Evan Sharp, author of “His Final Act”, is a Melbourne-based writer and editor. His short fiction has appeared in Germ (YA) and forthcoming in Marrow Magazine.
*****
A plunge into momentary darkness was the desired effect, and we found our audience gasping with awe the way we’d planned it. When the lights turned back on, the two leads were meant to confess their love, lock their lips, and freeze center stage before the fall of the curtain—all as rehearsed, of course. Instead, the stage light beamed on and the crash came with it.
The rest of the company stared on with horror and shock as we realized it was the body of our director, Stanley Andrews, that had fallen from the rafter. But the audience found it necessary to clap anyway, not understanding that, according to the script, the play wasn’t supposed to end that way.
I didn’t know Stanley that well. We’d worked together on only one film—Louis’ Revenge—before he decided to adapt it into this play. He was, of course, the director of that film as well. He was always the director in everything he was a part of. He always wanted to take charge.
The rest of the company stared on with horror and shock as we realized it was the body of our director, Stanley Andrews…
I was the extra in the film, billed as “the boy in the back.” The back of the supermarket, to be exact. In the film, I was meant to stand by the confessionary shelf and put candies into boxes for several hours. I got fired from that project, though. According to him, I kept “facing the damn camera!” when I wasn’t supposed to. His thundery voice still haunts me. I liked to think that hiring me for the play, this time around as the cashier, was his way of apologizing to me.
This was why the police pointed to me first during their investigation.
“And where were you, Mr.—is it Greenville?” asked the constable, squeezing her eyes as if trying to recognize me. She sounded too rude. All the constables I’d ever met in my life were soft spoken but still authoritative. I knew because I’d done a lot of research in the field of law enforcement just in case I’d get to play one someday.
“It is Greenwell,” I corrected her with gritted teeth. “Mr. Graham Greenwell is my name.” I smiled for effect. For a moment, I thought she might recognize me from some of my other roles. All extras and bit parts, of course. If I were offended that she didn’t know who I was, I’m sure I didn’t show it in any crevice of my face. I was an actor. It was my job. I could control it. It was what I was trained to do.
No, I’m not offended at all, I thought. I was glad, in fact, to correct a potential fan. Maybe one day a devoted fan. Had she seen my work? I asked myself. You could never tell. Even constables come to plays, don’t they? Maybe when they weren’t in uniform, I decided.
“Mr. Greenwell, where were you when this all went down?” she asked again.
Ironic choice of words, I thought. What did she mean by “went down?”
“I was over there,” I said, pointing to the area just behind the curtain, near the dessert tray, where the oatmeal cookies were free to take if you were part of the company. And it was good that I was. A hungry actor is an uncooperative actor.
“So you saw Mr. Andrews falling?” she asked.
“No, not exactly.”
“Really?”
“Well, I was hungry,” I confessed. The memory of the cookies came back to me in a warm stench of oatmeal and the sweetest sugar. I wasn’t supposed to put on any weight. I didn’t eat sugar. The voluntary fasting made me exhausted most of the time. But that was the best way to remember my lines. When I think of the first letter of my opening lines as my gut churns and moans, suddenly I can recall entire sentences into reality like a forgotten pipedream.
I didn’t explain any of this to the constable. Her head was pointed down. She was scribbling on her little notepad. She didn’t ask me about my relationship with Stanley Andrews. She didn’t want to know about the previous film we’d worked on together or the play that had been halted by his death.
The play, like the film, was called Louis’ Revenge. It was about a forty-three-year-old man, named Louis, who ditches his tech job to work in a supermarket and uncovers a serial killer in the neighborhood. The twist: he falls in love with her. Naturally, my role as “the boy in the back” from the film could’ve provided the perfect sidekick for the play’s hero. But Stanley wouldn’t have it. For this theatrical, I’d been relegated to cashier without any lines. Still, it was a job. It was better than “the boy in the back.” It was better than being fired.
