A Bright Ray of Darkness

by Ethan Hawke

  “He won two,” I said.

  “Gosh, wow, I thought he was totally lying,” she said to me apologetically. Then she checked her cell phone and then ran over and joined a gaggle of young people who were just arriving.

  Moments later, stinking of smoke as bad as I probably did, he walked back into the bar and sat a couple of stools away from me. He ordered a shot of tequila on the rocks and another Tecate. After a moment, he casually spoke to me.

  “So, I hear you’re having woman troubles?” he said.

  “Woman troubles?” I laughed; this guy was my absolute hero. “You could say that.”

  “Is your heart like fish when they’re fryin’? Like you just can’t breathe without knowing she’s there? Is it like missing your hands?” he asked, bearing down on me hard with a stare that made me laugh. My hero was blitzkrieged drunk.

  “Nah,” I said. “It’s not like that.”

  “Good,” he said sharply and sucked back half his Tecate in one quick slug. “That’s good. I was worried we were gonna have to have a different, dumber conversation.”

  There was a long silence. He was charismatic and handsome as hell. Even at seventy there was something hypnotic about his movements. I imitated him, drinking my margarita in a slow-motion way I imagined he would find manly.

  “So, tell me the story,” he demanded, moving two stools closer to me. “The hard dirt. The nitty-gritty. Huh? Give me the skinny.” He was smiling as if my trials and tribulations were sure to be hilarious.

  “I got caught cheating on my wife and she’s pissed off about it,” I stated simply.

  “Yeah, I read all that.”

  “You shouldn’t read them papers,” I said, trying to adapt his tough guy cowboy talk.

  “Everybody’s gotta buy groceries, right? Everybody’s gotta get a tooth capped.”

  “I guess,” I said to my drink.

  “You’re an idiot for letting those rags get ahold of you.”

  “Tough to avoid.”

  “I don’t envy your position,” he said, shifting to a different posture as if he were instantaneously sober. “So you cheated on her. Big deal. You gotta pair, don’t cha? She knows that. How old are you? Thirty?”

  “Thirty-two,” I mumbled.

  “Well, what did she think? She think you were gonna keep it tucked away till you were in the grave?”

  “I don’t know what she thought.”

  “Well, she’ll get over it.” He spoke authoritatively.

  “She’s a proud woman,” I said.

  “She’s got to be, you’re not alone, right?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean, you two are not just making decisions for the two of you. There’s other people you’re responsible for, right? Little people.”

  “The kids?” I asked, like an idiot.

  “Yeah, the kids. They need you guys to work this out. You gotta teach them with your actions right now. You gotta love each other, forgive each other, you gotta be humble.”

  “I am so unhappy living with her. I feel like I’d rather cut off my head,” I stated. I would tell my problems to anybody who’d listen.

  “Of course you’re unhappy. You married a rock star.” He laughed. “I fucked a couple rock stars. You’re always just material.” He kept playing with his empty shot glass, moving it around the bar top.

  “So, what do you want to do, get a div-or-ce?” He said the word in a mocking tone.

  “Nahhh, I don’t want a divorce, but I don’t think I can live with her anymore. That’s my trouble. Let me tell you”—I just launched into the details—“when I fucked this other girl I felt like somebody pulled a long dirty sock out of my trachea, and I don’t want to put it back in. It’s like I can breathe, like oxygen is getting to my brain.”

  “You’re growing up, son.” He slapped me on the shoulder. “You’re growing up. People think unrequited love is heartbreak, but it isn’t. Unrequited love is a blissful state of melancholy. Watching love die: that’s an ornery armor-piercing bullet. When taking the kids to school, the laundry, and the dishes rain down on the last remaining coals of your romance like piss on a morning campfire. When all you’re left with is enough smoke to choke on. Then your heart is dead. And if that happens to you at thirty-two I am sad for you.”

  He ordered us both a beer and a shot of tequila on the rocks.

