by Debra Dean
“Is he okay?”
“I dunno.”
“Dan?” I open my eyes and Pitney is standing directly in front of me, silhouetted darkly against the glare. “Ready to rock and roll?” he asks. Sheila is behind him, and she’s got one arm wrapped around Lab Rat’s snout, the other grasping its open neck. I can’t speak, but I attempt a smile and a nod. Sheila, my executioner, holds out the empty head. When I peer inside, there is nothing but blackness and, in the distance, two pinpricks of light, the eyeholes. They are impossibly far away, and I realize with a heart-jolting certainty that there’s no way I can get enough air in my lungs to make it that far. I take a shallow gulp, though, and I try. I shut my eyes, and I swallow another breath and then another and then, God help me, I pull the head down over my own, but just as I feared, I’m not going to make it. Waves of panic crest over me, my air is running out, and I can’t find the eyeholes. When I try to extricate myself, one of my damn claws gets hung up on something. I am on the verge of passing out before I finally yank myself free.
“You okay there?” Pitney asks.
I find enough breath to whisper the word “fine.” This is so clearly a lie, I have to amend it. “Just give me a minute,” I wheeze. “I’m a little dizzy is all.” I shrug my shoulders as though to suggest I’m just as mystified as he is.
Teeka swims into view. Her head is shaking slightly, a little tremor of disgust. “Are you claustrophobic, Dan?” She might as well be asking me if I have gonorrhea. I study the question carefully. Claustrophobia? No, I wouldn’t call it that, exactly. Perhaps some discomfort in dark, enclosed spaces. I try to avoid being trapped in dark and enclosed spaces, how’s that?
I was five or six years old, and my brother, Ricky, and I were playing magician. Ricky tied our mother’s red skirt around his neck, drew a mustache on his upper lip with what turned out to be an indelible laundry marker, and christened himself the Truly Amazing Ricardo. Being the younger sibling, I was assigned the role of magician’s assistant, the one who picked a playing card out of the deck (a card, any card, not that one) and stood against the wall with a handkerchief tied around my eyes while he threw silverware at me. Anything to be in the show. Then Ricky got the brilliant idea to lock me in the hope chest at the foot of our parents’ bed. This was thirty years ago, but I can still vividly recall the suffocating blackness of my blanket-lined coffin, the sharp smell of mothballs, the muffled voice of my brother explaining to our imaginary audience that he had nothing up his sleeves. And then his voice was drowned out by screams. Mine, as it turned out.
Someone has found a chair, but I can’t sit down, not with my damn tail, so they instruct me to bend over at the waist. I stare down at the floor and see paws where my feet should be, paws at the center of a circle of human feet. “Take slow, deep breaths,” a voice is saying. I overhear another voice, farther away. “What’s the problem?” and then “You gotta be kidding me.”
I try again, valiantly, but each time I descend into the interior of Lab Rat’s head, I am engulfed by fresh panic, a panic exacerbated now by the fear that my career is crashing before my eyes. When I reemerge, gasping and blinking away my blindness, I am confronted by a gallery of stone faces, the veneer of patience worn thin. I try again. It’s no use. Even if I could stay inside the head for a few minutes, there is no way I could simultaneously remember to move and breathe, much less climb the exercise wheel. While this is not a demanding role, it does require motor skills.
By now, the news has spread to everyone on the set: the actor is freaking out and can’t get his head inside the rat costume. An impromptu powwow is called a few feet away. Because I am the subject of discussion, they are careful to lower their voices, so I can’t make out most of what is being said. But I can guess. I hear Pitney issue orders to find the stand-in, and there is more murmured discussion, punctured by a crackle of laughter before the group breaks up. Preparations are underway to move forward without me.
My panic has begun to subside, and I’m pretty certain I could stand up without getting woozy. But I stay bent over all the same. I can’t bring myself to face anyone. Besides, it would be unseemly to recover so readily. Indeed, I’m guessing it will be viewed by some as bad taste on my part not to expire right on the spot. I would happily accommodate them if I could. If this is not the most humiliating hour in my life, it’s right up there.
Sheila appears again at my side, and as though she is talking me off a ledge, she explains that they’ll need to get me out of the costume. It’s all right, she says, no need to move just yet. She’s brought my own clothes from the dressing room. First the paws, she says. When I lift my head, I see my street clothes in a heap on the chair. She means, I realize, to strip me right here.
“I can walk to the dressing room,” I say. I intend my tone to convey steadiness, but it must sound angry to Sheila because she steels her gaze and looks right through me.
“They need the costume.”
And sure enough, the stand-in, who has been recruited to take my place, is poised just on the other side of the set, behind the giant pellet dispenser. He is talking with Pitney and nodding intently.
I pick up my clothes and walk away, not as far as the dressing room but far enough to get out of the circle of broiling lights and into the relative anonymity behind the cameras. Sheila strips me of Lab Rat’s costume, piece by piece, and returns me to my human state. She gathers up the costume, and I am alone. I watch at a distance as she suits up the stand-in. He snugs on that rat’s head as though it were a stylish hat and hops up onto the wheel, ready to work. Pitney instructs him to lie back on the wheel and bicycle his legs, and the stand-in obliges, looking more robotic than frantic. Still, let’s be frank, there’s not much acting required here. He can put on the suit and follow instructions, and in the end, that’s what counts.
