by Leah Stewart
“Sorry, Ben,” Adan says, after Thomas leaves with the bowl. “It is because of your country.”
“What about my country?” Charlie asks.
Adan waves his hand toward the window. “What they do.”
“I don’t know what you mean. It wasn’t me.”
“But you are here. You are here.” Adan points at the floor. “Lie down.”
“Can’t I stay like this? I can’t go anywhere.” Charlie tugs his ankle chain to prove its strength.
Adan hesitates. “Lie down.”
“I’m claustrophobic,” Charlie says. “I have asthma. I might have a panic attack.”
Adan looks puzzled, shakes his head.
“It makes me sick to chain me up,” Charlie says. “Sometimes I can’t breathe. This room is too small. It might give me asthma.” Adan looks no less confused so Charlie breathes shallow and rapid. “Asthma,” he says. “Like that.”
Now Adan looks worried, but this time when he shakes his head it means no. “Not the boss, Ben.”
Charlie says, “But . . . ,” and sees frustration flex in Adan’s jaw. He doesn’t like the position Charlie’s putting him in. Charlie makes a quick calculation to retain his goodwill. “I understand, Adan,” he says. “You’re doing your best.” He lies down and lets himself be chained, wrist, wrist, ankle.
Adan pats him on the leg when it’s done. “Be good,” he says. “Maybe they will change.”
“I will be good,” says sweet, compliant Ben Phillips, while Charlie Outlaw pictures the knife sunk to the bottom of the toilet tank like a clue in the aquarium in all kinds of movies. Charlie Outlaw wonders if he can really use it to escape. Charlie Outlaw wonders if there’s any chance on earth he can get back to Josie before they catch him, before they find the knife, before they figure out he lied.
III.
The need to be loved and protected is at a peak when we feel abandoned and are particularly vulnerable to difficult circumstances. Most people will have experienced something comparable more than once before they have finished their teens, so it should be relatively simple to find a transference for this reality.
—UTA HAGEN, A Challenge for the Actor
One.
The PA smokes a cigarette while he waits by the parking lot for Josie Lamar. He’s twenty-three and only recently took up smoking. It was part of fashioning his LA identity, shaking off the guy from Mayfield, Kentucky, who graduated from Murray State. And, yes, he sees the irony of avoiding tobacco in tobacco land only to succumb in the kingdom of self-conscious health, but his parents are religious, middle-class, small-town, hetero-normal conservatives, and his whole life until he came here was about pretending he was, too. Later, the habit will come to seem a grim enslavement, but that’s many years and personal ups and downs in the future. For now, he’s still young enough that smoking gives him that chin-lifted so-what feel of insouciant rebellion.
A car approaches, hesitates, and then turns into a spot a few spaces from where he stands. The PA—his name is Mason—sees the red hair of the woman at the wheel and knows this must be the actress he’s awaiting. He didn’t even know who Josie Lamar was until someone told him. He looked her up so he’d recognize her, and now he has seen photos of her at every age since she became famous and some from before (as one middle school and a couple of high school shots popped up in “Before They Were Famous” posts). He’s formed opinions about her various hairstyles and her fashion choices and the effects of aging on her face. Despite never having been even remotely famous himself, he feels superior to her because she’s not as famous as she once was. Don’t judge him too harshly, though, for the smug pleasure he takes in his own indifference. We’re so often helpless in the face of celebrity: helpless not to behave like malfunctioning robots in a famous person’s presence; helpless not to click on headlines as the stars romance, rehab, and reproduce. Perhaps it’s no wonder that we feel a small triumph about the ones we manage not to care about.
Mason doesn’t put out his cigarette or approach the car just yet. It’s his job to guide her to the stage, offer her coffee, take her into the conference room, be polite and welcoming, etc., and he’ll do all that, but he doesn’t have to hop to. He doesn’t have to stand there looking eager while she checks her face in the mirror. He wants to be a writer, and in modeling himself on this show’s writers, he’s imbibed their disdain for the actors—“those black holes of need,” the showrunner calls them. He’s filed away some of her other comments, too. “An actor and a writer are two people with guns at each other’s heads,” she said once. And another time: “An actor’s dream is a script with twenty-two characters, and you tell her she’s playing every one.”
