The movement is unmistakable.
Even at the end of the cinderblock hall where the fluorescents don’t reach, I know it’s him. He tumbles in slow motion. There is a soft jingling as he shifts and rearranges himself, replaces himself. He is mis-angled and mangled. I cannot tell if he is moving closer or further away.
I catch a confirmatory flash of the black grinning half-face crooked beneath a shattered elbow and my voice rises from my throat high and reedy, along with my stomach, to ask if he’s him. But of course he is. Just as I am me. And twenty years later, he and I are together once more in the belly of Malworth Hall for the Performing Arts.
Did I know when I came here I was coming for this? Did every dream portend this moment? Or has it been happening my entire life? What has my life even been with this moving photograph looming forever above me?
By any account, Sean Teagues was not a good actor. He was desperately self-conscious on stage, wooden as a two by four. All it took was one stilted monologue in our first Intro to Scenework class at Ramheart University and you could practically hear the whoosh of relief from the guys. There were only so many roles to go around and we were all sizing each other up. This gangly boy would not compete with us during our four years together. Not with me or Josh or Stuart, at least.
Sean had this thing on stage where he would never blink. It didn’t matter if you were doing Shakespeare or Sondheim, it felt like he was going to blow a hole through you with his gaze. He seemed to bring no life experience to a scene, played no emotional truth. Had he ever loved anyone? Had he ever lost? Been hurt or betrayed or challenged in any way? He spit a lot, too.
And yet, no matter how clear it was that Sean didn’t have what it takes, Professor Frock never let on. She critiqued him, sure. Diagnosed him with a “heightened performance nervosity.” But she never stopped pushing. Frock spoke of a scene as a generous exchange, with the ultimate goal being disappearance, into oneself and into another. No one wanted to disappear into Sean, and more than one student was chastised for audibly groaning when being paired with that perpetually surprised brow, those spittle-flecked lips.
And yet, Sean never seemed to notice. As self-conscious as he was on stage, he was oblivious off of it. He didn’t realize he had already been cast in our caste. A supernumerary. A ghost in the wings.
Sean couldn’t hold character and words and intentions and emotions and backstory and inner life in a single moment. But if you divorced him of all those ingredients, as happened twice a week in Intro to Movement, you bore witness to something else entirely. He wasn’t just limber, he was double-jointed. He could stretch and fold himself into any shape, transitioning from one to another as fluid and frictionless as broth poured in a bowl. Our movement instructor loved to shout out challenges for him.
You are a penguin!
You are a proud tree, felled by wanton greed!
You are an automobile in a trash compactor!
This last one set the class on edge. I can still remember Kelly’s gasp as Sean’s arm popped backwards and wrapped behind his back. Moment by moment he became smaller, bulging with untold energy, ready to explode outward as invisible pressures shifted inside of him. By the end he was a snarled hunk of metal. You could have picked him up and put him in a duffel bag. And our senior year, after Sean was cast as the lead in Ramheart University’s production of an obscure 17th century commedia dell’arte play, that’s exactly what we did.
Every theater has a ghost. The Royal Shakespeare Theater has the Perfumed Lady. John Wilkes Booth still climbs the back stairs of Ford’s Theater. The Huguang Huiguan Opera House was literally built on top of an ancient burial ground. At Ramheart, we had Charlie Shank.
Charlie was a former Ramheart student felled by a poorly secured sandbag. After his death, he could often be seen seated several rows back on house right during mainstage performances. You knew it was him from the navy-blue flat cap angled atop his head and the unlit cigarette pursed in his lips. None of us ever saw him, of course, but that didn’t make him any less real.
One particular yarn that had been rewoven over the years involved a Senior named Derek Berkenson. Derek attended Ramheart in the seventies. He was a lighting guy. There was a cramped catwalk above the seats where he used to spend hours getting high and adjusting Fresnels. As Derek told it, one night after everyone had retired to their dorms to party, he came face to face with Charlie Shank on the catwalk. A black swirl of smoke hovered above the plywood sheets that kept the metal grid from biting into your knees. A hint of a face peered through the haze, framed by that unmistakable flat cap. Everyone wrote it off to the dimebag ditchweed Derek was so fond of, but he swore.
Derek’s encounter with Charlie gave birth to a Ramheart tradition. Students would get ripped on the cheapest, most regrettable swill imaginable and then visit Malworth Hall in the wee hours of the night. They’d hunt for Charlie through the cinderblock halls that crisscrossed beneath the mainstage through the green room, dressing rooms, the costume lab. They’d hunt the back halls, the stage manager’s booth, the sound and lighting booths, professors’ offices. And naturally, they’d hunt above the stage on that cramped little catwalk. The faculty didn’t seem to mind until one group painted a pentagram on the stage floor. After that, no one was allowed in Malworth after hours.
