Christopher sulks in his apartment. Knocking. "Who is it?" "Paulie. Open the door." Christopher, in an ill-fitting tank top and giant shorts, lets Paulie in, then goes back to the couch and slumps in front of his laptop. Paulie puts out his hands palms up and says, "I thought we were steppin' out." Christopher gestures towards the laptop. "I got two broads in the car," Paulie complains. "You said Ade went to stay at her mother's." Christopher shrugs. Paulie says it's no wonder; the apartment "looks like a fuckin' sty." Word -- dirty clothes and cigarette butts everywhere, dishes piled up on the table. Paulie eyes the still-silent Christopher: "What's wrong with you?" Christopher shakes his head sadly. "Talk to me," Paulie orders him. "This ain't like you, kid." Christopher just shrugs again. Paulie tells him that he ran into Billy Cracchiolo, who told him the Nutley cops "are looking for a guy, blew a kid's toe off for no good reason in Russo's Bakery…drove a Lexus?" Christopher sags on the couch and asks if Tony knows about it. Paulie shakes his head and asks, "What's goin' on, Chrissy?"

Christopher mutters that he's "been working [his] ass off" on the script, and he has nineteen pages so far. "Is that a lot or a little?" Christopher tells Paulie that the books say a screenplay should come in at 120 pages or so, and he thought the computer would help -- Paulie interrupts to ask if he's "bein' frank about the business," and Christopher assures him that he would never do that: "It's only 'suggested by.'" Paulie tries to help by slagging Hemingway: "That writer, with the bullfights? Blew his own head off." "I bought a screenwritin' program and everything," Christopher mopes. Paulie advises him to put the screenplay aside, "we go get our joints copped -- and tomorrow, the words'll come blowin' outcher ass." Wow. I'll have to try that sometime. Christopher asks if Paulie has ever gotten the feeling that nothing good would ever happen. Paulie snorts, "Yeah -- and nothing did. So what? I'm alive, I'm surviving." Christopher doesn't want to just survive, though, and he talks about character arcs for a while, and he asks, "Where's my arc?" and rambles on a bit more about Richard Kimble and The Devil's Advocate, and Paulie sits down and listens patiently while I have a terrifying flashback to Dawson blathering on about his "art," and Christopher asks again, "Where's my arc, Paulie?" Paulie points out that "those are all make-believe," and he doesn't have an arc either -- he grew up, he went into the Army, he spent some time in jail, "and here I am, a half a wiseguy. So what?" "I got no identity," Christopher moans. "Even Brendan Filone's got an identity, he's dead!" He goes on to say that he killed Emil Kolar and he got nothing, he didn't move up at all, "all I got is nightmares" because Kolar visits him in his dreams every night.