  “I just always believed that ultimately love was a decision you made, you know?” I said. “Feelings come and go, right? I just always wanted to provide a home for my kids.”

  “I gather you’re talking about your own old man?”

  “I wanted this marriage to work more than anything I’ve ever wanted.”

  “Why?” he asked.

  I looked at him dumbly. I didn’t know.

  “Just go get her back, can’t cha?” he asked like a kid. “Start there.”

  “If I do it just for the kids she’ll smell it, and it won’t go over.”

  “Take a break for a year,” he said, considering my situation deeply. “Just take a break.”

  “She says she can’t live like that. She wants me to get a lawyer.”

  “Then you got to get radical,” he said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “You got to disappear.” He waved for another drink. We hadn’t been seated there ten minutes and he was on his third.

  “Keep ’em comin’,” he said to the waitress. “Don’t make me ask again. It makes me feel like an alcoholic. Now, listen to me,” he said, locking eyes. “You disappear for a week: you’re an irresponsible child. You disappear for a month: you’re a bum. You disappear for a year: she’ll be glad you’re alive. You disappear for a year and nobody will be asking you to get a lawyer, nobody will tell you when you can and cannot see your kids. She’ll be beggin’ you to take ’em. You disappear for a year and you will get your dick sucked upon arrival. I guaran-goddamn-tee it. I shit you not, my friend. Do you even know how to disappear?”

  “No,” I said.

  “Montana, Idaho, Nova Scotia, the Dakotas, ten grand cash, a fishing pole, some decent tackle, a pickup truck, and you will turn this year on its ass. Have the best time of your life, you’ll come back and all this shit will have sorted itself out.”

  “What about my kids?” I asked. He gave me a look that made me feel like my dick was barely an inch in length.

  “How old are they?”

  “Five and three,” I answered.

  “No problem. They won’t even notice you’re gone. They don’t take note of their old man till they’re eight. She’s a good mom, right? She loves ’em. They’ll be fine. Let her know you’re a man. Let yourself know. Start being judged by your gifts, not your faults. Let everybody know what they’re missin.’ And for God’s sake don’t start pussyfooting around with lawyers and timetables and meaningless details.”

  Mr. Whitman took a long look at me and then waved me off. “You’re not going to do it. But you should. Sometimes life asks you to get radical.”

  He played with the ice in his glass.

  “It’s like this,” he told me, his drunk snake stare going cross-eyed. “You’re driving a car, tryin’ to get cross-country, or someplace, you don’t even know where you’re going, you just know you gotta move, but something’s buggin’ you. Something’s not right. Maybe it’s the car, there’s a noise you don’t like. You look at the engine but you’re not a mechanic. Fuck! you think, if I touch one thing in that contraption it’ll all come apart. I don’t know what I’m doin’. So, you hit the road again. Pressing on. Rambling. Hopin’ for the best. And you crank up the stereo to try and cover the noise with pop tunes. It doesn’t work. Every time there’s a slight pause in the melody—you hear that same sickly sound. It makes you twitchy, and anyway, you hate pop music. You stop and pick up a woman. You think maybe chatte
ring and smooching with her will cover up the rattling noise. Her lips are hypnotizing. But shit, she’s annoying, wrong woman. So, ya get rid of her. You get another more distinguished female, but she’s boring…And damn it, you still hear that damn sound of change falling out of your pockets. And now you’re getting spooked. Maybe it’s not her that’s boring. It might be you? You wanna suck back a fifth of Wild Turkey, but someone has absconded with your bottle. Good news, you got a secret stash! But you know soon you’re gonna sober up, and now there’s no more hooch. You think ah…maybe I should get radical and get a new car! You can’t see that to get radical—you gotta lose the car entirely. Walk. Better yet, where the hell you think you are going anyway? Sit down.” He stared at me as if he had said something insightful I should remember forever. “Every time you lose something, you should scream—Thank God. You are now a little bit lighter, you are a little bit more you. ’Cause if you can lose it—a car, an idea, a belief, a woman—it wasn’t yours.”

