The first thing Jack Novotny did that he would later count as the beginning of the slide was so small that, at the time, he did not count it at all.

It was March 1987. The Writers Guild strike was a month old and the town had split into sharp camps — strikers on the picket lines outside Paramount, scabs inside writing dialogue for shows they had no business touching, everyone else caught somewhere in between, angling for position. Jack was thirty-one years old, four years out of USC film school, and he had exactly two credits to his name: an uncredited rewrite on a Cannon Films ninja picture and a story-by credit on an episode of a sitcom that had been cancelled after six episodes. He lived in a one-bedroom on Fountain Avenue, drove a Datsun with a cracked windshield, and had a stack of spec scripts that no one had read.

The thing he did was this: a producer named Marty Krieger, a man Jack had met exactly three times at industry mixers in the Hollywood Hills, called him at seven in the morning and asked him to pick up an envelope from a bungalow at the Chateau Marmont and deliver it to an address in Benedict Canyon. Marty said the words "I'd do it myself but I'm in a meeting with Barry Diller" and "you'd really be doing me a solid" and "the guy at the bungalow is expecting you by nine." Jack said yes. He did not ask what was in the envelope. He did not ask why Marty couldn't send an assistant. He said yes because Marty Krieger had produced three movies that had opened at number one, and because Jack had a spec script sitting on Marty's desk, and because in Hollywood in 1987 you did not say no to a man who was in a meeting with Barry Diller.

The bungalow was occupied by a man in a white linen suit who answered the door without speaking and handed Jack a manila envelope that felt heavier than paper should feel. The address in Benedict Canyon belonged to a house behind a gate, and the gate opened before Jack buzzed, and a woman in sunglasses took the envelope and closed the gate. Jack drove back down the canyon with the radio playing Guns N' Roses and told himself that delivering an envelope was not a crime, was not even a favor, was just a drive on a Tuesday morning, and that he had no reason to feel anything at all.

The second thing happened in May. Marty called again — Marty called a lot now, which Jack took as a good sign — and asked Jack to meet a writer named Paul DeSantis for lunch at the Ivy. Paul was a friend of Marty's, a guy with a problem, a guy who needed help. The problem, it turned out, was that Paul had been hired to write a treatment for a studio picture but had spent the advance on something else — something he gestured at vaguely with a forkful of chopped salad — and now the studio wanted pages and Paul had nothing. "Marty says you're fast," Paul said. "Marty says you can turn around a treatment in a weekend."

Jack could turn around a treatment in a weekend. He had done it before, for himself, for scripts that had gone nowhere. He took the project file Paul slid across the table — an adaptation of a Philip K. Dick story that the studio had optioned — and wrote forty pages in three days. Paul submitted them under his own name. The studio paid Paul. Paul paid Jack, in cash, an envelope that appeared in Jack's mailbox with no return address and no note.

Jack put the cash in his checking account and told himself that this was how the business worked — that writers had always ghosted for other writers, that spec work was spec work no matter whose name was on it, that he was getting paid to write, which was more than most people could say. He told himself that the cash meant nothing except that Paul DeSantis was a flake and Jack Novotny was a professional. He told himself it was reasonable. And it was. It was perfectly reasonable. That was the thing about all of them — each one was perfectly reasonable.

The third thing was a rewrite. Not Jack's rewrite — someone else's rewrite, a draft of a buddy-cop comedy that was supposed to star Eddie Murphy. The script was terrible. Everyone knew it was terrible. But the writer had a powerful agent at CAA, and the agent had a relationship with the studio head, and the script was going into production anyway because that was how the machine worked. Marty called Jack and said the rewrite needed a polish, a pass, nothing major, just smoothing the dialogue, tightening the second act. "No credit," Marty said. "But the money's good. And the writer doesn't need to know."

Jack didn't know the writer. He had never met the writer. If he did the polish and no one told the writer, the writer would never know, and the movie would be better, and Marty would owe him another favor, and wasn't a better movie worth a small lie of omission? He did the polish. He took the cheque. He told himself that the writer's name was still on the script, that the movie was going to be made either way, that he was improving something that would otherwise be embarrassing. He told himself that this was reasonable, and it was, and that was the whole problem.

The fourth thing was a party. June 1987, a house in the Hollywood Hills with a pool shaped like a kidney and a view of the city that made it look like something holy. The house belonged to a director named Vince Corso, a man who had made his name on car-chase pictures and was now moving into bigger things. The party was full of people Jack wanted to know — producers, executives, actresses whose faces he recognized from the cover of Premiere magazine. There was cocaine on the coffee table, lines cut on a mirror that had probably cost more than Jack's car. Jack had done cocaine before — at USC, at parties in Venice, the occasional late night at a club on the Strip — but he had never done cocaine at a house that belonged to a man who could hire him.

He did one line. He did a second. He stood by the pool with a glass of champagne and felt, for the first time in his life, like he belonged in this room, in this city, in this version of his life. The cocaine was not a compromise. The cocaine was just cocaine. But it was part of the pattern — the tiny lowering of internal barriers, the gradual acceptance of things he had once told himself he would never do.

The fifth thing was the girl. Not a girlfriend — an aspiring actress named Melissa, who was at the party at Vince Corso's house and who asked Jack what he did and lit up when he said screenwriter because screenwriter meant access, meant connection, meant a way in. Jack knew this. He knew exactly why Melissa was talking to him and not to the valet. He took her phone number anyway. He called her the next week. He took her to dinner at a sushi place on Sunset and told her about the projects he was developing — he used the word developing even though none of the projects were his — and let her believe that he had more power than he actually had because it felt good to have her believe it.

