Roland
ROLAND
S peaking was a hell of a lot easier when I was alive. The most maintenance I ever had to do on my instrument was drinking a mug of licorice tea before an ADR session. Now, I don’t even have vocal cords. It’s hard to describe what I have, exactly, even after two weeks in this condition. I don’t show up in any mirrors, even though I’m still somehow able to “look” at them, the same way I can “hear” what’s going on around me. I have some sense of a boundary between what’s me and what’s not me, but it’s blurry, and I’m certainly not shaped like I was before I died. All that work to define my calves only to end up limbless, as some kind of sphere of energy, about as big around as a toy basketball if I had to guess.
“Hello?” Adam is calling out. Hovering behind him in the foyer, I watch the writer run a finger through the dust on my entry table, but I need a minute to recover before I try to talk again.
It took me an entire day to figure out how to possess speakers. Keyboards were much easier; each letter is its own simple circuit that I just have to “zap” to make the right one show up. It only took me a few hours of effort to figure out how to start sending emails to Matt, instructing him to say yes to that publisher who’s been courting us for years. My agent made short work of the request to get Adam here right away, as he usually does after he accepts that he doesn’t have a choice; he’s a prick, but I could have told him to deliver the Shroud of Turin to my door and it would have shown up.
Replicating my voice is a more arcane process. Almost magical. I wriggle into the speaker, envision the word I want to say, concentrate really hard, and “shape” an electrical signal in just the right way, all to produce the faintest whisper. It’s like doing two sudokus in my head at once, and numbers were never my strong suit. Theater kids don’t care much for cosines. The first time I managed a word—“hello,” I think it was—I had to rest for an hour, even though I don’t sleep anymore. I sort of stay motionless and wait to “recharge.”
But there are no excuses for my struggle with the gate. That was humiliating. A simple closed-circuit, open-circuit situation? I should be able to do that without thinking by now. Using the computer is like quantum physics compared to a binary on-off switch. But even simple machines still require some wooing first.
I was so busy practicing on the speakers that I completely forgot about the gate. The chime notified me that Adam had arrived, and I went out the window in a panic to retrieve him. Even at maximum speed, it took me at least twenty minutes, start to finish, to ferry him inside, judging from the time on the clock. With no one else around, it’s been hard to measure just how sloth-like I really am in this new form. Turns out, I move very slowly. Even though Adam is clearly out of shape, and he was rolling what looked like all his belongings behind him in a shitty Samsonite, I could barely keep up. I floated as fast as my floaty self could possibly float and still, he just kept getting farther away.
But it doesn’t matter. The important thing is Adam is here now in my house, setting his pilling coat on the table.
“Roland?” he calls out.
Adam Gallagher looks to be about forty, a little under six feet tall, with dusty blond hair that becomes dark scruff at some point beyond his sideburns. He’s pudgy around the middle in the way that I would have been if I didn’t have my trainer monitoring me like the Stasi. I’m just glad Lucas didn’t see me try to get up that driveway. He would have yelled, “Mark Wahlberg is older than you and he can do this in half the time!” and I would have panted, “Mark Wahlberg is a freak,” and he would have said, “A freak who made ten million more than you last year.” Which would be true, technically, but only because it was a Crash Street gap year.
Lucas knows how to push my buttons. He’ll be sad when he finds out I’m dead, though I suspect he’ll secretly be relieved to remove me from his roster. He can focus on his more cooperative clients—the guys who happily wake up at the break of dawn, swallow a hard-boiled egg whole like they’re Gaston, and do two hours of weight training before the sun comes up.
Look, I’m trying hard to focus, I really am, but my mind feels floaty, too. It’s difficult to keep a train of thought going unless there’s a clearly defined task occupying me, and I’m distracted by the first person I’ve seen since I died. Adam is currently peering out of the foyer into my stunning open-concept kitchen, calling out louder, “Hello? Roland?”
He’s a little sad, isn’t he? It’s been a while since I’ve met a bona fide writer, by which I mean someone who can really turn a phrase. The guys who pump out the Crash screenplays mostly seem like blitzed-out cokeheads, though I doubt they came to this town that way. Doesn’t take a lot of brain cells to write lines like “Floor it!” and “I don’t think we can make that jump, Crag.”
