Little Disasters

by Randall Klein

  A week back, for the first auditions, Ted rented out studio space on the Lower East Side for two hours, a fifth-floor walkup leading to a hallway with doors at opposite ends: one a dance studio with thin walls, and the other a black box theater. While an introduction to tap class took place next door, I read my classical monologue from The Princess of Elis for Teddy Gilles, artistic director of the Beehive Theater Company, so named for the London pub he drank in when he first conceived of starting a theater company in the already oversaturated market of New York. For the callbacks, Ted texts me the address, which I recognize as his own. He is going to have me read scenes from the play in his one-bedroom apartment in Alphabet City.

  Ted opens the door, greets me with applause. “There you are.”

  “Am I late?”

  “No, just there you are. Come in, come in.” He shoos me into his den. The coffee table has been turned sideways, leaving a three-by-three patch of rug upon which he expects Thespis to visit. I glance around—the bathroom door is open, so is his bedroom door. Unless he’s hiding someone else, I’m going to be reading scenes with him, which immediately raises my bile. Reading with the person auditioning you is the actor equivalent of performing your own surgery.

  “Just us tonight?” I ask.

  “Sit down, Paul. Can I get you a drink?” He grabs a beer out of his fridge, twists off the cap, takes a sip, then extends it to me. I decline. “Let’s talk about The Country Wife. You like the play?”

  “I do.”

  “So do I. Very funny. Still relevant today. Or resonant. Which word do I mean?”

  “… I don’t know. I guess either.”

  “Irregardless, you’re fantastic. Your audition was Oliviers ahead of the pack. Long way of saying you’re my Horner. If you want to be, of course. I hope you want to be.”

  Yes, I want to be. A role is a role. Stage time is stage time. Acting in New York means accepting a series of tautologies, but a love of theater is a love of theater.

  He continues, “You’ll also be a few other people.”

  “Oh. But … Horner is the lead.”

  “In the regular production, absolutely. But I’ve decided to do something a little more avant-garde. About a year ago, I saw a production by the Wooster Group, and they employed videography and other metatextual elements to create a more immersive experience.”

  I’m fairly certain he just used between four and six words incorrectly, but I stay silent and let him continue.

  “Why do a regular production of The Country Wife? Who wants to come and see that? Instead, Beehive is going to do an innovative three-person production. I’m going to have to chop the text some, but you’ll be playing most of the male roles, Elspeth Piery is going to play most of the female roles, and I’m going to find someone totally androgynous to be the third person in any scene where we need a third person. And then, there’s also going to be computer monitors onstage, and we’re going to make YouTube videos, and those will have prerecorded scene partners, so this play that’s about seduction is going to feature different forms that take place in the present day. Isn’t that an amazing idea?”

  My shoulders sink. Translation: barely anyone auditioned, he can’t afford to costume us, so he’s going to improvise. A part of me respects the hell out of Ted Gilles. That part isn’t being asked to memorize an entire play for a cut of the house. Jenny has been picking up freelance gigs left and right, so at least it won’t mean dipping into savings.

  “Who else would I be playing?” my weary tongue asks.

  This question flusters and irritates him. He shakes his head like scrubbing away a bad idea. “I don’t know yet, Paul. But let’s do this. I’ll try to find some weird space to stage it. It’ll be like the Wooster Group, but much cooler.”

  It’s a show. It’s a line on a résumé. Always a chance that a blogger will cover it and a junior agent will see it and it could lead to bigger things. When I came to New York, starting small and working my way up to bigger things seemed like a preordained path, the way a student would apprentice under a glassblower until gradually he learned every aspect of the trade and became a renowned glassblower in his own right. Such was my path for acting. Ten years later and I’m still looking for that place to apprentice.

  Suddenly I miss my son. It hits me sideways when I don’t expect it. I’d like to leave now and be with Jenny.

  “Let’s do this.” I shake Ted’s hand.