  After about an hour of sitting with him I was stumbling drunk, again. Old Eugene just kept spilling out more old-man howls of disappointment about the cold and holy night. I finished my second evening back in New York City alone in the Mercury Hotel, just as I had finished the first, puking up what felt like a few feet of my intestines. My arms were literally wrapped around the commode as I tried to sleep. Only this time there was a starving black and white puppy, barely the size of my palm, chewing on my boots. The cool tiles of the bathroom floor felt kind against my cheek. I remember thinking what a mistake it was to meet your heroes.

  ACT II

  Crush Collision March

  Scene 1

  I was going to let this motherfucking teetotaling altar boy have it. Adrenaline was shooting through my fists. With a sword twirling in my right hand and a dagger poised in the other, the blood of my fingers throbbed against the leather handles of each blade. I was going to slice this punk Prince’s head right off his body with two heavy, hacking blows. Anger lifted from some ancient cavern inside my heart was coming up in heaves. I stared at this Prince as sweat dripped into his nervous eyes. The others around us, thirty or so people standing hypnotized by the violence, approved of my every gesture—I could sense it. They loved me, and their approval felt good, like water on a hot brand: not cold enough to dampen the heat, just enough to release a touch of steam and alchemize my hatred into a red-hot, razor-like edge.

  Oh Jesus. Oh my lord God.

  How did I get so fucking angry?

  And why did it feel so goddamn grand?

  “Easy, easy,” I heard my friend call out from the crowd.

  Fuck easy, man. I was going to show everybody the ancestral line from which I descended. You don’t think I have a warrior’s heart? Why don’t I rip open my rib cage so you can watch the ventricles pound? My heart is old, my bones are strong, and my blood is fresh. Believe me, boys, there’s plenty to go around. Try me.

  “My name is Harry Percy,” I announced for anyone within miles to hear. There is a formality to the universe, and it respects you if you honor its code: always introduce yourself. It’s the right thing to do, even if it’s the last thing you do before you chop into some sucker’s spine and sever their head from their shoulders. He spit some nonsense at me, this puny Prince with his weak voice and his rehearsed lines.

  I didn’t care what he said. I wasn’t listening. I was staring at the artery frantically pumping fear from inside the soft delicate skin of his throat. That’s the spot. The first hack will be placed right there. I imagined how good it would feel.

  “The hour has come to end the one of us,” I shouted at this pissant, “and would to God thy name in arms were now as great as mine!”

  I like talking like that—old school. Let everybody know you’ve got a brain in your head and a pair in your pants. My voice was strong and sure as I made my move, screaming towards him. He flew backwards, as I knew he would. Feeling the others slink out of my way in silent fear, I charged. Everyone was trembling and cowering, but stealing secret glances. They didn’t want to see. They needed to see. Time slowed; each move for me was easy—I could observe where he would be retreating before he’d even had the idea. I knocked him left and stayed on top of him as he scurried away. The men flanking us were begging me to kill him. I don’t know why they loved me, but they did. Men are weak and silly and they admire strength and goddamn it, I had it.

  The final stroke—I swing at him—right for that magic open spot—certain I will lop his head halfway off his body. But I don’t. The pussy punk ducks and I miss him entirely and up from the ground the Prince snags some mislaid spear from a fallen soldier and thrusts the spike directly into my chest plate.

  “AHHHRRRGGGHHH,” I scream.

  The blade at the tip of this lance was supposed to be retractable—that’s how the fight had been choreographed—but, of course, this being the dress rehearsal, the first time we are performing the play onstage, in costume, the damn lance gets jammed and pummels me directly in my solar plexus.

  Worse than the white-hot pain rocketing out from my breast was the tear I heard in my throat. I just blew out my vocal cords.

  I fought my way forward through my death monologue. I had to.

  I could hear the tear. I had to dig deep into the lowest part of my register to get through the last few lines. The empty theater was cavernous.

  But thought is the slave of life.

