The first time Nicholas Delgado did something he would later wish he hadn't, he was sitting in a booth at Dan Tana's eating chicken parmesan with a man who made movies and the man had asked him for a favor and Nicholas had said yes before the man finished asking. This was October 1987, the stock market had just crashed and everyone in Los Angeles was pretending it hadn't, and Nicholas was thirty-four years old with one produced screenplay to his name and a stack of rejection letters in his apartment that was thick enough to insulate the walls. The movie he had written was called Running Lights, a small independent feature about a mechanic in Echo Park who fixed cars for people who couldn't pay, and it had premiered at Sundance and disappeared into the same obscurity where most small independent features went. But the producer noticed it. The producer was named Arlen Rothstein, and he had produced three of the top-grossing films of 1986, and he had chosen to eat chicken parmesan with Nicholas Delgado on a Tuesday night in late October, and Nicholas understood that this was the kind of opportunity that came once in a career, if it came at all.

The favor was small. Arlen needed someone to talk to a screenwriter who was having trouble finishing a script. "Not rewrite," Arlen said, cutting his steak with the precision of a man who had been cutting steak in expensive restaurants for forty years. "Just talk. You're good with people. I can tell you're good with people. You helped that mechanic with his situation, whatever it was. This is the same thing, different garage." He had a way of making everything sound simple. He had a way of making you feel like the complicated thing you were doing was in fact the simplest thing in the world and you were the only person who could do it.

Nicholas met with the screenwriter at a coffee shop on Fairfax. The writer was a young woman named Julia, twenty-six years old with a contract that paid her scale plus points and a script that was thirty pages overdue. She was not having trouble finishing. She was having trouble starting over — Arlen had changed the story three times without telling her why and she was trying to guess what he wanted and failing because what he wanted kept changing. Nicholas listened. He was good at listening. He bought her another coffee and told her that Arlen was not impossible to work with, just particular, and that she should try writing the scene a certain way, the way he would have written it, and see if that helped. He did not charge her for this advice. He did not think of it as work. He thought of it as being helpful, which was something he had always tried to be, which was part of why he had written a screenplay about a mechanic who fixed cars for free.

Julia turned in her script the following week. Arlen called Nicholas and said, "You're doing something for me now. I don't know what it is yet. But you're doing something." Nicholas laughed. He felt seen. He felt chosen. He went home to his apartment in Venice Beach, the one with the futon and the posters for movies he had never worked on and the typewriter he had bought with his first option money, and he told himself that he had made a connection, that he was networking, that this was how people became successful in Hollywood.

That was the first compromise. He did not know it was a compromise. He did not know there would be a list.

The second compromise came in December. Arlen called at ten o'clock on a Saturday morning and asked Nicholas to come to his house in Malibu. Nicholas drove up the Pacific Coast Highway in his 1982 Honda Civic with the broken tape deck and the cracked dashboard and the smell of old coffee, and he parked between a Mercedes and a Jaguar in Arlen's driveway and felt like a stray dog that had wandered into a kennel of champions. Arlen met him at the door in a terrycloth robe and led him to a patio overlooking the ocean and said, "I have a problem."

The problem was an actress. She was the lead in Arlen's new picture, a comedy about a woman who inherits a zoo, and she had decided she didn't like the director and was threatening to walk. The director was a man named Frank Solloway who had made three excellent films in the 1970s and nothing anyone remembered since. Arlen wanted Nicholas to talk to the actress. "Tell her Frank is a genius," Arlen said. "Tell her the script is being rewritten. Tell her whatever she needs to hear."

Nicholas did not know the actress personally. He did not know anything about the script or the director or the zoo. But he drove to the actress's trailer on the Fox lot and introduced himself as Arlen's creative consultant — a title he had just invented, standing in the parking lot, holding a coffee from craft services — and told the actress that the third act was being completely retooled, that Frank was open to her input, that the dailies were spectacular and she looked twenty-five in them. None of this was true. The third act was not being retooled. Frank was famously not open to input from anyone. The dailies were fine but not spectacular and the actress was forty-three and looked it.

