Adam
ADAM
B y the time I was halfway through the second burger, I started hoping that Roland would be too shy to come out. Of his room, to be specific. I wanted it all to myself. Jet-lagged and still stressed from driving a pristine luxury car through a mountain pass, I could easily scarf down two meals in one sitting.
It was somewhat disconcerting to eat fast food while Roland Rogers grumbled one-word commands at me through a smart speaker, but I’m trying to acclimatize myself to the strangeness—at least long enough to find out if I even have the job I came here for. In a moment, I’ll try to push Roland again. My practiced speech, which I only half believed—well, maybe a quarter believed—didn’t have the desired effect. I’m not sure how much of it he even heard before he started ordering me to eat.
But even though I didn’t like being bossed around, fast food turned out to be a good suggestion. Leaning back as far as I dare on the kitchen stool, savoring the feeling of fullness, I assess the wreckage of wrappers in front of me. The only items left now are a few fries and half a chocolate shake. I cast a longing look at my Moleskine. Maybe I can ask him a few questions. He seems to be in a better mood now that I’ve eaten, even making small talk with me.
“Is In-N-Out a guilty pleasure for you?” I ask him.
“You could say that,” his voice crackles through the speaker. He sounds more relaxed. Like he’s sitting in an easy chair somewhere over there in his wing, contentedly purring into whatever device he’s using as a microphone. I’d be tempted to think this was some kind of kink for him if famous people weren’t all eccentrics anyway. For all I know, this is a bizarre rite of passage: you have to eat Roland’s favorite food before he’ll talk to you.
“It was good,” I tell him. “I wish I could order everything animal style. Like, I want hot dogs to come animal style, too.”
“I’d order one of those in a heartbeat, but Lucas would kill me. If I weren’t already …”
Roland catches himself, but I decide not to press. Well, maybe I’ll press a little bit.
“Who’s Lucas?” I ask.
“My trainer,” Roland says. “A gym addict who hasn’t eaten carbohydrates in a decade. His body is made of steel, which is how Crag Dynamite is supposed to look onscreen. Which I’ve never understood. I don’t know if audiences realize this, but it doesn’t take a lot of muscle to turn a steering wheel. You can do it with a pinky.”
It’s the most he’s said to me since I arrived, which is encouraging. We might hit this deadline after all. I just need to keep him talking about any subject that manages to pique his interest and our first full day together won’t be totally wasted.
“Yeah, I always wondered why you had to have washboard abs for movies where I can’t even see below your shoulders most of the time,” I tell him, not admitting that I’ve only watched the first Crash Street —and then, I barely paid attention. Later on, assuming I spend another night here, I’ll continue the series on my phone, beginning with Crash Street 2: Resurrection .
Roland laughs. “Yeah. It’s not like Cary Grant had to have pronounced deltoids.”
“And he was still sexy as hell.”
He laughs at that, and it’s a relief to hear him speaking so openly after all the stilted awkwardness of the last twenty-four hours. “When he wears that ridiculous bathrobe in Charade ?” he says. “That may have been an awakening for me.”
He’s already giving me something I can use: I realized I was gay when I saw Cary Grant in a bathrobe . That’d be a hell of a chapter opener, though I fight the urge to tell Roland as much. Better to ease into an interview given how difficult it’s been to get to this point. I decide to offer an admission in return—something embarrassingly personal.
“For me, it was Columbo.”
“Columbo? Like, Peter Falk?” Roland asks, incredulous.
“Yeah, he’s super smart, he’s always smoking cigarettes, I love his voice, and you never see his wife,” I explain. “Which is a bit suspicious if you think about it.”
“Maybe he’s smoking to deal with the stress of being a closeted cop,” Roland jokes, but it feels like there’s a touch of truth laced through the quip. I wonder how Roland has managed his own stressors. I reach for my notebook, hoping to jot down some ideas without interrupting the flow of conversation, but Roland stops me with my hand in midair.
“No. Don’t write that down. Not yet.”
