By Randee Dawn

In a moment, I will open the door, and then I will know.

The dressing room is so quiet I can hear the invisible ticks on my wristwatch, a prop like everything else I wear. My clothes aren't mine. The shoes on my feet, the ones that pinched all through the second act, they're not mine either. I am surrounded by the unfamiliar, the unowned. The only thing I possess, the only thing I know for sure, is that she will be on the other side of the door in six more minutes.
But there is doubt in that, too.
I have tried very hard to be certain, but I may have slipped.

I do not want to think about that now.
When I drink, which is often, a bubble encases me. I am lighter somehow, my words carry no weight and the hard reality of the bar or lounge or airplane or hotel room or club turns fluid. The world becomes a prop. Funny word, that. To support, to maintain, to lend assistance to. I wear props and I lean on them. Over the years it has sometimes been hard to know what -- and who -- is the prop, and what --and who -- is the reality. My apartment feels full of props. Items I have collected over the years to create a person I hardly know. Mere things, mere material goods, each chosen with the unspoken question: would I have bought this if I hadn't already read the script?
I never know for certain.
You see, I had the map. I was given the book. But there were gaps, holes, missing sections. I have been groping blindly in the dark, living amongst my props. Waiting.
Of course she will be there. Unless --
I don't want to think about that right now.

I have six minutes, which will draw out as I concentrate on every second, staring at the crudely-painted white door and wonder if somewhere along the line I missed a step, I forgot what to do, I managed somehow to rewrite what had been written. If I have, she may not come.
I want to drink right now. I am thinking very hard about the warm whiskey against the bright slick ice cubes that I have within arms-reach, the only stipulation on my rider. Rock stars want their green-coated chocolate candies; for tonight I have insisted on Jack Daniels. But I am not going to drink, not yet. In truth, I do not need it. I already feel my lightness, where my hands touch but not quite feel the arms of the chair, the hairy woolen seat cushion scratches fibrously through my light shirt. The itch might as well belong to someone else. I know it is there, but the sensation is not mine. I am just watching the door. I feel drunk. But except for my cough medicine, there's not an ounce of alcohol in me.
It is square, like most doors, unremarkable in any respect. A gold plated door handle. Approximately seven feet high and three wide, it knows -- as well as inanimate objects know anything -- its purpose. Keep out, keep in. Divide. Conquer.
My own instructions were less clear. Perhaps I shouldn't have brusquely turned away my only other visitors as soon as they arrived. Perhaps the room should have been filled with well-wishers, flower, signs of life. But I wanted silence. I wanted emptiness. I got both. I am the star, after all. I can do these things. My dressing room is austere, impersonal, tidy.

I blew it tonight, of course. Too much else on my mind. The performance was dreadful; my lingering cold caught hold of the silences between lines and made my character seem weak. I broke concentration early on, with the thought of eyes on me. It was careless and stupid of me, but within seconds of taking the stage I was back to where I began thirty years ago, pale and self-conscious and blustering through everything as if I knew what I was doing. That was how I acted then, by pretending. At some point I learned to act by being. But tonight, I was eighteen again, reading my first lines on stage. And somehow, despite that the next two and a half hours turned to shit, somehow it felt appropriate. Going back to the beginning. Starting from before I had all of the information. I took it as an omen.

Five minutes. Christ.
I want to move. I could get up and go to the door and be standing there casually when she approaches, smile my thin-lipped moue and watch for her reaction to know whether my life has been a waste of time. I could do that. But in addition to not being able to drink, I have lost the ability to move.
How long are three hundred seconds?
Enough.

