What You Don't Know About Charlie Outlaw

by Leah Stewart

  Five.

  For the next two days, nothing happens, a nothingness that weighs on Charlie even as it offers him relief. For Darius, the nothingness is unbearable. He dispatched a letter, made demands. Where is his response? His negotiator? There is not a single person in that house who doesn’t feel like a caged animal. This is a crucial fact novice kidnappers fail to consider, that they themselves will be held captive until the demands are met, the ransom paid.

  During that time, Charlie sees Mystery only once, when she comes to retrieve his bowl and gives him, as promised, a magazine. It’s a copy of People with a Real Housewife on the cover. “Thank you,” he says. “Thank you, thank you, oh my God.” He is fervent in part because he takes this as a sign that she didn’t notice the shavings, or that if she did she didn’t know their meaning, or that if she did know their meaning she kept it to herself. He clutches the magazine to his chest and closes his eyes as she leaves the room, feeling again his own terrifying vulnerability. He could weep and weep over this magazine. He could kiss the Real Housewife on the mouth. He reads the magazine all the way through from the first word to the last, lingering even over the ads. Finished, he starts again.

  While Charlie, poor Charlie, is in raptures, the happiest he’s been since the moment the cars pulled into the clearing and the people with the guns got out, Adan is in the bathroom trying without success to flush the toilet. He makes a sound of resigned irritation and lifts the heavy clanking lid from the tank. Adan is an upbeat person, an optimist, but even he is growing cranky, mostly in response to everyone else’s mood. He himself does not mind the situation. He likes taking care of Ben. He likes being part of a group. He likes that he is necessary. He sets the lid down and peers inside the tank, and right away he notices a foreign object in the tank, wavery through the water. He frowns, plunges his hand into the cold water, closes it around the knife. He holds it dripping above the tank and stares and stares. He wants to believe one of the others put it here, or that it’s been here all along, but he knows that’s not the case because he’s had to fix the problem in the toilet before, and the knife definitely was not there, and no one else in the house had a reason to hide it. Unbelievable as it seems to him, this knife is Ben’s.

  Why does the world do this to us, good in the left hand, bad in the right? Why couldn’t Charlie have had a little more time? He doesn’t know the conversation that’s taking place in the kitchen, his fate being decided, as Adan hands Darius the knife. Adan’s face shows dismay and betrayal to a degree that surprises Darius, who thinks that if he were held captive and he had a knife, he, too, would try to conceal it. “Well,” Darius says. “It’s good that you found this.”

  “How could he do that?” Adan shakes his head. “I treat him well. Don’t I treat him well?”

  “Of course you do,” Darius says, and then can’t resist adding, “Don’t you think you would do the same in his position?”

  Adan doesn’t seem able to hear this question, still shaking his head. “I treat him well.”

  Darius considers his options. His instinct is to throw the knife away, or perhaps keep it, say nothing, go on as before. Yes, why do anything else? He can have Adan pat the guest down again. Perhaps also Adan should check the room for signs that the guest used the knife somehow. Perhaps he should go back into his chains. He turns the knife over in his hands, admiring it. It looks expensive, with all its little gadgets. That is when Denise comes in. Darius stiffens, represses the urge to hide the knife. Why should he hide it from Denise? He’s the one in charge.

  She leans against the counter next to him, crosses her arms. She waits, her eyes pointedly on the knife in his hands.

  “Yes?” Darius asks, and then hates himself for letting her compel him.

  “We should teach him a lesson. He wants that knife, give it to him.”

  How did she know? Does she stand about eavesdropping in the hall? Creeping silently, imagining herself a guerrilla or a spy? “What good is he to us if our lesson kills him?”

  Denise scoffs. “I didn’t say kill him. I said cut him.”

