As Played by Gregory Peck by Ben Frischer

“Eat me,” he said.

“What?” she replied, more angry than inquisitive.

“Just eat me.”

“That’s gross. I don’t want to discuss this anymore.”

“Understand, you might have to.”

“No one is eating anyone and that’s that.”

“When I die, eat me.”

The not-yet man of twenty-two lay in a rented two person tent situated in the middle of a small national park. The tent cost him thirty dollars for a week of use, plus an additional fifty for everyday that is was late. It was the seventh day he and his companion had used the tent, but on this day their tent was surrounded by mounds of pure white snow.

“You’re being ridiculous,” she said.

“What’s so ridiculous about it? Are you going to hunt?”

“We’re not going to be stuck here forever. The snow will stop, I’ll get help. It’s that simple.”

“That kind of simplicity is a luxury I do not have.”

“Why do you keep on talking like that? It’s so . . . so dramatic”

He knew she thought he was being dramatic, but dramatic was not the right word. He had always hated her diction. Fictitious was a much better choice. Maybe he wasn’t hurt that badly and maybe the snow would stop in an hour. He was not responding as much to the situation as he was to a series of lies that defined his life. Thinking about all the different kinds of lies, he smiled.

“Oh, it’s all a joke to you. Ha ha, eat me when I’m dead. You are a regular comedienne,” she said.

“Comedian.”

“I hate when you do that.”

“Then it’s mutual.”

He impressed himself with how witty he could be given that he had stopped listening to her. A small part of him felt bad for being so cruel, but he was focused on other things. And, he was fairly sure she didn’t understand what he meant.

“I’m sorry, there is just a lot on my mind,” he murmured.

“How does your leg feel?” she said. He did not respond with words or movement. “Have you ever heard the story about the time I almost drove into a Dairy Queen?” she asked.

“No.”

“Do want to he – ”

“Not really.”

“I could read to you.”

“Fine.”

He didn’t really care what she read to him. As long as she read, it was guaranteed that he did not have to respond to her. The lies were all he could think about. Every day, in numerous situations he would respond to the real world in accordance with some kind

of cinematic, theatrical or literary reality. Always the character and never myself, he thought. Or perhaps he was truly an amalgam of scenes, camera angles, and metaphors. He didn’t know for sure.

“He had whored the whole time and then, when that was over, and he had failed to kill his loneliness . . .” she read.

What he did know was that he was acting even then. He was trying to be tough and terse and cool like a character he read about or saw in a movie. He had never experienced pain like that before and he had no idea how serious his injury was or was not. But, he knew he should be behaving a certain way, exemplifying a certain persona. I’m a fake, he thought, always have been.

Even to her, with her tiny freckles and awful choice in words, he was false. He was pretty sure that his feelings for her were real, but how he chose to express those emotions stemmed from a world of untruths. When he was cute and adorable and sensitive, it was a young sleepless Tom Hanks. When he was strong and cool, it was Sam Shephard as Chuck Yeager in The Right Stuff. And their fights, at least on his part, could have been lifted directly from Who’s Afraid of Virginia Wolfe. His happy, sad, angry, confused, scared and hurt were all stolen from famous representations of people. She was, in effect, dating a library, a video store and Broadway.

“No, he had never written about Paris. Not the Paris he cared about. But what about the rest that he had never written?” she read.

As she read, his mind drifted to the past, remembering his college application and interview. Throughout high school he had always wanted to just be great at something. He didn’t want to learn something new and practice at it; he just wanted to find some unknown greatness. After his efforts in music and athletics proved fruitless, he tried his hand at art. Not really knowing what to do with a blank canvas, he smeared on globs of paint until he thought it looked like what art was supposed to look like.

“I see you have included a portfolio along with your application,” the college interviewer said.

“Well, its like an expression of my identity that I didn’t think I could vocalize in an interview, you know,” he said doing his best of impersonation of Jeffrey Wright’s portrayal of Jean Michel Basquiat in the movie Basquiat.

“The pieces are rather powerful. Do you think you will continue your painting in college?”

“Well, can you stop being yourself? I mean, it’s like you could you stop telling the kind of jokes you do? It’s just a part of who I am.”

Who I am – what bullshit, he thought. Who was I even trying to be: an artist or what artists look like in the movies? Is anything I do real? Is this whining real or did I learn it from some self-important form of entertainment. I am nothing but a copy, a facsimile of fiction. I produce nothing new. And now I might die with nothing resolved other than that I am a compilation of other people’s creativity. Somehow I have managed to stand on the shoulders of giants and remain the same height. Fuck, that’s not even that original.

What was real was that his thigh was all cut up, his knee was swollen and wouldn’t bend and there was a piece of bone pressing up against the skin of his calf. All this, and it had been snowing for a day and a half. The pain finally gained his full attention and he passed out.

Later, the next day perhaps, he could not open his eyes. He strained against the muscles in his eyelids as hard as he could, but they would not open. There was a burning singe moving up his body, making its way from his trunk to his torso. And there was a smell. The odor was unlike anything he had ever experienced, it wasn’t sweet and it wasn’t foul. It was the smell of nothingness, of white noise. Then, he heard something.

“Do you play chess?” it said in a Swedish accent.

“No,” he lied.

“The board is set up.”

“I can’t see anything.”

“Well then, we must try harder.”

He strained against his eyes once more. Slowly, his eyelids moved up like a stage curtain. Soft strings played in his ear. He could see a long tunnel, not made of industrial cement and steel, but of something soft and otherworldly. And, he hated himself for it, but he saw a light at the end of the tunnel.

“But where are you?” he asked.

“The end,” the Swedish voice replied.

Despite everything he knew to be true, he had to go towards the light. Damn the movies and damn the books. He needed to get out of that tent. He needed to get away from her, from the pain, from everything that made him false and phony. He began to crawl on his belly, pulling his weight with his arms and pushing with his good leg. He could hardly feel the burn anymore and the smell had vanished. Trudging down the tunnel, he knew exactly where he was going and he felt no pain.

When he woke up he saw a bearded man in a forest green parka reaching out for him.

“So, this is our guy?” the bearded man said.

“Yup, that’s him. Is he gonna be ok?” she said.

“His leg is in pretty bad shape. Looks like he’s got a break, maybe torn a couple tendons in his knee too,” the bearded man replied.

“But he’s not going to die or anything.”

“Oh no no no. He’ll be just fine, maybe he won’t run as fast, but he’s not gonna die.”

“Could he have died?”

“Well, it’s a pretty small park and we patrol it pretty frequently. Hell, we rarely get storms that last more than a day. I mean he is hurt bad and all, but I doubt that it would have ever gotten that serious.”