I’m at a loss what to do now. I wait for a while, vacillating between the hope that someone will appear and direct me and the hope that, mercifully, I have been forgotten. Finally, I search out Teeka, moving around the edges of the soundstage from one clump of people to the next. As I pass, there is a perceptible ripple of awareness, but they each do their best to pretend I don’t exist. Only Sheila actually makes eye contact, and she lets me know with a look that, as much as she would like to sympathize, I have brought this on myself. Now, it goes without saying that there are a lot of people here who would just as soon I’d never shown up this morning. After all, they have to rehearse the new guy, and this little fiasco is going to set back the schedule a couple of hours. By the same token, though, there should also be at least a few union people on this set who would have a generous thought for me, as I will no doubt be responsible for some overtime, possibly even golden time. If so, they keep it to themselves. I am being shunned, as surely as if I had a scarlet A on my breast for Actor.
When I find her, Teeka is painstakingly professional. She tells me in clipped tones that she’s put a call in to my union rep. She’s never had to deal with this situation before, so she’s not sure what the procedure is. As she understands it, if I want to get paid the session rate, I may have to stay on call. In any case, I’ll at least have to wait until she hears back. If I want to wait in the dressing room, that’s fine. Everything in her demeanor suggests that I have pulled a fast one, that I may have conned the rest of them, but she for one is not buying.
It is only now that I remember I have an agent. This is what he gets paid for. I beg some change off Sheila and retreat down the hall to the pay phone.
“Good afternoon—Shepard, Pape, and Associates.”
I recognize the voice of one of the associates. No one is a receptionist anymore; they are all associate agents. So theoretically this guy, Patrick, represents me, but neither he nor I see it quite that way.
I ask to speak to Zak, and he deflects me.
“He’s on another line. Can I take a message and have him ring you back?”
“No, I need to talk to him.”
Patrick repeats woodenly,
“He’s on another line.”
“No shit. I need to talk to him now.” I speak slowly, in case he’s an idiot. “Not later. Now.”
Patrick has no easy reply for this. I have violated the carefully honed rules of his universe: actors with status give orders; actors without status plead and grovel. I hear a click, and for a split second, I figure he’s hung up on me, but then the tinny strains of salsa pipe through the phone.
If I were going to start worrying about my career at this late date, I could mull over the fact that I have just alienated one of the people whose job it is to make sure my résumés get submitted to the casting people, a person who will probably never again let me speak to my agent.
“Dan.” Zak’s mouth is full and I hear him chewing something, chew, chew, swallow. “So what’s this big emergency?”
“Zak, I’m sorry to bother you.” Now that I’ve got him on the phone, I’m not sure where to go from here.
“Patrick tells me you ripped him a new asshole.”
“Tell him I’m sorry.”
“Yeah, yeah. Between you and me.” He chuckles. “Ah, never mind.”
“It’s this commercial thing.”
Zak takes another bite. “What’s that? Oh, yeah, the Dobbins national. Aren’t you shooting that today?”
“Zak, I fucked up.”
“What do you mean you fucked up?” I now have his complete attention.
“There’s a head. The costume has a big headpiece, and I couldn’t wear it.”
“I’m not following you.”
“I couldn’t put the head on. I get claustrophobic. No one ever said anything about a big head, or I would have told them.”
There is a pause while Zak attempts to make sense of this.
“So you’re at the studios, yes? And what are they doing?”
“They’re rehearsing the stand-in.”
“And no one ever mentioned this headpiece to you? Not during one of the auditions, maybe?”
“No. I mean maybe I should have assumed.”
Zak jumps in. “Fuck that. That’s not your job. That’s their job.” I can hear him working out his strategy. “Someone should have informed us if the costume required special skills.”
I could weep with gratitude.
“Forget about it. Go home. Make sure you sign the paperwork.”
“I’m sorry, Zak.”
“What are you apologizing to me for? Go home, get drunk, whatever. There’ll be other jobs.”
Yes. Other jobs. Of course. A tiny bright light winks in the blackness, like the eyeholes in the rat’s head, far away but bright. This time, though, I may make it. I take a deep breath.
“Speaking of which,” I say, “you haven’t heard anything from Tribeca yet, have you? I know it’s early, but I had a really good feeling about that one.”
Zak clears his throat. “They went with someone else, Dan.”
There is a fly on the wall, right at eye level. I could move to the desert like Robin wants. To hell with these people. This life. My chest feels heavy like it’s covered with a lead X-ray apron.
“But Helen said they loved you, that you read like a house afire. They just decided to go a different way. You know Kyle McCann? He’s one of ours. Maybe you met him at the Christmas party.”
“I gotta go.”
“Okay, kiddo. Sign the papers.”