Now the car door opens, and Josie Lamar gets out and spots him. “Are you here for me?” she asks, and though she says it with a smile and a pleasant tone, Mason feels a shiver of irritation. “I’m with You & Me,” he says. “I’ll take you to the stage.”
“Okay, great,” she says.
One thing does impress him about Josie Lamar, and that’s the fact that she got to make out with Max Hammons. She got to make out with him so many times! “I’m totally going to ask her about it,” he told his friend Alex—with whom he’s been intensely, and apparently unnoticeably, flirting—and Alex said, with crushing dismissiveness, “No, you’re not.”
Yes, he is. He’s determined to report back that he did, and his hilarious, titillating, victorious retelling will be the moment when the music changes and Alex Patroski sees him anew. He just has to find a segue.
Josie asks his name, and then repeats it aloud, and then repeats it a couple more times in her head. “Nice to meet you,” she says. Once upon a time, she was unerring with names, but as she crossed the border into forty, she seemed to leave that skill behind. And, my God, the last couple weeks—or longer?—she can’t remember anything for more than thirty seconds. She thinks, I should write that down before I forget, and by the time she’s grabbed her phone and clicked on Reminders, she’s already forgotten. It’s important to remember names. She knows how people interpret it when she can’t remember their names.
The PA—shit, she’s already forgotten—sets off at a brisk pace, and she follows him, not quite keeping up, which is fine because it removes the obligation to chat. Martin? Something with an M. This job is a guest spot on a sitcom—a multicamera comedy, staged like a play and filmed in front of an audience the way they’ve done it since Lucille Ball. It’s Josie’s first time on a comedy, let alone a multicam. She never would’ve auditioned for a multicam, knowing she’d either have to dazzle them out of their preconceptions or wait for the I-knew-it looks to appear, smug or polite or politely smug, when she proved to be just okay or even awful. It’s possible she’ll be awful on this show. They might be worried about that. God knows she is. But they wanted her anyway: They wrote the role for her, or at least that’s what the passion letter from the showrunner said.
She’s nervous about the table read, which is the only thing on the schedule for today, and though it’s not a particularly long walk from the parking lot to the stage, it feels like one as she picks up her pace, now, to catch up with this speedy PA. She’s beginning to feel tweaked by his pointed lack of interest in her. She stops walking. “Hey,” she calls, and then her brain helpfully supplies his name. “Mason.”
It takes him a second to turn, his mind obviously completely elsewhere, and when he does, he seems flustered to find her standing ten feet behind him. She puts her hands on her hips in a pose that Mason—had he ever seen an episode of Alter Ego—would recognize as her badass stance from the last shot of the credits. That’s right, Josie. That was you who struck that pose. “Are we late?”
He shakes his head as he walks back toward her. “Sorry,” he mumbles, and now he looks so abashed and young that she feels a modicum of shame for calling him out on being a dick even though the kid was definitely being a dick. Maybe it’s his f
irst day and he’s nervous. Maybe someone just chewed him out. Maybe his cat died.
“My mom always says I walk too fast,” he says. Granted, he didn’t exactly say it in a snarky way—more a weird combination of wistfulness and triumph—but that can’t have been an accident, that clichéd attempt at a jab. She dislikes him again. She’s nervous, and he’s making it worse. His mom. She probably could be his mom, too. Which is depressing. She’s nervous and depressed and angry at herself for letting a crack about her age sting. Exactly how you should feel before your first time ever on a comedy.