  He leaps off his couch and hugs me, then escorts me out the door, promising to be in touch with a rehearsal schedule and all the other important details, like who I would be playing beyond Horner, as soon as possible. On the steps outside his building, I spot Elspeth Piery smoking a cigarette. I like Elspeth, she’s young and blond and hopeful and set a semiserious goal of playing a corpse on one of the Law & Orders before she turned thirty. Ted spoke as if she’d already agreed to the role(s), but my guess is that was wishful thinking that he now intends to make a reality, with my name dangled as her opposite. Not my place to blow up his spot, so I make twenty seconds of small talk with Elspeth and jog to the subway.

  The apartment smells like a cookout, and two plates of kielbasa and beans steam on the table. My heart swells to see it. I haven’t gone to the Polish butcher in weeks, there hasn’t been time and Jenny hasn’t had the appetite. She must have gone out today, left the apartment and walked the blocks to get this meal.

  I move toward our bedroom to get changed but stop at the open door to the nameless room. Formerly the nursery, in time the office. Now it’s a project, one I’m paying another man to do, and Jenny stands in the middle of it, the last light of the day sinking through the windows. She has wooden boards in a semicircle around her feet. I wrap my arms around her and she exhales. I kiss her cheeks to find they’re dry, and when she turns to me and I see her in half-light, she looks more like the Jenny I remember from a year ago. From years ago.

  “You got us kielbasa,” I marvel. “Thank you.”

  “How did the audition go?”

  “I got the part.”

  She vibrates in my arms. “Yay! Fenn, that’s awesome. Where is it going to be?”

  “Downtown somewhere.”

  “How downtown is downtown?”

  Staten Island? New Jersey? “I don’t know. Ted will figure that out. I’ll tell you about it over dinner. How did it go with Michael today?”

  “He’s really good at this.” She turns back to the wood samples. “He left these for us to decide. I think we should go with the natural oiled birch for the wood and the fog color for the paint.”

  “That sounds great.” I kiss her lips. She doesn’t pull back. She doesn’t tense. We’re in the very sad room kissing and she’s picking wood samples, and it’s all going so well that I decide to try something. I decide to push my luck by placing my right hand on her hip, low, enough that my fingers curl around to the top of her bum (she calls it that and I love her for it). She sighs into my mouth and kisses me harder. This is the Jenny I know, and I’ve missed her so very badly for so very long. The past two months have been the worst of my life, and with one kiss she’s dangled the rope down the well to pull me back out.

  We break the kiss, and she brushes my hair out of my face. “I want you to fuck the daylights out of me,” she says, and laughs. And I laugh, because it’s an old line between us, an inside joke, a catchphrase, a password and song lyric and psalm and antidote.

  “I can do that,” I say my line back. Then I carry Jenny Sayles into our bedroom, where she’s laid fresh sheets and lit vanilla-scented candles; she’s been three steps ahead of me this entire time. And I place her on the bed, a starring role and cold kielbasa and the home of my heart coming back to me in one fell swoop.

  Paul Fenniger

  Present Day: July 19, 2010

  11:59 AM

  It finally sinks in what the surface must be like. No one in the East River tunnel speaks above a whisper, but their voices carry, and only the most delusional still think track fire or some oth
er innocuous inconvenience. Above our heads we see buildings falling and fires spreading. We see our city laid to waste. Even the small footprint of a dirty bomb or a downed helicopter is cause for mass casualties. In our mind’s ears we hear sirens, drones swarming to the hive, to recover and stitch and save what can be salvaged. And tonight, there will be a chasm of sadness and grateful relief for those who survived. The knowledge of what has happened above us shortens our steps on this cautious walk.

  Whatever apprehension I feel is mitigated by the security that Jenny’s on the right side of the river. There’s simply no way she made it to Manhattan and I didn’t, short of stealing a car or hijacking a boat. If they have routed us back toward the Bedford Avenue stop then the danger must be behind, not ahead of us.

  Jenny must be scared that something has happened to me. Or she isn’t, and I’ve earned that. I understand why she’d be on the fence about me still. If she’s worried, my Jenny drowns her guilt in morning cigarettes and breakfast screwdrivers.

  Can’t say for certain where Michael is at this point. He may be back in Red Hook, standing on the roof of his studio, watching pandemonium from afar. Or he may be flattened under a very large piece of building, splattered and wafer-thin like a cartoon character. I can’t decide which I’m hoping for.

  A wiry, shirtless man does a backward weave through the stragglers to the rear of the pack, where I keep a slow pace. “Think we can smoke down here?” he asks me.

  “Probably shouldn’t. In case it’s a gas leak.” My voice takes on the tone of authority. I have no idea what put the ramrod straight spine into my throat.

  “It’s not a gas leak. This is some false flag bullshit. It’s something designed so that they can restrict civil liberties and no one will complain because we don’t want another July Nineteenth. I’m Carl.” He extends his hand out across his body. It hits me in the chest, like a branch, until I find it and shake it once. “I saw you helping people off the train.”

  “Yep.”

  “What made you do that?”

  “I don’t know.” I try to size him up in the gloom, whether or not he has muscle tone, whether he looks dangerous. From what I can tell, he’s barely three-dimensional, but to reassure myself that I’m not about to get shivved by someone who thinks I’m on the “inside,” I take a misstep and stumble into him, gentle enough to not send him sprawling, but enough that he would have to deal with my weight. I jostle his shoulder and he goes into the wall of the tunnel, kicking the third rail along the way. He’s waifishly thin, so he’s less of a threat. “I’m so sorry,” I say, offering my hand to the darkness.

  “It’s okay, I can’t see shit down here either.”

  Carl falls back in step with me. “Listen, I don’t mean to come off like I’m crazy. About the conspiracy stuff.” I don’t reply, still walking forward, keeping pace, the old and infirm in front of me, following the waving flashlight some quarter mile in the distance. People turn to look at us, but we’re practically invisible to them, just two inky blobs floating in the blackness. “I think I’m just stressed about not knowing.”

  “Bothers me too,” I try to soothe.

  “I have three different devices in my apartment that can tell me almost anything. My boyfriend and I were debating this the other night, the limits to what information is out there. And I asked him to name a celebrity, any celebrity. He said Kevin Costner. And I bet him that I could find out, from our couch, what Kevin Costner had to eat within the past week. Maybe not for breakfast that morning, but some meal within the last seven days. So I do a search and it takes me thirty seconds to find someone tweeting that they sat next to Kevin Costner in some restaurant in Los Angeles. And then they followed it with a tweet about what he ate. I can find all sorts of shit like that and I don’t even know what’s going on above my head right now.”

  “We’ll find out soon enough.”

  “How fucking crazy is that, though? There has to be a condition for this, that we can’t deal with less than total information. It doesn’t even need to be good information, I’d take eyewitnesses who know somebody who saw something. It’s even more pronounced in kids. We need to know everything at all times, or our skeletons will leap out of our skin.”

  The people in front of us pause, but I don’t realize this until I crash into the back of an older man, redeem myself by catching him before he falls flat on his face. There’s a low, angry rumble above us. Everyone pauses, holding breath in our chests in case it’s the last breath we take. Carl reaches out and grips my shoulder. I clutch the man in front of me, who grips my forearm back. We’re trying to fuse ourselves together, assemble into something terrifying and powerful, be mightier by size than whatever is making that sound, like the vibrations of the lowest note on a piano.

  This is it. This is it.

  The growl of the space around us grows louder. People moan and heave sound, too scrambled even to scream, or the scream is starting in the bowels and working its way up to peak volume.

  The tunnel is collapsing. I clench my eyes shut, brace myself, hope that the water somehow spits me out at Bedford. I think of Jenny. I make sure my last thought is of Jenny. I think of my parents, see flashes of their faces, a checklist of the people in my life that I’ve loved. That I’ve truly loved. My mother. My father. My son. Jenny. And Jenny. I come back to Jenny. I see her face, laughing. Head back, laughing from the throat, biting my ear on the couch because she’s bored. Then laughing. That’s the image to die on. The rumble rises to its fever pitch. Now the screams start. A thousand of us in the tunnel yell, and cry, and wail, but no one runs. Not a single person runs from what comes next. Given fight or flight, we accept fate.

