family anyway. We only went to church on Christmas and Easter. So your dad got that saying from a thirty-year-old movie instead of a two-thousand-year-old book? That doesn’t mean it isn’t true, does it? In fact, maybe that makes it more true.”

Inspired by his mother’s deep faith in him, and by the low dose of selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor he’d recently begun taking, Shane had what could only be described as an epiphany:

Weren’t movieshis generation’sfaith anyway—its true religion? Wasn’t the theater our temple, the one place we enter separately but emerge from two hours later together, with the same experience, same guided emotions, same moral? A million schools taught ten million curricula, a million churches featured ten thousand sects with a billion sermons—but the same movie showed in every mall in the country. And we all saw it! That summer, the one you’ll never forget, every movie house beamed the same set of thematic and narrative images—the same Avatar, same Harry Potter, same Fast and the Furious, flickering pictures stitched in our minds that replaced our own memories, archetypal stories that became our shared history, that taught us what to expect from life, that defined our values. What was that but a religion?

Also, movies paid better than books.

And so Shane decided to take his talents to Hollywood. He started by contacting his old writing professor, Gene Pergo, who had tired of being a teacher and ignored essayist and had written a thriller called Night Ravagers (hot-rodding zombies cruise postapocalyptic Los Angeles looking for human survivors to enslave), selling the film rights for more than he’d made in a decade of academia and small-house publishing, and quitting his teaching job midsemester. At the time, Shane was in the second year of his MFA, and Gene’s defection was what passed for scandal in the program—faculty and students alike huffing at the way Gene shat all over the cathedral of literature.

Shane tracked Professor Pergo down in LA, where he was adapting the second book of what was now a trilogy—Night Ravagers 2: Streets of Reckoning (3-D). Gene said that in the last two years, he’d heard from “roughly every student and colleague I ever worked with”; those most scandalized by his literary abdication had been the first to call. Gene gave Shane the name of a film agent, Andrew Du

And today it all pays off, with Shane’s first-ever pitch to a Hollywood producer, and not just any producer, but Michael Deane himself—or at least Deane’s assistant, Claire Somebody. Today, with Claire Somebody’s help, Shane Wheeler takes the first step out of the dank closet of books into the brightly lit ballroom of film—

As soon as he figures out what to wear.

As if on cue, Shane’s mother calls down the stairs: “Your dad’s ready to take you to the airport.” When he doesn’t answer, she tries again: “You don’t want to be late, honey.” Then: “I made French toast.” And: “Are you still deciding what to wear?”

“Just a minute!” Shane calls, and in a burst of frustration—mostly with himself—he kicks at the pile of clothes. In the ensuing explosion of fabric, the perfect outfit seems to float in midair: whisker-washed boot-cut denims and a double-yoke Western snap shirt. Perfect with his double-buckle biker boots. Shane dresses quickly, turns to the mirror, and rolls his sleeve so he can just see the right cross of the T in his tattoo. “Now,” Shane Wheeler says to his dressed self, “let’s go pitch a movie.”

Claire’s Coffee Bean is crowded at seven thirty, every table sporting a sullen white screenwriter in glasses, every pair of glasses aimed at a Mac Pro laptop, every Mac Pro open to a digitized Final Draft script—every table, that is, but the small one in back, where two crisp businessmen in gray suits face an empty chair meant for her.

Claire strides over, her skirt drawing the eyes of the Coffee Bean screenwriters. She hates heels, feels like a shoed horse. She arrives and smiles as they stand. “Hello, James. Hello, Bryan.”

They sit and apologize for taking so long to get back to her, but the rest is just as she imagined—great résumé, wonderful references, impressive interview. They’ve met with the full museum pla

Shit. Claire riffles through worst-case scenarios: The pay is in cocaine; she has to kill the interim curator first; it’s a porn film museum—

Instead, James says, “Claire, how much do you know about Scientology?”

Ten minutes later—having begged the weekend to think over their generous offer—Claire is driving to work, thinking: This doesn’t change anything, does it? Okay, so her dream film museum is a front for a cult—wait, that’s not fair. She knows Scientologists and they’re no more cultish than the stiff Lutherans on her mother’s side or her father’s secular Jews. But isn’t that how it will be perceived? That she’s managing a museum full of the shit Tom Cruise couldn’t unload at his garage sale?

James insisted that the museum would have no co