Don’t ask me why watching Sean contort himself into a tiny box made me think of Charlie Shank. All I know is the connection was made. And that connection lay dormant for nearly four years. It finally lit up our Senior year, after the cast list was posted for our final mainstage production. I still remember Josh’s face, enflamed with humiliation. There was murder in his eyes.
But we weren’t murderers. We were college students.
Josh, Stuart, Kelly, Aoki and I had established primacy the year prior. We were always cast in the best parts. The other students fought over our table scraps. It was unspoken. Understood. An inviolate law. And then Professor Frock broke it.
The rest of us were cast in good roles. But Josh, the leading man, our leading man, was left to play a hodgepodge of bit parts. Maybe it was retribution for his casual auditioning style, his tardiness and truancy. The faculty at Ramheart weren’t above such petty maneuvers. But the fact was—a fact I would never in a million years have shared with Josh—Sean was perfect for the part of Harlequin.
Frock borrowed freely from Harlequin’s many iterations over history—servant, lover, demon, clown. She translated the play from its native Italian, and in doing so, removed all dialogue for the role, a canny move that some of us believed had been purposeful, to give Sean the best shot at the role, which consisted of a dazzling array of exaggerated comical gestures and daring acrobatics. Watching Frock work with Sean, the two of them trying out different gags and stunts, was exhilarating. Sean was goofy and graceful, flipping and cartwheeling and pratfalling with ease, unbound by the laws of nature. I found myself making excuses to do my homework in the auditorium, just to watch him perform.
The effect was complete when we had our first costume fitting. A jingling preceded Sean’s entry and we all turned as one. He wore a red and black unitard covered in tessellated triangles and tiny bronze bells. Most of us wore powdered faces, but Sean wore a black neoprene mask. It covered the top half of his face, with bushy surprised eyebrows over beady eyeholes. The nose was prominent, if not outright obscene, and his top lip jutted forth stubbornly where the mask’s edge met his mouth. There was something vaguely menacing about it all, but I couldn’t tell if it was the mask itself or the lower third of Sean’s face, which, when divorced from his dull, gullible eyes, made it look like he might sink his teeth into you at the slightest provocation.
I can’t exactly remember when Josh first brought up Charlie Shank. It might have been at lunch, with Sean perched un-self-consciously next to us eating a tuna fish sandwich. It might have been at rehearsal during our warmup exercises. It doesn’t matter now, of course. What matters is that Josh planted the seeds we all would water over the course of several weeks.
It started with an innocent question. Had any of us felt a cold spot in the stage left stairwell? I noticed the faintest flicker of skin under Josh’s eye, and Stuart, being the eternal “Yes, and” actor, jumped in. Before you knew it, we were all agreeing that yes, yes, actually, we had indeed felt a little chill in that stairwell, even though we had no idea why we were agreeing. All we knew was that Sean wasn’t in on it, and that was enough for us.
After that it became a game of sorts. Aiko and Kelly lost pieces of their costumes only to find them mysteriously in the prop cabinet. I caught a whiff of tobacco smoke near the cold spot. Stuart felt a tap on his back when he was sure he was alone backstage. These were all casually introduced, slipped in between our insults and our flirtations, our dreams big and small. But we only ever talked about them when Sean was in earshot. How far could we push it? How outrageous could we get before he caught on?
But he never caught on. Not even when Josh introduced the next phase of the game. It was a week from opening and we were all smoking out by the loading dock. It was perfectly timed, a thing of beauty. As Sean rounded the corner, Josh flowed naturally from whatever story he was telling into a tale of the flat cap he found on the costume shop mannequin. Sean, who normally skulked past us to get to his stretching exercises, slowed just enough.
Josh recounted pinning a small note to the cap, and by the end of the night the note was gone. And then the pièce de résistance, he asked with a hint of anger if we were fucking with him. When we all vigorously shook our heads, he turned to Sean as if just noticing him, and asked if he was fucking with him. Sean put out his hands like no no, he would never do such a thing. Josh stubbed out his cigarette and turned for the theater. When Sean called out to ask what was on the note, you could practically feel the hook going through his lip. Josh turned around and answered. Are you Charlie?
We all shivered as one, only Sean’s shiver was real. Josh blurted out his idea as though it just came to him, as though it hadn’t been hovering under the warmth of an incubator light for the last several weeks. Opening night. We’d sneak back in. We’d have us a good old-fashioned Charlie hunt. Josh looked at Sean as if weighing his mettle. Asked if he was in. Sean’s weak chin dropped nearly to his chest. After nearly four years of college, he hadn’t just gotten a lead role.
