Actor: A Novel in Three Acts

The lights above and beyond me dropped, centering solely on me. Creativeness, Stanislavski wrote, is first of all the complete concentration of the entire nature of the actor. I exhaled and ignored the shuffling papers, the shifting of weight in chairs, the bored coughs; the yearnings to be anywhere other than there...the whispers in theatre's wings. From the plane of actual reality into the plane of another life...created and imagined by him. There were tricks to arouse the inner and the real. I had a few. They got me there, sometimes.

"Different kind of heat," I murmured, imagining the stage lights as the desert sun. "Out there it's clean. Cools off at night. There's a nice little breeze."

The space fell quiet. In the air, dust particles caught in the light spun in a hypnotic dance as the audience dissolved into the darkness. Overhead, the ceiling seemed to open up and reveal the sky. My body felt like it was being pulled somewhere else...coalesced for reasons I didn't necessarily need to understand. My own but not my own. From the plane of actual reality into the plane of another life there was sometimes a moment of in-between in acting, a kind of overlapping when one and the other simultaneously tap into the world of the play and the real world where both players become the serpent or dragon consuming its own tail. It's best not to talk about it because whatever may be happening is easy to startle and scare...like a butterfly, a hummingbird, or a child's innocence seeing the wicked ways of the world too early.

Then, Lee arrived.

My stance widened. My pelvis inched forward. Everything, I felt, was slowly becoming heavy, labored, arduous—even my crotch ached like a small bag of wet rocks. And both of my legs suddenly felt beaten with whiffle ball bats. How? The middle of my brow suddenly tightened and demanded attention...authority. I had never paid attention to that area of my face before. Why now? My spine lengthened, then dropped violently into a pained, awkward, crescent moon shape.

Becoming is being, Edie often told me.

My stomach released and I felt my gut, usually sucked in and constricted, roll over my belt...fat, unwanted, and free. Deep, nasty, nasally inhales through my nose followed. I imagined all the dirt and dust and tiny pebbles from the desert deep down in there. The back of my throat filled. I could taste their grit. Nature was trying to choke me...trying to kill me. Where were you God? Where were you when I needed you? Where was anyone? My before, I told myself. On the verge of death, with no one there like Austin or my parents or my friends to help me—all alone.