Actor: A Novel in Three Acts

Ave, anxious about Edie's state, is on his way back to his apartment after a long but successful audition at Steppenwolf Theatre. An actor, enraged at the theatre director's affection, hinted that Ave may have landed the role. Almost at his apartment, he runs into Peter, an old classmate and actor from LA. Clearly drunk, Ave, out of intimidation, loneliness, or to network, stops to talk with him.

"Oh yeah?"

"Yeah," Peter laughed and leaned his head back on the bars window. "More drink."

I took another pull as he began to lightly tap the back of his head against the wall. His pace quickened. Peter’s face didn’t react—an empty mask. His body was completely still except for his skull. A few people from inside noticed when he began to do it harder. A few more hits. A few more. Then a few more.

Peter stopped when the bartender came outside and asked what the fucking shit he was doing.

"Just clearing my head," Peter answered.

"Fucking stop," he said. "You're scaring people inside. I literally have three customers." He nodded down the street. "Use the brick wall if you need to." He looked at me. The look in his eyes was lost and tired, but direct. "Or talk to him, I guess."

"Cubs game on?" gesturing at one of the TV's with his chin.

"Yeah," they said, then smiled. "You do really like pain then."

The bartender went back inside, and in that moment of transition, I noticed my hand reaching for my phone on its own. It did that from time to time—fulfilling some unconscious need. At the upper edge of my vision, I could see Peter watching as I opened my messages. He didn’t ask who I might have been waiting to hear from. I didn’t tell him. Didn’t matter. Nothing, again.

For a moment, the white, hypnotic light transported me to a place of many places, many people...too many in fact that, at some point, I ascended to a realer place than Peter standing in front of me. I didn’t want to look up. It felt so good even though I knew it was someone else's lie.

"Flask," ordered Peter.

I handed the liquor back over to him again.

“Live alone?” He took a hit, gulped it down, and exhaled with a hiss for a full ten seconds. "Fuck me twelve to twelve...that's strong."

Peter motioned to throw the bottle into the street at a passing car (a Hummer), forcing me to flinch. He laughed, and I half-faked a laugh, fulfilled that I had gotten a rise out of him other than whatever he was doing to me. This dance of informalities off the stage was a first for him and me...and it wasn't going well.

“No one would want to live with me,” I said after it appeared Peter relaxed by drinking again. “Talking to myself all the time.”

"True." He looked up at the sky, then down at his feet, then up at me. "Same problem."

He smiled like he did all those times on stage as three people: himself, the actor, and his character.

I had the impulse to ask if he was alright, then reminded myself we weren't in conservatory anymore. We weren't in some closed-knit ensemble. The days of sharing our feelings and unearthing trauma like clay from the earth to create something were no longer a casual ask. It's not that people didn't care out in the world: how was anyone in their right mind supposed to answer that question?

We stood there in the dark, weighed down by the summer's heat, without words to exchange between us. People think that because actors make a living by talking, we do it all the time. Some do, but most don't. Communication is everything that can't be felt; a social contract that keeps us falling in love rather than killing each other. What is real is silence.

"How's your family taking it moving out here?" Peter asked. "How's Edie taking it? Still acting?"

My throat cinched, and I couldn’t breathe. The urge to break inward and topple swelled up from my stomach to my throat and into my eyes. There was a helplessness to the feeling: an uncontrollable, overwhelming internal storm that could not be reasoned with or manipulated or swayed. It was and I was not, indifferent to whatever the evocation was doing to me. Attempting to hold onto any semblance of reality from before only made it worse as it grew from a ripple into a wave, then a few sharp punches, and finally into a constant rumble that burrowed and shook my spine, my temples—my entire body. I swallowed and exhaled, imagining myself back in the desert with nothing; somewhere else.

The orange glow of the streetlights, catching the glass of a passing taxi and striking my face, brought me back.

All I wanted to do was tell Peter what was going on, that Edie may be dead, but I couldn’t bring myself to do it. I didn’t want to be one of those actors who suddenly puts all of their problems and worries on someone. There was only so much time. There were only so many shoulders. Everyone had problems.

I was about to make a move to get us inside. The Beam was starting to wear off. I needed something stronger. I needed more of something. Then a cop car in a wild fury shot by. I watched the hurling rectangle of metal shoot down the street with little regard for itself or anyone else around it. It didn’t even look like there was anybody in the car; a mindless mass of violence careening at a full, deadly speed. The two of us jolted and turned to look at the flashing, shrieking sounds and violent light as it turned a street corner and disappeared to continue its hunt.

“I did a movie once,” Peter told me. “I think it was a porno. They never asked me to fuck anyone, so I can’t be sure.”

"Oh...wow," I replied.

He sounded guilty, but after he hiccuped and almost vomited, I realized his admittance was maybe an effort to cover up his body's revolution. The drunk was truly on him now: swaying, lips muttering to themselves with no tangible words spoken; the fingers of his hands undulating from pinky to pointer like a shit-faced wave. At that point, there was no coming back, leaving only the opportunity to make it worse.

“Were people having sex on set or something?” I asked.

He shrugged and again said he couldn't be sure.

I nodded, and swallowed a big ball of spit and whiskey which had congealed in my throat.

“It was work. Better than no work. I remember expecting more than theatre because it was film—a movie. That embarrassed me.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know,” he admitted. “I felt duped, but I don’t even know what I necessarily accepted beforehand that left me feeling duped. I still don’t.”

