cease and desist

by stephen david hurley

  Cease,

  I don’t judge. Only God can do that. That’s the fun part about being a saint. I try to help people.

  Petit/Nothing,

  Well, thanks for all your help. Why don’t you go help someone else?

  Cease,

  Tell me something. Did you like kissing Brad on that date? He’s a pretty hot boy. It must’ve been fun.

  Petit,

  Yeah. I wish I’d gone all the way, for the whole world to see. Then I could’ve told everyone what a fraud you are. So, tell me, little Miss Saint, Do you condone sex and murder?

  Cease,

  No. I don’t condone those things. But I’m not some starry-eyed fairy with a magic wand—which is what most people think when you ask them about saints. I know the score. I’ve chosen you to address a problem that goes beyond sex and murder. The sickness of your age isn’t that young people have sex and try to kill each other. The sickness of your age is that young people have sex and try to kill each other while other people watch.

  The France I lived in was an occupied territory The British had ravaged our country for nearly a hundred years. I was called to take a stand. You live in a free country, only we both know it isn’t free. The country that’s now being ravaged is the delicate landscape of your body. Do you want to take the podium? Be the last girl standing? I’ve watched the armies slowly advance, year after year, century after century, across the dilatant landscape of young people’s bodies; you’ve become trophies to be won, undiscovered countries to be divided and conquered, shaved, waxed, cut to fit this season’s latest trend. And then we’ll put you in the ring and watch what you’re willing to do to each other to come out on top. Of course, we’ll say it’s for your own good…that all this is a matter of learning to survive. You’re a survivor. And after you’re done, after you’ve fucked and sucked and killed your opponents, we’ll wring our hands and say, see how sorry a state the world is, that a bunch of young people could be so sick with ambition that they could do such things.

  The mob that watched me burn at the stake is alive and well and watching you suffer on You Tube. They’re waiting for you to take off your clothes, go all the way.

  Cease, I was something the world couldn’t stand. I refused to let my body be ravaged, because I knew it was a metaphor for what was being done to my beloved country. I won’t lie to you, child. It is much harder for you to take a stand like that today, mostly because of the transformation; the first step to becoming a woman or a man in your world looks so innocent. But before you know it the world holds up that mirror, and after you’ve primped and cut and shaved, and had all the right procedures, and you still don’t look like one of the Kardashians, you’ll cry and want to go back to being just a girl. But then it’s too late. You’ll be a prisoner, locked inside your own strange body, an object to be measured, judged…all those ogling eyes, all those fingers pressing down…

  Dear Petit,

  Maybe you’re right, but there’s nothing I can do about that now. Goodbye. Maybe you’ll come to me at my next audition, but I really doubt I’ve got what it takes to deliver that kind of message.

  My screen goes blank.

  I turn the light off, toss and turn in the bed—try to find a position where something doesn’t hurt. What do the boys and girls think about Susan’s performance? Were more grown-ups watching? They were probably screaming for more sex and more violence. I get up and take out the rest of my clothes from the duffel bag at the foot of the bed.

  I’m free. The same way I felt when I got on that plane and headed back to California…

  But I don’t feel free at all. The only thing I feel is guilty.

  I go back to the dusty tome. Arrows are drawn beside the young girls—arrows my brother had taken an intense interest in. A footnote on the bottom of a page in the year 1631 has a sequence of vowels that I repeat in my head. I remember the first time we played the game, how James had taken his thumbs and made those two revolutions on my temple. It felt real; it had an initiatory quality and made me feel like a locked safe that the boy who knew me better than anyone else in the world was trying to crack…with just the right combination I’d suddenly become that strong, irresistible girl…I’m relieved Nina’s asleep as turn the pages. I carefully study the boxes; my mind races through the names, the lines, as if they’re one giant, eternal equation waiting to be solved…I stare follow those strange lines the way my brother did, with a look of cool determination until I find it—

  There’s a pattern.

  Few of the strong girls in the first two-hundred years after Jeanne’s death had lived beyond the age of fourteen…Why?

