Actor: A Novel in Three Acts

I tried calling Edie the second I left the theatre. The ringing from the phone in my ear merged with the wood-and-metal rumbling of the L train as the summer's sunlight reminded me I was in the real world again. It had been so dark inside Steppenwolf; another place, out of time—a layered reality. From Lake Michigan, a gush of wind pushed me backward, forcing me off balance.

No answer. I tried Dean. Nothing. They were always right there when I didn't need them and nowhere to be found when I did. I tried Tim. Nothing again.

Behind me, the theatre's doors opened and then slammed against the wall. I turned around not from the sound, but from a sense of danger. Overhead, the sky was still baby blue—no clouds or wind; quiet, like an audience before the curtains opened. Someone was approaching me. As they got closer, I saw from their face who it was: the actor from before, the one with the beer. The guy's eyes were squished together and bulging, yet melancholic in a mixture of hopeless rage.

I was paralyzed in the middle of the sidewalk with nowhere to run. And go where? I barely knew where I was.

He stalked towards me as if he was going to tackle me, or hug me...muttering the whole time. I couldn't hear what he was saying from the phone ringing in my ears as I tried to get a hold of Edie. Reminiscent of Lee, he stuck his meaty finger in my face.

"Momma's boy!" he screamed. "Kiss ass silver-spoon having hack."

I said nothing to defend myself. What could I say? He wasn't wrong. Edie, the one thing I tried to get away from and hide from, had followed me.

He dropped his finger and drew even closer. I tried to tell him I was in the middle of a call even though the phone was only ringing. He ignored my excuse.

"With who?" he asked. "Your momma to tell her how good you did in there? That she did everything right? That you stole a role from a local in only three months of being here?"

I lied and told the beer guy I was calling a cab.

"Did you not hear me?" he asked. "Lisa is gonna' cast you. She cut half of us just now. Doesn't take a genius to know what that means."

"Wait," I said, "Wait, wait, wait. Did she tell you that?"

"Fuck off."

He spat at me and raged off.

A slew of other actors leaving the theatre looked at us. They seemed to accept they hadn't been right for the role. That or they didn't see who I was. Lucky for me. They could have all come over and curb-stomped me as an ensemble.

"Tough break," I murmured, looking down the long road to the end of one block, and then to the left.

Survivor's guilt crept over me. I learned to let that go. Everyone had to.

The phone kept ringing and ringing with no answer. The digital drone of it was drowning me out. The line went to voicemail.

"What the fuck?"

That guy back there, I started to tell myself. He wasn't mad at me. He was mad at Lisa. He was mad about how she recognized me as an object, a utility for her systems. Lisa had all the control, and she used it like strings to a puppet—me, which I allowed. Rather than his collaborator, his confidant, his artist-in-arms, I became his symbol, his totem…a value placed on something he lost...something stolen...something he feared they maybe never had. I told myself that was it.

I tried Tim. He would pick up. He would tell me Edie was OK. He would tell me Lisa didn't do all that because he told her to. He would tell me the truth.

"Pick up, pick up, pick up."

An ambulance rushed by, its sirens screaming, its red and blue lights clashing with the peace of the street. The driver's face was a blurred snapshot. The person next to them was a shadow of a shadow of a soon-to-be memory as it wheeled down the street, turned a corner, and was out of sight. I saw Edie in the back of the ambulance, alone on one of those stationary gurneys, reaching out. Her red fingernails were cracked and chipped as she tried to hold onto anything that would let her stay. No one around her knew of her work, the art she had shared, and the realities she had spun on stage for thousands, maybe millions.

Had they been changed as much as her?

The soft rumble of the L-train echoed in the distance. I slid my phone back into my pocket and ran for it after Tim didn't pick up. For a moment, with only my body, my breath, my legs, my eyes, all that was real before became imaginary, and I was only someone running.

The train was nearly empty. A drunk lay out across one of the two-seaters, both legs tucked against their chest. Clothes and other things were everywhere: a few blankets, and food wrappers, some open, some not. They smelled of stale vodka and urine. Wrapped around both of their feet were what looked like red spray-painted Converse with the bottoms ripped off.

A few seats behind them sat a fifty-something woman. She stared straight ahead. Occasionally, she crinkled her nose and glanced around. A kid, younger than me, was standing in the center area looking into their phone. He never looked up: not at me, the drunk, or the woman who I noticed was wearing a shiny, gold necklace. A middle-aged man in a black suit at the back of the train was passed out asleep, gone to everyone, including me.