  Darius shakes his head. “No.” He shakes his head again. He pushes on the little blade, feels its resistance, lets it stay open. Then he strides to Charlie’s room, bangs open the door. Charlie is where he often is, sitting by the crack in the window reading his magazine. When the door bangs open, he jerks up his head. Darius walks up to him with the knife open and Charlie braces. But Darius stops in the center of the room. He holds the knife out toward Charlie as one might hold out toward a child an item the child had broken. “No,” he says firmly. He brings his other hand forward and closes the knife. Now he holds it in both hands. He shakes his cupped hands at Charlie. “No,” he insists. Then he turns and goes.

  In the doorway, Denise moves aside to let Darius out of the room. She doesn’t look at him as he passes her; she moves only enough so that he’s forced to brush past her to escape. She keeps her gaze on Charlie. Charlie looks back at her. She doesn’t need to speak to convey her message: Things would’ve gone much worse for Charlie if she were the one in charge. Her eyes move to the magazine, and then with alarming swiftness she comes close and snatches it from his hands.

  Charlie cuts off his protest, fights the upwelling of anger and grief. Wouldn’t Denise love an excuse to hit him. Wouldn’t Denise love to see him cry.

  “This is mine now,” she says with a satisfied smile.

  Just like that, once again, Charlie has lost everything. The knife. The magazine. Mystery. Has he lost Mystery? Did she tell them about the knife or did someone find it? Who knows? For God’s sake, her name is Mystery.

  Hours go by before he sees anyone. He runs through his cache of favorite Josie memories: first meeting; first I love you; the time they saw a sea turtle while snorkeling in Hawaii and the rest of the day she’d suddenly beam at him and say, We saw a sea turtle; the time he cried while watching her shoot a sad scene even though he’d rehearsed this very scene with her six thousand times. She was just so good, he forgot he knew all the lines. He risks using up these memories, but they are the only things that keep him from collapsing into panic.

  When someone finally comes, it’s Adan. But Adan doesn’t say, “Hi, Ben!” Adan doesn’t smile. Charlie hadn’t even considered this—he’s also lost Adan. Adan thrusts his food at him without eye contact. He comes back later to take Charlie to the bathroom and refuses to let him in there alone. He stands behind Charlie waiting while Charlie urinates. Is this the greatest humiliation yet? Charlie has lost track.

  Back in the room, Adan once again fixing every one of his limbs to a chain, Charlie says, “Adan, talk to me,” but Adan shakes his head, won’t even look at him, and what the hell was Charlie planning to do? Explain, as though his desire for escape needs justification? Apologize? Adan leaves him alone in the dark, trembling with rage at them, at himself. He was about to fucking apologize. He could kill them all.

  Six.

  When the noise starts, he’s asleep, and his mind incorporates it into his dream: The shouting is an angry audience, the slamming door part of a set. But then the door to his room bangs open, and Adan is there, and then Adan is fumbling at his chains, and Charlie, nauseous from his abrupt reentry, says, “What? What? What?” and can’t think of anything else to ask, which doesn’t matter because Adan isn’t answering. Adan is breathing hard, wrenching at the chains like he can break them, and he’s set his gun on the ground, so Charlie might be able to grab it if he knew whether he should grab it. Should he grab it? On TV this would be an obvious choice, so it’s puzzling to Charlie how it doesn’t seem to be one. What would he do once he had it? Would he shoot Adan? Would he shoot them all? Could he do that before they shot him? He knows he couldn’t but believes he could. He’s done it before. Adan has one leg loose now and is at work on the other, fumbling the keys, muttering under his breath. Outside the noise grows louder. They all seem to be shouting. The other leg is loose, an
d Charlie still hasn’t decided, but it’s too late, because Adan picks the gun back up and starts slamming the butt against the boards on the window until he’s smashed one and then another. He wrenches them away, and then he breaks the glass, too, and knocks the shards out of the window frame with the gun. “Out, out!” he says to Charlie.

  “What’s happening?” Charlie asks.

  “They are coming,” Adan says. “Go, go, go.”