  I turn the pages slowly, stop at the year 1730. Another encircled cross, but also an asterisk, beside which is a name I can barely make out, but when I do, I let out a heavy sigh. I recognize it: Avril. I turn another page and feel the word in my head—it first rises in my chest and twists the bolt of grief until I gasp—

  Curse.

  Not the histrionic lament of a girl playing a vampire, but the feeling I got when I first read Romeo and Juliet and realized, only a few pages in, these kids were going to die. Curse—as in something that was done by your blood relations, something so horrible it can’t be undone in a single generation.

  I finally fall asleep. Stars swim before my eyes in a strange dream. A purple gash on a boy’s thigh rises up from murky depths, and then I’m standing on 43rd Street—at the foot of the silver monolith, blinded by the light it reflects. The overpass on First Avenue is filled with photographers. They aren’t aiming for me—they’re photographing the light on the cross streets, aligned so perfectly to the city grid it feels as if I’m back on the set.

  It’s that day of the winter when the sunset aligns itself perfectly with the city grid. A winter solstice—Manhattan-henge is what real New Yorkers call it.

  And then a voice calls out to me. A voice I know as my character.

  J’ai nom Jeanne la Pucelle.

  Pu-cel-le…The way the voice stresses the third syllable tells me that the word is an adjective, not the noun as it now is in modern French.

  I’m a girl and I am here to protect girls.

  You are not just a maid, the voice informs me. You are pure, chaste, a virgin—that is the secret to your strength.

  Cease. Did you really think I would abandon you?

  “Cease, wake up.” Nina’s gentle hands and spongy breasts are pressed against me. I heard the phone ringing in my dream; only it was disguised as a car engine revving. It’s a landline connected to a speaker that makes an awful din down the long hallway. It’s probably just someone from the studio to tell me I’ve got to return the script. Nina’s standing at my door. “It’s one of the production assistants. He says it’s urgent.” I feel like telling Nina to hang up. She’s holding the phone over the threshold of my doorway, as far as the cord will reach. I get up, hobble over to her, take it.

  “Cease. Francis needs to speak with you,” an assistant says. “The numbers are in, Cease, and it’s incredible. They voted. They want you back.” Nina eyes me gravely. She stands in the doorway with her arms across her chest.

  What have I got to lose?

  But she’s revving up with a monologue that says otherwise.

  “You’re not going back, my precious. I lost a sister. I lost a nephew. I’m not going to lose—”

  “Nina. I can’t hear what he’s trying to tell me.” I turn away. I should tell him to talk to my agent, but it’s past midnight. I have reservations, conditions, terms—because that’s what a grown-up would say, but all that comes out is, “Yeah. OK. I’ll be there at eight.”

  I hang up. We stand together in front of the mirror. Nina’s silent as she gently presses her fingers against my swollen face. “Auugh!” I scream. I study the giant bruise on my cheekbone and my swollen eye. I hope Francis wants it real, cause that’s what he’s gonna get. I hobble down the long hallway to the living room. The teapot down the hall whistles and then I hear a crash and the slamm
ing of cupboard doors. It sounds like a giant whirlwind has just engulfed our little kitchen.

  “La Bete,” she cries. “He’s not going to take my baby.” And then my Nina’s blocking the front door. She hugs her terrycloth robe desperately and knocks the brass umbrella stand over with her foot.

  “You’re not going, my precious. I’m not going to lose you to this—”

  I’ve said my Nina’s shaped like a refrigerator but has all the warmth and security of a down comforter. Well, right now she’s just a refrigerator.

  “What, Nina?— this curse—is that what you’re going to say? Just say it once, for the whole world to hear. That’s what we have in our closet. Let the chorus sing our condemnation. Whatever so-called gift you and James thought I’d been born with isn’t much of a gift at all…” I can feel myself wind up with the monologue I should’ve given last night. It wasn’t a victory speech and it wasn’t a confession—it was real, though, and so dark it would scare even the grown-ups.

