The Danger of Being Me

by Anthony J Fuchs

Ethan snapped a dozen pictures with a digital camera he'd borrowed from Amber. Then he packed the chess set, the camera, and his script notes into his own bag.

  We broke for lunch, and migrated to the Creekside Diner. I paid the check. Blake left early to attend his cousin's quinceañera, and the rest of us headed back to Asterion Park to shoot the next scene. Charlie called it Cyrano's Soliloquy. I thought of it as Scene 4½, and it was my greatest departure from Rostand's play.

  After reading my script, Charlie had lent me a copy of a Chuck Palaniuk novel and assured me that I'd enjoy it. I hadn't started into it yet, but I kept it in the front pocket of my bookbag. At Asterion Park, we spent the afternoon shooting an extended monologue. It was a wholly original scene focused on Cyrano, taking place alongside scene five while Cristian stammered vainly at Roxane.

  We intended to shoot the scene in seven full-length takes from various angles. But with each recitation, Charlie added breadth and depth to my words, revealing hidden meaning that I had not written. What started out as a page-and-a-half of script became a four-minute speech as Charlie extemporized, venturing out along the secret path of his own inner through-line.

  He left the script, and came back to it. I trusted him to find the truth between the words, even if I didn't know it was there. He was the actor, after all. Finding that truth was his gift, and it was an organic process.

  His delivery varied from take to take. After shooting for two hours and nineteen takes, I knew that the final cut would be greater than the sum of my words. Because Charlie had created something more out of the material I had given him. He had made the scene his own.

  I wouldn't have given Blake that kind of latitude. But Charlie Carmichael was an artist. And I trusted him.

  We shot until almost five o'clock. Charlie rounded out the shoot with one final take in an imitation of James T. Kirk for the outtake reel. Then I gave my last, "Cut."

  Charlie leaned on the chess table, palms pressed to the stone. He grinned up at me. "No more fuckin takes?"

  "No," I said, laughing as I packed away the camera. "No more fuckin takes."

  "That was some brilliant work," Ethan told him as we cleared our gear out of the pavilion. He shot me a lopsided smirk. "Most of the best stuff wasn't even in the script."

  "It was there," Charlie said. "It just hadn't been typed onto the page."

  I laughed, returned Ethan's smirk. He laughed back, and the group of us started up the short grassy hill toward the parking lot. We packed up our equipment and personnel and headed to Amber's house in Brookshire, a neighborhood along the northern edge of town.

  5.

  The Chandlers lived in a dramatic Queen Anne.

  All five vehicles fit comfortably into the cobblestone driveway along with a Mazda MX-5 and a Ford Mustang.

  The final shoot was my reimagination of scene six: Roxane on the balcony with Cristian and Cyrano below. Amber had offered her house for our shooting location without hesitating. Her own bedroom window had a small balcony and faced a sprawling backyard. It was a night shoot, but that wouldn't be a problem with the floodlighting on the back of the Chandlers' property.

  We unpacked the equipment quickly, but Blake wasn't due back until six. While we waited, we settled into the living room and watched a Flyers/Bruins game on a projection television. I had a couple of pizzas delivered from Giuseppe's, and was amused that I had become the crafts service. We ate pepperoni pizza and drank from two-liters and yelled at Eric Lindros and Ron Hextall until quarter-after-six, when Amber's cellphone rang.

  My first guess was that Blake was calling to say he'd be late. But then I saw Amber's expression darken. She looked at the phone, deliberated for a moment whether or not to answer it. Then she sighed, pushed herself off the sofa, crossed the living room toward an interior hallway. A trailer for the Big Lebowski ended and the game resumed. The noise redoubled, but I heard Amber clearly from across the room: "What the fuck do you want?"

  I turned to see her step around a corner into the hall. Now she spoke lower. I couldn't make out the words anymore, but I couldn't miss the tenor of seething fury in her voice. I remembered her monolithic anger in the parking lot of the Morris. The untold tragedies that must have propped it up. And I was suddenly sure that the person on the other end of that call had wounded her, breaking something in her that might never fully heal.

