by Leah Stewart
Josie doesn’t think. She stands there while her various forces gather—superhero and cop and high-powered lawyer, everyone she’s ever been. On film, the camera might spin around her, or many images of herself might succeed one another in a rapid montage. Throwing a punch. Staring a bad guy down. “All right,” she says.
Six.
Thomas is gone. He slipped away in the night, when he was supposed to be on guard duty, while Denise and Adan were fast asleep. Denise can’t believe he’s really had the temerity to leave and take most of their food supply with him. She expresses her conviction that he wouldn’t dare with force and repetition, as if force and repetition were sufficient to make her right. Adan makes murmuring sounds of agreement, trying not to give her a reason to make him the target for her anger. She paces. She goes into the jungle, and he doesn’t watch what she does there, but from the sounds, he’d say she’s attacking a tree. He is used to Denise being calmly and scornfully certain. It’s unsettling to imagine her otherwise, so he pretends to himself that Denise still knows what she’s doing.
Is it because he’s afraid of Denise that he went along with this plan, continues to go along? Or because he loves her? She’s been his older sister all of his life. He’s never been able to tell the difference.
Maybe now Denise will decide that they, too, should leave. That is the best outcome he can envision, and if it happens, he will be forever in Thomas’s debt.
He goes over to see if Ben—Charlie—is still breathing. Yes, he can make out the faintest movement in his chest. The magazines that got Charlie into trouble are in a pile under the hammock where Adan put them. He crouches to pick up the one from the top of the stack, which happens to be the one with the picture of Charlie Outlaw in it. He studies the man in that photo, who is strikingly tall and walking with confidence, and then he looks at the man in the hammock, who is bruised and thin and shabby and can make you believe, when you look at him, that he is in the process of dissolving. What is the point of being an American star if you can still end up like this? Adan shakes his head over the strangeness of it all, the fact that these two men could be the same.
IX.
SOCRATES: I wish you would frankly tell me, Ion, what I am going to ask of you: When you produce the greatest effect upon the audience in the recitation of some striking passage . . . are you in your right mind? Are you not carried out of yourself, and does not your soul in an ecstasy seem to be among the persons or the places of which you are speaking. . . .
ION: That proof strikes home to me, Socrates. For I must frankly confess that at the tale of pity my eyes are filled with tears, and when I speak of horrors, my hair stands on end and my heart throbs.
—PLATO, Ion
Get up!” Denise says. “Get up! Get up!” She screams in his face. Charlie hears it as if from very far away because he is dead. He doesn’t feel the pain in his nose, the pain in his chest, the hunger, the fear, because the dead feel nothing. Once you’re dead, what is there to fear? Even someone like Denise can’t hurt you anymore. He is better at dying than anyone he knows. Josie once challenged him to prove this, and he died for her, not even closing his eyes but emptying them of life for the extra challenge, and she hated it, because he was so good that for a moment she believed him. She said, “All right, you win,” and when he wouldn’t stop, she punched him in the arm, and said, “Live!”
Denise and Adan engage in a long and voluble discussion, Denise’s voice rising and rising while Adan’s grows softer. What does Charlie care about the arguments of the living? They yell, they whisper, they attempt to persuade. It all takes so much effort. Being dead is easy. If he concentrates hard enough, he doesn’t even have to breathe.
More discussion, then rustling sounds, then Adan’s light touch on his arm. None of it moves him or causes him to move. Denise speaks rapidly, insistently, Adan no longer answering back. None of it has anything to do with him.
At some point, he realizes that the voices have stopped, but this could be a trick meant to reanimate him, so for a long time he goes on being dead. Eventually he can’t ignore that there is a new quality to the stillness. He hears nothing but the sound of waves, some faint birdsong from the jungle. He is thinking, he is noticing, and against his will, this brings him back to life. This happens in stages. First, he opens his eyes. Above him he sees nothing but the same trees he’s been seeing all along. Then slowly, slowly, he shifts his eyes to the side where normally he would see some sign of Denise or Thomas or Adan. He sees nothing. There is no hammock strung up where Adan’s has always been. As he realizes that, he loses some of his caution and turns his head. Still nothing. Just the depressions they have left in the ground, a few scattered pieces of trash. Are they gone?
He sits up, swaying his hammock violently, and feels a rush of dizziness. Are they really gone? Is this a trick? Are they really gone? He closes his eyes, breathes slowly through his nose, trying to conquer the dizziness. Something fell from his lap when he sat up. Slowly he eases himself out of the hammock. His legs wobble as though they’ve never before supported his weight. He has thought in the past—after illness, after a long day shooting an action scene, after a three-hour workout to keep his camera-ready abs—that he was exhausted and weak. He has never felt like this. He crouches to see what fell and finds a wrapped piece of beef jerky. Adan must have left it for him. All the other supplies are gone.
He takes a couple of halting steps, leans against a tree. Minutes pass, and there is no sound. He begins to believe. They are gone. They are gone! If he wasn’t so recently dead, he might be able to summon joy.
