Roland
ROLAND
I see darkness and then I see light and then I am gulping down air, trying to swallow it faster than my lungs can extract the oxygen. Above me is cloudless Utah sky. I’m alive. I knew it. Somewhere, underneath all the nonsense about controlling appliances in my Malibu house, I knew it had to be a dream I was having on the cusp of death.
“Roland, don’t move,” a familiar voice orders from somewhere down by my feet. Feet. I have feet . I wriggle my toes just to make sure.
“We’ve got a helicopter on the way,” the voice continues. Who is that?
It’s not Adam, is it? No, that doesn’t make any sense. Is Adam Gallagher someone I dreamed up, or is he a real person who somehow got dislodged from my memory? I try to think back. There was something about a book, but I’m not working on a book, am I? Soon, everything will go back to normal. A team of medical superstars will sort me out; my doctors could put Humpty Dumpty back together again if they had to. I can recover just in time to start filming Crash 10 . This one’s coming out in IMAX 3D. The premium ticket sales alone will deliver the most massive opening weekend numbers the studio has ever seen.
“I’m alive?” I ask the voice. “I’m not an invisible ball?”
Whoever’s standing over me laughs. “You’re banged-up, but you’re going to be OK.”
Yes, I can feel it now. Pain everywhere. A few broken bones and some frostbitten fingers aren’t the end of the world. Crag Dynamite gets beaten to a pulp every movie; I can survive a little tumble down a mountain. I’ve survived worse.
“There’s just one problem, Roland …”
Is that? No . Against the voice’s advice, I crane my neck up to see my agent, Matt, standing there in nothing but a white T-shirt with a big red X embroidered across the front of it, clutching his phone in his hand. Isn’t he freezing? How did he get all the way out here without a parka? And why would he be the first person to the scene?
“… if you’ve been under all this snow,” Matt continues, “then who’s been emailing me about writing a book? And why did they have me send an ‘Adam Gallagher’ to your house?”
“I, uh—”
“No, you don’t need to worry about it. I’ll take care of this,” Matt says, cutting me off. He lifts his cell to his ear.
I try to speak but my mouth has been glued shut; the best I can manage is a frantic series of muted, guttural syllables. As the phone rings, Matt’s pupils morph into two glowing red orbs to match the X on his chest. They look like hot coals burning in his skull. I want to scream, but I can’t.
“Hi, I’d like to report an intruder,” Matt says into the receiver, and then he recites my address. He listens for a moment, then adds, “Yes, you can shoot the trespasser on sight. In fact, my client would prefer it.”
Adam. I need to get to Adam. Forget Crash 10 . I need to warn him the police are on their way. I need to apologize for what I said. “Donut boy” can’t be the last words he ever hears from me. I try to stand but Matt puts a snowy boot on my chest and pushes me back to the ground, knocking the breath out of my battered body.
“Don’t worry, Roland,” he says. “I’ll take care of everything from here.”
I thrash my aching limbs but it’s no use. Matt’s boot has become a block of concrete compressing my rib cage. “You’re not getting away from me, Roland,” he growls, his voice multithroated and demonic, his eyes so searing-hot now they melt the snow around us. “We have more movies to make.”
And the darkness returns.
I wake up in the study. Still no fingers, still no toes. It’s the only nightmare I’ve had since that first day, when I wore myself ragged letting Adam into my place. But I wasn’t even tired before this one, was I? I try to retrace what happened: I remember Adam storming out of the room, I left the record player speakers to try to go after him, and then … and then what? If there wasn’t a warning for this one, not even some kind of interior low-fuel light, that scares me even more. Are they going to keep coming back?
This one felt different from the first, too. So much worse. The anxieties were closer to the surface. The fears were more real, the immediate regret I felt after saying what I said to Adam somehow intermingled with a future in which Matt makes me do Crash until I need a walker. Worst of all, my agent was attacking me, not the other way around.
I sluggishly float over to check the time on the desk clock: 2 a.m. The whole house is quiet. Adam must have already gone to bed, but not before spending some time sulking first, my brittle little ghostwriter. He’s not just a stenographer to me, to answer his question too late, and to no one. This sounds gay—which is fitting, I guess, because I am gay—but I have cherished our time together, more than I’ve told him. That cherry changed everything. I’ll never get back the life I could have lived, but with Adam, I at least get to taste it. He’s not just a convenient body, it’s his fucking brilliance I can’t do without.
Even with the shallowness of what I’ve given him, I see him at night, tearing pages out and rearranging them on his desk before taping them together and stuffing them back into his Moleskine. Against all odds, he has somehow written the book I said I wanted. Almost. And he wasn’t content to stop there. If he didn’t have such an uncanny sense for sniffing out the things I’ve left unsaid, he wouldn’t have gotten frustrated with me, and I wouldn’t have lashed out the way I did, hitting him where I knew it would hurt the most.
