Unraveling

by Owen Thomas

  “There’s always a choice, Dave.”

  I ignore the invitation to ask her what the hell she is really getting at. Pithy wisdom at this point promises annoyance rather than anything revelatory.

  The sun is an ebbing glow from well beneath the horizon; a brooding memory of a day without much brightness. My spirits are congealing into a muddy purple gunge.

  “Where to?” she asks. “Wanna go someplace? Talk? Drink? Pool?”

  “Pool?”

  “Bowling? Darts? Strip-clubbing? Putt-putt? Tennis? Nascar?”

  “Nah. I gotta get home. Start working on my jingle.”

  We ride in silence. She eventually turns on the radio to compensate for my lack of companionability. It’s a country cover of Ray Charles. I know it’s true, he twangs. Into each life, some rain, rain must pour… It puts me in the mood to drink and I almost change my mind and tell Caitlin to steer towards someplace with dark, smoky booths and low music. But against my unspoken urging, the moment and its impulse pass. The silence between us has become a hardening cocoon and I cannot pull myself from the window. The surface of Ohio slips beneath us, mile after mile, like a darkening, spot lit lake, as if in pulling over and stopping on the side of I-70 we might just sink beneath the surface.

  When we reach the boundaries of my neighborhood it is the sense of cold, moldy, left-over dread that threatens to overtake me. I strangely miss the adrenalin-soaked moments; those times when things are happening so fast, even terrible things, that the mind is completely occupied with trying to keep its grip and has no opportunity for full or meaningful comprehension; no opportunity to dwell, in any sensorial or deeply emotional way, on just how fucked up things really are. Once the adrenalin of the moment has subsided, then we get the stench of detail and the big picture of life that lies rotting like a corpse on the living room floor, waiting to be understood. I’ll take the panic. I miss the adrenalin like a drug that makes everything else fade away. I’ll take anything but the corpse and the smell of dead fish.

  I am wrong, of course. The shallow, uncomplicated distraction of panic is appreciated only in its absence. We are all deathly allergic to panic in the moment. We will wish and pray for anything else in its place, even having to comprehend the cold and rotting corpse of the big picture.

  I realize this – my adrenals flushing their toxin once more – as we approach my car, which is still at the curb, and my driveway, which is not the empty slab of concrete that it should be. The lamp above my front door still needs to be replaced and fails to illuminate the man beneath it, who is nothing but shadow.

  But I would know that silhouette anywhere. Like it was my own.

  CHAPTER 55 – Tilly

  Elle?

  Mm?

  If we stay…

  Alan…

  I know. But if we stay…

  Okay… if we stay…

  Let’s get married.

  Married?

  Yes.

  Why?

  Because I love you. Because I can’t until we’re done and back. I can’t wait eight years.

  You’d still have me.

  Not the same.

  You realize the odds are that the crops…

  I know.

  And that both crews are probably turning right around going home in a year.

  But if we stay…

  If we stay… maybe. I’d have to resign my commission. Rules are rules.

  Would you? For me, would you? Elle?

  For you? Yes. For you, Alan, I believe I would do anything.

  Do you want children? Don’t laugh. I’m serious.

  I know you’re serious. What makes you think I’m not sterile?

  Because you’re a general’s daughter.

  So.

  So generals like grandchildren. I’d bet my right arm you got a waiver.

  Maybe. Maybe I’m one of those Femme Fertiles you read about in the black market sexrags.

  I think not. You’re too well bred. You’re not that sort woman. So?

  So what?

  So do you? Want them.

  Yes. Okay. I do. One of each. You?

  Yes. God yes. I want to repopulate the world. No. I want to populate the new world. Our new world.

  Alan. I said two. Not a whole world.

  How …miraculous.

  What.

  That you’re young and beautiful and fertile. That you’re not spoken for.

  I’m not so easy to love.

  But you are, Elle. You are. There is nothing easier. Not for me. Not out of uniform. You see that?

  What.

