Roland
ROLAND
I ’m dropping down the hatch of a tank into the turret basket, slinging my assault rifle over my back. My dad is in trouble. His face is pale. Firestorm’s poison is going to reach his heart soon if we don’t find the antidote.
“Pops, stay with me, Pops,” I plead, kneeling by his side. “You’re not dying on me. Not today.”
Figuring out how to operate the home theater was one of the first things I did after mastering the simpler devices. Before Adam got here, movies were one of the few things that could stop my mind wandering from subject to subject. Watching Crash Street 6 with him is a departure from my usual evening fare. I’ve mostly been revisiting old screwball comedies. It’s a shame the Golden Globes weren’t around when Bringing Up Baby came out; Cary Grant deserves some kind of trophy for that one. But yesterday, after The Dynamite Chronicles came up in that last interview with Adam, I suggested we watch it in my screening room. He seemed like he could use a break for an evening, especially after the way that conversation went.
On a practical level, though, it’s more comfortable for him to watch it here than it is to prop his phone up on the nightstand, which I’ve spotted him doing several nights this week. He dozed off in the middle of Crash 3 , but I don’t blame him. For some reason, the director of that one thought we needed to spend a lot of time on Crag’s home life.
“There isn’t any antidote, son,” Nick Nolte as Tad Dynamite is saying, coughing and sputtering between the words. “I just needed you to have something to believe in. Otherwise, you’d never have stopped Firestorm in time. You’d be … too worried about your old man to save the world.”
Adam chuckles at the cliché-ridden dialogue from his leather recliner. I remember exchanging a private look with Nick when we were filming this scene. Even though we didn’t say anything out loud to each other, the gist was that we used to be proper actors, and now we were doing this shit. Our faces were doing everything right, but the words we were given to say were garbage.
Nick—or Tad, I should say—coughs, and flecks of corn syrup—or “blood,” rather—stain his scraggly white beard. Still, he keeps a hand gripped tight on the tank’s wheel lever, determined to steer forward to the titanium wall surrounding General Firestorm’s fortress. A lot of people think this is when Crash Street jumped the shark, but I’d argue it did that in the first entry. Hell, the franchise opened with Crag skydiving into the passenger seat of a convertible barreling down the Pacific Coast Highway.
“We’re gonna finish this thing together, Pops,” I say onscreen, in my best Crag Dynamite growl. “Please hang in there. Do it for me.”
Adam, unmoved by the touching scene playing out in front of him, casually sips his drink, sending a minor jolt through me. For some reason, his drinking doesn’t have quite the same effect on me as his eating does, but it’s still a pleasant tingle. These first two weeks, I’ve felt no obligation to tell Adam about the secondhand sensation. It’s the only form of pleasure I have access to; I didn’t want him to get weird about it, and it’s not like he had to participate. He has to eat anyway. But the better I get to know him, the guiltier I feel about not mentioning anything, especially because his own need seems to be enhancing the experience.
I wonder if he suspects something anyway. The other day, we—I mean, he, but sometimes it feels like we—were eating chocolates from Diane Kron, and he said he was full, but then, with the slightest hint of mischief in his voice, he offered, “I’ll have one more for you if it’ll make you happy.” And then he popped one of those truffles with the whipped filling into his mouth, and, well, “happy” was an understatement.
“No, son, you need to do something for me,” Tad is saying.
“What, Pops?”
“Say goodbye.”
I’m currently inside a small portable shower speaker Adam rigged up to hang around his neck. He found it in one of the guest bathrooms, and lately we’ve been using it so he can cart me around the house when we’re not doing interviews. Not only does it let me speak to him in more places, getting toted around has the bonus benefit of being faster than floating. I told him I’d give him privacy while he works, and while he’s in his room, and I’ve mostly honored that, but otherwise I’ve been hanging out in it. It’s no body, but it’ll have to do. The only trick is keeping it charged. A handful of times, he’s gotten a little alarmed when I stop responding, only to startle when my voice comes from somewhere else in the room moments later.
“This is the part I was telling you about, Adam,” I say, keeping my voice low. “The dialogue’s nothing to write home about, but watch what Nick does here.”