God, I hope he didn’t leave. He wouldn’t have done that, right? I start floating out of the study, toward the kitchen, trying to suppress the panic.
Before tonight, I hadn’t given much thought to whether there might be something after my current state. In some movies, ghosts haunt crumbling Victorian mansions for centuries, wandering the halls in their petticoats. Why shouldn’t I get to hang around indefinitely? Over the past week, I’ve been puzzling over a way for Adam to have access to this house after they declare me dead, so we can continue to enjoy each other as long as we want. I’ll have to send him away in a week to handle things in Alta, but could I set it up so that he can administrate my estate? Could I sell this place to him for a dollar? No, Matt would think I was getting scammed and shut it down. There must be some arrangement I could make. Then we could hang out here forever. He could still have living lovers if he really wanted, so long as it didn’t come at the expense of our time together. Maybe the trusted ones could even join in?
But I’m worried we have more than just the looming snow melt to worry about now. This new nightmare was less like dipping my toes into some pool of turbid Georgia pond water and more like falling into a deep ocean. I felt an … edge … down in those depths, a limit that I can sense even now at the horizon of my perception, and it terrifies me. Will I become something else after this—if there is an after this? Will I be nothing? An absence? A spark in the void? And when will that happen? Can I stop it, or even slow it down, if the bursts of life I’ve been sharing with Adam are no longer enough to keep the bad dreams at bay? Has there been a countdown clock this entire time?
If I don’t quell those questions, though, I’ll get lost in them. I’ve got to keep floating. I’ve got to find Adam. If he’s still here. I emerge from the hallway into the kitchen and head toward the guest wing, only to stop when I hear the sound of water. Is that the Jacuzzi? Yes, it sounds like the gurgling of the jets. The sliding door to the courtyard is open. Adam?
In the time that he’s been living here, I’ve never seen him use the pool; when he’s not with me, he’s working. I’m glad he didn’t go anywhere, at least. But him being out there alone in the middle of the night is worrisome.
I float out into the night and sure enough, Adam Gallagher is sitting in the hot tub, eyes closed, blond hair matted down over his forehead, his pale skin turned lobster-red from the heat. Even though I’ve grown quite fond of him, he can still be such a mopey sight. Sometimes I see him look just as sad while he’s brushing his teeth. This time, though, he’s got a good reason to be in his feelings. I was a dick. I wouldn’t even talk to a production assistant like that. And he was right. As hurtful as it is to admit it to myself, I was a “hack” in the end, and it’s time he knows why.
“Hi,” I say out of the stereo speakers embedded in the side of the hot tub—and Adam nearly leaps out of it.
“Jesus!” he yells, but then eases himself back down into the water, clutching a hand to his chest to calm his racing heart. “You’ve got to warn me before you talk out of something new.”
“Sorry,” I say. “You weren’t wearing the shower speaker …”
“It’s OK,” he says, without thinking, then seems to remember that he’s mad at me. “I mean, it’s not OK.”
“What are you still doing up?” I ask him, trying to build up the courage to apologize. “Shouldn’t you be huddled over your desk writing the next great American memoir? The Roland Rogers Story ?”
“I probably would be working,” he says, scowling. “If you weren’t stonewalling me.”
“Maybe you should throw a Stonewall Riot,” I joke, pleased to have pulled off an in-group reference—and even though Adam’s still pissed at me, he laughs anyway through clenched teeth.
“That’s exactly the kind of joke that would get you canceled if you were still alive,” he says, shaking his head.
“Do you want to come inside?” I nudge him, finding it hard to utter the words now that I’m here. “There’s still some Cherry Garcia in the freezer.”
Adam doesn’t respond. Through the steam rising off the water, I can’t tell whether the moisture gathering beneath his eyelids is sweat or the start of tears.
“Adam? Are you OK?”
He inhales sharply, like he’s trying to hold back the emotion. “Honestly, Roland, this whole thing has been a lot to process.”
Seeing him in pain finally shakes the words loose. “Look, Adam, I’m sorry. I was cruel. I shouldn’t have said what I said—”
“No, I was mean, too,” he interrupts me. “I didn’t mean to call you a hack. It’s not just that, it’s …”
He trails off, craning his neck up to peer through the palm fronds above us. The night sky is cloudless and calm. This is why I wanted to live out here in Malibu, far from the light pollution of the city. If the mood between us were different, I’d say something like, “Who’s stonewalling now?” but I let the silence stretch out instead. I’m just glad he’s still here, speaking to me.
“You know,” he finally says, returning his gaze to the water, “I spent the first twenty-one years of my life being told that only my tiny little religion knew the truth. Everyone else was wrong about everything: not just the atheists, but the Muslims, the Hindus, and the Jews. Other Christians, too. On a planet of billions , we thought only a few million Mormons were right. Sometimes I wonder if being raised like that just broke me in an irreparable way. Like, what if I’m fucked-up forever?”