"I'm dreaming," she told me twenty years ago, resting her fingers on my forearm. "I'm dreaming you."
I don't know what she saw when she first approached me. Twenty years ago I was twenty-eight and had been recently given that glimpse of the road ahead, a bright, vibrant path on which I would change the face of acting. My first starring role in a motion picture, shared with a buddy of mine from the same acting class. The studio had thrown us a signing party, held at some upscale Central Park West restaurant, and there I was, a lanky Midwestern kid with a big, silly grin and freckles -- god, freckles still -- high on my cheeks. I wasn't your usual leading man type; I hadn't the Ken doll looks that were permanently in fashion, but then again, neither did my costar. We were regular joes, and we were going to method our way through Hollywood and, as I've already said, change the face of acting.
"Bob Redford," scoffed my friend, now my costar, about six months before we got signed to the same picture, "that fucker's got less ability in his body than we got in our wisdom teeth. But he'll make it, his kind always do."
"What kind's that?" I had asked him.
"Beauty queens."
"What about our kind?"
He had squinted up at me. "I'll tell you," he began, but waited a good few moments to get his thoughts in order. "Look at me. I got this puffy face and my hair don't go nowhere and I'm short. Christ, am I short. You, you asshole, you got the height. And those baby blues. If you was a blond, you'd be beating that Redford fucker without blinking. But yer too much of a Mick. I'm too fucking Eyetie. So we gotta do it different. We gotta make them see us different. And I betcha. We will."
I never was that certain, even if I pretended to be. He -- oh, hell, you know him, you've seen him in scores of pictures since, from every gangster movie ever made, nearly. A few more pictures after the one we made together and he was set for life. I only imitated his resolve, and most of the time, it worked. I was imitating him all through the signing party, putting on that smile I had begun to develop for when complete strangers approached wanting to be my best friend. I didn't know it at the time, of course, but once you've done a film or two and lost anonymity...that smile is the actor's greatest friend. Deferential without seeming cold, distant without seeming forced, that smile had become my face's latest language. Never again would I know whether someone approached me because of me or because of a face seen elsewhere first. Not that I complained. Actors have to know what they're getting into. I did. From the minute I got my first applause juggling for my six aunts and three uncles after Thanksgiving dinner, from the moment Melinda Conway rewarded my showing off before the class with an acceptance to the Spring dance, I had been both hooked and informed of the benefits of performance. It had been like getting buzzed. So I knew what was coming, in that small sense.
But now that it had arrived, having the stage leech out into the real world, where people saw not me, but the part I had just played, I wondered just how good an idea this had been. Lately I had begun to feel I was always acting on some level, pretending for some potential stranger. I questioned. I doubted. Inwardly, of course. Outwardly I was gregarious, charming, witty, and terribly superficial. Slowly, the world was becoming my prop; the glass in my hand not really belonging to anyone but the house. And the house was whatever room I was appearing in. Whoever I was speaking to was not just some other conversant, but another actor in this play called life. We were exchanging lines. It had all been previously written and mapped out, scene by scene, careful and precise. I had wanted to act, and suddenly, that was all I was ever going to be allowed to do.