The hairs on the back of my arm stand up. I had no idea he could see me. Has he had a camera trained on me this entire time? Did he watch me eat two hamburgers from some sort of surveillance center in his house? Maybe he’s not in an easy chair; maybe he’s more like Dr. Claw from Inspector Gadget sitting behind a control panel with a million buttons, scrutinizing my every movement. I try not to sound too freaked out, even though I am.
“Um, sorry,” I say. “I didn’t realize I was on camera.”
“Oh … no, you’re not.”
“Then, um, how did you see me grabbing my notebook?”
“Oh, right …” he says, like something just occurred to him.
I crane my neck around to look through the glass wall behind me but all I can see in the courtyard are palm trees, and the surface of the pool rippling underneath an ocean breeze. Roland’s perfectly angular jawline is nowhere to be found. Either he’s hiding behind a double-sided mirror, or he’s got ESP; there’s no other way he could have known what I was about to do. That is, if he’s telling the truth about not having cameras in here. This situation is getting fishier by the second.
“It’s hard to explain how I saw it,” Roland says, his voice sounding shakier now.
“Try me,” I say.
“It’s too soon.”
“Too soon for what?”
I’m getting angry now. The screen on the fridge—the one that strangely said YUM when I walked back into the house after my excursion through the Malibu mountains—blinks off and comes back to life.
“To tell you,” he says through the speaker a moment later.
“To tell me what ?”
This felt off. From the beginning. He’s only confirming it now.
“You’re not going to believe me,” Roland says, and the haughtiness in his voice is gone. After taking orders from him all day, it’s disconcerting to hear him hit a pleading note. I’ll give him one chance to tell me what’s going on, and then I’m leaving. My contract had a lot of stipulations, but it did not include being spied on.
“I don’t know,” I tell him, throwing a hand up in frustration, confident he can see the gesture on his camera. “I’ve believed some improbable things in my life. I used to think that Joseph Smith could translate Egyptian.”
“Adam, I’m dead.”
It’s insulting that after all this buildup, he’d just repeat the bad joke he made yesterday. That is what he said, right? That he was “dead.” In my tiredness, I had forgotten it, but yes, he used that word: dead . He sounds so serious now, though, like he’s trying to show me some deep inner wound.
“You’re dead, like metaphorically?” I ask.
“Literally, Adam. I’m dead. I died in an avalanche in Alta and I woke up here.”
I laugh. I can’t help but laugh. It’s a ridiculous notion. I’m not just on camera; I must be the mark on a full-on hidden-camera show. Was Paul an unwitting accomplice in this? Did the producers for this prank program google “sad gay writers” and pick me? I look around at the corners of the ceiling for lenses and under the kitchen island for microphones. There’s nothing there, but the empty fruit bowl could be hiding something. I lift it up and turn it over in my hands.
“What are you doing?” Roland says, only confirming my suspicion that he can see me. “Stop fidgeting around like that. You’re stressing me out.”
I’m mad. I flew all the way out here, thinking I had a genuine opportunity, only for me to end up a laughingstock. What even is the joke here? Is it supposed to be funny that Roland is telling a gay writer that he’s gay, too? Does that kind of homophobia still play on reality TV anymore? Are they timing me to see how long I stay, ramping up the weirdness until I hit a breaking point? Well, I’ve certainly hit it now.
“I’m making you nervous?” I shout. “ I’m the schmuck you lured onto Punk’d or whatever this is with the promise of two hundred and fifty thousand dollars. Are you even going to pay me anything? Or is this what you wanted: to pull the rug out from under some poor writer? Except your house doesn’t even have any rugs, just a fucking gray plaster floor. You’re not even gay, are you?”
I stand up, pushing my stool back so violently it crashes to the floor, feeling faint from gorging myself. My blood takes its sweet time returning to my toes and fingers.
“I’ll wire you some money right now if you’ll believe me,” Roland says.
“Do you also want to talk to me about the extended warranty on the bridge you’re trying to sell me?”
The jig is up. How much of a reaction does this TV show need from me before someone comes out from behind the curtains? Except his dumb house doesn’t even have any curtains, just huge glass windows and doors.
“You’re a writer, Adam. You shouldn’t mix metaphors.”
The gall of this man. First, he pulls this shit, then he makes a crack about craft? What the fuck is even happening? Is this some sick version of The Hunger Games where the ultrarich torture a member of the creative class for their own amusement? Don’t they already have Hollywood?
