“Reveal Day”
by Brandon Forinash
It all happened very quickly, the big reveal. I’d just come home from work when I was met by the celebrity host and with him all of my neighbors who reintroduced themselves to me now as a cast.
Dave and Samantha from across the hall were actually Khaleeq and Imogen and not at all romantically involved. My landlord Janet, as it turned out, was a Stella Adler Studio trained actress. Craig, who played the building’s super, Rick, pointed out to me all the hidden cameras that had recorded in real time my every action from various angles. And only minutes after being informed that I was the central figure of a seven-year-hidden camera reality TV project, I came to learn that 1) the project was over and 2) that it will probably never make it on TV.
But there was cake, which helped a bit.
So I sat on the side of the street as the stage crew struck what had been my apartment for the last seven years. I tried to take stock, but everything seemed to be passing me by. Goodbye, plush couch! I said to myself as they carried it past. Farewell, antique suit of armor! So long, seldom-played theremin.
“Goodbye, wife!” I called out to my on-and-off-again girlfriend as she passed on the other side of the street.
“Wife? Your wife? That was never in my character arc.”
I wanted to argue the point, but it seemed to me that she, like everyone else, knew a lot more about my life than I did. And anyway, already I was being pulled to one trailer by the costume supervisor and then another by a prop runner and after I had seen all my things labeled and cataloged, after I had signed and verified the manifold inventories, I was surprised to find how little of it was my own. A single legal file box with a few books, some kitchen utensils, a dvd organizer, my xbox.
I had entered my 20s with so little, and now I was entering my 30s with what felt like so much less.
_
Well, I will tell you that I was feeling pretty low at this point, so I picked up my box and set off to the neighborhood bar to get myself good and drunk. No need to make sense of things today, I told myself, that’s tomorrow’s problem. But when I got to the neighborhood bar I found that the location had already been repurposed as the setting for a neighborhood laundromat.
“Mr. Reddy,” I exclaimed to the man behind the counter—he had been ‘Mr. O’Leary’ but the signage made me think that this too had changed, “What’s happened to the bar?”
“I’m all about clean living now,” he said with a smile and a wink as he walked past me.
“I don’t know if I can take this much change,” I said and set my things on the counter.
“Life is nothing but change,” he said and emptied a coin box from a washing machine.
“I think I liked you better before the puns.”
“Well,” a voice behind me said, “They’ll come across better when they add the laugh track.”
I didn’t have to look to know who it was. She had a habit of dropping lines like this, like they were written on a cue card, which, like much of the day’s revelations, made a lot more sense in retrospect.
“Hello, husband,” my on-and-off-again girlfriend said to me and then breezed past, “Hey there, Mr. Reddy, would my laundry happen to be ready?”
“Reddy ready,” Mr. Reddy said, and came out of the back with a black garment bag.
The cameras came in to frame the action and the boom operators took their positions and I tried to ask her if we could talk, but the scene was already happening. And I was in the way.
So I left. But I didn’t know where to go or what to do. I stood out on the familiar street and the world seemed entirely strange (to me) and indifferent (to my person). I mean, the totality of the thing was starting to sink in. I’d lost my apartment, my bar, and hell, now I was pretty sure my career was over, too. I’d always thought my boss looked like this one suspect on an episode of Law and Order: SVU, and now I was rethinking that coincidence.
It was right about then that one of the crew caught up to me. I had left my box, it seemed, and my ex was willing to meet me in her trailer if I wanted. I told him that it was very much wanted.
“And the box?” he asked.
“Dump it.”
_
“I’m in between shoots,” she said when I stepped into her trailer. I hadn’t seen her like this before. Her hair was pinned up for a wig. Her makeup was done for lighting. She handed me a script, “Do me a favor and read lines with me.”
“They took my home—”
“No, that’s my line. Here,” she said, pointed to the place, “start there,” and turned away from me.
“I wasn’t. Nevermind. Ok. Right. Um…Why did you keep it a secret?” I looked up at her, “Really?”
She turned back to me dramatically, “They took my home. My planet was destroyed. And then I came here. And for a while I had a home with you…Keep going.”
“But why did you keep it a secret from me?”
“You have to understand, Cal, I was trying to protect you.”
“I’m supposed to be your husband. I’m sorry. I’m not reading this.”
“That’s ok, improvise.”
“Fine. I want to know about the thing you said on the street. Why hadn’t it been? Why was ‘wife’ never in our arc? I don’t know who decided that.”
“I tried to tell you once before, but you didn’t see me.”
“I saw you, like, every day.”
“But you didn’t see me. Do you remember once, when the Dark Sed invaded and the city was almost destroyed? Afterwards, during the blackout, we watched whatever news we could get together on our phones. Do you remember the footage of Star Queen battling Garthulhu? I asked you if she looked like me. Cal, she didn’t look like me. It was me. And I was trying to tell you.”
Maybe it was just a line in a script, but it made me think back. I don’t know if she ever tried to tell me. Or if anyone had. Or everyone had. And if I had known that I was the main character in a show, would I have done things differently? Would I have tried a little harder with her? Not taken things for granted.
“I don’t know how I missed it.”
“It’s hard to see the things closest to us.”
“You know, it’s funny. I don’t even know your name.”
“Yes, you do. It’s Star Queen. And then we kiss. How was that?” She looked back at the pages, “I think I got all my lines, but you were a little off script.”
A runner knocked and then entered the trailer, “They need you in makeup.”
“There were things that were real,” I asked her before she left, “Between us.”
“Finish the scene,” she said and pressed her lips up against mine in that familiar way that felt not quite like kissing. And then my on- and-off-again girlfriend was out the trailer and out of my life for good.
_
After the big reveal, they put me up for a couple of months at Chateau Marmont. It made me feel pretty grand for a few days and then incredibly unimportant.
There wasn’t much to do but apply for jobs and catch up on everything I’d missed the past seven years of filming. Which was a lot. SEAL team six had taken out Osama bin Laden and we had gotten out of Iraq, my Cubs had finally broken the curse, the country had elected a reality television star, which in one way made me feel like less of a fool but in another way.
I read about Bill Cosby, Harvey Weinstein, Louis C.K.
I had a bad feeling about the world and myself for several years.
You see, when you’re no longer the main character, you suddenly have all this time to second-guess things. And then, altogether too much time. You could spend your whole life trying to get under the rock of your reasons. But even if you finally did, they might not turn out to be terribly smart or even original. Might actually be very small and rather ugly.
Which is a fine thing to figure out, my therapist keeps telling me, but it doesn’t make the grass green or the trees grow.