“How’d you like to do one more scene?” he says. “Just, you know, to try it?”
I had nearly forgotten what had caused my change, so wrapped up in how I’d changed, how I was being recognized for my ability and not my crooked nose or whatever I’d written on my CastCall profile (Leading man or supporting man: I do both!)—the headshot Cole had taken and generously edited: How many jobs had that got me?—that had attracted Sal in the first place. I need to call the doctor back. I’m vaguely disgusted I haven’t yet. In fact, I feel disgusting, covered in dirt, my shirtsleeve awkwardly rolled up, the rain giving me an undone, feral look.
“Can I have a minute?” I ask him.
“It’ll only take a minute,” he says.
“What’s the scene?” I say.
He turns around and gives his assistant the thumbs-up; the man runs to turn off several lights moths had started to buzz around. He shuts off all but one, as if I already agreed to doing the take. A current of wild air rattles and knocks over a folding chair. It’s freezing, I realize, and the hair on my arm shivers up, my blood cold as a cobra’s, and I’m reminded of Cole, and how pale he was three weeks ago.
“Oh, it’s the same part,” Sal says. “Where you die. Sort of.” He pauses as he settles back into his chair and whispers something to his assistant. “We just want it zoomed in. We want it slowed down. Think you can do that for us?”
* * *
—
The way Cole and I decided to get over it—after I briefly cried out on the porch, a thunderstorm coming, and went back inside, after we ordered dinner and he told me between bites of pasta curled around his fork that he loved me, he was doing this for us—was to not talk about it, and to create a code for when a client was coming in. When he said, “Looks like bad weather,” I’d know. He was sensitive to my idiot grief, and I both admired and hated him for it, because that meant nothing would change. I finally unpacked my things in his dresser that night, convinced I could do this, that I could stay.
That night, after Cole fell asleep, I stayed awake thinking about emotional turning. The window was open; the air smelled like moss. It wasn’t just Cole. I had been so blindly trusting in my acting coaches. Once, years ago as a rehearsal warm-up exercise, the cast was asked to become ice cream cones on “a hot July boardwalk” (weirdly specific, I recalled thinking), and I melted stupidly to the floor. Why had I done this? Why hadn’t I asked more questions? Had I grown from this moment? Softened further? And then the question I dreaded: Why did I act at all? I was soft serve vanilla melting from that moment, melting still.
Closing my eyes, I found instead of rest the image of Cole’s photo, hanging in the kitchen. Looking at me. The model reached one hand out of the glossy film and onto the wall; his other hand steadied itself on the photo base, and he lifted himself out—right there onto the tile floor, nude. His muscular shadow stood in the bedroom doorframe, watching Cole and me under the covers. I wondered if this would stir anything in Cole, and what that would be.
Before I fell asleep, I was thrown back into that scene in Please Hold: The director pleaded to me, red faced, looking at the notes from our last dress rehearsal. “What have you won?” He seemed drunk at the time, and spat a bit with passion. It occurred to me I didn’t understand the question but that my admission of this would only rouse in him a storm. I said, “Nothing.”
“That’s right,” I remember him saying, pleased with himself and me. “Nothing.”
* * *
—
Sal gave me only a minute to figure out my emotional turning. I decided Andy Campbell’s final moment would go something like this: 1. Shock at having mishandled the snake → 2. Shock that the snake I loved, that I had cared for, bit me → 3. A strong surge of purple venom through my neck, seizing all other thought → 4. The knowledge I will die → 5. Both the lightness of fainting and that final sting of regret for ever having moved out to the mountains, for losing all the people of my life, for becoming so completely resigned to begin with.
We run the take, though I don’t move in it. I close my eyes and pace through the emotions as if they are a flip-book, touching each and just as swiftly moving to the next, wincing, letting every minute difference appear barely, even risking its loss on the viewer. Only for a second I consider whether I am trying out any of what Cole is feeling right now, those yellow plastic bands around his arm, a clear IV stuck in his elbow, his head shaved and reflective, almost greasy. Here, filming as Andy Campbell, the Vermont mountains like dark teeth jutting up around me, I wonder if I have already lost him.