Or at least joy is what he imagined he’d feel when he so heartily wished for their absence. Now that they’re gone, he realizes what he should have realized before, that without them he is alone. He is alone. He has no food. He has no water. He has no means of returning to the world. He is weak and incapable of making the hike even if he had a guide. He wanted to send away his captors and he did. Now that he is alive again, he has no one to keep him that way.
There is always a price for getting what you want.
On stumbling feet, he makes his way down the beach until there is nowhere left to go. He sits in the sand. He no longer has his towel. Perhaps they took that, too, but how could a sunburn matter now? He is glad for this time alive without them even if it will not last. He feels the sand settle beneath his weight. He watches the ocean. He watches it without internal comment, without metaphor, without meaning. He watches the waves and he hears the sounds they make. It strikes him that this is all that’s meant by transcendence. The trouble with transcendence is that as soon as you name it it’s over. With that thought, he remembers himself.
He turns the piece of beef jerky around and around in his hands. The last food he’ll eat might be a food he doesn’t eat. He wonders how long he has, how long he can eke out of the jerky and the fruit he can find in the jungle. He would like it to be a long time. He would like it to be forever. He would like to go home. He would like to tell Josie he loves her. He would like that baby to be his.
Terror and grief, he thinks. Terror and grief. He remembers himself attempting Shakespeare back in college, failing to summon Richard II by failing to summon what Richard felt. His kingdom was gone, he’d lost, he’d likely die. Charlie would like to go back and try the scene again. Of comfort no man speak. He knows how he’d say that line now. He remembers the whole speech, and he recites it here at the edge of the world. For you have but mistook me all this while, he says, and the tears just come, like they’re supposed to, not forced, not conjured by the will, but real, real, real, all of it is real.
X.
The approach to drama and tragedy, or to comedy and vaudeville, differs only in the given circumstances which surround the actions of the person you are portraying. In the circumstances lie the main power and meaning of those actions. Consequently, when you are called upon to experience a tragedy do not think about your emotions at all
. Think about what you have to do.
—CONSTANTIN STANISLAVSKI, An Actor Prepares
One.
Mystery has an air of command at the wheel of the boat. Perhaps this quality is not innate to Mystery but to the steering of a boat. Anyone looks confident keeping a boat on course, cutting the ocean into crisp lines. Thoughts like this are a bulwark between Josie and her fears. Her fear for Charlie and her fear for herself and her fear for their baby and the rage and horror that return every time she remembers the image of her beloved’s battered face. Yes, that is why Bronwyn was so full of wry asides. Josie knows that, having known everything about what it was to be her. People sometimes ask Josie what she thinks happened to Bronwyn after the show’s conclusion, and Josie makes up a gratifying lie or asks them what they think and listens politely. The truth is that Josie can’t imagine Bronwyn going on without her. The show ended, and Bronwyn went to sleep. Let’s wake her now, let’s put her on this boat where Josie needs her to be and tell all the people that she is doing what she was born to do, which is to save the world. Once you do that job, you define yourself by it. That is not a job you quit. Josie can go willingly into danger to rescue someone she loves. She has done it many times.
But she feels no certainty. She is beset by doubt. She remembers how momentous it seemed to pass up one drink for the baby, and what she’s doing seems crazy, crazy, crazy. The only certainty she has is that she has no other plan. She believes Mystery when she says that if Josie goes to the police Charlie is as good as dead.
Look at Mystery at the wheel of the boat. She is the picture of certainty. She is so certain that the kidnappers will be gone that she has repeatedly dismissed Josie’s efforts to discuss what will happen if they’re not. “I waited long enough,” she repeats, with weary firmness, when Josie brings it up again now.
“But—”
Mystery shifts irritably, and the boat wavers. “If they are there, I say I sent ransom, and they write back Charlie must see doctor. I say you are doctor.”
“And then what?”
“You say he must go to hospital, we must take him in boat.”
“You think that will work?”
Mystery shrugs. “You are actor.”
She is actor! So, of course, she can be anything.
“What if it doesn’t work? What if they just try to take me hostage, too?”
Mystery sighs. She says, with reluctance, “I have a gun.”
Is it because she has lived so many scenes like this before that Josie is able to remain calm? “You have a gun.”
“Yes, because Denise have gun.” Mystery looks at Josie’s face and sighs again. “They cannot keep you there, you and Charlie and also them. I bring no new supplies. They have no food. Do not worry. They must leave.”
Mystery has a gun. Is this reassuring or the opposite? Josie moves away from her, to the back of the boat, and trains her gaze on the water. She thinks of something Cecelia once said to her, when one of them, she can’t remember who, was struggling to recover from a particularly wrenching scene. “Actors spend their lives going to places other people avoid.” Oh, Cecelia! What Josie wouldn’t give to have her there right now, wearing one of her character’s authoritative suits.
Bronwyn felt certainty. Once she committed to a course of action, she never looked back. Maybe that was the wrong way to play her. Or maybe it wasn’t—maybe Josie just needs to allow certainty, needs to allow the blessed release of doubt. Mystery’s plan seems insane and also like something that might work on TV. We breathe life into art, and then we reverse the flow.
