The Placebo Effect Read Free Page B

had done so long ago as she demanded, “Do you know what you are doing, Decker? Do you know?” Decker pushed aside the memory, held the actress’s interlocked fingers aloft, and announced to the actors watching, “Two kids, a mortgage, and a car.” Then he dropped the actress’s hand and said, “And they don’t know how it happened.” Decker smiled and added, “How it happened is what they learn from actors.” He turned back to the actress. “Put out your hand again.”
    â€œYou going to marry me a second time, Decker?”
    Decker paused, then said, “No. Just put out your hand.”
    She did.
    He turned to the class and said, “The six inches between our hands is actor territory. No writer, no director, no cinematographer can guide you across those six inches. That territory belongs to you. It’s the reason that evolution hasn’t removed you and your kind.”
    Without segue Decker turned back to Tawtiawna. “Did you have a private name for yourself when you were a little girl?”
    The actress looked around—wary—as if Decker had seen into a secret place. Finally she said, “Yes.”
    â€œI’m not asking you to tell me her name. But she’s your artist, and she wants to voyage, but you protect her because you think she’s frail. She’s not—she voyages all the time and is waiting to take you along with her.”
    After a few more questions Decker put the first of the evening’s twelve scenes (the Venice sequence from Pinter’s Betrayal ) on its feet—completely unaware that he was being watched, every move noted, every word recorded then transcribed.
    Class ended just short of midnight. The actors packed up and headed for cheap beer at Squirly’s up on Queen Street. Decker stored the cameras in his office beneath his sixth-grade report card, which he’d tacked to the wall. Long ago he had circled his teacher’s comment: “Does not play well with others.” Beside it was his son Seth’s sixth-grade report card. The comment circled there—“Does not fully participate in group activities”—was more politically correct but meant the same thing. He looked at the two reports, thought about taking them down, then decided, as he usually did, to leave them where they were.
    Back in the studio he picked up Tawtiawna’s diary—she always left her diary. Decker had been tempted to leaf through it the first time he’d found it but quickly realized it was Tawtiawna’s effort to reach out to him. It was tempting, but Decker wasn’t ready—perhaps would never be ready to risk hurting those he cared about again.
    He had caused enough pain.
    He put Tawtiawna’s diary on the monitor cart, locked up the studio and headed down the block to his “office,” an upscale bar called Politica.
    Sitting at the bar he ordered bourbon with water on the side—a holdover from his time directing in regional theatres in the American South.
    The waitress knew him and didn’t hurry him. But when he gave over his Visa card he was surprised that the bank rejected the plastic.
    He apologized, made a mental note to check on this, paid in cash and headed home to the Junction—never suspecting that his personal voyage was about to take him to places of which even he had never dreamt.

5
YSLAN HICKS
    YSLAN HICKS HATED WASHINGTON. THE CENTRE OF HER HATRED was Congress. And the very epicentre of that hatred was the congressional oversight committee before which she now sat, waiting for the last plump rump to squattle down into its assigned chair for the morning session. She hoped that both the early hour and the esoteric name of her NSA file would scare away reporters, few of whom were really thinkers. Most weren’t really even newshounds anymore; now they all seemed like wannabe infomercial guys—“For the next twenty minutes we’ll double