  This is a moment that Charlie will revisit over and over. Because when Adan says they, he thinks he means the other kidnappers. He believes that Adan has realized the absurdity of his resentment over Charlie’s desire to escape, feels such compunction that he’s going to help him. With a dreamer’s obedience to events, Charlie climbs out the window, then waits for Adan to tell him where to go. They are in a scrubby little yard, all brown grass and desiccated weeds, not the right yard for people who live in paradise, and at the back there’s a dilapidated doghouse, and behind it a fence. “Over,” Adan says, and then demonstrates, using the doghouse as a stepladder. Charlie imitates him. As he jumps down—now they’re in an alley, a fence on each side, above them a cat sleeping in a window—he hears the gunfire. “Why are they shooting?” he asks Adan.

  But Adan only looks incredulous and begins to run. Charlie runs after him. They sprint down the alley, dodging trash and low scrubby bushes, and then they are out into a street and still running. “Where are we going?”

  “We have a meeting spot,” Adan says. “In case, in case.”

  “Who’s we? In case of what?”

  “We,” Adan says. “We, we.” He makes a frantic circle in the air with one hand, and somehow from this Charlie understands what he means.

  “Wait,” Charlie says. “You mean the others?”

  “Yes, yes,” Adan says. “We have a place to meet. Emergency place.”

  “I thought we were running from them.”

  Adan frowns in confusion. “Not from them. From the police.”

  “From the police,” Charlie says. “We’ve been running from the police.”

  “Yes, they will shoot us.”

  “They won’t shoot me.”

  “They will, Ben. They will shoot us all.”

  Charlie takes a step back. “They won’t shoot me.”

  Adan’s expression shifts from urgent persuasion to wariness. “You come with me, Ben.”

  “They won’t shoot me,” Charlie says.

  Adan raises his gun. “They will shoot you.”

  “They won’t,” Charlie says, and he turns to run. Even as he runs, he’s bracing for impact because he doesn’t know, does he, whether a bullet is already coming. He gambles this way, running back in the direction of the house. He’s following his instinct, an instinct that says this is his best chance, but also, and perhaps more important, he’s angry. He’s as angry as though Adan were a longtime friend who deliberately played a wounding trick, a fan who turned nasty, a reporter who made him look a fool. In running, he’s saying, Fuck you, Adan, and he’s saying, Fuck you, Ben Phillips, you pathetic, agreeable pussy, thinking you’re kind when what you really are is weak, and I should have grabbed the gun, I should have grabbed the gun and shot them all. I am Charlie Outlaw, and I know how to do this. I know how to run when bullets are flying and not get hit, I never get hit, I’m the hero, and if I get hit, I’ll survive. I’ll survive, Josie. I’m coming. I’ll survive. I’ll survive.

  Only later will Charlie learn the context for the things that are happening to him right now. The police found the other house. All the hostages kept there have been released, all but one of the kidnappers captured, the last one killed. The kidnappers, being neither hardened nor particularly afraid of Darius, gave up the location of the house that contained Charlie.

  And now he’s free. He’s free and running, his legs already burning, his lungs burning, too, but at the moment, this is beneath Charlie’s notice. He hears sirens. He hears gunfire. He slows and looks around, suddenly not sure where to go. Around him, houses, plants, cars. Darius rounds a corner into his vision and runs right at him, and Charlie’s watching him approach with a furious terror on his face so he doesn’t see where the shots come from, but he does see Darius drop to the ground. All instinct, no thought, Charlie turns and runs, not toward anything, just away. Behind him he hears shouting, he hears more gunshots, and then from up ahead, he hears, “Ben! Ben! Ben!” and after a moment, he remembers that’s supposed to be his name. He swerves toward the sound and finds himself in another alley, or maybe the same alley, and when he sees Adan, his chest explodes in fragments of a terrible, desperate relief. “Behind me!” Adan says. Charlie ducks behind him, and Adan leans around the corner to fire wildly at whoever is firing at them. Then he says, “Come on, Ben, run!” and though, as they pelt down the alley and then down a street and another street and on and on, Adan is ahead of him, not looking back, Charlie has forgotten about escape. Charlie follows Adan. Charlie runs.

