I am dead.
The director scrutinizes the lighting, the angle,me, there in the coffin. His head floats above me; his eyebrows cinch. My ruffled collar itches my chin, but I must remain still, for stillness is an actor’s greatest tool.
I am neverreallydead.
I always recall the characters I’ve played as though I’m still playing them.Embodying them, my old acting teacher at the conservatory would say.Channeling their essence.She used to have us sit at a table with our eyes closed, our palms stretched wide.Listen for a pulse, a voice inside you, she’d say.Your body is no longer your body. Your mind is no longer your mind. Now say it…More than a decade and a half later, in that plywood coffin, I repeated those words to myself.I am not me. I am not me.
It was early January 1986, around the time of the comet, thatnine-mile ball of light that appears every seventy-six years and bears the name of the astronomer who predicted it. Halley’s Comet. Already the comet was everywhere: on ball caps and T-shirts, on magazine covers and beer ads and souvenir spoons. Each night, the local meteorologist tracked the comet’s progress toward perihelion—February 9—when it’d be closest to Earth, visible to the naked eye.
There, in that box beneath the dirt—though really on the soundstage—I said it:I am not me. I am Stella. My body elongated and relaxed. My skin stretched. My legs became her legs. Her hands were my hands. I was full of grit, literally and metaphorically. I manifested strength on-screen.
I became Stella. I was in a box. The box was in the ground. The ground was in Port Middleton, the fictional setting ofStars and Shadows, the fifth-ranked soap opera in the nation, though the most popular in the regional market because it was filmed in Cincinnati, Ohio, in the studio attached to the Earthshine Soap Factory, the show’s only sponsor.
Elliot yelled, “Roll sound,” then I heard the click of the clapper board by the production assistant, some young intern with no panty line. I couldn’t see much from where I was lying, only the bobbled heads of the makeup girl and the wardrobe assistant, the boom mic hanging above me. My stomach growled, and this felt like a betrayal because I’d eaten Dexatrim for breakfast.
I focused my mind again. I was Stella Shadow, the niece of Celeste Shadow, the wealthiest woman in Port Middleton. I’d contracted a disease so rare that only two doctors in the world had ever heard of it, and luckily one of them practiced at Port Middleton Memorial.
My body felt heavy.I’m buried alive, I told myself. At the conservatory, my acting coach taught me to feel my impact points. She taught me to follow the breath through my body, to extend it out of the top of my head like a whale spouting water. I began to sense the walls around me, the way my toes and arms and head grazed the wood. The dome lamp hung over me, and the heat dampened my skin, butI imagined it’d be cool beneath the soil. I imagined earthworms wriggling outside the box, the kind Wyatt would tell me increased soil aeration and nutrient cycling. He’d once bought me a bag of worms when I’d planted a garden because that’s what our marriage looked like then: possibility.
“Action,” said Elliot. The camera rolled. The bulb near the viewfinder blinked red three times, then became a beady eye.
Oh, I’d died before: a boat explosion, a safari disaster, an airplane crash over the mysterious island of Notelddim Trop, which is just Port Middleton spelled backward. But I always came back. The credits list me as a recurring guest star—and I loved seeing that word beside my name,star, even if I wasn’t technically part of the main cast.
Above me, I could hear Celeste Shadow beside my grave weeping.
“If only I’d been in time,” Celeste said. She’d been in the Far East, searching for the other doctor who had the cure for the rare disease that claimed me. “I arrived with that vial just as you expired,” she wailed.
I heard my cue, then I felt it: the weight of expectation, the shift of attention in my direction. So much of acting is stillness and energy combined—even when you’re not playing dead. My eyes were closed but they fluttered, then opened, and then fill lights blinded me, like I was looking directly at the sun. The brightness distracted me. I began thinking about endings, about Wyatt, about how the last time I’d seen him everything was confusing again. Wyatt kissed me goodbye and said,You’re a hard habit to break, which was just a lyric from a Chicago song, so it didn’t mean anything, really. But it made me sad because, first, it was a breakup song, and, second, I wasn’t a habit: I was still, technically, his wife.
And that’s when I heard it first, there in that coffin. I mistook it for a horn in the distance, or a barge passing on the Ohio River nearby. The noise was staticky, faraway and close at once: just a single note, repeating.
Waaaa. Waaaa.
“Line,” I said.
“Can you hear me? Can you hear me, Aunt Celeste? Youarein time. I’m still alive,” read the production assistant. The way she spoke told me she had secret ambitions.
“Cut, cut,” Elliot yelled. A hand reached down for me, and I allowed myself to be pulled up. “Ten-minute break, everyone,” he said, then: “For christsakes, Nona, what’s your problem?”
“Sorry, Elliot,” I said. I could no longer make out that strange noise. “Just give me a minute.” Getting out of the coffin was like getting out of a canoe; there was no easy way. I wore heels for authenticity, even though the script called for only close-ups of my fists pounding the box.
“I know, I know,” he said. Elliot was short, so I slouched to make myself smaller.
“I’m distracted is all.”
“Me, too, Nona, but Christ. I’m doingmyjob—at least while I have one, which may not be long, if you’ve been keeping up with the news. Did you see today’s paper? Another one.”
He was talking about the latest article in theCincinnati Inquisitor. Last month, four Jane Does had come forward with a lawsuit, claiming Earthshine Soap contained addictive chemicals of some sort, psychoactive ingredients that caused all sorts of side effects. Since then, production schedules had been all over the place; the studio was needed to shoot new commercials for the latest PR campaign. Now, according to this morning’s paper, a fifth woman had been added to the lawsuit.
“Crazy,” I said. “Soap crossing the blood-brain barrier. Who’d ever come up with that?” Standing there on set, my toes squeezed into too-narrow shoes, I’ll admit: I didn’t believe those Jane Does. I hadn’t considered I could be one, too.
“I’m already getting heat. Threats of a boycott. Worse. We can’t drop our only sponsor. We’d be done.”
“Bored housewives would never give up Port Middleton,” I said.
“Someone egged my car this morning. Those women are batshit.”
“Was it one of them? A Jane Doe?” I asked.