I observed him press the top of the flask of Beam to his lips, tip the butt of the flask up into the air, thrusting it towards the sky and the stars, and then proceed to suck the rest of the brown liquor down. I watched his Adam's apple thrust out and then in, out and then in. Both of his eyes were open, clear, and looking straight ahead. His gaze looked absent and his thirst seemed almost out of his own body and mind; as if there was something inside satiating itself unconcerned with Peter. There was little else to do but to continue watching and see what came next.

Peter released the bottle without a hiss and slipped the Beam into his back pocket, stopped, and then decided to delicately lean it up against the wall.

“For the most part," he said, "they give you all the time in the world. Fucked up the stakes for me, in and out. No one told me movies were going to be easier.”

I acted in a few student films while in conservatory. Never anything for a professional director or studio. Nothing like that. Just a couple of kids playing with words written down on paper and a camera rented from the school. Some of it was even shot on our phones.

Edie said if I wanted to unlearn everything I'd learned on the stage as an actor, I should do film. In her mind, the medium was tainted, lesser than—"far from life." Often, she'd cite Giacomo Rizzolatti's work on mirror neurons, "just without the presence or lack thereof of self." I had no idea who he was. It sounded like an ice cream flavor. I know who he is now. I know a lot of things after the fact. She insisted the stage was the closest any actor, audience member, or playwright would get to what was real in natural time. Which was what? I'd often ask. Eternity, she always said. A "no-place." Movies were silhouettes of silhouettes; fake, manufactured permanence—a betrayal, she believed, to the shadow and dust of our being; our aura. "Hubris," she would whisper.

“The magic was replaced by the money,” Peter said. “At first I didn’t even realize I was getting paid, but when they did at the end of the first day—half at least—something died.” He sighed. “Then, something else was born.”

The two of us looked up and saw off-white snowflakes. They were stained with the orange of the streetlight, falling from the black sky onto the glistening gray concrete of the road. The moon was out, but instead of beautiful, it seemed commonplace; nothing new, just big, round, and glowing white. We looked down at the gray, quasi snowflake as it bitterly flaked, split, and then blew away with a sudden gust of wind.

“Ash,” Peter advised. “Must be a fire somewhere.”

“What did you think of the audition?”

Peter looked ahead out onto the street at nothing in particular. His face was motionless: no eye twitch, no scratch, no mouth tic. Something was happening in his mind I would never know. Then he cocked his head to his left shoulder once, quick, and then back straight. The impulse to do the same stirred.

“You got a lady here already?” Peter asked, ignoring me. He gave me a few playful punches at my ribs and started laughing to himself. “You’re good looking—kind of.”

“No, no,” I said. “Not me."

"Yeah," Peter agreed. "No time."

"I should probably go up and get to bed.”

Then, as if he had been planning it, Peter lunged at me with his entire body.

I didn’t even have the chance to try to move as he first bear hugged me from the front, then turned me around and gripped me hard with my arms crossed around my chest. There weren’t any words or reasons or apologies. No laughs, only the sound of our heavy, labored breathing and unsure if what was happening was real or not. He dug his fingers into my forearms. The bulge of his biceps squeezed me tighter. Any air from my lungs that had escaped was given over to him. My vision shuttered from the heat and exhaustion and as I tried to push him off or wriggle away, I realized I didn’t have the power. Peter was simply stronger. He moved me to the wall and pinned me, chest hard against my back, hot bourbon breath forcing me to blink. Our feet slid around on the concrete when he slowly, softly started to laugh and then speak.

"You know Shakespeare got drunk," he said with hollow melody. "How do you think he wrote dialogue so well? Booze, parchment, quill, ink, time, and the ear. You know there's nothing up there on that stage for us but imitation? The imaginings of dead people who will never love us; all that writing and rehearsing and acting and applause for the beauty of human experience given immortal form for a humanity today that doth not know how to desire to know themselves; they lie on their backs in the dark with the light of a million dead made up synthetic suns all beaming frivolous gossip across their face to fill a hole in their hearts and minds that was never supposed to be sated."

He let me go and I brought the tip of my elbow back into his rib. He groaned, chortled, and wavered as he continued to hang his head. No one on the street or from inside the bar noticed. Peter rose, vertebrae by vertebrae, and winked.

“I didn’t think you had any fight in you." Peter spit on the ground and then spit on his shoe. “Ever since, way, way back, I heard about you being Edie’s kid and getting brought to the front of the line at conservatory, I always figured you were one of those kids that thought they didn’t have to earn what they really wanted.”

“Fuck you,” I said. “That’s not me anymore."

"But that old elbow of yours sure told me." He rubbed his stomach. "I think you broke a rib."

"That's not me."

"So it was?" he asked sarcastically. "At one point?"

"You seem to think so."

"I’m here to get away from all of that," I said.

"And do what?"

"Do it without her."

“What is it, man? All you actors at school always talked about it—it, it, it—but I never knew what the fuck you were talking about. Farmers farm. Schoolteachers teach. Actors do what? What is it? I want to know. I need to know. Successful set pieces dressed to best fit a poet's words and a technician's newest eye? Tell me!"

My phone buzzed and rang in my pocket.

"Saved by the holy device, the holy distraction," Peter muttered, finishing off the flask he’d picked up from the ground.

“I need to take this,” I said, moving away from him.

“Take it,” Peter said. “Take it here, please. Don't leave me in this shit hole by myself.”

I looked at my phone. It wasn't a call. It was a text from Tim.

Edie's had an accident. I'll call you. It's serious.

“The look on your face is like that letter-reading exercise I used to do in high school,” Peter badgered. “By the look of you, by my read of the contextual mise-en-scène, worldly reality is perchance a dream.”

“Fuck you,” I exhaled. “I’m not a character. I’m not in a scene.”

Peter yelled something after me, but a hit of wind and cold swallowed his voice as I ran toward my apartment.