AFTER MY IMMIGRANT’S holiday at Hotel Goliath, I lived and breathed only for our film. I spent every spare minute rereading the book, tweaking what remained of Michael’s script, practicing my diction in front of the mirror. During the days we couldn’t shoot because of work, I became easily irritable, impatient with the small, meaningless tasks that make up a life: grocery shopping and cooking, brushing my teeth, chasing the spiders in our house with cans of Raid. Even going to the toilet made me angry. It seemed unfair that I had to waste time on these things while the story haunting my mind was on pause. Art elevates life above these tasks, making the banal all the harder to accept. I wrote letters to my mother expressing these frustrations, and she replied with the soothing wisdom I’d hoped for.

When I have to stop writing poetry to feed the chickens, Babi wrote, I want to murder the chickens. But when the poetry won’t come, when the words elude me and the empty stanza laughs at my foolishness, I’m most grateful for the chickens that need feeding. The small tasks are a respite from what truly matters, and vice versa.

As my obsession peaked, the crew of The Great Newt War gathered in Siesta Key for the last day of the shoot, which would include our most expensive scene. We began with the establishing shot.

Rostislav sits in a living room filled with luxurious antique furniture, holding his scotch and reading a book. He gets up and roams the mansion that was given to him by Governor Salamander in the redistribution of all human property acquired in the war. Years have passed. His clothes have become more elaborate to display his wealth (sleek black tunics embroidered with silver thread). He has learned four languages, though there is no one to speak them with. He employs a staff of humans who tend to his dietary needs, maintain the pH balance in his water tank, and keep dust from his books. The humans also soothe his ache for Ava, a longing that is clear in his walk as his massive hind legs tap and echo in the empty mansion, leaving drops of salt water on the extravagant ivory floors. He never leaves the house, this Newt of Xanadu.

During these days of feeling lost, Rostislav orders a typewriter with enlarged keys to accommodate the large tips of his fingers. He begins a letter to Governor Salamander, introducing himself as a scholar and a student of everything salamanders and humans have in common. “Though we are now able to subject humans to newt rule without any consideration for their lives, should we? Is endless expansion the point of our existence? What if humans and salamanders could live satisfying lives alongside one another, refusing to participate in the hamster wheel of competition among nations? Is the newt a moral creature or a sheer force of nature? Doesn’t having the power to destroy all life also mean having the power to preserve and safeguard it? Why mimic the failures of humans so loyally, Great Governor?”

After these musings, Rostislav moves to his main point, a personal plea. During the war, he relates, he fell in love, or friendship, or something in between, with a human woman, and she was set up to take the fall for him. Thereafter she was sent to a human work camp in the Mediterranean, helping local salamander armies manufacture machine and harpoon parts. He begs for Governor Salamander’s mercy and asks for Ava’s release. “She was a friend to salamanders,” he writes. She protected him from a human mob, and he betrayed her, broke his promise to protect her in turn. If Governor Salamander cannot show mercy for an innocent human, perhaps he can do it to unburden the soul of a haunted fellow salamander.

Rostislav sends the letter and continues to roam his halls. He receives no reply, sends another. And another. Years pass. The coasts of the world give way to newts, and humans migrate farther inland, to mountainous areas of Latin America and Central Europe and the deserts of Africa and the Middle East. The human populations that have not yet been touched by the newt expansion resist the flow of millions of coastal refugees coming to their land. Conflicts arise. Humans wage war against one another even as their species is being replaced by another.

Rostislav never receives a reply from Governor Salamander. In despair, he stays in his water tank, barely moving, growing fatter. He suffers painful infections on his skin. Some of his servants begin to treat the house as their own and sleep in its many bedrooms, cook lavish meals for themselves, and organize end-of-the-world parties for their friends. Once in a while, salamander enforcers come to take a human servant away to the work camps. Rostislav ignores these disappearances, ignores the pleas from his other staff to protect them. The only human he is concerned about is Ava; his guilt shrinks his world, his body, his intellect.

Rostislav has sent sixteen letters to Governor Salamander by the time the enforcers arrive for him. The butler opens the door and leads a trio of newt soldiers, armed with specially designed rifles, to Rostislav’s bedroom.

MICHAEL AND I had spent several sleepless nights planning this scene. We needed three more newts to appear in the film, but of course we had only one Rostislav. In the end, the local high-school theater department saved us, as their musical about the occupation of Earth by lizard people had just finished its run, and the reptile costumes were therefore available. With a few adjustments—newt armor and weapons—we were able to make the soldiers look like a large specimen of salamander. We dressed our PAs in these costumes and asked them to kneel. We’d fix the rest in post. It was hardly the perfect solution, but we hoped the strength of the story would keep audiences from judging the effects harshly.

“Rostislav Adriatic?” asks the newt captain.

Rostislav crawls out of the tank and wraps himself in a dark blue robe. He beams with hope—are these the royal bodyguards accompanying Governor Salamander on a personal visit so that they can discuss Ava’s case?

Rostislav tries to excuse himself to get properly dressed but the captain shakes his head. “As of last week,” the captain says, “all salamanders who originated in the Adriatic Sea are declared inferior to all other salamanders. You are to be relocated, to serve the salamander cause at work camps.”

Rostislav studies the yellow spots on his green and brown skin, a contrast to the dark blue and green spots of the soldiers before him. “Newts are rounding up newts?” he says.

“We can allow you to get dressed, although you will be assigned a standard work uniform once you arrive at your destination.”

“This is my house.”

“No longer.”

