by Leah Stewart
“He will be trouble,” she says, in their shared language.
“No, he won’t,” Darius says irritably.
She shrugs. She taps on the gun in her waistband with one judgmental fingernail, a new habit of hers that irritates Darius so violently that it’s beginning to cause him physical pain. “Go back inside,” he says. “Check on him.”
Tap, tap, tap. Then she shrugs again and retreats. For the moment, she still obeys his orders. There may come a time when she doesn’t, but this, too, Darius cannot afford to acknowledge. Adan is her younger brother, the other young man, Thomas, Adan’s best friend. She is at the center of a web of loyalty and cannot be gotten rid of.
It is too bad for Darius that this is true. Too bad for Charlie, too.
Four.
Charlie’s first steady job was a small part on Alan Reed’s show—one of Alan’s shows. He was twenty-eight when he got the part. Alan Reed was a TV star, a man in his late fifties, veteran of two long-running and high-rated comedies. So this show was a star vehicle, a workplace sitcom set in a restaurant, with Alan as the brilliant, hot-tempered chef, and Charlie as his sweet bumbling nephew, the world’s worst waiter, fired and rehired repeatedly throughout the show’s two seasons. It was his job to say the adorably literal thing that set Alan’s character off on a hilarious rant.
“Ah, for a need.” That was something Alan would mutter sometimes between takes. Other times, he’d look at Charlie and say, “Bored yet?”
At this, Charlie would smile and shake his head, and usually Alan would smile back and say, “That’s good, that’s good. I envy you.”
But once, that first season, in a grim mood, Alan told him instead, “You will be. I promise. I know how happy you were to get this part. Hell, I was happy to get this part. And I know when this show ends we’ll both be desperate for another one. You know what I worry about more than anything, anything in the world? My next job. But there’s no actor on a TV show who by season two isn’t desperate to get off it.”
They were only two months into filming, and Charlie was still awash in gratitude. That Alan, of all people, was worried about his next job, that Alan was anticipating desperation of any kind: This made no sense to him. “Why?” he asked.
“Ah, for a need” was Alan’s reply.
“Is that a quote or something?” Saying this, Charlie felt as dumb as his character. In Alan’s presence, he helplessly played the ingénue whether or not the cameras rolled.
Alan shrugged. “It might be Shakespeare. One of the Henrys. Or maybe I made it up. The point is, kings get bored. That’s why we have wars.”
At the time, Charlie didn’t believe a word of it. It was easy to say from the top of the mountain that the view got boring after a while. At the upfronts that first season, advertisers came up to take pictures with the cast, everyone crowded onto a small platform for the purpose. Charlie was never their favorite character; Charlie was never the one they were excited to meet. The advertisers invariably stood right in front of Charlie, already at the back because he was tall and on the edge because he was unimportant. One time he fell off the back of the platform just as the flash went off. People noticed, of course, and asked if he was all right. But for a moment after he stumbled backward, it seemed to him that he could fall off the world and nobody would bat an eye. He looked at Alan accepting some fan’s gratitude for his arm around her shoulder, for his polite smile, and felt a baffled resentment. Bored? How dare he use that word to describe the condition of having it made? In Alan’s position, Charlie would never be anything less than grateful. Charlie would never be bored.
And yet he has been bored.
Ah, for a need.
Now Charlie has experienced a sudden and vertiginous reduction in his sense of what he needs. The water that Adan brought him is warm and has a chemical sharpness, but so what, so what, it is water. He starts out gulping, then makes himself slow down, tilting the glass only a little so the inflow diminishes to a trickle, letting it pool on his tongue before he swallows. Concentrating on the relief of liquid on a hot, dry throat. He’s closed his eyes to aid that concentration so he doesn’t know that Adan has looked away, unable to bear the sight of Charlie’s desperate pleasure, while Thomas watches with open fascination, as if Charlie were an anthropological experiment.