No, for a project like this, I needed someone outside the system. If Adam Gallagher is still the man who wrote Salt Lake City Sodomite , he can get this done. A Hollywood writer would just rehash the same hackneyed story I’ve doled out about the Georgia boy with a dream in his pocket—true enough on its surface, but hardly complex enough to do justice to a subject as deep as Roland Rogers. People may be forgetting it now, but I was an artist once, well on my way to getting an Oscar. In ways, I was the soul of America in human form. Adam can show everyone that the most challenging role I ever played was myself; that line could even go on the back cover, above the effusive blurbs.
His book meant a lot to me once. I bought it after I saw him on the news talking about Proposition 8 getting overturned. At the time, I could never imagine marrying a man, no matter how many states were trying to make it legal. His writing was like a portal to a world where I had made different choices: he, too, was locked in a restrictive institution but he broke out of his. I spent a whole week poring over every page of Salt Lake City Sodomite at night, imagining what it would be like to come out of the closet.
And even though I couldn’t recall the title after I died, or even Adam’s name, I still remembered, at least in paraphrased form, the prologue’s opening line: “Secrets can’t be buried, only covered, and even then, you can still see their shape, like felled logs in the snow.”
Kind of ironic. The snow part.
I died skiing. You’re never supposed to go on a backcountry trip alone, and if you do, you should leave a flight plan with somebody. But I’ve always hated being nannied by my team. It’s why I’ve never had any live-in staff, only cleaners, chefs, and security on permanent call. It drives Matt crazy. During the whole Bling Ring saga, he sent me nagging updates, telling me the thieves had just gotten into Orlando Bloom’s place and urging me to reconsider my “lone-wolf attitude.” But it’s fun pissing off my pet Brit. Lately, he’s been getting on my nerves about re-upping the Crash contract, like he hasn’t already squeezed enough money out of me to buy all the Bentleys his heart desires.
This time, I didn’t let anyone know what I was doing. A couple weeks ago, I told my people I’d be traveling between my properties until I was due back on set, packed up my gear, and took the 15 up to my chalet just outside Alta. I don’t think anyone recognized me in town this time around. I wore my balaclava at the general store, and I was only in there long enough to pick up groceries, including the Double Stuf Oreos that Lucas would incinerate if he ever found them in my pantry.
For two glorious days, it was just me and the powder—a welcome reprieve from all the bustle of the Crash sets. And then everything went sideways. Literally. I knew I was in trouble when the snow started to slip out from beneath me, and within seconds, I was trapped in an unstoppable slab thundering down the mountainside. I did everything right. I didn’t thrash my limbs, and I tried to keep my head up, always looking for the sky as I tumbled headfirst over my skis. But by the time I got to the bottom, a wall of white crunched down on top of me with a thousand tons of force behind it. Everything went black. Before long, there wasn’t any air left to breathe.
At first, I thought someone had medevaced me back to my bed. Yes, it was odd that I couldn’t feel my body anymore, but I tried to convince myself I was just on horse-grade painkillers. The good stuff. The top-shelf morphine. But over the next few hours—or was it a whole day?—the numbness wouldn’t go away. And I couldn’t figure out why I would be back in Malibu. Wouldn’t they have taken me to an ICU in Salt Lake?
When it finally dawned on me that I was dead, it didn’t feel jarring so much as it felt like something I already knew bubbling to the surface of my awareness. Of course I was dead. Why didn’t I put it together sooner? It took me another day after that to make sense of my new form. I thought I’d at least get the dignity of being an apparition. I guess I can blame my own industry for giving me that expectation. In that ghost movie I did with Emily Blunt, they just put a glow around me in postproduction. It’d be pretty hard to film an invisible orb, I suppose.
After a day of trying to will myself to move to no effect, I somehow “got out of bed” and started floating. It felt like swimming through rooms full of lukewarm tap water—the kind that’s too soft and aerated, like what came out of the faucet when I stayed at my grandma’s place out in Gordon as a boy. If my house weren’t so big, it wouldn’t take me so long to get from place to place. But after Leo upgraded, I had to upgrade, too, only for him to sell his place in Malibu a few years later.
For the first week, I tried to appreciate the advantages of being a ghost. I missed eating, but at least Lucas wasn’t around anymore, yelling at me to take the buns off my cheeseburger. Even on cheat days, he would make me order my In-N-Out “protein-style,” as if lettuce could ever be a suitable substitute for bread.
I didn’t miss sleeping as much as I thought I would. It was peaceful at night. I hovered over the bed—mostly out of habit, I guess—and thought about things, in my meandering way. I imagined what I might have done with more time. Some nights, I roamed the halls, mostly because that seemed like something ghosts should do.
