Husk (4 page)

Uprising, and . . .

Spewage. The bread basket rebelled and tossed the intruder out. An asteroid of chuck rocketed up my throat and out, hitting the window and three-pointing a perfect rebound into the sink.

Damn. It just wasn't right.

I suppose that, amnesia or not, I knew what
was
right but didn't want to face that reality at the moment.

Discouraged, I left the kitchen and ambled about the living room for a few minutes, idly checking out my blu-rays. Some of the titles twigged familiar:
Casino Royale
,
Glengarry Glen Ross
,
Spaceballs.
The hunger, if that's what it was, wouldn't kill me.
Won't kill me more
, I corrected. I took a seat at the dining room table. I was surprised I had a dining room, frankly; the person who occupied this house, the pre-death me, gave every indication of being an individual who ate meals over the kitchen sink or balancing a plate on the arm of the recliner in the den as he watched
TV
. Sofa wandered in and leapt gracefully upon the table. She thoughtfully allowed me to minister to her various itches, purring and stretching out on her back as I absentmindedly scratched her all over.
This cat is centered
, I thought.
She has life all figured out
.

I envied Sofa her contentment. I was glad I had come back, if only to make sure she didn't die from hunger.
Was there something to that?
I wondered. There had to be a purpose behind all this. Classically, people do not arise from the grave without there being an overarching theme behind it. I was flummoxed, but I was sure that becoming a supernatural pet-sitter was not a reason for reanimation. Still, whatever happened, I'd make sure Sofa was cared for somehow. She deserved better than a lonesome death in this house, curled up under the bed and mewling for an end to her pain.

A flickering light brought my thoughts back to the present. Red, blinking light. On the wall.
Phone
, I thought. A cordless phone, and a red, blinking, oddly insistent light.
Messages
. I reached over and pressed
Play
.

“Shelley? Are you there?” a female voice asked.

Shelley. Was that a name?

“Pick up, Shel, good news on this end.”

Lightning flashed and leapt over the gulch between the hemispheres, connecting the neurons, repairing the holes, patching up knotholes, stuccoing the drywall of my past.

The key to the lock. Door ajar. Floodgates open. Alert the townspeople, the dam has burst. Everything coming out. I could hear the cubbyholes and inglenooks of my brain strain, flatten, and push out under the force of thirty-seven years of memories swarming in with unrestrained glee. My eardrums popped and fizzed. I felt a
pop!
and collapsed, my forehead smacking the dark oak of the table. Sofa leapt up, hissing at the sudden action, and ran for the next room.

There was shit on the seat.

Holy shit.

I blinked.

I rubbed my eyes.

I blinked again.

I looked away and looked quickly back.

The greasy log refused to vanish.

I took another look to make absolutely sure.

Yes.

Shit.

Shit
.

This was a bus, for god's sake. How the hell do you bust out a growler on a public bus without people noticing? There had to be
someone
who would have observed the groaning creation of excrement occurring in such an enclosed area. Why would they let people on?

Nevertheless.

Shit.

On the seat.

By process of elimination,
my
seat.

I glanced at the man in the seat next to the window, a listless-looking twentysomething cursed with a sad fauxhawk and extended lobeholes so vast I could fist them, seeking acknowledgement of the absurdity of it all. Maybe he could offer up a solution my stress-addled self was unable to arrive at, but his eyes were closed, head slumped against the grease of the window and earbuds amped to max carnage, blaring classic Foghat for the enjoyment of the other passengers.

Foghat? Who the hell listens to Foghat anymore?

I scanned the bus for options. Nothing left, of course. I sighed and wrote the seventeenth mental note of the day reminding myself to quit Rowan as soon as I reached home. Or grew a sack. Whichever came second.

All my worries about leaving as tiny a carbon footprint as I could began to evaporate the longer I looked at the excreta claiming the last seat as its own.
It even has peanuts in it, for Jesus' sake
, I thought
. No deference to the faltering ecosystem is worth this
. No one would blame me for taking a plane now and then; even Al Gore flew to environmental conferences, right?
Fuck Mother Earth for once, we're talking human shit here. There's gotta be a limit.

I cursed loudly as I stared at the log, daring it to offend me further. A woman across the aisle hissed out a sustained
shush!
, covering her daughter's ears as the girl sniggered at my f-bomb droppage. I stood back, allowing the woman an unobstructed view of the moist monstrosity that glimmered and pulsed (to my fevered mind) in the soft lighting. She formed an
O
with her mouth and looked quickly away, huffing out air and pushing her daughter back into her seat as the child craned forward to get a look at the fuss-causer. The woman then paused and took another gander.

“It's chocolate, shithead,” she sniffed.

“What?”

“Chocolate. Snickers or Mars maybe. Look closer.” She motioned for me to lean in. Hesitating, I slowly inched my head downward to the cushion. There
was
something rather manufactured about it. It was almost too perfect a specimen. I crouched down and leaned in closer, taking the briefest of sniffs.