  And life, time’s fool.

  And time, that takes survey of all the world,

  Must have a stop.

  I fell down dead. Our first preview would be the following evening, with eighty-one performances lined up after that. I lay there, a bag of nerves, eyes closed, face smashed against the hard wood. The play continued around me: voices above me; feet stomping to the left and right of my head. Six months of Henry IV, Parts One and Two, eight times a week, coming straight at me, and I blew out my voice during the fucking dress rehearsal. Quietly, with my eyes closed, still lying dead in center stage, I hummed to myself, hoping that I might be overreacting.

  No, my voice was shattered. How could I lose my voice? I felt like I’d just walked into a moving propeller. This play was everything to me; it was the only thing keeping me alive. I was still living in the Mercury Hotel; my wife loathed me and wasn’t speaking to me. My son and daughter seemed disoriented around me and sobbed every time we parted. Weight was falling off me like off a turkey being carved on Thanksgiving. I’d lost fifteen pounds in the last four weeks and was scared to get on the scale again. I couldn’t eat. I was never hungry. My cheekbones were jutting out of my face. Anxiety surged through my bloodstream. No, not anxiety: heart-pounding terror. I’d failed as a husband, as a father, and now, in the dress rehearsal, I had failed my art. My art was the best aspect of me.

  I could not lose my voice.

  Other actors continued with the play, their dialogue sparkling above me. My eyes remained furiously clenched shut. Some characters mourned my death, others sounded pleased.

  That morning I had watched my wife on a television program, as I brushed my teeth and got dressed. She was dutifully promoting her new “chart-topping” album, while this talk show host sweetly and mournfully told the nation about all my disreputable actions. The facts are not always friendly. The court of public opinion was finding me unequivocally guilty. There is so much they don’t teach you in acting class.

  Playing dead was the best I was going to feel all day.

  * * *

  —

  This was the last night of the long week of tech rehearsals, which is the most tedious section of the rehearsal process, where you basically live in the theater for a time (usually about three or four days) while they set the lights, costumes, and sound, and fine-tune all the technical elements. We had worked until midnight, so by the time I changed out of my costume and was heading home it wa
s almost 1:00 a.m. I had shaved my head earlier that day (Hotspur didn’t brush his damn hair), and now my scalp was freezing. When my phone rang, I was dead tired, with bandannas coiled around my throat and no hat. It was Dean.

  Now, I don’t give a shit what anybody else says; for my money, Dean Deadwilder is a great actor. Of course, he had a terrible reputation for throwing random shit at paparazzi and hotel employees; punching producers; all that kind of celebrity antics. The last time I’d talked to him, he’d just had a nervous breakdown on set, probably drug related, and was hospitalized. I read about it in the paper and called his cell, thinking I would leave a message. He picked up.

  “I left the studio unconscious in an ambulance after five months of shooting and no one from the cast, the crew, or production has called yet to see if I’m alive…that should give you some idea what kind of giant asshole I have become.”

  This time, however, he called me, saying he was worrying about me (we’d done a movie together about five years before). He would pick me up in three minutes outside the theater. So, after an epic day of tech, destroying my voice in the final dress rehearsal, I stepped into his limo. His driver was hidden behind a black screen. Dean dipped a key into a very large bag of cocaine while he talked, casually offering it to me. I had tried cocaine several times before but have never been drawn to drugs. Not so this night. This night I began to snort cocaine like it was magical healing fairy powder.

  It was not.

  The inside of the limo was dark, but the lights moving outside lit Dean’s face. He’s not model handsome. He looks like a man, the man every fifteen-year-old boy wants to see himself as: large, powerful, with deep, expressive, soulful eyes.

  “William, you think you got it bad? I buried my old man three nights ago, I’ve been in this limo for three fuckin’ days. We put my pop into the ground in Alberta and since then I’ve just been driving around. I had to get away from my mom and my sisters and my daughter, my ex-wife…Without my old man they’re all nuts.”