The Actor Prepares

In the basement of the neighbor’s house again. Channel six on the black-and-white television, this fifteen-inch someone stood up, rabbit-eared in the corner. Before this rusty-springed loveseat that stank of motor oil. On this mound where the stone foundation had crumbled despite there being many good options.

Maybe fourteen-year-old Vic Greener was woozy the day of the first break-in, having sprayed oil-based paint all that day inside a rotting dairy barn. Maybe he’d climbed in through one too many windows after his father’s plans to evaluate whether another foreclosed home was worth buying and selling or not—regardless, Vic’s been tricking this window for weeks and shimmying down here. To watch the late-night movies he could never watch back home with the supersonic ears of his sleeping father. This working man who considered the slightest noise, the very thought of sapping energy from the workday ahead of him, the highest possible blaspheme.

The other kids on the bus call the kid who lives here Turtleboy, and enjoy tormenting him. Specifically, they are prone to smack at his head to see if it will suck back inside his slouching shoulders. On account of his long neck and stooped posture. The achingly slow way the kid walked up his gravel driveway after the bus dropped him off.

A slowness, Vic noted, that appeared to run straight down the Turtleboy hereditary line.

It took him a few weeks of breaking and entering to differentiate between Turtleboy’s footsteps and those of who he guessed to be the grandfather. The bent in-half geezer who’s always puckered up on the porch when the bus stops out front. But tonight, yes, Vic thinks he can. Tonight, he’s almost certain he can identify a slight unevenness to the walk. A history there. A backstory, like so many of the characters he watched. As if long ago, the leg had been broken or shot. In a deer hunting accident or by a scorned ex-lover, he couldn’t guess. Turtleboy’s alcoholic Eastern European grandmother, perhaps?

Working to decipher, Vic leans in, turns the volume down, and listens. A door creaks open. A weak stream hits water. A toilet flushes. A blast through the copper pipes that peek through the ragged insulation at him, like hanging hanks of flesh above his head. Then those steps again on the floorboard continuing to suggest their own story, followed by rows of bedsprings crunching. Vic thinks, an Eastern European grandmother with a bent for witchcraft and Vodka, no doubt, then turns the volume back up to sink into the soggy couch.

Or maybe not?

Onscreen a slimy creature rises—inch-by-inch—from the oily void of a swamp. The shot is then crosscut with a screaming blonde grabbing at the length of her pale face.

Last night, a similar-looking woman seduced a salesman to kill her too-rich-for-his-own-good husband. The night before, a couple fled a flock of murderous birds that preyed from telephone wires. And before that, a crop of UFOs hovered over the glowing crowns of cities all over the world while a heroic scientist searched for plans to prevent their collective destructions. All these movies whose rolling credits left Vic confused and delighted, returned him to the confines of his family life, thinking things like:

Where am I?

Who am I?

How in the hell did someone bring this to life? These scenes that contained more intricacy in design and scope than any flipped foreclosure of his father’s?

Then there’s this feeling: of Vic’s consciousness falling back into him from someplace else. Except tonight, curiously, the feeling descends unprompted. There are no rolling credits. No swelling score. Only the townspeople, onscreen, continuing to discuss how to destroy the creature—stuck in the same scene, at the same pub, with the same sticky bar top, that he’d been imagining himself seated at only a moment ago.

Now Vic turns down the volume again, listens. Realizes that the grandfather’s footsteps have veered from their usual path. That he needs to climb out the window and run—right that second—but the opportunity has already passed. The basement door is creaking open. The light from above spills, yawning along the stonewall. Wider and wider before his eyes. As the shadow of Turtleboy’s grandfather gently begins to fall—step-by-step—from the ceiling. His bent shadow clarifying with every slow moment’s passing.

From Vic’s quick glance over his shoulder, the old man looks every bit of the character he imagined: bearded, ghastly white, favoring the one foot where his maybe Eastern European wife shot him. His own elongate neck stretches out its shadow.

“What’s this here?” Turtleboy’s grandfather says, shuffling toward him through the dark.

Vic turns back to the TV, stares straight and silent. Suddenly grabbed by the irrational fear that his heart’s knocking would wake his sleeping father next door. Would forever end the awe he felt watching these films, and whatever success he sensed that’d blossom into.

Closer now, the shuffling stops. When he senses the pressure of the grandfather’s hand on the back of the loveseat, intuitively, Vic stretches his neck out. When the old man’s fingers creep into his hair, he begins the process of deepening his slouch.

I am Turtleboy, Vic thinks. Eugene in the flesh.

“Hey, I’ve seen this one,” his grandfather says, breathing thinly in the dark behind him. “They’re about to show that froggy bastard what’s what.”

Onscreen, the townspeople have entered the cave with their torches and deer rifles. The creature is trapped, surrounded. In the cramped space, it appears much smaller and vulnerable than any of the townspeople seem to have considered. There’s a moment’s hesitation. But only that. Then the shooting starts. Bullets and beastly moans echo off the cave’s strobing, craggy walls, and throughout the basement. All the while grandfather’s fingers continue raking through Vic’s hair—these long hard nails like a gardening tool cutting against his scalp. Through which Vic only continues extending his neck and slouching his shoulders. Just like he’d seen Turtleboy do on the bus.

Trying to feel what Eugene feels when his grandfather touches him like this.

It’s a feeling, Vic guesses, not so dissimilar from the time his father sent him up a forty-foot ladder. The way they side-hugged when he descended and chatted much longer than usual over their packed lunch of turkey and cheese sandwiches. And as the creature’s dismembered body sinks back into the swamp’s watery depths, so much like the nuclear waste from which it came, Vic attempts to radiate this remembered love.

Vic sinks too, relaxing into the pain. Now the creature’s final breaths bubble through the amber mulm. Slowly in pairs—one-by-one—then not at all. The creature dying. The creature gone—the actor inside that slimy suit executing the creature’s death so convincingly that, when the credits start rolling, the raking stops: the grandfather claps as Vic turns around—

Clap…

Clap…

Clap…

And it’s here, in this applause, before the reality of the situation is realized, that Vic hears something vaguely promising. Comforting, even. The first of a sound that will upend his life and become his calling.

—

Harris Lahti’s first novel, Foreclosure Gothic, will be available from Astra Publishing House June 10.