Outside, apartment lights and stars mingled, flashing like fleeting explosions of life. When I found myself in between actions, I realized how much other life was going on, unconcerned with anyone's struggles but its own. What a world, Edie said after too much gin. What a mixed-up world of strangers we all are, clueless to what makes us tick...a mystery to what makes each of our hearts break.

I gazed out at a graveyard. Hundreds of trees stretched their skeletal limbs across the earth. Each tombstone had a name, a date of birth, and a date of death I would never know.

A nurse in a light blue frock, exhausted, got on at my next stop. We caught eyes after she glanced at the drunk while a bottle rattled between their feet. She was done helping people for the night. I imagined all the mistakes she saw people make and the things left unsaid.

I tried Tim one more time. No answer. People make mistakes, I told myself. Especially Edie. She is ok.

I felt like praying, but I didn't know how.

"Edie," I murmured. "Hear me. Listen. Please be ok."

Off my stop and down the stairs on my way home, I figured it was as good a time as any to grab myself a bottle of something to keep me company.

Liquor was a bad old friend I couldn't quit; an ex I couldn't help but call in the dead of night for a kiss; wings to lift the dead weight of life off of me. There were probably other ways to stave off anxiety and the fear of possibly losing Edie, but I had yet to discover them. Being drunk and alone would have to do. But as I turned the corner before the liquor store and the refuge of my apartment, I spotted Peter, the guy from the Steppenwolf audition; the big actor from college.

He was standing outside a bar called Jackson's, smoking a cigarette, wearing the same clothes he'd had on before: brown shoes, plain slacks, and a white-collared shirt. The blue and red neon of its marquee overlaid his body, seeming to transport him into another world where only he and he alone existed. He didn't see me. Not yet at least, putting me in that awkward position of deciding whether I wanted to talk with him or try to slink by unnoticed, only to feign shock if he did see me.

Then he did two seconds later.

"Goddamn," I laughed.

"Goddamn," Peter smiled.

"You stalking me outside of my place or something?" I put my two hands up like an old-timey boxer and waved them around. "Or you just out for a drink after that audition?"

The blue and white of the Miller Light neon in the bar's window sharpened his jawline, which flowed down into his neck and ended at the top of his chest. He was definitely bigger than before. Not fat—muscular. I didn't notice that at Steppenwolf. He wasn't like that at all in conservatory. It's the lighting, I told myself—definitely the night.

I was in denial of Peter's physical glow-up because I never bothered myself with any of that. Skinny-fat was my strategy. Being thin in LA was always a thing, but actors and actresses needed to be thin and toned; one needed to be perfect, better than perfect. Aspirational. More real than real. The embodiment of moral ethos to use as an anchor to tell a great story to the world and all its viewers.

Peter squinted and pinched his thin lips around a cigarette, slightly off-balance with an off-kilter swagger that looked almost rehearsed. Not Brando in that infamous first early screen test, turning all the way around and laughing. Not even James Dean flipping his knife in his hand, but something else beyond all that baby fat acting. The lack of definition made him impossible to look away from. He was the everyman, which made him nobody—mysterious. I never knew what he was going to do.

"A little bit of both," Peter said. "Your Airbnb here or something?"

He nodded up into the air with no particular direction. He was already drunk, which put me at ease a little bit. It made me envious.

"Right across the street," I told him.

He flicked his cigarette and lit another one, half-smirking to himself, me, or no one. Maybe he heard me. Maybe he didn't. I wasn't sure. His glassy eyes reflected the TV's from the bar, obscuring his focus from me, to my apartment, then down the block, then the sky, a cloud, then back at me, and then back into the bar.

Was he here with someone? Was he alone? Was I?

There was a half-glass of beer between his legs. It had to be from inside. Then I watched him as he pressed his chin to his chest, started rustling around the breast pocket of his black sailors' pea coat jacket, and took out a decent-sized flask of Jim Beam. Without looking at me, he exhaled and perfectly spun the cap off with his thumb, catching the cap as it fell to the street without looking for it. Peter caught it as if he was already holding it.

"You living in a nice place?" he asked, taking a plug.

"Yeah," I tried to joke. "A penthouse with a full fridge, state-of-the-art oven, and any girl in town anytime I want."

Peter scoffed, took another while looking me up and down, nodded slowly, and then handed me the Beam.

"You know what I'm going to say, right?"

"I don't. I never do."

He looked me in the eyes and then through them for a long time.

"Forget it," said Peter, and then waved at the bottle. "Drink, sir, is a great provoker of three things...nose-painting, sleep, and urine. In my opinion, Shakespeare missed one."