Chocolate. Sweet, sweet product of the cocoa bean.

Never had I been so happy to contemplate such an unlikely event as sitting atop a softened bar of chocolate. Compared to the rest of the day, feeling my buttocks slide and smoosh over a sweetened mahogany snack would be an absolute relief. I gave the woman a wide grin of idiotic amusement, but she had already forgotten me and was busy fussing over her daughter's mp3, securing the earphones over the girl's thick mass of blonde curls while the daughter whined, unable to find her favorite tweener megastar of the micromoment in the menu. The woman, I couldn't help but notice, was uttering a string of masterly expletives as she pressed the music player in various spots. I guessed familial obscenity was okay with her. Better the girl learn that language in the safety of her own home.

“Bus is leaving, pal,” the driver said from behind me. “Take your seat, I gotta do the head count.”

I straightened up and took another look around for any open seats. “But there's a melted chocolate bar here,” I said.

The bus driver looked at the seat. “I care? Sit. Leave. Same to me.”

“Do you have anything I could use to clean it, or something to cover it?”

The driver scoffed. “Where do you think you are? This is a
bus
, you're lucky it has cushioning. Now sit, or I get security.”

“And they'll clean it?” I shot back. Fuck if I'd take some abuse now, when I was so clearly in the right. It mattered not that the driver outweighed me by eighty pounds, nor that his forearms were wider than my head. If this was to be my Alamo, then so be it. It was the principle of the thing, the
thing
being that one hundred and twenty-odd Canadian dollars might not purchase luxury or speed or a properly functioning heating system, but they should at least purchase a seat on public transport that didn't stain your Dockers-clad bottom with creamy brown paste.

The driver crossed his arms (a spectacularly complicated maneuver given his proportions) and awaited my countermove. I took in his physical dimensions. The driver was a walking brick, a flesh cinder block, genetically perfect for his job. His dimensions completely filled the aisle, allowing for no squeezing past. If he was coming down the aisle, the only options were to sit, flee back to the lavatory in the rear, or be crushed underneath his treads.

Reluctantly, I asked the busbeast to
please wait one moment
and grabbed a couple of glossy headshots of myself from my valise. I wadded one up over the dewy bar, smearing bog-brown goo over my scrunched-up half-smile, and wiped up the chair as best I could, depositing the whole mess in the tiny-to-the-point-of-useless plastic garbage bag offered to each seat. I then put another picture facedown on the leftover smear. Grimacing, I lowered myself gingerly onto the paper, checking to make sure rogue caramel wasn't spurting out the side. All seemed dry, although the sensation of the photograph, lubricated, sliding forward under the weight of my ass made me squirm. The driver continued dawdling down the aisle, counting passengers in a loud grunt, my dilemma already a forgotten memory.

Before the bus could get moving, I whipped out my cell phone and checked my messages. Nada. Either Rowan had not yet received my recorded diatribe on just how humiliating this last audition had gone — the words “useless” and “new agent” and “planning on getting a” had been uttered several times, alone and in clusters — or she was employing her usual tact when dealing with an upset actor; ignore it, because he has no power whatsoever save the capacity to whine. Still, the venting had felt good, cleansing. There's something about tearing someone a new one by screaming into a cell phone while walking through Times Square that makes you feel alive.

I wasn't even the most manically upset person on the street — while I was forcefully reminding Rowan via wireless tantrum that my success paid a fraction of her salary, I stormed by a slickster in a three-piece tearing at his hair and throwing his battered briefcase under the wheels of a passing garbage truck. Papers blew outward under the pressure and he shrieked in tribal joy at the mayhem he had created. He then silenced, noticing me noticing him, and gave me a knowing nod/wink combo. I replied with a solemn thumbs-up. We were part of the same clan, the unendingly unappreciated. Then we parted, and my harangue on Rowan's ineffectualness continued unabated.

I snapped my phone shut and closed my eyes, ignoring the headache that had transferred its power to the rest of my body. I ached all over, nausea flitted about my insides. I half-listened as the busmonster clicked on the intercom and informed his passengers that tonight's ride from New York to Toronto was about to commence, would take approximately eleven-plus hours, please have our passports ready at the border, keep our arms inside the bus at all times, and smoking while on board was a definite no-no and punishable by ejection from the vehicle. Whether or not he'd actually slow the vehicle down before expulsion wasn't clear.

The bus jerked, and the lights fluttered, dimmed, then extinguished, plunging the riders into darkness. The city began to drift away, streetlights flickering through the grime of the windows. The driver droned on about how happy he was to be the chauffeur on our mystical trek to the unholy coldland of Canada, and that, again, smoking was not allowed on the bus, not even in the restroom. My seatmate had the right idea; I dug my iPod out of my briefcase and shoved the buds as far into my ear canals as I could, cranking the volume until the roar of the engine was only a throbbing sensation in my back. Early Fiona Apple filled my brain, warbling smoky notes of ennui that thrummed in my eardrums and caressed my medulla. I mentally flipped the city the bird and began to replay the day in my head, cursing my twelfth-grade acting teacher who had thoughtlessly encouraged me to follow my dreams.

