Actor: A Novel in Three Acts

On the cold floor of my apartment, I woke.

From my stomach to my back, I flipped over and listened to the distant resonance of the sounds of a city I did not know: birds chirping, hobos retching from drink from the night before, taxi horns and tires squealing, and the heavy metal rumblings of delivery trucks on their morning routes. Foreign, but familiar; orchestral. With those accompanying sounds, I looked up and stared at the ceiling, noticing a crack within its plaster striking clear across, like God himself had purposefully flicked that exact spot. Why me? I wondered, confused between the trappings of Lee's victimization and my own personal woe. Or me? Not me, but parts of me. Only parts of parts of parts.

I sat up and looked around at the apartments sparseness, resembling more of an empty stage than a place to live. It resembled a drunk tank, which would have been a little too Method given Lee's character, even for me. I told myself I would figure it out.

The temperature at what I assumed was 7 or 8 AM was already sweltering. Everything felt sticky and wet, like the aftermath of one of my old conservatory’s yoga sessions or music-to-movement lessons. Those were the worst: slipping and sliding and thrusting around in the dark with a gaggle of bodies, emoting through gestures and projected, maybe “real moments” moments of therapeutic ensemble release. One of the gifts of awareness of these classes was becoming hyperaware of every physical tick one had, as well as pain, which I felt in my right butt cheek. I kneaded the flesh and muscle against the hardwood as I began to worry that the audition would be just as hot as in the apartment. Sweating on stage was a pain point for me because I sweat a lot, to the point that it became a distraction. Edie had warned me about Midwest summers, but I didn't have the context to understand them. My mind only went to Chicago's freezing cold and biting winters, which, I assumed, I would see soon enough.

It will be fine, I told myself. Hamlet's "To be or not to be" came to mind, specifically its end:

Thus conscience doth make cowards of us all, / And thus the native hue of resolution / Is sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought, / And enterprises of great pith and moment / With this regard their currents turn awry / And lose the name of action.

When the memory of the audition and everything that was about to be or not to be flooded over me—real life and consequences and not mere musings—I rose steadily from the floor like Dracula. My shoes had been kicked and thrown off wildly in the middle of the night, along with my heavy black peacoat, which Edie and Dean gifted me before I left, blanketing me like a baby during the night. The whole scene was ridiculous, the whole vibe, and it was clear the ones that knew me best—Edie and Dean—thought so too. But maybe that was all part of the severing process; it was funny, in those moments of dispossession, when I took a second to look at myself objectively, unable to keep myself from laughing.

With no coffee or food in the apartment, my mind and attention could only return to my audition.

For art, lacking was always a good thing. Being without brought me down to two foundational reactions: fight or flight. Fight to create, or resist and do nothing. The bigger question was what to fight for, but it had worked. I'd gotten through all the sides and memorized most in a pretty good clip, reading through the play once and the lines as many times as I could until I passed out. The old trick of writing down the first letter of each word to lock in the dialogue helped too. Prepare, prepare, prepare, Edie always told me, and she was right. To think otherwise was to show that I wasn't fully invested in the stakes, which would only be revealed in the voice, the body—everything, on the stage.

Sitting cross-legged on the floor, I inhaled, exhaled, and repeated only Lee's lines to myself under my breath. I tried not to see the pages, the lines they were written on, or the highlights and scribbled notes that had come to me in the middle of the night. I then tried to release and forget any memory of preparation, and see and treat the sections as I would the unconscious act of breathing. Word by word, line by line, I said each one aloud, and started over when I was done. Slowly, that strange feeling of stepping from my world into that in-between place of myself and the character and their world started to meld.

"In fact," I said aloud. "I've been inside some pretty classy places in my time. And I never even went to an Ivy League school either."

"You want some breakfast or something?" Austin's imagined voice replied in my mind.

"Breakfast?" I asked. Hot, acidic disgust started to rise up in me.

"Yeah," I said. "Don't you eat breakfast?"