Her fingers were barely brushing my forearm when she spoke, and yet I turned, jolted somehow. A thick strand of hair fell over my forehead and I wiped it away with a flourish, turning from the woman I had been speaking with.
"It is you," the dreaming woman said in a cloudlike voice, hushed and awed. "I wasn't mistaken."
I didn't find her attractive then. Not right away. In fact, I thought not a bit about her appearance, which for me was rare enough. Later on I would see everything, the fine short hairs on her arms, the way her bobbed brown hair swished from side to side, how her perfectly sideways teardrop-shaped green eyes reflected every light in the room at once. But what I saw at first was an improbably-dressed woman at this most fancy Hollywood affair, in ill-fitting jeans and a crisp white collared shirt, standing before me, touching my arm still.
I started to brush her off. After all, the woman seated leisurely, attractively, and just below me on the sofa was still staring up, eagerly awaiting my next line. I was hoping the script would call for us to quietly leave in another twenty minutes or so, and I hoped the set decorators had included a waterbed back at her penthouse. So I really had no time for a starstruck fan who was not only far from being a teenager, but older than I was, by at least five years. "If you don't mind," I told her, "you're interrupting."
She seemed not to hear me. "How remarkable," she whispered again. "You're so young."
There was a strong scent of lunacy in her words and I lifted her hand from my arm and went to turn back to my companion. But as I touched her something great and strange occurred to me. I could not place her in my equation. If all the world was a stage...she was not part of the production. I felt it as clearly as a cold blast of air. Her words were ethereal and at the same time more concrete than anything I had heard before, and when I looked at her full on and saw my hand on hers she seemed wraithlike, sharply defined and yet not entirely dimensional. On taking her hand in mine I felt its presence, but neither warmth nor chill. She was there, and yet not there. I could almost feel her enveloping me with her gaze, and yet I was left with the impression that if I tried, I could make my arm pass through her essence, like a ghost. Quickly I gave her my protective, thin-lipped smile, and acted for her. It was the only defense I could muster. "Yes, yes," I said. "Excuse me." And I turned away.
Anyone else would have gone away. I assumed she had, because a few moments more conversation passed between myself and the lovely young woman on the couch. But I still felt this presence, and as the minutes drew out I began to be more and more aware that she had not only not left, but was watching me still. I was about to straighten and call for security to remove her when a smooth woman's breath brushed over my shoulder and into my ear. "I know about you," her voice reverberated. "I know everything there is to know. Almost. You should listen to me. You should trust me." And then the voice withdrew.
Slowly, I righted myself. She wasn't drunk; I knew drunk and it didn't radiate from her. She wasn't really crazy, either. She was completely sincere. And for the first time I really looked at her, without the false smile. "Trust you?" I said finally, turning towards her retreating figure. "I don't even know you. I don't think I care to. How did you get in here, anyway?"
Rude or not, it never seemed to penetrate her. "Say what you like," she told me, a Zen calm settling in her features. "I'm dreaming you. Eventually, you'll talk to me."
I wasn't altogether comfortable with her unwavering poise, and I liked even less this repeated reference to some dream she had. Or was having. Crazy talk. I shook my head. "Get lost," I told her, but this time didn't feel like turning back to my conversation. I wanted to see what she would do next.
To my surprise, she shrugged. "Fine," she said. "I'll see who else is here. But I'm fairly certain you're the reason I'm dreaming all of this. None of it makes sense if we don't get to talk. Because..." she twisted her lips slightly into a bunch, and for the first time I thought of her as pretty, just a fleeting spark in my head -- isn't that lovely -- and then it was over. "Because I think I'm supposed to warn you."
"Oh?" I said, raising my eyebrows exaggeratedly. "And what am I in such danger of?"
"Yourself," she shrugged, and turned away, heading to the bar.
She was good, I had to give her that. I scanned the room, trying to catch someone's eyes, wanting to see one other person watching this practical joke play out on me, someone who was getting satisfaction out of my unease. But no one was watching me; in fact the rest of the room felt muted, all of the bright color drained, and when I turned back to where the woman had walked she stood in stark contrast to the other partygoers. The blue in her old, faded jeans was strikingly vibrant, the crisp white shirt seemed made of porcelain. I felt myself hooked, and decided to let the line play out. After all, it didn't matter who I went home with later; if I went along with this odd person's notions perhaps she would be the one with the waterbed in her penthouse. Or better. I fitted an amused, haughty look on my face and slipped on to a stool at the bar next to where she had assumed position.
"Do go on," I told her. "I'm naturally dying to know how I'm such a danger to myself."
She leaned on one arm, her head cocked to the side, and a familiarity came into her eyes, as if she had known me a long while. It was the only way I could describe it. She acted as if we had met not only once before, but many times, and before I knew what she was doing she had reached forward and moved that loose piece of hair away from my forehead again. She tsked slightly. "The screen never has done you justice," she told me. "And your hair really was this thick once, wasn't it."
Her fingernail lightly scraped my scalp as she moved the hair back and my spine felt looser. "What crap you say," I shook my head, but there wasn't much emphasis in it. She was either fully, completely loony, or something beyond my comprehension was happening.
Two Scotches with water appeared by our arms; I had been about to order one when I glanced down at the faded oak bartop and there they were. That did it; I began to feel unhinged. With a hand that was shaking slightly, I picked up my drink and downed it at once. "Who are you?" I asked her, dropping the grin for a moment.