“You can’t just take salamanders as prisoners. Don’t you feel ashamed of this order?”

“Law is law,” the captain says.

“And when they outlaw your kind?”

The salamanders chuckle at this, a noise not unlike snakes hissing.

“Salamanders of the Indian Ocean gene are the superior breed,” the captain says. “We’re the ones who build our Empire of Salamander, Adriatic.”

Rostislav looks at his butler as if the man can save him. “This is my house,” he repeats.

“You took it from someone and now they’ll take it from you, sir,” the butler says.

Per law, the newt soldiers make no acknowledgment of the human butler by speech or glance.

“It makes no sense,” Rostislav says.

“I find it’s best to settle for your place in life,” the butler says. “We, your loyal servants, have conspired to murder you in your sleep for years, but we could never quite bring ourselves to do it. Even servitude can become a habit, to my own horror.”

“I never realized you were here against your will,” Rostislav says. “I am sorry.”

The soldiers leave the bedroom, and the butler helps Rostislav dress, the man’s eyes lingering on his captor as if he’s undecided whether their parting is an opportunity to punch him or embrace him. Rostislav puts on his Sunday suit, bow tie and all, and the butler wishes him luck. Rostislav ambles down the halls that had given him refuge from his grief. He listens for the excited shouts of servants celebrating his demise, popping champagne bottles, so that in this final moment, he can feel himself a villain justly punished, not merely another clueless victim swept up by currents he failed to consider. But the confirmation of his evil doesn’t come. He departs the house silent and solemn, never to learn about the fate of its human inhabitants, though he can make a guess.

Slow fade-out…

… and slow fade-in to salamander industrial zones in the Mediterranean [a beach in southwest Florida transformed with a few cheap tricks]. Ava stands inside a factory, a collar on her neck announcing her new name: 2108761. The window in front of her workstation offers a full view of the ominous ocean. She looks at the conveyor belt in front her and checks the quality of harpoon parts manufactured for the salamanders’ ongoing war against the shark population. There is a jarring cut to Rostislav, stripped of his clothes, his back hunched, wearing his own collar number: 31087. He is hauling pipes slung over his shoulder down to the sea so the salamanders can build a stronger, better infrastructure for their submerged world.

DURING THE LUNCH break, Michael didn’t talk much. The rest of us were ecstatic that the shoot, countless early mornings and hard labor in addition to our day jobs, was almost over. He felt disappointed by the limitations of the budget. Ideally, this last scene would have been an epic panorama of a Mediterranean port with the roofs of massive towers peaking above the ocean’s surface, cargo submarines and amphibious excavators pushed into the ocean, hammers swung by the arms of ten thousand newt prisoners. A wonder of industry and efficiency. Above it all would reign the statue of Governor Salamander, twenty times as tall as Lady Liberty, overlooking the rise of his civilization.

But the budget didn’t allow for such a vision. Michael hoped that we could still get a large group of extras to fill the beach out with bodies and convey the idea of a lived-in world, but our friends were tired of getting up early to stand around, and we had no money left to bribe them with booze.

I didn’t mind. Showing the world as bare, empty of other people and salamanders, underscored the perfect isolation both characters felt at the end of their journeys. The empty spaces were a powerful contrast to the vast backdrop of the sea’s horizon.

Rostislav marches along the beach to the sound of shouts and pipes crashing to the ground as exhausted laborers faint in the heat. He pulls on a rope to the count of one, two… and again. His hands slip and he falls into the sand, and he glances up at the factory on the northern end of the beach.

Does Rostislav know that the woman he loves works in this exact factory?

Ava looks out the window of her workstation. Her hands are cut up and bloodied from her job, the foul-smelling oil having congealed around her wounds. Her hair is shaved, all life and defiance vanished from her eyes. All she can see, staring past the Dickensian factory around her, is the ocean, the same ocean she used to adore once upon a time in Florida, before it brought destruction to everyone she knew. She cuts her finger and lets the blood drip onto the floor, fully aware of the punishment she will receive for soiling the factory.

Rostislav trudges up the beach toward the factory, leaving imprints in the sand. Dents appear on his skin where infection was cut out by salamander medics. He drags his heavy hind leg in a limp acquired from a beating for disobedience. The guards pay him no mind; he walks with such purpose that they assume he has been reassigned to the factory. Rostislav doesn’t miss his human clothes or his wealth or playacting a scotch drinker. He misses books. He misses the days of learning the history of a new city, strolling around Prague with the professor. He misses the stories of Ava’s childhood, the beauty of her youthful discoveries, denied to him because he spent his childhood fighting sharks while hunting for pearls.

Ava wipes the sweat from her forehead. She has tried to drown herself in the ocean countless times. The newts came quickly to save her, every time. They put their hands around her ankles and arms and carried her to shore. Then they beat her and starved her, let her know that peace must be kept and that obedience was essential.

Rostislav appears at her window.

What was. What is.

He sees Ava.

Her reflection merges with his image. She seems to recognize the salamander. What was his name? Rostislav? Perhaps she forgives him and is glad to see him here, at the end of everything. Or perhaps not. Perhaps she simply looks out on the ocean, recounting its betrayals. Or planning a better, quicker way of drowning.

Or perhaps she dreams of those days when she swam as far as she could, until she reached a point of panic. Suddenly aware of the dangers that lurked in the ocean, she would rush back to the beach and run to her parents, who would assure her there was nothing to be afraid of. That the world was connected, and the ocean was the bond. It would never harm her. There was always peace and safety to be found somewhere ashore.

No more.

Fade out…