Sam unlocked his car, watching the headlights illuminate the darkened street. At night you couldn’t see the scuffs and scrapes on the rear bumper and driver-side door of the car, a black Audi sedan that he had leased the week he had come to California, still buzzing from the high of having picked up his entire life and left New York. He hadn’t even considered whether or not he could actually afford it on his modest salary, hadn’t researched whether it was a good car, even. He had lived in New York since he was a teenager and had never had a car of his own before, though he did know how to drive, sort of, and the Audi, with its sleek contours and luxury finishes, looked like the kind of car that would be driven by someone who had made it, someone who really had their life together.
The car was a big long boat of a thing that barely fit into the cramped parking spot in the garage of his West Hollywood apartment complex, and it was nearly impossible to wedge into the compact spaces that filled most lots in Los Angeles. Within the first month Sam had already crashed it twice, backing carelessly into medians and scraping it against a wall trying to park at Whole Foods when he urgently needed to pee. And then driving down Melrose, a woman had rear-ended him, and when they pulled over around the block she got out of her car crying, waving her phone around with Instagram still open on the screen, begging him not to go through insurance because if she got in one more accident she’d get her license revoked, and Sam felt so bad for her that he just took down her phone number and never called her or bothered getting it fixed, since the damage was all cosmetic and the car was already beat-up enough anyway. He had grown to hate the car, this expensive symbol of his impracticality.
Never mind that after a few weeks driving it around Los Angeles, on streets clotted with Range Rovers and Bentleys, it no longer seemed like that nice of a car. An Audi sedan came in the West Hollywood gay guy starter pack, along with an Equinox membership and those Gucci mules everyone seemed to be wearing. (Neither of which Sam could really afford after his lease payments.) Sometimes it felt as though everyone in Los Angeles was rich and yet nobody ever seemed to work.
Sam did work and he was not rich. He was the entertainment editor at a magazine in the twilight years of old media, in an economy where the internet was threatening jobs like his into obsolescence; all it would take, he thought, was one pivot to video and he’d be out of a job. He had failed to recoup the advance on the book he’d released a year earlier, about his troubled adolescence spent strung out on drugs and in rehab, although its underperformance was a secret, or so he told himself, something only he and his publisher really had to know. His whole life looked good on paper, but it didn’t actually net out to much.
Privately Sam wondered when he was included in things like this, the dinner party at Buck’s house, how much his résumé was responsible for the invitation, because it made him seem interesting by default, especially because he was still relatively young. So few people in Los Angeles even read books that to write one seemed to strike people as very special, though of course, Sam reasoned, there was a time when writing a book was only a wild dream to him, too, but then, most things become unremarkable as soon as you have done them.
On some level he remained certain that he had stumbled into this career through sheer dumb luck and someday, unavoidably, he would be exposed for the fraud he was and the whole house of cards he’d built from these accomplishments would come tumbling down, leaving him with nothing. People talked so casually about “imposter syndrome,” like it was just a nagging occasional anxiety to be rationalized away. But Sam found that each morning the constriction around his throat had grown a little bit tighter, even while he continued to try to project an image of confidence and success, meeting friends at SoulCycle and picking up the tab for dinners out—“No, no, I got this,” he’d say as he swiftly grabbed the check, trying to ignore the guilt that clawed at his throat about how unaffordable it all really was, to stay in the warm bright swell of beautiful spaces and beautiful things for one more moment until reality kicked back in.
Where did that come from, he wondered? Was that a gay thing? An upwardly mobile middle-class thing? Was it a mental health thing? Or maybe it was just a symptom of modern life, when there were so many different ways for Sam to have his own inadequacy reflected back to him, every time he opened Instagram, where, it seemed, everyone was always in Mykonos or Tulum in their designer clothes and white teeth and abs, always the abs.
Yet the thing that depressed him the most was that he had no traction on the second book. The book was his albatross. Once he finished it, he imagined, things would get easier—an influx of cash, even a modest one; a sense of forward momentum, something to point to as proof that he wasn’t actually that much of a flop; and maybe when it came out, he would finally be content. But contentment—every time he thought he was approaching it, the finish line jumped to just beyond his grasp. That wouldn’t happen after this book was done, he told himself as he got into the Audi. This sense of unbelonging would actually leave him, for good.
It must have been his résumé, Sam thought as he made switchbacks down Laurel Canyon—the reason Buck had asked him to dinner in the first place, to fill a vacancy in the cast. Surely Buck didn’t see Sam as a romantic prospect. He probably just wanted Sam around as a new and interesting thing to show off, like the Aston Martin parked in Buck’s driveway—which, Sam noticed, did not have a single scuff.
* * *
At the base of the canyon, Sam called his best friend, Kat.
“How are you?” he said.
“Emotionally exhausted,” Kat said. “Just leaving therapy.” She said something to this effect every time they spoke, which they did nearly every day, and this was comforting to Sam, both the predictability of it and the intimacy that came with having known someone for so long you could completely drop the veil and say exactly what was on your mind without fear of being misunderstood. They had become friends when they were in high school and had somehow managed to remain close through all the turns of early adulthood, and were so connected now that when they spoke, Sam could intuit the meaning behind the slightest modulations in the tone of her voice, knew exactly what she was about to say before she said it.
Kat lived in Portland, their hometown, so they only saw each other a few times a year now, but in his mind’s eye he could see her as vividly as if he were watching her on a closed circuit camera—driving across a bridge through the rain, windshield wipers working furiously, a curvy blonde in yoga pants and a hoodie, forever running late to a workout class, sucking six-dollar cold brew through a straw. People underestimated Kat because she was pretty and voluble, but she was flintier, and more perceptive, than she seemed.
“What’s going on?”
“Oh, the usual,” she said. “Existential dread and environmental despair. Did you see this new report out today about the sea level rising? I spent all afternoon spiraling.”
“No. What did it say?”
“Sam,” she said emphatically. “We have, like, twenty years left before we’re all basically underwater.” Kat talked about the end of the world like it was an inevitability. Maybe it was.