The actress stayed on the picture. The picture made eighty million dollars. Arlen sent Nicholas a check for five thousand dollars and a note that said: "Retainer." Nicholas deposited the check. He paid his rent. He bought a new typewriter ribbon. He told himself that he had helped a production stay on schedule, that everyone had lied a little in this town, that the movie had turned out well and the actress had received good reviews and Frank Solloway had worked steadily for another two years. He told himself that the lie had cost nothing and earned five thousand dollars and the only thing that mattered was the result.

He did not call Julia to ask how her project was going. He had not thought about Julia in weeks.

The third compromise came in March of 1988. Arlen's assistant called and said Arlen needed Nicholas to have dinner with a journalist from the Los Angeles Times. The journalist was writing a profile of Arlen and had been asking questions about a lawsuit — a former business partner who claimed Arlen had cheated him out of a production deal. Nicholas knew nothing about the lawsuit. Arlen had never mentioned it. But Arlen needed someone to vouch for his character, someone credible, someone who wasn't on the payroll, and Nicholas was perfect because Nicholas had the face of a man who told the truth. He had one produced screenplay and a reputation for sincerity and the kind of earnest quality that made people want to believe him.

Nicholas met the journalist at the Polo Lounge. He ordered a martini because the journalist ordered a martini. He told the journalist that Arlen was the most honest producer he had ever worked with, a man of his word, a father figure to half the young talent in this town. He said he had never seen Arlen do anything unethical. He said the former business partner was disgruntled, was probably looking for a settlement, was not a reliable source. The journalist wrote all of this down. The profile ran the following Sunday. The lawsuit was settled out of court for an undisclosed sum.

Nicholas read the profile in his apartment and felt something shift in his stomach. He had not exactly lied. He had never seen Arlen do anything unethical because he had only known Arlen for six months and during those six months Arlen had not done anything unethical in front of him. The things Arlen had done when Nicholas was not looking had been settled out of court. Nicholas did not know what had happened. He did not want to know. He put the newspaper in the recycling bin and went for a walk on the beach and watched the sun set over the Pacific, which was orange and pink and beautiful and had no opinion about any of this.

He had started wearing better clothes. He had bought a leather jacket on Melrose Avenue for three hundred dollars. He had switched from coffee to espresso.

The fourth compromise was the first one he felt as a compromise, and he felt it for approximately ninety seconds before he convinced himself otherwise. It was June, and Arlen was producing a picture about the Vietnam War, and the screenwriter — an actual screenwriter, a veteran who had served two tours — had written a script that was dark and brutal and probably brilliant and absolutely unmarketable. Arlen needed the script rewritten to be more commercial. The veteran refused. Arlen asked Nicholas to write the rewrite without the veteran's knowledge.

This was a violation. Nicholas knew it was a violation. The Writers Guild had rules about this, rules about credit and consent and the rights of the original writer, and Nicholas had been a member of the Guild for seven years and had once served on a committee about exactly this issue. He told Arlen he couldn't do it. Arlen said, "You're right. I'm sorry I asked." And then Arlen said, "The veteran, his name is Mike, he's got a daughter with something wrong with her spine. The insurance doesn't cover it. If this picture falls apart, he doesn't get paid, and his daughter doesn't get the surgery. But you're right. You're absolutely right. Forget I asked."

Nicholas wrote the rewrite. He wrote it in three weeks, working nights at his typewriter while the Venice Beach fog rolled in and the streetlights flickered and the apartment grew cold. He wrote a version of the script that was less dark and more commercial and probably less brilliant but definitely marketable. He put the veteran's name on the title page and did not put his own. He told himself he was protecting the veteran's daughter. He told himself he was protecting the veteran's reputation — a dark and unmarketable script would damage a career, and a rewritten script that succeeded would open doors. He told himself that the system was broken anyway, that the studio would have hired someone else if he refused, that his refusal would have changed nothing. All of this was true. All of this was also convenient.

The picture was released in November of 1988. It made money. The veteran received a screenwriting credit and a share of the profits and his daughter got the surgery. Nicholas received a check and a thank-you and a feeling that did not go away.

He stopped writing his own scripts. He had an idea for a film about a jazz pianist in the 1950s, a story he had been carrying for years, a story that mattered to him. He opened the file on his typewriter one Sunday and stared at the blank page for an hour and closed the file and went to the beach instead.