Charlie hears someone come in—footsteps, a tap, tap, tap that’s a fingernail on a gun. He opens his eyes. He sees the blond woman and gulps the rest of the water before she can take it away. She regards him with disdain, then looks at Adan, who snatches the glass from Charlie. Charlie wipes his mouth with the back of his hand. He’s still so thirsty. He decides to risk it. “Can I have some more?”
The woman considers this request, all impassivity. Then she nods at Adan, who hustles out of the room. If Charlie couldn’t tell from her bearing that this woman was someone to be feared, he’d know it from her effect on Adan. She walks very close to Charlie, stepping over his legs without appearing to look down to avoid them, and he flinches out of her way. At the far wall, she turns to regard him. She manages to give the impression of having just noticed he’s there—no, of having just decided to notice. She stands with her legs apart, her chest open, making clear his status as a nonthreat. It’s as if she’s practiced, as if the director told her before the take, “You’re confident, you’re intimidating.” Charlie would rather think her a good actor than imagine this is just who she is.
“Who are you?” he asks.
“My name is Denise.”
“But I mean who are all of you? What is this group?”
Denise shrugs. Does that mean she doesn’t understand? Or just that she won’t answer?
He tries again. “What do you want with me?”
“We want you.”
“But what for?”
She shrugs again. “Another time,” she says, so casual. So irritably dismissive. As if he were a fan on the street asking for a selfie, not himself on the floor asking for his life.
The boy still in the room stands with his gun pointed at Charlie, lazily swinging the muzzle from side to side. Charlie gives him a nervous glance. “What’s his name?”
“That is Thomas.”
“Is his gun loaded?”
She scoffs. “Of course.”
“Could you ask him not to point it at me? It’s making me nervous.” He looks back at Thomas. “Thomas, would you mind pointing that gun away from me?”
Thomas looks at Denise, who responds with a slight nod. Thomas lowers the gun toward the ground.
Emboldened, Charlie sits up tall and deepens his voice. “I need to know what’s happening.”
“Why?” Denise asks.
Why? His mind stutters. He feels as if there’s a correct answer, one that will unlock the information he wants. But what is it? Because I deserve to know? But this woman doesn’t care what he deserves, or, even worse, she thinks that’s what they’re already giving him.
“It will not help you to know,” she says.
Just like that, all courage is gone. Courage was an illusion! The world is a vortex of fear. “Because you’re going to kill me?” he manages.
Denise laughs.
“Why is that funny?” He hears his voice swerving louder. “Are you going to kill me? Tell me!”
She sighs extravagantly. “You are crazy,” she says. “You will be fine.”
He searches her face. He believes her. Queasy, he makes a ha sound under his breath, smiles in the angry way you smile at someone who just terrified you for fun. “I’m crazy,” he says. “I’m the crazy one.”
She moves her hand to her gun with slow deliberation. Tap, tap, tap. Be careful, Charlie instructs himself. Watch your mouth. “I do not tell you things,” she says. “You tell me things.”
“Like what?”
“You tell me who you are.”
Who he is? Is this a metaphysic
al question? Does she want him to describe his personality? I’m a Gemini, he thinks, with stunned hilarity. “What do you mean?”
“Who are you?”
“Who am I?”
“What is your name?”
He stares at her. “What is my name?”
The look on her face tells him he’s an idiot. “Yes,” she enunciates. “Now you say your name.”
His mind flickers with the possibility that he’s gotten this situation all wrong. “You don’t know my name?”
She clicks her tongue in irritation. “No. That is why I ask.”
“But you said you hoped for me.”
“We hoped for an American.” She shakes her head. “Not for you. You are nothing.”
“I am nothing,” he says.
“Yes, yes.” She’s dropped her don’t-care stance to lean over him, frustration twitching through her. “You are nothing. What is your name?”
Adan returns with the water, providing a convenient interruption. Charlie takes a sip. How should he answer this question? He doesn’t know. He’s distracted by a giddy urge to laugh. He’s nothing! That’s why he came to this place, to be nothing. Anonymous American, mid-thirties white male. Good for you, Charlie, you did it. No one wants your autograph here. He’d had himself convinced that anonymity would have spared him. He thought they’d taken him because he was something. Well, aren’t you full of yourself.