Instead, the constable thanked me and walked over to the rest of the crew to get their statements. I felt deflated and ignored, and I thought what a rude little person she was. Five-two and turquoise-eyed, with a square jawline and a sharp nose—the perfect side profile, actually. She resembled a young Isabella Rossellini, only with a hat and a baggy uniform.
If only she were nicer to me, I thought while watching her walk away, she’d probably find herself in contact with my agent right about now. Well, she had her chance, I thought, tearing off my cashier’s apron and leaving the theater.
The brisk air outside the opera house hit me crisply, sending my fringe flying askew. I forgot to bring my hat. The only one I owned was a fedora. Something I found in an antique shop on my way home from rehearsal one night. I bought it solely to land a role in Stanley’s supermarket-detective film. I always thought I’d play a constable, though. One from the 1930’s era. But that hadn’t happened yet. I was too young and inexperienced. Young enough to look like a cashier in a supermarket but unwilling to actually be one in reality.
But maybe, just maybe, I thought with a chill of hope, that now with Stanley gone I’d get to be one. I could audition. I was an understudy of the male lead, after all. Maybe a little death was a good thing.
Suddenly I felt cheerier. I caught a whiff of something in the air. Toward the end of the pier, I saw coils of smoke blowing off someone’s lips. I saw a red wink of a lit cigarette. Two of the other actors were smoking near the water. I never smoked. It yellowed the teeth. It was bad for closeups. It made your breath smell foul. Obviously, I would take up smoking if it were required for the role. A smoking detective. A constable showing his audience just how calm, cool, collected he is.
Feeling quite cool myself, I went over to the smokers. I sucked in my breath, holding it in. I was careful not to taste the smoke because I might cough and ruin the composure of the scene. The tough, young constable approaching the other suspects. The policewoman who’d just gotten my statement could’ve taken notes, I thought, if she’d been nicer to me.
“Oh God,” James Fury muttered under his breath when he saw me coming from across the pier. We were rivals. We fought for the same roles. He won most of the battles, however. He was “more mature” and “right for the role” as according to Stanley and some of the other casting agents. In the theatrical of Louis’ Revenge, he was the male lead out of the lovers. He was thin and wispy and without muscle tone, but he had these blue eyes and that crooked nose which gave him a distinct look of enviable, sexy trouble. And with a surname like Fury, he could play a lot of roles that I simply couldn’t. Not with an old person’s name like Graham.
“Lovely to see you again, Mr. Fury,” I said.
“Graham.”
“Did you hear, Graham?” Lily Carter, the female lead, asked me.
“What?”
“They’re going to shut down the play for good,” she said.
“Really?” I asked, her words hitting me like a spray of nails. “Because of Stanley? Can’t we get a new director?”
“No,” James said almost mournfully. Maybe he needed this role more than I’d thought.
“His assistant director was fired a week ago,” Lily revealed.
“Really?” I asked. I didn’t know anything about it. Had I known, I might’ve approached Leonardo, the assistant director, earlier. I could’ve given him some words of wisdom from someone who’d been there before. Someone who’d once gotten fired by the same tyrant.
“Just as well,” Lily said.
“Oh, why’s that?” I asked.
“No one told you, Graham? Stanley would’ve had to cancel the play either way. He was broke. It was just a matter of time. We were all out of work from the beginning, and he didn’t bother to tell us.”
“That bastard!” I said. Stanley was broke yet he drove a red Porsche to rehearsal and owned several wineries in the south of France. Or so he’d said. “That bastard!” Twice for the effect.
The two of them looked at each other, then back at me. I felt the need to explain my outburst.
“I just can’t believe he wasn’t going to pay us,” I said. “I needed the work. I needed it.” I felt my cheeks burn through my otherwise pale mask. There was a heave in my chest, as if I were about to cry. My eyes felt wet and mushy, like jelly.
“You’re right, Graham,” James said, and I was taken aback. Usually he disagreed with me on everything. “That son of a bitch. I wish he were alive so I could kill him.” Smoke blew quickly out of his mouth, like an old steam-engine train.