In normal circumstances, Josie loves a boat ride. Growing up on the plains in New Mexico, she had little opportunity for water travel. In fact, she’d never been on a boat before she moved to LA. Now she’s been on many. She’s been on tours where you see the land from the boat—the white cliffs of Dover and the Na Pali Coast of Kauai and the lighthouses of New England—and that’s fine, she enjoys that, but what she really loves is being in the middle of the ocean, surrounded by water, no land in sight. She always moves to the back of a boat, removing the human from view so she sees only the glistening expanse. She chooses the back instead of the front because she likes to watch the wake, evidence of their passing, quickly erased. Watching the water, she is able to do what she can never do in any formal attempt to meditate: observe and not think. The patterns of color made by clouds here, partial clouds there, clear sky there, gray and muted blue and brightest blue, a conversation between water and light. The jewel-like gleam of a crest under the sun, seeming for a moment carved of crystal, permanent, its loveliness heightened by the fact that its permanence is an illusion. It exists and is perfect and then vanishes—beautiful, then gone, whether anyone saw it or not.
What is on her mind right now is too much for even the ocean to overcome. But she tries. She watches the water. She at least remembers calm. Breathe, breathe, breathe, Josie. Then move to the front of the boat and look at where you’re going instead of where you’ve been.
She rejoins Mystery at the front. Mystery smiles at her. “I wonder,” she says. “What will you name your baby?”
“I don’t know. How did you get your name?”
“My parents.”
“It’s an unusual name.”
“No. Not so unusual.” She doesn’t elaborate. After a moment, she says, “Do you hope for boy or girl?”
“I think I would be happy with either.”
“Charlie will be very happy.”
“Do you have any children?”
Mystery’s face closes. She doesn’t answer.
Does she have a child-related tragedy in her past? Is Josie’s pregnancy why she’s willing to help them now? Josie looks at Mystery and sees a person she doesn’t know, to whom she has committed her life, and Charlie’s, and the life of their child. Does she want to know more? Does she want her backstory, her motivation, her object? Perhaps it’s better to take Mystery on faith.
Mystery leans toward her to place a palm on Josie’s stomach, like someone warming her hand. “Ah,” she says tenderly, though there is nothing yet to feel.
Two.
They’ve been walking about an hour when Denise changes her mind. She doesn’t bother to explain herself to Adan. Denise is not one for explanations. She just stops. She is in the lead, so Adan stops, too. Then she turns and pushes past him, back the way they came.
There is a moment when Adan considers rebellion. He doesn’t want to go back. He was so relieved when she decided to leave, so thankful that Mystery hadn’t appeared before the decision was made. He was nervous the whole time they debated and packed, listening for the sound of the boat, which might arrive at the last minute to keep them there. Then he was relieved again when she decided not to kill Ben/Charlie. Though things will be no better for them at home than they were before, they will unquestionably be better than slowly starving on a beach, watching a man will himself toward death. She said they would go, and he felt a new rush of love and faith. At moments like that, an optimist feels his worldview affirmed. Now, at the sight of her returning to her folly, he feels all the worse for having believed it would be otherwise.
He doesn’t know what she has in mind, but it can’t be good. Either she’s decided to kill Charlie instead of letting the world do the work for her, or she’s decided to recommit to the ransom plan, which Adan knows—for the first time he fully admits this knowledge—is bound to end in disaster because Denise is in charge. Maybe it would’ve worked out with Darius, who had the strength to be reasonable. But Denise will screw it up no matter what. She will murder Charlie or she will demand so much money that the negotiations will last the length of a siege or she’ll alienate Mystery so entirely that she never comes back with supplies, which is perhaps what’s already happened. Adan does not have to follow her. He knows the way home. He carries more than half the remaining supplies.
Why does he follo
w her? He is a compliant, empathetic person, someone who wants people to like him, who hates to say no, who doesn’t want Denise to fail or be furious, who doesn’t want Charlie to die. It takes an enormous act of will to be other than we are, which is perhaps what we mean by fate. His moment of rebellion is so brief that Denise doesn’t notice it happened.
Three.
There,” Mystery says, and points.
Josie sees a small curve of beach enclosed by trees, white sand, no figures yet visible on it. From here, it looks very pretty, a place you might be delighted to find, a picture of secluded paradise that belongs on a glossy calendar. “I don’t see anyone,” she says.
Mystery hands her a pair of binoculars. Through them, Josie sees trees then, with a quick downward correction, sand, then sand and sand and sand. “I don’t see anyone!” she repeats, her voice full of accusation. “You think they might have taken him?”
Mystery looks worried. “He is too weak,” she says. “Look back, back in the trees. They sit back. In shade.”
Josie trains the binoculars on the trees at the back of the beach, but all she sees are trees. She takes a breath and concentrates on a systematic search. They are getting even closer and so are the things through the lenses. She tries to move the binoculars in steady lines down the beach. A half-remembered fact floats through her mind, something about how the eye sees, how it skips over some of the picture.
Then his face fills her vision.
Charlie’s face.
On it an expression that mingles hope and fear. He is looking at the boat.