She shrugged. "Nobody. Just a fan." A delighted gleam jumped into her eyes. "I know. Ask me where I've just come from."
I rolled my eyes and set the glass back down. "I can't imagine."
"I've come from sleeping," she said. "Or rather, that's not entirely true. I'm still asleep. I'm in a car right now, and I'm sleeping soundly. Can you believe that?"
"No," I told her, pressing my lips tighter. The glass was full again, and I picked it up. "You're nuts."
"It's true. I'm in a 1994 Ford Taurus with my friend and we've driven all the way across the state in order to get to your performance on time. You're in a play. You're in the lead role. Guess what the name of the play is."
"Back up," I told her, and felt the smile coming back to my face. The enigma had evaporated; now she was just ridiculous. "Let me see here. Not only am I a figment of your dream, you're also from the future. I see. And are all these cars in the future named after signs from the Zodiac?"
She laughed just then, a deeply-voiced chuckle, an indulgent, amused sound that infuriated me. "I never thought of it that way," she said. When I didn't respond, the teasing fell from her mouth and she laid both of her hands over mine. "I am on my way right now to see you perform in a musical called Sweeney Todd. It is very famous, and won all sorts of awards years before you agreed to do this revival."
"Never heard of it," I growled.
"Perhaps it hasn't been written yet."
I rolled my eyes again. "You make so little sense I can't imagine what I'm doing listening to you."
She ignored me and yet gave her full attention to my face, drifting for just a moment. "I wish I could convey to you how strange this is for me. I know full well I'm dreaming, but everything is so lucid, as if I was really here. But that's completely impossible. Do you know how old I am?"
"Do I care?"
"Yes," she said simply. "You do. Guess."
The odd thing was that I did. She was so odd, and yet so convincing I felt the rest of the party bleed away around us. There was just her hands over mine and the drinks next to us, the stool under me and those teardrop green eyes. "I don't guess women's ages."
"Try."
I told her I guessed she was twenty-six, which was shaving a few years off, but I did it out of instinct.
"Twenty-eight," she said. "Now guess when I was born."
"Oh, come on," I said. "This is getting silly."
"I was born in 1968."
I didn't know what to say. We had progressed from the metaphorical dreamstate to hard, impossible facts. One born in 1968 was not drinking in front of me, circa 1974. It simply was not happening. But I was letting myself be convinced. I wanted to go along with her because the longer I spent with her the more attracted I was becoming. What had seemed plain only moments before was now almost blinding, and her serenity, her absolute sense of omniscience had taken me over. Whether I believed her or not made not an ounce of difference. I just wanted to see what was under all that composure. What did I know? I was a child. And really, so was she. I decided to play along. "I see," I told her calmly. "So you're from the future and you're here to warn me of what? Can I ask who wins the Series this year? What about the stock market? Have we nuked the Commies yet?"
"You don't believe me," she stated. "And I don't blame you. I sound completely insane. But I'm afraid I'll wake up before I get a chance to really talk to you."
I laughed. "What's so goddamn special about me, anyway?"
Now her smile was thin-lipped, and she did not answer, just stared at me for a long moment. Then, deliberately, she pulled her eyes from my face and scanned the room. I followed as she pointed to a thin, swarthy man standing near a window, talking to my classmate-turned-costar. "Him," she said. "I'm not certain, but that's Martin Scorcese, isn't it."
I squinted. "Might be. Who's that?"
"He's the one. He'll make your friend very famous someday soon."
"Doing what?"
"He's going to be enormously well-known as a director. And your friend, who's getting his big break in the same picture as you are, he's going to ride up with him. You should be making friends with Mr. Scorcese, not me."
"You're much more fun to look at," I made my first pass.
She blinked and her mouth opened slightly. "Oh, my," she said softly. "Don't do that."
"Do what?"
"Don't waste the chance," she said. "Don't waste everything. Not again."
I straightened on the barstool, affronted for a reason I could not grasp. "What did I waste, if you don't mind explaining?"
"What if," she began, "what if your entire existence was to serve as a warning to others? What if the only reason I'm here right now is to tell you exactly what happens to you over the next three decades? Would you want to know?"
I slipped down to the ground, glad to find the floor felt solid enough to walk on. "I think I need to be moving along now. Interesting meeting you." She had thoroughly unnerved me and all I could think right then was how I wanted to slink away, back to the unreal reality I knew how to move around in. Sitting with her I was losing touch. I was going slightly mad myself. This was far too serious. Without turning, I started to walk away.
But her voice reached out to me again and stilled me in my tracks. "You might have been so great," she whispered, almost to herself.
I wheeled around and pointed, striding back to her. "Stop that," I said. "No one is a lost cause at twenty-eight. I've got years and years and years and I'll win every award in the book. I'm a fucking good actor and I know exactly how to get the roles I want. So just cut this sighing angel bullshit and leave me alone."
Her eyes scanned my face and what shocked me was how torn she seemed. She was clearly forcing herself to remain in her seat, composed and detached, but the pull of her teeth on her bottom lip said differently. "You really want to be left alone," she said quietly. "You're just going to walk away."
I heard a new opening, so I softened my tone. "Look, you have to see it from my point of view." But I got no further. As if in slow motion I saw her crane her face towards mine and she kissed me full on the lips, and she tasted so good I did exactly what I was supposed to do: I kissed her back.