Do you? I thought, the curve of a smile pulling at one corner of my lips. Did you do it? I asked myself. Then I came to my senses. James was on the stage with Lily when our director had fallen from the rafter, standing right in front of me. And my smile faded. It seemed I wasn’t the detective I was trying to be.
Then I asked them what they were going to do now that the play was cancelled. They just shook their heads. It had never occurred to them. Back to the unemployment office, I thought. I’ve been there as well. I promised myself that I would buy them a coffee if I saw them there, sitting by the window as they waited an eternity for their case worker, looking out that window at the reality of a very different future from the one they had envisioned. Welcome to the club, I would tell them that day.
They finished off their cigarettes and flicked them into the air. I watched the red coals extinguish the moment they landed onto the sea by the harbor. And I felt the chill coming off the water, attacking my bones like an onslaught of booing from the audience.
For the rest of the afternoon, I had nothing to do. I couldn’t return to my apartment, which was a box with a bed and no hot water. And I couldn’t call my agent and tell her I was out of work again. She’d make me grovel just to audition for a low-paying commercial. I wouldn’t even be the lead in that, either. How embarrassing!
I’d have to tell her a few lies just to get her away from that thought. The production, yes, well it’s going really well, I’d have to say to her. Stanley loves my work. He says he wants the cashier part to be the lead! Do you think there might be similar parts anywhere I can go for? Because I’d love to sit behind a counter, just out of the camera’s eye, and drop items into paper bags all day. I’d just love it, Sheryl!
So I didn’t bother calling her.
Instead, I chose to return to the theater. Call me nostalgic, but I wanted to get one last look at the stage that would’ve, I thought, been my opportunity. My opportunity to showcase my abilities as a liar on a stage of indirect truth.
Besides, maybe I could try my hand at detecting. I thought it might come in handy just in case my agent did get me auditions for more thrillers in the future. It was always good to be optimistic. Without it, you’re simply dead.
But when I approached the stage, I realized something macabre. The coroner hadn’t taken Stanley’s body away yet, from the spot where he’d hit the cold wood on his literal fall from grace.
He was on his stomach, his cheek pressed into the floor. He was taking up the marker tape where James and Lily, in the guises of the protagonists Malcolm and Sarah, were meant to speak their lines and then lock lips before the curtain fell, the mystery embedded in Louis’ Revenge having unraveled before the audience.
At the end of the play, it was Louis himself, played by James, who was the killer in the supermarket. Lily, the woman he fell in love with, was simply a red herring. And the audience was deceived. They were meant to praise Stanley for this deception. Now, looking at him dead, it all seemed so silly.
Honestly, I never understood the love story part of the play. I didn’t think it needed one. But Stanley wouldn’t hear it. He insisted that even a murder mystery needed a moment or two of romance.
I circled to the stage with the intention of inspecting his body. I would, in macabre fashion, ask him questions. It seemed that a dead Stanley was the only version of him that could listen to constructive criticism.
I’d tell him about the play, how it should’ve gone, diverting from his script. I’d school him on how I’d pop out in one scene and ad-lib some lines. I’d get a standing ovation for this by curtain call, I thought.
In my mind, the cashier would be the true hero of the story, stopping the true killer, saving him from his own narcissism and tyranny. The play would be a success. Stanley would come to terms with his shortcomings, which made life miserable for everyone. He could’ve been rich for it. No need to cancel the play. No need for the actors to go to the unemployment office. If only.
I climbed the stairs to the stage and felt immediately the heaviness of the boards beneath my feet. Of course, maybe it wouldn’t go like that at all. Maybe it was true. Maybe I was a mediocre actor. “A damn bad liar,” as Stanley liked to put it. He would berate his actors, and I, being a professional, would take the criticism with a grain of salt. I’d let the tears, gained from his critical onslaught, fall only in the privacy of the hallway that was my dressing room.