It’s three in the morning and I’m driving up I–95, headed to Maine. Just past Boston, the jazz station I’ve been listening to dims and sputters out. A little farther north, Puck, too, grows quiet, finally exhausted after hours of lurching around the interior of Stuart’s car, whining and stress-shedding on the immaculate upholstery. He is asleep now on the seat beside me, dreaming who knows what, his paws lightly beating the air. There is only the occasional car. The night is quiet and dark and empty. Living without a car for the past fourteen years, I had forgotten how intoxicating it is to drive alone at night. Cocooned in Stuart’s snug little Honda, I might go anywhere. The world becomes a series of possible destinations, the road signs lit up like invitations. And behind me, New York recedes like a weirdly distorted dream, a dream peopled with outsized rats’ heads and boys with baggy pants and enormous running shoes, boys who are running from me. I need to catch up, to explain something, but no matter how hard I push myself, I don’t seem to be any closer. I am running and running, and then suddenly I am on a wheel and my feet have become paws and I am running, still running. And Judy Garland is dancing, her knees and elbows pumping, her smile game, her eyes wide with fear.
That was hours ago, years ago, a lifetime ago. If it weren’t for the hollow ache in my gut, I could almost pretend that none of it had ever happened.
I roll down the window, just in case I’m sleepier than I think. The air is cool and smells like seawater. I haven’t yet figured out what I’ll say to Robin. She doesn’t even know I’m coming. I should probably pull over and sleep, but I’m afraid that if I did, when I woke up I wouldn’t have the courage to do whatever it is I’m about to do. A little sleep might put this all in the flat, reasonable perspective of daylight.
I remember the first night I went on stage in New York. I didn’t come on until near the end of the first act, but I was too antsy to wait in the empty dressing room, so I came upstairs early. I stood in the dusty dark behind the back set wall and listened to the spill of familiar lines, mixed now with the laughter of an audience, a stray titter, a cough. The play was zipping along, and as my entrance drew closer, I started nervously running my lines in my head. A few lines in, I blanked. Suddenly, I couldn’t remember what came next. Nothing, not what Rob said, not what I said, not a single line of the play from that point forward. Nothing but sheer blank terror. The bottom fell out of my stomach. I had a fleeting notion that I could run downstairs and grab the script off my makeup table, check the lines, find my place. But on stage, they were maybe six lines from my cue. Five. Four. I moved stolidly toward the stage right wing, to the edge of the light, and before I could think any further, there was my cue. I took a deep breath and walked into the blinding light, like stepping out of a plane and into the sky, trusting the chute will open.
Of course, it did. No problem. Once on stage, I was home. I knew what to do as if I’d been doing it all my life. The lines appeared as they were needed, as though I had just thought of them. And it was exhilarating, living in that moment, knowing only peripherally what might come next.
The moon, sweeping in and out of clouds, follows at a distance. The engine hums, the dog snores, pavement unrolls beneath the headlights. If some miracle were to occur and I was able to sleep again, this is what I would miss.
About the Author
DEBRA DEAN was born and raised in Seattle, Washington. The daughter of a builder and a homemaker and artist, she was a bookworm but never imagined becoming a writer. “Growing up, I read Louisa May Alcott and Laura Ingalls Wilder, Jane Austen and the Brontës,” she said. “Until I left college, I rarely read anyone who hadn’t been dead for at least fifty years, so I had no model for writing books as something that people still did. I think subconsciously I figured you needed three names or at the very least a British accent.”
At Whitman College, Dean double-majored in English and drama: “If you can imagine anyone being this naïve, I figured if the acting thing didn’t work out, I’d have the English major to fall back on.” After college, she moved to New York and spent two years at the Neighborhood Playhouse, a professional actors’ training program. She worked in New York and regional theater for nearly a decade, and met her future husband when they were cast as brother and sister in A. R. Gurney’s play The Dining Room. “If I’d had a more successful career as an actor, I’d probably still be doing it because I loved acting,” she said. “I understudied in a couple of long-running plays, so I was able to keep my union health insurance, but the business is pretty dreadful. When I started thinking about getting out, I had no idea what else I might do. What I eventually came up with was writing, which
in many ways was a comically ill-advised choice, given that the pitfalls of writing as a career are nearly identical to acting. One key difference, though, is that you don’t have to be hired before you can write. Another big advantage is that you don’t need to get facelifts or even be presentable: most days, I can wear my ratty old jeans and T-shirts and not bother with the hair and makeup.”
In 1990, Dean moved back to the Northwest and got her MFA at the University of Oregon. She started teaching writing and publishing her short stories in literary journals. The Madonnas of Leningrad, her first novel, was published in 2006. It was a New York Times Editors’ Choice and a finalist for the Quill Award and the Guardian First Book Award (UK).
“In retrospect,” she said, “I’m very grateful for my circuitous journey, that I wasn’t some wunderkind. I like to think I have more compassion now and a perspective that I didn’t have when I was younger.”
Visit www.AuthorTracker.com for exclusive information on your favorite HarperCollins author.
ALSO BY DEBRA DEAN
The Madonnas of Leningrad
Copyright
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.