Wil Wheaton (35:26)
for a good four hours while crews clean up the mess. I wanted to become a ghost, too, kenny says later at Rehearsal, her head and right arm bandaged to be closer to Luke, to match him in his process. It's a few days before opening night. Hell week, that's what we call it. 12 hour plus days for tech and running the show. I'm back at my apartment, exhausted. The show is not good. I know this. Everyone knows this. My apartment looks the same as it did when I wrote the play. It looks just like the set. I feel as if I have never left the theater. The books, yogurt stain, the bowls of dried spaghetti in the sink. This is a moment set up for self reflection, something, something autobiography, something, something. No imagination, but fuck that. So I get in the car and drive in a direction. It's maybe 20 minutes into the drive when I feel the cold ghost fingers on the back of my neck. I can feel Luke's cold ghost breath on my cheek, the cold fucking ghost heart that is just my heart too. Luke's hands are on mine and he steers me to his house in the Hollywood Hills, more modest than I'd imagined, old Victorian like you might see in any haunted house in any movie. He points me to where he'd hidden a key for himself, for the particularly drunken nights where he was dumped off, pockets as empty as his head, which had happened more than he cared to admit. A key tucked inside a hole in the tree in his yard, a tree with sprawling bare branches that lean over me as if to smell my breath for alcohol maybe, or something else, something else rotting deeper down wherever the roots of a person are. Listen, I knew all this. He was telling me all this somehow it's embarrassing. He was saying, come upstairs. I don't turn on any lights. I walk carefully, hand on the banister, a thin layer of dust puffing up into the air in front of me, and I. I think I almost see him, the dust clinging to an outline of him. I know the play isn't good, he is saying. It's my fault. I'm not a theater actor and I'm a ghost. No, it's my fault, I say. I left stuff out, I just don't know what. I get to his bedroom. It's sad, the bedroom of a dead person, even a dead person I never really liked. I woke up here one night, he's saying, and there was this guy standing at the foot of my bed, naked, eating a fudge sickle. I don't like to talk about it. Then why are you? I say. Because I can't seem to manifest myself, he is saying, and I think it has to do with that, like, I think he thought he was invisible. And I think I have to do the same, but like in reverse. I don't know why I do this, because I don't do stuff like this. But I take off all my clothes and I stand at the edge of the bed and I stare at the empty spot where he should be. And I try to believe I am invisible. And it is like I am standing on a stage and being stared at by an audience. I can't see through all the stage lights. And then the lights start to dim and the audience becomes clear. And I'm more naked than I've ever been. And he is there. A full ghost manifestation. The transparent sketch of what was Luke Ford. But he looks like Lou, the character in my play, in our play. Is it working? He says. I nod and I lay down on top of the comforter and I fight the urge to cover myself up. I'm going to stop there. You pervert. Imagine you are in a theater. It's opening night of a brand new play written by me. You are still trying to pretend that you didn't see your ex sitting two rows ahead of you. The lights go down and the play begins. You hold your breath and so do I. But I do. Because I don't know if he can do it again. Luke Ford has stage fright. And this one performance might be all he's got before he disappears to return to his natural state of translucence, of evaporation, of the traceless. It takes a terrible amount of energy to resist it. But there is Henny as Hattie, her bandages mostly off, a few bruises hiding beneath layers of makeup. And there is Luke as Lou, fully present, just barely transparent. You can see the bookshelves through his skin. And there's something poetic about that. There's a meaning there that wasn't intentional. You certainly hadn't anticipated any kind of meaning. Sorry, I'm projecting again. I hadn't anticipated anything. I enjoy the show because I know that this might be his last performance and I want to remember it. I glance up to the house, right corner of the theater where that purple chair is, the one reserved for general admission ghosts. And I wish I'd sat there holding the hand of whatever ghost managed to show up on time. Because what is time to dead things anyway? People and creatures and lovers, even if you want to use that word. And the lights start to go down on the stage and just focus on me and that empty chair, me as I stand up, ready to say something to someone, to everyone, to you. The thing I had left out of the play the thing I didn't I couldn't have the lovers say, ugh. I really hate that word because it's doomed. Lovers are star crossed, are found out, are dead by the end of the story. The thing I couldn't have them say on stage would have made you laugh. The things people say in person, curled together on a yogurt stained couch have been overused on stage. On stage they have no meaning anymore. More and I'm not good enough to know how to rewrite your words and make them better, to have you say things like how you holding up a transition of sorts, a melting away of a dream as I realize lies. I'm standing in the middle of the lobby at intermission, right in the center, like I'm about to make an announcement. But no one is looking at me. Only you. I'd seen you looking at the program earlier, before the show, focusing so hard to not look at me. But you came here, didn't you, Lou? Surviving, I say. Just barely. I ask you what you think of the show. You say, well, Hattie, I never expected you to write realism. Sorry to disappoint you, Lou, I say. I think I feel cold fingers gentle on the back of my neck, the way Luke had held them there that night, swirling along my skin in circles. The way you used to. Hattie, you say. I hope you don't mind, I say. I almost forgot that I know the ending, you say. Lou, I say. I hear rapping on the wall near us and I turn to look, but it's just some guy waiting in line