I looked down at his lifeless form now, a mere prop in the play of life and death, and truly wanted to kick him. No one’s around, I thought. I can do it. Just do it.
I even pulled one of my legs back, preparing to release it against his flab of a body.
Of course, I didn’t do that. I was too much of a coward and a bad liar. Even on this stage of truth and hollow boards. Lying even to myself.
“That’s why you’re never the lead,” a voice said from somewhere. It was as if the voice were mine, but I didn’t remember letting the words out of my mouth.
“Who said that?” I asked, my own voice bouncing back. Might as well ask the air, I thought immediately. “Who’s there?”
“I am,” he said. It was a man’s voice. There was a creak. Someone was coming up the stairs behind me.
Turning, there I saw him. Stanley. He wasn’t dead. He was standing across from me, as clear as though a spotlight were cast on his figure, although it was a literal theater of darkness and shadow. Yet I looked down at the body that lay before my feet, too. There he was as well. I frowned but didn’t remain speechless. I couldn’t.
“I say, away!” I shouted to the spirit. “Go on; I’ll follow thee.” It was the only thing that came to mind, something remembered from Hamlet. Act 1, Scene 4, I believe. The moment Hamlet sees his dead father, or thinks he sees him.
The ghost before me laughed. He even clapped. Everything was just like Stanley. Every mannerism. They shared the same bushy beard, balding head and that signature frame with the round shoulders and large belly.
“You remembered something,” he said gleefully. “That makes me a little proud. What are you doing here, Graham.”
“I was going to pay my respects to the … to your body.”
Another laugh. “No, you weren’t. You were going to attack that body, weren’t you?”
“No, I wasn’t.”
“You were always a bad liar. Or just a bad actor. I never thought you were a coward, too.”
“What’s happening here, Stanley?”
“And never too quick, either. But I don’t blame you. You actually thought I was a ghost just now, didn’t you?” He shook his head, smirking at my stupidity.
“Yes,” I confessed.
“There. The truth. This stage has a way of bringing out the truth in all, eventually. I knew you were capable of it. It’s just too bad you never got around to saying it to the mirror. If you can’t convince yourself, you can’t convince us, Graham.”
He was always cruel. He made his actors work into the night. He made them kiss each other when one of them had the flu. He made sure that the dessert tray was locked in an undisclosed room but just close enough to let the smell of fresh pastries and warm cream reach you, tantalizing you.
I thought that if he were really dead, he’d at least find some enlightenment in the afterlife. I was wrong on that part. He wouldn’t change. This was the real man behind his mask. The man he’d always been.
He stepped closer to his own corpse and looked down at himself, who lay there motionless.
“That’s not you, is it?” I realized aloud.
“Finally, you get the scene right,” he said, clapping like after an encore. “You know, I always knew you could do it. That’s the truth.”
“Now you’re the liar,” I said. Though the stage was where the truth was told, you never knew if it came before or after the fall of the curtain. That was the rush. “You just did all this because you needed the money?”
“Well, how else does a play succeed, Graham? Even sponsors and benefactors want a return. Most of them back out at the wrong moments. Usually it’s before the opening nights. And then you’re left holding the bag, taking the criticism. That’s show business.” He shrugged. “Sometimes it’s better to start again, to reinvent yourself. I thought an actor would sympathize with that more than anyone.”
“So, who is this man?” I asked.
Stanley’s hands were tattooed with dirt. He looked down at the corpse and frowned.
“You know, I have no idea,” he said. “I suppose you weren’t the only one who borrowed something from Hamlet tonight.”
“Alas, poor Yorick,” I whispered. He was, of course, referring to when Hamlet digs up the grave of his father’s jester, Yorick, holding the man’s skull in his bare palm and saying the immortal words.
“Yes, poor Yorick,” he agreed. He must’ve been digging around cemeteries, looking for corpses that resembled him.
“The plan was to fake your death and claim the insurance money. You could start again, probably in a decade or so. With a little plastic surgery, it would be easier.”
“Easier than what?” he asked.
