I knock on Ossley’s door and receive a muffled, paranoid query in response. I tell him it’s me, and he cracks the door open to make sure I’m not lying. When he sees my two bodyguards, he assumes they’re assassins and panics, but I jam my shoe into the door, lean close, and speak in a low voice.
“Look,” I say, “I can get you off the hook.”
He lets me into the room. My guards take up stations outside, on either side of the door. Emeline isn’t there, and without her the place has a look of despair, its only light a laptop computer running its screen saver, and a forsaken room-service meal slowly composting on the dresser.
I take the room’s single chair, leaving Ossley to sit on the bed, where I had sat that morning.
“I see that your curtains are still drawn,” I say.
“Be careful walking in front of them,” he says. “You might get silhouetted.”
I look at the curtains with more respect. “I’ll do that,” I say. And then I turn to him.
“Look,” I say, “they found people from the Tricolor Cartel working on the production.” He winces. “They’re going to keep coming after you,” I assure him, “so what we need to do is make you harmless.”
I’m hoping for a glimmer of hope to shine in his eyes, but what I get instead is a glimmer of suspicion.
“How do you plan to pull that off?” he says.
“We sell your process to the cartel.”
He considers this with what seems to be impatience. His lips curls. You cretin, is what the lips seem to say.
“I see two problems,” he says. “First, what stops them from just killing me instead of giving me money?”
“You need to have insurance. You need to have the process documented, and in the hands of people you can trust to release it if anything should happen to you.”
His sneer grows. “People like you?”
“No,” I say. “I don’t want anything to do with it. I wouldn’t understand it anyway.”
“You sure don’t,” he says. “Because you didn’t even get what I told you earlier—there is no process. I haven’t printed any drugs, all I’ve done is theory. And all my theories are available right on the Internet, in forums devoted to additive manufacturing. There’s nothing to sell!”
I give this some consideration. “Well,” I tell him, “we could say that you’ve got a complete process. And then get money for not telling anyone about it.”
Ossley jumps off the bed and paces about, waving his arms. “Tell a bunch of violent criminals I have a process that doesn’t exist? And expect them to pay me to suppress it?”
“Well,” I say, “yeah.”
“That’s crazy!” he says.
I’m on the verge of agreeing with him: yeah, it’s not my most brilliant idea. But then he goes on.
“You don’t know me at all!” he proclaims. “If there’s one thing I believe in, it’s freedom!”
I’m not sure what any of this has to do with freedom, but then Ossley goes on to tell me.
“I’m not interested in making money from my ideas!” he says. “I’m not interested in patents and copyrights and trademarks!” He practically spits the words. “All that gets in the way of freedom to use the technology, and the technology’s what’s important! The tech’s gotta be free—free to all the people who want to use it, without some asswipe standing there with his hand out collecting the toll!”
“Even if it kills you?” I ask.
A gleam of absolute certainty shimmers through Ossley’s thick glasses. “If I die,” he says, “the technology’s going to happen anyway! Someone will figure out how to do it! People are going to print drugs in their homes! It’s as inevitable as people connecting their computers to phone lines and creating the Internet!”
“Yeah,” I say, “and whoever figures out the answer is going to get a ton of money.”
He looks down at me from the absolute heights of moral superiority. “This information needs to be free,” he says. “And I’m the one to free it.”
It occurs to me that the last thing I need tonight is to put up with a lecture from some sneering, megalomaniac geek. I remind myself that I’m very tall and that I look like a Klingon and that I’m a murderer, and that I could just stand up right now, pick up Ossley, throw him down on the ground, and tell him that he’s going to do what I tell him, or I’ll kick his stupid fucking head in.
But I don’t do that. I’m not really that guy.
Instead I leave, pick up my bodyguards, and return to my cabana, where I study my lines until it’s time to go to bed. I get a call from Tracee, the sound tech, but I tell her that I’m too upset to see her.
Have sex with someone three times, it’s dangerously near a relationship. So I decide not to see her again.
“I want it bigger,” Hadley tells me. “I need you to fucking act, here, Sean.”
When Hadley is actually being a director—when he’s in his little shed or tent, surrounded by video monitors, and communicating with his minions through a headset or a loudspeaker—he’s not the grimacing, twitching, half-hysterical character he is the rest of the time. When he’s directing, Hadley is in his element. He’s authoritative, decisive, and he tells you what he wants.
Though of course he’s still a prat.
Still, I could use some direction about now. I’d rather it come from a director who’s actually on the set, and knows how to talk to actors, instead of some Jehovah-wannabe off in a little room by himself with his barista, a macchiato, and a Napoleon complex, but I’ll take what I can get.
Fact is, I’m beyond depressed. Mrs. Trevanian has killed the movie, the movie will kill my career, and the point of finishing the film at all has begun to elude me.
I know that I should be the living embodiment of the Three Ps (Prompt, Perky, and Professional, if you want to know) and that I should give the part everything I’ve got because I should be happy simply to be working; but now I’m wondering what the reward for any of that will be. I’ve been a hardworking professional all my life—I’ve even killed people—and annoying characters like Mrs. Trevanian and anonymous Tricolor snipers still won’t let my happy place alone.
Suddenly I’m wondering why I’m even bothering trying to play the lead in a feature. I’ve never played the hero in a movie. And working in movies and television requires different styles of acting.
TV stars are cool. Even if their characters are less than admirable, they come across as somehow sympathetic, maybe even neighborly. They are, after all, people you invite into your home every week. If you don’t like them, you won’t watch them.
Movie stars, by contrast, are hot. They have to blaze so fiercely that they fill a screen forty feet high and demand the attention of a crowded theater.
That’s why very few TV stars have graduated successfully to features. It requires not only different skills but a different personality. You have to go from amiable to commanding.
Likewise, some movie stars are simply too big for television. Jack Nicholson is riveting on-screen, but you wouldn’t want him in your living room week after week. The television simply couldn’t contain his personality.
I think I’m doing well in the feature. Everyone tells me I’m great—but then they would whether I was any good or not. I could sit through the dailies and find out for myself, but I’ve always been too insecure to watch dailies.
But now I’m having a hard time seeing the point.
I get through it somehow, and Hadley pronounces himself satisfied with whatever energy I’ve been able to summon. I go back to my cabana for a shower and supper, and then—thank God—my guards tell me that the prop master Yunakov is at the door.