Part of what drives this story for me is the lack of control, the chaos—he doesn’t know how it works, he screws up, the machine pushes forward (showing him such strange sights) and it pushes him backwards.

Unlike many of my stories, this had a specific inspiration—I was hiking a new-to-me trail in Rocky Mountain National Park, which is near where I live. I found the most amazing, peaceful spot—a kind of still murky pond with lily pads, and a nearby grove of aspens—it was autumn, the leaves had fallen, so the trail was carpeted with gold, and the bare branches reached up to a bright blue sky. It felt like a refuge—a good place to hide.

I googled “how to structure a heist” and got a lot of “here are the one hundred and nineteen essential plot beats for a heist,” so that was a dead end, because I don’t believe in more than, I don’t know, two plot beats at a time. So then I watched a bunch of heist stuff in the hope that it would all just sort of passively pervade my mind. The Thomas Crown Affair, Leverage, and so on.

I love night markets, and I love magical market stories. So of course I wanted one day to write one myself! I was also thinking about parenthood, about the baggage that we bring to it, about learning to be open and present even when that’s really hard. About vulnerability and defensiveness in general. And about the inevitable calluses that we acquire through life, the armor that we don to survive.

I did a lot of digging into the idea of “closure” and how looking for closure can become detrimental. It doesn’t matter how smart or well-adjusted you are. Like a dog chasing a bird, you can chase closure right over the edge of a cliff. The narrator of “The Last Lucid Day” is someone who has done the homework: He’s likely been in years of therapy; he knows the language of complex trauma, parental neglect, attachment styles, and so on.