  I hear a whoosh, feel a sudden gust of wind—turn from the alcove to face the living room. I locked it last night. I left the key in, but I locked it. I eye the dusty tomes. A sudden chill washes across the room like a giant wave. She must’ve left the window open, too. But it’s January and the wind off the East River would freeze us—and then I see the open journal on the coffee table, its pages fluttering in the breeze.

  First one way, then the other.

  It stops with a sudden shift. I run and check the windows in Nina’s corner of the apartment. They’re all closed. I walk to the open page, stare down at the words with the excitement I feel when new scenes arrive.

  “Nina,” I call. “Why did you leave the bookcase open?”

  “I thought you did,” she says, still blocking the front door. I look down at the page. The year is 1735, according to the faded ink at the top, above three boxes with horizontal lines. The name “Sophie von Anhalt-Zerbst” appears beneath a box of two names…a marriage…the wife has a child named Sophie. The mother’s name is…I turn the page and see a heading entitled “Peter” beside one for “Tsarina Elizabeth.” I see the date August 21, 1745, and then Peter’s name in marriage beside Sophie. But the name that appears beneath it makes me drop the book back on the glass coffee table.

  Caterina. Catherine.

  Catherine marries Peter. No big deal, until I realize this is Peter III. And that means…

  “Nina. What is this?” But she’s already behind me with a protective hand on my shoulder and that solemn look she had after I found my brother’s last words in the script and she told me there were larger things at stake.

  “This was one of those larger things you talked about, isn’t it?” I slowly raise the book. “Nina? Is this genealogy trying to tell me that our family is related to Catherine the Great?”

  “You’re from a long line of strong girls,” Nina says flatly, as if she’s a waiter reminding me of a special on the menu. Then I remember the line in my dream.

  I flip the pages forward. “I’m related to Catherine the Great?” I shake my head in disbelief. “And that character just happens to be appearing alongside me in a show by some crazy director?”

  Only he’s not so crazy, Cease. Brilliant, yes, and definitely weird. But not crazy.

  “You don’t find that a little—” I flip the pages forward. “Nina?” I point to the armoire. “This genealogy… all that so-called history—” I reach to pick up the book and then am suddenly afraid to touch it—“that your sister started was all made up. Right? You said James needed a father and a normal mother—so he just made them up, along with all the other rich people he wanted to be like when we lived on East End Aven—”

  “Well, some of it was…”

  “When was Susan B. Anthony born?” I ask. Nina tugs her robe in silence. “Must have been the early 1800s…” Nina stands mute, wearing a solemn mask, like she’s going into battle. The pages flip by themselves—the years spin backward, in a wild montage.

  Western Massachusetts. A town in the Berkshires. I see it in a box; a marriage in the year 1818—“Margaret Lipscomb” alongside “Robert Anthony” and the name appearing beneath it—“Susan B. Anthony” in the year 1820. The teapot whistles and we ignore it. Someone wants to show me I’m related to the characters I’m going up against in a crazy reality-drama. Someone’s trying to show me I’m related to a bunch of real-life superheroes. There isn’t much to read but names and dates—and occasional annotations in fresher ink that I recognize as my brother’s inscrutable scrawl, but I dismiss these, the way I dismissed everything he did after Serena and her brother fucked with his head. I consider the contents as far-fetched, as unreliable as all the oracle-props I uncovered in the past or the future on the set.

  Nina reprises her role as a French linebacker blocking the doorway. There’s a line between us—and right now it’s a line of scrimmage. “I love you, Nina. I know you won’t be able to rest until you hear what happened between James and me on the last night of his life, and I won’t be able to share that with you until you let me go.” I carefully pull at the cloth strap of the scapular, untangle it from the folds of my T-shirt and sweater, raise it up until my Nina blinks, steps aside, and hurries to the kitchen to turn off the teakettle.