  Sergei Samsonov scored a short-handed goal. I drained my glass of soda, set it back on the coaster on the end table, climbed off the chaise-longue. At no point did I decide that I was going to eavesdrop. But I knew that one of the downstairs bathrooms was along the hall that Amber had just headed into. And I knew that that hall emptied out under the staircase into the foyer.

  I crested the three steps dividing the living room from the foyer, rounded the bottom of the staircase, and cut down the vaulted hallway. Before the corridor bent to the right, I ducked through the last door on the right, into the brightly lit bathroom. A second door led off the room back into the hall on the other side of the bend. Amber had stopped just inside the corner, a few steps from that second door, and I could hear her clearly now.

  "No," she hissed into the phone. "I don't want to see you. Not ever again."

  I breathed slowly, quietly. I wanted to hear. I didn't want to snoop. I needed to know.

  "I don't fucking care," Amber growled. I should have cut back out the way I came in, back through the foyer and into the living room. The second period was almost over.

  I didn't move.

  "You are absolutely unbelievable." I caught a glimpse of myself in the vanity mirror, saw my own eyes the color of brushed chrome, and found the expression on my face shocking. An equal mix of concentration, revulsion, and fascination as I intruded on the privacy of this girl. I bent forward over the sink, palms on the counter, listening.

  "That was my grandmother's, you heartless bastard." She was on the verge of tears now. I felt my heartbeat quicken inside my throat, felt the sweltering scarlet veil of my own rage swirling up around me. In that moment, I understood her monolithic anger. Staring into my own brushed-chrome eyes and listening to her hold back tears, I tasted spearmint and lime in the back of my throat.

  "—know what, Hank?" she said. I memorized that. "Keep the horn. Keep the chain. Keep it all, you fuckin scumbag. Because you're going to burn in Hell."

  I flicked the cold water handle on the sink before the last sentence was out. As I cupped the water into my hands and doused my face and neck, I heard Amber snap the cellphone closed. She made one wretched choked-off sob that was barely audible under the sound of the game and rowdy teenagers watching it in the living room. But I heard it. I heard it. Because I needed to know.

  I flicked the handle on the toilet to flush it, then turned off the faucet. My own cheeks were red in the mirror. I toweled my face and neck dry, drew in one long breath and released it, then crossed the bathroom to the second door. Amber was slumped against one wall, hidden from the view of anyone in the living room who glanced back. But I had gone through the foyer and the hallway and the bathroom. She wasn't hidden from my view.

  She held her forehead with one hand. Her shoulders trembled noiselessly. She cried, but she refused to let anyone know it. Her phone remained in her other hand, her grip on it so tight she might have thought it was Hank's throat. I took two steps, reached her side. She didn't react, even when I reached for the phone. She didn't loosen her grip on it, and I wrapped my right arm around her shoulders, pulling her deeper into the hallway.

  She shook, and made no sound. Tears rolled down her face, soaking through my Flogging Molly t-shirt. She still didn't let go of the cellphone, but she wrapped her left arm under my right, clutching onto my shoulder. I held the side of her neck as she cried for what Hank had taken, for letting him take it, for telling him to keep it, for letting him win. She cried mostly, I think, because she was furious at herself for giving him the power to make her cry.

  A cheer went up in the living room. Rod Brind'Amour had tied the game s
econds before intermission. Amber looked up at me in the soft light thrown by the wall sconce above us. Confusion flickered across her face. She seemed to realize all at once that she was holding onto me, crying against me. Letting me watch her tears etch silvery streaks that glittered on her face in the hall's warm light. This, above all, was my most unforgivable intrusion.

  Each tear burned a fiery meteor trail into my memory. From the living room, Victor Estes shouted about the mind-blowing deals on new and used vehicles at Victory Chevrolet. Amber sniffed – it was the most noise she had made – and swiped her sleeve across her face. The tears disappeared. Then her cellphone rang again.

  Amber turned, not quite stepping away from me. She held up the phone, checking the display with a murderous look. Then she laughed, once, a dry sound with little humor, but her expression had softened. She flipped the phone open, punched the speaker-phone button.

