A Bright Ray of Darkness

by Ethan Hawke

  I picked my kids up from their mother’s house the morning they returned from the Balkans. My wife didn’t come to the door. The jet-lagged nanny asked me to wait there while she got the kids into their jackets. This was a first. Usually, I was allowed in. Valentino must’ve been a sleepyhead. I hugged the kids and we cabbed it uptown to take my daughter to her kindergarten.

  “So, how was your trip, you guys?” I asked, busy trying to arrange my stomach in a way that could minimize the piercing pain my boil was causing. It felt like someone was pouring hot lead into my belly button.

  “Oh, Daddy, it was so fun,” my five-year-old daughter said while lounging comfortably by the taxi’s window. “Mommy’s friend Valentino has all these elves that work for him. So, we didn’t have to do anything.”

  My son was sitting on my other side and said, “They’re not real elves with funny ears or anything.”

  “Valentino just calls them elves ’cause they help him with stuff. He’s really funny…” My daughter trailed off, blithely spinning her hair in circles around her finger. “He always says things like ‘No pun intended,’ and we all laugh. Anyway, we played the whole time. The weather was truly breathtaking. Very healing,” she said in a perfect imitation of her mother’s tone.

  “They have a gumball machine and movies and a pool and the beach and boats and bananas that you can ride on,” my son continued.

  “Not real bananas,” my daughter corrected, “but this yellow inflatable one that somebody—”

  “The elves,” my son asserted, “they blow it up for you!”

  “It’s just so nice there.” She paused, taking a more serious tone, New York City whizzing by outside her taxi window. “And you don’t have to pick up your towels or carry your sand toys back inside because the elves will do it.”

  “And the sand has been imported from somewhere really amazing and that’s what makes it so special,” my son stated.

  “It’s not like regular sand,” my daughter added, “with a stranger’s pee on it and stuff.” She looked at me curiously, as if to see if I understood what she was saying. I nodded.

  “And Valentino bought me a jump rope and taught me how do it. Oh, Daddy, it was so fun. To speak frankly, I just don’t know what I would do without Valentino right now. He’s really helping me and Mommy through a supertough time.”

  That’s all I remember. The lights went black again.

  * * *

  —

  When I walked into the theater that Tuesday night I didn’t reveal to anyone the infection under my belt that was now moving and swelling to the size of a golf ball. The pain was fierce. I could barely breathe but went onstage and screamed my fool head off anyway. After I was killed, my voice was so demolished I could barely speak. It’d been getting worse steadily for months, but never this bad. Every sentence coming from my larynx sounded like someone kicking gravel. While I waited for the curtain call, I smoked and bought myself my daily ice cream sandwich from the vending machine backstage.

  Once back at the Mercury, I reopened the computer and returned to my online quest, looking for more pictures of my wife and children playing on the beach with that Italian, nickel-rattling, fashion poseur. Then I saw an email from my father.

  He apologized for taking so long to write but he was hoping to find a way to contact me without having to reach out to my mother. It was sincere and affectionate. He loved me. He didn’t care that I’d ruined my marriage and received bad reviews. He cited some passages from the Bible that might give me courage. He said he understood that I might want to be alone, but he was worried I’d be concerned he was judging me negatively. Well, he wasn’t—he was not without sin and he knew from experience that life was unpredictable and that no one gets a free pass. He’d read an interview I’d done in a magazine and it seemed to him like I was in a lot of pain. He’d been praying for me twice a day and just wanted me to know if there was anything he could do to help, to please let him know. He wrote his number and told me to call. I just went to bed. Too little, too late.

  * * *

  —

  The following day was a two-show Wednesday that was pretty much all I’d been looking forward to for the last couple of months. The senior English classes from a dozen New York City public schools were coming to our matinee performance. The New York Times could say what they liked, because I was sure that the real folks, the Great Unwashed, the Uncounted Heads, the Salt of the Earth, the Humble of Birth—they would love me. But there was no doubt the daily grind of the run was wearing me down. Even after a night’s rest my voice would be hanging on by a thread, and now some kind of poison was bubbling like a witch’s brew in my gut.

  I could feel my anger pulse from this infected wound in my intestines as I stared at the picture of my brother Jesus Christ on the ceiling. The pain was now so acute I could forget to be worried about my shot vocal cords. The pus was scalding me from the inside. I put some ice in a blue plastic deli bag and lay on the bed, icing my wound all night. After two hours, my sheets were sopping wet from my fever and the melting ice.

  Still, the boil grew.

  * * *

  —

  By dawn, my mattress was like a heavy sponge; my fever was fully spiked; and the boil had grown to the size of a fat Florida orange. I panicked that I might not be able to perform that day. I needed to see a doctor; something was very wrong.

  I arrived at Bellevue at 6:23 a.m. and stumbled into the emergency room. My two-show Wednesday had arrived. The 2:00 p.m. matinee performance was the most important for me not to miss. I imagined the students talking to each other when they heard the announcement that my understudy was going on. Oh, he thinks he’s too good for us—he doesn’t care. What a spoiled little shit! I knew he wouldn’t be here. I hate his movies anyway!