He’d arrived.
It sounded like good fun, scaring the shit out of Sean. It sounds mean now, but back then, well, it was mean. We were mean. I hate to admit it, but that’s all this ever was. Petty spite and jealousy that originated in Josh and metastasized through our group. We wanted to put Sean in his place, to remind him who he was. Who we were. What were we thinking? We weren’t. We weren’t thinking.
And yet, it was my thinking that finally set the plan into motion. It was that time in movement class, Sean self-compacted on the floor, all of us riveted. The connection lit up. Even at his height, you could zip him into a bag. Leave it in the dressing room. All he had to do was remain still.
And that’s exactly what he did, waiting nearly a half hour for Security to do their carefully choreographed sweep of the building, starting in the basement hall, shining their flashlights in all the dark spaces, moving through the space until they were certain no one was there.
We were already tipsy when Sean came to the door to let us in, so it shouldn’t come as a surprise that we lost every ounce of our shit when we saw what he was wearing. Why the fuck had he put on his costume? For a Charlie hunt? It didn’t matter. It was perfection. He passed his fervor on to us like a flu, and soon we too were tossing on our raiments and our robes. Kelly’s seduction began right then and there, as she changed into her costume, asking Sean to help zip up her dress. Josh had persuaded her that it wouldn’t work without the whiff of sex. She had to soften Sean up, bring down his guard. That’s how the two of them wound up on the catwalk about 45 minutes later, at the spot of Derek Berkenson’s famed sighting of Charlie Shank.
As Kelly tells it, by the time they got up there, Sean was pretty drunk. She’d been casually plying him with sips of vodka along the way. When they climbed over the ladder’s edge on house left—Kelly in the lead, of course, to give Sean an eyeful of her undeniable ass—she fell into him drunkenly, and then did that thing with her eyes. Sean was a good kisser, apparently. She told us that later.
Before things went too far, there was a noise from the shadows of the catwalk on house right. Kelly gasped on cue, said they should go back down. But Sean was drunk, lusty, emboldened. And so he did what Josh had hoped he would, what we all hoped he would. He told Kelly to stay put as he investigated.
The thing about the catwalk was that it was more of a catcrawl. There were only a few feet between the plywood laid flooring and the stucco ceiling above. To get any sort of lighting up there you had to kind of scoot and lug. There were rusty protective mesh screens that allowed you to see down to the stage, with removable panels for hanging lights.
Being as tall as he was, Sean struggled to crawl along that tight space. It took long enough that Kelly was able to secret herself halfway down the ladder before yelping in fear, to get Sean, who was now nearly all the way to house right, to look over his shoulder, to see no Kelly where Kelly had been.
It was in that moment—that moment of confusion and fear—that Josh slid quietly from the shadows, head lowered menacingly, face dusted with black soot makeup, teeth clenched around a cigarette, low cap tilted, so that when Sean turned back, he could roar and lunge and make Sean freak out, maybe even wet his pants if we were lucky. But instead of Sean lurching backwards, he threw himself inexplicably to the side. Toward the lights. Toward those rusty mesh screens.
I was standing stage left pretending to busy myself looking behind some curtains when I heard an expulsion of breath followed by the snap of metal. By the time I looked up, Sean was already mid-air.
I have only ever been able to remember it as a series of photographs.
Click. Sean in the air, limbs pinwheeled, all grace and body control gone.
Click. Sean’s body splayed across uneven platforms, spine snapped in half, arm twisted and broken under him.
Click. Sean’s mask twisted to the side of his face, a second nose, a third eye, a top lip curling from neoprene to flesh.
Click. Josh peering from the catwalk, his flat cap knocked loose and falling too.
Click. Stuart and Aoki and Kelly struck dumb in the wings.
Click. Sean’s dead eyes, locked on mine, holding a question that will never be answered.
Click. Click. Click.
That night, a handful of hours earlier, Sean received a standing ovation. When he bowed, he creased in half, arms penduluming up behind him, the nose of his mask grazing the floor.
There’s nothing extraordinary about what happened after that. The world came crashing in. The play was canceled. There was an investigation. Josh was charged with involuntary manslaughter, but got off thanks to his wealthy father’s backroom dealings. I will never forget Sean’s parents at the trial. Every time my eyes would flick over to them, his mom would be curled into his dad, enveloped. I couldn’t distinguish where one’s limbs ended and the other’s began.