With little understanding as to why, I abruptly spat on the floor. The spit, wet and smeared, then splayed explosive on the hardwood. Apparently, I could spit very hard. If I were asked why I did it now, I would probably say that I was angry, enraged, and disgusted. But back then, I remembered feeling fear and shock, like the panicked feeling of trying to hold onto something invisible as it slipped from my grasp.

"Look," I said, starting again, talking from the belly of my gut now. "Don't worry about me, pal. I can take care of myself. You just go ahead as though I wasn't even here, all right?"

An image of a pair of dusty, worn boots beside a slow-moving river, cast in endless darkness save white slivers of the moon, came to me.

My cell phone began buzzing somewhere in the apartment, pulling me out of that separated, surrendered place. A part of me didn't want to return, but the world, the real world, wanted me back. I could not stay in that fantasy land forever. I knew the names of the ones who never came back. Finding the phone at the bottom of one of my boots, the screen read Tim.

"Don't tell me they cancelled on me already."

"Not a chance," Tim laughed. "Just checking in to make sure you're ready." He paused. "You ready?"

"Yeah," I said. "Went through it all until I passed out. Even slept on the floor."

How could he even ask me that? He knew I knew what to do. Unless this was Edie working through him to get to me? No, not yet. Let me try at least. Let me fail. But then I thought, would she let me fail?

"Why are you asking me that, Tim?" I asked. Is Edie talking to you?"

"Edie?" Tim's voice was suddenly stern. "I told you I wasn't going to get her involved.

"Then why are you checking in on me? You never do that. What's this about? The money?"

"Money?" Tim laughed even harder." You haven't even booked yet and let me remind—theatre pays absolute shit."

I looked at the spit on the floor. Just over the last couple of minutes, it had dried up. Now, there was merely a stain.

"I'm your agent. That's my job. I've also known you since you were shitting in your pants and everyone telling you it was high art."

Tim was an exploiter of art. But he was also a necessary evil, and I'd be a hypocrite to say I didn't need him.

"You done?" Tim asked. "Because you're in a different world now. You're in a place where no one knows your name, everyone knows the fuckin' lines, and they'd just as soon cast the mayor's hack son than you because it would mean more funding for them down the line. You wanted this. You." I heard him crack his knuckles and neck through the phone. "If anything, Ave, you're more a liability now. But I love you. I love Edie and your fuckin' dad Dean. So I'm here for you." He sighed. "Which I will always be."

I said that I was done and I apologized.

"Good, because—well, I didn't want to tell you this. They're a little hesitant about recent graduates."

My face flushed. "Tell them I've been doing it since I could walk."

"How about you show them?"

I knew Tim was nervous about something when he pushed me, when he started sounding and acting like a freshman football coach.

"I got it," I told him. "We're good. I know I'm a little young for it, but they are going to see something beyond Malkovich. They are going to see something new. I'm making sure of it."

"That's what I want to hear."

I ran my fingers over the marked audition side, reviewing the blocking, the underlined words I'd repeated over and over to engrain them in my mind. I flattened the crinkled corner of the left page where I'd balled it up and thrown it against the wall when I couldn't remember the second-to-last line. Different kind of heat, it read. Out there, it's clean. Cools off at night. There's a nice little breeze. The lime-yellow highlighter I'd used to mark my sections was bright and erratic. It appeared someone or something else had taken over at some point last night. At the bottom of the page, I read a note: What is your intention? How do you change? What is one physical action you do? Under it, I'd written: get more beer, drink more beer. Genius, I thought.

"Other than that," Tim said. "Are you good?

"Ya' got crickets anyway," I murmured. "Tons a' crickets out there." I looked around the kitchen. "Ya' got groceries? Coffee?"

"Ave?" Tim asked, raising his voice. "Lonely in a new place. All that time alone...people are strange when you're a stranger and all that."

"Yeah," I said. "I'm good."

"Stay out of the bars until you're done. I know you were hitting it pretty hard near the end of your final year."

"Don't have the money."

"Drink finds a way," Tim said. "Trust me."

"I'm on top of it."

"Audition's at three. They'll be back from lunch wanting two things: wanting to find their Lee and start rehearsing to get the real work."

Tim hung up without a goodbye. I ran the side until it was time to go. Outside, the birds were still chirping.