  And the rumbling stops. The only water I feel is the sweat pouring off my face. Shrieks give way to tears. The feet start up again. I open my eyes. Jenny’s face dissolves and the blackness of the tunnel returns. Carl takes his hand back. I let the man in front of me go.

  Then a voice, from a hundred feet ahead, says, “Let’s keep moving.”

  No, it’s just the echo that makes it seem so far away. It’s my voice, carrying over everyone, stage-trained to reach the cheap seats. I can’t see whether people are listening, but I can hear it, starting with a shuffle forward from Carl.

  One foot in front of the other. A fresh stench of urine now wafts through the air. Images flit through the mind’s eye: people screaming, people running, helicopters descending into the middle of intersections, police in riot gear, the National Guard carrying AK-47s down Broadway and Madison and Delancey Street in Humvees. One foot in front of the other, back to Brooklyn. The rumbling has stopped. Safe in the tunnel. Jenny is okay. Jenny is okay. Jenny is okay.

  “Your boyfriend back in Brooklyn?” I make small talk to get out of my head. The words still don’t feel like they’re coming from my mouth.

  “No.” Carl sighs. “He goes into work at seven every day. He works on Wall Street. When I get to the surface the first thing I’ll try to find out is whether or not the old jerk’s still alive.”

  I can’t make out Carl’s expression in the dark, so I don’t try.

  Michael Gould

  Present Day: July 19, 2010

  11:50 AM

  I’m a dying animal, panting and lumbering toward a cool, dark corner in which to die. I squint under the ridiculous sun and sniff the air for the silvery scent of water. I don’t even have the energy to lash out at people standing in the way of my zombie shuffle through Morningside Heights. I fantasize about bowls of chilled soup, cold lunch meats, salads slathered in dressing, the cubed ham like life rafts.

  Still north of the park, my energy stores are running critically low. All that’s gone into my face today are two bottles of water and the granola bar I ate a hundred blocks ago. Rebecca keeps logs of cookie dough in the freezer, and more than anything right now I would like to saw off two thick slabs and use them as the bread for a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, to be devoured without shame. Let her film me if she wants to, this disgusting
sweaty shitpig eating a raw cookie dough hoagie. I’m that starving.

  But I’m also down to four dollars. The ATMs, and I’ve tried a bunch, still don’t work. Stores haven’t yet hit their charitable place, wherein they respond to mass tragedy by handing out Luna Bars and Naked Juice in Dixie cups to people passing by. I duck into a bagel store north of Columbia, on Amsterdam. I’ve been drifting eastward when the lights oblige, trimming time and distance whenever possible. I scan the menu and realize the only thing I can buy that will leave me with enough money left over to buy another bottle of water is a bagel with nothing on it. I want to mash my face into the cream cheese, hold it there for the sheer relief against my skin, but I’d settle for a dozen of those doughy motherfuckers.

  With the sun glowing through the windows, it also takes me a tick to realize that all of the lights are out. All of the cream cheeses in the dim display cases are gray, with a sheen skimming the top. The lightboards behind the counter are down as well. I peer back out the windows and see the lights are on across the street, but there’s no food on that side and I need to eat now.

  The young cashier behind the counter waits for my approach, distaste on his permasneer. He’s fashioned a sign reading ONLY CASH from receipts and taped it to the register. “What bagel has the most calories?” I ask him. He raises a pierced eyebrow and turns to look at the bins. Plain. Egg. Sesame seed. Do sesame seeds have more calories than poppy seeds? A seven-grain bagel is essentially a plain bagel with oats glued to it; will that provide a bigger meal than cinnamon raisin?

  To his credit, he takes my question seriously. “Probably jalepeño cheddar.”

  “Can I get one of those, please?”

  “What would you like on it?”

  “Nothing, just by itself.”