footlights - K

He was always someone else. Consistently, day after day, he thrust himself wholly into a role that existed outside him. He became another person entirely. He rewired his own brain until he no longer liked the butter chicken from Radhika's on King Street that he'd found so delightful the week before; until he preferred powdered creamer in his coffee to milk, which he had taken without protest last Thursday; until he could no longer stand for his hair to be that shade of pale yellow, because that wasn't him. He became Mr. Julian Moore who smoked a pipe and made catcalls to poor, frightened women. He became Dr. Daniel Newhouse, the studious and humourless professor of logic. Always, always he was someone else. Someone who was not real. Someone who existed only on the page until he took them and absorbed them into himself. He gave them fire.

It was beautiful. He knew it was beautiful, because he abandoned himself to make it so. He had to, to make it believable. To make people laugh at his light-hearted follies or cry when he lost something precious. He had to make them want to scream at him when he was dastardly, want to punch him in the mouth or wrap their fingers round his throat and squeeze the life from him. He had to make them want to fuck him when he was sensual, and whether the desire was sweet with feeling or filthy and base was something he needed to control.

His true passion was for the stage. When he first tried his hand at screen acting, they had dismissed him. He was too over the top, they said. He made love to the panels during casting calls as he made love to his audiences, and it was too much. It wasn't realistic. He worked on his manner and his method and tried again. Again. Again. The transition to screen was not an easy one because the people watching him while he practiced his art were not the right people. They were not the people who loved him or hated him for who he was on stage, not the people whose energies and emotions he fed from during a performance—

A stage. A barely known piece, just finished, from a local playwright who had gained some popularity within the city for his last play. It had been about a child growing up in Alaska. This one was about sin.

A stage. He was poised there. He was fluid and erotic. Tempting. He was sweating under the stage lights, and the white makeup was suffering for it, but the audience was enthralled. He was Sin. He was every terrible thing in the world that someone, somewhere desperately desired. He was vile, but they wanted him. They all wanted him. Under the glaring lights, to the sultry voice of a cello, he swelled with it.

A stage. It was the only place left in the world. He had forgotten the filthy, beer-stale bars where he had drunk himself dumb and cheated at cards, and the beige-draped motel rooms where he had paid thin, smoky women to suck his cock. He forgot the casinos, he forgot the nameless, impersonal rooms and hallways in which he had lied to people. He forgot them, but he never forgot the sin. He became it.

—Oh. No. They wouldn't give him what he craved. They weren't there to be swept away, but to analyze and judge. Can you fill this role or can't you?

He understood what they wanted, eventually. He gave it to them, and when he did, they gave him the parts. He was given Julian Moore and Daniel Newhouse, and he violated every part of them with his fierce need to become.

But what of Afton Stanwood? Lord knew there was only room for one man in there at a time, and when other men reigned, Afton was forcibly silenced, cut down to be resurrected at a later date. Slowly, Afton became subject to the same version of reality as Moore and Newhouse and countless others. Afton was a role. A part to be played when other parts were no longer needed. And the man himself was lost.