Denise looks at Thomas, who knocks the water out of Charlie’s hand with astonishing speed. Charlie stares at the inexorable spread of the puddle from the cup. Deliberately, Denise puts her foot in the puddle. She crouches to retrieve the cup, hands it back to him. “Go ahead,” she says, and he drinks the two sips remaining, survivors of the waste. “Good,” she says, when he’s finished. “Be good.” She grips his chin and turns his face back and forth, as if deciding how to photograph it, how to make it up. His best side is the right. When he’s posing for a photograph, he has pretty good control over how he looks. What expression is on his face right now, as she puts her hand on him, as she controls him, he has no idea. He can tell his jaw is clenched because his lips are going numb.
The woman—Denise—releases him. She rises and takes two steps back. “What is your name,” she says again, her voice gone dead, her voice flatlined.
How can he possibly know whether it’s best to tell them who he is? When he thought they knew, it seemed like a bad thing—maybe they wanted to execute him on the internet or bankrupt his family, or Josie. But if they don’t know, does that make him more disposable? What if they turn out, by some miracle, to be fans of his show? Maybe if he says his name they’ll let him go. “We didn’t recognize you!” they’ll say. “We thought you’d be taller!” They’ll ask him for his autograph. Who can blame him for this sorrowful little fantasy? He’s been ushered to the front of so many lines, feeling self-conscious, even unsavory, no less because part of him enjoyed the special treatment. Maybe there’s some sort of celebrity upgrade for kidnap victims, a bigger room, cushy padding on his chains. Being recognized makes things better except when it makes them much, much worse.
He needs more background! He doesn’t know enough. He risks a last attempt. “Is this about money?”
“Money,” she repeats, as though it’s the first time she’s considered the notion. He wonders if he’s made a terrible mistake. “It’s about”—she spreads her hands and smooths them across an imaginary table—“everything.”
“But what is everything?”
She ignores the question. “Your name,” she says.
But he can’t decide, he can’t decide. “You’re Charlie Outlaw!” people say on planes, in restaurants, passing on the street. “Oh my God, you’re Charlie Outlaw!” Sometimes they get confused and call him by another actor’s name. Even when he says they’re wrong, they’ll continue to insist. They think they know better than he does who he is. Sometimes they call him by his character’s name. One woman ran into the street when she saw him on the other side, narrowly missing death by vehicle, shouting Charlie Outlaw! Charlie Outlaw! At least once a day a stranger tells him his name.
He senses movement behind him, glances back, and so turns into the blow. It’s Thomas who has hit him in the face with the butt of his gun, but in the moment Charlie doesn’t register the particulars, only the pain. The pain is bad. Charlie has been in a number of fights in his life, but not one of them has been real. Being hit very hard in the face knocks you back more than choreographed fisticuffs typically suggest. There is blood, there is throbbing, throbbing, there is the stunned confusion that results from the sudden infliction of pain on someone wholly unused to receiving it. Poor Charlie. He suffers pain and fear but also an unreasonable sense of inadequacy. Because he’s been taught, you see, how to grab a gun, throw a punch, vault down a fire escape: and there is a part of him that believed his training applied to real-life danger as well. Now that part of him is exposed as a self-deluded sham. He’s only ever had to fight back against people who were paid to let him do it.
His face throbs and bleeds against his hand. His eyes are filled with tears—of course they are, but on TV a blow has never made him cry. He looks at Denise through the blur and says, “Ben Phillips.”
Eight years ago, back when Charlie still had roommates, he was living with a friend when the friend got his first part in a movie. The part was a small one—an American prisoner in a foreign jail who shares a cell for one night with the movie’s hero—but the friend was very nervous and excited, and began commandeering the television to watch episode after episode of a reality show about people imprisoned or held hostage in foreign countries. Interviews with the formerly imprisoned, actor reenactments of their imprisonment. Charlie and the friend watched as a man captured by guerrillas in Colombia gave a fake name to protect his adult daughter, his only child, from fear and impossible ransom demands. It was a striking act of heroism. “Someone should make a movie about this guy,” said Charlie’s friend.
