Occasionally, he was recognized. In line at the supermarket, sitting alone in a diner, piloting the airport shuttle. Strangers’ eyes up in the rearview mirror from one of the seats behind, trying to place his face.
They remembered the laundry detergent commercials, the antismoking PSAs. They remembered L.A. Heat, the police procedural on which George guest-starred for a season in the early ’80s. Sometimes they misremembered him as another actor who was the same age then that George was now, a graying, creased character player with a face that held a kind of battered dignity. When George was feeling up to it, he corrected them. They were folding time back into itself, he would say. He was a young man in the year they were thinking. He hadn’t always been this old.
Sometimes they remembered the movie. Young people, especially. These kids had seen it all; so much was available on their computers, their phones. They took a competitive pride in the obscurity of their interests. George could see victory in their faces when they remembered the title of the film. They started typing immediately, snapping pictures, sending out proof of their find.
Thalassa, they said. Weren’t you in that movie?
To George, it wasn’t a question, it was an accusation. Thirty years ago, the movie had played in theaters across the country. George was the leading man—his first and only role in a major studio film. It had opened with a brief, energized sprint, but then faltered quickly, disastrously. Stumbling through July, crawling through August. By Labor Day it was showing at odd hours in odd locations. Newspaper ads shrank from full to half to a quarter page, then to a single line tacked on to another movie’s announcement, the back end of a bargain double feature.
Over the years it had developed some kind of minor cult status. A curiosity, a joke, a cautionary tale. George had heard that film professors discussed it in budgeting classes, the perils of spending too much on too little.
Checking out a book at the library, drinking a cup of coffee in a cafe, they approached him, warily at first, but gaining a brazen confidence as they grew more certain. He’d answer for the commercials and the TV show and the PSAs, but when they called out the title of the movie he denied it.
I’m not who you think I am, he’d say. You must have me confused with someone else.
* * *
He was having a sandwich at the shuttle depot when his agent called with news of a remake. She said that the studio was restarting what it now called the “franchise,” planning a new version of the film as a summer blockbuster.
“They want me to be involved?” George said, before she could go any further. He had almost forgotten the little surge of hope that could come from answering the phone. He hadn’t been offered a part in years.
“Oh God, no,” she said. “That’s the last thing they want.”
The studio, she told him, was going to make the original movie disappear once and for all. Burning the baggage, is how they described it. They were recalling home video versions, scouring the internet for clips and pirated streams. By the time the new film opened, there would be nothing left of the old, just a smoothed-over patch of collective memory, an entire summer repaved.
“Is that even possible?” George said. He imagined all those kids with their websites and newsfeeds, endlessly clicking, relinking, echoing.
There was a crunching on the other end of the line. Lunchtime. Salad croutons, it sounded like.
“With enough money and lawyers,” his agent said, “you can make anything go away.”
* * *
He had received the news that he had been cast in the original film while standing in a phone booth on Franklin Avenue. An afternoon in late spring, thirty years before. George’s agent had been trying to reach him all day. The phone upstairs in George’s apartment was dead; the line chewed by squirrels walking the wire.
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 house,” 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.
Years later, he had seen the listing for the movie on a local station’s late-night schedule. From a pay phone, he had called the channel and asked to speak to the programming director. When the man answered, George told him that if the movie showed a bomb would detonate in their building. He hung up the phone and stood shaking in the booth. That night he sat up waiting, the TV the only light in his bedroom. When the hour came another movie appeared onscreen, Martians in flying saucers attacking a small Midwestern town. George sat on the edge of his bed, relieved and ashamed and afraid of himself. Such a strange feeling, fearful of what could happen in a room when he was the only one there.
Now, in his car on Santa Monica Boulevard, he tried to imagine the scene in the near-empty theater. He had seen movies there before, remembered the musty auditorium, the high screen, the old purple curtain worn thin like a pair of jeans at the knees. He tried to imagine his other, projected self, thirty years younger, with a smoother face, darker hair, another name. The man he had become in the desert, briefly. He wondered if the courage of that other man was still apparent, if it could be transferred, absorbed in the light of the movie’s projected frame.
* * *
On their last night in Cape Cod, after dinner in town, they all sat out on the back deck and Eric made margaritas, heavy on the tequila. Ted had picked up a newspaper in town and they all crowded around to gawk at the ad for a drive-in up in Wellfleet, George’s face right there in black and white.
“We should go,” James said, more than a little drunk. “We’d be walking in with a real movie star.”
Eric and Ted agreed. George tried to argue that they were in no condition to drive, but James called for a vote, a show of hands, and then he and Eric and Ted rushed inside to get cleaned up.