The fifth compromise was the easiest. In February of 1989, Arlen asked Nicholas to meet with a director who was being difficult about budget cuts. The director was a woman named Patricia Okonkwo, a rising talent who had made a documentary about Nigerian schoolgirls that had won an award at Cannes. Arlen had hired her to direct a romantic comedy — a strange choice, Nicholas thought, but Arlen was full of strange choices — and she was objecting to changes the studio wanted to make. Arlen asked Nicholas to convince her to accept the changes. Nicholas flew to New York and met Patricia at a restaurant in the Village and told her that the changes were minor, that the studio was nervous but supportive, that she should pick her battles and this wasn't the battle to pick. He did not tell her that the studio had already decided to fire her if she refused. He did not tell her that Arlen had told him to lie.

Patricia accepted the changes. The studio did not fire her. The picture was released and made a modest profit and Patricia went on to direct other things, bigger things, and Nicholas told himself that he had saved her career. This was true. He had also lied to her face for forty-five minutes while eating an eighteen-dollar salad.

He had stopped calling his old friends. The friends from film school, the ones who had read his early scripts and told him he had something real, the ones who had crashed on his futon and eaten his ramen and stayed up late talking about Scorsese and Coppola and the kind of cinema that changed people's lives. They still called him. He didn't call back. He told himself he was busy. He told himself they wouldn't understand what he did now, wouldn't understand the compromises that the industry required, would judge him for being successful. He told himself he would call them next week. Next week became next month. Next month became never.

The sixth compromise was not a compromise. It was a crime.

Arlen's business manager had been embezzling money. Nicholas did not know about the embezzlement until Arlen called him at three in the morning and told him to come to the Malibu house immediately. Nicholas drove up the PCH in the dark, the ocean invisible to his left, the hills invisible to his right, and arrived to find Arlen in his study with a bottle of scotch and a man's face that Nicholas had never seen before — cold and flat and without the charm that had gotten Nicholas to say yes six times in a row.

The business manager, Arlen said, had taken two million dollars. The business manager also had information about Arlen — information about offshore accounts, about a deal with a foreign distributor, about things that Nicholas did not want to know about and would not be told about. Arlen needed Nicholas to find the business manager's weak point. A family member. A secret. A leverage point. Nicholas was good at finding people's weak points, Arlen said. It was what he did. It was why Arlen had hired him.

Nicholas said no. He said no and he meant it and he walked out of the Malibu house and drove back down the PCH and felt something like relief, something like the breaking of a fever. He had said no. He had drawn a line. He was still the person he had been before.

And then he thought about the check Arlen had written him for the rewrite. And the check for the actress. And the check for the journalist. And he thought about the veteran's daughter and Patricia Okonkwo and Julia from the coffee shop, and he realized that Arlen had more leverage on him than he had on Arlen. He knew where the bodies were buried because he had helped bury them. He was not a witness. He was an accomplice.

He found the business manager's weak point. It was a son at a private school in Connecticut. Nicholas made a phone call. The business manager returned the money. Nicholas never learned what happened next.

The seventh moment was not a compromise. It was a mirror.

In January of 1990, Nicholas was invited to a party at a house in the Hollywood Hills. The house belonged to a director he had admired for twenty years, a man whose films had made Nicholas want to make films. Nicholas arrived in a suit that cost more than his first car and shook hands with people whose names he had grown up reading in Variety and drank champagne from a glass that someone kept refilling. At some point in the evening, a young writer approached him — a kid in his twenties with a script under his arm and hope in his eyes and the same look Nicholas had worn when he had walked into Dan Tana's three years earlier. The kid said he admired Nicholas's work. He said Running Lights had changed his life. He said he wanted to make films that mattered, films that helped people, films like the ones Nicholas used to write.

Nicholas looked at the kid and saw himself at thirty-four, the earnestness and the hunger and the belief that talent was enough, that kindness was enough, that the industry was a meritocracy that rewarded the deserving. He wanted to tell the kid the truth. He wanted to say: don't take the meeting with the producer, don't accept the favor, don't say yes before they finish asking, because every yes is a small step and you will look up one day and not recognize where you are.