Was “ghost” even the best term for what I was, I wondered? Not in the classical sense. I didn’t feel like wailing or teeth-gnashing or doing any of the other stuff tortured souls did in my childhood preacher’s sermons about heaven and hell. I was just … home . Surrounded by my things. I could still float over to the shelf in my study and look at my Emmys. The Golden Globe, too. I would like there to be an Oscar, but not even Cary Grant got one of those. Except the honorary one.
And once I figured out that I could get inside electrical appliances, I had plenty to keep me busy. I could float to the kitchen in the morning and make the La Marzocco hiss and whir, for old times’ sake. I could play movies in the screening room. In the evenings, I could hover out to the cliffs and watch the sunset bleed orange into the Pacific.
But all the while, the clock was ticking, and there was so much I wanted to say. I was due back on the Crash set in April. Matt would probably get suspicious if I went radio silent for too long. And if I didn’t do something to prevent it, I’d be remembered forever as someone I wasn’t. Once the authorities found my body, or if they just gave up and declared me dead anyway, the obituaries would be all too predictable: “ Crash Street Star Roland Rogers Found Dead.” The press would treat me like the heterosexual heartthrob everyone thought I was. The reporters would call Zoya for comment on her dead ex-boyfriend. She wouldn’t tell them anything scandalous though, not just for the sake of her own reputation, but because the “Roland Rogers was gay” story would be better saved for her own middle-age revelation. Who knows if anyone would believe her that late in the game anyway?
There was never even any suspicion about my sexuality while I was alive, which always surprised me. You’d think after Montgomery Clift and Rock Hudson, people would have started assuming every male movie star was gay until proven otherwise. Going on arranged dates with actresses at regular intervals helped keep my cover; I never called any of them back, which led the tabloids to brand me a “playboy.” And then after Crash started, the public just saw Roland Rogers, action hero. The guy who rode dirt bikes off skyscrapers. Well, computer-generated skyscrapers. So much for gaydar; somehow, I managed to fly under everyone’s, deleting my browser history every night, only messaging men online under pseudonyms, never meeting up with them, never confiding in anyone. Except Zoya, the only reason my secret wasn’t so hard to bear.
I told myself I wouldn’t take it to the grave. I had sketched out a rough five-year coming-out plan. My contract for the Crash movies was almost up. I hated doing them. So many wires. I kept begging the producers to write me out of the series early and let one of the B-listers in the ensemble take over. They could have sent Crag Dynamite’s Bugatti careening off a cliff in a final blaze of glory. Maybe I’d even come back to film a flashback out of the goodness of my heart. But once I was done for good, I was going to give Zoya plenty of advance warning wherever she was living—Milan?—and take a few months away from the spotlight. Then I’d offer someone a super intimate, tell-all interview. Variety was mostly nice to me, so it probably would have been them. The news would spread everywhere the second it was published. People would talk about it online for a month. GLAAD would make a statement about how “monumental” it was that a “star of Rogers’s stature” was finally “sharing his truth.” The more irreverent gay people would make jokes about Crag Dynamite being a “power bottom.” Fox News pundits would foam at the mouth.
After that initial uproar, though, the furor would fade. I’d stop landing big roles. Everyone would expect me to start playing gay. Ryan Murphy would call and put me in some tonally scattershot streaming show, and I’d collect Netflix checks for a little while. Within a decade, I’d probably be headlining Hallmark rom-coms. Some fates are worse than death, I suppose. But as much as I told myself I was going to follow through with the plan, I never mustered the willpower to execute it. I had been hiding for so long already by that point. Why would I give up all my luster if I didn’t have to? Was sex really worth losing everything I had built? I convinced myself that masturbating to porn and Grindr pics was still enough to satisfy me.
Only after I was dead did the regret fully set in. Being misremembered as straight was one thing, but it was the thought of being immortalized as Crag Fucking Dynamite that was absolutely intolerable. I was going to be Brando once. I had depth— real depth—and now no one would ever see it. How many years did I waste on those movies? How many jokes did the snobbier critics make about how I was “blowing up” my career by playing a man called Dynamite? How many minutes of my “in memoriam” segment would be devoted to a role that only required a fraction of my capabilities? I couldn’t stand it. The thought of that consumed me, funneling my scattered attention toward a single goal: correcting the record. I just needed the right person to help me do it. And I needed my team to believe that I was alive while the plan unfolded.
