Actor: A Novel in Three Acts

Scene 2 Morning. AUSTIN is watering plants with a vaporizer, LEE sits at glass table in alcove drinking beer.

"I never realized the old lady was so security-minded," I said aloud, clear and distinct.

I took a drink from my pantomimed beer and placed it back down on the table, holding my focus on it for a few beats. One. Two. Three. Then, slowly, with my hands still wrapped around it, I rotated them both horizontal, tipping the can to the point of where it would have split out from its top, onto the table, and eventually onto floor. I imagined the liquid inside, bringing a kind of presence of place over me I still can't explain. Lee's voice was gone, off somewhere I had no intention of following. I was in control of my mind again, for now.

"How do you mean?" the reader asked.

They sounded timid, a bit off guard. Their unease made me feel powerful.

"Made a little tour this morning." I looked over both of my shoulders. "She's got locks on everything. Locks and double-locks and chain locks and—what's she got that's so valuable?"

Never put locks around me when I was young. Lee had returned. Why didn't you do that for me, huh Mom? Edie. Mom. Edie...why won't you let me go? I tried to stop him. All of a sudden, there was no air in my lungs. I struggled to take a few, quick, meager gasps of air and get them into my lungs, but the reader was already onto their next line.

"Antiques I guess." The reader shrugged, playing along with my glib attitude—probably an actor. "I don't know."

"Just the same crap we always had around." I looked back at them with a new sense of contention. "Plates and spoons. Spoons and plates."

Who cares? Lee's violent laugh echoed within me. These are my words, anyway. This is my world. Who are you?

The reader paused and looked up at me. They noticed that I had skipped something. I looked back at them and nodded, hoping it communicated direction.

"I guess they have personal value to her."

We recovered and continued.

"Personal value!" I laughed so loud that I saw the shadow of the reader jolt. The others, up by Lisa, did too. "Yeah..." I continued, "Just a lota' junk. Most of it's phony anyway. Idaho decals. Now who in the hell wants to eat offa' plate with the State of Idaho starin' ya' in the face?"

The reader snorted and so did Lisa from the back.

"Personally, I don't wann' be invaded by Idaho when I'm eatin'. When I'm eatin' I'm home. Ya' know what I'm sayin'? I'm not driftin', I'm home. I don't need my thoughts swept off to Idaho. I don't need that!"

An unauthored rage was starting to build in me. I couldn't reach out and hit the reader, but I wanted to. Lee wanted to. I wanted to? I didn't know. The only thing that was true was that untraceable anger. I had no other choice to use it for the next line.

“You go out last night?” asked the reader.

“Yeah, yeah," I answered. "I went out. I went out. Why?” I slung my hand back to finish off the rest of my beer. Then I brought up my feet and loudly dropped them on the table. “What about it?"

“I thought..." they started to say, then stopped. I could see they were trying to find their place, distracted by the noise I was making. "I thought—um."

They sounded even more hesitant. Intimidated. Their weakness made me hungry, like an animal, like a dumb, impulsive, needy beast. Then I realized that I had muddied the lines again. Dumb, impulsive, needy beast. A line from An Actor’s Handbook suddenly came to me as if some kind of salvation:

AUDIENCE: The more the actor wishes to amuse his audience, the more the audience will sit back in comfort waiting to be amused; but as soon as the actor stops being concerned with his audience, the latter begins to watch the actor.

I paused, quickly running through them in my head like I had done all night, bringing all attention back to the world between the reader and I. My vision, blurred from the lights and the attention, cleared. A second of darkness had passed, but there they were, my next line and my place again, as if waiting for me to return to them.

"Why?" I asked.

"I heard you go out."

"Yeah, I went out. What about it?"

"Just wond—"

“Damn coyotes,“ I blurted, cutting them off. "Kept me awake."

I got an impulse to rise so I went with it and moved downstage, turning my back to them entirely. I brought the beer. The reader continued.

“Oh yeah, I heard them,” they said. “Killed somebody’s dog or something.”

The reader coughed and squirmed around in their chair as this thought arose: Hell does he know about coyotes? Austin’s pulling that out of his goddamned ass like he does every goddamned thing. That’s some New York shit thing to say.

"Yappin', yappin', yappin their fool heads off," I said, turning profile and then peaking through an imaginary window, on the hunt for the those damn sandy mutts. "They don't yap like that on the desert. They howl. These are city coyotes here."

The reader half-laughed. "Well, you don't sleep anyway do you?"

Like the starving mongrel that I was coming upon a fresh corpse, I pulled my fingers from the imaginary drapes, turned from the window, and paused to stare dead at the them. I didn't need to say anything. Not right away. The silence was enough. Then, at the moment the energy started to flip from intentional to accidental, I stood as tall and straight and mountainous as possible.

"You're pretty smart aren't ya?"