“I don’t know what you’re doing these little jobs for,” Sal says. “Tell you what, I’ll be in touch.” He moves forward to shake my hand but sees my thumb.
“How’d that happen?” he asks.
“I fell coming up.” I try to make it sound convincing, and it does. “Wet leaves.”
“So that’s why you looked awful.” He laughs. It offends me and then it doesn’t. There is a distant clap of thunder. Wind races through the trees, trembling the leaves.
“Huh,” Sal’s assistant says. It’s the first I’ve heard his voice, which is mousy and thin, not at all what I had expected. He removes his earpiece and holds a palm up in the air. The lights click off behind him, and my eyesight doesn’t adjust right away. The man says, “Better head out. Looks like some pretty bad weather.”
* * *
—
“It’s called Lethal Instinct,” I yelled. It was a warm night, almost a month after I had arrived at Cole’s place. He was downstairs, uploading photos onto the computer. He’d stopped doing the prints at my urging; the profit was better online anyway, and most of his models didn’t mind—better exposure. Not that I ever saw them. I always made a point to hide away or drive to town whenever he had the men over. I avoided my occasional desire to go downstairs, to uncover anything, because I had nowhere else to go.
“This guy,” I said, scrolling down, reading the description of Andy Campbell. “This guy had over fifty snakes, Cole! In a trailer.”
“He did what?” Cole asked. His voice was deadened from the other room.
I briefly considered this, what Andy had done, but I was trying to get down to my point: a freak. This guy must have been a freak to do something like this—however he’d even managed it. Hauling tanks and snakes up a mountain, something I couldn’t even picture. And what kind of guy, the thought distracted, got cast in that role anyway? How does that mind work?
Through the kitchen window I saw a flock of crows settle on the branches of a tree. I sat down at the table again and squinted at Andy’s physical specs, the actor’s desired height and weight and features. It was me right there on the screen, down to the note about a particular kind of nose.
The sun dimmed quickly, like a lamp clicked off, and I felt myself stiffen in my chair as I read on, looking up occasionally to see the birds, to wonder about where they’d come from and why they hadn’t moved. When I went downstairs to check on Cole, he got the story wrong: He thought I’d said Andy bit the snake. He looked as he had when I’d first seen him, a blue button-down, attentive eyes, that messy brown hair styled in a perfect swoop, all that energy of love coming at me like a breeze from across the quad, too easy to be anything real. And I could see his computer screen in the reflection of a glass cabinet behind him: some man like me, maybe, or not—I could only make out the frame, and it occurred to me for the first time that if it were me, with my eye behind the lens, I would not know how I would pose Cole, which angles might flatter, what it would mean to say, Stand like this, I want to see you like this.
* * *
—
Lethal Instinct comes out two weeks after Cole closes his eyes for the last time. He leaves me with the whole house and his business, and each night I look up how to shut it all down, but I haven’t brought myself to do anything yet. I don’t touch the photos. With Cole’s gorgeous si
gnature in each, they’ve taken on a haunted quality, and I am superstitious of everything. The messages just add up in his inbox: Still on for next week? There is evidence of nothing I had felt, all those suspicions I had hissing away in my mind. A model showed up a few days ago at the door, his blond hair cut for the occasion, and I just stared at him, feeling a fury grow in me, before saying Cole wasn’t around. A euphemism that felt sinful.
And when I’m being honest? I know what’s true. I know that I had given myself my own snakebite when, days after seeing Cole in bed with that model, after we’d decided to just get over it, I met a guy at a dive bar and went—proudly, decisively—home with him. A secret sealed so deep within me it began to fester and spread. I had all the upper hand I could ask for, but I still wonder if all the emotion I keep down is why I can’t act for anyone other than myself. Every time I get upset, I take it over the top, because there’s twice as much as I let myself feel. One bite either kills you or gives you fangs. I look down at my thumb. No evidence, so how will I know it had ever been me?