“Excuse me?” I balk.
There’s a beat of silence. I can hear my pulse in my skull.
“I know how this sounds,” Roland says. “But don’t you think Punk’d is below my pay grade? Even Kutcher quit doing it once he got big.”
“I mean, I wouldn’t put it past you. I saw George Clooney in a Nespresso commercial!”
“I haven’t done TV in two decades,” he tells me, taking a tone that he might think is patient, but that comes across as scolding. “Even as the studios lure everybody else onto Plus this and Plus that, I haven’t stepped foot onto a set unless it’s for a film. Well, not anymore, I guess. Unless someone figures out how to shoot me like this. I doubt I’d show up on camera. I certainly wouldn’t have the same gravitas.”
At that, I hear a short burst of static that sounds almost like Roland is laughing at his own joke. I don’t believe him for a second but still, I’m having trouble piecing together what could possibly be happening. He’s right that a prank show doesn’t seem like a believable career move for him. Maybe he’s … not well? I can’t pretend to be an expert on the DSM, but perhaps he’s struggling with something internal, and this is how it’s manifesting externally. I’ve never heard of someone believing that they’re dead before. It’s probably a mental disorder with some Latin-sounding name. Necrodelirium ? Maybe if I can humor him a bit longer, I decide, I can wring some more information out of him. At minimum, I can convince him to get some psychological help—even if the show I’m on right now just ends up playing this for laughs, too.
“What do you mean ‘like this,’ Roland?”
“Invisible. A ball of energy. A ghost, I guess.”
“You’re a ghost,” I deadpan.
A long sigh comes whistling out of the speaker. I stare at it, my pulse slowing a bit now that the immediacy of my anger has given way to cold resentment.
“Not in the classical sense. I’m not wearing a bedsheet or anything. I’m invisible. I just kind of float around. And I can use the appliances, obviously.”
Nope. I can’t humor this. “So, you’re like a poltergeist?” I ask. “Can you make a palm tree crash through the window? Is that what’s going to happen next? Is this all breakaway glass?”
I scoop up my notebook. The rest of my bags are back in my room. I turn to leave the kitchen.
“Wait!” Roland shouts, sounding panicked at my movement. God, he’s really committing to the bit. “Look, I never expected you to believe me at first. I knew I would have to prove it to you before you started writing the book,” he continues. “But that’s the problem. Even with all this time to think, I can’t figure out how to get you on board.”
“Maybe you can ‘float’ through me and I’ll feel a chill,” I snark, unable to help myself. “Isn’t that how it works in the movies?”
“You’d think I’d be able to. That’s what happened in the ghost movie I did. But no. I can do all sorts of stuff with electricity, though.”
A moment later, the kitchen is dark, and then the lights blink back on. Then the fridge screen goes black again before returning to its bizarre display of the word YUM . I watch as two more letters get added to the end: YUMMY . What is it with this man and yum ? This has to be part of the bit, right? The producers must have thought it would be funny to rig the lights and have the fridge show me silly words.
“I’m serious, Adam,” Roland says from the speaker a moment later. “This isn’t a joke. Please. You have to believe me.”
What the fuck is going on? I’m downright dizzy. Two days ago, I was binge-watching Bones on my couch, and now I’m standing in one of the most expensive homes in the world, listening to a celebrity try to persuade me he’s speaking through an Alexa from the great beyond. He sounds so serious. Is this just good acting? Or does he … actually believe he’s a ghost? Fifteen years ago, I thought God told Brigham Young to marry dozens of women, but these days I don’t do so well with irrationality. When someone spouts a patent untruth, I find it almost unbearable to be around them, even if they’re just exaggerating a dinner-party story. There has to be an explanation for this.
“In a smart house like this, you can control the lights from your iPad, Roland. Now come out and let’s talk. Maybe you feel like a ghost. I know that being in the closet is a form of death. I’ve been there.”
“Except I’m not like dead, Adam,” he insists. “I am dead. I’m literally a foot away from you and you can’t see me.”
I stare at an imaginary point a foot in front of my eyeline. There’s nothing there except some dust hanging in the air.
