Rolling
“I just want a place to charge my phone,” Daniela says, standing in what seems like a cross between a bar and a warehouse, wearing a green and purple Dr. Seuss hat.
Daniela is breaking out from this stress, all this stress of four in the morning and a cheetoh diet and everyone wearing strange costumes and her phone’s placid “connect charger.” Daniela’s breaking out, and she can tell when she looks in the harsh light-rimmed mirrors and sees the redness on her cheeks and the darkness under her eyes and the speckle of tiny raised bumps on her brow. Daniela’s breaking out and when the wranglers yodel into bullhorns and pile extras into a co-opted schoolbus so that they with their four-in-the-morning long-day forgot-to-shower bodies (and breath smelling of unwashed) sit three to a seat, she’s sure of it, she’ll feel the throb of a pustule blooming, and her face at its worst will be presented to celebrities (what celebrities, it’s four in the morning, what movie is this even) and forever documented with her wide thighs and stupid shoes and limp, scraggly hair, documented under a blaze-bright purple and green Dr. Seuss hat that she doesn’t own, would never buy, didn’t want to wear.
“Excuse me? I’m looking for a place to charge my phone.”
Because on set—she knows it—her face will erupt (“Babe, would you not sit on those, please? Thanks.”) and she’ll have no recourse but her phone’s camera mode, the lens through which she can view herself live, mirrored.
Daniela smiles at one of the nicer casting people, a boy with red-blond hair and a freckly face, and he tells her to plug into the plugs on the mirrors.
“Those things will fry your phone,” someone says.
“Live dangerously,” Daniela mumbles, pulling out her charger.
“Wait, we’re being moved.”
“I just found the plug!”
“Shhh, she’s saying something.”
The forms all say background artist, but they’re asked: “Y’all know how to be an extra, right?” Yeah, they know. They’re loaded onto the bus. She’s wide awake; everyone’s wide awake now because they’re going to the set, and the set will have lights and cameras and maybe, if they’re lucky, action. But no one ever says that. The director will say “rolling,” and they will roll, all of them; they will undulate or luminesce or gape or shiver as one single mass of artistically arranged humanity.
And this movie’s got that one actor, the one that she considers uniquely hers and she knows she shouldn’t but does. She likes that he lives in New York and not California like the other ones, and she likes the odd way his bones lie under his skin. She wants to touch him in strange places like the sides of his knees and the hollows under his cheeks. She likes that on set he doesn’t wink at her like he wants her to swoon.
The people behind her comparing notes: “Oh he won’t be on set today, no I know, he left earlier” or “No like last night she was wearing this dress and I thought I would die she was gorgeous and they wanted me to stand next to her and I was just like can I not?” They try to assemble the movie from the IMDb summary and the scenes they’ve been in. They try to piece together chronologies. “No Cindy was there for the car chase scene and the bar scene and she says she thinks the car chase came first and that’s why there was baby powder on their suits in the bar.” When they pile out the lights are blinding and the air is cold. Someone says “That guy you’re crazy about, he’s not gonna be on set tonight,” and Daniela says “What, who, oh, him.” And tells herself she doesn’t care, and then doesn’t, and sits where they tell her.
And then he’s hurtling straight for her at fifty miles per hour, with cameras. And who cares why or what the plot is or anything but he’s running straight toward her, (and cameras,) and she stands stock-still with wide eyes and enormous throbbing pulses wavering quantum-like down the path of her spine and she’s clenched and loose all at once and she knows his name.
And he looks at her and he does not know her. And he runs past. And he leaps into the air, vaults, lands firm. He turns his head slightly and says: “Was that okay?”
And this is how she will remember him years from now, he standing firm with his back to her on top of a ledge, awaiting orders from a woman she doesn’t know and can’t identify. Caught under a spotlight, his coat blowing in a wind she can’t feel from the ground. And she stands in the dark, stationary and throbbing and enjoying the painful sensation of knowing his name.
The camera moves past, and her phone loses power, and she stands in the dark, unknown.
