He hadn’t time to ponder the question before the visor flipped open to reveal not Cat and her sweet, pillowy lips but a man Benji knew only as Knuckles, the assistant to the sound engineer, whose purple-ringed, slightly bulging eyes and beakish nose gave him the aspect of a baby bird fallen from its nest. Taken aback, Benji registered the intrusion as if he’d discovered someone peeking into his home through the mail slot. “What do you want, Knuckles?”
Knowing the risk he’d taken in approaching an actor after Kay had called places, the man glanced behind him, taking stock of the stage manager’s proximity and whether, like some fanged forest animal locked on the scent of a defenseless chick, she had spotted him. “I have a favor to ask.” He spoke quickly but quietly, a torrent of words practiced on his approach. “My mom’s sixtieth birthday is coming up, and she’s a huge fan of your father. She used to teach English and has all of his books. I’m not kidding. All of them.”
“That’s not so hard to believe, Knuckles. He isn’t Trollope.”
“Who?” Knuckles asked before shaking off a question he didn’t care to have answered and returning to his script. “Anyway. Could you ask him to sign one? It would be great. Happy birthday, Marge.” Here, he pressed a hardcover edition of Henry’s fourth novel, the seventh book in history to win both the Pulitzer and the National Book Award, into Benji’s hands. If the uninvited game of peekaboo was a violation, this equally uninvited game of hot potato was worse. Benji flicked the novel back to Knuckles, but Knuckles had already turned and, quick as a child who believes his every wish will be granted if only he can outrace the word no, scurried away uttering a stage whisper of, “Thanks, Brian.”
Brian? Benji hammered on the name like a coffin nail as his dulled but not entirely useless reflexes sent him fumbling after the airborne book. He caught it with every intention of hurling it after its owner, but it became, in that instant, heavy as marble. His arm felt like he’d been carrying that stupid book his entire life. Brian. He could die with Brian etched on his tombstone and who — other than his mother and father and sister — would register the mistake?
Benji wilted against the wall in his great metal suit. The lambent red of the exit door shone like a beacon, and his feet, before his mind could tell them to move, ferried him outside. The sudden shot of mid-August air, already crisp and cool as a September night, fueled him past the reeking leviathan of the Dumpster, into which he tossed the birthday present for Knuckles’ poor mom. He had no particular destination in mind, but, in what was technically a stolen suit of armor, he began to run. Or at least move as swiftly as he could encased in fifty pounds of metal and mail. The thrill of escape from the thankless chore of playing King Hamlet, from the crushing, mocking, monolithic successes of his own father, from the indignity of being called Brian — fucking Brian! — spurred him forward. That, and the adrenaline that came from being chased.
As he ran, he made ridiculous music that brought to mind a festoon of tin cans rattling behind the newlyweds’ car, a sound punctuated by the flat footfall of the homelier of two assistant stage managers, who demanded, sotto voce, that he stop, turn around, and get back here right now. With her shiny Elvis hair and oversized lumberjack shirt that essentially rendered her pear shape shapeless, the woman looked not merely like Kay’s assistant but her clone. Even in work boots, she was, compared to Benji, lithe and swift and beginning to gain. Her winded, whispery plea zipped into Benji’s ear at such close range he expected her to grab his shoulder and throw his helplessly stiff body to the ground, but at the edge of the parking lot, like a dog who’s reached the perimeter of an invisible fence, she stopped. It was eight o’clock. Soon, the Alice Stone Memorial Pavilion’s little stage would be aboil with light. The curtain would rise. And Kay No. 1, regardless of the actions of a washed-up child actor and now costume thief, expected outpaced Kay No. 2 to be in her place.
Watching her hurried retreat, Benji stopped running and, hands on knees, struggled to catch his breath. The thought that there would be no ghost, not tonight, curled his mouth into a dark, momentary smile. He hadn’t set out to fuck Kay over, or jam up the night’s machinery with a wrench big enough to cause even the easy-breathing Judge Tornquist to hyperventilate, but if that was the icing on this particular cake, he wasn’t above licking the fork. Then again, maybe fucking them over was exactly the reason he’d run. Imagining the lot of them now, Judge and Delores and sweet, sanctimonious Cat, who one by one had looked across the table on that first day of rehearsal and claimed they’d never heard of him, being either too young to remember any sitcoms older than Saved by the Bell or, in Delores’ case, too flatulently theatrical to own a television, Benji savored a backstage scene of contagious panic. The very people who’d left him feeling untalented, unsexy, unsung, whose poisonous mockery still rang in his ears, would, as curtain time came and went, want him, need him. They would hate him, all their worst suspicions of him confirmed, but a second before that they’d choke on their own superiority and simply wish he were there.
He dropped his helmet and continued on his way.
A road well-tended by the state parks commission snaked for more than a mile down a gently sloping wooded incline. It descended a hill of significant historical note, a trail of blue-and-white signs, ubiquitous in these parts, explaining the role it played, in 1777, in General Burgoyne’s surrender. Or something. Quicker, though, a path cut through the trees, a straight shot along the ridge of a craggy ravine, across an old, moss-covered bridge, to the entrance of the park, where a rotating cast of rangers, either committedly mute or annoyingly chipper, sat in a booth handing out maps and parking stubs, making change. And, in the one named Seth’s case, selling the surplus from his personal stash of pot, mushrooms, and pain medication.
Over the course of his many pilgrimages, Benji had come to see Seth as the fallen powerhouse of his high school swim team. Seth had had the trophies, the top place on the record boards, the requisite hot swimmer girlfriend and college scholarship, then in about the time it took to tear a rotator cuff, he traded it all, everything he loved in life, for a stiff-brimmed olive-green campaign hat and a drug problem. Good-bye, girlfriend. Good-bye, scholarship. Hello, OxyContin. Ultimately, though, Seth’s biography mattered less than the fact that he was an appreciative Prodigy fan and, unlike most drug dealers in Benji’s experience, willing to extend credit.
Shagged with a shifting carpet of pine needles, the path gave under Benji’s feet, and the grade proved steeper than he remembered. Because his time onstage was so brief, the boards he traversed so straight and level, he’d failed to realize the very real difficulties in walking in a metal suit. The more he tried to hurry, the more he moved like he had Parkinson’s. He took small, stuttering steps, sliding and clattering between the trees, ricocheting like a silver pinball, before a sunny ray of the obvious cut through the afternoon’s whiskey haze: why not take the armor off? He began with the gauntlets. One by one, with little grace and a violent twisting motion that would have given onlookers the impression that he meant to use his armpit to rip off his own hand, he shed his metal mittens.