Over the past years I have tried to dissect that first and only sexual contact, tried to pull it apart and understand what was so unique about it, because I sense that if I could understand that one kiss I might be able to wrap my mind around everything that came after. All I know is what I remember, that she felt more present, more real, more alive than anything I could remember over the past several months, since my life upended and reality was something one acted one's way through. There was a solidity, a purity of form in that kiss I have not felt since, even in the women I later married. For just a flash, a moment, I owned her completely and knew everything there was about her. I forgot it instantly. But I came away with one realization: she was not lying to me.
She pulled back first and sat back against the bar. "All right," she said gently. "I guess I'll have to live with just that."
I lost all right to choose from then on; she was somehow, inexplicably, impossibly, here and yet also in a car sleeping, she was in two different years at the same time, and none of it mattered. The contact had been all the confirmation I was going to get. She was willing to let me go without explaining herself; that had to be enough of an assurance for me. It was. I leaped back on to the barstool. "Explain," I ordered her. "I want to hear this."
"Are you sure?"
I nodded. "I want to know." Suddenly I shivered. Her words were starting to sink in like cold rain drops through flimsy fabric. She came from a world where I hadn't changed the face of acting, where I had not dazzled the billions, where the awards had eluded me. Or rather, not entirely; in her world there was enough in something I had done to fire her imagination. I had done something worthwhile. But not very much. Not enough.
I was enough of a fantasist to believe this was possible, that there were other, unwritten endings for every path taken. An actor has to be willing to accept the unusual, the unlikely, even the impossible. How else is it possible to be someone else's incarnation? How else could I fill the spaces between words written by another person? To sit here and talk to her and accept what she told me...all I had to do was believe in the script she was spinning out. In her world I was surrounded by mediocrity. That depressed the hell out of me, and I didn't have to act much to feel it. But whether she was certifiable or not, it couldn't hurt to listen. I waved for another drink, trying to absorb that wide-eyed kindness in her face. What did it mean? I was about to find out.