Given that it was already February, I figured I had a little over a month before ski season ended and I ran the risk of my body showing up in the melt. If I got a ghostwriter out here, pronto, and managed to convince him of my predicament, we could produce my last living record. We could write a testament to my nuance. Then, once it was done, Matt could send the bloodhounds looking for me, so long as I knew that my story would get out there one day. That assurance could give me the peace I need to truly “pass on,” unless that was another ghost movie stereotype, but regardless, I wanted the truth in print.
That’s when I decided to find Adam. I remembered he had an Irish-sounding surname like “Callahan” or something. But I needed to google “ex-Mormon memoir” to find him, which meant I had to learn to use my desktop computer in my study, painstakingly memorizing the placement of all 104 keys on the keyboard so I could manipulate the circuitry.
The first email I wrote to my manager—a cursory message saying I was back in Malibu for a while, but “do not send any staff until future notice”—took an hour to compose. I think I averaged about a word a minute.
After that, I found Salt Lake City Sodomite— and, by extension, my ghostwriter. The search results jogged my memory. He was fresh off his mission when his priest or pastor or whatever the Mormons call it caught him kissing his boyfriend in public. He got excommunicated, which is how he made national news at the time, and in turn how I was introduced to him. It was Rachel Maddow’s show, I remembered. He squirmed in his chair, adorably stuttering his way through the interview, but every word he said felt like it spoke directly to my experience. It seemed like gay Mormons were probably some of the only people who could understand what it was like to be a closeted actor. They were so buttoned-up, hiding all their secrets behind those crisp white shirts.
It quickly became clear in my research that he hadn’t done much of note since his first book, which arguably made him an ideal candidate for what I had in mind: He was just sitting there, preserved in amber, waiting for an opportunity like this. Adam wasn’t going to be fussy about the terms. A literary superstar would be much harder to procure on short notice.
After some more googling, I was really cooking. I had always hated emailing Matt, an ex-Londoner who adds a little x abbreviation to the end of his messages. A kiss seemed excessive for business emails. But Brits make good agents in the end; they’re passive-aggressive enough to get what you want without pissing anyone off. Still, he could barely contain his rage after I sent him a message that just said, “Matt, I want to do that memoir after all. Also, I’m going to come out in it. This is not a joke. I’m gay.”
His reply had seven bullet points explaining why this was an outrageous plan, telling me that I’d tank the Crash renegotiations and then I’d be toxic. None of the studios would touch me anymore, he said, and before I knew it, I’d be doing guest spots on QVC, as if that threat held sway over me anymore. I kept at it.
“I’m doing it, Matt,” I wrote. “And I’ll need a ghostwriter. Get me Adam Gallagher. Pay him so much money he can’t say no. Then fly him out here right away.” That one only took five minutes to write, which I was pretty impressed with.
After Matt threatened to quit if I went through with it, I called his bluff, and two days later, he sent me a first pass of the contract from the publisher along with Adam’s flight details.
I wrote back, “Thanks, Matt,” adding an x for good measure.
I did all that work to get Adam here and the first thing he does in my home is insult my Chihuly. I catch him looking up at the entryway chandelier and muttering, “Jesus Christ …” under his breath. I’d like to see what kind of IKEA lighting fixture he has in whatever hovel he came here from.
He takes a few cautious steps into the kitchen, and I float along behind him, summoning a burst of speed so he doesn’t get too far ahead of me again. I practiced using the smart speaker sitting on the island for most of the day, so this next part should hopefully be easier. Unless my speech is still sluggish from the long trek down to the gate and back. I might need one of my waking naps first, or whatever my version of a nap should be called. I’ve been toying with float time but it sounds too childish.
“Um, hello?” Adam is all but shouting now, scanning the darkened kitchen with big brown eyes, which look weary in a way that goes beyond mere jet lag.
I should have turned some lights on. It would make what happens next a lot less creepy. I need to say something to him soon. The computer nonsense, the back-and-forth with Matt, the elaborate orchestration—so much effort went into producing this moment. I can’t waste it.
“Roland?!”
I slip into the smart speaker. I can picture the signal I need to send for hi , but I can’t do it. I’m nervous and even more spent than I suspected I was.
“Is anybody home?!”
I funnel all my power toward speaking.
“Adam. Hi.”
The author jumps half an inch into the air, not expecting my voice to come from so close to where he was standing. It’s not a great start, but it’ll have to do. He collects himself as he notices the gray sphere on the counter pulsing with a blue light.
“Are you … where are you?” he stammers.
“It’s hard. To explain,” I tell him, barely squeezing the words out. Every syllable is making me woozier than the last. I can’t keep talking much longer.
Adam stares at the speaker, looking puzzled. “I didn’t know you could use these things as intercoms.”
