Lansdale then starts a painful adjustment to not having his drawing hand, while Anne deals with the guilt of having caused the accident and tries to get closer to her husband. Lansdale attempts unsuccessfully to recover the hand himself, though he does find his signet ring that Anne gave him. The couple move to New York and Lansdale is approached by his friend and agent Karen Wagner (Rosemary Murphy) to co-produce his comic with another artist, David Maddow (Charles Fleischer). Lansdale however, begins to show signs of a mental breakdown, and when he shows the test boards to Karen, they are all marked up. The deal is off and Karen fires Lansdale, who cannot recall marking up the boards while questioning his daughter about the incident. In a fit of frustration, Lansdale loses his signet ring. Anne is unable to cope with Lansdale's increasingly erratic behavior and general instability. Lansdale becomes jealous of Anne's yoga instructor and begins his slow descent into total darkness when an encounter with a homeless man (Oliver Stone) leaves the man dead at the "hand" of his former appendage. It's not entirely clear whether or not this was a real event or something in his mind. Lansdale begins having hallucinations about various inanimate objects coming to life as a hand, like a shower faucet.