And what a nightmare I have ruminated on all these years in accepting her offer: a man who knows his future condemns himself to a daily boredom that surely must mirror the torments of hell. But it was a double-edged sword: how could I turn down an offer like this, and yet at the same time, how could I live knowing that every page of the script had really already been written by a hand that allowed no revisions? Something inside of me died then, and a fierce desire to defeat my fate took hold. Let her explain; let her give the outline of how not to do things. How I had done them before, and how they had defeated me. And then I could pick and choose my life as I saw fit. Scorcese, eh? Good, then. Knowing what to do, and what not to do...that would be enough.
But knowing and doing -- this I did not know then -- they are two entirely separate things.

I never got her name. It simply never came up. As she spoke and told me what she knew of my career and my life, in all the time I watched her eyes light up and dim or her mouth open and close, a name never occurred to me. She simply was, and that was enough.
She was not omniscient, however. Her knowledge was faulty and full of spaces, years in which she had no knowlege of me. She knew some things in great detail; my Emmy award, my first trip to Broadway. My own Scorcese, only this in the guise of a B-movie king. Television. Another Emmy. It all spun out from her mouth in fits and starts, the things she had read and heard, the missed opportunities, my own disillusionment that came from such losses. She was not an angel at all, she was exactly what she had said she was, a fan who could never know the whole story. When her recountings turned even more personal, telling me how I would age and how my personality would warp, I grew morose and wanted desperately to tell her to stop, to go no further. But I couldn't make the words come out; hearing was like a drug, and I lapped it all up. Hear now, change later, I decided. I could stand that I would be blacklisted later on, knowing it was so easily altered. I knew what roles would be generation-defining, what films would overwhelm the industry. In just a few years the entire country would be swept by science fiction, a trilogy of stories all filmed with spectacular effects. These stories were not even written yet, and here I was, knowing they would be enormous successes. I could make my own ticket.
And the more I heard the more I wanted to hear. I began peppering her with questions, insistent and driving. I asked and demanded, I wanted to hear what she thought, what she remembered. It was like having the greatest agent to ever hang out a shingle, but only have them for an hour. I began to swing back around again, seeing the road once again paved shiny for me. I had been given Hollywood's blueprint for many years to come, and I was relentless in dragging every scrap of detail from her. I have no idea how long we spent sitting there, talking, but as we did we moved closer to each other, and I took her hand in mine, as if trying to hold on to a drifting sailboat. She answered, spoke, repeated, tried to remember, and then...she began to fade on me.
"I can't remember any more," she said finally, stymied. "That's all I know. Every bit of it."
I tried to think of some question I had not asked, but as I paused her hand began to feel less substantial beneath my fingers. "If you run out of things to say," I told her, "you'll wake up, don't you see?"
She shook her head and yawned slightly, covering her mouth with her free hand. "Oh," she said.
"Don't," I entreated her. "Don't leave."
"I have to," she said. "I don't belong here." She blinked quickly. "Do you hear that?"
Oddly, I heard nothing; the room around us was still muted and faraway.
"A noise. I think we've stopped."
It was as simple as that. She slipped her hand from mine and when I reached to take it back my fingers seemed to pass through hers. I cringed backwards against the bar and gripped my seat. Would she fade before my eyes? And if she did, could that really mean everything we had just talked about was true? I knew she had not lied to me, and yet I was still rational enough to know I had accepted something utterly impossible.
Around me, I could hear the party sounds seem to grow, and as the room came back to me I saw her slide from the barstool and inch away from the bar. "I have to go," she told me. "I have to stop dreaming now."
My head buzzed and inside my chest I felt a lurching. "Stay," I said. "I believe you."
She smiled slightly, backing away. From the corner of my eye I could see someone approaching me. "I'll see you right after the play," she told me. "I'll come back and you'll tell me all about it."
It was two hours for her; it was twenty years for me. I couldn't bear the thought.
And a crease of worry came over her face. "Unless..." she began, but just then my costar sidled up to me.
"Hey," he winked. "Whafuck you sittin' over here all by yourself, huh?"
For a second my attention was diverted.
When I looked back, she was gone.
"Meet my buddy Marty," my costar, my classmate, my superior, told me. "He's got this weird fucking story about a psycho cabbie."