I remember some of the details about Mormonism from Sodomite , but I never quite understood the intensity of that isolation. I was raised as religious as any Georgia boy, in a Baptist church where I heard plenty of Bible-thumping rhetoric about homosexuality. Everyone around me believed that the AIDS crisis was a plague sent from God to punish the sinners. I never bought into the ideology myself. Mama must have shielded me from the worst of it, always making sure I felt safe in our private moments. But the prevailing atmosphere was enough to scare me away from naming my own feelings—my “too muchness”—until I got to college. Adam makes Mormonism sound like a pressure cooker by comparison, with no relief, not even inside his own family.
“You never questioned it growing up?” I ask him, genuinely curious. He spent time around other kids, right? I know Salt Lake City is deeply Mormon, but there are other people there, too. Immigrants, craft beer–drinking skiers. He must have had some window into life outside the Latter-day Saint bubble.
“I mean, when you’re a little kid, you can’t imagine your parents lying to you,” he says. “Then when you get older and realize other people think differently, you ask your parents about it, and they tell you it’s dangerous to listen to the ‘non-members.’”
“But you were gay,” I point out, too eagerly. “That didn’t make you question what you were being told?”
“No, I wasn’t gay, I was ‘tempted,’” he clarifies, lifting his hands out of the Jacuzzi to make scare quotes as he speaks. “I ‘struggled’ with ‘same-sex attraction’ the same way alcoholics struggle with vodka. And it was such a taboo subject that I never told anyone until … well, you know the rest. You read the book.”
He makes it sound almost like Mormonism saw it as a mental health problem—something to be diagnosed and treated in a twelve-step program. In my world, there was talk of praying it away, paired with plenty of outright fire-and-brimstone stuff, but being gay was more like a demon to be exorcised. There was a brutal simplicity to that. This? This sounds like a mind pretzel. I hate that he was ever caught in it.
But before I can express my sympathy, Adam adds, “I’m sorry I said mine was the only book you’ve ever read, by the way.”
He has nothing to apologize for. Not after how I responded. His barb was closer to the truth than he realized.
“I’ve also read Green Eggs and Ham ,” I say, opting for self-effacement, which doesn’t come especially easy to me.
Adam laughs, then runs a wet hand backward through his hair. “The point is I already fell off an existential cliff once in my life,” he says. “Everyone told me that air was water and water was air, and then I grew up and I had to breathe, you know? I had to fucking breathe .”
“Yeah,” is all I can say, feeling how insufficient it is. He’s the writer here, always so much more articulate than I could ever be, but all I have in my current form are words. Never have I wished for arms more than now. I want to hold him.
“And now, being with you,” he says, “it feels like everything is getting upended all over again. Like, what’s even happening, Roland? Why am I the one who gets proof of life after death? I was trying to move past all that stuff.”
Christ, I hope I didn’t scar the kid all over again. I wanted to give Adam money, stability, and more recently, as many orgasms as possible, not some mental albatross he’ll have to carry with him.
“I’m still getting used to this, too, if that’s any comfort,” I tell him. “I never thought I’d be inside my hot tub’s sound system.”
He chuckles, then makes a little splash in the water, swirling a hand around in circles as he talks. “I already felt isolated before, Roland,” he says. “Not at home in the Church or in the gay community. And once this is over, I’m going to be the only one who knows about this. About you. About us . I have to live with something no one else will understand. I’m right back to where I started. Maybe worse. I can’t even write about this.”
In my fantasy of Adam somehow coming back to Malibu, I didn’t think about him continuing to work. He wouldn’t have to if I quietly transferred enough money to him. But obviously he’d want to. Radical as it may be in this town, some people still see writing as an art form.
“What were you working on?” I ask him. “Before all this.”
“Oh, it was a detective novel,” he says, shifting his weight now to get out of the path of the Jacuzzi jets. “I came up with this private investigator named David Harrington, a grumpy old leather bear who solved mysteries. It was fun, but it had nothing to say.”
“That’s a clever idea, though. It could be an indie movie.”
“Yes, clever is exactly what it was,” Adam deflects. “A cute story, but it didn’t feel like there was any reason to tell it. I don’t think my agent even read the whole thing. That’s what I’ve struggled with since Sodomite .”
“What, your agent?”
I can definitely relate to that. But Adam clarifies.
“The reason. The reason for any of this.” At that, he gestures out toward the mouth of the courtyard, where the space opens up to the sea. The jets reach the end of their timer and the silence of the night envelops us.
“Does there have to be a reason?” I ask him. “Isn’t living enough?”