Now they’re walking again, more slowly than necessary, and whether Mason’s being considerate or pointed is difficult for Josie to determine. She gives up on trying, stares at her feet. Who cares. Who gives a shit. Life is fraught with pointless prickly encounters, hard little pings against your soft matter. A good actor is an instrument of exquisite sensitivity. It’s a difficult way to go through the world, registering every slight. Exposing yourself over and over, and then having people come at you eager for more exposure. Wanting to excavate.
Mason stops abruptly, and Josie looks up to see they haven’t yet reached the You & Me stage, the side of which features a giant billboard advertising the show. No, they’re standing outside the building next to it, which features a giant billboard advertising Max. She looks at Mason in bewilderment, then follows his gaze to see they’ve stopped at Max’s very parking spot, right by the stage and labeled with his name. Mason has brought her to Max’s parking spot. Why? Did Max ask him to? She has a giddy image of Max muttering, “Hey, kid,” from under a detective’s hat, pressing a folded twenty into Mason’s hand.
Of course she knew Max’s show shot on this lot, but she’s been trying not to wonder if she’ll run into him. She didn’t realize she’d be shooting right next door. He’s here—his car is in the spot. Well, she assumed he’d be here. He’s number one on the call sheet; he’s probably here from seven in the morning until nine at night. He’s probably here all the time. That doesn’t mean she’ll see him. Does she want to see him? Not exactly, and yet she knows she’ll be disappointed if she doesn’t.
Max’s car is a Mercedes SUV. No surprise there. That first year on Alter Ego, Max spent an outrageous portion of his income on a Range Rover so he had to go on crashing for months with his girlfriend and her three roommates or with whichever friend had thrown that night’s party. Alter Ego was Max’s first job. Before that, he’d been manning the front desk at a gym.
“What are we doing?” Josie asks.
“Um,” Mason says. Whatever attitude powered his various walking speeds seems to have abandoned him now. He looks stricken. Josie’s sympathy for him returns. Sometimes it exasperates her how easily her sympathies are stirred.
“Did you want to show me Max Hammons’s parking spot?” she asks patiently.
“I didn’t know if you knew he shot here,” Mason mumbles.
“Yeah, I knew,” Josie says. She gives him another beat to recover, out of baffled curiosity as much as kindness. Then she points at their destination and says, “Don’t we need to go there?”
He nods without looking at her and sets off again, fast as a race walker, before catching himself and slowing to a normal pace. Josie fights an urge to laugh and then another to glance back at Max’s car. She sighs inwardly, remembering what it was like to have her own parking spot right by the Alter Ego stage, her name on a sign. At first it was a thrill, and then it was routine, and then it was gone. It’s not the thrill she misses—it’s the routine. She feels a pang of longing at the thought of taking something for granted.
Mason continues twitchy and embarrassed all the way to the conference room, where tables are set up in a U-shape, place cards and small bottles of water at each chair. In the presence of his utter weirdness, Josie triumphs over her nerves, and there’s something that settles her, too, at the sight of her name on her place card. By the time Mason escorts her up to the showrunner, mumbling about what she’d like in her coffee and then scurrying away, she feels a queenly calm, which in turn makes her feel a tender gratitude toward him. When he hands her the coffee, she meets his eye and says, “Thank you, Mason.”
“You’re welcome,” he says, surprised by her sincerity into matching it.
Poor Mason. He won’t have any further alone time with Josie—when she arrives tomorrow and the rest of the week, she’ll need no escort from the parking lot—and he knows it and knows Alex was right that he wouldn’t have the balls to ask about Max. He retreats dejected to the back of the room, like a person who should just go on home to Kentucky.
The table read goes well for Josie, meaning that her lines get laughs. Predictably, appreciative surprise is a component of that laughter: No one really expects her to be funny. Even though she was funny on Alter Ego, people mostly remember the fighting and the crying. The first few times people laugh, her primary emotion is relief—she’s not awful!—but as the table read goes on, she starts to feel the happy buzz of pride. She’s good!