  The ER nurses recognized me from one of my older films and brought me in ahead of some poor, bleeding saps who just stared at me. I got my picture taken with some orderlies. I didn’t care; I was glad for the quick attention. The doctor looked at my gut and told me we would go into surgery immediately. He said I was in extreme danger. Apparently, if this ball of pus ruptured into my bloodstream I could get a kind of crazy toxic sepsis, or whatever they called it. I was in a hazy fever and wasn’t listening.

  “Will I be outta here by one p.m.?” I asked.

  “What?”

  “I’m doing The Henrys on Broadway with a matinee this afternoon and I’ve got another show tonight.”

  “Well, you better call somebody and tell them you’re not going to make it,” he said calmly.

  “What do you mean?” I asked, suddenly completely lucid.

  “You will not be able to perform today for sure, and probably not tomorrow either.”

  “No,” I said, “I can’t miss a show. Can’t you just do it quick? I really will pay all the money I have.”

  “It’s not the money.” He laughed innocently. “You are going to go under general anesthesia and the hospital will not release you until tomorrow at the earliest. I’m sorry. Them’s the rules,” he said, affecting a real regular-guy approach.

  I couldn’t move.

  “Can we do it on Monday? On my day off?” I asked quietly.

  He looked at me blankly.

  “Actually, Sunday evening would be perfect,” I went on, “ ’cause we have a matinee in the afternoon, but then I don’t have another show till Tuesday night. That gives me almost forty-eight hours off to recuperate.” I felt happy about this possibility.

  “If we don’t treat this infection right now, you will most likely be dead by Sunday—get it?” The doctor was still smiling. “You could lose your sight even more quickly than that.”

  “Do you have to use anesthesia?” I looked up, this new idea filling me up with hope.

  “Believe me, cowboy, you want me to use anesthesia.” He chuckled. “Trust me on this.”


  “No, I don’t,” I said gravely. “I’ll do anything to go on that stage at two o’clock today. Please.”

  “Don’t you have an understudy?” he asked.

  “Today we are doing a matinee for the public schools of Harlem—I can’t miss this show. If I miss that show, I’ll just be so ashamed of myself…Please. The kids, they want to come to see a movie actor, you know? And they will be so disappointed. It means a lot to them. It’s important.”

  “No offense, but I really don’t think the kids will give a shit.”

  “You don’t understand—this is my life. Acting in this show is more important to me than real life. My real life sucks. That show goes on without me…To me, it’s like you leaving a patient on the operating table. Make sense?”

  “I guess…” He studied me. “But listen, you can barely talk. Is your voice even OK?”

  “My voice will be fine…” I’d forgotten about that obstacle. “It always sounds this terrible in the morning.”

  “Well, why don’t you take a break? Sometimes our bodies speak to us, and your body is shouting that you need a rest. Spend a couple days in the hospital, get better, and return to the show stronger.” The doctor turned and looked at a nurse-type woman standing behind him. She was twenty-five or twenty-six with jet-black hair, black eyes, olive skin, and an Italian name on her little name tag.

  “I’ll speak to your director,” he continued, “or stage manager, or whatever…My wife’s an actress, so I know about this stuff.”

  I sat there on the crinkly white paper covering the patient’s table and wept in front of the doctor and his uniformed nurse. The only noise in the room was my snorting sobs.

  “Please. Please. I beg you. Please. Cut out this infection or whatever and let me go onstage. I have to go on today. I know my body needs rest, and I will rest. But I need to do a good job today more than I need rest. I’ll come to the hospital on my day off. Or tonight after the show. Anything. Please. I’ll take care of my voice—I just can’t miss this performance and I can’t walk anymore with this fucking boil-thing stabbing me.”

  There was a long silence in the room.

  The young Italian nurse lifted her lips in a Mona Lisa–like expression at the doctor. She seemed sympathetic. He turned back towards me.

  “Look, if you want to do the operation without anesthesia, I’ll get somebody to do it.” He shrugged his shoulders. “I loved you in that cop film you did. And we’ll shoot you up with Novocain, but it will still hurt a lot. This will be extremely painful—the stomach is very sensitive. I’m also going to give you a heavy antibiotic that you will take, and I will give you some steroids that should help with your voice. But you have to promise me that you will call me between shows and come back and see me first thing in the morning.”

  I nodded in gratitude.

  “And”—he smiled a big friendly smile—“I need two house seats for February fourteenth”—he winked at the nurse—“for my wife.” He turned back to me. “You got it?”

  I tried to smile. “Happy Valentine’s Day.”

  They left me alone in my little room for more than an hour. I was shit-crazy. I felt like a wolf waiting in a veterinarian’s office. I couldn’t stop pacing, touching my stomach, picking things up and playing with them. I was worried the doctor would change his mind. If he did, I decided I would make a run for it.

  I forced myself to sit down and think of something else. The room had a poster of the Milky Way with a small red arrow pointing to a tiny blue planet, next to the words you are here.