But he didn't say that. He couldn't say that. Because saying that would mean admitting that he had taken all those steps himself, and he wasn't ready to admit that. He had never been ready to admit that. Each step had made sense. Each step had been reasonable. Each step had been the only thing a reasonable person could do in an unreasonable situation. The sum of reasonable steps was unreachable from any single one of them.

He didn't say it to the kid. He said, "Keep writing. That's the only thing that matters." And he walked away and found the bathroom and stood in front of the mirror and looked at the man looking back at him.

The man in the mirror was forty years old. He had a leather jacket and an expensive haircut and dark circles under his eyes. He had not written a screenplay in two years. He had not spoken to his film school friends in eighteen months. He had not visited his mother in San Diego since Christmas of 1988. He had lied to journalists, lied to actresses, lied to directors, rewritten scripts without consent, found people's weak points and used them. He had done all of this one reasonable step at a time.

Nicholas stared at the mirror. The mirror stared back. Neither of them knew who they were looking at.

He went home to Venice Beach. He sat at his typewriter. He put in a fresh sheet of paper. He typed: "The world is not kind." He stopped. He stared at the words. He had not written anything of his own in so long that the act of typing felt foreign, like a language he had once spoken fluently and now could barely remember.

He typed: "But we can be kind to each other."

He stopped again. He didn't know if he believed that anymore. He had spent three years being kind to Arlen Rothstein and he wasn't sure if that was the same thing as being kind. He had told himself he was helping people — Julia, the actress, the veteran, Patricia — but he had helped them by lying to them, by manipulating them, by treating them as problems to be solved rather than people to be respected. The helping had been real. The manipulation had also been real. Both things were true at the same time and he couldn't figure out how to separate them.

He thought about fuzzy logic. He had read about it in a science magazine at Arlen's house, waiting for a meeting, killing time. Fuzzy logic was the idea that truth wasn't binary — a thing wasn't true or false, one or zero. A thing could be partially true. A person could be partially good. You belonged to a set not absolutely but by degree, and the degree was called your membership function, and the membership function was always between zero and one. A man could be 0.8 honest. A favor could be 0.6 ethical. A career could be 0.4 the thing you had wanted it to be.

Nicholas had been moving along a membership function for three years. He had started close to one — a writer, a truth-teller, a person who helped for free — and he had been sliding toward zero ever since. But the slide was continuous. There was no threshold. There was no moment at which the membership function crossed a line and said: congratulations, you are now a bad person. He had to decide that for himself. He had to look in the mirror and say: the membership function is now low enough. He had to draw the line. Nobody else was going to draw it for him.

He looked at the typewriter. He looked at the sentence waiting for its ending. He looked at the reflection of his own face in the darkened window, superimposed on the lights of Venice Beach, the palm trees and the neon and the Pacific somewhere beyond it all.

He typed: "That is the only refraction that matters."

He pulled the paper out of the typewriter. He folded it once and put it in his pocket. He did not know what he was going to do tomorrow. He did not know if he could undo the steps he had taken or if the membership function could be raised again, point by point, the way it had been lowered. But he had written something of his own, finally, for the first time in two years. It was only three sentences. It was the truest thing he had written since the mechanic in Echo Park who fixed cars for free.

He left the apartment and walked to the beach. The sand was cold and the ocean was black and somewhere out in the darkness a ship was moving, its lights small and steady and impossible to read. He stood at the edge of the water and felt the tide pull at his shoes and he thought about all the people he had helped and all the people he had hurt and how sometimes those were the same people. He thought about the kid at the party, the one with the script under his arm, the one who would make his own compromises someday, one reasonable step after another, and would look in the mirror and not recognize himself either.

He threw the folded paper into the ocean. The wave took it. The wave always took everything, eventually.

The next morning he called his film school friend. The one whose calls he had stopped returning. The phone rang four times and Nicholas almost hung up, almost, the membership function trembling at some unknowable coordinate, and then a voice said hello and Nicholas said, "It's me. I'm sorry. Can we talk?" And the friend, after a silence that contained everything that had happened in three years, said yes.