  "Where the hell are you?" she demanded. Before I heard the voice, I saw the caller ID blinking D. BLAKE. Wind rushed in the background. He was driving.

  "On my way now," he said. "Running a little late."

  Amber glanced to me, quirked a goofy grin. She said: "Yeah, I can see that."

  "Couldn't be helped," Blake answered. "Got tied up with a couple of boricuas calientes."

  I bent toward the phone. "But you're actually in your car, on the road, driving. Yes?"

  "Mike, yeah," he said. "I'm headed up 119 right now." He paused, perhaps checking his dashboard clock and looking for a landmark. "I'll be there in ten minutes."

  "Pizza's almost gone," Amber told him. She snapped the phone closed, laughed once more and shook her head. There was sadness to the sound this time, and she watched the phone for a few extra seconds before looking back to me. "He'll be here in twenty."

  "Plenty of time to finish that pizza," I said. She smiled. It was genuine despite all the pain it had to fight through to get out. Or perhaps that made it more beauteous.

  She slipped the cellphone back into her pocket and returned to the living room. I started to follow, but paused after the first step. I spotted a framed picture among the dozens hung along both walls of the corridor. The gallery included recent snapshots, and sepia-tinted pictures of kith and kin, and black-and-white shots almost a century old. There was no particular reason for this one photograph to catch my eye. But I paused, and looked at the picture.

  Three women stood outside of Veterans Stadium, all wearing Phillies jerseys. The youngest of them, on the left, was Amber in her early teens, four or five years ago. The woman to the right was her mother, who had greeted us all an hour ago before hurrying out on an urgent call. Dr. Chandler, I recognized her now. The woman in the middle was the oldest of the three, nearing seventy, and she looked too much like the other two women in the photo to be anyone other than Amber's grandmother.

  A thin steel chain hung around this oldest woman's neck. And dangling from it, carved out of what looked like blue jasper, was a cornicello. The Italian horn.

  "Yeah," Amber said next to me, startling me back into my own skull. "That's my Nonna."

  I turned to her. In the half-decade since the photo was taken, Amber had assumed more of her grandmother's features. If the picture was any indication of how she'd look in another fifty years, then she was lucky indeed.

  She watched me for a long moment, then glanced to the photo. Her eyes lingered there, her expression darkening for one more fleeting instant. But then she smiled again, sadly but truly, and took my hand to lead me back into the living room with her. The game was back on. The Flyers were trying to capitalize on a power play.

  "Hey," I said as she reached the sofa. "It'll be okay."

  A smile flickered across her lips. She looked at me, and nodded. I could see that she didn't believe me. But that was fine with me. She didn't need to believe.

  Blake arrived fifteen minutes later. The crew ventured out to the back patio to set up the ground shoot. Amber headed up to her bedroom for her balcony scenes, and once Blake and Charlie had their blocking on the patio worked out, I cut back through the living room toward the foyer. On my way, I spotted Amber's cellphone resting on the endtable next to the sofa. At no point had I decided that I was going to meddle in her private affairs.

  I just picked up the cellphone, scrolled through her list of received calls, jotted down the number that had come in before Blake's, and returned the phone to the endtable.

  6.

  On Friday afternoon, I pushed through the heavy door into the newsroom.

  I maneuvered through the clusters of teenagers to find Ethan and Ben stooped over the movie reviews page. Ben gestured across the sheet. "If you move Avalon Rising to the top left, you can build the page around it."

  "I get it, Ben," Ethan sighed. "You want your writing above the fold."

  Ben shrugged. "It's the strongest piece on the page."

  Ethan rolled his eyes, turning toward the door so Ben couldn't see it. His gaze landed on me, and he twitched a beleaguered grin. "The Fuckin Snitch," he hailed me.

  "Do I look like a piece of wizarding athletic equipment to you?" I demanded, smirking back at him.

  He barked out a loud laugh at that. "Slumming it down here with the proletariat?"

  I leaned against the counter. "Just for the afternoon," I said, looking up at the assignment board. At my other side, Winnie shuffled panels of paper around the poetry page.