  I could have stared at the poster for a million years. It wasn’t going to change the fact that I had no idea where I was, and never had. Next thing I knew, I was asleep on the little patient table and being awoken by a short, elderly female doctor. I checked the time; it was not yet 9:30 a.m.

  “Wake up, Mr. Harding.” She jostled me. Behind her was the same young Italian nurse and a big, burly bastard in a white robe that I immediately clocked as being the heavy brought in to strap me down. The elderly doctor was like a villain from a James Bond film. Her voice was crackly and hard. Her teeth were small and pointy and stained with coffee and cigarettes.

  “So you don’t want to go under, huh?” she asked as she was laying out all her instruments. I said nothing.

  “It will be no problem—it won’t even hurt very much,” she continued as she prepared. “I was a field nurse in Vietnam and we did much more invasive surgery than this without so much as a lick of gin.”

  She held up a syringe displaying the injection I was about to get.

  “This will be the worst part, Mr. Harding. Just a few injections into the inflamed area and then your midsection should go numb. You are quite right to refuse sedation. It’s ridiculous how overused those drugs are.”

  Her insistence that this was, in fact, a good idea was terrifying to me. “Lift up your shirt,” she asked. “Let me see this thing.”

  She stared and poked at my boil. Then she prodded the area around the abdomen several times with her finger. I convulsed in agony every time her stubby fingers neared the swelling.

  “OK, well, it really is quite enlarged, isn’t it? Tender, too.” She picked up the syringe. “Don’t worry, this will be over in a jiffy. Bruce,” she called over to the big son-of-a-bitch, “why don’t you hold his arms, and Alyssa, lie down across his legs.”

  The following eighteen minutes were a kind of physical agony I had never known. I felt I was sliced open with a ragged, rusty blade and then raped in the wound. When the nurse left, I was holding my stomach, with my face and shirt absolutely drenched in sweat, snot, and tears. The infection had been carved out. I had a hole the size of a fist in my stomach and the entire wound was stuffed with some antiseptic gauze.

  The young Italian woman, who was the last to exit through the door, turned and said, almost apologetically, “Are you going to be OK?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I’m getting a divorce.”

  “I’m sorry. I read all about that,” she said. Then she added, with her hand still on the doorknob, “I’m engaged to be married in May.”

  “Good luck,” I said. She smiled sadly and was gone.

  * * *

  —

  Stumbling out of the hospital, holding my bloody (now boil-less) gut with one hand and a bag full of free sample painkillers in the other, I felt all right: I was going to make the show.

  That was all that mattered.

  On my dressing room door, there was another quote. This one was from Bertolt Brecht, comparing love to letting your naked arm float in the weeds of a nasty pond. I looked around for someone skulking in the hallways. Lady Percy?

  When I stepped out onstage, fuckin’ A—surprise, surprise—I felt fine. These lights were a holy calling. It was the balm in Gilead, the healing waters of youth, and my springboard into eternity. My stomach was painfully tight, wrapped in bandages, but each breath felt good, the way lifting weights can feel good. It hurt, but it also made me feel awake and alive, like I was gaining in strength.

  After my first scene, when I ripped the King a new asshole, I felt even better. My voice was growing stronger with every rhyming couplet. The shot of steroids was doing its thing. Shit, man, I felt like Barry Bonds hammering home runs. As I strode across the stage, I could hear our young public school audience fawning over me, whispering, “There he is!” Titles of my films were being tossed out in hushed voices through the aisles. I like attention. For a second, I thought I saw my wife’s black beautiful hair out there in the back row…I even thought that perhaps I could make out her shape. Could she have come to a student matinee? Why would she do that? Maybe it was the only one she could make? When I was offstage, I stared through the black scrim at the audience. I couldn’t be sure.

  Back in my dressing room, I wrapped a leather belt around my wound—I didn’t care if it
hurt. I had to cover up the incision so that when I took off my shirt, the girls wouldn’t be grossed out.

  There was something about that performance—maybe it was what I went through to get there, carving out the boil; maybe it was my voice magically healing. It could have also been the fact that the whole house was full of nonpaying students: When they were bored, you knew it. They were not polite. If a scene became dull, you could feel them restlessly checking their phones. But if you moved them emotionally? Oh Lord, that is the sweet stuff. Even grouchy old Virgil Smith was having a ball. He was tearing it up. And despite all the laughs adding time to the show, we were still running a few full minutes faster than usual. The pace was clicking and the pistons firing. Where we normally got a polite chuckle, this matinee house exploded in guffaws. When I ripped my sword from its scabbard on an average performance, I’d be met with reserved silence; today: shrieks of terror. Any lewd joke was cause for a full-blown eruption of knee-slapping hilarity. When the girls took their tops off in the tavern scene the teachers had to storm the aisles to quiet everybody down. When I led the charge into battle, I thought the whole senior class might join me.

  In the penultimate scene of our first act, when one of my rebel comrades (performed meekly by my understudy, Scotty) rushed in and warned me that the Prince of Wales was coming with his father, the King, to fight me with legions of men “plumed like estridges,” I screamed at this little lord, with a voice as powerful as an African drum, “LET THEM COME!”