I try to put a sentence together but what comes out is: “I’m not here?”
“Well, I can see that,” Adam says, sounding a little too miffed for my taste. He’s getting paid handsomely to write my memoir; he can afford to cut the sass.
I had a whole speech rehearsed. First, I was supposed to warn Adam that what I was about to tell him would sound unusual, and that I didn’t believe it myself at first, so he should pour himself a drink and have a seat. He can even open the bottle of Pappy I’ve been saving. Then, once he was comfortable, I’d relay the whole story, from the avalanche all the way to his arrival. After he understood my condition, we could lay out some ground rules. But there’s no way I’ll get through any of that now.
Adam shifts his weight from side to side. “So, where are you, Roland? Another room?”
“Dead,” I say, half out of exasperation, half out of exhaustion.
I want to kick myself, but Adam’s the only one here who has feet. And he looks angry now. He starts rummaging through his messenger bag, searching for something. I have to stop him from calling somebody; in addition to banning him from bringing a laptop, Matt should have told him he had to put his phone in one of those security pouches when he landed in LAX.
“You’re dead?” he asks me, and at this point I don’t know whether to walk back what I said or try to roll with it. These days, all the rising actors have taken improv classes; guys of my generation always stuck to the script.
“Yes?” is the answer I settle on.
“OK, is this some kind of a joke?” Adam says, still riffling through his things.
I need to speak. Now. But as I fumble to send a signal through the speaker, all that comes out is a burst of static that only succeeds in startling him again. He’s gripping something. It has to be a cell phone. Did his agent give him Matt’s number? I hope not. Matt may not know what to make of this, but it’ll be enough to arouse suspicion and put the entire plan in jeopardy.
“WAIT!” I manage.
Adam pauses to look at the speaker.
I’m totally drained.
“I need. Help.”
There’s an anguished tone in my voice that I don’t intend. I can hardly talk, let alone control how I sound. But the desperation is there anyway, and it might work in my favor. Adam still looks annoyed, but he releases his death grip on his phone. Who still uses messenger bags anyway? He’s going to give himself back problems, not that he has great posture to begin with.
“Well, I’m here to help,” Adam huffs, and if he does feel compassion for me, he’s certainly not showing it. “You need a memoir written and that’s what I do. But we need to meet for that to happen. Face-to-face.”
“I wish. We could” is what I’m able to utter.
Adam pulls out one of the stools around the island—a thick slab of Carrara flown in from Italy that the designer assured me looks way better than Leo’s Romanian knockoff—and sits down directly in front of the speaker.
“Look, I don’t know what’s going on,” Adams says, rubbing his temples. “Were you planning to do the interviews over intercom? Couldn’t we have done this over the phone in that case?”
“No,” I tell him.
“So, do you want to come talk to me or not?”
I still don’t like his tone. No one has spoken this rudely to me in decades. Then again, he probably flew out here thinking he had landed a dream job only to find an empty house waiting for him. If he wants to work, the most helpful thing he could do right now is go away and give me time to regroup.
“Not yet,” I say, running on fumes. “Tired. Tomorrow.”
Adam looks at his watch—a digital Timex that looks almost as old as he is. It’s only late afternoon, but with the time difference, it’s not unreasonably early for him to go to bed, right? I need to recover, and I don’t want him wandering around my place unsupervised.
“Fine,” he says, curtly. “Where should I sleep?”
At last, something breaks my way.
“Guest wing,” I eke out. “Past Koons sculpture. My wing, other way. Don’t go. In. There.”
God, I hope the questions end soon. Adam stands up, collecting his luggage.
“OK, I’ll go get some sleep, I guess,” he says. “It was a long flight.”
I can’t even remember the last time I flew commercial. After I got cast on Life or Death in the late nineties, everything changed for me. Macon, Georgia, looks a lot different after you’ve been to Paris. On first glance, Adam Gallagher looks a lot like my hometown did to me when I went back there for the first time with a fat wallet: flat, dull, unremarkable.
Everyone in my family saw me differently, too. The boy they had once teased about starring in school plays was now a sort of demigod they begged for blessings: money for a new roof, or for my cousin Suzie’s braces, or for Uncle Walter’s knee replacement. With the last ounce of my energy, I examine this writer who I’ve let into my home. This man whom I’ve trusted to tell my story. He must think this is his big break—that what Life or Death did for me, my book can do for him. How the hell am I going to tell him what he really signed up for?
“Please make yourself at home,” I say, miraculously managing a complete sentence, before everything goes black.