I sat against the wall in blissful meditation, pressing on my breast and shoulder wounds.
I had won. Now. Anagram of won: now. Now, I had won. I had discovered his weak spot (or strong spot depending on how you looked at it): he would not harm me seriously.
A few minutes later I heard thunder approaching through the hallway. I saw a big dark cloud flying quickly toward me and clapping loudly. It lit up like a lightbulb for a second. And then again. On and off, it blinked irregularly. And then I saw a lightning bolt spear to the floor.
Behind the cloud was Damon, advancing with long, confident strides, and carrying a large electric fan, which explained the cloud’s rapid progression.
He blew the cloud into my cage and came in himself. He grabbed me and shoved me in the bathroom and blew the cloud in with me. I tried to open the door, but Damon was holding it shut.
I immediately got struck by lightning. The pain was revolting; worse than normal straightforward pain. You couldn’t tense yourself against it. It was a tricky, very powerful pain that possessed you, and then left you.
I was struck again. I screamed, and tried to open the door, but Damon wouldn’t let me out. I climbed into the bathtub to get away from the cloud. Just inches from my waist, a bolt of lightning hit the soap, which leaped a foot in the air, accompanied by its plastic dish. For many long minutes I stayed in the bathtub, which in no way prevented me from getting struck by lightning repeatedly, to the point of almost losing consciousness. I would not do realist. I would rather die. Eventually, of course, I changed my mind and pounded on the door and told him I would do realist. Just as the door started to open, I got struck again and collapsed on Damon. He had to drag me to my bed.
He laid down next to me and was quiet. I wondered if he was expecting me to actively be doing realist right now, but I didn’t have the strength to worry about it. I closed my eyes.
After a few minutes I mumbled, “I thought highly of you, earlier, when you stopped shooting me and left. I thought you wouldn’t hurt me seriously. That you didn’t have the heart to. I was wrong.”
“No, not entirely,” he said. “I would hurt you but I wouldn’t harm you. There’s a difference.”
I didn’t answer and kept my eyes closed.
He went on: “The bolts you were struck with were bonsai bolts, coming from bonsai clouds.” He hesitated. “I had to make a decision. There was, to be honest, a small risk that you could have been harmed by the clouds—”
I raised my hand to shut him up, and said, weakly, almost inaudibly, but with extreme indignation: “I was harmed.”
“You were hurt, not harmed, as you’ll see in a week when these disappear,” he said, taking my arm and pointing to some marks in the shape of bull’s-eyes.
I stared at the marks. I hadn’t noticed them.
“You’ll find similar ones on your feet and calves, where the lightning exited your body,” he said. “Anyway, as I was saying, there was a small risk, quite small. But I felt it was important that I take it. Your future suddenly looked grim to me. I put your life at risk to save your dreams.”
I was feeling nauseated from the lightning. I didn’t need his words to sicken me more.
He said: “I wouldn’t have made you take a risk that I hadn’t taken myself. Through my work, I’ve been struck by lightning more times than I can remember. It’s a loathsome experience, disgusting, and every time it happens to me I swear I’ll get out of the business. But look at me, I’m still here, all my limbs function, I’m still smart, I’m still normal.”
“Normal?”
“Time for the movie.”
He put on Terminator 2 (so that I could “get motivated by Linda Hamilton’s muscle tone and general fitness”). It was hard to concentrate on her muscles, however, because soon after the movie started, he said, “Now do clownish.”
I stared at him. I was awed by his talent for coming up with the mood that was the most distasteful to me at any given moment.
“I thought you wanted me to do realist,” I said.
“That was good for then. This is good for now.”
I did my best to do clownish, which was not an easy task after having been struck by lightning.
Before going to sleep, he placed on my bed a scene I had to learn for the next day. I did.
That night, after I went to the bathroom, I checked around the corner to see if by some miracle my cage was wide open. It wasn’t, but resting on the carpet just inside the bars was a ruby. The card next to it read:
Dear Anna Graham,
This is what we must do to your old self.
(4-letter word)
Yours,
Damon
I was so exasperated with everything that I didn’t want to guess, but it was too easy, and the inauspicious answer rudely barged into my mind, completely uninvited.
The anagram for ruby was bury.
Chapter Eleven
The days passed. Damon came up with words, key words, and phrases, that he decided to utter when he wanted me to begin a scene. “Act” was one. “Do what you love,” was another. There was never any warning, never any time for preparation. His philosophy seemed to be that there was no point in doing a scene if it was not at an awkward time. That’s how one learned to act welclass="underline" through spontaneous slips into character. Sometimes he began arguments between us so that he would then have the pleasure of choosing the ripest moment to utter the word, “Act.” Swallowing one’s pride was part of becoming a good actor, he said.
And the scenes continued. They often involved ourselves, our lives, our future. In one scene he played my secretary once I became famous. In another he played my acting teacher, Aaron Smith, telling one of his protégés, played by me, that his former student, the now famous Anna Graham, had not allowed him to give her name to another girl. He said he couldn’t understand how she became such a good actress, because she was always herself too much, and she was now committing that dreadful sin more than ever. “I’m baffled,” he would add. “Maybe I should retire.”
And I, the protégé, would say, “Maybe you should. To be frank, you’re not a very good teacher.”
In one annoying scene, I had to play myself calling Damon a few days after saving him in the subway, and he asked if he really had to see me again just because I had saved him, and was his life going to be plagued by me from now on.
An even more putrid scene was the one where I was reminiscing about my kidnapping to a friend of mine (played by Damon), telling him it hadn’t been so bad, that sometimes yes, Damon did indeed shoot me with ice shards, but it was always for a good reason, never gratuitous.
Sometimes he gave me a scene that was the exact duplicate of our normal way of living, our normal routine. Once, he reversed our roles, and he played the captive (without, however, giving me a loaded water gun). Another time we were both captives.
Things stayed the same during the following weeks, except that the trampoline broke. Damon insinuated that it was my weight that broke it. This caused tension on my part.
Another thing that caused tension was that Armory Jude, the woman who had been voted most likely to be me, the pursued woman, got a movie offer. I tried not to think about it too much, but it was hard.
Nothing else in our lives changed. Damon continued going to the unfilmed room every day at 1:30 P.M., and coming back out half an hour later having cried. Every day except weekends. I didn’t find out what it was about. The anagrams continued. One night there were five rubies on the carpet, next to a note that said:
Dear Anna Graham,
In case you are concerned, the pain that your beautiful gift brings me lessens when I think that it makes you happy.