“I don’t know if it is,” he responds. “I’m trying to figure that out. To be honest, I don’t know if I expected to get this old.”
The admission surprises me. He’s a decade younger than me. And even though he looks much older than I did when I was alive—in large part due to his limited means, and his obvious lack of a skincare regimen—he’s still got a lot of time ahead of him. He’s not the one currently turning into a popsicle under a Utah snowbank.
“What, thirty-nine? I hate to break it to you, Adam, but the human lifespan is a little longer than that these days. Play your cards right, eat your leafy greens, and you might even make it to forty-two.”
Adam smiles, but only ruefully. He swirls another circle in the water with an index finger, then reverses direction, clearly choking back emotion. “The first time I kissed a man, I thought I was going to hell. I was at BYU. I met up with this guy off Craigslist at one of the only bars in Provo—this dive called City Limits. We made out in the back alley because I was worried someone from school would see me, even though no good Mormon should have been inside. And it felt so amazing to finally let myself have the one thing I had always wanted. But even with my tongue down this guy’s throat, some part of me was thinking, ‘What if God really will damn me for this?’ Do you know how horrifying that is, Roland? To believe that there’s a being with an infinite capacity for love, but who would banish you precisely because of how you love? I was twenty-two then, only a year off my mission. I was convinced I had doomed myself—like, literally doomed myself. I had my doubts, but all that programming runs deep. I didn’t want to make it to twenty-three. I never got to the point where I made an active plan, but for a time, I thought about it every day. Then I met my first boyfriend. And slowly, slowly , he eased me out of the panic.”
I don’t recall any of this from Sodomite . In my mostly hazy memories, the book began with him and that boyfriend getting caught kissing. In medias res, as he put it. “Did you write about that?” I ask him, uncertain of what to say in a situation like this. It’s a lot to take in.
“I mean, I alluded to it,” Adam says, “but I wanted to strike a resilient tone in the book. I didn’t want to give the Church any more power over me than it already had. And it worked to my advantage, I guess. The media loved the story of the defiant gay Mormon. They didn’t need to hear all that weepy stuff.”
I am at once honored that he thinks of me as a confidante and ashamed that I haven’t matched his vulnerability with my own. He’s dusted off his darkest corners and in return, I’ve locked my doors. I pause, listening to the dull roar of waves in the distance, then settle for the simplest response possible: “I’m sorry, Adam.”
“Well, I got through it.” He sighs. “I wrote the book. I spoke out. I had a reason. That reason kept me alive. But after a few years, it felt like I had served my purpose. And yet I was still … here. Decades I never expected to see were spread out before me, and I didn’t know how to fill them, or why I should even want to. I kept writing mostly because I had written, not because I had something to say. Even now, I don’t think I’ve figured out what I’m here for. I did what I needed to do. What story could I possibly share that’s more important than the one I’ve already told? Am I supposed to write about living alone with my cat?”
I think about how I filled my own decades. How many movies was I in before Crash ? It must have been at least twenty. I had to check my own IMDb page sometimes to jog my memory because a few of them I forgot as soon as they wrapped. I think I once played a janitor who was moonlighting as a saxophonist. Not all my films have been winners. If there’s one thing I’ve learned from the movies, it’s that sometimes people just need a place to sit for two hours and get outside their heads. Cinema can be high art, but it doesn’t have to be. Adults need bedtime stories, too.
Adam doesn’t have to keep writing books as meaningful as Sodomite , especially when he’s got my memoir to work on.
“Not everything you write has to be important,” I tell him. “You don’t always need some overarching reason. A story can just be two people learning things about themselves. My Dinner with Andre was about best friends talking over quail. Lost in Translation was about two lonely souls doing karaoke in Tokyo. Not everything has to have huge stakes.”
“Says the man who’s always in movies where the world is going to get blown up.”
“Yeah, well, even in those dogshit movies, people found stuff to connect with. They got invested in Crag and Anders being brothers from opposite sides of the tracks, and in Tad’s dumb redemption arc. The audience is looking for a mirror. They want to care; you don’t have to force them to.”
“I guess I did care a little when Nick Nolte blew himself up,” he coyly admits. “But maybe that’s because of what happened after …”
He’s leaving an opening for us to kiss and make up, and usually I’d be eager to take it. We could turn the Jacuzzi jets back on. I have a few ideas about how we could use them. But if time really is running out, I need him to hear me.
“Your fight may be over, Adam,” I tell him, “but you’re still a storyteller. So, tell stories.”
He exhales, his breath mixing with the steam coming off the Jacuzzi. He closes those big brown eyes, and opens them again, the sadness replaced with a weary resolve and, if I’m not mistaken, the faintest glimmer of hope.
“Starting with your story?” he asks.
I know what I have to do now. I know what I have to say.
“Starting with my story.”
“The full story?”
“The full story.”