When it’s over, she pauses by the display of pastries and fruit and cookies and half sandwiches, suddenly starving. As she considers, the lead actress catches her there. Her name is Kirsten Campos. This Josie knows because she recognized Kirsten, not because Kirsten introduced herself. Kirsten doesn’t need to introduce herself, of course, and is aware of that, but the fact she didn’t enact the ritual of humble politeness says something about her, good or bad Josie isn’t yet sure.
“I’m such a fan,” says Kirsten Campos. “I was obsessed with Alter Ego.”
“Oh, thank you. That’s so nice.”
Behind them someone says, “We’re going to begin notes,” which Josie recognizes as the cue to leave even without Kirsten taking her arm in a light grip and guiding her toward the exit. She’s able to reach back and grab a sandwich and a piece of pineapple with what she fears is unseemly haste. Outside, the sun is stark and bright. A golf cart whizzes by, followed by a group of background performers decked out for the nineteen seventies. “Oh, I did an episode of that,” one says loudly. “They were so behind. I was there all night.”
“What show are they for?” Josie asks around a bite of pineapple. She’s really unbelievably hungry.
Kirsten gives a cursory glance over her shoulder, shrugs. “I’m so excited to have you here,” she says.
Josie nods, swallowing. “I’m excited to be here. I don’t get to do much comedy.”
“It was my idea. Is it really tacky of me to tell you that?”
“Not at all. Thank you. I’m having fun!” She holds up the sandwich. “Sorry about the face stuffing. I’m starving.”
“No worries,” Kirsten says, but then she watches with an odd expression as Josie takes a bite. “Did you know Max Hammons shoots here?”
“Yeah, yeah, I saw his car on the way in.”
“I have to admit, I always used to wonder if you two actually had a thing.”
“No, no, we didn’t.”
“Really? Not even a little bit of a thing?”
Josie has to make a decision. Another big bite of the sandwich gives her time to weigh the options. She doesn’t want to talk about Max. Or perhaps she does, but only with someone in sympathy with her—Cecelia or her therapist. Definitely not with a stranger whose face is agleam with prurient interest, Max himself somewhere nearby, close enough that she can imagine him popping into the frame with sitcom timing just as she utters some horribly embarrassing truth. But, newly revealed as the source of this job, Kirsten may be someone to keep firmly on Josie’s side.
This show is in its fourth highly rated season. When it began, all the power resided with the writers, not the then unknown actors, but now that it’s become a hit and made those actors stars, the power is theirs. This is the way of things. At first the actors had to say whatever lines were in the script even when those lines struck them as stupid or wrong and sent them home in impotent f
ury or this-show-is-killing-me creative despair; now they simply assert, “My character wouldn’t say that,” and the writer has to slink off in impotent fury or despair and make the change. If Kirsten likes Josie and wants to have her back, and Josie keeps getting the laughs, giving no one a reason to say no, then perhaps this could become a recurring gig. And then someone might think to cast her as a regular on a comedy. While she’d love a job on a smart single-camera, these old-school multicams have amazing schedules. It’s only 11:45 and the whole cast is already done for the day, which blows her mind.
Making these calculations in less time than it takes to describe them, Josie relaxes into a posture of conspiratorial friendliness. “Your marriage on this show,” she says to Kirsten, “does it ever feel a little like a real marriage?”
Kirsten rolls her eyes. “Totally.”
“So you know how it is.”
“But I mean, like, he annoys me like a real husband. You and Max, you had that whole Romeo and Juliet thing going.”
Josie lets a knowing smile overtake her face. “Exactly.”
Kirsten laughs, delighted and satisfied. She thinks Josie’s given her something though Josie has done her best not to. Nicely played, Josie. “You’ll see Max while you’re here, right?”
That it doesn’t seem to be a question for Kirsten makes Josie feel like it shouldn’t be one for her either. “I thought I might,” she says.
“Well, if you want, he usually plays basketball with his buddies every day right about now. I can show you where. A lot of people who visit me on set want to go get a look at him.”