  Those two moons, coming up on the far side.

  Yes.

  Those are your eyes.

  Alan.

  And that nova is your smile. And the spiral galaxy, where is it… there…

  Stop. Please…

  Right there. Your heart, Elle. That is your heart. A hundred trillion different suns in your heart and countless more worlds orbiting those suns and I want to conquer every one of them and call you my own.

  I’m afraid the miracle is that you’re not…

  What.

  That you’re not saying all of that to someone else.

  Who?

  Anyone.

  It’s no miracle. I’ve been waiting my entire life for you. If you ever leave me I will die a lonely, broken man.

  Silly Lieutenant.

  I’m dead serious, Elle. Marriage or no, tell me you will never leave me.

  Never, Alan. I will never leave you.

  * * *

  I spent roughly three weeks kissing Stewart Glenn before I began to relax and think that maybe my life was correcting itself for the better. Stewart was no Casey Travern and that was a good thing as far as I was concerned. Casey kissed like his lips were connected to his abdominals, which, in turn, were hard-wired into his self-concept as a screen idol. He tended to muscle-flex his way into the act of kissing like he was making a Plaster of Paris impression.

  Stewart, by contrast, had a very feminine way about him. His lips were connected to his oceanic eyes. One sought them out and fell into them. The softness of Stewart’s Lieutenant Miller was a perfect casting counterpoint to Ivanova’s rigid strength. It took that kind of softness to draw her out of her shell and into the open where she could be hurt. It took time working with Stewart to realize it, but Casey Travern had been almost exactly the opposite of what the story required.

  That Stewart turned out to be a happily committed gay man mattered not at all. He was credible in the role and he knew how to osculate like no one’s business. The two or three weeks that we spent filming what Blair called the transit scenes were like a salve to my battered nerves. The set that Blair had built hardly resembled the massive Santa Maria – with its gleaming twin silos, Pazienza and Coraggio, like pontoons connected by an ovular raft, built around a transparent, globular arboretum that glowed a living green against the blackness of space – the ship Angus had imagined for the long, lonely silent trip from Earth out to Rhuton-Baker. But the ship scenes themselves were so subtle and quiet, so minimalist and delicate, that they served as a kind of refuge from the upsetting turmoil of my life. That set, even with all of its plywood and wire and duct tape scarring, was a direct portal into Angus’ story; into Ivanova’s world. And that was where I hid; from Zack and lawyers and police and paparazzi and my friends and even my mother who, in the wake of my blooming scandals, had stepped up her efforts to connect. I disappeared into my character, pulling her wholly imagined world over my head.

  Since Angus’ Santa Maria was piloted by a skeleton crew, the rest of the cast was largely absent. The ship scenes were almost exclusively a series of careful and evolving interactions between Colonel Ivanova and Lieutenant Miller. The experience could not have been more different from almost all of the Pryce Point shoots, which were so packed with cast, crew and associate producers that concentration was a major challenge and I tended to stay huddled in a trailer until someone was sent to summon me.

  S
tewart, Blair and I spent a lot of time together those weeks, actually on the set, taking care to make each shot perfect. Blair was at his consummate best, impressing me all over again with his attention to detail and his love affair with light, using it like it was a kind of clay that he could shape with his hands, or a syrup that he spread through the air with his fingers. To this day, the arboretum scenes amaze me in the way Miller and Ivanova seem to float on wisps of interstellar light dappling the travel-sized orchard and grasslands and jungle in dusty blues and pinks and purples.

  In Angus’ story, the trip out to Rhuton-Baker was like a floating, dreamlike paradise stretched between two poles of an untenable reality: at one end, Earth, which is all but destroyed by its own past and at the other end, Rhuton-Baker, which will not, alas, support humanity’s future. In the middle, aboard the Santa Maria sailing the black sea, all was weightless color and dream and everything we want to be true about ourselves. Everything that could be true about ourselves outside the gravitational grip of the past and the future. It was a magical part of the story and Blair translated it as well as anyone could have hoped.