Aoki dropped out, even though the college board determined that we would be allowed to graduate. She’s the only one of us who ever really made a go of things. She got a couple of national commercials under her belt, a three-episode arc on some streaming show that got canceled after one season. The rest of us dispersed, geographically and vocationally. Last I heard, Kelly was tending bar in Atlantic City. Stuart sells insurance in Minnesota. Josh killed himself a few years back. None of us attended his funeral.
I tried to make the acting thing work. Although the bubble had popped, I could create another one. I was in my twenties. I didn’t know what I wanted. I moved to Chicago, auditioned here and there. Got cast in some decent productions for some decent theaters. But I lost my nerve when Sean started attending my shows.
The first time I nearly lost my lines, lost myself all together. I was monologuing downstage, my character’s eyes searching the blackness above the audience’s heads for meaning. I saw a silhouette in profile. At first I thought it odd that someone would attend a show only to watch the person next to them. But then a small shift in the form’s posture revealed the angle and length of their nose and I knew it was that half mask half askew.
I kept acting. Sean kept appearing. I quit acting.
Now I fix things with my hands. Old radios. Vintage consoles. If it’s got transistors or circuit boards, chances are I can get it working again. It doesn’t pay much, but it keeps me busy, keeps me out of my head. I have a wife and two kids. An ailing dog. A mortgage that’s underwater. At times I think about where I thought the arc of my life would take me. It certainly wasn’t here. But it couldn’t be the stage. Not ever again.
The nightmares began when I stopped doing plays. There was no narrative drive to them, no scene for me to play in. Sean and I. Hovering in the air together. We would rotate, neither of us able to stop our bodies. His limbs would judder. Break and rebreak, rearranging themselves in hellish configurations of tessellated triangles. When our orbits aligned our gazes, he would look at me through his mask, as he looked at me then, eyes wild like an animal caught in a trap. I would wake more nights than most with my arm wedged underneath me, dead and useless, not even pins and needles to prove it was mine.
I started going to therapy. It didn’t help, but it was a thing to do, just as taking apart and reassembling a circuit board was. My therapist suggested that I had given Malworth power over me, and that in the absence of other healthier pursuits, that power was growing. If I revisited the place of my trauma, I could begin the process of taking some of that power back. My wife agreed. I think she was getting tired of being married to a basket case.
I resisted for a very long time. Until the email landed in my inbox. I couldn’t believe it had been twenty years.
When I got to Malworth Hall, it didn’t feel special or scary. It felt old and new. Like I had spent a seminal part of my life in this place and like I had never been in this place before. I think both were true. Because I wasn’t the same person. I’m not the same person. The others didn’t come with me. For them, it would be an act of self-immolation.
The stage feels small. So does my heart. They’re all gone, my friends. Or I am. I look up. The catwalk above is reinforced with heavy metal grates. I turn toward the seats, expecting Sean to be there. He is not.
The tours have long since ended and I’ve stayed behind to see what’s changed, what’s remained the same. I take the stairs to the basement and there are no cold spots. But when I reach the hallway, I hear jingling. At first I think it is someone’s mobile phone left behind. But it’s irregular. My spine is an icicle. Whatever is in the hall is ringing for me.
“Sean?”
I can’t tell if the entirety of him is a hallucination, or only parts. The extra arms, the half face broken toothed over here then there so fast they may both exist. He somersaults, unfolding and refolding. No part of him touches the floor or the walls or the ceiling. As he spins, I’m back on stage that night, the flailing ball of him caught in my eye’s camera before being severed from the world.
He grows nearer, and as he grows nearer, the lights behind him flicker and wane. He remains in black. I freeze in the cold fluorescent blue. He is a long dead star and only now the darkness of his light is reaching me from across these years. He hovers to a holding, jittering thrum inches from my face. Still rotating. Every time I think a foot or an elbow or the tip of his mask’s nose is going to brush against me, it seems to pull back into itself at the last second, reappearing on the other side of it. Of him.
Unlike the stories we told of Charlie in the stairwell, warmth radiates from Sean. I reach to still him, to end this ceaseless movement, but he passes through my hand. There is a tug though, and my fingers travel along until he arcs away and my arm draws my hand back towards my body.
The rest of the lights in the hall go out and it is the two of us, here together, in the dark. I feel the warmth of him rise and fall as he passes, the shadowy bulges undulating in and out, arrhythmic and organic and comforting.
It is my decision, he seems to be saying. And so, I make it. Perhaps it is the only decision I’ve ever made since that night. Stepping off the rails that have carried me through life, into the vibrating warmth of another being, losing all my borders until there is no me or him. There is only the energy we create as we disappear into one another. A generous exchange, like Dr. Frock was always going on about.