  V.

  The reality you create on the stage by threading a needle and sewing, or cleaning your glasses and putting them on, is not created so that the audience will believe in you; it is created so that you will believe in yourself.

  —STELLA ADLER, The Technique of Acting

  One.

  Josie is sequestered, like each of the other Alter Ego cast members who have recently arrived for the convention, in her own personal black Escalade with driver and bodyguard. At one point, on the way from the airport to the hotel, her bodyguard actually jumps out of the car and starts directing traffic. You have no jurisdiction here, Josie wants to shout, as she did during a procedural guest spot, playing a cop antagonistic to the heroes. Her bodyguard, Cyrus, is a retired policeman, an utterly humorless individual with an exhausting alertness, scanning the world. He keeps calling her “ma’am,” though she’d guess he’s at least ten years her senior. She’s persuaded he’s confused about her identity, thinks she’s a visiting dignitary under threat of assassination, queen of England or president of the world. She’s never played a politician. She auditioned for the role of a senator once, but she didn’t get the part.

  “Have you done a lot of this kind of work?” she inquires politely. They’re sitting at a stoplight, her bodyguard’s head literally swiveling in threat assessment. It seems rude to pull out her book or her phone, though she would dearly love to. How much farther can it possibly be to the hotel?

  “Yes, ma’am,” Cyrus says. He clamps his mouth shut, as though he fears she might tempt him to gossip.

  Don’t worry, guy. She’s not asking for an inside scoop. “I wondered what kinds of incidents occur,” she says. “When you have to intervene.”

  He keeps on sweeping for bombs. “You just don’t know, ma’am.”

  “You don’t have to worry so much with me. I’m not that famous.”

  He looks at her.

  “I mean, yeah, people used to mob me sometimes. But not now.”

  “Ma’am,” he says sternly.

  What is he scolding her for? Distracting him? Diminishing the threat? Diminishing herself? She’s just trying to be realistic here. No one is going to come leaping out at this car from the side of the road. How would anyone even know who was in here? “I’m just not sure what you’re expecting.”

  “I don’t know what I’m expecting either, ma’am,” he says. “But they pay me to be ready for it.”

  Ah. Josie surrenders. After they filmed the second season of Alter Ego, Josie and her boyfriend went to New York City. They’d just started airing the show; Josie and her boyfriend watched the third episode in a relatively inexpensive hotel room in the Financial District. This was before Twitter, before website comments. She had no idea that the cult had reached saturation level. They were in the Met when someone noticed her, and then there was a mob. She remembers how that felt—the press of bodies, the shrinking air, the heat, the panicked desire to escape. Al
l that love looked a lot like fury. She would’ve appreciated this guy’s presence then. But now. She doesn’t need him now! This is a ridiculous pretense.

  True, there’s been a sudden resurgence of internet interest in her, thanks to Charlie’s interview and that photo of her kissing Max, which was up within hours of it happening. But that’s not the kind of publicity that leads to being mobbed, not the kind she was hoping this convention would bring her. Maybe she was wrong not to bite the bullet on a publicist’s fee. A publicist would have had ideas for working that interest to her advantage.

  She wishes she didn’t have thoughts like that.

  As punishment, she returns, as she has many times since that night and that photo, to the well-worn track of Max-related worries. You can no doubt imagine some of the many questions and concerns and possibilities looping through her mind. Perhaps you can also imagine—if you’ve posted something on Facebook that pissed off your friend, if you’ve written an e-mail critical of your boss that got forwarded to your boss, if you’ve coyly mentioned a crush on Twitter and everyone knew exactly who you meant—how it complicates your personal life when it goes public. If Josie kisses Max and no one records it—it was such a small kiss!—then it’s easier for them both to pretend it didn’t happen, if that seems necessary. But now everyone knows it happened—and, oh, their insistent questions, so certain they have a right to know—and that means Josie has to answer to it for them and for herself. She can’t pretend it didn’t happen, and neither can Max. Max and Josie saw the picture, too.