The show is somehow even less of a feature than I’d imagined, remade to a short docuseries on exotic animals that kill their fawning owners. I turn up the volume and sit on the couch, a pillow Cole had bought on my chest. The house had been so much his creation that the pain of his absence feels often, in the past days, like something I invent myself.
Watching this is a form of masochism, I know, but this particular way of hurting feels also like a way of honoring Cole, a logic that I know doesn’t add up. My body tenses during the opening credits. Someone on the crew must have learned more about Andy, because the narrator starts confidently with facts about his childhood, stock footage of babies an embarrassing precursor to my scene with the snake. Andy’s mom had died of cancer when he was young. He loved snakes especially, though he also kept a pair of pigeons and tried to train them to carry messages—something a neighbor awkwardly divulged in anonymous silhouette during a cut scene. I find it unbelievable that there is a neighbor in Andy’s story at all, the man who found him slumped there against his trailer a few days later, a poisonous cobalt hue marbling Andy’s hand and wrist. That Andy had given up on people seemed to be the general point of his adolescence, and though I was waiting with some excitement for information that would surprise me, the obviousness of this felt right.
I don’t see at first that the crew had decided not to use me at all. They had gone with a different actor, someone who didn’t even type the part: a thick head of wild brown hair, muscular arms. Played up the handsome. They gave him another story, took liberties. I only see that it was another Andy at that shot from the snake’s point of view—so stupid, but I feel it in me, a betrayal that can be any size I want, another little pulse of venom in my veins that I know I’ll survive. When the credits roll, I don’t bother looking for my name. I stand and walk to the kitchen. The light from a candle catches on each mounted photo, that glass hiding those wild secrets I had put there myself, those little monsters, my reflection in every frame.
BE ALIVE
We’re on our way to the city, finally, when Glen tells me that the chainsaw got him this time. He was out of ammo and extra lives, so he hid under the bed. “Who knew,” he says, looking out the car window at the bright night skyline, “zombies could crawl?”
Early December. The roads are still without ice, but the air is bit through with cold. My boyfriend Glen and I are driving to a dinner with his parents in Chicago, a city I loathe for its constant bleakness, the way you can turn a street corner and be jarred into another gray atmosphere. Glen once used the phrase “melting pot” to describe the city, the place he’s from—a reminder he’s seventeen years younger than me and still not clear that almost everywhere is a melting pot. Some places just wear the title better than others.
“Which is crazy, right?” Glen says. “Thinking zombies. With chainsaws.”
“That is crazy,” I say. “Aren’t zombies not conscious?” I try my best to make it sound rhetorical, to erase the top of the question mark. I can hear myself using lawyer-voice, sounding leave-me-alone bored, like I do at work.
“Exactly,” he says. “It’s crazy. Be dead or be alive—I mean, come on.”
This is what upsets you? I almost say. But I sense the awkward shine it would give the conversation. So I say nothing.
Here is what I’m not saying: Three hours ago, I learned that my brother has been committed, finally, to the psych wing of Mass General for swallowing the bleach our mother keeps hidden behind the washer. It is like the universe is saying, Deal with this. Look at this. Acknowledge this. Which is to say, I no longer care that Glen’s parents will learn I am not, in fact, twenty-six. Or that I am likely to pay for another dinner I cannot comfortably afford. This is to say my brother has now absolutely missed the part where he transitions to being self-sufficient. My mother’s words through the phone: Mark, he is never going to get there.
“I shouldn’t have lied,” I say. I rest a hand on Glen’s knee. “About my age.”
“You look thirty,” he says. And then, more sincerely, “Really.”
This is another problem: I’m in love with Glen, a love misunderstood by even many of my gay friends. Sometimes I think it hurts too much, to feel in my blood the interrogating thought of others when I’m around him. And then I imagine my life without him.
