They were standing at the entrance of a bungalow, adorned by the same gray stucco as the main house. A motion sensor that always ignored Senderovsky snapped to attention immediately as the Actor neared, a halogen light spotlighting him and only him. “Although I must confess,” Senderovsky continued, “that while all bungalows were created equal, this one may be my favorite. And my wife’s, too. You’ll see why in a minute.”
He opened the door and turned on a light. The Actor could not see why. Maybe it had not been a minute. The walls were covered by rough-edged, handyman-made bookshelves, which were filled with volumes, some of them old and foreign. There were framed, fussy drawings and photographs of a city he did not recognize （Copenhagen, could it be?）， a massive drawbridge accepting a carnivalesque cruise ship, an array of homunculi in baseball caps waving from its deck, an orange castle framed by two frozen canals and groaning under a blanket of snow no one had asked for, a map of a subway system written in an unfamiliar alphabet, the intersection of its green, red, blue, and purple branches forming the occasional parallelogram or backward 4.
“This is the Petersburg Bungalow,” Senderovsky announced. “The city where my wife and I were born!”
“Huh,” the Actor said. “Is one of these books Crime and Punishment?”
“That one!” Senderovsky said, stabbing a Cyrillic spine with his forefinger. “And a translation is right here, next to your bed. You are, of course, welcome to read anything you like. Make a little picnic if you wish and sit in the meadow, reading. I can think of nothing better.”
The Actor smiled with his eyes. He was about to tell Senderovsky some unhappy news, and suddenly felt a syringe’s worth of compassion for the man whose book he had been adapting for the last half-dozen years. Senderovsky—or “Return to Sender,” as he and Elspeth had nicknamed him after they had rejected so many of his drafts—sounded different than he did back in the city or in Los Angeles. The Actor did not realize that the bilingual nature of time spent with his wife and daughter inspired in him a different soundtrack.
Meanwhile, Senderovsky enjoyed the Actor’s smile and the way his presence inhabited the five hundred square feet of the Petersburg Bungalow. Back in elementary school, a dreadful place for the likes of short, awkward Senderovsky, students collected glossy informational cards with pictures of animals on them. The most desired card featured a puma resting its head atop its paws, white-furred mouth and yellow eyes conveying the height of animal thought and repose. If you flipped the card over, the puma could be seen licking its lips after a successful kill, its tongue reaching up as far as its nose, next to a series of statistics that demonstrated how fast the puma was, how sentient, how beautiful and feared. Time spent with the Actor, with those thoughtful eyes and white mouth, always brought that glossy puma card to mind.
The vineyard duffel bag fell on the floor with a surprising thud. “Listen,” the Actor said, “there’s something I have to tell you. I read the latest script. I don’t want to waste any more of your time. I think it’s best if we scrap what we have and start fresh.”
“From the beginning?” Senderovsky could feel his dressing gown come open, the breast modestly covering his heart open for the Actor to see, especially its small pink capsule of a nipple. “But I thought you said we almost had it this time.”
“I’ve finally diagnosed it,” the Actor said. “I took it apart at the joints. The tone is all wrong for a pilot. We can’t lead with humor. We have to build to it over the course of the first three seasons.”
“But the network expects—”
“I’m not interested in the network. They work for us. They answer to us.”
This, Senderovsky thought, was a profound misunderstanding of the situation.
“I’m going to take a whiz,” the Actor said. For the second time that night, Senderovsky heard loud urination, a deep country toilet bowl supplying the acoustics of a cathedral. He looked at the framed metro map of a city once called Leningrad. He had not known Masha during the first seven years of his life spent in that city, nor did she know him through her eleven, but they were connected by the all-important blue line, officially known as M2. Senderovsky’s metro station, Elektrosila, literally “Electric Power,” was found deep in the charmless and tough-nosed southern part of the city （one of its neighborhoods would give the country its current president for life）， while Masha’s station was Petrogradskaya in the city’s Art Nouveau north, the kind of place which might lead to someone saying, “There goes a real Petrogradsky intellectual in his slippers and dressing gown.”