Does Charlie remember that show, that man, how much he admired his selflessness? Not at this moment. Art determines life determines art. Sometimes that’s buried deep.
Denise is satisfied by the name he’s given. She nods. “What is your job?”
“I’m a waiter,” Charlie says.
She frowns. She was hoping for something better than a waiter. A lawyer, a doctor, a businessman. These are the jobs she assumes Americans have, and yet Darius snags a waiter. If Charlie were a fish, she would throw him back. If Darius were a fish, she would throw him back, too. For a moment she considers giving this whole thing up in disgust, but Denise believes in perseverance. She believes in surviving. She believes there will yet be something she can get out of this.
“Ben Phillips,” she repeats.
“With two Ls.” As far as Charlie can tell, she believes him. He is surprised and not surprised; he trusts his powers of persuasion, but that doesn’t mean they won’t fail him after someone hits him very hard in the face. Ben Phillips was his character on Alan Reed’s show. Honest, innocent Ben Phillips. It was a challenge to portray him so he seemed a pure soul, not just an idiot. Charlie loved that character, felt an intense protectiveness toward him, and yet by the second season, he felt increasingly constricted when he put him on, like a growing child still confined by last year’s clothes.
“You don’t have to hurt me,” he says, with the wounded sweetness that would have been in Ben Phillips’s voice had anyone ever hit him in the face with a gun. “I’ll tell you what you want to know.”
“You did not say your name until I hurt you,” says Denise. As if she’s scored a match point, she strides in triumph from the room. “I” she said, though it was Thomas who did the hurting.
Charlie has always wanted to play a spy, a multitude of parts contained within the one. A good performance for a spy is not money or praise or another juicy role; it’s survival. This is something Charlie ca
n understand. He said something like that to Josie once, about performance being survival for him. If that notion came to his mind now—which it doesn’t, his mind being entirely with his throbbing, bleeding face, his fear—he’d have to shiver at the irony. How he’s always loved the high-wire act of acting! The risk. The reach. The audition akin to stripping naked so that someone can throw knives at you. And then surviving, and surviving, and surviving, to the resounding echo of applause. But danger, emotional or physical, is only fun when it’s voluntary.
With Denise gone, Adan comes around in front of Charlie and crouches down to examine his face. “Hurts?” he asks, with sympathy or a good imitation of it.
Charlie nods. He takes his hand from his face to look at the blood. Adan looks at it, too. Then he moves his gaze over Charlie’s head and says something in their own language to Thomas, who answers in kind. Charlie was already braced against his awareness of Thomas standing behind him, but at the sound of the boy’s voice, he has to work not to flinch. He feels a flicker of rage at the fact that this boy can make him flinch. Skirting Charlie’s chains, Thomas exits the room. These two are clearly lowest on the totem pole. They must follow orders. And yet they’re allowed to leave the room without permission. Adan points at the gash on Charlie’s cheek and says, “We will clean it.” He looks at Charlie expectantly, and Charlie, raised to be polite, says, “Thank you.” Adan smiles as if enormously pleased.
Thomas returns with a bowl and a rag, and Adan stands to allow him access. It is Thomas who crouches in front of Charlie now. Charlie has become a child; faces appear in close-up before him, then rise into the air. Thomas doesn’t make eye contact so Charlie stares right at him. He’s a slight person, really. Charlie probably outweighs him by fifty pounds and could most certainly overpower him if not for the gun. Maybe he could do it anyway. Maybe if he revisited all his training, rehearsed the moves in his mind. Summoned that muscle memory. Waited until he got Thomas alone. And then wrestled the gun away and hit the boy with it as hard as he could. While Charlie imagines this scene, Thomas is cleaning the wound he inflicted with a weird, unsettling tenderness. He finishes by drying Charlie’s face with delicate care before administering two Band-Aids in a cross. Is he penitent? Maybe it’s all the same to him, hit Charlie or doctor him. Maybe he just does what he’s told.