  Yousef picks me up a half-hour later. We’re headed to an airfield near Weehawken. Francis sits on a hydraulic lift in the prop depot, a giant hangar large enough to hold tanks and guns and an entire village that had been erected on the set. He fumbles with his tablet and the controls of the console. His chair buzzes, lifts, then descends. He looks like Charlie Chaplin fumbling though The Great Dictator. He’s wearing dark gray pants with a wrinkled, white shirt that tells me he’s probably headed to a meeting with his beloved producers. He’s looking at a scene on his tablet. I steal a glance over his shoulder and see it’s the crane scene: My free-fall. (I wonder if he’s been playing it over as many times as I played it in my head—watching the pulley come loose, headed right for my face but then swerve…) He gives me a strange look that tells me I’m no longer cattle—I’m a strong girl with secrets he’s desperate to decipher.

  “Young people—boys and girls between the ages of eight and fourteen, love you. They think you’re some kind of angel.” He raises a fat, little finger as he reads, “Cease de Menich has the face of an angel and the moves of a superhero—a boy from Van Nuys wrote that—a boy who’s supposed to like blood and guts and giant Transformers.” He shakes his head in disbelief. “Looks like you’ve got a fan base.”

  I silently thank all those lost girls and boys who wrote me emails. I see my opportunity and take a step toward him.

  “You shouldn’t act so surprised, Francis—you’re the one who came up with historic figures to take the place of all those phony superheroes, right?”

  He nods.

  “I bet the critics thought you were nuts—but you showed them.” I pull at the long sock that hangs over my dirty bean boots, careful not to move too fast. “Tell me, how did you choose these characters? We certainly don’t have anything in common, do we?”

  “No,” he says, and I can see his ego shine through whatever dark cloud the producers or the critics hold over him. My mind races as I try to remember what I’d read about Francis. He doesn’t care much for money and will bank anything on his vision, which makes him so invitingly dangerous to the studios. Maybe that’s it. He’s just gotten more money out of them and wants to be finished. He looks tired, like an exhausted Humpty Dumpty who fell and never got fully put back together again. But it’s more than money.

  My Nina’s right—he’s got a big ego.

  “These characters; an American suffragette, a Russian tsarina, and a French virgin, don’t have anything in common, do they?” I repeat. Francis grunts and looks back to his tablet.

  “They were all just girls when they had to make great decisions about their lives and those they loved,” he says as if he’s reading copy for the trades.

  “A long line of strong girls,�
� I say, drawing out each word carefully. “How’d you choose them?”

  “I just went looking for the strongest young women I could find throughout history.” I suddenly feel empowered—but not just empowered—chosen in a way Nina was trying to get me to see, a way that went a helluva lot deeper than just getting a call from my agent. He shrugs. He’s telling the truth. Francis and his writers had no idea these characters had anything in common, and that tells me he’s probably telling the truth about those lines from my brother’s suicide note. He may enjoy mind-fucking me, but he doesn’t know just how close my real life is to this character I’m trying to become.

  “What did you mean when you said you know what happens to anyone who gets between me and my brother?”

  “Nothing, really. It’s just a rumor I heard about an investigation into a missing person.”

  “Her name was Cherise and nothing happened between us,” I say confidently. I’m not going to turn back now. “Brad’s got a concussion and the giant who attacked us could’ve killed me. But that doesn’t matter to you, does it?”

  “If you can’t stand the heat,” he says. The scar through his left eyebrow arches. He’s treating me like a grown-up now, and although a part of me still wants to run back to my Nina, run back to make-believe, I have to stand my ground.

  I may be a grown-up, but I’m an expendable grown-up, and unless someone stops him there are going to be some dead actors in this all-too-real show.

  “Francis. Why don’t you just cut the crap and face it. Your audience wants to see more than sex and smarm.” I feel my feet being drilled into the concrete floor—my training kicking in—telling me not to back down, because I doubt even famous actors talk to Francis like that. I’d been rehearsing that line since I hung up with the assistant last night.

  Whoa, Cease, wake up. It hadn’t been last night. Nina got the call at two o’clock this morning. It’s eight now. I scramble for the rest of my monologue.

  “Why do you think so many people voted to have me back?”

  “I don’t know, really. Some say you look the most honest of all the finalists. A few say you look like a dark horse who’d have a big secret to share in the final round.” He cocks his head and gives me a tight-lipped grin. His cold, gray eyes stare me down. “How’d you like another shot at the podium?”