  The peace in those scenes may have had something to do with Blair’s uncharacteristic tranquility in the course of their filming. The cinematic tyrant that I had come to expect, the crew had come to fear and that Stewart had had no occasion to experience, was nowhere to be found in that part of the production. Blair was relaxed and patient with the process and generous with his time. Each shot was dozens of takes, as if time and money were but trivial concerns. He solicited our input regularly, deferring to many of our ideas. He admitted when he was wrong and praised us effusively when we were right. Stewart had to have wondered whether Blair’s hard-edged reputation had all been a big joke cooked up by his friends when he was selected for the part.

  Blair was as patient with me as he was with the filming. Gone were the inauthentic, exasperated tirades about my acting. What little criticism he offered was calm and constructive, one professional to another, and always tempered by his personal concern for me. Rarely a day passed when he did not pull me aside and inquire as to my state of mind in light of the twin scandals that had erupted like pustules on the public face of my life. He insisted that the studio pay for the legal services of Burton Dalrymple, claiming an insurance arrangement I did not understand. I relented, even though I subsequently came to believe that Blair was reimbursing the studio from his own pockets. This amounted to not a small monthly sum. At seven hundred fifty dollars per hour, Burton was tasked with blunting the ambitions of prosecutors who may be looking for a way to make cheap headlines by insinuating my involvement in a designer drug ring or a revenge plot against Zack or both. He was also charged with legally intimidating every person who may have come into possession of a copy of my first and only sex video or who may have considered assisting such people with its dissemination. Whether Burton was securing legal injunctions or making payoffs or writing me a letter explaining that there was nothing to do but keep my fingers crossed, everything he did cost a lot of money. I never saw a bill.

  Though the search of my home had revealed nothing incriminating, and while there were no further efforts to interrogate me, the police were persistently unwilling to acknowledge that I was not actually a target in an ongoing investigation. We were forced to assume, therefore, that I was a target. Burton was adamant that until it was absolutely certain that I was safe from any sort of prosecutorial effort, I was not to have any contact with Zack West or any of his close friends. The prosecutor had not put up any fight against Zack’s release on bail. They would be watching him closely, using him any way they could to get to others. Glass warrants, Burton said, were a distinct possibility and the authorities – state and federal – would love to get me on tape saying something that they could twist and use against Zack or against me. I was rattled enough at the prospect of being pulled further down the rabbit hole that I strictly obeyed his instructions.

  And, in fact, Zack did call on several occasions, often leaving no message and otherwise asking to meet him someplace so that we could “talk” and “work all of this out” and “clear the air.” I assumed the worst about his intentions. As much as I wanted to hear in his voice a tone that made it clear he knew I had nothing whatsoever to do with the drugs in his ruined Escalade, I did not hear any such tone. What I heard was that he suspected me. Real or imagined, the thing in his tone that I heard was accusation and it pulled at my unacknowledged reservoir of guilt like a magnet, drawing it ever closer to the surface. Zack became a symbol to my psyche; a personification of the uncontrollable, rogue force in my life that was maneuvering to take me down whenever I dropped my guard. When I saw his number flashing on my phone, I never answered.

  The same fate met the many who called from the Pryce Point production team, including Darnell Lewis himself. The wrap party for the movie, an enormously swanky affair at Cecil Abram’s Bel Air home, was attended by invited members of the press and a who’s-who A-list of celebrities that had nothing to do with the film, but the two stars of the film – Jack and Sienna Pryce – were both missing in action. No one should have been especially surprised in my case, since I had completely dropped out of circulation after the Fox 11 newscast. The subsequent articles speculating about the possibility of my connection to Zack’s arrest, illustrated by photos of the police raiding my home, should have done nothing to make my appearance at the wrap party any more likely.

  But they all called me anyway. I did not answer. I did not call them back. I did my best to push that entire continent of my life out to sea while I holed up with Blair Gaines and Stewart Glenn in four different cross-section replicas of the Santa Maria, pretending we were all floating out in space, drifting away from a dying world toward something I could only hope would be better.

