Gone

“Dylan’s a freak…it was freaky up there, dark, cold, this emptiness in the air. You could hear things crawling around.” She hugged herself. “I said this is too weird, maybe it wasn’t a good idea.”

“What did Dylan say?”

“He just laid there with his head to the side.” She closed her eyes and demonstrated. Let her mouth grow slack and showed a half inch of pointed, pink tongue. “Pretending to be dead, you know? I said, ‘Cut it out, that’s gross,’ but he refused to talk or move and finally it got to me. I rolled over to him and touched his head and he just flopped, you know?”

“Method acting,” I said.

Puzzled stare.

“It’s when you live a role completely, Michaela.”

Her eyes were somewhere else. “Whatever…”

“How soon into the exercise did you tie him up?”

“Second night, it was all the second night. He was okay before that, then he started punking me. I was letting him because I was scared. The whole thing…I was so, so stupid.”

She folded wings of golden hair forward, masking her face. I thought of a show spaniel in the ring. Handlers manipulating the ears over the nose to offer the judge a choice view of the skull.

“Dylan scared you.”

“He didn’t move for a long time,” she said.

“Were you worried you’d tied him too tight?”

She released the hair but kept her gaze low. “Honestly, I can’t tell you, even now what his motivation was. Maybe he really was unconscious, maybe he was punking me a hundred percent. He’s…it was really his idea, Doctor. I promise.”

“Dylan thought the whole thing up?”

“Everything. Like getting rope and where to go.”

“How’d he pick Latigo Canyon?”

“He said he hiked there, he likes to hike by himself, it helps him get in character.” The tongue tip glided across her lower lip, left behind a snail-trail of moisture.

“He also says one day he’s going to have a place there.”

“Latigo Canyon?”

“Malibu, but on the beach, like the Colony. He’s crazy intense.”

“About his career?”

“There are some people who put everything into a scene, you know? But later they know when to stop? Dylan can be cool when he’s just being himself, but he’s got these ambitions. Cover of People, take the place of Johnny Depp.”

“What are your ambitions, Michaela?”

“Me? I just want to work. TV, big screen, episodic, commercials, whatever.”

“Dylan wouldn’t be happy with that.”

“Dylan wants to be number one on the Sexiest Man List.”

“Have you talked to him since the exercise?”

“No.”

“Whose decision was that?”

“Lauritz told me to stay away.”

“Were you and Dylan pretty close before?”

“I guess. Dylan said we had natural chemistry. That’s probably why I got…swept along. The whole thing was his idea but he freaked me out up there. I’m talking to him and shaking him and he looks really…you know.”

“Dead.”

“Not that I’ve ever seen anyone really dead but when I was young I liked to watch splatter flicks. Not now, though. I get grossed out easily.”

“What’d you do when you thought Dylan looked dead?”

“I went crazy and started untying the neck rope, and he still wasn’t moving and he held his mouth open and was looking really…” She shook her head. “The atmosphere up there, I was getting freaked out. I started slapping his face and yelling at him to stop it. His head just kept flopping back and forth. Like one of those loosening exercises Nora has us do before a big scene.”

“Scary,” I said.

“Scary-terrifying. I’m dyslexic, not intense dyslexic, like illiterate or illegible, I can read okay. But it takes me a long time to memorize words. I can’t sound anything out. I mean, I can memorize my lines but I really work hard.”

“Being dyslexic made it scarier to see Dylan like that?”

“Because my head felt all scrambled up and I couldn’t think straight. And then being scared blurred it. Like my thoughts weren’t making sense- like being in another language, you know?”

“Disoriented.”

“I mean, look what I did,” she said. “Untied myself and climbed up that hill and ran out to the road without even putting my clothes on. I had to be disoriented. If I was thinking normal, would I do that? Then, after that old guy, the one on the road who…” Her frown made it as far as the left side of her mouth before retracting.

“The old man who…”

“I was going to say the old guy saved me but I wasn’t in real danger. Still, I was pretty terrified. Because I still didn’t know if Dylan was okay. By the time the old guy called the rescue squad and they got there, Dylan was out of the ropes and standing there. When no one was looking, he gave a little smile. Like ha-ha, good joke.”

“You feel Dylan manipulated you.”

“That’s the saddest thing. Losing trust. The whole thing was supposed to be about trust. Nora’s always teaching us about the artist’s life as constant danger. You’re always working without a net. Dylan was my partner and I trusted him. That’s why I went along with it in the first place.”

“Did it take him a while to talk you into it?”

She frowned. “He made it like an adventure. Buying all that stuff. He made me feel like a kid having fun.”

“Planning was fun,” I said.

“Exactly.”

“Buying the rope and the food.”

“Uh-huh.”

“Careful plan.”

Her shoulders tightened. “What do you mean?”

“You guys paid cash and used several different stores in different neighborhoods.”

“That was all Dylan,” she said.

“Did he explain why he’d planned it that way?”

“We really didn’t talk about it. It was like…we did so many exercises before, this was just another one. I felt I had to use my right side. Of my brain. Nora taught us to concentrate on using the right side of the brain, just kind of slip into right-brain stuff.”

“The creative side,” I said.

“Exactly. Don’t think too much, just throw yourself in.”

“Nora keeps coming up.”

Silence.

“How do you think she feels about what happened, Michaela?”

“I know how she feels. She’s pissed. After the police took me in, I called her. She said getting caught was amateurish and stupid, don’t come back. Then she hung up.”

“Getting caught,” I said. “She wasn’t angry at the scheme itself?”

“That’s what she told me. It was stupid to get caught.” Her eyes moistened.

“Hearing that from her must’ve been tough,” I said.

“She’s in a power role vis-a-vis me.”

“You try talking to her again?”