He did not sleep with her. That would have been too clear, too bright a line. He simply allowed her to persist in a misunderstanding that benefited him. He let her think he was someone. He let himself pretend to be someone. The gap between the pretending and the being was so small that you could not have measured it with any instrument then available, but it existed, and it widened slightly with every encounter.

The sixth thing was the strike. Jack was not a Guild member — he had not earned enough credits to join the Writers Guild of America, which meant he was not technically bound by the strike, which meant he could work, which was exactly what Marty Krieger wanted him to do. In July, with the strike dragging into its fifth month and the studios getting desperate, Marty offered Jack a rewrite on a film that was supposed to start shooting in September. The film had a Guild writer attached. The Guild writer was on strike. The rewrite would cross a picket line.

"You're not Guild," Marty said over the phone, his voice tinny through the car speaker — Jack had finally bought a car phone, a Motorola that sat between the seats like a black brick, the most 1987 thing he owned. "You cross a line, so what. Nobody knows you. Nobody cares."

Nobody knows you. Nobody cares. Jack sat in his Datsun in the parking lot of a 7-Eleven on Santa Monica Boulevard and thought about the pickets he had seen outside the studio gates — writers carrying signs, writers he admired, writers whose films he had watched in the dark of the USC screening room and sworn that one day he would be one of them. He was not one of them. He was not Guild. He was nobody. He took the rewrite.

He told himself it was reasonable. The strike was going to end eventually. The writer would get his credit either way. The movie would get made either way. Jack needed the money — his credit card was maxed, his rent was late, his Datsun needed a new transmission. He told himself that survival was not betrayal, that doing what you had to do was not the same as doing wrong, that everyone in this town had made the same calculation at some point and called it a career move.

The seventh thing was not a thing at all. It was a realization, which arrived gradually, like fog rolling in from the Pacific, sometime around dawn on a Tuesday in early November. Jack was standing on the balcony of his new apartment — a two-bedroom on Doheny, with a view of the hills and a parking space in the garage — and he realized that the spec script he had left on Marty Krieger's desk in February was still there. Marty had never read it. Marty had never intended to read it. What Marty had done — what Marty had been doing since the envelope at the Chateau Marmont — was testing Jack, measuring his willingness to comply, calibrating the threshold at which Jack Novotny would say no.

Jack had never said no. That was the thing. He had said yes to the envelope, yes to the ghost work, yes to the uncredited rewrite, yes to the cocaine, yes to the pretense with Melissa, yes to the strike-breaking, yes to every small reasonable request that had accumulated into something that was neither small nor reasonable. He had crossed from one side of a line to the other without ever seeing the line — because the line did not exist, because it had never existed, because the universe of moral choice was not a binary state but a gradient, a spectrum, a membership function that declined from one to zero in increments so small that no single increment could be identified as the moment of crossing.

That was the true horror of it, Jack thought, standing on the balcony with the November wind cutting through his shirt. Not that he had turned bad. Not that he had made one fatal mistake. But that he was still, in every way that he could measure, the same person he had been in February. He still loved movies. He still wanted to write something true. He still believed, in some deep and inarticulate part of himself, that he was fundamentally decent. The decency had simply eroded, one particle at a time, until what remained was an outline of a decent man surrounding a hollow space.

He went inside. He poured a drink — whiskey, no ice, the way Vince Corso drank it. He sat on the couch he had bought with money from the strike-breaking rewrite and thought about quitting. He could quit. He could return the keys to the Doheny apartment, move back to the one-bedroom on Fountain, start over. He could call the Guild and confess. He could write something honest and send it to someone who was not Marty Krieger. He could stop saying yes.

But quitting would mean admitting that he had done something worth quitting. It would mean acknowledging that the thousand small choices had accumulated into something recognizable — a career, a reputation, a self that he did not want to own. And the thousand small choices were so small, so individually blameless, that to repudiate them felt like an overreaction. An apology for what? For delivering an envelope? For doing someone a favor? For taking a job that was offered to him? Each thing was defensible. Each thing could be explained. The aggregate could not be explained, but the aggregate was not a thing that anyone would ever ask him to explain.

So he stayed. He accepted Marty's next job — a full credited rewrite on a Christmas comedy that would film in December. He called Melissa and told her about it, using the same voice he had used at the party at Vince Corso's, the voice of someone who had power. He went to another party and did more cocaine and met more people and made more connections and told himself that this was the life he had wanted, that this was success, that he had earned this through talent and persistence and nothing else.

The only thing he could not do was look at himself in the mirror for more than a few seconds. Not because he hated what he saw — hatred would have required a clarity he did not possess. But because the face in the mirror was the same face he had always had, and the same face meant the same person, and the same person meant that nothing had changed, and nothing had changed meant that he had always been what he had become, and that was the thought he could not hold for long.

In December the Writers Guild and the studios reached an agreement. The strike ended. Jack went to a celebration party at a bar on Sunset and stood among the writers — the real writers, the ones who had walked the picket lines and lost five months of income and held out for residuals and creative rights. They welcomed him. They didn't know. Nobody knew. Nobody cares, Marty had said, and Marty had been right.

Jack stood at the bar with a drink in his hand and a smile on his face and a career that was, by any measure, finally going somewhere. He had everything he had wanted. He was lighter than he had ever been — lighter by the weight of a self he could no longer quite locate, a self that had attenuated so gradually he had not felt it leaving. One day, he thought, he would sit down and write the true thing. One day he would stop saying yes. One day the scales would tip back and he would remember who he had been before the envelope, before the ghost work, before the thousand small choices that had turned him into someone his younger self would not have recognized.

But not today. Today he had a meeting with Marty Krieger at nine tomorrow morning, and a car phone that needed charging, and a life that was exactly what he had asked for, and no idea how to ask for anything else.