A Bright Ray of Darkness

by Ethan Hawke

  Also by Ethan Hawke

  Rules for a Knight

  Ash Wednesday

  The Hottest State

  Indeh: A Story of the Apache Wars

  (a graphic novel illustrated by Greg Ruth)

  THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF

  Copyright © 2021 by Ethan Hawke

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York, and distributed in Canada by Penguin Random House Canada Limited, Toronto.

  www.aaknopf.com

  Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Hawke, Ethan, [date] author.

  Title: A bright ray of darkness / Ethan Hawke.

  Description: First edition. | New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2021.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2020019918 (print) | LCCN 2020019919 (ebook) | ISBN 9780385352383 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780385352390 (ebook) | ISBN 9781524712006 (open market)

  Classification: LCC PS3558.A8165 B75 2021 (print) | LCC PS3558.A8165 (ebook) | DDC 813/.54—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/​2020019918

  LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/​2020019919

  Ebook ISBN 9780385352390

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Cover images: (match) Zonda / Shutterstock; (background) CSA Images / Getty Images

  Cover design by John Gall

  ep_prh_5.6.1_c0_r0

  Contents

  Cover

  Also by Ethan Hawke

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Prologue: So Shaken as We Are

  Act I: Rebellious Liquor in My Blood

  Act II: Crush Collision March

  Act III: Firing the Vainglorious Rocket

  Intermission

  Act III: The Blue Jean Kid

  Act IV: A Hell Broth Boil

  Act V: If Wishes Were Horses

  Acknowledgments

  A Note About the Author

  To Jack

  PROLOGUE

  So Shaken as We Are

  When you finish a movie, they always forget to call you a car. When you are starting a movie, everything runs perfectly—town cars, hotel rooms, per diem—but once the film ends they couldn’t give a shit. I arrived home late in the afternoon on the first Sunday of September. Rehearsal for Henry IV would start the next day. I should say I arrived in New York. I didn’t go home. I got into a taxi outside JFK international arrivals and told the guy to take me to the Mercury Hotel.

  The driver stared at me through the rearview mirror.

  “William Harding?” he asked, in a slight Indian accent.

  “Yup,’’ I answered.

  “Is what they are saying about you and your wife true?”

  I had been in Cape Town, South Africa, and wasn’t yet aware of the media buzz around my collapsing life.

  For my driver, my silence was an admission of guilt.

  “People of your kind, they make me feel upset where I breathe.” He spoke to the mirror. “You have everything, but…that is not enough. You are greedy, my friend, am I right? Driven by greed?”

  We entered the highway.

  “You don’t even know me,” I said quietly.

  “Pardon me?” he shouted.

  “You don’t even know me,” I said again, louder.

  “I know you. I used to like your movies very much.”

  I could see his brown eyes bounce up from the road and scour my face and my clothes.

  “I am a large fan of the cinema. I thought you were different than the shiny fake ones. I liked the futuristic movie—with the music. Ahhh…great music. And the one you did with the young Russian girl, very sexy movie, but good, smart. I liked that one. People like you are spoiled so it is difficult for you to live a meaningful life. You do what you love for a living; you get paid well to do it; you get awards. Do you think I have any awards at home? Do you think that’s because I am undeserving?”

  “Keep your eyes on the road, pal,” I said.

  “Remember this next time you are complaining,” my taxi driver continued. “No one wants to be hearing you! I have a seventeen-year-old who is giving me hell all day long. I am paying bills, always. I work two jobs and if you want me to listen to you whimpering—you are speaking with the wrong taxi driver. You are hearing me? I am not crying salty tears for you, my friend.”

  I did my first movie when I was eighteen and now at thirty-two I’d been sort of famous for the entirety of my adult life. So, I’ve been dealing with being recognized by strangers for a good long while. Usually I am adept at ignoring it. My powers of denial are formidable. They have to be. If someone told you that everywhere they went they hear people behind them whispering their name and details about their life and ex-lovers, you might assume they were a delusional paranoid schizophrenic. But this was my reality.

  “Why don’t we celebrate goodness, honesty, substance? Why not?” my cabdriver said. “Why don’t we find somebody who’s not a self-satisfied plastic pod person and put them on the cover of People magazine and sell twenty million copies of that? What if a person of humility could have twenty million Google hits? Why are we not having awards show full of adult people, who are talking about grown-up-person ideas? Like for why are we born? It’s not all your fault,” he reassured me. “If they put me on Entertainment Tonight would I be as big an asshole as you? That’s the valuable question.”

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  I didn’t want to go home. If it weren’t for my kids I wouldn’t have come back to this city for twenty or thirty years. Coming back to New York was like placing my head into the center of a well-made noose.

  My driver took me to Thirty-second Street and First Avenue. He quoted the Bhagavad Gita, talked about Eli Manning and the New York Giants, and told me that sex wasn’t relevant. He’d been faithful eighteen years and his wife was a lesbian.