  Blair worried openly that the recent stress of my life would impact my health. He encouraged me to laugh when he could and, incredibly, shared freely from his own treasure trove of ancient humiliations to give me perspective. But when I could not be consoled, Blair never tried to suggest that I was over-reacting or that my sense of emotional turmoil was unreasonable. He was conscientious enough to make sure that all of this discussion was conducted in private, away from Stewart Glenn and the crew and the occasional studio executive that dropped by to see how the shoot was progressing.

  When one such executive, a pretentious, hoary-headed labradoodle of a man, once tossed a light-hearted sex video reference into the conversation (I dare say the lighting on these love scenes is an improvement from your last production), Blair’s famous temper surged forward to make it clear that the issue was not a laughing matter and asked him to leave. It is fair to say that during this time in my life, I had no greater friend or supporter than Blair Gaines.

  Simon Hunter was also trying his best to be a great friend in my time of despair. While Simon did not bother me during shooting hours, and while he was never so bold as to try to visit Blair’s set, he seemed ubiquitous in every other context. The phone messages, emails and texts were relentless, mostly proposing dining or drinking or party invitations and usually with a selling point that such distractions would take my mind off my troubles. I declined most of his invitations with a revolving list of excuses, including that Blair’s production schedule had left me exhausted and that I was not up to going out, explanations that only succeeded in worrying Simon about my mental health. Depression became his favorite word and he began emailing me articles on the latest clinical research from Psychology Today. On the occasions that I did indulge Simon’s requests to get together, I tended to regret it: for the attention I had hoped would satisfy him only wetted his appetite for more and the calls and emails only increased.

  It was certainly not that I disliked Simon. To the contrary, I was as fond of him as ever and I found his loyalty endearing, especially since it would surely cost him points with Milton Chenowith if my former agent were ever to learn of his associate’s rather constant attention to me. But, as Simon’s coun
trymen would say, I did not fancy him in the way I knew he hoped I would. Moreover, the intensity of his support for me was mildly off-putting. Where Blair had found a way to be relaxed and avuncular, Simon always seemed to be doing anything he could to sell himself as my date to the senior prom. These were not things that I ever had the heart to tell him. I tried to push him out to sea with everyone else and hoped that he would eventually lose interest.

  The one person who made no effort to be a part of my life and who I would have welcomed had he tried, was Angus Mann. It was exceedingly odd to take refuge in his world, his characters, his mind, without him there. Weeks had passed without any word from him. Blair pretended to write it off as just Angus being Angus, stating with some confidence that tomorrow or the next day he would walk onto the set and sit down in the chair with his name on it and carry on as though nothing had happened. I knew, however, that in private Blair was experiencing the entire gamut of emotions, from rage to worry, about Angus’ disappearance.

  For all of Blair’s efforts to support and console me, I wanted to be of whatever help to him I could. I offered to start calling hotels, hospitals and morgues. But I was not much help. I got the sense that Blair had already tried all of my ideas and that, in any event, it was not a subject he wanted to discuss, or at least not with me. Angus had disappeared because Blair had insisted on me, the insubstantial Pryce Point girl whose life was like a depraved circus, for the part of Colonel Ivanova. That was Blair’s fear: Angus had left and would stay away as long as I was involved in the production. Short of my resignation, I was not a person that could help Blair with his Angus problem.

  I might have resigned. I seriously considered it more than once. I felt myself a weakling and a coward for not offering Blair that obvious solution, even though he would probably have refused it. In the intervening years I have improved that self-assessment. I have come to realize that it was not so much cowardice or weakness of character that kept me from resigning, but loyalty. My fidelity to Ivanova was stronger than my concern for either Blair or Angus. I knew that no one could play her like I could play her and that anyone else would do her a permanent disservice to supplant her literary existence by immortalizing her on film.