Alone on the back deck, George was surprised by how desperate he felt, how afraid. Since they had arrived on the Cape he had tried not to think of the premiere, the shame he’d sensed from the audience as they left the theater. James would see the movie eventually, George couldn’t stop that, but he could postpone it, keep it away from them here, at least. This could remain a safe place, another world of their own where they could imagine a life together, painting, dreaming, following a son’s progress up a doorframe.
The others were in the bathroom, brushing teeth and combing hair.
“I have a better idea,” George said.
They stopped and turned, curious. George lowered his voice to a conspiratorial stage whisper.
“We should go out.” He pointed a thumb over his shoulder. “The cove,” he said. “The chairs.”
Eric smiled, his sunburned cheeks wrinkling white. Ted nodded along. James needed some convincing, he was set on the movie, so George joined him at the mirror, draping his arm over James’s shoulders.
“We’ll see the movie,” George said, looking at their reflection. Two bodies, so close. His lips brushed James’s ear. “As soon as we get home. I promise.”
They pulled on their swimsuits, sprayed themselves slick with bug repellant, grabbed a flashlight and the tequila. The marsh water was cool and hip-deep. They kept the flashlight off as they waded, whispering and laughing, jumping at noises in the trees flanking their approach. George led the way, holding the tequila bottle high. He stopped when they reached the opening to the cove. The dark water spread before them, rippling slowly, radar waves that grew to some unseen outer limit. The sky was clear and star-flecked; a bright half-moon sat high above. They stood looking up, breathing deeply. George took a sip from the bottle and passed it to James.
The chairs sat above the reeds on a large, flat-topped rock. George climbed up to the first chair. He sat looking out into the cove, the open water beyond. James sat beside him and took his hand.
Eric paddled out in front of the chairs. “It’s deep out here,” he whispered. “It drops off quickly.”
“Can we jump?” James said.
Eric held his breath, flipped under the water. A moment later he reemerged. “It goes way down. I couldn’t find the bottom. We could probably dive.”
Ted was first, climbing the rock. He handed James the flashlight as he stepped up onto the arms of the chairs, one foot on each. Lifting his hands to the sky, he gave a soundless primal scream, then plugged his nose and launched up and out, tucking his knees to his chin, grabbing his ankles. The splash cracked the silence and they all stiffened, looking back through the trees toward the neighbor’s house. Ted surfaced, gasping and laughing, and Eric shushed him. After a moment, when no lights came on through the trees, George stood up on the chairs, handed James the tequila bottle, and jumped in.
The water was a shock, colder and deeper than he’d expected. George paddled down, reaching for the bottom, finally brushing silt with his fingertips before running out of air and pushing back up. He reemerged into another world, soft and moonlit. He could see Eric’s and Ted’s heads bobbing a little ways out in the water. They were all looking at James.
James set down the empty bottle and climbed up to jump. George heard a small wet slap when each of James’s feet touched the arms of the chairs, the little puddles they had all made there. James lifted his own arms, gave a silent, head-shaking shout, its length and ferocity surprising, the release of what looked to George like rage or frustration. He wanted to ask James what this was, if it matched some of what George had felt earlier in the house, his desire to protect something they couldn’t really have, but then James squatted on the chair arms, ready to spring out, and one foot left the wood but the other slid in the puddle and he fell back, his head hitting the seat and then the edge of the rock, a sharp snap and a dull thud, and then he was gone, underwater, leaving the surface rippling, dark rings in the moonlight.
George dove under immediately, grasping, but there was nothing, just water. When he came up for air, Eric was coming up, too.
“I couldn’t get him,” Eric said. “He’s way down there.”
They went under again. George opened his eyes, but there was only inky black, swirling shadows, vague shapes. He swam down until he touched silt again, pushing himself along the floor, reaching, coming away with nothing but handfuls of mud. Then, finally, a limb, an ankle. George didn’t know if it was Eric or James but he pulled hard, swimming up toward the surface.
It seemed like hours, a timeless expanse, climbing, reawakening from a dream.
Then, air and moonlight. George gasped, filling his lungs, and then Eric was there, and Ted. They dragged James back to the rock, lifting him up. They laid him flat and George took James’s face gently to clear his mouth, to start resuscitation, but his hands came away glassy with blood.
Eric was already running back, splashing through the marsh toward the lights of their house. Ted turned on the flashlight and followed, shining its beam for a path. George stayed with James, quiet for a moment, until that silence grew too loud and he had to break through it, screaming for help.