“Easier than facing failure,” I said. “You never cared about the production.”
“Well, there was a time when I did care about it. That’s just how a young person thinks. An actor prepares. An actor has hope as you know. And if an actor is good enough, he or she can go places. If not, they stay. It’s the same for directors.”
“Does that mean I had potential?” I dared to ask, still ever hopeful of his guidance.
“We all have the potential, in the beginning.”
“That is the truth?”
“That’s the truth,” he agreed, never more sincere.
I wished he would’ve told me that earlier. Maybe then I could’ve done something more in this business. In this play. In the other film. Now I’m thirty-seven and still going for roles that are billed as “boy.” Nameless and speechless parts.
I bent down to try and touch the unknown man, whom the real Stanley had smuggled right out of his grave, no doubt filling the poor man’s coffin up with stones and dirt.
“Don’t touch him,” Stanley said.
“Why not?”
“He’s perfectly placed for when the paramedics return later tonight to collect him. Don’t touch him!”
I don’t know what came over me. I felt angry at the director’s voice. My teeth clenching, I felt a sharp pain strike my jaw. I wasn’t aware how my face might look with a clenching jawline, either too forced or not forced enough to put on camera. I wasn’t worried about the cool ache in my eye from not blinking as I stared with intense irritation at him.
I straightened up and came closer to him. Becoming more acquainted with this role of detective I’d stepped into today, I wanted to know exactly what he’d done to this poor man.
“You killed him, didn’t you?” I said. “Somehow, you killed him.”
He frowned. “What do you mean?”
“You murdered him,” I said. “How did you do it?”
“I didn’t murder anyone. There was an unmarked grave in the cemetery. The opportunity presented itself.”
But I didn’t hear it. I convinced myself that’s what he did. I saw it in my mind’s eye. I saw Stanley sneaking up to his doppelganger’s neck and injecting a poison into his jugular. I saw him hitting him over the head with a sledgehammer, or perhaps a shovel. I saw him tipping cyanide into the man’s coffee cup at his local café in the morning. I saw him pushing him into a ravine. It was conceivable. Stanley was always plotting things.
However he did it in reality, I saw him do it in my mind’s eye.
The police wouldn’t know any of this. It was privileged information. Information only known to the director as he or she prepares the stage.
As I came closer to him, I was yelling at him. Just words ad-libbed from the heart. The real Stanley shuffled back. He put his hands up defensively. I wasn’t going to hurt him. I wasn’t going to do anything to him. When the coroner would arrive, then the truth would all be revealed, I thought. One Stanley was alive, the other dead. What really happened here was as obvious as daylight.
It felt good, yelling at him. My chest felt all tingly. My cheeks burned with mirth and excitement. My jaw relaxed. I could blink again. There was no strain in any of my muscles anymore. I felt like I’d been on stage playing Hamlet in front of two-hundred people, my body relaxed, everyone silent to make room for my soliloquy. This scene was easy, I thought. This scene I could do.
He opened his mouth and tried to speak, but I spoke first.
“That’s right, back right up, Mr. Andrews! We’re going to wait for the police. You’re going away for a long time, I’m afraid. All the evidence is against you.”
“Graham, don’t you dare come any closer!” His voice thundered even now. Even without the cameras rolling or the audience looking on from their seats.
“You’re not the director anymore!” I shouted, my voice bouncing back at me like a tennis ball against a wall. “And I’ll have as many cookies as I damn want before this scene’s over.”
“Scene? Graham, this isn’t—”
When Stanley fell, I stopped coming closer. I stopped laughing altogether. I heard a series of loud thuds and some grunts let loose as his body met each step.
Then it was all silent again, like the split second between curtain call and the audience’s reception.
The scene was set. I was alone in the dark with the two Stanleys. Now, when the coroner and the police returned to collect the corpse, they could say that the great Stanley Andrews was truly dead. The other man would be reunited with his rest.
But the show had to go on somehow.
The story I’d tell was already written in my head, begging to be played.
*****
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