DISPATCHED FROM ROOM 614, A MID-TIER MANHATTAN HOTEL — 11:47 PM, WEDNESDAY

At approximately 9:14 PM Eastern time, the occupants of the suite adjacent to mine — Room 615 — checked in with three rolling cases and what sounded like a portable thermal printer.

I know this because the walls of this particular property are

The logo is wrong in a way that only I would notice. The anvil itself — my anvil, the one I had sketched on a paper napkin at two in the morning in 2009 and paid a designer in Wicker Park four hundred dollars to turn into something with actual gravity — is maybe fifteen percent larger than it should be, and the weight of it sits differently on

I was sitting at my desk this morning — third coffee, first cigarette, zero patience — when I watched a woman on the sidewalk outside spend eleven minutes filming herself walking into a CVS. Not walking out. Not finding a deal, not confronting a shoplifter, not discovering a new species of pharmacy beetle. Just walking in. The

I am writing this from a hotel room in Manhattan that I am pretty sure is in Manhattan, though the mini-bar prices suggest I may have accidentally crossed into Zurich. Meadow flew me here last week on what I can only describe as a mission from God — or, more accurately, a mission from Meadow, which is like God but with more nicotine

I am sitting in my leather wingback chair. Marmaduke — one hundred and forty pounds of constitutionally-minded Alaskan husky — is sprawled across my feet, which are going numb, but I refuse to move him because I need the ballast. I also cannot feel my left foot. These facts are related. What I am about to tell you will unsettle you. It will

I am going to be honest with you — a thing I rarely do, and never for free — and tell you that I have been awake for approximately thirty-one hours. I came to this screening directly from a press breakfast at which the coffee was lukewarm and the croissants were, I can only assume, assembled by someone who had once seen the word "croissant"