It snowed in New York on New Year’s Eve. It started early morning and shrouded the city with relentless cruelty. It ruined everyone’s plans and forced them to stay home. By late evening, the city was silent.

Mitch Keller felt miserable. Truth be known, he’d been unhappy for weeks and he didn’t know why. This made him feel even worse.

He’d bailed on party invites and realised how his absence would be taken. They would think him arrogant for not going, their parties not important enough for somebody of his repute.

Instead, he’d stayed in his cavernous TriBeCa apartment, the Triangle Below Canal Street, and looked through steamed up windows at a strange world. And all the time he drank Jack Daniels because he thought it would make him feel better, but it didn’t.

Mitch had everything. A leading role in a TV series, a play on Broadway, and his agent said he was first choice for a forthcoming movie role. He was recognised when he walked the streets.

In the afternoon, Mitch watched a rerun of ER, the one where Carter paid a visit to his drug-addict cousin who answered the door looking like shit. “How are you feeling?” Carter asks him. “When you’re ill, you feel worse than you are.”

He turned the channel over and watched Homicide: Life on the Street, but it depressed him even more, and switched the TV off.

When night came, Mitch did something he rarely did. He dressed in a big coat from a charity store, found a woolly hat that wasn’t his, and the loneliest man in the world went outside. He walked the cold abandoned streets that nobody went to.

The snow was knee high in places and where it wasn’t, it crunched underfoot, because the temperature had dropped. He saw the white hats that had formed on chairs and tables outside a café he knew. Snow piled up against the door of its dark entrance. He thought about the people who worked there, having fun with family and friends inside a bright and cheery apartment in a part of the city where it was cheaper to live.

Mitch could only think of Zombies.

But he continued walking through unfamiliar streets where there was nobody, and cars were lost under thick blankets, and lights shone from upper apartments. There was a secret world above, one he wasn’t part of, and he wished that he could be in one of them, a tiny apartment, with somebody who cooked spaghetti and meatballs and talked to him like a normal person.

He remembered the summer when he was a teenage boy and walked down a similar street. Mrs Zsepy leaned out of an upstairs window and waved. Mitch shouted and asked her how she was, and she called back that she was fine. Afterwards, he heard her shout to a neighbour across the street. “Mitch is a good kid,” she called. “He’s a sensitive boy.” There was nobody leaning out of a window tonight.

Mitch thought about Patrick Swayze, whom he once met and liked, and the movie that he was hoping to star in with him. He thought about Sam in Ghost, a decent man, a decent ghost, but then he remembered the scene where his friend Carl is killed by a huge piece of falling glass and steps out of his body and is whisked away by black spirits, doomed for eternity.

The snow was falling harder, and the faster it fell, it caused the weight on his mind to get heavier. He was soaked, a thousand snowflakes clinging to his hat and coat, and he was cold. Each snowflake weighed heavy on him. And he’d wandered somewhere he didn’t know, where the streets would never be cleared of snow because nobody went there.

There were abandoned factories and meat packing plants where snow blew through broken windows and the missing tiles to form little mountains inside. There was a doorway, protected by planks of wood nailed together, but with space for somebody to climb through.

Mitch thought of dead rats, frozen in the snow, and wanted to see one.

He climbed through the gap and found himself in a dark hallway that might once have been the entrance to an office. It matched the strange silence. A city wrapped in cotton wool, muffled until nothing could be heard.

He sat in a corner, amidst broken glass and syringes, closed his eyes and thought about his nightmare. He needed somebody to talk to, but there was nobody. But the longer he remained there, in this dank, dark space, the more it provided odd comfort.

As he slipped between sleep and consciousness, he thought about people hitting the bottom. And he believed that when you hit rock bottom you bounced, but it was a matter of how hard you bounced. If you hit the bottom hard then you were likely to bounce right back to where you came from. But a slow fall didn’t provide enough bounce and you might settle on that bottom forever.

Mitch did bounce, and he bounced hard, and he considered that moment the worst it could get. But he picked himself up, went outside, and walked through the snow back to his apartment. He saw other people in the streets who were celebrating a new beginning.

It was time for a change, and he needed a new start as well.

Mitch resolved to put New York, and dreams of Hollywood, behind him, and move to Paris where he would be successful in Europe. And that’s what he did.

He never made that Swayze movie, but before he left New York, he starred in a film, the one that everybody remembered, and for one scene.

It was a long time ago now, but it still seemed like yesterday, and he thought back to when production had wrapped, and Danny had encouraged him to go to that small cinema at the Paramount lot to watch the preview cut. He hadn’t wanted to go, but Danny insisted.

Danny had been his childhood friend and he remembered the days when they used to shoot pool together, but when Mitch started acting, they drifted apart, and one day somebody told Mitch that Danny had died in a car accident. But he hadn’t, because one day Mitch saw him on the street outside his New York apartment and the two were reunited.

The two of them sat in the dark theatre and watched the movie, and Mitch thought he was quite good in it. He hadn’t been looking forward to the final scene, the one that earned him an Oscar nomination, but when it came, he thought it brilliant.

The scene is where Mitch is in a derelict factory, propped up in a corner where he has sheltered from the snow outside, and the camera pans across his unshaven face and sunken eyes, wet with snow, but showing no emotion. And then, somebody clambers through a gap in the boarded-up doorway and sits beside him.

The down-at-heel stranger talks to him, but Mitch is too cold to respond. It plays out for several minutes, and the stranger, who is just a kid, tells him that his life is wasted. They share a needle, and Mitch just sits there while something is pumped into the vein on his arm.

Mitch thinks the kid is good.

And then, the kid steals his hat and coat, and goes through the pockets where he finds a little money. Mitch sits motionless, watching this unfamiliar person, but grateful that there is somebody to talk to. And the look in his pained eyes, as the kid goes back into the snow wearing his hat and coat and leaving Mitch to die.

The lights came up and everybody clapped and cheered, and Mitch knew that the movie would be a critical success.

On the way out, Mitch saw River Phoenix, who’d watched the preview, and had made his way over to them. He told Mitch that it was an awesome performance and that last scene would always be be remembered. But Mitch realised that it couldn’t have been River Phoenix because he had died a few years earlier and he wondered who it might have been.

Danny put his arm around Mitch’s shoulder and guided him outside where there was a bright light, a mysterious light that looked incredibly beautiful.