Roland
ROLAND
I am eleven years old and forgetting my only line in the school play. My mother is there and so are all of her awful church friends and they’re baking an enormous pie fifty feet wide, and the rest of the audience is sitting inside it, packed in tight among berries as big as their heads. “Ro-land! Ro-land! Ro-land!” they’re chanting, and I can’t tell if they’re trying to encourage me to remember what the jailer is supposed to say to Egeon or if they’re taunting me, but while I’m trying to decipher their tone, I age all the way to eighty-four years old and Zoya is holding my hand in the hospital. She’s telling me she’s proud of me but I’m on BoxOfficeMojo.com counting the number of top-grossing films I’ve starred in. The nurses come in and try to rip the iPad out of my hands so they can take my blood pressure and I shout, “Wait! Wait! If I hadn’t bad-mouthed James Cameron, I could be in so many more of these! There’s still time,” and I look back down, and the iPad is now the disembodied head of my agent Matt, his lips puckered up for a kiss, so I throw it across the room, and it hits the wall-mounted TV that was playing Life or Death but my costar is a rhinoceros and she can’t hand me the forceps because she’s a rhinoceros. The screen shatters and light, bright and blinding, bursts out of the cracks, filling up the room, and then I’m awake, except I was never asleep to begin with, I was just—
I don’t know what I was doing. But I’m here now. And I can hear .
“Roland? If you’re there, I’m just letting you know I’m awake,” Adam is saying. “Do you want to get started?”