A Perfect Universe

by Scott O'Connor

  Three weeks later he was on set, baking in the desert in the impossible costumes, the helmets, the boots and gloves. Trying to get into his character amidst all the distractions, the gigantic cast and strange vehicles and hundreds upon hundreds of takes. At night he sat in his motel room, stripped naked in the heat, reading the script and trying to inhabit this man, Dean, a scientist, a pioneer courageous enough to leave every certainty behind, to follow his ideas and passions to an unknown world. It was a leap for George; he had never thought of himself as brave, as someone who sacrificed for a dream. But finally, late one night in the delirious heat, exhausted, nearly defeated, he realized that this is exactly who he was, who he had willed himself to be. This is what he was doing with his own life. He had moved to Los Angeles, he had auditioned and waited tables and endured rejection and indifference, he had already taken that leap, and finally he was here, Dean was here, to make something of that dream.

  The shoot ended in mid-autumn, the first week of colder nights. George returned to his apartment early one evening and set down his suitcases and turned on every light in the place, a boy afraid of the dark. How small and bare it seemed now, the stale air, the windows that shook in their casings when a bus passed on the street below. He felt as if he had become a different man in the vastness of the desert. These were now a stranger’s rooms.

  He turned and walked back out, driving aimlessly, eventually ending up in Los Feliz at the storefront theater where he had taken acting classes since first arriving in town. He was welcomed like a visiting dignitary. Other students crowded around, asking for details from the set. They wanted to know what it was like to finally achieve what they were all striving for.

  George didn’t know what to say. He was surprised by how disarmed he felt. The richness of the experience in the desert had started to fade as soon as he’d returned to L.A., like a hallucination, or a mirage. The finished film wouldn’t arrive for months; he had no proof yet of what he had done out there, what they had made. So instead, he related little bits of petty gossip—who was difficult to work with, who was sleeping with whom—and when the excitement died down he sat alone in the last row, trying to fade back to anonymity. He watched the exercises and scene work, feeling so out of place, so alien, and then a young man, a new student, crossed to the center of the stage and gave his name.

  George could still recall James in those first moments: tall and slim, with dark eyes and darker hair combed back from his high forehead. He looked like a Wall Street wonder boy, or what George imagined a Wall Street wonder boy might look like. A junior executive from some 1950s car ad, gleaming, precise, confident. It was as if he had stepped out of George’s childhood memory, one of his father’s polished colleagues stopping by the house after work for a drink.

  George watched, enraptured, for the rest of the night. He was captivated by James’s composure in a scene or a Meisner exercise, standing face-to-face with another student, each repeating what the other said until boredom or emotion drove one of them to change the inflection or phrase. James was fearless. Nothing fazed him: displays of affection, revulsion, anger. He knew who he was, and was unafraid to let others see.

  George continued to attend class, partly because he was feeling uncertain again about his abilities, but mostly to see James. As the weeks went on, they began sitting together in the theater, then they were going for coffee after, gossiping about the other students or their instructor, a woman more than twice their age who was rumored to have once dated Cary Grant. But despite their growing connection, neither of them made a move. It seemed to George as if James was waiting for him to act first, as if James expected to be pursued, but George held back. The confidence he had found in the desert was wearing off. He was reverting, turning back to who he’d been before.

  One night they ran into each other at a club in Silver Lake. Both were with other groups of friends, and surprised to encounter one another. It was the first time George had seen James blush. By the end of the evening, they were both drunk, sitting together at the bar. James leaned in and told George that he had a confession to make.

  “I’ve been waiting for you to ask the right questions.” He yelled to be heard above the Bee Gees on the bar’s overdriven sound system. “But I might die of old age first, so I’ll just come clean.” He put his arm around George’s shoulder and smiled. “I’m not an actor,” he said. “I’m a grad student at UCLA. Psychology. I’m taking the acting class for a project I’m working on.” George could feel James smile as his lips brushed George’s ear. “It’s an undercover mission.”

  George turned to look at James, surprised. James was such a good actor.

  “Now you’re going to out me,” James yelled. He leaned in close again. “What do I have to do to keep you quiet?”

  * * *

  At night now, when he didn’t have the late shuttle shift, George sat at the desk in his bedroom and used his aging computer to search online. His agent had been right: The movie was disappearing. Each time he looked, fewer search results surfaced. Clips and scenes and trailers had vanished. Scanned pages of the script, production designs, photographs of the actors in their costumes—one night he was able to access them, the next they were gone. He thought of saving what he could still find onto his hard drive, but it seemed a futile gesture. Who would he be saving it for? Who would care to see?

  One night, a week past the call from his agent, the search engine returned nothing but other meanings of the movie’s title, sites for Greek mythology and menus from seaside restaurants. George continued clicking, almost in a panic, finally finding a reference several pages deep—an old, scathing newspaper review from that summer, a discovery that once would have saddened or enraged him, but which now brought a small, desperate feeling of relief. George left the review up on his screen, watching it from his bed like a nightlight.

  The next morning, George woke to find his screen darkened with its own sleep. When he clicked it awake and refreshed the browser, the review was gone.

