An actor is forced to confront his sexuality after being cast in a short film which blurs the lines between fiction and reality.

“He’s not really alive, is he?”

You’re thirty-two and work the front desk at a ritzy spa on the upper east side. You thought your father would be pleased to hear you finally had a steady job (having dropped the dead weight of your acting career the way you once saw him cut a fishing line that had snagged on a bloated deer carcass). Instead, he found the description of your new job indistinguishable from the half-dozen odd jobs you’ve worked since college, even though you now have steady hours and health insurance. Your therapist suggests otherwise, but you’re almost certain your father has written you off as a lost cause.

Dr. Kara puts another needle in the side of your neck, causing your right arm to involuntarily spasm. Her murmuring sounds positive, so you assume this is a good thing. Today was supposed to be your day off, but your manager asked if you could be the acupuncturist’s model: a handy visual aid to entice the divorcées and tourists to pony up some extra cash between rounds in the sauna and hydrotherapy pool. You had never tried acupuncture before and didn’t know what to expect. Despite having felt ok that morning, aside from a slightly tweaked muscle in your shoulder from overextending at the gym, it now feels like Dr. Kara is showing you, needle by needle, that your entire body is (and always has been) a clenched fist of pain. You assume you must be doing something wrong, either here on the table or in your physical day-to-day life, to be feeling this way right now.

Almost worse than the pain is the fact that most of the spa patrons who have wandered over to hear the acupuncturist’s spiel have assumed you’re a mannequin. “Is he real?” a middle-aged man asks about you. Dr. Kara pauses, thrown from her practiced monologue, and then continues, not answering the man so as not to lose her spot in her speech. This is the third person in fifteen minutes to question whether you are a real person or not. You’re surprised to find that you are incredibly offended by this. Can’t they see how much pain you’re in?

You try to speak up for yourself, but your face is awkwardly smushed into a pillow, and you’re muted by both the doctor’s drone and the ‘Sounds of the Rainforest’ playlist being piped in over the speakers. You’re also starting to find it difficult to focus. Your head is turning into a hot air balloon, inflating with fire to the point of bursting, and your mind drifts up, up, and away.

***

You’re twenty-seven, and you’ve never kissed someone with stubble before. You didn’t plan to kiss Conor back when you were running lines in the hallway, didn’t even discuss it with him beforehand, but there’s a moment in the audition room where he gives you a look of such genuine yearning that it cuts through the artifice of the scene and pierces something deep within you. You’re no longer in a cramped studio, the director loudly sipping his coffee from behind a folding table. You can no longer hear the hum of the AC or the cars honking out on eighth avenue or the poor girl in the studio next door cracking at the top of her sixteen-bar cut of “Memory.” For that moment, you’re Jeremy. You’re in your lover Tyler’s apartment, desperate for him to throw caution to the wind despite the recent mandate against unauthorized coupling.

And so, you kiss him.

To be fair, it does specify in the sides that you’re supposed to kiss him at this point in the scene, but whenever you’ve had a stage kiss with a woman, you’ve always checked in multiple times beforehand to see what they’re ok with, and it’s just an audition for chrissake,surely the director isn’t expecting everyone to be comfortable sucking face with someone they’ve just met, right? You realize you’re still kissing Conor and are mortified for a moment at having so brazenly overstepped, but then he abruptly takes the lead. He yanks you in, sending the audition sides you were holding pinwheeling to the floor. His hand slides to the back of your head and gives your hair the gentlest of tugs, short-circuiting a large portion of your brain. It’s only through years of improbably expensive training that you’re able to spit out the remaining few lines of the scene with some tact.

“That was great!” Conor says after the audition as you grab your bags and weave past the other pairs of guys waiting to go in. You press the button for the elevator.

“Sorry about…” you say, trailing off.

“Oh that? Nah, it’s cool. It was hot. Sorry if I slipped you some tongue.”

His grin makes you wonder if he whitens his teeth or if having a smile that bright just comes from flossing every night, the way you always mean to do but forget. Then you realize you’re looking at his lips, which are the first pair of men’s lips that you’ve kissed. And that you’re not so much looking as staring. You pretend to text someone so that you have an excuse to turn away until the elevator arrives. You both step inside, the doors slide shut with a rumble, and you begin your descent.

“What do you got going on tonight?”