I slow for our exit, signal the turn. There is a chain of cars ahead of us, their lights blinking red. Glen starts again about a zombie that came after him with a syringe. He was running up these cement stairs, so many stairs, and the zombie was gaining on him. But it was a new release of the game. They let it out too soon, he says, with this glitch—those stairs didn’t end. He just kept running, but it didn’t matter how far, and then there was the blood dripping down the screen, and there was the refund, and how unrealistic is that anyway, a zombie that can think like that, that knows what it wants and always gets it.
BREATHING UNDERWATER
Gavin had told Jay he was a professional diver on their second date, almost four years ago, and had avoided all water-related activities since. The lie wouldn’t have been a problem if Jay’s cousin wasn’t, as luck would have it, an Olympic hopeful swimmer. Or if Jay hadn’t always—as he put it—loved the way a man’s body “rose and dove in a single motion” through a current, which was his response when Gavin told him, across that restaurant table, that he spent his early twenties glistening like a mirage in radiant blue water, his body hit with those shining fluorescent lights as he shot past the black lines in record speed. Ever since, Gavin didn’t have to actually defend the lie to Jay so much as either pretend to be sick, or injured, whenever swimming was called for, which wasn’t often. He got cramps when Jay wanted to go to the pool. He developed a convincing and unexpected allergy to chlorine.
The problem started the day Gavin and Jay had taken their Sunday picnic from the town green to the lip of Black Lake, a body of water twenty miles inland of Cape Cod’s coast that was known for looking like a pupil from the sky. It was early summer, the grass hot and dead under the cloth. Jay moved closer to Gavin and rested his hand on his thigh, biting into an apple, just as Gavin noticed the small head a dozen yards into the brown water, the tiny hand slapping noiselessly. So unlike him, Gavin had forgotten his lie just then. When he stood, his knee struck Jay’s brow, and Gavin sensed him wince and turn away as he dove into that boiling brown water, the pebbled bottom digging into his chin. He swam out fast and saw—a child, the body submerged, air bubbles pocking the surface of the water. What he remembered next was the cold metal of the small white lifeboat that had appeared, rocking with the lurch of CPR, and the sight of families standing onshore, and Jay, holding his eye with ice wrapped in a checkered cloth napkin, smiling like an idiot.
Jay, vision clouded with tears, missed seeing Gavin out there in the water, and a father on the beach approached Jay—a reporter for the local news. Jay spilled every detail about Gavin, his
“partner”—a word Jay had avoided using to describe them until then. But this was that one problem, coming up for air from the depths: Jay had unloaded all those years of who Gavin was. Including, of course, how good Gavin was with kids, his sixth sense for when food was about to burn, how long they had been together, and his status as once a record-holding swimmer, best in state.
* * *
—
Gavin held a golden memory of his first important lie. He remembered how the words had tumbled out in a way he almost couldn’t control, how easy—even clean—it was to tell Erin before gym class that he could see the future, that he’d seen it before. He had said this as a fun distraction he’d decided split second. When prompted for a prophecy, Gavin shut his eyes, listening to the sound of basketballs hitting the shining linoleum floor. He concentrated on his breathing and told her she would be famous one day.
“How?” she asked, skeptical.
“I think it’s singing,” Gavin had said. “Or dancing. Something. When you get nervous you sing to yourself.”
Gavin had heard from a classmate that Erin had taken to humming annoyingly to herself during quizzes in English. He took the easy leap of imagining she enjoyed it, that he could flatter her into believing.
Erin looked a little stunned, pleasantly surprised, and Gavin felt the same about what he’d just done. What he didn’t realize, before stepping off the bleachers and standing against the padded wall to be picked for softball, was that Erin would tell her friends, and they would tell their friends. The next day during homeroom, several others came asking. Gavin had good visions for them, too, took what he knew of them and, like recombinant DNA, or even magic, made whole a future in which every suspicion of success was prophecy. Those seeds he planted, surrounding him and growing, like invasive weeds. Walls trapping him in a room, alone.
I Know You Know Who I Am Page 9