  * * *

  James was having problems with his roommates and had moved out of his place in Westwood. He spent a week or so on various friends’ couches before George asked him to move into the apartment on Franklin.

  They did some redecorating, buying a few prints for the walls, movie one-sheets from Rebel Without a Cause and Blow-Up. James picked out throw rugs, adjusted the angles of the furniture, covered the television with a red chenille throw and set a potted cactus on top. James didn’t care for TV; it was movies that he loved. Movies were art to James, or at least held the possibility of art. They left an impression in the world, created a communal experience, people sitting together in a dark room, sharing focus.

  Their first argument occurred when George told James that he couldn’t bring him along to the movie’s premiere. “Can’t or won’t?” James had asked. “Both,” George said. He was anxious not only about finally seeing the film, but about the attention it might bring, the cameras and questions. His career was just getting started, and it would be too much to have to explain who James was—a friend, not a date.

  “Is that what we are?” James said. “Friends?”

  “It’s not the same for you.”

  “What does that mean?” James raised his voice. “That because I’m not in a movie, I’ve got nothing at risk?”

  “That’s not what I said.”

  “I’m asking you to be brave. To be honest.”

  “It’s not that easy,” George said.

  “I didn’t say it was easy.” James turned back to the magazine he was reading, briskly flipped a page. “You’re afraid,” he said, lifting his eyes back up to George, challenging. George looked away and said, “I guess you just know me so well.”

  At the premiere, George walked the red carpet, smiling away questions about his bachelor status, rumors he was dating the film’s lead actress. When the curtain opened and the studio’s logo appeared onscreen, he quietly left the auditorium, too nervous to watch. Out in the lobby,
he spent the evening talking to the concessions staff, waiting for the auditorium doors to open at the end of the show. He tried to imagine the crowd pouring out, ebullient, buzzing, high from the experience.

  Instead, when the movie was over, the audience filed out quietly, their heads down, avoiding eye contact. George accepted compliments from studio executives and other cast members, but their praise felt forced and insincere. In a corner of the lobby, two producers began a heated discussion that quickly turned into a shouting match. They had to be pulled apart by their assistants. The room emptied. It seemed no one could leave too quickly, could create enough distance between themselves and what they had seen on the screen.

  When he returned to his apartment that night, the rooms were dark. James was already asleep, or pretending to be. George turned on a light in the living room and opened the script, his constant companion during the months in the desert. A block of white paper shot through with magenta pages, lime, goldenrod, the rainbow colors of revision, delivered every morning on set from one of the director’s assistants.

  George didn’t know what the audience had seen in the theater, but he knew what they should have seen. What he had seen, finally, after wrestling with it for so long, the days under the unrelenting sun, the sleepless nights in the motel room. He sat with the script and began reading from the beginning, imagining the theater dimming at the title page, the audience’s conversation receding to murmurs, then the curtain opening, the projector’s light shining in the dark.

  * * *

  “You look familiar.”

  The man was George’s age, late fifties, Latino, dressed for business in a sleek gray suit, his black Oxfords gleaming with an airport shine. He looked up into the shuttle’s rearview from his seat behind George. Their eyes met and George looked away.

  “I get that a lot.”

  The man said, “An actor?”

  George shook his head.

  The man squinted back up into the mirror, refusing to let it go.

  “Somebody famous?” he said. “From a long time back?”

  Something caught George’s eye then, a word on a theater marquee on the opposite side of Santa Monica Boulevard. It pulled his attention from the road, the changing traffic light. He recovered at the last moment, kicking for the brake pedal, missing, then kicking again and connecting, locking the tires and sliding the last few feet to the lip of the intersection.

  “Jesus Christ!” The businessman struggled to connect his seatbelt across his lap.

  When the light changed again, George pulled a quick U-turn and drove back on the other side of the street. He parked at the curb and stared at the entrance to the small theater. He’d been right: The phrase he’d seen spelled out in flimsy plastic letters across the center of the marquee was Diomedes-1. In the original Thalassa, that was the name of his—Dean’s—spaceship.

  “What the hell are you doing?” the businessman said.

  Instead of a movie poster, a large sheet of white paper hung beside the box office window. Diomedes-1 had been spray-painted through a stencil across the top, guerrilla-art style, and at the bottom was a small drawing of a spaceship, hurtling through the vast white void. Another strip of paper was fixed to the bottom of the makeshift poster, a single string of handwritten dates and times.

  The decoy title was code, George realized. The original movie was here, somehow, playing twice a night, this week only.

  “Hey!”

  The voice jolted George back. He looked up into the rearview mirror. The businessman was strapped tightly to his seat, his expression teetering between panic and anger.

  “Are you taking me home,” the businessman said, “or not?”

  * * *

  That summer, just before the original movie’s release, George rented a house on Cape Cod. It was George and James and their friends Eric and Ted, another couple from acting class who had welcomed George warmly when he was a new student. George paid for the house and the plane tickets, an extravagant gesture, the biggest expenditure of his life to that point. He described it as a celebratory vacation, but what he really wanted was to be away from Los Angeles when the movie opened. He had learned from the audience at the premiere—he was trying to create distance.