The way he asks this is pitched so perfectly down the middle that it’s impossible to tell if he’s simply making small talk or checking to see if you’re free to do something. You don’t dare allow yourself to imagine what that ‘something’ might entail. You’ve never been asked out by another guy before, and a half-dozen different responses cycle through your mind.

“I’m late to meet up with a friend. Yourself?”

“Got another audition, then…” He shrugs, grins. “Who knows? Night’s young.”

He steps out of the elevator, which is somehow already at ground level. You trail behind him, following him out onto the sidewalk. He starts left, and even though that’s the direction of your subway, you veer towards the right. He looks back.

“Well, cool meeting you, man. Hope we both book it.”

“Yeah, me too.”

With another flash of his heartbreaker smile, he’s gone. You play over every moment of the audition again and again as you ride the train back up to Harlem. Your roommate is visiting his parents in Philly, so you’re alone for the night. You keep thinking that you should call up a friend to grab a drink so that it would no longer be a lie about having somewhere to be. Instead, you sit at your bedroom desk until the sun sets, staring out your window at the strips of burnt orange attempting to slice through the darkening clouds.

***

Dr. Kara said you’d be on the table for about an hour. You could swear it’s been at least two, though your concept of time is currently fuzzy and/or completely gone. Also, you’re pretty sure your neck has caught on fire. You’re almost certain this isn’t how you’re supposed to be feeling. You might be paralyzed and it’s getting difficult to breathe with your nose flattened into the cushion and your head is going to pop off and you need you need you need to get up or scream or drift off to sleep so that you can no longer feel the flames Madeline Kahn-ing up the sides of your face. You visualize lifting your hands to make the Mrs. White gesture, but they’re stuck to your sides. All you can do is wiggle your fingers, and even that takes effort. You try to focus on something – anything – to distract yourself.

You’re thirteen, and your mother found one of her Victoria’s Secret magazines stashed under your bed while cleaning. Your father has been appointed the role of stern lecturer, but you can tell he’s relieved, your recent interest in theatre having pushed against the edges of his perceived notion of heteronormativity. You nod along, not listening to what he’s saying, thanking God (despite your recent wavering towards atheism) that your mom didn’t find the other secret hidden in your room, the images you searched for online when you were certain no one was home, printed out, folded up, and tucked inside your copy of The Horse and his Boy. Of these pictures your father would be far less understanding, as in his eyes they would surely confirm his worst fears about you.

You’re twenty, and over half of your theatre department is crammed into your off-campus apartment. Your roommate Gabe has downloaded a novelty spin the bottle app, and enough people are drunk enough to think this is an excellent idea, despite its potential to throw at least two precarious showmances into utter turmoil.

You haven’t been drinking much, attempting to cut back on beer in order to trim down for your school’s upcoming production of Hair. You wave off Gabe’s slurred attempts to get you to participate and watch from the sidelines, “woo-ing” along with everyone at each randomized pairing, a full-blown cheer erupting as Bre and Ellie kiss. It’s when Abe’s digital bottle lands on Luis that you suddenly feel just how sober you are, and as they kiss, a queasy mix of jealousy and revulsion lands like a rock in your stomach. You silently slip away, searching for something, anything to drink. You do a shot of tequila someone forgot on the kitchen counter, then beeline to the cooler on the deck to shotgun a few beers, but by the time you work up the nerve to come back inside, the game has already ended.

You’re twenty-four and smoking outside the bar your acting class frequents. You normally don’t go out afterwards, but between your recent break up with Lizzie and the critiques you just got on your Hamlet soliloquy (“It’s ok for the audience to not know what you’re thinking, but you need to know”), you’re looking to blow off steam.

A tall girl with bleached eyebrows asks to bum a smoke, and while making small talk, she nonchalantly asks if you’re gay. Caught off-guard, you stammer that you’re not, which is technically true. It’s been a while since someone has asked you this, but not the first time, what with majoring in theatre and all. She asks you to prove it, and during the expensive cab ride to her apartment in Brooklyn, an old vocab word from fourth grade pokes its head up from some back pocket of your memory. Prevaricate: Verb. To lie through evasiveness or omission. You wonder what your answer would have been if she had worded her question as the slight-but-subtly different, “Are you into guys?”

***

You’re surprised to learn that you booked the film, a high-concept sci-fi short about love being outlawed and relationships regulated by the government. The way the director Lane talks about the project seems at odds with the small stipend he’s paying you (not to mention the red flag that springs up when you hear he’s cramming all of filming into one day), but he speaks with the confidence of a white man in his twenties, which is coincidentally what he is.

“My VFX guy worked on 2049, but I’m dating his roommate, so I’m getting him for cheap. He’s the fuckin’ GOAT, man!”

He talks a mile-a-minute about how it’s the little details when it comes to selling a sci-fi setting and how he’s already got multiple festivals lined up that are interested. When you think you won’t be able to stand it any longer, you finally ask, in as casual a tone as you can muster, who he wound up casting as the other lead. Your shoulders shoot up to your ears when he says Conor’s name, and when he suggests you two meet up to rehearse before filming, your left leg begins involuntarily jackhammering.

You’ve always fallen a little bit in love with your scene partners. Sometimes, it’s led to actual relationships, like with Dani, who you met doing a terrible college production of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. Others never moved past the awkward stasis of an unrequited crush, like Julia, who played Imogen to your Posthumus and who you’re still pretty sure had feelings for you despite her boyfriend back in Virginia. That’s all this is, you tell yourself, your dumb actor brain confusing characters with real life.

You’re meeting at a different rehearsal studio than the one you auditioned at, nearly identical except planted further north. You hadn’t planned to walk the forty-odd blocks down until you pass the entrance to the subway and keep going. You also hadn’t planned to stop, backtrack a block, and go into a liquor store, but apparently that’s what you’re doing. You debate between the airplane bottles and the half pint of Makers before settling on the half pint. Every few blocks, you duck into a doorway to steal a furtive sip, not that any of the other New Yorkers walking by give a shit about what you’re doing. You’ve killed the bottle long before you get to the rehearsal studio and bury it at the bottom of your messenger bag, chomping on two pieces of gum to make sure Conor won’t be able to smell it on you. You aren’t remotely tipsy, adrenaline overriding the whiskey’s attempts to settle your nerves.

You had planned to get there early so you could give yourself a onceover in the bathroom, reapplying deodorant and trashing the empty bottle, but Conor is already waiting for you. You hear pens clinking against glass in your bag and berate yourself for not having thrown it out earlier. Conor hasn’t noticed you yet. You watch as he stretches, his Henley riding up and offering a glimpse of a tattoo on his left side, too brief to make out what it is. You imagine something effortlessly cool, one of those minimalist, geometric tattoos that would look preposterous on your own body. He finally spots you, grins.

“Hey man, looking good!”

You’re wearing a trim button-down shirt dotted with a pattern of black cherries. You’re between a medium and a large, and this is one of the few shirts you own that fits you perfectly, hugging the arms you’ve worked so hard to develop while hiding the small gut you’ve never quite been able to shake. You always think of the shirt as ‘stylish, but not gay’, which you would never admit out loud. You instinctively tug on the front to make sure it’s not bagging out.

One of the walls of your rehearsal room has a floor-to-ceiling mirror for when dance studios rent out the space. Conor’s eyes never glance over to check his appearance. He knows he looks good. Each time his attention is elsewhere, your eyes flick to your reflection to see if the sweat you feel under your arms is visible. You wonder if he can smell the whiskey coming out of your pores.

You’re nervous, and it’s manifesting in you being colder than you mean to be. You find yourself acting as director, offering suggestions of blocking and intention. Conor, for what it’s worth, appears to be fully on board with you taking the reins of the rehearsal. He isn’t the best actor – too forceful, too obvious – but his sharp cheekbones and Paul Newman eyes must read killer on camera. You’re grateful for his average talent. One less thing to find attractive.

When you get to the end of the first half of the script, where Jeremy and Tyler go to bed together, you chicken out, yada-yada-yada-ing over the physicality and attempting to skip to the ‘morning after’ scene. Conor asks if you want to do one more run, “all out.” He gives you a look as if he can read every thought painted on the inside of your mind. You imagine he gets a lot of feedback about his ‘intense magnetism’.

The scene as written fades to black on the characters kissing and stripping off their clothes. Sex is imminent. Your head is pounding as you near the part of the script where you’re supposed to kiss. I’m just saying what they tell me to say, going where they tell me to go, you think. A vessel for characters with more interesting things to do and say and feel. The kiss is abrupt, inevitable, surprisingly soft (did he shave for you?), and his sharp, audible inhale of air gives you a dizzying rush.

There’s a moment where it makes sense to end the kiss, which is toeing the line of what one might consider making out. You could run it from the top, or move to the next scene, or you could take a quick break; hit the water fountain out in the hall and check your phones.

The kiss continues.

There then comes a small, transitional moment. An infinitesimal pause in the action, as it were, a lift in the music, both of you coming up for air, a quick check-in to see what degree, if any, you’re both still in character. You pull back together like magnets. You press Conor against the closest wall, which is the mirrored one, a hand on the back of his head so he doesn’t bang against the glass. It’s a move you’ve used on several girls after seeing Patrick Swayze do it in a movie and thinking it was A: sexy as hell and B: polite. You can’t help peeking at your reflection in the mirror, mostly obscured by Conor’s head, and for a wonderful, blissful moment you don’t recognize yourself at all.

A battering ram of self-awareness splinters you awake, and you pull away. You have no idea how much time has passed, or if it’s possible to pretend you’re both still acting, even though you know that ship has long sailed. You suddenly realize you’re hard and quickly tug on the front of your shirt, though that just spotlights the obvious. You’re unable to look directly at Conor, so you turn away, pretending to be fascinated by the radiator and the yellowed venetian blinds and the long paint crack ripping across the wall like a rollercoaster, looking anywhere else except the fucking mirror or at Conor’s easy smile as if everything is normal and right and ok.

You recall a piece of acting advice from one of your college professors: Acting isn’t lying, it’s convincing yourself that you’re living in the truth. You casually announce, as if nothing has happened, that you should move on to the next scene. Conor nods, taking his cue from you, and you give the ‘morning after’ scene a cursory run through before pretending to have received an emergency text from your roommate. He’s locked himself out of the apartment and needs to get his meds, to turn off the iron, to feed his cat. You apologize for cutting the rehearsal time short, autopiloting small talk as you exit the building until you’ve rounded the corner out of sight. In a sudden, pounding wave, you finally feel all seven ounces of whiskey, burning like mad behind your eyes.

***

You’re face down on the table, and someone is poking your foot. You’ve fallen asleep. Maybe for a few minutes, or hours, or maybe you were always asleep but have finally taken the red pill and woken up. You vaguely recall that ‘red pill’ now has a negative connotation, but you forget exactly why. Something bad, but reddit-troll bad or literal Nazi bad? Your session must be up, only you can hear Dr. Kara monologuing somewhere in front of you. So who’s poking you?

“Is he alive or a mannequin?” a woman with a thick, Missourian accent asks. You mentally dub her Miss Ouri, which in your groggy state you think is hilarious. Then you remember this woman is poking you. You try to tell her that you’re very much alive, but your sleep-thick voice is a sludgy mumble, pillowed by the table.

A man’s voice answers, equally thick accent. “Probably a dummy, he ain’t breathing.” Mr. Ouri, you presume. You feel a strong urge to horse-kick Miss Ouri, blame it on reflexes.

Poke-poke-poke.

That’s it. You don’t care if you lose your job, you’re kicking this woman. You try to jerk your leg back, but your body betrays you, refusing you more than a spasm of your left foot. Still, it’s enough.

“Oh geez, I guess he is real!” The voice fades as the couple meanders off. “I would swear he wasn’t breathing,” she adds huffily, as if you’ve purposefully deceived her. You try to summon righteous indignation over the casual disregard of your physical boundaries, but you’re too exhausted.

You simultaneously feel like you’re burning to death and that you may fall asleep. You wonder if this is what dying feels like; the urge to go to sleep rather than feel pain. You decide this is an incredibly morbid thought, and that you probably won’t share it with your therapist. Besides, you’re not dead, no matter what Mr. and Miss Ouri think.

***

The film shoot is, to put it bluntly, a clusterfuck. It immediately becomes clear that the short film isn’t low budget so much as no budget. A skeleton crew made up of three of Lane’s friends congregates around the craft services table, which consists of a pitcher of water and a box of granola bars. Lane has apparently not considered the challenges of shooting an interior night scene in the early morning and is trying in vain to duct tape poster board over the windows to block out the sun. “Why won’t this work?” he yells, causing the crew to look up for a moment before returning to their Nature Valleys.

You and Conor hole up in a side room to run lines and kill time. All you can think about is what happened during rehearsal, but it seems not to have affected him one way or the other. There’s no awkwardness on his end, no flashes of regret. There’s also no secret acknowledgment, no hint of a subtext-laden smile or attempt at light physical contact, which would be very easy for him to do since you keep inching your leg closer in case he wants to gently bump his knee against yours.

When it finally comes to filming, Lane keeps pushing you to go smaller. “Too much. This isn’t theatre,” he says. You try to visualize the terrible performance you’re giving like it’s a pair of clothes, removing it piece by piece until all that remains is the stripped, naked soul of the character. “C’mon,” Lane says, tearing off his glasses and wiping them on his shirt. “Even less. Just be yourself, just be you.”

The intimacy is worse, every moment of contact awkward and clinical. Lane and the crew are crowded around you, and it’s impossible not to feel their eyes studying you. The passion you had felt earlier with Conor is gone, replaced with stilted, tight-lipped kisses. The scene ends with both of you stripping down to your underwear, and as he pulls off his shirt, you finally get a good look at his tattoo. You frown upon seeing that it’s of Jiminy Cricket.

You’re wrapped before Conor, who has one last insert shot of his hands pouring a cup of coffee. You bolt out of the apartment without saying goodbye, sprinting to the subway and picking up speed with every step as if you can outrun the concept of shame entirely.

***

You’re twenty-nine, and you’ve just burnt your tongue on your coffee while distracted by the e-mail from Lane. You were mid-exit, and a homeless man is making a show of holding the coffeeshop door open for you. You awkwardly step to the side as his demeanor grows aggressively nice: “Have a beautiful day!” he sings, beaming, tapping his cane against the glass door. So much time has passed since you’ve heard from Lane that you assumed the film would never be finished. You scan the e-mail. The short film’s too edgy and out-there for the festivals he submitted to, so he’s saying, “FU” to the system and posting it on his website where its true audience will be sure to appreciate it.

You breathe a sigh of relief. This way there will be little chance of your parents ever accidentally stumbling upon the film, something that’s been in the back of your mind since the first audition. The homeless man raps his cane against the glass again to draw your attention to the fact that he is still holding the door open for you, and this magnanimous gesture sure could stand to be paid. You squeeze by him as he passive-aggressively shouts, “God BLESS you, sir!” As soon as you’re sure he isn’t going to whack you in the back of your head with his cane, you delete Lane’s e-mail.

You can’t help thinking of the other e-mail you deleted, the one you received from Conor a few days after the film shoot. You had just finished working out and had stripped down, one last check of the phone before showering. The message was short and direct. He said he really enjoyed working with you, especially the rehearsal, and wanted to know if you wanted to get together some time. He had italicized ‘especially’ and added a winky face after ‘rehearsal’ to drive the point home.

You happen to be wearing the same shirt with the black cherry pattern that you wore during that rehearsal. Now, whenever you wear it, you subconsciously think of it as your ‘Conor shirt’. Sometimes, that label carries with it a sense of shame, and you can never wear it when visiting your parents, as if the black cherries were tiny scarlet ‘A’s. Other times, it gives you an inflated sensuality. You imagine the mere act of wearing it changes your posture, the way you walk, how you exist in the world. Today, it makes your coffee taste like chalk.

***

You wonder if you now live on this acupuncturist table. You were wrong, Sartre, hell isn’t other people, it’s listening to Dr. Kara give the same broken record spiel while strangers poke your legs. Your mind drifts, imagining a version of yourself who could have messaged Conor back (who you occasionally look up on Instagram but have never followed), a version of you who could finally rip the blinders off and see yourself, all of yourself. Multiple drafts were composed, deleted, composed anew. But in the end, you never responded to him.

“Is that really a person under the sheet?”

You take as deep a breath as you can, focusing on the oxygen filling your lungs, the rise and fall of your back. You will continue to breathe just like this. Like clockwork. You take the largest inhale of breath you’ve ever taken, a caricature of a man breathing in fresh morning air. You’re not acting at breathing; this is the truth in which you’re living. You will breathe so deeply and so fully that no one could possibly mistake you as anything other than what you are: unbearably, inexorably alive.

Photograph of film set by Valery Tenevoy on Unsplash, with added filters

---