That "unless..." haunted me until I understood it.
For days I could not get her words, her being, from my mind. I still haven't, not entirely, and that's fine. I don't want to lose her; I've worked very hard not to lose her. I got very drunk that evening with my new friends, heard all about Taxi Driver before it was ever put to paper, and passed out on the sofa where everything had begun just a few hours earlier. I did not dream of her. It did not work that way.
It took me nearly a week to understand it all, and by then we were filming down in Alabama. It was hot and sticky outside; I was being eaten my mosquitoes, and at every turn I saw in the people around me what she had done her best to explain. I saw the future careers of some, the obscurities of others. I had gone out and purchased stock in some computer companies she had told me I needed to pay attention to over the next ten years, and that had been the first time I had consciously acted on what I had been told by this woman, this green eyed woman I had never even gotten a name from. And as I bought the stock, slipping the receipts into my wallet, I felt oddly calm. It had been like brushing my teeth. No thrill, just something which, if I wanted to make a killing, I had to do. I knew the result. I had seen the answers on the test. No, I didn't know who would win the Series, because she didn't know much about sports. But there were things I did know.
I had an entire life to lead, however I chose to lead it. I had learned one string of paths not to take; there was no guarantee that if I took another I would do better. I might even do worse. But after a week none of it mattered. I realized what she had known at the very end: change any of it, and change the ending. I wanted to see her again. Not just wanted. Needed to. Had to. I counted on it. And that desire -- that overwhelming need, which came over me like the necessity of breathing -- changed everything back again. I knew, twenty years from now, with absolute certainty, that she would come to see me after a show I would be performing in called Sweeney Todd. She had given me dates and names of films, a long-running stint in a television series I was to have. All of it came before this one single play. And it became like a game: if I played by the rules, I would see her again. The other paths were closed to me now. I was impelled. There was no other option.
Two hours for her. Twenty years for me.
It seemed an even trade.

The long, thin second hand on the clock sweeps so slowly it might as well not be moving at all. Twenty years has come down to twenty seconds. The knock will come at the door and there she will be. She has to. I followed every instruction.
Because in the end, foreknowledge is not power. It cripples. I might have taken the roles in films I knew would be successful, I might have forged forward in any number of fields with the knowledge she gave me. I could have been great. And I decided against it. I spent my wilderness years doing crappy B-films for a crappy B-film director while my costar reaped the adulation of the industry for having paired up with an auteur. I did mediocre television and still, to this day, receive awards for the miniseries. I saw every loophole open and like a noose I slipped my head in and let myself hang. I married women I knew I did not really care for; they often criticized my meticulous attention to detail and thorough, almost businesslike approach to momentous occasions. They had no idea I was trying to follow a road map given me years earlier. When my son was born it felt like nothing, just another tick mark in a long list of expected events.
I lived, for years, with the fear that I might screw up. And I still have no idea that I haven't. You see, had I gone on to be hugely famous, praised to the heavens, considered the defining actor of my generation, well, then I couldn't possibly have done Sweeney. Not at this rinky-dink theater. And if I had shunned the lowly form of television I might not have played one of my favorite roles, the one where she first said she saw me. I saw the blacklist coming and while I railed against it publicly, privately I embraced it, reveled in it. An article from around that time period questioned why I seemed to shoot myself in the foot so often. It never occurred to anyone that I didn't feel the pain. She had said it would happen. And it did. And that was how I knew I was still on track. That was how I knew I would still see her.
There have been gaps. She did not know everything, she could not know everything. But I have followed her instructions to the letter. Is it ridiculous to have lived an entire life in order to converge upon one moment? I once thought so. But whenever I wavered I just pictured her teardrop eyes and that funny way she twisted her mouth. "Unless..." she said, and like the Lorax, she drifted away, leaving me with the seed for the future. I suppose I might have done things differently. But I never wanted to. Because always, up ahead, was a small, inconsequential show at an even more inconsequential theater. And afterwards was this person I had to see just once more. To know if it was really all true. So I rushed forward to greet it.
Tonight's performance was terrible. I could think only of the after. I cleared my dressing room. I want it clean, I want it perfectly devoid of anything that might change the course of how things were supposed to be all along. I'm still wearing my props. I'm more comfortable, surrounded by props. Always have been. And any second she will knock on the door, and we can face the uncertain future together. For the first time, neither one of us will know what comes next. It is so quiet in here I can hear the ticks on my wristwatch.
I can wait. I've waited a long, long time.
I wish I could drink.

I think my watch must be fast.

Copyright 1997