The neighbors reached the scene first. A husband and wife, middle-aged but tanned and fit, she in a bathrobe, he in pajamas. The wife ran back to the house to call an ambulance. The man stayed, standing hip-deep in the marsh beside the rock, a fist up at his mouth, his face hard, unreadable. George knelt beside James, holding his head, pressing on the wound with his fingers, talking to him, pleading in the cool night air.
* * *
The doctors said that James had died on impact. It was the first hit that killed him, his head striking the chair. George could tell that this information was intended to comfort, to assure him that James hadn’t suffered, hadn’t spent those eternal minutes suffocating underwater, hoping for rescue.
James’s parents arrived to bring his body back to St. Louis. They flew in overnight, and the next morning came to the rented house to collect James’s things. George had never met them. James didn’t like to talk about his strained relationship with his parents, the difficult phone calls and infrequent visits. They were older than George had pictured, and looked more like grandparents: gray, a little shrunken. James was their only child and they’d had him later in life.
James’s mother moved through the bedroom gathering books and clothes. When she saw James’s canvases she stopped, looking at the blurry landscapes, his unidentifiable portrait of George. Finally she said, “Are these his?” and when George nodded she set them on the pile of books and clothes.
She never looked at the bed. She never looked at George, who stood just outside the doorway. He wanted to ask what she imagined they did there, how she imagined that they lived. Would she believe they were asleep by ten most nights, exhausted from sun and salt water? That they spent the mornings on the back deck with their breakfast and their books? That her son had died like a child, jumping from something he never should have climbed?
James’s father stayed out in his rental car, the engine running, radio news so loud the muffled voices of the announcers pushed through the rolled-up windows. George watched from the house. The man’s hands never left the steering wheel.
After they were gone, George went back to the bedroom. He tried to find any trace of James, but all that was left was his toothbrush in a glass by the bathroom sink, its bristles still caked with flecks of dried paste. George lifted the toothbrush out, then sat on the edge of the bed, holding it tightly. When he finally let go, his palm was pocked sore where the bristles had bitten his skin.
* * *
After each shuttle shift he searched online, but found only new, younger faces; images of more impressive technology, locations, sets. He typed in all of the names he could remember, cast and crew, but there were no links to that lost world. He typed in his own name, but stopped before sending the request, afraid now of what he wouldn’t find.
* * *
The night was warm; the air retained an echo of the day’s sun-streaked heat. George sat in his car across from the theater on Santa Monica. He had been drinking at a hotel bar down by the airport, but the weightlessness gained from the gin had worn off on the drive north. His body was heavy now, every joint and limb.
He kept the window down, the radio low. A scientist on the news was talking about the NASA rover on Mars. A month or so earlier, the machine had discovered icy white patches in the Martian soil, but now those patches had disappeared. The scientist believed they had phased from ice to vapor without ever becoming water. A rare occurrence, he said. Sublimation was the word he used to describe it.
It was nearly time for the later showing. George hadn’t seen anyone go into the theater. This was the final night of the movie’s run. Tomorrow, another would open; a classic this time, famous faces. The new poster was already up.
His hands ached. Sometimes, he could still feel that toothbrush pressing into the skin of his palm. Such a common thing at the strangest times. Driving the shuttle, or, over the years, mornings with other boyfriends, other men. Standing at the mirror in someone else’s bathroom and having to look at his hands to reassure himself nothing was there.
He had thought this would fade with time and it had, but not entirely. It had just grown duller, an ache instead of a burn. It was the one constant in his life. He had carried it through all of his jobs and relationships. There were times he had wanted it gone and times he was afraid it had left him. But it was always there. It had never turned into anything else.
Horns honked as he crossed the street, the sound smearing in the air behind him. Screeching brakes, angry shouts. At the ticket booth, he slid his money through the slot in the cloudy Plexiglas. In the lobby, he walked past the concessions, the smell of old carpet and hot popcorn, and then into the theater, the cool, dim room.
He was alone. He sat and then the room darkened even further and the curtain swung open to free the screen. From above and behind, he heard the projector whirl to life. The first bright light crossed the room, the beam rich with dust. The studio logo, the fanfare. He didn’t have to watch. If he let it, the film would pass, one last time, unobserved. He closed his eyes, weak again, shutting it all out. But then he could feel that pressure in his palm, the pain of the bristles refusing to let him slip away. He squeezed back, holding his fist tight, until the pain turned, softening, spreading, and then George could feel warmth from the seat beside him, the pressure in his palm becoming that familiar hand in his.
He opened his eyes and the movie began.