“I mean in the speaker,” Roland clarifies. I adjust my gaze but of course the speaker looks normal, too. There’s no hazy supernatural glow emanating from it, only the same blue light around the bottom rim.
“You’re in there? Not just speaking through it, but inside of it?” I ask.
“WAIT!” Roland’s voice is loud now. Decisive. He sounds more like Crag Dynamite, commanding and collected. “I have an idea. Your watch.”
“What about it?”
I look down at the digital Timex on my wrist. I’ve worn it since my dad handed it down to me in grade school, even though I’ve had to hunt for tiny batteries at specialty stores every few years to keep it running. If he still talked to me, I’d tell him how much the gift meant, even if he was just upgrading to the next model. Funny that he believes the Church’s “Families are forever” slogan when he no longer gives me the time of day.
“It’s not internet-connected, right?” Roland asks.
I don’t see where this is going. “No, I think Al Gore was still busy creating it when this watch was made.”
“OK, take it off and hold it upside down.”
This is the last game I’m willing to play before I storm out of here and call Paul. If they don’t at least pay me a kill fee, I’ll sue Roland Rogers, I swear. I take off my watch, pointlessly dangling it upside down by the stainless-steel band.
“Here you go, Roland. I’m holding my watch upside down, but you can already see that on the cameras, I’m sure.”
“Give me a second,” Roland says, sounding serious, like he’s about to putt at the Masters and needs the crowd to hush.
My eyes go blurry as the upside-down time—03:02—disappears from the watch face. Does he have some kind of high-powered magnet installed in the walls? This can’t really be his doing, can it? Then, an inverted 4 appears on the screen. Upside down, it looks like an h . This is how I used to impress the boy who sat next to me in algebra class, showing him how to spell out crude words on our TI-83 calculators. One of the only things I knew how to spell was boobs , which excited him way more than it did me.
“You’re … writing an h ?”
“Yes!” Roland exclaims, after a pause. “Sorry for the delay. I have to go back and forth between your wrist and the speaker.”
Did he rig my watch in the middle of the night? No, I would have felt it. I’m too light a sleeper. How would he even know how to reprogram an old Timex anyway? There are probably only a few people left on earth who could do this.
The h disappears, and it’s replaced by an upside down 3 . An E . The numbers keep appearing—two sevens and then a zero.
H-E-L-L-O.
“Hello?” I say dumbly.
“Hi,” Roland says. “That’s me. I’m doing that. Neat, right?”
My arms fall limply to my side. The kitchen shrinks around me. And then it starts spinning. I struggle to get my words out as I place a hand on the island for stability.
“How are you doing this, Roland? Really. Tell me the truth.”
“I did already. I’m dead, Adam. And you’re going to write my book before people find out.”
I still can’t believe him. The dead don’t speak. I gave up thinking that a long time ago. But I also don’t believe my eyes anymore. There’s no way someone could remote control my watch. It’s got no Wi-Fi, no Bluetooth, no nothing. I need to lie down.
“Wh-what happened to you, Roland?” I stutter.
“I—no, wait, hold up the watch again,” he instructs me.
It feels like a dumbbell as I lift it back up to my face. I’m not sure where I am anymore. Am I still asleep on the plane ride to Los Angeles? Am I the one who’s dead? Did I die after that dinner with Paul? What was in that Bordeaux?
The number 1 shows up.
“I,” I say out loud, translating.
“I’ll need your help for this one,” Roland says, a moment later, sounding pleased with himself, like a street magician about to hustle me. “Cover the bottom edge of the screen with your thumb.”
It takes an absurd amount of effort to raise my free hand to the lip of the watch face. An upside-down 3 appears again, but partially obscured, it looks like an F .
“Thanks, Adam, and now please remove your thumb so I can finish.”
He—I catch myself thinking it’s really Roland doing this—keeps spelling out a phrase: next, there’s an E , and then two L’ s.
I-F-E-L-L.
“I fell,” I say out loud. “I fell. You fell ?”
“Trust me, it’s a hell of a way to go.”
And then I fall, too, aware of my knees buckling beneath me but unable to stop myself from crumpling to the floor.