  Ethan turned away from Ben. He seemed relieved to be rescued from Ben's company, and resentful of having been condemned to it. Because despite writing so little, Ben still somehow held a notoriously high opinion of what he did produce. So this wasn't the first time that he and Ethan had sparred over word-count and layout.

  "You've been holed up in the A/V suite all week," Ethan said, and he was right. Blake and I had spent four and five hours a night over the past four days piecing together a final cut. We had the first two-thirds of the movie in the can, but the last seven minutes were proving trickier than I'd anticipated. "You do whatever it is you have to do," Ethan said, grinning at me, "but you better come out of there with the next Trainspotting."

  Ben snorted, flashed a sardonic smirk. I glanced past Ethan, found Ben engrossed in the layout page in front of him. "So far we're a little ahead of schedule," I told Ethan, watching Ben stare at the disembodied block of his article. "But Blake begged off this afternoon."

  Then I looked back to Ethan. "Family obligations."

  "Bollocks," Ethan laughed. "He's trying to shag that boricua from his cousin's party."

  "She was his cousin, too," I shrugged. "Does that make it a family obligation?"

  Ben faked a theatrical shudder.

  "Oh, please," Helen called to him from her table. "You would so shag your cousin if she gave you a greenlight."

  Ben shot her a glance. "I'd shag your cousin if she gave me a greenlight."

  "My cousin is your cousin, nitwit," she said.

  I twitched grinned at that and watched Ethan, who watched Ben. Instead of answering with an equal and opposite wisecrack, Ben glared at Helen before turning back to the layout page. Helen rolled her eyes at Ben's back and looked to Ethan with an expression of pity, like he alone could understand this burden they shared.

  Then she turned back to her own layout page.

  "Hold on a second," Ethan said. He turned to me, and both of his eyebrows shot up. "These two are related?"

  "By marriage," Ben and Helen insisted in synchrony, each of them refusing to look at the other.

  Ethan looked at Helen, then looked at Ben. Neither looked back, and Ben suddenly flicked his pen onto the counter without a word, bludgeoning his way across the room. He rounded the center table, flung open his locker door, and dug through the accumulated junk in his locker for something that he had more than likely thrown away months ago. Ethan grinned at me. "I feel like I could have done so much with that piece of information."

  Then he hiked his shoulders. "I take it to mean that since you're done editing for the week you'll be
hanging out with the crew at the Morris this evening." He turned back to the movie review layout page. "I haven't properly humiliated you in a round of nine-ball in a fortnight."

  "Can't," I said. I felt myself grinning. I couldn't help it. Ethan glanced sideways at me, and waited for the rest.

  So I told him, "Got a date tonight."

  "Oh, so now it is a date?" He shot back, laughing. "You two are officially an item?"

  "We—" I said, and then stopped. I stared at him for a few seconds second, considering my choice of words. "I guess we are," I told him, laughing at myself. "Yesterday was the two-week anniversary of our first fight."

  "That's the sticky-note anniversary." Ethan said.

  He looked at me, and gave me solemn nod. I laughed. I couldn't help it. He flashed an impossibly knowing grin then, one that was complicated and unfathomable, like he'd just seen some piece of an incomprehensible puzzle settle into place. Maybe he was just glad to be distracted from Ben's purple prose. I shook my head at myself.

  "If you could see fit to postpone my humiliation until tomorrow night," I suggested, "I'm sure that I could talk Amber into coming out with our little consortium."

  "Oh, no, sir," Ethan laughed. "We are not getting into the habit of rescheduling group activities around your love life." I watched him, feeling a little like he was putting me in a position to choose between Amber and my friends. Then he continued, "But I'm sure we're all going to hang out again tomorrow night, and I'm sure we could find our way to the Morris again. And if Amber happens to be with you when you show up," he said with a shrug, "then all the better." He glanced back down to the layout page, as if the blocks of text might have rearranged themselves. "We have to make sure she can hang with the crew."

  A smile tugged at my lips. "I'm sure she'll manage."

  Ethan turned back to me, tilting his head like he was looking over a pair of glasses that he wasn't wearing. Then he flicked his eyebrows as if to say: we'll see. I laughed at that, and turned back toward the assignment board.