This Masquerade

I was on the phone with a divorce attorney when I died.

The desk at which I was sitting was in the small nook we - my soon to be ex-wife and I -

- had generously dubbed the 'home office.' "We're not ready yet, Mr. Destry --" my attorney began, but what he thought we were not ready for will be forever unrecorded. He didn't get to the end of his sentence when what felt like a shaft of lightning slammed me from behind and I stopped breathing. A sustained jagged firebolt that seared my senses and seemed to remain jammed into my breastbone.

Imagine a lightning bolt that persists where it strikes - that might give you a rough idea of the fusion of vertigo, fear, and pain I felt as the world warped and bubbled like a stuck movie frame melting in the heat of the projector bulb.

The floor suddenly seemed to pitch forward, and I felt myself tipping into a fall, a fall that continued even after my head struck the desk.

******

"Not ready." One thing I had not been ready for was the ending of my marriage. But marriage, like everything else, is subject to the laws of nature that tell us that nothing human is either permanent or predictable.

We had been drifting apart - at any rate, Kate had been drifting away from me -- but still the end had come with shocking speed. One moment our marriage was a going concern, and the next it was Kaputsville.

Which all caught me entirely unprepared, because I was under the impression that the prevailing script for these things called for a protracted firefight of name-calling and plate throwing before the white flag could be waved. But everything collapsed without a single angry word being said.

Thinking back, it was hard to say exactly when our marriage began to go wrong. I suppose it was sometime after our daughter Noel left for college back east. Neither Kate nor I were prepared for the loss of one of the cornerstones of our respective identities.

Absent the intense, daily parenting binding us together, who now were we as a couple, as individuals?

Yet I wasn't particularly worried about anything at the time, except maybe losing my hair - each morning my brush got hairier and my head grew balder. My male-pattern baldness was acquired from my bygone father (snatched away through the medium of cancer), and my fleshy face acquired from my bygone mother (sidewalk, ice) - a face further thickened by twenty years of married cooking.

And if I did begin to glimpse something troubled, a shadowy disturbance at the core of our marriage, I wasn't aware of it. Any sense of foreboding simmered in the back of my mind, where I tended to stash stuff I didn't want to know.

You think because you're getting out of bed in the morning, brushing your teeth, putting on clothes, going to work, then coming home, eating dinner then watching some TV, that everything's under control.

On the evening the whole rickety structure of our marriage came crashing down, we were supposed to be going out with Guy and Elaine, friends of Katherine. Guy was some sort of department head of a wholly-owned subsidiary of CBS that does marketing research. He had that full-of-corporate-pizzaz look of a man who's always spearheading some task force or other. Elaine, like Kate, was a home buyer's agent. The two women were colleagues at the same high-end real estate firm.

Elaine and Guy had a son, Jacob, just out of UCLA film school. They made enough money to afford a grand Pacific Palisades house, along with the latest in-vogue cars and Bora Bora vacations.

Kate and I, on the other hand, lived in a modest stucco ranch, bought at an immodest price. We dwelt in the Valley, with its strip malls and minimarts and nail salons. A place so without personality it felt like it could dissolve your very identity and absorb you into its facelessness.

Why we two couples had begun to exchange dinner invitations was one of those mysteries of a social order as administrated by women. (Not that I didn't like Guy and Elaine. Well, actually I didn't really, but I pretended otherwise for Kate's sake.)

I had been having a busy day at my job, working in a legal firm that specializes in entertainment law. (After a brief, abortive attempt at becoming an actor, I had joined the firm and begun my unstoppable climb to the top of the middle). A deal with a movie studio was in danger of collapsing, and if the deal wasn't finalized that week, the lead actor who'd attached himself to the project was going to walk.

My client, one of the scriptwriters, was anxious to get the contract sorted out so that she could receive her fee. In the entertainment business, the laws and conventions change almost daily, and unless you know exactly what you're doing, the contracts you draw up will spring leaks like a Chinese virology lab. Every t must be crossed, every i dotted.

And so, after a long day of back-and-forth emails and a four-hour zoom meeting, we finally closed the deal. I was tired but triumphant.

Triumphant, that is, until I remembered our dinner date with Elaine and Guy. Okay, so maybe it wouldn't be so bad, I tried to convince myself, as I anticipated another evening of smiling and nodding while listening to Guy's incomprehensible shoptalk about CBS corporate politics. At least I'd get a good meal out of it -- we had reservations for Mother Wolf, the Roman-style Italian restaurant, in Hollywood.

And then, just when I had resigned myself to my fate, Kate called from her workplace. "Elaine had an accident," Kate said. "She's okay except for a black eye, but tonight's off."

"Good!" I said, then catching myself I hastily added, "Not good she injured her eye of course, but it's been a tough day at work and I'm exhausted. I'd probably be nodding off during the main course and doing a face-plant into the rigatoni."

"It's okay," Kate said. "I didn't really want to go either. Been on my feet all day showing properties, and I'm pretty bushed myself." Kate had a clear, smooth, engaging voice. At one time she'd been in local public radio, but left after Noel was born.

"Sorry, hon. Let's just take it easy tonight. So, how did Elaine acquire this black eye? Angry client? Botched eye lift?"

Kate snickered. "No, seems she was texting while driving -- "

"Naturally. Her time is too important, must grab any opportunity to multitask."

"Ha! Anyway, so she had to slam on the brakes on her BMW to avoid a collision, right? Which led, the way Elaine tells it, to her espresso cup launching itself out of the cup holder - "

Me: "Prada espresso cup, you mean."

"-her six-hundred-dollar Prada espresso cup, okay? Launching itself straight at her face - "

"Like a Botox-seeking missile?" Comedy! Unfortunately, I am often my own best audience.

"Jesus, Jeff. Anyway, the cup belted her in the eye and spilled the espresso all over her blouse."

"Let me guess. Armani?"

"Marc Jacobs, and don't be such a dickhead."

Though we were both well-paid, we didn't earn anything like Guy's considerable chunk. Our coffee mugs were simple crockery, not shapely design objects.

"Sorry," I said. "Though, I can imagine all these designer espresso cups just lurking and waiting for an opportunity to strike at their swanky owners."

Kate snorted, then said, "And then have to be put down like pets that attack people." After an interval, Kate asked, "Well, what about food? Want me to pick up something?"

Since Noel left home, Kate and I had survived on microwave, pickup, and delivery, with occasional meals out. We didn't keep much food in the house.

"No, you did yesterday. I'll swing by Ralph's on the way home and raid their deli." "Ralph's? I was thinking more along the lines of Gelsen's."

"Okay. Any special requests?" "Surprise me," she said.

"Will do. I'll be home seven-ish."

If you ever want to mingle with the trendoids and showbiz show-offs of greater L. A., Gelsen's Market might do the trick. You'll see flocks of handsome men in mustaches and two-hundred-dollar sweatpants and beautiful women in sunglasses and canvas jumpsuits. This evening, no one looked like they were seeking asylum from autograph seekers exactly, but I did recognize a few microcelebrities.

I stood in line behind the deli counter while two women in Western hats debated about their choice of sushi. Their handbags probably cost more than the deli clerk's annual salary. While they waited for their bait to be wrapped, they launched into a discussion about the difficulty of finding a competent personal chef.

Tossing a plastic container of chicken parmesan into the basket, I then wandered over to the bakery section, thinking about picking up some Danish for tomorrow's breakfast.

It was then that I spotted the chocolate-filled cornettos. So maybe no dinner tonight at a fancy Italian restaurant, I thought, but it would be a fun treat if we recouped by enjoying some Italian pastries for dessert after the chicken parm.

Later, I would wonder how differently events might have played out had I brought home a couple of the Blackberry Ginger Danishes instead. Odd how Fate embeds itself in the fallout from our most casual choices.

Kate was already home and we greeted each other a little guardedly. We hadn't expected this evening to be just the two of us. I guess we'd been counting on Guy and Elaine to help dilute the strained climate that had lately grown around us.

Kate was delicately featured, with large dark eyes that seemed at odds with her fair complexion and with the freckles that lay across her nose and fanned out over her cheeks. Her auburn hair was styled in one of those tossed-salad type cuts.

She helped unload the shopping. And that was when it happened. Kate lifted out the bakery box of cornettos and exclaimed, "Hey look! Cornetti again, chocolate though instead of lemon-filled. Good choice."

I looked at her, looked at the box, and then back at her. I hadn't a clue what she was talking about. When had we ever had cornettos (excuse me, "cornetti")?

"You know," she insisted. "Remember when we --"

She stopped abruptly. I stared at her, curious. She stared back, her face freeze-framed in an expression of dismay.

My body knew before my mind did, in the form of a panicked sweat on my palms and a sudden nausea behind my belt. Kate was talking about someone else, an intimate moment shared with another man.

If you ever sought to know whether your wife was sleeping with someone else, you'll recognize the ambivalence I was feeling right then. Desperate for the truth, but hoping Kate would deny it, and make me believe the denial.

I didn't speak, just looked at her, waiting, silently begging her to clarify, to make it all go away.

"Jeff--," she began, then faltered. She opened and closed her mouth several times, as if by doing so she might trap the right words out of the air.

I was experiencing something like vertigo. Everything I thought I knew about Kate, about us, lurched and wavered. A weightless, floating feeling washed over me, as if I'd been cut adrift, as I turned and walked towards the bedroom.

This strange untethered sensation persisted as I first perched on the bed, then immediately stood up again. Sitting left me too vulnerable. I picked up the pillow from my side of the bed, clutched it to my chest.

The term "cuckold" flashed into my mind. How fittingly silly was the very sound of the word, in that a husband betrayed was not seen in the eyes of the world as wronged, but only as a buffoon.

Kate came to the doorway. "What are you doing, Jeff?"

Several imagined scenarios unreeled in my mind - scenes of raging arguments, Kate's brokenhearted pleas, my stern admonitions, montages of my own future revenge infidelities with beautiful women. I could recall dozens of TV shows of marital stress in which husbands and wives spatted brightly through colorful arcs of emotion, but now I could think of nothing biting to say.

Suddenly I was very tired. "I think I'd better stay in Noel's room for a bit."

Kate nodded, wrapping her arms around herself as though the room had gone suddenly cold. We fell into a glum silence. Finally, she blinked hard as if coming out of a trance, her eyes glistening. "Sorry," she said softly, holding her arms even tighter.

Perhaps I should have pressed for details. Who was cornetto boy? How long has it been going on? But I had no fight left in me.

I felt nothing, only a relentless numbness, as if my blood had been replaced by Novocain. This was a stage of grief I remembered from the death of my parents. You function, talk, smile, you think you're being strong, and it's only later that you are swallowed up by misery and begin to dry-heave into the kitchen sink.

A series of events had tipped over like dominos -- the espresso cup striking Elaine's eye, the phone call when I'd said I'd pick up some food, the box of chocolate-filled cornettos -- all culminating with that moment when Kate lifted them from out of the paper bag and exclaimed "Hey look!"

So, look I did, and I finally saw behind the mask of daily routine. I saw that the colorless life I'd been leading had suddenly died, a life in which my keenest hope was that the dining room floor would be re-finished in time for Thanksgiving. I'd thought I'd known what my future looked like, but I'd been wrong. My life would be something else now. I was starting over, but I didn't know if I had the courage.

When we're entering our adult lives, we adopt these roles for ourselves - in my case, husband, father, paralegal specialist - with the arc of our lives already set, its limits already visible. But now I was at a crossroads, only the type of crossroads that didn't have a sign in it.

I did not move out immediately. There was all the mess of it to get through first: trying to find an apartment in this housing market, dividing possessions, and so on. And I began to picture a renewed life unspooling in front of me - new women I might meet, a more glamorous part of L. A. to move to, even a return to my first love, acting.

These possibilities formed in my fancy just long enough to tantalize, then dissolve before I could panic about all the chances I would have to take to actually bring them about. But at least I was becoming curious about what was next in store for me. For the first time in I don't know how long I was following the action with interest.

And so, let's rewind to the beginning of this story: at approximately two o'clock on a bright November afternoon, as I was talking with my attorney about my ongoing divorce, and death snuck up on me like a burglar.

Death. An unreal word, a word that applied only to others. Death was for the old, the sick, the unlucky. But here I was, my body collapsed on the desk like a discarded

puppet, my peripheral vision growing black around the edges. Everything that was me began to recede down a tunnel into a gathering darkness.

I hurled up desperate silent prayers to anyone or anything that might be listening - God, the universe, my dead mother: please, don't let this be my end, I'm only forty-seven, I'm not ready, not here, not now...

My last fragmentary thoughts chased after me as an irresistible weight pulled me down, down into a dark that had no bottom:

"Not now..." "Not --"

FADE TO BLACK.

####################

CUT TO LIGHT.

"-- now"

I woke with a jolt, gasping. Air hit my lungs like acid. Breathing was inhaling needles. The pain in my head was a metallic crimson-black thing.

Waves of vertigo billowed and heaved beneath me. I peeled open gummy eyelids. The world was spinning dizzily around like one of those carnival tea-cup rides. Above me a ceiling slid one way and then the other. I squeezed my eyelids shut.

I waited for the swells to ebb. When my equilibrium stabilized, I forced my eyelids open again. Tried moving only my eyes around in their sockets. I didn't want to risk moving the whole head, not yet.

Didn't know where I was or when, but I was lying down, I was sure of that much at least, naked and sprawled out on my back, lying against a springy, damp surface, my head pressed against something soft and sticky.

Bed. I was lying on a bed. And I appeared to be in a bedroom, going by the... well, by the bed I was lying in.

The world was a flat collage of tinted splodges. I willed my vision to focus. Managed to inch my head to the side a bit. Oscillating smudges of random colors began to resolve into objects, and I started at last to get a grip on my surroundings.

Beside the bed stood a nightstand. Beyond the nightstand: a black slate wall. Afternoon sunlight blazed through a pair of casement windows.

My mind was thrumming and muzzy and only half there, but I knew my own bedroom, and this wasn't it.

My mouth tasted of bile. Probed with my tongue and encountered oatmeal-sized soggy clumps of vomit.

I spat out what I could and unstuck my head from the crusty pillow. The movement sent my head spinning. I hacked out a series of coughs. Breathing still a struggle, each inhalation shredding my throat.

My ears rang, as if someone was running a finger around the rim of a drinking glass. I put my hand to my head and something about my hair felt wrong.

My body was a dead weight. It took all my strength to wrench myself into a more upright position. I grabbed the side of the bed to steady myself against the sudden downward pull of dizziness. Blinked until the room swam back into focus once more.

Gradually my limbs came back online, with a prickling sensation across my skin - a prickling steadily intensifying into something that felt like the stinging of burrowing red ants.

I turned my head, and this time the room didn't wobble quite so much. A doorway off to the left disclosed a large en-suite bathroom.

I waited for my body to reconnect with my mind. There were crucial facts stranded in my brain, but I couldn't find them. How did I get here? And where was here? Was I in a hotel, is there a plane to catch? But a more urgent matter snuffed my curiosity for the moment, however, as suddenly there was a lurch in my bowels as something within made a bid for freedom.

The bedspring groaned, and then so did I, as I threw off the sheets, swung my legs painfully across the mattress and managed, with the help of a bedpost, to rise. Bolts of agony flared up and down my spine. I then half-crouched, half-crawled toward the bathroom. It was maybe ten feet away, but it seemed like ten miles.

Grabbing the seat to get the lid down just in time, I squatted on the toilet and shat out a hot gaseous slurry - a fecal eruption that left my rectum feeling like a blown-out inner tube.

Wiped and having flushed, I crab-scuttled my way to the sink, and fumbled with the faucet knobs to get a stream of water running. My throat was still itchy from vomit. Body parts transmitted complaints from faraway places. I was freezing. A spasm of shivering gripped me.

I put my face beneath the hissing spray of the spout and sloshed the water around every nook of my mouth to wash out the gravelly bits of barf that caked the inside. When I straightened up the movement sent my head whirling again. I gripped the sides of the sink to keep myself upright and then reflexively glanced up at my face in the medicine-cabinet mirror above the sink.

But I wasn't in the mirror. Gone was my familiar, meaty, middle-aged face and in its place was the face of a stranger.

I closed my eyes, giving the stranger in the mirror the chance to vanish. Maybe if I stood still with my eyes closed for a few moments, everything would snap back to normal. I re- opened my eyes.

The stranger was still there.

I tried to make sense of what I was seeing. This couldn't be real, I thought, had to be a dream, but it didn't feel like a dream. And this bathroom wasn't a dream. Somehow, I'd awakened in someone else's body.

I looked cautiously over my shoulder, to see if my real body might somehow be still lying on the bed. It wasn't.

A fit of trembling washed over me as I switched an oppressively bright fluorescent light on and leaned closer to the mirror, turning this new face one way, then another, shakily taking inventory.

He was young: a boy, really, closer to twenty than twenty-five. Male-model perfect, like it might belong in a Ralph Lauren ad. Perfect, that is, except for the skin tone - it was the color of parchment, parchment shadowed with nasty undertones of gray.

I scanned the reflection for some sign of my real face behind this one, but Jeff Destry remained hidden. Gone were my own dullish brown eyes, replaced by piercing blue ones. Gone too was my wispy reddish hair that yearly retreated across my big pink forehead, and in its place, abundant blond hair, cut in a fashionable style: long hair on top and buzzed sides and back.

Through his eyes, I watched the reflection - my reflection - tilt and turn as I let these fingers - my fingers, now -- trace the cheeks, the nose, the chin, to be sure this strange flesh was real -- as if touch is truer than sight. For a mad moment I wanted those fingers to dig into the flesh and claw that false face off.

I looked down at this body that I was wearing. In place of my familiar pear-shaped one, my new body was painfully thin. Taller, too. A tattoo of a snake swallowing its tail blued the left bicep. His rib cage was rutted, his lean legs pale as fish-flesh.