  I didn’t say anything. I just looked him in the eyes through the mirror and nodded.

  “If your wife leaves you, it’s OK,” he lectured. ‘‘You violated a sacred trust, the covenant of your marriage, and you must respect her decision, my friend. We must respect each other’s freedom and everybody agrees with that idea until that freedom causes us pain. Then, when they hurt us, we resent their freedom and talk about how our ex-person is a crazy, or looney tunes, or that ‘they have problems.’ They are not a crazy person; they don’t have problems—they just have their own will.” He laughed and stopped in front of the Mercury Hotel, an old building covering half a city block, mysterious, gothic, like a place where one goes mad and shoots himself, as many had. I’d romanticized the hotel since I was a kid; famous writers, poets, musicians, and painters had lived and worked there. Built just after the Civil War, it was now run-down and seedy, full of tourists from Tokyo and Germany, and operating on reputation alone.

  “If you respect your woman, you will let her grow her own course. She is not the important person right now. You have children. Your son needs you. Your daughter needs you. Please take a shower and smell more-better. You dress like a hobo and stink of piss and cigarettes! Get to rehab!”

 
; “Cut me a little slack, will ya?” I shook my head. “It was a long flight.”

  I shoveled the money through the bulletproof slot.

  “One more thing,” he added. “Can I get a photo?”

  * * *

  —

  I walked through the doors of the hotel and up to the front desk. The lobby was paneled in a dark, rich chocolate wood. The place smelled like soft moss around an old tree. The ceiling had a mural of cherubs riding clouds as if they were horses. They were friendly angels but it was unclear if they were welcoming the living or the dead.

  “Wow, look who it is, Hester Prynne herself,” said the owner, Bart Asher. Even at seventy-four, he still manned the front desk. “When I read about you in the Post and saw how you fucked it all up, I got excited, figured we might see you.”

  “You got a room?” I asked.

  “Best room in New York City,” he said proudly.

  * * *

  —

  Bart showed me to room 714, which was lightly furnished with a living room set from the Eisenhower era. The space was dark but warm and comfortable, with high ceilings and large thick wood moldings. Dirty yellow light seeped in from the cloudy windows. There was a kitchen, a den, and two bedrooms; one for me, and one for my children.

  “How much?” I asked.

  “How long will you be staying?”

  “What kind of chances did the Post give my marriage?”

  Glancing to my bags, he studied the stuffed animals and African coloring books. He looked up with a warm smile.

  “I’m a romantic. I’ll give you the place for free for one month. Till you get back together.”

  “What happens if we don’t get back together?”

  “You gotta get back together,” he said simply.

  ACT I

  Rebellious Liquor in My Blood

  Scene 1

  Rehearsal for Shakespeare’s Henry IV began promptly at 10:00 a.m. I hadn’t slept at all and the back of my throat still burned from puking. My first night at the Mercury had not ended well. I worried people could smell the alcohol seeping through my pores as I stepped off the elevator and into the rehearsal hall.

  I like old theaters or sweaty church basements, places where you can smell some history on the walls. This place was antiseptic. Spread over half of the twenty-seventh floor of a corporate office building, our rehearsal area was roughly the size of a baseball diamond. The lengths of the far two walls were floor-to-ceiling windows. The lights, cops, and chaos of Times Square screamed mutely through the glass. It was distracting as hell.

  Earlier that morning I had taken my daughter to school. We paused in front of her Upper East Side kindergarten. She asked me, “Are you living in a hotel because it’s closer to rehearsal?”

  I stood there, hungover and silent.

  “That’s the only reason I can think of,” she added.

  “Well, that’s one of the reasons.”

  “Are you gonna keep living there?”

  I stared at her in silence.

  “ ’Cause I was thinking,” she continued, “if you and Mommy aren’t going to live together anymore, that would be great! I can get a puppy and Mommy wouldn’t be allergic.”

  “This afternoon, when school and rehearsal are finished, we’ll go to the pound and rescue a puppy. Deal?”

  “I get to name her.”

  I nodded and we shook hands.

  Promising a child a puppy. Pathetic.

  * * *

  —

  Inside the rehearsal hall, tables were set into a large square with folding chairs arranged all around the outside edges. The first day of rehearsal for a play is always the same: bagels, coffee, orange juice, pencils, Actors’ Equity forms, nervous chatter, people who haven’t seen each other since that boring production of The Iceman Cometh back in ’04, the election of a union deputy, the stage manager’s speeches about promptness and work-related injuries.

