5:00 a.m.

I have recently divided one novel into two. The first I have handed off to my daughter for now, as raw material for a class she’s taking in screenwriting at the New School in NYC. That story (boy having a psychotic break escapes from his psych ward and ends up on a freeway bridge in downtown L.A. with an important message he is hoping will be captured by TV cameras and broadcast to the world before it is too late) is inherently more cinematic than the second part, involving a different set of characters. That part begins like this:

“She continues to hope that her younger brother, Ted, is still alive. Her best-case scenario has him a cloistered monk in a cliffside cell somewhere. It’s a romantic notion but not inconceivable—Ted in secrecy and solitude, pouring out his life in prayer for the world. He would be happy doing that. As a little boy he’d wanted to be an architect, and maybe he ended up a builder after all, but a different sort: one who has traded rebar and I-beams for the inner geometry of the Kingdom of God. Its own forces and vectors, its many mansions.

“The overwhelming likelihood, however, is that his bones lie somewhere between the western border of Cambodia and Phnom Penh, buried or not. She imagines a team of archaeologists coming upon a pile of skeletons in a mass grave a hundred years from now, five hundred—and Ted’s remains somehow standing out. He had soft tooth enamel and a mouthful of silver, the one thing that might distinguish him from the Cambodians with whom he fell. Or someone, against all odds, might note a truncated left pinky finger and wonder what had happened to make it so.”