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.