Heat inside this body was returning now, building, flooding the limbs. The skull throbbed like a stubbed toe, but at least my mind was beginning to clear.

Let's start with the basics, I thought. I've awakened in a strange bed, in a strange room, in a strange body.

I tried to remember where I'd been last, on the grounds that was as good a place to start as any. Concentrate on how you got here. Wherever here is.

I remembered, haltingly, the flying espresso cup blacking Elaine's eye, the canceled dinner date, the box of chocolate-filled cornettos, and... Oh.

And I remembered dying at my desk. Right. That'd be it, then.

Panic beckoned, but I forced it down. Pressed pause on trying to figure out how it was possible I could die and wake up in a new body. There wasn't a lot I could do at the moment anyways. All right, I thought, so first I'll get myself cleaned up, leaving me free afterwards to investigate this place for some indications of my whereabouts.

Starting off, I diluted the aftertaste of vomit with a gargle of mouthwash. Then, a stiff- legged stumble brought me over to the shower. I stepped under a burst of hot water, and let the torrent beat down on me for a long time, rinsing death from the skin, until fingertips began to prune.

Billows of steam filled the bathroom, even after I shut the water off and tottered out onto the bath mat. As I toweled dry my new body, out of the corner of my eye I saw in the fogged-up mirror something move. A looming mist-warped human shape shared the looking glass with me.

Adrenaline slammed through me, sent me lurching an involuntary step sideways in panicky shock, knocking a hairbrush to the floor. Whirled around to face whoever it was.

Nothing.

Not even some ordinary object that the clouded mirror might distort into the illusion of a ghostly human figure. I turned back to the mirror and, willing the hand that was now mine not to shake, swabbed away a wide arc of condensation, partially clearing the silver surface.

Saw only my new body's reflection and a reversed still-life of what lay behind me: bathroom wall, doorway, bedroom. I sagged with relief as my nervous system stood down from Red Alert. I was alone.

I tried to un-tense myself. My new eyes playing tricks on me, my stressed-out imagination painting monsters in the mirror. That's all.

I opened the mirror and inspected the medicine cabinet. The entire top shelf was taken up with packages of "ultra-ribbed and lubed" Mega Sleek condoms. The lower shelves were stockpiled with enough drugs to start a small pharmacy. I dry-swallowed a couple of tablets of ibuprofen. (Kate called them I-be-hurtin's).

Still naked, I sort of shuffled-waddled on rubbery legs back into the bedroom. It looked like the site of an explosion: scattered clothes littered the floor. On the nightstand that flanked the bed I found a cell phone, a calfskin wallet, a Versace watch, keys, and a phone number in a feminine hand written on a cocktail napkin.

I looked at the watch. 2:22 p. m. Wednesday. July 7. Which can't be right. Today is Tuesday, I remember. November tenth.

I feel like I'm free-falling. Nine months. That's how long I'd been Rip Van Winkle-ing. Either the world has gone mad, or I have.

Part of me wanted to freak out, to shout that being here in this room, in this body, was Alice in Wonderland stuff that could not and should not exist, but another part of me felt like this was all a puzzle or a test that I could rationally solve.

I breathed in, hard, trying to reset myself. In. Out. In. Out. (Kate once told me I was a histrionic breather.)

Think! So, where am I, exactly? Let's start there.

I rifled through the wallet. Social security card. Credit cards. A Screen Actor's Guild card. Driver's license, the photograph a less sickly version of the reflection that had stared back at me from the bathroom mirror. Spencer C. Day, the DL read. 1129 Glenn Ct, Santa Monica, CA, 90403. I looked at the birth date listed, did a quick calculation.

The body I was now inhabiting was twenty-one years old.

A corner of the bedroom featured a walk-in closet. Shirts and pants on hangers, Nikes stowed in cubbies, a stack of T-shirts on an upper shelf. I opened a shallow drawer and rummaged through a selection of boxers. I got dressed, which was a tricky business, because every move I made caused another set of cramping muscles to report in as Unfit for Duty.

Everything in my new body felt different. My head was higher, the pressure of my feet against the floor lighter. Even colors and smells were subtly different.

Still reeling like some drunk, I began a circuit of the apartment. A sense of near-criminal intrusiveness made me uneasy. After all, I was doubly trespassing - not only in Spencer's home, but also in his body.

The apartment was large and, apart from the bedroom. entirely open. It looked to be out of a design magazine, all one sprawling space backed by glass and floored in black slate as glossy as an oil spill. Brightly patterned rugs and modern Italian furniture clustered in different areas across the open floor plan. It sported a college dorm odor of neglected laundry and old takeout. Silence was broken only by the faint hum of air conditioning.

Sunlight flooded through floor-to-ceiling windows. The place seemed perhaps four stories up. A silver-blue stripe of the Pacific was visible. On the southwest side, there was a view of the Santa Monica pier and of its spinning Ferris Wheel, with its red buckets rotating upwards into the blue sky. I stared at the Ferris Wheel for a few moments but it didn't do anything remarkable. After the batshit insanity of this day, I found this to be an agreeable surprise.

The kitchen area was separated from the rest of the main room by a crystallized glass countertop. The countertop was crowded with a multihued mishmash of unwashed glassware. Food-encrusted dishes piled up in the sink. I put the glasses and dishes into the dishwasher - a frenzy of tidying up that lasted only briefly before a wave of dizziness and fatigue swept over me.

Bright crimson spots stippled my field of vision. To keep my head from getting too spinny, I shuffled back to the bedroom and, braving the sulfurous reek of puke, sat down on the soiled sheets. I reached for the phone. Debated the possibility of calling Kate, then gave my head a slight shake to rid myself of the thought. Despite the pain killers, this motion set off a string of tiny firecrackers somewhere in the back of my skull. I put the phone back down.

I regrouped. Logic, I thought. When all else fails, try logic. So, what's a good plan of action? Sitting there on the bed, I gave it some thought, and then I gave it some more thought. I idly kicked at a T-shirt that lay crumpled on the floor beside a little nest of used tissues. Underneath the shirt was a small baggie, empty but for crumbs of white grit that clung to its bottom.

Did Spencer Day overdose and then somehow switch bodies with me? Did this mean that my Jeff Destry body was now inhabited by some drugged-out kid? Maybe in my home, wearing my clothes, looking with horror at my puffy middle-aged face in the mirror, wondering what kind of weird mojo was at work here? Or could he at my workplace, faking his way through my job?

That was a thought. I stood up and began pacing up and down by the side of the bed, as best wobbly legs would allow. I could call my office desk phone. Speak to whoever picked up, even if it was just Colin fucking Capehart (may his scrotum fester), and then I'd ask for me.

Do I dare?

I dare. I sat down again. Picked up the phone again. Punched in my office number. My borrowed fingers trembled.

"Hello, Phelps & Briggs. This is Lisa Casey. May I help you?" Lisa was a recently hired legal assistant. Though I guess, after my nine-month nap, not so recent, after all.

"Is the Contract Manager in today?" The sudden noise of this new, boyish voice startled me. It's reedy tone and cadence weren't mine. Was nothing now truly mine but my thoughts?

"Speaking."

Huh. Lisa seemed a capable young woman from the little I knew of her, but she hadn't the training or experience to be filling my position as Contract Manager.

"I understood Jeff Destry was Contract Manager," I said, trying to keep my voice how's- the-weather casual.

Dead silence for a beat.

Finally, Lisa responded. "May I ask who's calling?"

"Dave Datlow. Jeff handled a contract for me a couple of years ago." (Dave was a former client -- a Second Unit director on a superhero movie).

Another lag, in which I imagined Lisa weighing her words. At last, she said, "I'm sorry, Mr. Datlow. Jeffrey Destry died last year."

I slowly pulled the phone away from my face and looked at it quizzically, as though it had just materialized in my hand. I ended the call, then put the phone down on the bed and just sat there, my hands in my lap. My hands? They're the hands of some dead boy.

I looked down at those hands - they were thin, but not bony. I turned them over and looked at those lines on the palms that were supposed to tell us who we were. I had once read that your left hand showed the fate you were born with, and your right showed the fate you made for yourself. Maybe that's all that fate was, the opportunities we're given, and what we do with them.

So. Dead. No Freaky Friday body-swap. Instead, I was a ghost, it seemed. A ghost that for some reason found itself a squatter in Spencer Day's body.

I closed my eyes and let my thoughts collapse into a silent cry of dismay. I didn't realize I was clenching my jaw until the pain in my molars made me re-open my eyes. I took a deep raggedy breath.

Who would miss me? Kate would be torn between grief and relief, with relief being the eventual winner. Noel would be distraught, of course, but she had already begun floating away from home and into her future. People at the office would be shocked, but ten minutes later they'd be arguing over the future of Disney's Lucasfilm division.

And my list of potential mourners ends there.

It seemed crazy that in a world without me in it, that people would just carry on. Kate would still be going out to the garden on Saturdays in her jeans and sunhat to prune the forsythias, Noel would be sleepily carrying her cinnamon cappuccino into her Italian History class, Colin fucking Capehart, with his Tom Ford sandals and his novelty mustache, would be swanning into the office ten minutes late every morning, complaining about the 101 traffic.

My marriage keeled over and died, then shortly afterwards I did the same. My soul had been removed like airport baggage and rerouted elsewhere. But by who? And why?

Even death wasn't something I could do properly, it seemed.

Dead, but I simply hadn't the slightest notion what I was meant to do about it. I'd never been dead before.

Sitting there on the soiled sheets of Spencer's bed, I thought of him dying there. Did he know he was dying? What were his last thoughts?

My borrowed gut began to churn, interrupting my musings. For a moment I concerned myself with sorting out the sensations of nausea from those of hunger. In the end I decided that this body was ravenous.

I piloted Spencer Day's ex-body back to the kitchen area. The contents of the stainless- steel refrigerator were sparse and less than nourishing. A triangular slab of moldy cheddar, a nearly empty carton of juice, and a jar of mustard with a crusty lid. I rescued three apparently long-abandoned chicken sausages from the back of the otherwise empty freezer and microwaved them into submission. Bon Appetit!

I had so many questions, they all seemed to snag into a tangle of how's and why's and where's. The facts themselves were deceptively simple: I had died and then had been reborn nine months later into the corpse of a young man.

This rip in the fabric of reality demanded an explanation, and, while I forked down the sausages, here is four I came up with:

Theory one: I was now in some sort of afterlife, a weird sort of prosaic purgatory.

Theory two: through some sort of magic, my mind had been inserted into a vacated body.

Theory three: Spencer Day is the real me, and I'm having a drug-induced psychotic break and hallucinating that I had once been an imaginary character I had invented named Jeff Destry, a middle-aged middle management mediocrity.

Theory four: I was actually on an operating table while doctors tried to jump-start my heart, and all this was anesthetic-induced delirium.

Ok, let's go through these one by one:

The Purgatory Theory: Instinctively I knew, somehow, I was still in the material world, with all its rough, prosaic solidity, though, granted, I didn't have the vocabulary for just what sort of death-adjacent metalife I might now be living.

The Body Swap Theory: On the face of it, this one had the advantage of being a plausible and coherent scenario, except where was the Gypsy curse, or the sorcerer with a magic ring, or a sinister scientist with a brain-swapping machine?

The Jeff Destry Isn't Real Theory: How to account, then, for, say, such memories as the cedar smell of Grandma Dietrich's coat closet, of Kate's eyes scrunched up in laughter at our first-date miniature golf misadventures, of the way Noel pursed her lips around the reed of her oboe when practicing?

The Anesthetic Hallucination Theory: If this was a hallucination, it was a pretty damn hi- res one -- I could sense the physical actuality of the pulse in these wrists and temples, the seesaw rhythm as these lungs expanded and contracted with each breath.

The opening riff from AC/DC's 'Back in Black' blew me out of my reverie like a shotgun blast. A ringtone. The sudden adrenaline rush felt like I was having another heart attack.

The sound pierced me with dread. What could I possibly say on Spencer Day's phone without gibbering, for fuck's sake?

I hustled unsteadily back to the bedroom and grabbed the phone. The Caller ID showed a name.

Taylor Day. Family.

Fuck. Fuck to the power of Fuck squared. I have to decide. Answer it. No, let it go to voicemail.

Spencer's voicemail greeting kicked in after four rings. "Hi! Sounds like me, but it's just my phone, pretending to be me. Tell it your tidings and it'll pass them on to the real me, if such a thing exists."

"I'm not ready for this!" I thought. But I needed to pluck up my courage and take the plunge. (For those not reading the Cliff Notes, me "not being ready" forms an ongoing theme. In fact, it could stand as my future epitaph - that is, if I weren't already dead).

I took a deep breath and blew it out slowly. I lifted the phone to my face, feeling like the air itself had put on weight and my arm was moving through something with the consistency of syrup. "Hi," I said, before they had a chance to leave a message.

Silence, then a mint-cool female voice.

"Well, I've called you a dozen fucking times. What's going on? Why aren't you returning my calls?"

"I was feeling a little sick." Well, that was no lie. Should I try to bluff my way through, until I could figure out what was going on? Or maybe plead amnesia? Or reveal the truth to the world and be thought crazy: that I had died and then been reborn into a stranger's body?

"Yeah, I bet. Someday you're going to kill yourself. That would be tiresome, I find funerals such a chore." She spoke with a light, shimmery cadence, almost as if there were musical notes behind each syllable.

"That so?" I replied.

" 'That so?' " she mimicked. "Not up to your usual level of sparkling repartee."

A pause. She seemed to be waiting for a clever rejoinder. "Yeah, well, don't worry. I'm going to live if it kills me." Good one, Jeff.

"Witty. You should consider standup."

"Right now, my main ambition is just to be able to stand up, period."

She gave a derisive snort. "Fentanyl laced in with your happy powder again, huh? What's the world coming to when you can't even trust criminals? And speaking of remaining upright, think you're really up to staying clean for one whole day Sunday? You did promise Mom and Dad we could all get together. We're still expected at one, you know."

Ah. This must be Spencer's sister.

I began to feel slightly more confident. I would just need to play the part of Spencer Day by using the verbal cues and prompts from those who knew him. When I was trying to be an actor, I was known in acting class for being a quick study and after all, who could suspect that this body was currently occupied by a dead man?

"Yeah, I'll be fine. I'm finally cleaning up my act."

From the other end there floated a sigh. "Yes, your act. Exactly. Everything with you is always an act, just one performance after the other."

"You really seem to think you have my number," I said.

"I have your number all right, and it's a low one. A reliably unreliable trust fund nepo- baby with a drug habit, a car habit, and a girl habit."

"A boy needs hobbies."

"I hear needlepoint is quite relaxing." She was quick, I'll give her that.

Inspiration struck, and I said, "I got so fucked up I'm even drawing blanks on some parts of my life," thus setting up an alibi for not remembering details of our supposedly shared past.

"Not surprising. You've probably trashed entire chunks of your brain," she replied. I mentally high-fived myself. I was beginning to think I could pull this off.

"Well, like I said, I've changed. You're getting a whole new me." If she only knew how true that was. "I'm finally straightening my life out."

"You've been saying you're straightening yourself out for two years now. Just how bent were you originally, anyway?"

Your animosity is being directed at the wrong dead guy, I silently protested. The strain of keeping up the pretense of being Spencer was making me sweat. Plus, I had no idea where Spencer's car was parked, or how to get to his parent's home.

Improvising clumsily, I began, "I was just thinking..." "Wow! Don't let me interrupt that!"

My fingers tightened around the phone in a slow strangle. "Thinking, maybe you could you give me a ride Saturday?"

Her voice was suddenly wary. "What happened? Total your car again?"

"To be perfectly honest - " "Please don't strain yourself."

"I was just going to say I'm still a bit shaky. Could you pick me up, say, noonish?"

"Noonish? When did you become one those ish people? I can deal with you trying to cram all Peru up your nose, but adopting that pretentious little suffix is a step too far."

"Sorry, I guess I've fallen in with a bad crowd." "Yeah? Are there really chi-chi coke-heads?"

"Chi-chi-ish. Anyway, no need to be so peevish. Let me amend my request. Can you pick me up when the big hand and the little hands are straight up?"

I could almost feel her shrug over the phone. "Ok, I'll get you at noon. Ish." "I'll be ready."

"Imagine my glee."

"Goodbye," I said, but she had already terminated the connection. Spencer's ghostly reflection stared back at me from the screen.

Having to impersonate her brother over the phone for even this brief conversation exhausted me. Would I be able to carry on in front of not only her but her parents for an entire day?

I was left with a feeling of having stepped out on a high wire on which going ahead might be treacherous but turning around impossible. One end of the wire was anchored to my old life, the other to my new one. To get from one end to the other, I must take one wobbly step at a time over a terrifying chasm.

Life eggs us ever onward, even as it mocks us. I kept being dragged forward, but still I resisted the pull. I yearned instead for the past, to go back, to be with Kate and Noel, to be myself, to be Jeff again.

But how would I make Kate and Noel realize who I really am? By telling them things only I could know? Declare, "It's me, Jeff, in the body of a twenty-one-year-old junkie. Surprise!" They'd think I was crazy.

I chased my thoughts around in ever decreasing circles for a while, before getting down to the crux - a bottom line I'd been dodging thinking about: there was no home to return

to. Kate and I were split. Noel was no doubt returning to Providence in the fall. And the body of Jeffrey Destry, my body, was now just meat for worms.

It all felt too big to grasp. You know about the stages of grief: denial, bargaining, acceptance, so on. If you lose someone, there's a hole in your world. But I didn't just lose someone, I lost everyone, including even myself. There are no stages of grief for losing everyone and everything.

But you couldn't mourn forever. Or you could, but I had better things to do. Come up with a plan of action, for instance. And so, I tallied up all my options, and got as far as one: I needed to learn everything I could about Spencer Day.

And ok, maybe that's not really much of a plan. The original plan was to continue to live my life and not die, but that ship had sailed, so this one would have to do.

Tapping Spencer's phone awake, I scrolled through his contact list for those with a Day surname. Found work and mobile phone numbers listed for Robert and Elizabeth, along with a Beverly Hills home address. His parents, presumably.

And I also found a cell number listing for a Taylor Day. Must be the sister. I then opened the Photos app and found an album labeled Family. I scrolled up the screen and landed on a series of childhood pictures.

Toddler Spencer on his dad's shoulders in a swimming pool.

Pre-school Spencer, his look-alike sister, and his mother at Disneyland, all three wearing Mickey Mouse ears.

Halloween. Eight-year-old Spider-man Spencer posing with ten-year old Taylor costumed as Supergirl.

A garden funeral for a pet turtle, a solemn Taylor holding the hand of a weeping Spencer.

I continued, thumbing through more recent images: Spencer at school, at the beach, on the ski slopes. His features were sleekly androgynous, almost too handsome, like something carved in porcelain. And while always lean and angular in these photos, with bone structure for days, the Spencer I had just seen in the mirror was now verging on gaunt, with a notable hollowing of the cheeks.

Along with pictures of various relatives, there were photos of the Day family with people I recognized from the trade papers. Actors, TV showrunners, directors. So, either the father or the mother, or both, were involved in the industry. Not surprising, I supposed, given their Beverly Hills address.

My new legs were moving properly by now, and I walked back to the area where the kitchen segued into the living room. On a shiny black cube - some designer's idea of a table -- sat an open laptop, its screen dark. A sprinkle of white granules, a crumpled Kleenex stiffened by snot, and a rolled-up dollar bill, evidently used as a coke chute, littered the remaining surface not taken up by the laptop.

I tried cocaine just once as a young man, and never did it again, because it made me feel then as I was feeling now: jittery, anxious, paranoid, unable to hold onto thoughts whizzing by too quickly.

A chic charcoal couch faced the laptop. On a cushion sat a grease-splotched pizza box. Inside I found a surviving slice in the early stages of fossilization. Still famished, I collapsed onto the cushions and devoured the stale triangle of pizza as if it were ambrosia. This new body began to feel like it belonged to me.

The laptop had decals stuck all over it. A keyboard tap brought the screen to life. Time to do some cyber-sleuthing by turning to the great internet oracle for enlightenment. You may ask what qualifies me to be an expert cyber-sleuth. Answer: I know how to type stuff in the Google search field.

Now, if you ever need to put things in perspective, know what will do the trick? Reading your own obituary.

"Jeffrey Lee Destry died at home in Los Angeles, CA on Tuesday, November 8, at the age of 47."

The word "died", though not unexpected, still hit me in the eye like a dart.

So, this was my life, then, just words on a screen? "Survived by his wife Katherine and daughter Noel... Preceded in death by parents Charles and Beverly... Franklin High School... UC-Irvine... Employed as Contract Manager for Phelps & Briggs... In lieu of flowers..." Etc.

Well, it doesn't add up to much, does it? Just a series of dull facts. I suppose that's what a man's life is, in the end. My life, anyway. Dull facts about a dull man. So dull that neither Heaven nor Hell bothered to claim my soul.

I mean, life's a bitch and then you die -- and then, if you're me, things get really weird.

Gradually I became aware that my free hand was balled into a fist, and I was rocking back and forth on the sofa. My mind was racing, if only to keep pace with my heart. The painkillers were already wearing off. My face ached, and the tom toms had started up again in the back of my head.

Stop. Reload. Focus. Back to playing database piano on the laptop keys.

Robert Day, then. Emmy-winning TV director of network police dramas and Hallmark Channel Christmas rom-coms. Elizabeth was a retired model and actress, her acting credits, such as they were ("Girl in bikini"), dating from more than twenty years ago.

I switched my focus to Taylor. I hit Google Images first: paparazzi pics from B-list events, some glamour modeling poses, some Instagram selfies, in all of which she looked achingly beautiful.

Moving on to Wikipedia. Age twenty-three. UCLA graduate. Currently co-starring on a show called BASED. The show was an hour-long drama-with-jokes, about three girls attending college in New England. I watched some clips on YouTube. Taylor had a facial structure that the camera yearns for, her attention-riveting radiance so compelling that it rendered questions of acting ability irrelevant.

Her twitter feed provided little in the way of personal info, mostly just plugs for her TV show. For all her cyber-exposure, she had shielded her love life from view.

I also came across a handful of IMDb listings for Spencer Day. Cast member on some basic cable sci-fi show and guest roles on some TV shows I had only vaguely heard of, the last of these appearances occurring two years ago. I watched some of his performances online, studying Spencer's mannerisms.

Spencer had a gift for conveying slyness in his acting -- there seemed to be some kind of calculation going on in his mind that came across on camera. He had a cocksure, smartass gleefulness to him, a charismatic sex-idol presence that might have taken him far had he lived.

I needed to do more homework, I knew, if I wanted to pull off this impersonation. L. A. is, after all, the capitol of self-reinvention, a company town where illusion is the chief product, and those who reach the top are the greatest pretenders of all.

Though there were still those gutting moments of loss and mourning that made me clench my eyes shut and take deep breaths, by and large the next few days had a weirdly calm, dreamlike quality to them. My acting class training proved useful. I had been feeling my way around in my new role as Spencer Day, circling for the core of my portrayal, and now I thought I pretty much had it: that of a playful rascal, an irresistible charmer.

It took time to learn how to manipulate my new face. I see his face in the mirror, and somehow, I'll have to make it mine. I spent hours rehearsing Spence's acting mannerisms - squinting shrewdly at people with head tipped back, eyebrows twitching faintly, or gazing at them levelly, jaw muscles flexing. One of the most useful expressions in Spencer's repertoire was a wry, carefully crooked smile that could charm a stone.

I also practiced speaking in his voice: a boyish and bell-like one that could slip smoothly when called for into a raspy lower register.

I grew comfortable in what I'd come to think of as my new skin. My game plan: infiltrate Spencer's family, and then arm myself with the information I gathered there. Knowledge is power, and so far, I didn't have much.

It would require thinking on my feet, speaking off the cuff, and, I feared, a good measure of luck.

*****

Saturday night's sleep was another uneasy one, the kind of sleep you might get in a hotel, say, where you keep waking up and trying to reconcile the unfamiliar room you're in with the bedroom you're used to.

One time after I had awakened, I thought I heard something tapping at the window. Struggling out of bed, I padded over to the window and looked out, but I couldn't see anything but my ghostly reflection and the dim outlines of neighboring buildings. I pulled down the curtains and went back to bed.

Pre-dawn, I awakened to the sensation of a dream receding from my mind, a procession of phantom images that ebbed away even as I tried to hold on to them. And then I became aware of a presence in the bedroom. I was not alone.

A shudder curled inside my stomach. I contemplated opening my eyes, then wondered if there were maybe something on the other side of my eyelids I didn't want to see. As a compromise, I opened one eye just a sliver.

The bedroom was still pitch dark. Something in that darkness waited. Watching me. Staring.

Tendrils of fear twisted in my belly as I waited for my eyes to adjust to the dark. After a few moments, I seemed to detect shadows moving slowly across the walls, dark disturbing shapes that gathered in the corner and began to churn. Out of these shadows a silhouette slowly became visible. It was the silhouette of a man, his body billowing and rippling like black bedsheets left out to dry on a clothesline. Eyes wide open now, I tried to sit up but couldn't.

I could see a mouth, but in the darkness, I couldn't see the eyes. I guessed they'd be there if I looked closely enough. I therefore decided not to look closely enough.

The mouth moved, and a sound shivered the air. "When you see right through them," it said, in a voice that was strangely toneless, as if it were electronically processed.

Just then a bell rang. The figure's mouth grew wide and swallowed his head, then the apparition winked out of existence with a jarring thump that ruffled the bed sheets.

The noise continued, a harsh insistent sound, more buzzer now than bell. Like someone waking from a nightmare in a movie scene, I bolted upright, my body sheathed in a cold sweat. I groped for the alarm, and after a few moments of floundering, succeeded in smacked the button on the alarm clock and stopping the noise. The clock face proclaimed 6:00 in digital crimson. I got out of bed, pulled open the curtains, and let the early morning light spill into the bedroom.

I hadn't had so intense a nightmare since, as a child, I had watched INVASION OF THE BODY SNATCHERS on TV. The idea of going to sleep as yourself and waking up as someone else terrified me at the time. And now here I was in reality, waking up into someone else's life, having given up my own with hardly a whimper.

The phrase, "When you see right through them," sparked my memory but I couldn't get a handle on it - one of those tip-of-the-mind fizzles.

Forty minutes later I had unburdened my bladder and bowels, showered, and shaved. By the time I had my coffee, the phantom had vanished from my thoughts as thoroughly as it had from the bedroom. Just a bad dream, I believed, though afterwards I wouldn't be so sure.

Due to my lack of familiarity with Spencer's wardrobe, deciding what to wear took me longer than ordinary. Ha! "Ordinary."

I stared into the walk-in closet mirror. Spencer's reflection stared back. The cadaverous skin tone had warmed, and he looks so young, so handsome -- but it's a mask. There's another face beneath this one, the face of a doughy, defeated middle-aged man.

I took a moment to be amazed once again that I was in a new body, then, after subjecting Spencer's clothes to the sniff test, I settled on black jeans and a yellow polo shirt - yellow being the color of my cowardly soul.

I imagined myself a theater actor standing in the wings waiting for his entrance on opening night. I had rehearsed what I would say to Taylor, but nothing I rehearsed sounded sane, so I figured I would play it by ear.

For today, anyway, I would be Spencer. It wasn't a role I relished, but I felt confident I could do it justice. That long, tense moment of waiting in the wings for my cue ended when a little before twelve the doorbell from the building's front vestibule made a sort of angry-wasp buzz.

Showtime.

Going up to the intercom, I said "Taylor?"

"Good to see drugs haven't dulled your keen powers of deduction."

"Score one for Spencer Day, ace detective," I replied, gamely but lamely, then pressed the buzzer to admit her into the building. Even from this distance, I sensed the impact she was to have on me - an undeniable gravitational force sweeping me into her orbit.

Elevator ping, footfalls, and then a firm rap on the door - four knocks that reminded me of the opening of Beethoven's Fifth, said by critics to signify Fate beating at the entrance.

I touched a hand to my hair - it reassured me a little, this thick abundance of my new head of hair.

Then I opened the door.

The Taylor that existed in my imagination had been assembled from pixels on a laptop, but now she stood before me as solid flesh.

She stepped into the apartment and looked around curiously. She was improbably, shiningly beautiful. I resisted a wild urge to reach out and poke her face, to test if she was indeed real.

No more lingering in the wings. I was onstage now, in the thick of the action. "Hi," was my admittedly unambitious intro.

Her smile lasted only about as long as the blink that accompanied it. Long lashes flicked over blue eyes the shade of glazed berries. "Ooh, clever opening conversational gambit."

I tried to think of a witty comeback, but nothing witty arrived. Suddenly it's like I'm back in high school, and I'm again the stammering fat kid who accidently bumps into the head cheerleader in the cafeteria lunch line.

Her ice-milk skin was so luminous it was as if invisible spotlights shone on her. A long, smooth neck swooped down to a pair of posh collarbones. She wore a vanilla-colored strappy sundress and snazzy bubblegum-pink sandals on her feet. Her legs were slender and sinewy - dancer's legs that seemed to climb forever.

My mind camera-clicked further details:

Hair: a golden cascade, like strands of lustrous honey.

A dusting of cinnamon freckles fanned across the bridge of a strong, gently uptilted nose.

Cheekbones you could grate Provolone on.

Down boy. I gave myself a mental cold shower by reminding myself I'm a middle-aged man wearing her dead brother's body.

Taylor raised a perfectly arched eyebrow and regarded me with a quizzical eye, as if there were something a bit comical about me that she was too polite to openly laugh at. Her eyes then crawled up and down Spencer-me in a laser-beam stare of appraisal so meticulous that my face heated all the way to my ears.

"You almost look presentable, Spence." It made my heart jitter around in my chest, being studied and measured by those radiant blue eyes.

I didn't know how my character was supposed to relate to her. I struggled to play the scene. Groping for a bantering tone, I remembered to precede my attempt at snappy badinage with a rehearsed, sardonic grin. "Thanks. I was going for a sort of' 'young, gifted, and dissolute' look, but I'll take 'almost presentable.' "

Holding her head to one side in an ironical manner, she again smiled, for longer this time. Her ripe-strawberry-red mouth had a lovely lower lip, soft and full.

"More like 'young, dissolute, and malnourished'. Lucky you have some good raw material to work with. You share DNA with me, after all. A few hot meals and you won't look so gaunt." She impatiently rattled her car keys at me. "And speaking of hot meals, I'm double parked, let's go. Mom is already preparing dinner."

Her voice -- a voluptuously creamy contralto -- registered as something tingling down my spine as much as heard in my ear. The needle on my ol' perv-o-meter tilted dangerously into the red. Unable to hold her gaze for fear she might read my impure thoughts, I turned to pick up the apartment keys from a side table.

Taylor quickly spun around, causing her dress to flare at her knees, and crossed the hall, striding with the power and suppleness of a bipedal puma. She repeatedly jabbed at the elevator button. I closed and locked the apartment door carefully, then checked it again to make sure. (I'm a bit OCD over locking doors, patting my pocket to confirm I have the keys, that kind of thing. I mean, I'm not nuts or anything, just... you know.

Careful).

The elevator doors slid open. Taylor got in. I got in. The elevator doors slid closed. Taylor pressed the button for the ground floor, and the machinery hummed into action.

I studied Spencer's reflected face on the elevator's polished metal surface. Taylor stared down absently at her crimson-toed foot as it tapped on the elevator floor, as if

she were serenely studying her own impatience. Ping went the bell, and the elevator doors slid open to deliver us to the building foyer.

The street on which Spencer lived was residential, lined with pastel stucco apartment buildings. When we reached the heat-steeped outside, Taylor slipped on a pair of expensive sunglasses. She walked fast, those designer sandals flashing on the pavement. The sunlight caught in her golden hair, bathing her in an otherworldly glow.

It was mid-July, and the mercury rose to the occasion. The air smelled like oven exhaust. The cars parked along the buzzing street mirage-shimmered in the heat.

With a swirl of skirt and a flash of leg, Taylor hopped into her candy-apple-red Jaguar, while I folded myself into the passenger seat. The car's interior raged with a terrible heat. Taylor's foot pressed down hard on the gas pedal as though it had personally offended her and I just managed to buckle my seatbelt before, with an angry-sounding squeal of the tires, we peeled out.

Taylor drove fast, recklessly, but with skill. The AC blasted gale-force. Santa Monica slid past the car windows as smoothly as a rear projection in a Hitchcock movie. A pregnant silence filled the enclosed space. Actually, the silence pushed beyond pregnant and right into stillborn.

Taylor's hair streamed down to the creamy-vanilla white of her bare shoulders. Her pale legs were so long that her car seat was as far back as it could go. My eyes seemed to want to go on looking at her, but at last I succeeded in switching them round until they were looking out the windshield.

She leaned forward, cycling through the radio dial, pausing only for a few seconds on each blaring station. It's been my experience that a car's close quarters can create an intimacy that you might not otherwise establish, and so I ventured one of Jeff's patented silver-tongued ice-breakers, speaking over the cacophony coming from the radio.

"So -" nerves gave me a little trouble with my throat, I had to cough and "ahem" before I could start again, "-so, mind if ask you about your show?" I didn't want to postpone a dialogue. I needed to know now whether I'd be able to pull off this masquerade. Would she sniff me out as an imposter?

"Please do. My ears are all atwitter," she said. She gave up fiddling with the radio and fell back in her seat, with her bra-less breasts, small and firm as young plums, joggling slightly with the movement.

I was jolted by a rush of energy to my groin. My new and improved cock felt like an iron bolt. A stealthy adjustment of the trousers hid my genital crisis from view.

I had last night booted up Spencer's laptop and read recaps for Taylor's show, and learned the names of the characters and the actors who played them. (I'm all for a little

improv when necessary, but it's better to be as overprepared as possible). BASED seemed to be a show that depended on soap-opera antics: love triangles, long-lost siblings, amnesia. Storylines about as fresh as dinosaur dung.

"Any interesting character arcs for you this season?" I asked, making my voice sound airily casual.

She seemed to be pondering whether I was worth the exertion of turning her head to glance my way. "What's with the sudden interest in my 'character arcs'? Do you even bother to watch the show?"

"Of course. It is enthralling. I laughed, I cried, it became part of me."

She laughed, but the laugh was of the nasally snorted kind. "Okay, so the writing wouldn't exactly have Aaron Sorkin squirming with envy. We do have a good young cast, though, doing the best we can with those scripts."

We arrived at a stoplight. Taylor slid her sunglasses down her nose to make faces at a delighted little girl in the back seat of the Honda SUV beside us. The light changed but we had to wait for pedestrians to finish wobbling past before turning east.

"You know, I've missed this these last few years, engaging in a sprightly exchange of banter with my drug-addled kid brother," Taylor said.

"Ex-addled."

She flashed me an oh-come-on look. "Ever the optimist."

She smelled like warm peaches. Sweat glistened at the cup of her throat. She arched her back, and I saw the outline of her gumdrop-shaped nipples defined against the thin membrane of her cotton dress. My erection felt hard enough to dent a fender. My old Jeff honker hadn't been that vertical in years.

Where was I? Oh, right.

"So, your character this season?" I reminded her.

She executed a little twitch of her nose that made her sunglasses jump. "Well, my English professor gets me pregnant, so I get to be up close and personal with Cole Harford. Having to make goo-goo eyes at Cole will stretch to the limit my quote unquote acting skills."

Cole Harford was the only cast member whose name I had recognized. He had, in his youth (and mine), starred in a TV drama that had made him a teen heartthrob for a few years.

"Yeah? So, what's Cole Harford really like?" I asked, raking Spencer's slender fingers through his lush hair.

"What is Cole Harford like?" she repeated. She narrowed her eyes in feigned contemplation, and brought her hand up to her face to lightly drum her fingernails against her bottom lip as she considered. "Hmmm..."

We rode in silence to the end of the block, then she finally decided on an answer. "Short."

It seemed she was just going to continue with the banter. I was thankful, to be honest. Banter I could do. "So, I gather you're not exactly looking forward to your love scenes with him?"

"I'd rather French-kiss a gecko."

"He's always come across in interviews and everything as a pretty cool guy."

"A lot of actors aren't what the look like. There's a second person inside them." She darted a quick, amused look my way over the rims of her sunglasses. "I've never heard you sounding so bougie. Is this an interview? Are we on THE TONIGHT SHOW?"

"Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome the very talented, the very lovely... Taylor Day!" I announced.

She shot me something vaguely smile-like, then said, "Don't get me wrong, I'm glad you're showing some interest. Maybe this means you won't utterly tank the audition for once."

I felt suddenly sick. My hard-on flagged. "Wait, audition? Remind me."

She gave me the side-eye, with a look that was at first startled then tensed into narrowed eyes and flexed jaw muscles. She straightened her fingers on the steering wheel, then gripped it again.

"All that blow has turned your brain to coleslaw, hasn't it? Please tell me you're still going to the audition that Maddie arranged. She's doing me a favor in hip-pocketing you," she said, her voice as sharp as an ice pick.

("Hip-pocketing" is a term used in the acting world when talent agents send actors out on auditions without first signing them, to see how they do. It's only if the actor books a part that the agency offers them a contract.)

Taylor cranked the wheel to swerve around a double-parked Coors truck. She made an effort to modulate her tone, although I could still see the quickened pulse at the side of her neck. "Please, just this once, don't fuck up."

"Don't fuck up," I repeated, as if making a mental note. "Check."

Well, so much for my first attempt at holding down my end of a conversation without getting totally lost. She might just as well have been speaking in code. What audition? Who was Maddie? I was way out of my depth. But then, I'd be out of my depth stepping in a rain puddle.

Taylor' attitude toward Spencer was hard to read, a peculiar mix of tenderness and scorn -- a warm current running under her icy surface.

We buzzed along Santa Monica Blvd., zigzagging through traffic. Taylor wove neatly around a mid-life-crisis Corvette, which hooted angrily. I was gripping the shoulder-to- hip seat belt that crossed me. "Speed limits," I said. "Heard of them?"

She huffed one syllable of a mirthless laugh. "Speed limits? That's rich, coming from you. I mean, have you met you?"

"Yeah, I have met me. We got on like a house on fire."

She spared me a micro-second glance. "I hope there were survivors." "I have similar hopes for this car trip," I replied.

She pulled off her sunglasses and turned her eyes on me, shooting BBs from the narrowed pupils. I held her gaze, partly to avoid peeking at the speedometer.

"Don't give me that look," she said. "I know that look all too well."

"This look is sheer bladder-shriveling terror. Keep both eyes -- watch out for that truck! He's changing lanes."

She swiveled her eyes back to the road, one hand on the wheel and the other twirling her sunglasses. "You really have changed. When did you become such a candy-ass?"

In a plummy, affected voice I said, "It takes bravery to come out of the closet as a coward."

Taylor's phone rattled in its cup holder. The ringtone was the opening synth riff from 'Sweet Dreams' by the Eurythmics. She slid her sunglasses back on, picked up the phone, listened, then replied "Yes." Her eyes slid back to me. "Yes, I've got him, mom."

She shot through a yellow light to swing into the traffic crawling along Sunset. The tension now filling the air seemed to press against the car windows, weighing me down and making me tired and gloomy. Bleating car horns and the rumble of a motorcycle cut into the silence.

Taylor blew out a sigh and turned on the radio again, leaning forward to fiddle with the buttons, and stopped when she found Tears for Fears. She amped the volume to eardrum-bruise.

"Welcome to your life, there's no turning back..." Taylor sang along, exuberantly off-key, pounding her palm against the steering wheel in time with the beat. The scenery outside rolled by smoothly, cars and billboards and palm trees.

We didn't speak to each other for the rest of the ride.

Taylor turned east on Santa Monica Boulevard, and after we crossed Wilshire, the Starbuck's, Walgreen's and McDonald's gave way to the broad green lawns and the sunlit white porticos of Beverly Hills.

We approached a light before the final turn to Overlook Lane. In the middle of the avenue, on the meridian, a man brandished a hand-lettered sign: HOMELESS. Which made me think of my own home, now lost to me. Which in turn made me think of Kate and Noel. Which was something I didn't want to do, not right then. So instead, I risked a furtive sideways glance to focus on the way Taylor's thigh and calf muscles bunched and slackened as she worked the accelerator and brake pedals.

When the light turned, Taylor twisted the steering wheel, hung a sharp left, and we entered a street lined with half-hidden houses in a jumble of architectural styles. Palm trees flanked the sidewalks. The only people in sight were Mexican gardeners blowing dirt with air-guns and Filipina uniformed maids being led by small dogs on their afternoon walks.

This wasn't movie-star Beverly Hills, but an older, mid-century neighborhood. The houses were large, but they weren't showbizzy bloated parade floats painted with Easter egg colors.

We turned and pulled up before a pair of wrought-iron gates. Taylor lowered her window, leaned out, and punched in a code on a key pad. With a rumble the gates angled inward.

A semicircular red-brick drive cut an inverted U through a front lawn, a lawn as emerald- green as billiard felt. The driveway led up to a courtyard, beyond which lay a sprawling two-story Spanish Colonial-style house, with rough stucco walls the color of peaches, a red-tile terra-cotta roof, semi-circular arches and ornamental ironwork.

Taylor parked her red Jaguar behind a blue Bentley and a black BMW. She opened the car door, twisted her lovely torso to grab a tote bag from the back seat, slung it over one bare shoulder - yowzah, that dress -- then squirmed out the car.

With a ball of anxiety nesting in my belly, I trailed her from the courtyard to a side door. She swung open the door and swept in, calling out, "We're here, mom!" I took a deep breath, and stepped across the threshold into a chef's-type kitchen that felt oddly familiar to me even before I had finished walking into it. It was if I'd seen it in some dream or other.

It seemed almost as big as the one in the hotel where, as a teenager, I had washed dishes for a summer. The Day's kitchen had an island in the middle, a dining table on the side, an industrial oven, and all sorts of pots and pans hanging from an overhead rack. Spencer's mother was leaning against a marble counter.

Elizabeth Day was beautiful in that distinctive way that middle-aged and moneyed L. A. women were beautiful. She wore a pink blouse, black pants, and her blonde hair tightly drawn back in a chignon.

I flashed her Spencer's mouthful of wonderful teeth.

Her eyes warmed when she looked at me and she gave me a bashful, uncertain smile. My heart went out to her -- I recognized that raw, helpless yearning in my own life from when Noel hit her teens and began to pull away.

Spencer's mother put down her coffee mug on a counter and stepped towards me. "So, Spence, how are you?" she asked. Her arms began what might have been a hug, but dropped down. "Taylor said that you'd been sick."

"Dead sick." Not my proudest moment, that remark.

"We've all been worried about you." Pink spots lit up her cheeks, then she continued quickly, "Taylor is telling us that you're doing much better, though you're having trouble remembering things."

I peeked at Taylor, who responded with a jaded smile and a twitch of disdain at the corner of her mouth.

"I'm okay, really. The memory thing is only temporary, I'm sure. In fact, I'm already filling in some of the blanks." I pulled a slightly anguished face, one of Spencer's specialties: first hollowed cheeks and half-closed eyes, then letting the expression soften into a rueful smile.

Behind her mother's back, Taylor crossed her eyes at me, pointed her index finger at her temple, and then did a you're-nuts corkscrew motion.

Elizabeth, frowning, was sizing up my answer skeptically when her cell chirped out an excerpt from 'Karma Chameleon' by Culture Club. She grudgingly picked it up from the table, peered at the screen, then, making a wryly apologetic face at me, answered it.

She turned and faced a window.

"Hey Jen, I can't talk right now. Taylor and Spencer are here. Yes, Spencer." She turned her head, smiled, and gestured for us to sit. I sat at the table, while Taylor grabbed a soda from the fridge and then perched on one of the high barstools scattered around the kitchen island, her dangling left leg jiggling with surplus energy.

Elizabeth ended the call, then asked, "Would you like something to drink? Ginger beer still your favorite? Have you tried Maine Root ginger brew, it's really excellent?"

"Sounds good." It didn't really. Sugary soft drinks are not something I normally fancy. I wondered though, had I inherited Spencer's palate along with the rest of him?

She handed me a bottle from the refrigerator, then sat down beside me at the table. I twisted off the cap and took a swallow. It stung the back of my throat, and a sugar rush came at me so hard and fast I nearly ducked.

Floor-to-ceiling glass formed the kitchen's rear wall, through which views of a landscaped yard and a gazeboed garden were visible. Past some fading pink roses could be seen the blue of a pool, and beyond that an igloo-white pool house.

A man exited the pool house and headed our way, striding vigorously. He was a trim man in his mid-fifties with the tight build of a tennis player, handsome in his smooth- fitting linen shirt, his coppery California tan, his salt-and-pepper hair now making a decisive turn towards salt. Meet Robert Day, Spencer's father.

When he entered the kitchen and saw me his face brightened. He stopped and raised his hands to his face. Forming his thumbs and index fingers into a square, he tilted his head back, closed one eye, and pretended to look through a camera lens.

"Camera tracks a distinguished-looking man walking into a house and greeting two beautiful women and a dashing young man," he mock-intoned.

It took me a moment to catch on, then I awkwardly stood and raised my bottle of ginger brew in greeting. "Close-up on the young man, casually dressed, standing up as background music swells." D minus for style there, Jeff.

Taylor was sitting behind her father, performing a pantomime of sticking her finger down her throat and gagging.

Robert Day strode toward me beaming and gripped my free hand tight while giving my upper arm a slap. "Looking good there, Spence. Isn't he looking good, Liza?"

Elizabeth smiled and replied, "He could stand to put on a few pounds, but yes." "How are you feeling, Spence?" Robert asked brightly.

I extended my hand horizontally, palm down, and wagged it like a plane dipping its wings. "So-so."

"Buck up, buckaroo. You're going to nail that audition. Who better to play Taylor's fictional brother than her real-life brother, right?"

The feeling of vague dread that had been circling me since Taylor's first mention of an audition finally settled into my stomach, forming a lump of cold terror. Is nothing to be simple any more, ever again?

Robert slapped his hands together and rubbed them briskly. "What say we all hit the pool before dinner? It's been ages. The Days all together again!"

"Rah rah," Taylor said.

"I didn't bring a bathing suit," I said.

"I'm sure you still have some old bathing suits in your room," said Elizabeth.

As I left the kitchen, I felt an eerie tingling on my scalp, a sense of recognition and nostalgia. I found myself knowing what I'd see when I rounded each corner: a grand custard-yellow dining room, a family room expensively under-furnished, and an oyster- colored living room two stories high, with second floor bathroom and bedroom doors visible over an elegant balustrade.

I climbed the spiral staircase leading up to a skylit corridor, at the end of which I somehow knew I would find Spence's bedroom.

It wasn't a room. It was a shrine. Where precisely the dividing line between "room" and "shrine" lay, I didn't know, but I was pretty sure Spence's bedroom crossed it, with every detail meticulously preserved from when Spencer lived there:

Red frame bed with matching night stand. A canvas print of a phoenix and flames hanging above the bed's headboard. A model airplane swinging near the window. Film posters on the two windowless walls (eighties comedy fantasies: BACK TO THE FUTURE. BIG. SPLASH. ALL OF ME).

Ransacking a dresser, I discovered, among the folded T-shirts faded by years of sun and laundry, a black Speedo swimsuit. I pulled it out, then hurriedly rummaged through the drawers of a nearby desk set. There could be stuff there that would tell me something about Spencer. What it would tell me, I had no idea, but still it felt like a place to start.

Rattling around inside the drawers were a tangle of Xbox game controllers. Superhero action figures. Loose change. A set of Magic the Gathering cards.

A voice startled me mid-rummage. "You know, the real shit to hock is in the entertainment room." Taylor materialized in the doorway, leaning against the jamb with arms folded. Sunlight spilled from the skylight above and illuminated her face. She looked ethereal.

"I'm headed there next."

Her lips acknowledged my attempted joke with a millimeter of smile and a mile of sneer.

She wore a watermelon-red two-piece swimsuit, with its strategic bits of colored cloth minimally interrupting the flow of naked flesh. My heart stopped or raced or skipped a beat or whatever it does in these matters. You could apply the term "complexion" -- usually relegated only to the face - to the milky-hued flawlessness of her entire body.

Beauty is only skin deep, as they say, but unless you're a radiologist, skin deep is plenty.

I flashed her Spence's best disarming grin, but Taylor was about as easily disarmed as the Michigan militia. She serenely flipped me a middle finger salute, turned on her heel, and exited. I stood looking at the emptied doorway for a moment. Her flip-flops clicked on the hardwood corridor floor, sounding like someone impatiently snapping their fingers.

With each encounter Taylor firmly put me in my place, wielding her disdain like a dagger. The animosity felt tangible, but faintly filtering through her steel-mesh aloofness was a vague sense of sorrow. I thought of the photos on Spence's phone. There had been a time when they had been close.

Something had happened. Drugs certainly, perhaps sibling rivalry, although I figured that Spence was the one who had first pulled away. Maybe I could patch things up, if I could ever penetrate her deflector shield of impervious mockery.

Robert's voice rose up from bottom of the staircase. "Come on, Spence, we're waiting on you." I hurriedly shucked my clothes, then squeezed myself into the swimsuit. The contours of my new genitalia were embarrassingly conspicuous within the sleek black nylon.

I descended the staircase in downward circles toward the ground floor, and then followed the sound of voices through a family room that looked big enough to skate in.

I opened the doors into the garden's blossom fragrance and buzz of cicadas, and bounded my way barefoot over a small stone path. Sunlight flickered along the path and

glimmered ahead in the blue water of the pool. I felt my insecurity falling away, only to be replaced by, what - nimbleness?

I felt so different in this body. Lighter in flesh, lighter in spirit. It'd been a long time since I'd had that feeling of footloose, endless possibility, a feeling owned only by the young.

Under my bare feet, the pool deck was warm and unexpectedly gritty. Robert was already standing mid-way in the pool, water nearly up to his chin, so that all I could see was his head like John the Baptist on a platter, except for a martini glass that he held aloft like a torch. Elizabeth was stretched out on a lounger, putting sunscreen on her legs. Taylor was standing on the deck, fastening the chin strap on a bathing cap.

"You coming in, Spence?" Robert called out. "Maybe in a bit."

Taylor turned her head my way, pressing her hand over her brow to block the sun from her eyes, and stuck her tongue out and blew a raspberry at me. I felt suddenly conscious of my knob-flaunting Speedos.

Taylor proceeded to adjust the swimsuit top that delicately cupped her breasts, kicked off her flip-flops, then loped toward the pool, her bare soles spanking the bare tiles.

When she dived into the deep end, Robert put a hand over his drink to protect it from the splash. Taylor rose to the surface, her head bobbing near my feet, and spat out a stream of water in my direction. I edged out of range.

Tell the truth, swimming was not my forte. I was never fond of water getting into my eyes, my ears, my nose. A performance in the pool uncharacteristic of Spencer might help unmask me, or so I told myself.

I dragged one of the several thick-cushioned loungers that lay scattered around the pool, over to where Elizabeth lay. I smeared some borrowed sunscreen on myself, and eased backwards, lacing my hands behind my head and crossing my ankles. The sun was warm on my skin. The Crayola-blue sky was so pure it bordered on the unreal.

Elizabeth raised herself on one elbow and leaned across the space between us. "How are you, Spence? I mean, really?"

"I'm great. Really." If only that were true. If only she believed me.

Elizabeth's face softened into something like defeat, then she slowly lay back and tilted her head towards the sun.

Robert and Taylor were like dolphins sporting the afternoon away. The sunlight shimmered off the ripples left in their wake. Watching them, I could feel the remaining tension drain out of me. The honey-lit afternoon had a droning, languid, siesta feel.

I flicked a fly off my leg and closed my eyes against the bright sunlight. A cluster of light- bursts flashed and popped against the underside of my eyelids. I drowsily tuned in to the murmuring sounds: the muffled splashes of leg kicks and arm strokes, the slap and slosh of tiny wavelets against the blue tiles, the muted gurgle of laughter from father and daughter. A sense of delicious lassitude engulfed me as the world receded, and I felt as if I were slipping down a water slide, feet-first, into a deep pool of sleep...

... and I am back in high school, moving in a rushing swell of students pouring through hallways. Gleaming green lockers line the corridor. In my arms is a bucket of fried chicken. There's something wrong with this hallway that makes the dread rise in my chest. I try to pinpoint what stirs my unease, and then I see that the locker doors swell and deflate, as if they're breathing.

Ahead, I glimpse the backs of two familiar heads. They belong to Kate and Noel, walking arm-and-arm. I feel flooded with longing and loss.

I start pushing and shoving, trying to catch up with them, but they continue moving farther away from me. I try to move faster but more and more students gush into the hall like water released from a dam. Kate and Noel slip away into the stream and get lost from view.

The corridor walls spasm. Shrieking faces emerge rhythmically from the locker surfaces, then sink back-screaming masks pressing through green metallic latex. They are the faces of Spencer Day.

The hallway dims, then tilts downwards into an abyss. I hang suspended and stare at the nothingness. The lockers are howling. The corridor holds its breath, then releases it one last time, and whatever was holding me suspended lets go. I fall headlong through a dizzying galaxy of white noise and blinding pinwheels -

--and abruptly dropped back onto the poolside lounge chair, jolting myself awake. My heart was beating against my rib cage as though it wanted to break free. I lay a moment trying to reassemble the particulars of the dream.

As the confusion cleared, I realized that the dream-school scream of the lockers had been occasioned in the real world by the whoop of a police siren sounding faintly over the distant thrum of traffic. (Don't know where that fried chicken came from - we are all surrealists in our sleep).

Masses of creamy clouds now sailed across the cinematic sky, blown by a late afternoon breeze that also ruffled my hair. The empty pool deck was a scene from a David Hockney painting - the slanting shadows, the cool blue rectangle of the pool, the water with its slip-sloppy reflections.

The implications of the dream still troubled me as I padded back to the house. Were bits of Spencer still stored in my/his/our brain? Was this body rejecting me as a, what -- mind donor?

Stepping up to the French doors, I caught my own reflection at an odd angle, and saw someone moving behind me. My chest seized up. I only half suppressed a panicked squeal and swiveled, but there was no one in sight.

A fanciful phantom, an optic glitch. My heart going slap, slap, slap but it's already slowing. Being body-switched is dangerous to your mental health, I guess. You can catch paranoia as easily as you can catch covid.

Spencer's mother was in the overqualified kitchen cutting up vegetables. She paused mid-chop to smile timidly and ask, "How was your nap?"

"Great. I guess I was really tired."

"Yeah, you were really sleeping the sleep of the dead." If she only knew.

She brought the cutting board over to the stove and tilted the cut vegetables into a stock pot. "Rob was looking forward to goofing around in the pool with you two kids like you used to. Taylor was too, though she doesn't like to show it. The Gruesome Twosome, remember? Always up to mischief, you two."

She kept her back to me, trying to keep her voice even, while she chopped and poured and pounded. "Taylor was hurt when you began distancing yourself, then when you pretty much cut off contact with all of us. We're worried about you, Spence. Sometimes I can't sleep, it's as if I'm waiting for a call, or for the doorbell to ring and there'll be a policeman -"

Battling through the self-disgust I felt at my role as imposter and liar, I replied, "No need to worry. Like Gloria Gaynor, I will survive." Always the comedian.

******

Beneath a crystal chandelier dangling from a soaring ceiling, we sat for dinner. Robert sat at the head of the table, and Taylor and I across from each other. The light coming in from the windows had a pink quality. Cinematographers called the hour before sunset the magic hour.

A maid in a white apron placed before us plates on which Elizabeth had created a visual composition of grilled pork shoulder, puffy herb omelets, and rainbow chard. The first bite made my fork hand go limp with pleasure.

Robert raised a glass. "To Taylor and Spencer, our incandescent progeny." I tried to make my own eyes crinkle modestly, though I wasn't sure exactly which facial muscles to use. Taylor made a comic business of clasping her hands under her jaw and batting her eyelashes at me.

The maid materialized to bus our plates as we finished with them. Dessert was a flaky pear and hazelnut tart. I tucked in heartily; Taylor bird-nibbled. Jamaican coffee was served with the tart. I asked for decaf, which Taylor scoffed at as "platonic coffee."

The meal might have been better at Mother Wolf, but I can't imagine how.

The Days pumped out small talk, the subject being the Variety/Hollywood Reporter seismograph of who's up, who's down, talk that seemed to be wired into the nervous system of everyone in the entertainment industry. I struggled to fit into the conversation - trying to shoe-horn my way in though was like trying to go through a revolving door on skis.

I tried not to ogle as Taylor unsandaled her feet and tucked her legs under her, briefly showing off her ivory-smooth haunches before tugging her dress down to cover her knees. She constantly fussed with her hair as she talked, combing with her fingers, pulling it into an impromptu ponytail and then releasing it to sweep back down across her pale neck and shoulders.

As a Turner's Classics buff, I perked up when the conversation swung round to Romantic Comedy movies. The discussion between Robert and Taylor flowed easily, as they X-rayed plot twists and camera angles. For Robert, the Tracy/Hepburn movies (he refused to say "films" - film was what you put in a camera) were the pinnacle of the genre.

Taylor took the contrary view that the Doris Day-Rock Hudson comedies were superior, being the last holdout of 1950's light sophistication ("good clean froth", as she put it).

The Hepburn and Tracy movies struck her as stodgy and talky. While she spoke, I put in some time just admiring her face - that always felt like time well spent.

When the talk turned to the topic of masquerading (Taylor: "A gay Rock Hudson suiting up in straight drag"), I entered the conversation, bringing up THEODORA GOES WILD (1936) as the precursor to other romantic comedies that followed, from THE AWFUL TRUTH (1937) to THE LADY EVE (1941). Like those later films, I said, it deals in impersonations and impostures, madcap masquerades and magical transformations.

Elizabeth's scrutiny of me grew more intense the more spirited my conversation became. A few times Taylor gave me a puzzled look. I don't know whether she was nonplussed, but she certainly wasn't plussed.

My spirits soared with the most wonderful sense of belonging, and to such a glamorous family. Things were going so swimmingly that my head swam. I shifted into a more

comfortable position on the chair, with a surreptitious little wriggle of contentment. My previous life as a doughy, middle-aged office drone felt increasingly unreal.

The talk then suddenly grew sharper as Robert asked about my preparation for the audition. Had I rehearsed my lines? Come up with an angle on the character? The questions came at me across the table like fast Ping-pong shots.

Robert had such expectations, such high hopes for Spence's acting career. And now that I was better, my talent should not be squandered, he said, inscribing circles in the air with his knife and fork. He squared himself a little and we all understood the climax was coming. "When you go to auditions and fail to prepare, prepare to fail!"

The energy had curdled. Elizabeth folded her table napkin into accordion pleats while examining it closely. I looked at Taylor, who looked back at me expressionlessly. I hesitated, debating whether I should reply or take another sip of coffee. I chose the sip.

My family, Jeff's family, had given me a funeral. I had been mourned. But there had been no funeral for Spencer. They would never know that he was dead.

Spencer had squandered a promising acting talent. My own gift, feeble at best, had rusted from decades of disuse. But now it seemed our only chance at mutual redemption was for me to get that part in Taylor's TV show. It would be my private memorial for Spencer, the only one he would ever have.

I had been ripped out of my Jeff-story, which wasn't going so well, and thrust into the Spence-story, where the upside was immensely higher.

Jeff Destry was gone. Spencer Day was gone. I'm what took their place. And whoever - and whatever - I now was, I would have to stay in character, forever.

A sigh came from Taylor, then from Elizabeth. I considered sighing myself. Finally, relieving us all of our silence, Taylor unfurled her legs and slipped her feet back into her sandals. She cleared her throat and, slapping the sides of her chair to rise, said it was time we headed back.

During dinner, night had finally laid its claim on the long summer day, and we all walked out together into the newly minted dark. Motion sensor ground lights illuminated the driveway. A chorus of cicadas serenaded us. The moon rose wide and full like a spotlight.

Robert and I gruffly shook hands. I was unsure how to say goodbye to Elizabeth, whether I should kiss her cheek or what. She pulled me in for a hug, and I went with it.

I steered Spencer's body -- all that remained of him -- back into the Jag. Taylor slid in behind the wheel with the sinuous grace of a cat curling up to nap. We buckled up, and waved goodbye to Spencer's parents as we drove off down the driveway.

Bye, Robert. Bye, Elizabeth. That's their last bit in the story.

Taylor drummed her fingers on the steering wheel as we waited for the gate to open. The moonlight cast an aura around her profile, giving her the appearance of a life-sized cameo. Her skin glowed luminous even in night's stingy blue light. I tried not to stare at her, but the principles of aesthetics were against me. Taylor was made to be looked at.

"What are you gawking at? Do I have a booger in my nose or something?"

I splayed my hand to my chest in a gesture of innocence. "I'm sorry, I just admire a striking profile, and you happen to have one."

"As a matter of fact, I have two, one on each side."

She goosed the accelerator as we wheeled onto the street. In the moonlight, the palm trees looked like paper cutouts. Taylor said, "And what was that deep dive into thirties romantic comedies? Is that what you've been doing these last two years, snorting coke and watching TCM? Cultivating your inner movie geek?"

"As it happens, I did develop an inner geek, but the doctor lanced it and it drained away." Not my best work maybe, but they can't all be winners.

"Well, book another appointment, Mr. Cineaste. It's growing back," she said, then, gnawing her lower lip (a job I'd happily perform, I thought before I could stop myself), added, "Look, I know Dad's expectations pisses you off. Mom and I try to get him to tone it down, but, well. "

"I don't know whether I'm a feather in his cap or a thorn in his side," I said for some reason in a bad Cockney accent I would have been helpless to explain.

Silence. Crickets. "That was a quip."

She let go a big breath, a not-quite-sigh of fatigue. "I'll take your word for it." "Tough crowd."

"Hope this isn't your A material." Taylor muffled a burp. "Anyway, the whole Dad thing is complicated." The Jag, as it sped up, hummed in apparent agreement.

"Does it involve trigonometry?"

The headlights of an approaching car reflected lurid yellow against the sharp edges of Taylor's cheekbones. The hint of a smile began playing about her lips. It wasn't getting much encouragement, but it was hanging in there.

"Yeah, maybe it's not that complicated after all. Dad's right about this role, you'd be perfect. When you go in for the audition, just be yourself."

"Just be myself? Wow, that was deep. Maybe next you can conclude that we only live once." Wink, wink.

"Know what your main sin is?" "Is it masturbation?" I hazarded.

She delivered a noise, rather like a muffled snort. "No, doofus, it's pride. You're too proud to put yourself on the line like the rest of us and risk failure."

"Me, too proud? Just the opposite. In fact, I pride myself on my lack of pride." Crossing an intersection on an iffy amber elicited horn honks and window-glass-muted

F-bombs. "Seriously, though, you've got a lot going for you if you don't waste it - looks, smarts, talent."

My seat creaked as we cleared the intersection and I slowly relaxed. "Nobody's ever called me smart before without tacking "-ass" onto the end."

She fought laughter, lost, coughed, took a moment to recoup. "Though really, Spence, I've never known such a narcissist with so much self-doubt."

"That's because know what my favorite part of self-doubt is? The 'self' part."

She laughed unguardedly at last, a chiming laughter, and it was like the interior light being switched on in the car. It thrilled me to cajole her into laughter. To impress Taylor Day, I felt, was really something.

"What did grandma say? 'When God was ladling out charm, He gave Spencer a double helping.' That charisma fools most people, but I could always see right through you."

"Maybe seeing all the way through someone can sometimes make you miss what's inside them."

She snorted derisively. "You're turning into quite the philosopher there, kiddo." "Socrates is my bitch."

"You have such a way with words. Like Jay-Z, but without the talent." She checked the rear-view mirror and changed lanes.

"Seriously, Taylor, what is there about our relationship that you hate to see take a turn for the better?"

She tried to give me one of her long, searching looks, but that's hard to do while driving in the dark. "For that to happen you first have a major life decision to make."

"Ooh, I love major life decisions."

The distant neon glow to the north - the glow from Hollywood - was blurry and dim. Taylor said, "We're young and beautiful, and that gives us an All-Access Backstage Pass to life. Take advantage before our sell-by date arrives, because soon enough we'll be dead, or even worse - old."

Under the sporadic flare of opposing headlights, my reflection, looking shapeless and blank, flickered in and out of visibility on the windshield in front of me. "Ok, ok. You've convinced me. I'll nail this audition, get back to acting. In fact, I'm already mentally polishing my star on the Hollywood Boulevard sidewalk."

"You're such a - I almost said smartass." Taylor belched mightily. "Mom's cooking always gets me gassy," she said. She leaned over and reached for the glove compartment and muttered, "Got a packet of fennel seeds in here somewhere." I stretched out my hand to help open the compartment and our fingers touched, sending an electric thrill through my every nerve --

-and in an instant, like a sudden burst of radio static, a compressed memory flashed into my mind. I see Taylor and me as young children, in the back seat of a car, Robert and Elizabeth upfront. Big gray clouds sag overhead. Rain is drumming on the roof above us, and the windshield wipers can barely keep up. The radio is tuned to a station playing 80's New Wave oldies. The bright melodic hooks of the Go-Go's fill the car, 'Our Lips Are Sealed'.

For a dizzying moment, I am more Spence than I am myself.

Taylor is eating from a box of Milk Duds which she holds on her lap. I reach over to grab one. She slaps my arm and pokes me with an elbow and now we're scream-laughing, kind of wrestling and loosely holding each other.

A younger Elizabeth, from the front passenger seat, turns and says something to us that I can't quite make out because the memory is now dissolving, the edges of the vision being eaten away by shadows. The dinging of the rain, the slap, slap of the wipers, the hissing of the tires on the wet road, the contrastingly sunny chords of the Go-Go's, all fade to a mere murmur in my consciousness. I blink, and I'm once more fully in the present.

"Want some?" Taylor was waving the fennel seeds bag enticingly.

"No thanks," I said woozily. The hyperlink to Spence's memories had been severed, but I was deeply rattled. Was this body I was wearing trying to bond with me, trying to become me?

When we arrived back at Spence's building, Taylor slide-slipped the Jag through a stream of cars to pull up to the curb. Illumination from a nearby streetlamp bisected her face, casting half in light, half in shadow, the shadow section masking her eyes. She turned her head to me and said, "I'll see you on set in a few weeks."

"Thanks for the vote of confidence, and for the ride. It was fun hanging out with you and the folks," I said, then impulsively added, "I've missed you." Was it me speaking or was it me channeling Spence's voice? Was there any longer a difference?

A car approached, its headlights sweeping away the shadow on her face. For a moment I saw her contemplating me as if I was a Rorschach inkblot in which she saw no clear image. The car swung past and her face returned to shadow. "Just keep away from the white stuff, okay?"

"I'm not that guy anymore," I replied, then opened the car door and stepped out onto the sidewalk. Echoes of Spencer's memories were still ringing in my mind as I stood for a moment and watched as her car, haloed in moonglow, melted into the traffic.

Spence's apartment was as I'd left it. Here I was hoping elves would have cleaned it in my absence. I felt a stab of homesickness for our Glendale house.

I read through Spence's email and found one from Madeline Kirk, Booking Agent, WME. This must be the famous Maddie. The email contained a PDF file: the audition script.

Included also were the time and the address for the audition.

Tuesday, three days from now. It was coming on so fast, my new life surging toward me. My stomach clenched, and I got an instant diarrheal cramp. I hopelessly read through the message again. It didn't change.

******

I remembered all too well what it's like to audition. Whoever the casting agents wanted I desperately tried to be, but again and again I wasn't what they wanted. Turns out, desperation was not what they were looking for. "We'll be in touch," they said, and never were.

At first, after I had joined Phelps and Briggs to specialize in entertainment contracts, I found it galling to have my nose pressed up against the window, so to speak, of an industry that had rejected me. But, in the end, I realized that mere spectator was the role in life that I was born to play.

So it was that my heart was already playing handball against my ribs as I arrived at Orpheus Studios in Spence's car -- a yellow Ferrari, which I had finally tracked down in the secured parking garage below his apartment building. These last three days I'd become subject to anal flutters whenever I thought about this audition. My eyes burned from lack of sleep.

As I pulled up to the guard station at the studio gate, I forced myself to look back at all my life's failed opportunities, failures that had frightened me into retreat. I was determined that this time I would not back down.

A bored middle-aged guy in a rent-a-cop uniform leaned out of the guard-house. I rolled down the car window and gave him Spencer's name. He spoke Spence's name into his phone, waited through a series of connections, spoke again, listened, then handed me a plastic parking pass.

"Keep that on your dashboard in plain view." He activated a motor which opened the gate, gave me directions to the BASED production office, then waved me through.

The studio lot unfolded in broad avenues containing a massive complex of buildings, dwarfing some towns I've been in -- a glittering realm of make-believe, surrounded by scaffolding and wiring and technicians operating the equipment.

After parking, I headed toward Gate Three, walking past the immense doors of cream- colored sound stages. These stages looked like giant humpbacked Quonset huts. Huge posters of the studio's latest releases were pasted on their sides.

The studio lots were thronged with people, makeup and wardrobe and catering and dozens of others whose jobs I couldn't begin to guess, dashing around with headsets on or headpieces in, half of them looking immaculately assured and the other half thoroughly panicked. Crews dressed in flannel grunge carried cables and lights while studio management identikit men buzzed around in golf carts.

As I strode down the backlot streets that, around a single corner, shifted from Main Street America to an ancient Roman square, I felt like I had toppled into a waking dream.

There was a water-less harbor cupping a Spanish galleon, stripped to reveal its gundecks, and a straw hut village bordering a New England courthouse. Aliens, wizards, and pirates strolled along like any ordinary bunch of employees on their way to the office.

A truck with pieces of what looked to be the command bridge of a spaceship rumbled past. The driver shouted something at me that I couldn't make out. A cluster of Asian women in Japanese kimonos checking their phones looked up when the driver shouted, then looked at me.

Red lights outside the doors of these airplane-hanger sized soundstages controlled entry, and when I saw one blink on as I passed, it re-ignited in me the excitement of my younger years, when I dreamed of a career before the camera.

The studio offices were behind an empty lot where walls and stairs from struck sets were stored. The BASED production office itself was in one of those faux-Spanish cream-colored bungalows built in the thirties, with orange-tiled roofs and black-iron- grated windows.

The casual, sunny, open-plan atmosphere inside made it hard to believe anyone really had a proper job. Everyone seemed dressed for a vacation - concert T-shirts and jeans. The offices were full of movie and tv memorabilia, posters, preparatory story boards for upcoming scenes, production assistants on the move, and lurking actors waiting to meet the casting director for the smaller parts.

.

"Take a seat," the receptionist said. I had to clench my jaw to stop my teeth chattering like castanets.

A few minutes later, I was met by a production assistant, an attractive Asian woman who introduced herself as Michelle. She clutched a clipboard and had an earpiece in her left ear that flashed green then blue. "This way, Spencer," she said, giving me a well-trained smile. "Here are your sides," she added, handing me pages of a script, a script I had already memorized in any case.

There were two people in a no-frills room sitting on a couch, each with a copy of the script in their hands. One was the casting director, a middle-aged woman with a nimbus of frizzy hair a curious shade of red. She had the wardrobe of a high school art teacher: a loose, flowing tunic and an abundance of chunky bracelets, bangles, and rings that verged perilously close to being bling. She introduced herself as Celeste Shapiro.

The other I recognized from my Google research as Gary Rosenthal, the creator and show runner, a tiny faun-like man with a pointy nose, pointy ears and a pointy V-shaped beard.

Gary stroked his pointy beard. "Great haircut, very edgy. You've got your sister's looks. In a masculine key, of course. Perfect for this role." I attempted a boyish smile. My mouth was dry and tasted like tarnished pennies.

Celeste said, "We all love Taylor. Such a great beauty. She's on the verge of blowing up huge -- the next Margot Robbie."

"LOVE Taylor," Gary said.

"So, I see here you've had a recurring role in ROSWELL PARANORMAL," Celeste said, reading from her iPad the resume sent by Maddie. "That was what, two years ago, what have you been doing since then?"

Casual shrug. "I worked so hard on the show that I decided to, you know, have a bit of a holiday after the series ended." Not my sharpest moment, but all I could come up with.

Gary asked, "Did you enjoy working with Paul Clement?" (Paul Clement had been the showrunner). "Paul and I worked together on BEND SINISTER. Great guy."

'LOVE Paul," I replied. "Love, love, love BEND SINISTER. Truly seminal work."

Gary gave an aw-shucks pout. "Yeah, a bit ahead of its time. People are rediscovering it on Hulu."

"Yeah, I was going to say."

Celeste spoke up. "The part you're reading for -Troy -- is going to have a five-episode arc. You've read the script?"

"Of course. LOVE it. Terrifically gripping. Gary has written such a compelling, richly realized character."

"How do you see him and his journey?" Gary asked, tapping his beard with his index finger and narrowing his eyes.

I tipped my head back, squinting shrewdly, before delivering a phrase I had prepared several days before. "Moody, troubled, but with a dark grace. Torn between his hope and his darkness."

Gary's eyes sparked, and his slight frame jolted forward, as if he'd been shoved from behind. "Whoa, that was deep. Yeah, I put a lot of myself into Troy. I see Troy as a combination of boyish sweetness and lock-up-your-daughters sexiness."

Celeste let out a long hum of appreciation at Gary, then said, "Okay, Spencer, if you're ready to read, the room is yours," spreading her arms wide. The multitude of bracelets on her wrists tinkled like wind chimes. I closed my eyes, and took a deep breath, like a gymnast about to begin a floor routine. Inhale. Exhale. I nodded at Celeste and Gary to let them know I was ready.

"You can begin the Troy-Wallis scene in the car, page twenty," Gary said, peering down at the script in his lap. (Wallis was the role Taylor played.)

I felt their eyes on me, judging, rating. I willed my anxiety to melt away, and replaced it with my character's insolence.

Producing another boyish grin, I flipped through the script's pages, then recited my first line: "Are you okay, Wallis?" I paused, then said through the adrenaline knot in my throat, "Should I read her line too?"

"No," Celeste said. "I'll be her." She looked down at her copy of the script. "I'm pregnant, Troy." Celeste read her part in a flat tone, keeping it neutral.

I shrugged, dead cool. "Are you sure it's his?"

"Not absolutely, no," Celeste recited. "I had an abortion last semester, Philip doesn't know."

"About the abortion?"

"No. That I'm pregnant again."

The scene continued for another page, building up to a dramatic speech from Troy. "Nothing stays the same. It all changes. Life moves on and there's not a damn thing we can do about it."

Gary twisted a few goatee hairs with his fingers, then delivered a salvo of one-word sentences. "Fantastic! Marvelous! Super!"

"LOVED your choices, Spencer, so bold," Celeste said, with a tinkling flourish of her arm. "Now, some practical issues. Love scenes with both boys and girls. Pretty steamy stuff. Any problems with that?"

"Not at all!" Smile. Acting!

"Great! Thanks for coming in," Celeste said. "We'll be in touch." Three days later I got the part.

******

There was reserved parking for me just outside soundstage six. A young woman came up to me as I got out of the Ferrari. "Are you here for me?" I asked her.

"Yes, my name is Grace," she said, as she held out her hand. She was purple-haired and steel-pierced. Clad in a gray RISD sweatshirt, black leggings, and technicolor running shoes. Lip-studded smile cordial but impersonal.

"I'm Spence."

"Makeup and wardrobe are ready for you. Have you eaten? Craft services table has coffee, juice, pastry, fruit, you can grab something on the way." Her eyes were so wide and round she looked permanently startled.

"No, thanks, had some breakfast before I left home."

Grace carried a clipboard with call sheets and other production notes fastened to it. She wore a belt bag circling her waist that had a radio fixed to it. A mic hovered over her right ear. She pushed a send button on the radio and relayed that she had Mr. Day and was taking him to makeup.

We started toward the makeup trailer, scuttling through a beehive activity of day players and crew. Walking through the BASED set, I felt I had entered a theme-park model of a New England college campus. Brick building facades had faux-ivy clinging to their sides. A concrete walkway passed underneath a pseudo-marble arch made from polystyrene.

The makeup trailer sat next to a longer trailer. Grace nodded toward it. "That's the wardrobe trailer, after you finish makeup you can pick up your costume from there."

Grace pulled open the door of the makeup trailer and stuck her head inside. "I've got Spencer Day for you, Liz," she said, then opened the door wider for me to enter and continued, "Nice to meet you, Spencer. I'll be back to get you after wardrobe." Her smile remained locked on autopilot.

When I stepped inside, I saw the makeup artist sitting in a big leather chair in front of a big silver station with its big vanity mirror, sucking on an e-cig vape. She looked at me via my reflection in the mirror and said, "Well, good morning, Spencer Day. I'm Liz."

She then put down her vape pen and pushed herself up out of the chair. She was heavyset, and her own hairstyle buzzed one side of her head to the scalp while the other side featured a feathered fuchsia-tinted do.

She swiveled the chair in my direction. "Have a seat."

I sank into the chair. She said, "Love the haircut. And I see that natural good looks runs in the Day family. I could almost get away with just spritzing a little sea salt to your hair to add volume and sending you off to the shoot."

She studied me for a moment, cocking her head to one side and pursing her lips, then leaned in to stick some tissues around my collar. Her breath humid on my neck, she grabbed a sponge and began swabbing pancake makeup onto my face. She then dabbed a little powder on my nose and forehead, then whisked it away with a soft brush. After a comb was run through my hair, she pronounced me camera-ready.

I looked into the mirror. Caking foundation transformed my face into a pore-less plasticine mask.

Next door, the wardrobe trailer contained long racks of clothes suspended from the ceiling on one side and wheeled racks full of various costume pieces shoved up against the opposite wall.

The wardrobe mistress herself wore an electric-blue miniskirt, a cowboy vest, and enough jewelry to rattle. Her limbs were loud with ink. She introduced herself as Olivia. Her many bracelets jangled as we shook hands. "So, how do you see your character?" she asked me.

"Well, he's rebellious and quirky and likes his clothes to make a statement. So maybe if we could-" She cut me off with a hand flick.

"Got it. Leave it to me," she said. She then fitted me with a retro eighties New Romantic look, all broody-gaunt rock star dandy, swathing me in a black leather jacket, an open- neck silk shirt, a red cloth bandana, and zip-sided black boots.

She tilted her head so far to the side, it was as if she was draining water from her ear. Eyes narrowed, she regarded the finished ensemble. "Cool retro look. You really are a very handsome boy. Sorry, you must be sick of hearing that."

"Well, I don't know whether 'sick' is the right word."

After my costume fitting, Grace met me outside the trailer. Bright sunlight glinted on the asphalt. In the courtyard, a crew was setting up tables and chairs for lunch. A bike messenger barreled around a corner and zipped by us.

Grace pressed her hand to her earpiece like she was a secret service agent at a presidential appearance. "Talent is walking," she said into the mic. I felt a cold wave roll through me, squeezing my insides.

Cole Harford and I were the only two actors called for the first scene of the day. The scene consisted of my character confronting Cole about his affair with my sister. I'd spent many hours in the apartment casting about for the best approach to my role. In the end, I decided on a combination of boyish charm and low-key menace.

The soundstage blocked the sun as we approached, throwing us into shadow. It was a gray hanger-like structure the outside of which featured a giant billboard advertising the show. As soundstages go, it wasn't especially large, about a hundred by two hundred feet, maybe forty feet high.

We entered the cavernous darkness through gun-metal doors, stepping high to avoid tripping over rubber-coated power cables that looked like a tangle of black eels. Grace

went to talk with the assistant director -- tall, and thin as barbed wire -- while I sat down on a folding chair and waited for the crew to finish setting up the lights.

A group stood around a bald round man - this week's director, a repurposed actor from an eighties medical drama. He waved his arms while he spoke. His strained face looked like someone painted it on a pink balloon about to burst. The tall AD walked over to the bald round man, spoke to him, and then turned to nod in my direction.

The bald round man waved me over. "Jim Haid. Good to meet you. Cool eighties look, my decade," he said.

"Spence Day," I replied. All things considered, I did a pretty good job of not sounding scared shitless. I could feel damp patches under my arms as we shook hands.

"I've served on a DGA committee with your father. Smart guy."

"Dad was thrilled when he learned you'd be the episode director. Couldn't be in better hands, he said."

"Very kind of Bob." He stretched out a hand to usher me around the dolly track laid on the floor and onto the faculty office set. "Let's go over here. Cole is on his way. We'll block out the action first, then shoot it. It's an important scene, this will be the moment that defines your character to the audience."

The faculty office set conveyed generic university professor. A desk with loose papers and an open laptop. A swivel chair in back and a guest chair in front. Lots of wood.

Diplomas. Bookcase.

Just then, Cole Harford arrived on set, shoving the last of a muffin in his mouth and waving a banana at us with his free hand. He was a wiry slip of a man who, if you factor in two inches of perfectly coiffed hair and the lifts in his expensive Italian shoes, swelled to a full five foot seven. His face had the sort of handsomeness that photographed well but loses something in the translation to reality.

He strutted our way as if autographing the very air by his presence.

"Hey Jim, great to work with you again. And Duran Duran here must be Spencer Day." Cole's voice was very actor-ish, all stretched vowels and meticulous consonants. He radiated such charismatic voltage that I was almost scared I'd get electrocuted if I shook his hand.

We shook. I lived.

He flashed a crescent of luminous teeth at me. I turned up the wattage on my smile in response. "Your sister warned me to be on my best behavior. Beautiful girl, inside and out." He sighed, shook his head. "If only I were your age..."

Jim and Cole took leave of me to stand off by the side near the video village. Cole listened intently with a hand on Jim's shoulder as Jim spoke quietly, and the rest of us pretended not to be trying to hear what they were saying.

I looked around at the lighting crew, who were still performing their labor-intensive thing on all sides of us. Finally, Cole slapped Jim's back as they broke the huddle. Jim nodded at the AD, who was jawing a wad of Spearmint and making notes on the script.

When the AD shouted "Very quiet here! We are rehearsing!" the people milling around the soundstage suddenly deactivated, staring into their phones like recharging droids. Jim said, "Okay, Cole, you sit at the desk and Spence, you knock on the office door here and poke your head in. Then say your line."

"Busy, professor?" I interjected.

"Yeah, yeah. Cole is grading papers. He looks up and says 'Who the hell are you?' or whatever the exact line is."

Cole said, "I was thinking, Jim, instead of grading papers, I'd be looking at the laptop. I could look up all surprised, and shut the cover quickly, guilty-like. Let the viewers guess what I'm looking at."

"Great!" Jim said. "Let's do it." He gestured at the guest chair facing the desk. "Spence, you barge in and help yourself to a seat, then put your feet up on the desk. You're a compete asshole, very sure of yourself."

I decided to make a production of sitting down, spreading out my arms expansively as if I were wearing a cape. I then leaned back, and, crossing my ankles, placed my boots on the desk. Cole unleashed a squawking laugh when I insolently wagged one of my boot soles at him.

Jim said, "Great, that's great! Keep that bit. Except for the laugh." He hovered over and around us as we continued to run our lines, occasionally eyeing us through a handheld lens. When the lighting crew finished setting up, Jim gave a let's-roll nod to the AD and the AD bull-horned everyone to silence, then called out "Camera! Action!"

My breakfast pastry began churning queasily in my gut as I imagined Jim Haid later watching the playback in the video village, grumbling to the cinematographer that I'd flubbed a line reading.

We say our lines. We stop to do close-ups. We repeat our lines. They change the camera setup and we do another take. They adjust the lights. Repeat.

In the show, the scene lasts two minutes. It took two hours on set. The whole thing was about as glamorous as dental surgery.

After we finally wrapped the scene, Cole and I wandered over to a cart upon which stood a coffee urn and a stack of Styrofoam cups. We poured the coffee, then clinked our cups together ironically. Cole gulped a mouthful from his and made a show of savoring it, even supplying an "aaah", like he was taping a commercial.

"So, bored with BASED yet?" Cole asked. I took a wincing swallow of my scalding coffee and shook my head. He nodded, then said, "That's good. I envy you."

"Yeah," I said, "I'm just happy to be working again."

"Let me tell you, I was absolutely thrilled when I first landed this part," Cole said with a pained, actor-ish furrow in his brow. "All out-of-work actors would give their left nut to get cast in a show, and by the end of the second season, would give their remaining nut to leave it."

He did something with his shoulders that might have been a shrug. "Trouble is, as my agent tells me, I've got too strong a personality for TV. I explode off the small screen and overwhelm the medium. I was really made for the big screen, but just one badly chosen project can kill your chances at movie stardom. Hottest thing in town, then KISS ME ON THE BUS fucked up my career."

The AD walked up to us, looking at his watch. His dark hair was pulled back in a tiny man-bun. "Hey guys, it's almost noon. Jim wants to do a couple of establishing shots, so we're breaking you for lunch. Taylor and Luna are called at two, and then we'll shoot the hallway scene with the four of you."

While Cole went peacocking off to his trailer, I shot Taylor a message. Usually, the stars ate in their trailers, but sometimes they went socialist, joining the crew and day players dining al fresco. Taylor and I had agreed by text to meet up for lunch at one of the outdoor tables.

When I came back out onto the sun-shot lot, blinking in a brightness that seemed unreal after the artificial-lighted world of the soundstage, I turned my face up to the flat blue sky and watched the L. A. smog rim the clouds with blue and yellow. The sun felt good on my face. This was my life now, the life I had always yearned for.

It wasn't until a golf-carty thing whizzed by on its way to another set that I looked around.

Things seen: A gaffer just outside the soundstage entrance fiddling with his phone. Background performers, college-aged, decked out in Oxford shirts and khakis, pleated skirts and V-neck sweaters, clustered around a nearby food truck. Rows of white trailers lined up like racehorses at the starting line, and, beyond, cast and crew sitting under a blue awning in the wooden-planked courtyard area.

The food truck was graffiti-frescoed in gaudy orange, and served Latin-Asian fusion. I ordered a Teriyaki Chicken Burrito and a bottled water. While waiting for the line cook to finish making my burrito, I noticed a couple of the pleated-skirted day players looking at me with avid eyes, as if I were the special on the day's menu.

I've always been ashamed of the pathetic casing of pink plump flesh I inhabited. When it walked into a gathering of strangers, it attracted only a quick scan and instant dismissal, but now, gratifyingly, this new body I was wearing was drawing looks, looks charged with frank sexual appraisal.

Taylor was already seated at a caf�-style table, cast in shadow under the awning. Sitting with her was one of her co-stars, Luna Rocca. Taylor caught sight of me and waved me over with a comic-conspiratorial air. My heart performed a little happy cartwheel. Over the last few weeks, I'd imagined our reunion so often I couldn't quite believe in its reality now that it was actually here.

I raised my bottle in salute, and trekked Taylor-wards.

Taylor listlessly fanned herself with her copy of the script as I threaded my way through tables. Her lips were glossed, her eyes shadowed. Her slicked back hair still preserved the grooves of a comb. Sunglasses sat on the top of her head like a tiara. The spaghetti straps of her little wisp of a raspberry tank-top drooped dangerously low from her pale shoulders, exposing a humid armpit.

As usual, once I'd started looking at her, the tricky thing became pulling my eyes away.

Taylor made a terse introduction. "Spence, Luna. Luna, Spence." I made a satirical little bow and tried to think of a good opening line, but I seemed to have left all my witty bon mots back at the set. "How's it hanging?" was all I managed.

"My brother is quite the wordsmith," Taylor said to Luna, then pulled out a spindly metal chair and made a have-a-seat hand gesture. "Your throne awaits."

Luna possessed caramel skin, large almond-shaped eyes, aerodynamic cheekbones, and a dark mop of unruly curls as soft as the coat of a black poodle.

"Do you like my new look?" I asked them as I slid into the chair.

Luna smiled at me. She knew her smile was dazzling - you can't be an actor and smile like that and not know what you're doing. "Gorg!" she said. "I am obsessed with that scarf." She spoke with a light delicate accent.

Taylor tilted her head and took me in through the filters of her long lashes. Her scrutiny had a bemused air, like someone watching a so-so movie they'd already seen. "Ooh. A glam sex-god," she fake-cooed. Her half-smile was suddenly swallowed by a mighty yawn. "Sorry, I'm bushed. Sitting around doing nothing is exhausting work."

Gazing back at her, I had to marvel at myself. Here I was forty-seven years old, and my heart was stuttering against my ribcage like I was a teenager again. "Cole called me Duran Duran."

"I think I've heard of him," Luna said. Taylor and I shared a look. Taylor shrugged with her eyebrows.

Taylor and Luna were lunching on artisanal vegan wraps and probiotic smoothies, delivered to the set from an upscale organic grocery. Taylor looked at my burrito with an exaggerated expression of longing as I unwrapped it and took a bite. It actually was pretty damn good, made with coriander and garlic. I took another bite.

Laughter, chatter, and the clink of cutlery floated from nearby tables. On the next table over a sound tech in a Dodgers baseball cap was eating tacos with Cole's stand-in.

How did it feel, I wondered, for your main value in life being your resemblance to someone else?

"What did you think of Cole?" Taylor asked me around a mouthful of mashed chickpeas. "A man in the throes of requited self-love."

"After twenty years of voiceover and dinner theater gigs, he's starring in something again, and so he's all puffed up with relief and ego," she said.

"Still, he's an accomplished actor. I did detect some depth there," I said. "Only on the surface. Deep down, he's shallow."

Prickles of sweat seeped through my makeup-coated pores. It felt like wearing a second skin of plastic. Under our feet sparrows hopped and pigeons strutted, scuffling for crumbs. The sparrows leaped into the air whenever we set our bottles down or crossed our legs.

Taylor dabbed fetchingly at a fleck of chutney on her lip with a napkin and then pulled her phone out of her handbag. She said to Luna, "Jake is on the lot today, doing prep." Her thumbs began to fly in a flurry of texting. Luna took the opportunity to hunch over her own phone and started pecking at the screen, checking her Instagram feed. After a moment Taylor's phone chimed, and she read the incoming text scowling and tapping her thumbnail against her teeth.

Jake? Was this Jake guy her boyfriend? This thought was so distracting that I found myself craning my neck to peek at her screen without quite realizing what I was doing. She glanced up sharply to shoot me a WTF? look. Heat stung my face as I began whistling tunelessly (a habit formed in my last life), and let my eyes glide in a slow,

nonchalant swivel to the neighboring table. Cole's stand-in was laughing at an unheard punchline.

Taylor placed her phone down. She looked at me with a quizzical expression and drummed on the table with her fingers. Her forearms glistened with sweat.

Luna pointed her phone at me. "Spencer, get closer to Taylor." I leaned awkwardly against Taylor, shoulder-to-shoulder, our faces so close I'm dizzy. Luna pointed her phone at the two of us. "Smile." We posed, she clicked, pressed the button and scrutinized the shot. "Let's see, what should the caption be?'

"Two Days to-day?" I suggested

Luna tossed back her hair, which actually was too curly for a proper tossing back. "You're funny."

"A national treasure," I agreed. Taylor let out a delicate snort.

This was the first time I'd seen a photo of myself as Spence, and I examined it closely to see if there was anything discernible of my former self, superimposed on Spence's image like some kind of aura.

"I've got five hundred and seven thousand Insta followers," Luna said, frowning prettily, which seemed to be the only way she knew how. "My agent says it'll help get me parts if I can get it up to a million."

"Luna is auditioning for a Godzilla movie," Taylor said.

"My astrologer says that now is a propitious time for career advancement," Luna said.

"I don't believe in astrology, but then we Pisces are skeptical like that," I said, a reply that earned a flicker of a smile from Taylor, very quickly on then off. Luna looked puzzled.

We sat there eating and talking, discussing the demands of social media, the piss-poor current state of the entertainment industry, the pitfalls and pleasures of the acting life. Taylor charmingly punctuated the rhythm of her conversation by waving a plastic straw as if it was a conductor's baton. Luna drank her smoothie, holding the bottle in both hands like a child drinking its milk, and chattered between sips. She talked with every muscle of her face, the way you sometimes see in those who make their living off of public adulation.

As I swallowed the last inch of water from my bottle, I saw the silhouette of a male figure moving towards our table in a smooth, unhurried stride. I couldn't quite make out his face, not with his head framed by the Technicolor glare of the sun. But when he stepped

into the shade cast by the awning, his face took on sudden clarity, like a movie character emerging from a dissolve.

A by-the-numbers L. A. hipster, I thought. He reminded me strongly of someone I couldn't place, and then I did: Jacob Levine, son of Elaine and Guy.

He shouldn't be here. It was as if someone from another reality had followed me into this one.

The years had melted fat from his face, chiseling out from the boy a man of twenty-five or so. His hair was much longer than I remembered, a Jesus-y mane that fell in wavy tendrils to his shoulders.

Jacob headed for Taylor's chair, leaned over to hug her from behind, and fake-bit her neck vampire-style. She leaned back languidly into his embrace, her delicate chin lifting upwards towards him, giving her long porcelain neck a swan's curve.

Taylor said, "I don't think you guys ever met, though you must have heard me mention Jake. From UCLA? Jake, this is my brother Spence."

In retrospect, connections like these seem both miraculous and inevitable. Fate has a knack for the most grotesque coincidences. But however explicable in hindsight, temporary disbelief caught me so off balance I was finding it hard to talk, my larynx having apparently deserted my body.

Taylor gave me a say-something-you-idiot frown and bopped my calf with her foot. I managed to lift the corners of my mouth. "Hi," I said. I cleared my throat when I heard how hoarse I sounded.

Jake leaned over, smelling of hair product, exhibited his teeth in an orthodontically majestic smile, and offered me a fist. We fist-bumped. I wanted to fist-bump him in those shiny white teeth.

He then rotated a chair, straddled it, and folded his forearms on its back. "At last, the man behind the myth. I've heard a lot about you, Spence." His voice sounded at once upbeat and laidback, the L. A. classic combo.

"I plead the Fifth."

Lover boy laughed, which pissed me off. I hate it when people I loathe appreciate my jokes. Just one good punch in the mouth, that's all I asked.

"No, really," he said. "And not just from Taylor." He grinned again. His teeth really were something

I must have looked doubtful, because Taylor broke in. "He's just cast Carl Moffat for his show."

I made a sound of recognition and let a slight smile play around my mouth, like I'd found a pleasant memory.

"The way Carl tells it, you and he had some wild times in Albuquerque shooting ROSWELL SUPERNATURAL," Jake said, beaming at me in a way I found utterly repellent. Did I mention his blue-tinted hipster glasses and his designer stubble?

He turned to Luna. "I've noticed your Insta is really starting to blow up."

Luna picked up her phone, scrolled, frowned at the screen. "My agent thinks I need to get my followers up to a million."

After a quick bite of burrito to jump-start my blood sugar, I was able to reactivate the language center of my brain. "Umm, so Jake, you're doing prep work for a show?" I asked, trying to ride out the conversation.

"Jake has a direct-to-series commitment from Paramount," Taylor said, looking at Jake, her chin propped on her palm.

"Yeah, the show is sci-fi, about a forensic unit that collects evidence from the ghosts of murder victims. Think CSI meets Ghostbusters." His eyes lit up as he gazed off into his glorious televisual future and liked what he saw.

"Jake is the showrunner along with Dirk, his writing partner," Taylor said to me.

I made appropriate noises to indicate interest. A wave of gloom had massed and was advancing toward me. I picked up the remaining wedge of my burrito, and took another bite. Food had suddenly lost its flavor -- I might as well have been eating paste.

They would have slept together. He's lain in her bed.

Jake ran his tongue across his upper teeth. "You know, Spence, my parents are throwing us a little celebratory party next Saturday. Luna will be there, and Taylor of course. Are you free?"

For a moment I had the odd sensation of being trapped in a story someone was writing, the sort of story I've always hated, the kind where characters exist only to illustrate the inexorable workings of fate. I shifted my weight from one skinny buttock to the other. I looked at Taylor. "Yeah, Spence, please come. I'd like you to meet our friends," she said.

I performed an urbane as-you-wish bow. "Sure. Sounds like fun," I fibbed.

"Yay!" Luna sang out theatrically.

As I chewed on a final mouthful of burrito and listened with half an ear to the trio chatter about mutual friends, I tried to get my head around how I was going to handle encountering Elaine and Guy again while wearing Spencer's body.

The synth riff from Van Halen's 'Jump' sounded from Jake's pants pocket, yanking me back into the present. He fished into his pocket, pulled out his phone, and gave us the gotta-take-this index finger. "Sorry, we're in pre-production, there's a thousand fires a day I have to put out."

Jake combed his fingers through his hair as he talked into the phone. "Yeah, Stefan, be there in five. No, the 14mm lens." Pause. "That's right, the Gilliam." The voice on the other end of the line reached us as a thin mosquito whine. Jake lowered his phone and tucked it back into his pocket. He shrugged and performed a sad-clown face. "Duty calls," he said as he popped to his feet and swiveled his chair back into place.

"Luna, always a pleasure." Luna produced a cheek for him to air-kiss. He leaned over to bro-thump me on the shoulder. "Spence, great to finally meet the man behind the legend." He kissed Taylor on the top of her head. "Later, babe."

Jake whooshed back out into the afternoon glare in a jet-stream of breezy complacency. At the next table, Cole's stand-in looked sideways at him like, "What a douche." To be fair, that just might have been me projecting.

Taylor and Luna continued making chitchat as I sat in morose silence. I didn't hear a word they said, although there seemed to be a lot of them. Instead, I was busy cursing myself up one side and down the other for letting this impossible infatuation with Taylor creep up on me half-unawares. What did I think, that I was some Pharaoh needing to keep the royal lineage alive by mating with his sister?

"Spence?" Taylor was looking at me. I came back to myself. "You seem to have drifted off there. Worried about our scene?"

"No, I'm okay." Which was utter bullshit, of course. What I was, however, was a seasoned virtuoso of shoveling disturbing emotions back inside, and locking them down. I am a man of inner departments and compartments.

Just then, Grace walked up, idly slapping one of her legs with her clipboard. Her cheeks tinted pink when she looked at Taylor. "Taylor and Luna, you're wanted on set for some touch-ups. We'll be ready for you, Spencer, in twenty."

Taylor sighed, turned her face in my direction and gave me an unspecific smile. She had that delicate glaze of preoccupation of someone already thinking about the next thing. She slid the mirrored Ray-Bans back down. Spencer's reflected image was momentarily duplicated in its lenses. She balled up her napkin, picked up her bottle,

grabbed her bag and in one smooth motion stood. Luna rose with her. "See you on set, Spence," Luna said, leaning over and lightly touching my arm.

Heads turned from other diners as Taylor paused for a moment to shake out her golden hair. It fanned then fell straight. She then gazelled out into the sun-glare, lobbing her trash into a metal bin without missing a beat of her stride.

I dug a bit of burrito from my teeth. A couple of pigeons kept me company, too stupid to realize that all the crumbs were gone. My mood gradually lifted from subterranean to merely glum.

Was going to the Levine's gathering a good idea? The question pretty much answered itself.

Still, I went anyway.

******

Sunset Boulevard winds its way through Pacific Palisades, the exclusive enclave where west L. A. air-kisses the ocean blue, and where dot-com jillionaires and a who's who of Hollywood royalty, major and minor, romped in the sun and shared recipes for shroom smoothies.

It was a tourist-postcard Saturday afternoon (some months before the wildfires) when I GPS'd and followed the directions of a sultry-voice female robot to the Levine's home. (I had visited their house a handful of times with Kate, but this was my first time finding my way there from Santa Monica).

My palms was slick on the steering wheel of the Jag as I turned left and found myself on a familiar winding street lined with cypress trees, its sidewalks mottled with shade. Most of the homes were immaculate Spanish and Mediterranean villas. Velveteen lawns were splayed in front of them, and luxury cars sat in moneyed driveways.

Elaine and Guy's home was all terraces and arches and cypress trees. The house sat smugly behind scalpel-cut hedges, a precise emerald lawn, and a billowing flower garden. You might have supposed there was a ban on American automobiles from the evidence of the cars of the party guests that stretched in front in a long, gleaming line.

The keys jingled in my shaking hands as I turned off the engine and then stepped out of the Ferrari into the dazzling, over-emphatic August sunshine. Seagulls wheeled in the blue sky overhead. I could almost taste the salt in the soft breeze that wafted off the nearby ocean.

I had, I felt, unfinished business here, the exact nature of which continued to elude me. Maybe it was to say a final goodbye to the Jeff who used to inhabit this world, my private wake for the me I once was.

Even as I walked up the circular crushed-gravel driveway, I could hear the subdued burble of raised voices coming from inside. When I arrived at the front door, I noted the security camera noting me. I wiped my palms down the sides of my pants, and pushed the doorbell.

I became aware that I was nervously whistling some random notes, and made myself stop. I wasn't sure I was ready for this. It would require thinking on my feet, speaking off the cuff, and, I feared, a good measure of luck. Obligatory small talk and force-fed conviviality always felt to me like I was auditioning for a role.

The rumble-buzz of party chatter went from muffled to loud when, after a moment, the door opened to reveal a man in his early fifties, dressed in a style best described as dapper. You could see in Guy Levine where Jake got his long hawkish nose, thin lips, and unflappable self-importance. "Come in, come in," Guy boomed, radiating a host's impersonal bonhomie. He extended his hand and gave me a firm, pumping shake while grabbing my elbow with his other hand. It was one if those show-biz handshakes, and with it he flashed one of those show-biz smiles.

I took one step and then another, and now I was over the threshold and into a familiar foyer - the console table with a vase of flowers from the garden, the mirror looming at me from the wall. Beyond us I could hear the greedy roar of the party, the cacophony of dozens of overlapping conversations.

"I'm Spence Day, Taylor's brother. Sorry to be so late."

"Not at all, things are just starting to kick into high gear. I'm Guy, by the way, Jake's dad. Taylor's talked about you quite a bit."

"I plead the Fifth." If the line was good enough for the son, it's good enough for the father.

He laughed, a deep, self-satisfied sound. "Come on in, make yourself at home."

Feeling like a man in a dream, I let Guy lead me past the catering set-ups in the hall into an enormous, open living room. It was much the same as I remembered it: high- ceilinged, stucco-walled, Italian-furnished. A second-floor landing wrapped around three sides. Smeary color-coordinated canvases too tasteful to arrest the eye took up whole walls.

We stalled on the fringes of the overflowing room, as I hung back for a moment to get my bearings. Here I was, some schlub from Loserville who should be at home in the

Valley wallowing in sofa-slug inertia, watching TV over a microwave meal. Instead here I was, hanging with the chic and the beautiful.

The party was in high gear. There was a lot of clamor, what with the booze and the red- vested servers jostling through the crowd, bearing trays of tricked-out canapes and high-concept hors d'oeuvres. "Mostly industry people, I'm afraid," Guy said, with a mock-disparaging wobble of the head.

So many people with open, feeding mouths and drinks in fists. People swarming the portable bar. People going up and down the stairs. People on the landing at the top of the stairs, leaning over the bannister and looking down at the revelers as if from a box at the theater.

Partygoers spilled outside, where a sliding glass door led to a gray slate patio and a turquoise swimming pool. Japanese paper lanterns, swinging fitfully in the breeze, hung from the cypresses.

I worried that Guy might abandon me, but instead he stayed at my elbow, steering me through the crush, sampling each of the little power-centers in the room, booming out introductions.

Two tribes occupied the territory. The old guard was there, middle-aged acquaintances and colleagues of Guy and Elaine, awash in Louis Vuitton, Rolexes, and hidden agendas. The other tribe, Taylor and Jake's crowd, were largely comprised of nepo- babies whose only real profession was the legacy of their surnames.

The room hummed with well-lubricated laughter and anecdotes polished through retelling, issuing from the agents and publicists in their two-piece tailored suits and form-fitting dresses, and from Jake's friends in their carefully tattered vintage concert tees and artfully artless bedheads.

I didn't see anyone I recognized. Of course, Colin fucking Capehart from the office would have been able to identify every one of them. Blindfolded.

We continued to weave our way in and out of various conversations, through knots of partygoers who were swallowing their drinks, nibbling their canapes, congratulating each other, seeing and being seen. Everyone seemed to be talking about acting - pacing, motivation, availability, auditioning, table reads, all the usual shit. Even the studio exec types were talking acting, and really, being in management is about acting too, isn't it? A pose, a masquerade, a pretense that you force the world to acknowledge.

Lost in a parade of giddy strangers, I backslapped and side-hugged and cheek-kissed. The quantity of handshakes exceeded the recommended daily limit. People and talk swirled around me until I felt hot and dizzy.

I excused myself to Guy and edged a path to the bar, sidling around furniture and popping through clefts in the crowd. On my way I grabbed from a passing tray one of those doll-sized puffed pastries that had a scrap of crab in them, and popped it into my mouth.

Behind the makeshift bar, a man in a red vest and black bow tie smiled at me with uncertain recognition, a reaction I'd been becoming used to. Occasionally I would even be stopped in the street. "You're, umm..." and fingers would snap at the effort of memory.

The bartender leaned over to take my order. "How you doing?" he asked. I raised my voice above the hubbub around me. "I'm good," I replied. "I'll be sensational with a gin- and-tonic in me. More G less T, please."

He pushed the drink across the bar. "You look familiar. Actor?"

"Of sorts." I tossed a twenty into a tip jar and then concentrated on the time-honored business of warding off existential despair by getting ginned to the gills. The bartender, it turned out, was an out-of-work actor with a face so forgettable I couldn't retain it even while looking at him. He asked me about working with Cole Harford, and then we were talking about the massive DEADPOOL & WOLVERINE box office.

I was soon a couple of G-and-T's deep into the retreat-and-regroup process, alcohol pumping through my bloodstream. I turned around, leaned my back up against the bar, grinned woozily over the rim of my shot glass, and let my eyes sweep across the room, scanning for familiar faces among these strangers, strangers who gathered in chatty clusters continuously drifting together then drifting apart..

It took a moment for me to register that I was half-consciously searching for one face in particular, a face it would be hard to miss even in a room twice as crowded.

I stiffened though, and my smile unkinked itself, when the scrum of bodies between me and the other side of the room parted before me like theater curtains and there stood Taylor. It seemed in that moment as if a stage spotlight shone on her and everyone around her was thrown into shadow.

When she sensed my eyes on her, she swiveled her head my way and parodied a fancy-meeting-you-here look. For a moment I felt unable to move, transfixed by her image. She then leaned forward to say something into the ear of one of the dim background figures, who suddenly snapped into focus. Boyfriend Jake, naturally.

And then a thick clot of partygoers stepped between us, and I couldn't see her anymore.

It took a little shiver of my shoulders to break the spell. I turned back to the bar and ordered another drink. My first impulse was to ignore and avoid her. I didn't want to be shoulder-to-shoulder with those jerks crowding around her - it was better to keep my

distance. While I was swirling the fluid in my glass and sucking on the gin-saturated ice cube in my mouth, the bartender suddenly craned his neck, his eyes lighting up, as he looked over my shoulder.

I twisted my head and saw Taylor navigating her way through the crowd towards us. She looked effortlessly chic wearing a tiny nothing of a James Perse T-shirt dress.

Multiple sets of eyes tracked her progress.

She leaned into me, jutted my hip with hers in greeting, and said, "You made it!" The collision lit up my nervous system like a Christmas tree. Taylor grabbed the shot glass from my hand and knocked it back - then, fake-wheezing, held it at arm's length, bugging her eyes at it in a bit of slapstick.

She slapped the empty shot glass down on the bar. "Come on over, say hi to Jake and Luna, meet our friends," she said. I made a gesture halfway between a shrug and a hands-in-the-air-surrender. She took me by the elbow, and I allowed her to herd me across the tightly packed room. As we picked a path between the clustered groups, a tray-wielding server swung by, and I snatched a Gorgonzola-stuffed date wrapped in prosciutto and took a nibble.

In the corner of the room, by a baby grand piano, Jake was holding court with his back to us, the hub in a wheel of admirers. A ripple of hilarity flowed through the pack of bodies huddled around him. I recognized Luna among them, her tiny black dress dripping off her caramel skin like fresh paint.

As we approached, Jake was waving a cocktail glass at his audience and carrying on with his view of art as being "mankind's unrequited romance with eternity."

Taylor announced our arrival. "Hey gang, speaking of eternity, here's my eternally unpunctual brother Spence." The loose circle around Jake turned to inspect me.

"All part of my ineffable charm." I didn't know what to do with my face, so I decided on a faint smirk and upraised, questioning eyebrows. I'm possibly a bit drunk.

"I don't know, from the looks you've been getting from the ladies, I'd say you're very effable," Taylor said, making a comedic show of waggling her eyebrows suggestively. Luna giggled enthusiastically.

Jake put his hands on my shoulders, the alarming prelude to a potential hug, and said, "I'm just chuffed you could make it, Spence." I shielded myself from an embrace with what was left of the canape, and granted him a brisk little nod instead.

Luna looked at me with her large liquid eyes. "Taylor was saying how elusive you can be."

"Elusive, huh? She makes me sound like a Bigfoot sighting."

She brushed my arm with the back of her fingers, and gave me an even-toothed, glowing smile. "Maybe from now on, you can be not so shy?"

From behind Luna, Taylor flashed me a my-my-my smirk.

I was now launched into another round of introductions. A rapid-fire exchange of effusions ensued. "Congrats on landing such a showcase role!" "Such a lovely setting for a party!" "Those crab puffs are positively orgasmic!"

Gossip bubbled and frothed around me. Trying to make small talk on a grand scale, stomaching the yap of platitudes, the merry-go-round of drink-flushed faces, all those names to remember - it wore on me. A headache began knocking at my temples.

After a while, Luna, in a burst of exuberance, did a little shimmy and said, "Wow, great shindig, huh?"

"Credit my mother. Elaine really knows how to organize a party," Jake said.

And lo and behold, as if summoned by the incantation of her name, Elaine Levine emerged slaloming through the teeming mob, hello-ing and dispensing cheek-to-cheek kisses as she approached us. Elaine was much as I remembered her: twig-thin, lush- lipped, with streaked blond hair she wore in a neck-length bob immobilized by hair spray.

"Mom, look who's arrived. Spence, Taylor's brother."

"Spencer, the prodigal brother," Elaine said, taking both my hands and gazing intently into my eyes. "We meet at last."

She gave me a bright smile that decIared just how beside herself with delight she was to be meeting me. In turn, I powered up my own smile. She offered me her cheek and we performed the ritual air-kiss. Her skin had the waxy glow of a recent facial.

We were old acquaintances, and we were strangers.

Elaine turned to the group. "I swear, all that we old farts seem to be talking about is acting," she said, with a dismissive shake of the head and flap of the arm. "What have you youngsters been discussing?"

"Acting," said Taylor, drily.

Elaine's laugh was light and silvery as tinsel. "I have no idea why people are so obsessed with pretending to be other people. Being myself is good enough for me."

"My acting coach calls actors shape-shifters," Luna said. "When you can be different people, sometimes it's hard to figure out which one you really are."

After taking a beat, as we say in the theatrical arts, I turned to Jake and, in a show of butter-wouldn't-melt-in-my-asscrack civility, asked him, "When do you begin shooting?"

"Early October. Can't wait."

A Tik Tok influencer in ironic red pigtails and harlequin glasses (Holly? No, Hilary) asked, "Aren't you at all nervous, starting shooting soon?"

"A little, maybe, but mostly excited. I already have the first episodes completely storyboarded right here in my mind." He tapped his temple in case we didn't know just where he housed his mind.

Taylor pointed with her chin towards someone across the room. "There's Dirk. Let's go say hi," she said to Jake. Taylor and Jake excused themselves and, with a proprietary palm on her lower back, Jake propelled Taylor through the throng. Our own little covey soon broke up, and suddenly I was alone with Elaine, as all around us the party buzzed with booze-oiled voices and the gleam of expensive teeth.

Raising her voice over the racket, Elaine confided, "Guy and I absolutely adore Taylor. As beautiful inside" - Elaine pressed in close to let a jewel-faced girl with a pixie cut squeezed by, then stepped back - "as she is outside. She's become part of the family." I leaned toward her and cocked my head. Why cocking my head should help me hear better, I didn't know, but it seemed to work in Victorian novels.

People behind me were clambering up and down the stairs, or going to and from the outside patio. Elaine said, "Have you tried the crab puffs? They're to die for." It took me dying to realize how many everyday expressions reference death.

I groped around for pleasantries. I snatched a bite-sized piece of a duck sausage and goat cheese pizza from a passing server and popped it into my mouth only because it got me momentarily out of the conversation.

Elaine, her face suddenly radiant, was distracted by something over my shoulder. "If someone told me as a young girl deep in Orange County that someday I'd be a bridesmaid at Matt Boxer's Malibu wedding, I'd have thought I'd died and gone to heaven."

I turned my head to follow her gaze in the direction of the sliding glass door that led from the back yard. My view was blocked for a moment by people pushing in an out of the entrance. Then the jostle of bodies cleared, revealing Matt Boxer, former sitcom star turned reality show host, and crowding beside him stood a woman who was my wife.

Kate.

The party clamor suddenly dimmed, as if my mind needed to be freed of the burden of sound to take in what it was seeing.

Of course Kate would be here. But still. Kate. With Matt fucking Boxer.

Middle age, I had come to realize, was that stage of life when most turns of event became eminently predictable, and yet you somehow always failed to see any of them coming.

I watched Kate's eyes alight on Elaine and then on me. Kate was holding a wine glass and waved with her free hand. For a mad minute, I thought she was waving at me, that she could somehow look straight through Spencer's face and see Jeff Destry peeking out, but no, of course she was waving at Elaine. Elaine extended her celery-stalk-thin upper arm to wave back.

Matt Boxer scanned the room, squinting as though he was looking past stage lights. Kate nudged him and gestured with her chin in our direction. His eyes wobbled until they finally focused on Elaine. He saluted her with an empty shot glass and flashed his Emmy-nominated grin. He was so tan that even from across the room his ultra-white teeth seemed to glow.

They began to move into the room heading towards us, smiling, greeting people.

My mind scrambled to find steady footing. 1) I wanted to once more be in Kate's company. 2) I wanted to bolt for the nearest exit. Neither of these thoughts would stick; nothing in my head would hold still.

Elaine was talking. "He's here with my friend Kate. Just back from their honeymoon."

The happy couple continued to head our way, sliding and squeezing through loose knots of chattering, drinking, laughing partygoers.

Elaine continued, "Kate works with me at Compass. The real estate company?"

I watched Kate loom closer and larger, her body aimed at mine. She wore a boxy blue shift that showcased her slim legs. Boxer was guiding her with his free hand on her elbow.

"In fact, that's how she met Matt, she sold him his Malibu house."

So, Malibu Matt -- former B-lister now barely hanging on to C-list -- he was cornetto boy? How long after my death before she was sharing a home, sharing a bed?

The person most likely to know the answers to those questions was now just a few yards away and closing. She disappeared as a stream of people flowed between us -

-- and reappeared directly in front of me, almost making me jump. She stood a half- arm's length away, holding her empty wine glass by the stem. Kate in close-up: her small catlike face, her oval dark eyes, the spill of freckles across her creamy complexion.

Kate, my wife of twenty-three years. Ex-wife. We were never legally divorced, but I guess death is the ultimate form of divorce.

Kate smiled to me, then to Elaine. "Those crab cakes are delectable."

"Amy's Culinary Adventures. Best caterers in town. Spencer, this is Matt and Kate." Not trusting my voice, I just nod, forcing myself to smile brightly.

"Spencer is Taylor's brother. He's also an actor." "I don't believe we've met." Boxer said.

"We haven't," I corroborated. Can't say the same about your new wife, I added silently, as I leaned towards Kate, unsure whether I should offer her an air-kiss or a handshake. What happened was a mongrel mix of both, a collision of bodies as awkward as our first time in bed together.

Kate, laughing, stepped back and said, "I can see the resemblance with your sister. Two beautiful peas in a pod."

Since we had last seen each other, I had died. Death does alter appearances. I had been afraid my mask would slip and she'd somehow see my real face, call me by my real name. But my disguise held.

Streams of gossiping, kvetching, joking, flirting revelers eddied around us. I performed a quick internal scan for the connection I once felt for Kate. It was now just the dull, distant ache of an old wound, still present but healed over. My life with Kate and Noel now seemed a million miles away, part of an old story that no longer involved me. I must have been gradually shedding my old identity and preoccupations all along, without noticing.

"How are you liking life in Malibu?" Elaine asked Kate.

"Love it. Love having the ocean as our back yard." Kate's voice carried the familiar honeyed timbre of her public radio past.

"They have a place right on the beach. Breathtaking sunset ocean vistas on one side, charming cliffs on the other," Elaine said to me.

"You can see why Elaine is Compass's top real estate agent," Kate said, laughing. Her cheeks were thinner, I noticed. She was a stranger now, out of reach.

"Shame that Noel couldn't make it. Is she still in Providence?" Elaine asked.

"Yes, she's just finishing her summer classes." Kate looked at me. "My daughter Noel is making up credits. She took last semester off from Brown."

Elaine leaned her face my way, splayed hand on chest. "Kate's husband died suddenly last November," she solemnly confided. "Such a shock."

"That's terrible. I'm sorry."

Kate said, "Noel was our savior. In fact, it was Noel who talked us into getting married. She told us, you only live once, why wait?"

"Noel was a rock through the whole thing," Boxer said.

"But I hope Jeff, wherever he is, understands," Kate said, a warble of sadness in her voice.

"Hello, you talking to me?" I thought crazily, suppressing a hysterical giggle rising in my throat.

Boxer waved his empty shot glass at us. "We just came in for a re-fresh." Kate started to move away, and gave a weak smile. "Nice to meet you, Spencer," and to Elaine, "We have to have a long talk and catch up, you and me."

"You know where to find me."

Then Kate and her husband were off. I watch as she walks through the crowd, around a Versace drinks table, past the winding staircase, and is finally swallowed up by the press of bodies, out of my story...

Elaine nabbed a Brie and cranberry thing from a passing tray. I permitted myself one question under the guise of small talk. "So, what was Kate's husband like?"

Laughter exploded nearby. She cupped her ear. "What?" "Kate's husband. Good guy?"

She took a bite, chewed thoughtfully, swallowed. "Jeff? Nice guy. Jokey. Smart. But let's face it, an underachiever, turned out not to be the man she thought she married." She dropped to a conspiratorial tone. "They were getting divorced, you know. Before he died."

She looked past me, and her po-faced expression suddenly flipped a metaphoric switch and she flashed a shining, spangled smile. "Ooh, here's Jake and Guy."

Jake and Guy stood next to the piano. Taylor, smiling, stood nearby. Guy loudly clapped his hands together twice. "If everyone could give me your attention for a moment," he began, raising his voice to be heard over the babble. The hubbub quickly died, and the milling bodies rotated to face his way. Guy then gave a little speech about how happy he and Elaine were to have us all here to celebrate Jake's series being picked up.

Guy concluded by picking up a champagne glass from a server's tray, and holding it high. "Here's to six seasons and a movie! Cheers!"

An overlapping burble of "Cheers!" and "Six seasons and a movie!" went up, followed by whoops and whistles and applause. Taylor put two fingers in her mouth and whistled.

Jake patted his chest ironically, as if his heart were swelling. Turning this way and that so everyone could see how he was reacting.

Chatter then resumed and the crowd rearranged itself. Taylor took Jake's hand in hers, coiled herself under his arm, and leaned her head against his neck.

All of a sudden, I felt desperately tired. The alcohol in my system, which had been up to now acting as a stimulant, flipped and instead became a depressive. The gaiety in the room now struck me as frantic, false. A gathering of masks.

I headed back towards the foyer. Passing through other people's conversations, the brief wash of their chatter falling on me, each individual with their histories, tragedies, comedies, romances, each sure they're the star of their stories.

I slipped out of the room without saying goodbye. I was halfway to the door when, over the gabble and clatter, I thought I heard a female voice call Spencer's name, but I heeded the warnings of the old myths and didn't look back.

********

But the day was not through with me just yet.

The sun had set by the time I arrived back at my building. I felt a bit yawny as I took the elevator up and unlocked my door, fumbling a little with the keys. As I entered, I experienced a surge of fondness for this apartment and the simple pleasure of being in it, alone.

Standing in the middle of the room, arms folded across my chest, I gazed for a moment at Spence's reflection overlaid onto the window-framed violet nightscape. Street noises sounded distant and abstract. I felt drained, body and soul.

The Pier looks haunted tonight. Reflections of smeary colored light from the amusement park fanned across the water to land gleaming on the apartment's glossy black floor.

Suddenly the illumination from the pier dimmed and the view from the window blurred and rippled like heat squiggles from a hot sidewalk.

I stepped back when I realized that this curling distortion was caused by some nearly invisible thing that hovered in mid-air in front of me, a yard above the floor.

I should have been more scared, I guess, but I lacked the energy.

The stressed air continued to shimmer in front of me until a monochromatic silhouette began to appear in several splotches of deepening tone that spread and merged, until the silhouette darkened into the flattened outlines of a man.

As I continued to stare transfixed, this shape gradually collected weight, assumed color, and then swelled into three dimensions -- and although it was but a low-res hologram of himself, it was recognizably Spencer Day.

With dizzy bravado, I addressed a series of pressing questions to the ghost, to the heavens, to the universe: "Of all the world, why was I given a second life? For entertainment? So that I may be judged?"

The specter darkened slightly, then its mouth began rapidly clattering open and shut like a wind-up toy before finally juddering to stability.

"Reply hazy, try again," it replied in Magic 8-Ball speak. The mouth and the words were out of sync, like a bad print of an old movie.

Oh-kay. I tried again. "Should I just take up your life where you left it?"

First the lips moved, and the toneless unsynchronized voice followed: "That's up to you. Write your own script. I can only tell you what to do if I were you. Or maybe I was you. Or you were me. Perhaps it doesn't matter either way."

With that. the ghostly figure began flickering in and out of existence, first with Spencer's blurred face, then with Jeff's.

Then, with a wave of imploding air that swept past me and stirred my hair, it was no longer there.

The illumination from the Pier became bright again. The silver-blue lights from the Ferris Wheel danced in the distant surf.

******

In a Hollywood ending, this would be the epilogue bit where the camera pans, the music swells, and a cozy voiceover wraps things up with a neat little bow -- yet here I am still waiting for the pieces of the puzzle to fall into place, for the celestial design to be revealed at last, or at least for the universe to give me a hint about what it wants from me next, but the Powers That Be were keeping their mouths shut.

Even Spenser the Friendly Ghost has fallen silent.

My life with Kate had already begun to fade away like the end credits in a straight-to- basic-cable movie, my identity as Jeffrey Destry discarded like a sloughed-off snakeskin.

My immediate future began to take provisional shape as I settled into life as a working actor. After completing my episode arc for BASED, I would, with the help of my agent, Maddie, continue chasing acting assignments and cobble together a kind of career. I'd start life again with a clean slate, date girls who weren't, you know, actual blood relations.

And after? Maybe I'd take this show on the road, head to Providence, look up Noel. And wherever the road may take me (whoever this "me" is), whatever plot twists Fate has lined up for me, now, for perhaps the first time in all my lives -- I will be ready..

Ready-ish.

FADE TO END CREDITS

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