  This morning was a little different only because there were so many people, thirty-nine in the cast and about twenty-five designers and assistants and producer types. The “Star” was already there when I arrived. That’s how you know you’re late: when a movie star like Virgil Smith is there before you. To his credit, he had about four scripts with him, all different versions of the play—and the play was damn long, so he was surrounded by piles of papers. A massive white beard, which he must’ve been growing for a year, covered his face. He looked like Orson Welles; or, I guess, in truth, he looked like Falstaff, which was the idea. Virgil stood up when he saw me and walked over to the table where I was standing. He gave me a big bear hug. I know he meant it to be nice, but it felt embarrassing, like pity. I was so hungover and dizzy I could’ve cried in his arms or punched him in the face. He was probably the only legitimate American film star who was also a universally celebrated and respected theater actor. He was everything I’d ever wanted to be, since I was old enough to want. In England, it’s common I guess, but in America, Virgil Smith is one of a kind. He’s a Rhodes Scholar, a Yale Drama School graduate, who won his first Oscar playing a gangster in what is arguably considered the finest American film since Citizen Kane. He’d won the Tony three times, once for his Macbeth, and two other times for his performances in original plays. We had never met before, but since I was kind of famous and he was superfamous, I guess he figured we should hug.

  “Is it true?” he asked with his big, wet Academy Award–winning eyes.

  “Is what true?” I asked.

  “What I read in the papers.”

  “Depends on what you read.”

  “Well”—he paused and smiled; I’d seen him give this same look in a hundred movies—“I read you cheated on your wife and that she’s demanding a divorce.”

  ‘‘Yeah, that’s pretty much it. That’s the story,” I said and left him there. This was not the conversation of my dreams.

  Next, I went and sat down at my assigned seat, took out my script, and tried to be nervous about the read-through that was to begin soon. There were many things in my life about which it made sense to be nervous, and this was the gentlest one.

  The previous night had been worse than I expected. I left the hotel, went home to see the kids and talk to my wife. She didn’t come downstairs to say hello, but I could hear her clomping around above us. She told the nanny to inform me I could take the kids out to dinner and put them to bed. She would meet me at the bar across the street at 10:00 p.m. The kids and I went to the park. We had a pretty great time seeing each other. I sat in the sandbox over at Union Square Park with the two of them pushing sand around and watching the sunset.

  “It’s darking again!” my three-year-old son shouted, pointing at the sun drifting below the buildings, the last gold light of the day hitting our faces.

  “It does that every day, silly,” said my daughter.

  “But it’s darking again!” he said, tugging on my shirt and looking me square in the eyes only an inch from my face.

  “I know, buddy. It does that every day.”

  “No, it doesn’t. This morning it didn’t,” he said.

  “The sun goes down at night,” my daughter responded.

  “It’s a miracle,” he said.

  “No,” my daughter corrected, “it’s a miracle when it comes up.”

  “I like it when it goes down,” he said.

  My love for these two young people was easy, uncomplicated, and unceasing, like a love for water, stars, light, breathing, or food. For me, marriage had been misshapen but parenthood had been a spontaneous pleasing reflex. Making a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, watercoloring, listening to Woody Guthrie and Elizabeth Cotten, playing crazy eights, throwing a ball, playing pickle, putting on shoes, treasure hunts, walking through puddles, singing songs, paper airplanes, I could do all that. Meeting my
responsibility to these two was more nourishing than sleep.

  After I put the kids to bed, read them stories, and scratched their backs, I went to the bar across the street to wait for my wife. Mary didn’t show and I sat there alone for over three hours, waiting, dousing myself with whiskey, until I was blind drunk and angry about being stood up. I don’t think it was the alcohol, I think it was the rancid gazpacho I ate; regardless, I finished my first night back in NYC violently vomiting my guts out, crying in spastic fits and spurts at the base of the Mercury toilet. Turns out I was at the wrong bar. Mary had been waiting down the block. The strange thing was neither of us had even tried to call the other.

  It was darking indeed.

  * * *

  —

  A muscular man in his late forties took his seat next to me at the rehearsal table. His name was Ezekiel. He wore a crocheted Rastafarian beanie, about five or six gold bracelets, and an olive green U.S. Army jacket. All of which, on him, radiated a masculine vitality. We sat there for the next couple hours with the rest of the cast going over all the necessary Actors’ Equity information you need to sort through before you’re allowed to begin any production. The fluorescent lights above us hummed in a frequency that made you want to murder someone. There was the unspeakable boredom of being guided through the contracts. How many weeks you must work to qualify for Equity coverage. The Equity rep giving his long speech about workers’ compensation and the future of the union. These guys are always out-of-work actors and give each union address with a sincere attempt at flair, like it’s an audition. Then the company was allotted a fifteen-minute break before rehearsal would officially commence. Time alone with myself was the last thing I wanted.

  I rode the elevator down the twenty-seven floors to Forty-second Street and stood in the middle of Times Square to smoke. Waves of people moved past me, bumping and shaking with their shopping bags, off to see some tourist attraction. Madame Tussauds wax museum, the Disney Store—it was all there. My son once asked me, “Mommy has two figures in the wax museum and you don’t have any. Why is that?”