The audition had not gone well, not even by standards set by earlier failures, a very high bar indeed. The previous winner for Most Debased Audition was for a brief role in a cheap slasher flick being lensed in Vancouver. You haven't honestly withstood career humiliation until you've been yelled at by an epithet-spewing German director on a low budget tax-dodge of a horror film for not bringing the necessary level of terror to your portrayal of scared victim number four.

It is one thing to be turned down for a role because of a bad line reading, or a height requirement, or an abundance of age lines, or a refusal to sleep with the casting director. All had happened to me. All were things I could deal with.

This had been different. This was an audition that made one seriously question an entire life's worth of vocational choices, an audition that showed me that, even at thirty-seven (the new twenty-five, I kept telling myself), the world was passing me by, and I did not understand its rules anymore.

Acting is a sucky way to make a living. It sucks eighty percent of the time, it sucks big-time another ten percent, it suckles at the nadir of your soul for a further eight percent, which leaves two percent for something tentatively approaching happiness and normalcy. A life of acting is a life devoted to the absence of pleasure. Every friend is a competitor. Every job temporary. Every compliment back-handed.

“Reality is where it's at, Shelley, and you know it.” Rowan had finally worn me down. Despite my threats to let her go, thereby denying her the fabulous wealth she received by leeching a percentage off my increasingly rare paychecks, she wielded all the power in our relationship. I told myself as many times as necessary to keep from slicing my veins that I was an artist, I had a craft, I was in all improbability an unrecognized virtuoso, but it was all so much shit. I was product. I was synthetic material processed into a vaguely human shape and thrust into an indifferent marketplace. I was a PlayStation in a PlayStation 3 world. And people weren't buying. “There's nothing major filming right now, the recession is hitting everybody, studios and producers included. Reality is cheap and popular, and if you want a little bit of that easily earned money, you are going to have to get over yourself. Tell you what, consider it ‘televised improvisational theater' if it helps you sleep at night. It's
commedia dell'arte
for the hillbilly and housewife set. Now suck it up and get going, they need someone in your age bracket to round out the housemates.” ‘They' being the producers of
House Bingo
, Fox Television's latest entry into the ‘how low will someone sink for a chance to be on the teevee' sweepstakes.

“Oh, and sweetheart?” she said as I was about to hang up.

“Yes?” I dreaded what was inevitably next.

“Don't forget: do
not
act like yourself.” Her motto for my entire career. I should have had the phrase crocheted into a decorative wall hanging to display at my front door, to read as I left the house for another day's worth of whoring my body:
Do not act like yourself.

The concept behind
House Bingo
was simple, the execution ridiculously complex: a house — located in some atypical netherworld where no one questions where a house with twelve separate bedrooms, a pool, and a Starbucks in the basement could be located — was populated by a variety of personality types, all of whom were competing for the grand prize of a quarter of a million dollars (U.S.). Ideally, the roommates were to be stereotypes, a representative cross-section of the population:

a body-builder

an airheaded bimbo who probably votes Republican

a smart-yet-devastatingly-sexy brunette

a still fit septuagenarian

a nerd or two (both sexes)

a more mature professor type (either sex)

a rocker (either sex)

a religious fanatic (not Muslim)

someone clinically obese (either sex, female preferred)

a farmer

a nurse

an Asian

a homosexual, and finally,

cannon fodder: a few extra ‘others' to fill out the cast, those rejects with no discernible skills or personality who would in all likelihood go down very early in the series unless they somehow beat the odds and became a fan favorite.

Guess into which slot I fit. If it helps narrow it down, I never had to come out as a professor.

At the beginning of the show, every contestant would be provided a card with a series of numbers, akin to a bingo card (ah, hence the title, I just got that). Over the course of twenty-three tri-weekly episodes — plus a surprise finale, broadcasted live! — numbers would fall from an enormous Plexiglas tumbler that hung from the ceiling in the main den. If the number was on your card, you had to perform a task or game, something essentially useless and superfluous to existence in the real world but which was of vital importance in the ‘reality' of the program. Some tasks would involve physical acts, some would necessitate that the competitor have at least a few brain cells in good working order. Eating things not normally consumed by man was definitely one of the tasks. Survive, and you get to fill in the number on your card. Fail, and you get nothing but sore bones and a foul taste in your mouth. As you're expected to live with people, teamwork is allowed, and backstabbing is encouraged. Fundamentally,
Big Brother
crossed with the more vicious elements of
Survivor
and
Fear Factor
.