Actor: A Novel in Three Acts

After I nearly started crying, struggling with the keys to the initial door of my apartment, halfway up the stairs, I was suddenly aware of how shallow, frantic, and infantile my breath was.

Was I always this useless?

Was I always so thinned of hope or courage?

Was I always on the edge of breaking through to the other side of nothing?

Down the stairway and through my door outside on the street, a marauding, drunken voice was calling my name. Avvve! the voice slurred. Ave, where'd yah go? Hey Ave! Hey Avvve! It was Peter. He was following me, though I was skeptical as to why. Too much trouble to trouble myself with him now, I thought. Looking up the rest of my stairs, I accepted I couldn't go back to help Peter. He would find his way back to the bar or his room. He was a big boy. That or he'd find the curb for the night.

What is your body but your responsibility? One of Edie's many lines arose in my mind as I continued to make my way up the stairs and finally to my door. But a tool for allowing us to do what we are meant to do or not do?

When I needed her, Edie was there. When I didn't, she was there; like a shadow, always present...just a matter of catching the light.

I rushed into my apartment. The air in the space had lost all of its energy from the last time I was there. The room looked back at me like a stranger. I'd left it unchanged. Had I?

Rushed into the bare, detached bathroom, I released a long-awaited piss. It flowed fast, bringing with it a sharp euphoria and sense that if it could last forever, my troubles would never return. But I knew that they would. I flushed and listened to the violent hit of the clean, rushing toilet water mixing with my waste, suddenly thrust back to my reality. Re-entering my spare living room, a desperate, delusional part of me hoped Edie would magically be there. She wasn't. She was in San Francisco—maybe dead.

"No," I said aloud. "No, she's not."

Still dazed from the bourbon, I opened two beers, feeling reckless. Secretly, I wanted to black out to be rid of myself for the night.

I was close, but I could never tell.

At my little table, I finished the first beer in five hard gulps and started on the second, noticing the ceiling fan was absolutely still. I looked around. Everything was. So much stillness reminded me of death, so I checked my phone again. No sign of anyone, just a mix of social media apps and notifications that only mattered when nothing else did. I tapped Reddit and typed, how to deal with the death of a parent. The first post to pop up was in r/GriefSupport: And sometimes I text myself, pretending it's her, just to get it off my chest. I closed the app pulling up from the base of the screen to present its card, then swiped up again to fully close it.

I drank in that silence and stillness, with only the sound of my weak, labored panting filling the room. Peter had stopped screaming for me outside. Down at the bar, the tribalistic sports crowd, filled with beer, liquor, and hope, cheered, the sound dashing from inside to the street outside, up the brick wall of the building, to finally find the starless night sky.

Maybe I'd read Tim's text wrong, I told myself.

An unexpected feeling of hope from the idea I missed something in Tim's text overwhelmed my apathy. I didn't doubt Tim. I questioned my my phone. I took it out and examined the letters, shapes, and the meaning each one presented to me. A few seconds passed with my eyes locked on the screen and its text until the symbols began to gyrate and rearrange themselves. I blink and they returned to normal.

Edie's had an accident, it read. I think it's serious.

"Accident," I murmured, trailing my finger across the phone's smooth screen. "Serious."

The idea felt pure until the ambiguity of it resolved nothing. Out of rage, I slammed the phone down squarely on its face, only to immediately panic, fearing I had broken it. Checking the screen, the buttons, everything else, I saw it was whole. Once again, I was left in that still silence.

"Enough," I said aloud. "Work."

I forced myself up, and went to the center of my living room. I reached my hands to the ceiling, stretching, stretching, stretching, then dropped everything so my torso and head hung nearly touching the floor. Vertebrae by vertebrae I rose, my breath and blood and mind coalescing until I was back and entered an old monologue from my early days of conservatory: a war-torn, Shakespearean prince, Young Clifford, on his damned path of a cruel child-killer: