The movie star says he is beginning to forget who he is or, rather, who he was because he had been someone before and now it seems he is no one or, rather, he is only who others believe him to be. Everyone always believes him to be the person they think he is, which in truth is no one.
What do you mean? Slotnik asks.I
You know, not me but one of my characters, the movie star says.
He has been trying to understand himself, but every time he gets close to understanding, his mind wanders, as if bored. He is trying his best to explain it all to Slotnik, who, typically, jumps ahead to supply details that are both ridiculous and correct. This Slotnik habit infuriates the movie star but is also the reason why he is in Slotnik’s office. Although he has seen numerous therapists over the years, they run together as bland as paint mixed from several pints, the color a dingy brown. Brown, he thinks now, the color of therapy.
He pulls his mind back to the present, to the heavy, draped room with its requisite African art and, inexplicably, poster of Provence. On the coffee table, an odd collection of knickknacks—glass animals, mostly, elephants and camels and deer and rabbits—march toward him. Bookshelves line the walls crammed with volumes on the brain, on interpreting the brain—the child’s brain, the teenage brain, the brain on drugs, the aging brain—even a few on the soul, though Slotnik has said she believes the soul would be much better understood as the self, a construct that resides between the heart and the stomach, closer to the lungs, possibly, or wedged somewhere near a rib.
My mother had a floating rib, the movie star said. I never understood it. She spent days on the couch.
Precisely, Slotnik said.
I always pictured it suspended inside of her—you know, kind of floating there, sort of boomerangish or like the Starship Enterprise.
She was your universe, said Slotnik.
She’s still alive, he reminded her.
She is your universe, said Slotnik.
She’s her universe, the movie star said. That time he had been in a feisty mood, eager to speak ill of his mother.II
Tell me, Slotnik said. She seemed interested.
Abigail still lived in the small town in Louisiana where the movie star had been born, a detail repeated quite often in the small town, so that now the signs that marked the town limits, both coming and going, include a rendering by a local artist of the movie star’s silhouette, along with the movie star’s name and birth date and the fact that, in addition to being a movie star, he had also been the winningest quarterback for the high school team, known then as the RedMen but now, due to a civil suit by the Muscogee in which the sensitivities of the Wild Snake rebellion were noted, known as the Men.
So it’s a big deal, the movie star said. Me: who I am.
They were in their first session and the movie star felt, as he did whenever he attempted this business, that he needed to offer a thumbnail, or blueprint, for what she should know, since everything she might think she knew about him was bullshit, the movie star said: he meant what she might have read.
I don’t read, Slotnik said.
He had been the winningest quarterback in Chalkton, and won a scholarship to the Big Ten university outside Indianapolis known for its football team and theater department. Had he not suffered an injury that first week and limped his way to auditions, or met Teddy Fine, soon to be in self-exile in Key West, a fading professor emeritus now known for his key lime pie and wicked mojitos but at the time very much the head of the theater department and the only man powerful enough to pluck a hobbled freshman to keep for his own, he might not be here now.
He of course understood Teddy Fine’s real intentions, but he had held Teddy back, he explained to Slotnik.
Uh-huh, Slotnik said.
I’d like you to engage, the movie star said.
How so? Slotnik said.
Speak, the movie star said. Say something. Give me your opinion. Argue with me. Tell me what I don’t know, what it means.
I don’t give answers, Slotnik said.
Understood, the movie star said.
But let’s start with your name, Slotnik said. Is it real?
No, the movie star said.
I like it, Slotnik said.
Thank you.
So, what’s it really?
What?
Your name?
I don’t say.
Uh-huh.
It’s not anything.
Uh-huh.
I. Slotnik asks although she believes she already knows. Slotnik believes there is very little she does not know; very little she has not heard before. She has been around so long she has come to think that she has listened to the demons of every artistic person of a certain means, and many others on a sliding pay scale, in lower Manhattan, which may be true, though the fact that she listens to both the movie star and his neighbor Elizabeth is pure coincidence, the kind of thing that often happens in New York City, though no one can explain why.
II. Abigail. Her name fitting her like one of the white gloves she and her friends still wore to church, Presbyterian, gloves they removed and folded and set next to them in the wooden pews, the empty fingers splayed on the needlepoint bolsters dedicated to the original founders of this particular congregation, names Abigail and the others had gleaned through much research and from the church cemetery.