  The house was just as the owner had described it over the phone, a big weather-beaten box looking out over a long green strip of marsh. The owner was a man in his fifties who seemed the human equivalent of the house: salty and rough-hewn, his face creased from sun and wind. He met them in the gravel driveway and led them on a tour, mostly, it seemed to George, to make the ground rules clear. No loud parties. No drugs. And stay out of the marsh, he said, standing before the French doors at the back of the house, pointing out past the high green reeds to a small cove beyond. A pair of wooden chairs sat arm-to-arm out at the water’s edge. All of that, the owner said, belongs to a very private and protective neighbor.

  George and James had been on delicate footing since the premiere. The connection between them had been bruised; a dark spot, sore to the touch. James was drawn to conflict, ready for a fight until he was injured, and then he retreated, shutting down almost completely. When James was in that state, George could feel nothing from him. It was as if, in James’s eyes, he no longer existed. George would have to draw James back then, slowly, carefully, always with the sense that if he pushed too hard or fast, James would take that final step away.

  Slowly, they eased into the pelagic rhythms and routines of vacation. The previous summer’s renters had left behind tubes of paint and a pile of small, blank canvases, so in the mornings, while George stretched out on the love seat in the living room and worked through the shelves of maritime-themed novels, James created a new character for himself, a pretentiously successful landscape artist, attempting to paint the scene beyond the open doors. After lunch they floated in the tidal pools at Skaket Beach, or rented bikes and rode the trail up to the bluffs, walking through the tall grass, looking out at the sea. Sometimes Eric and Ted joined them; sometimes they went their own way. In the afternoons they all reconvened on the back deck for drinks, everyone coming up with increasingly outlandish stories about the unseen neighbors and their forbidden chairs.

  Neither George nor James mentioned their argument over the premiere, but time and distance from the scene of the fight seemed to soften James’s anger. He began a portrait of George, though his figure paintings were worse than his landscapes. They laughed about the finished canvas, George as an indistinct blob on the couch holding a book with a majestically masted clipper on its cover. At least I got the boat right, James said.

  They went to bed early; they slept late. They spent hours in the fluffy, oversoft four-poster. Everything in their bedroom was white, the walls and ceiling, the bedclothes, the chairs and dressers. In the mornings, the room blazed with light.

  Lying in bed, they played a game called Future Tense; James’s invention. What they saw for themselves in five years, ten, fifty. Inconceivable, the lengths of the lives then before them.

  “You’ll star in a sequel to the movie,” James said. “Then another, and another. You’ll produce, then direct. You’ll stand at the podium at the Academy Awards, and blow me a kiss on national TV.”

  “All your fantasies are of me,” George said. They lay shoulder-to-shoulder, thumbs hooked, looking up at the ceiling fan’s languid spin.

  “Yes,” James said. “They are.”

  Someone had tracked a child’s growth on the doorframe. Pencil marks climbed the white molding, short horizontal lines like railroad ties. Knee height to college, it looked like, a fifteen-year span. The highest mark was fairly recent, and written in another hand. The young man finally recording his own height.

  “This is our house,” James said one morning, during a game of Future Tense. He was sitting on the edge of the bed, looking at the doorframe. George lay spread out behind him, a forearm shading his eyes from the sun. They’d forgotten to pull the curtains the night before.

  “This is our h
ouse,” James said, “and that’s our son. We’ve lived here for twenty years. We drove him to college last weekend. You cried all the way home.”

  George punched him gently in the ribs. James gave an overdramatic wince.

  “Is that so impossible?” James asked.

  “Yes,” George said. Then, “No.”

  He opened his fist, laying his hand on James’s side, palm against skin.

  James put his finger to his lips.

  “Shhhh,” he whispered. “Listen. It’s so quiet in the house now.”

  * * *

  Every evening after his shuttle shift, George sat in his car across the street from the theater on Santa Monica Boulevard. A handful of people went in for each show, young men mostly, some wearing T-shirts commemorating other, better-known science fiction films from the era.

  George had never seen the movie. He’d thought that in time he might come through the other side of the numbness that suffocated him after Cape Cod, and then he would be ready to see it. But he never came through, not completely, and when he could finally see anything on the other side the movie was gone. It had surfaced a few times over the years, and when it appeared he attacked it in whatever form he found it, surprising himself with his ferocity.

  Once on his way to a supermarket checkout, he passed a bin of bargain VHS tapes, a jumble of low-budget movies in cheap cardboard sleeves. He had stopped, almost instinctively knowing what he would find inside. He dug up ten copies of the movie. The cover on the sleeve was not the original poster, but some new, poorly executed artwork that emphasized the boy who had played George’s son and had gone on to a moderately successful TV career. The sticker price on each copy was less than the box of cereal George carried in his other hand. He bought all ten tapes, then carried them to the alley behind the supermarket, where he stomped each plastic case apart, pulling free the long ribbons of tape.