“I know I wasn’t the best father,” Tad says, wheezing. Tears form at the corner of his eyes, but don’t fall. The wrinkles on Nick’s face look as deep as canyons. His lips tremble as he croaks out the rest of the monologue like he’s gargling cotton balls. “I know I wasn’t around very much, Crag. Martha will never forgive me for that. But I taught you how to survive. I taught you how to fight. And I taught you that when we go up against scum like Firestorm, we fucking win . So if you can’t do me the dignity of saying goodbye, at least let me go out with a bang.”
“No, Pops,” Crag says, and I’m not nearly as proud of my own line delivery. “I love you, Pops.”
Adam’s willing to grant me one of his rare compliments. “Honestly, I think Nick Nolte is overselling it a little. But you’re really good in this scene. Much better than this execrable writing deserves.”
“Movies are more than just words, you know,” I tease him. “They have these things called images now, too. They even move .”
“Yes, well some pictures aren’t worth a thousand words,” Adam says. “I’d value this one at maybe … five?”
I want him to take another sip of his cocktail before I have to ask him nicely, but I try to keep focused on our repartee instead. In the rare hours that Adam’s not trying to mine me for juicy publishable secrets or making chapter outlines in his room, he can be stimulating company. Spend enough time in this town and you can forget what it’s like to be around people who think about things beside their net worth or their IMDb STARmeter ranking. And this is the most relaxed I’ve seen my ghostwriter by far. That notebook of his, which might as well be superglued to his hands, isn’t even in the room with us. I didn’t know he could survive without it.
“Cave paintings are older than human language, you know,” I say, recalling a fact I once recited when I played an archaeologist. “Sorry, Adam, but people got by before writing, and they’ll manage after the robots replace you.”
“What about when the machines replace you ?” he fires back. “They brought Laurence Olivier back from the dead with CGI, they’ll probably just use deepfakes of you to make Crash Street 37. ”
The joke hits closer to home than I expect. With the contract I signed, I wouldn’t be surprised if the studio had the right to resurrect me with a computer and turn me into one of those eerie-looking lifelike cartoons. When that happens, will I still be here, alone, watching it after whoever buys my house goes to sleep? And who can afford it anyway? If I still had hands, I’d only need one to count the number of people in Hollywood with this kind of money. If Leo decides to come back to Malibu, I swear to God, I’ll haunt him and his parade of girlfriends out of it. I let the movie wash that possibility away.
Onscreen, Crag’s sidekick Kitty is telling him over the radio that they’re only “three klicks out from that titanium wall.” Crag and Tad are exchanging knowing looks, forming a plan out of nothing. A splash of color comes back to Tad’s face as he lets out that hoarse, guttural Nick Nolte chuckle.
“Do you still have that micro-nuke, son?” he says.
Crag nods, reaching into his tactical vest and pulling out the “micro-nuke,” a grenade-sized superweapon that was the MacGuffin in Crash 4 . “Are you sure you want to do this, Pops?”
“Pictures being older than words doesn’t mean anything!” Adam interrupts, playfully half shouting at me. “That doesn’t make pictures better!”
He seems so loose now. Almost silly. His tumbler is only half-drained, so I know he’s not drunk. He may just be … having fun? It’s rare to see him like this. He seems hungry for it, like he hasn’t done anything for himself in years. I’d believe it. I wish I could give him the compassion he can’t seem to give himself.
“A lot of things are better because they’re older,” I tell him.
“Like what?” he says, that sly tone returning.
“Like wine,” I rattle off. “Like a violin. Like whiskey aged in a barrel.”
From my position in the speaker, I swear I can hear his heart pound in his chest.
“Like movie stars?” he asks.
Adam Gallagher is flirting with me. He’s made a handful of comments before—little remarks about my appearance and my acting—but it’s been hard to disentangle his professional register from his personal one. There’s no denying it now, though. The evidence is thumping against the casing of the speaker.
As the score swells, Crag hands the weapon to Tad, then reaches a single arm up to grip the lip of the open tank hatch. His bicep—my bicep—bulges conspicuously as he hangs from the edge, suspended in air.
“Kitty, tell everyone to fall back,” he says into his earpiece. “I’m thinking my dad’s gonna knock on the front door.”
“I think I aged pretty well,” I admit to Adam. I can’t say the same for Nick. But at least he’s still alive. He can touch the people he loves. He can hold someone, the way I wish I could hold someone. A particular someone.
“Hey, Pops,” Crag says.
“Yeah?” Tad responds.
“Shove it up Firestorm’s ass for me.”
“Attaboy.”