Burke

Playing Dead

By Amber Burke

I’m partially buried in scorched earth inside a large pentagram drawn in salt in upstate New York. My eyes are open, and my pale face could be a mask the earth is wearing; dirt clasps my cheeks, packs the canals of my ears, clumps in my radiating, root-like hair. I could be afloat in a dark pond, blanched almonds of my skin barely breaking its surface. You can see just enough of me to know I’m on back, limbs bent, like a runner’s. My hands protrude, one here, one there, showing the grit that has been carefully pressed under their fingernails. The camera glides into close-up, the ghost of it hovering very near me now, its warm electric breath daring me to move, daring me to blink. I won’t. I’m good at what I do.

Of course, I wanted to be an actress, my aunt said, when I was growing up. My mother was solitary. So solitary that it took two days before... Of course, I would want to be noticed. My aunt raised me from my infancy; she regarded me as an aberration. Amazing that I lived, and so on. She had her depressions and would sometimes say in the thick of them that it would have been better if I’d never been born. But she was not an unkind woman, and she’s very supportive of me now; she brags about me to all her friends at her living facility and calls me when she sees me on TV. You looked great. Glad to see you’re thriving! Sometimes it’s not me; it’s another actress playing a corpse—never as well as I could—or even a dummy made of foam rubber, but it gives her pleasure to think she’s seen me, and I don’t correct her.

My life as a cadaver started ten years ago with a call from my agent, Henry. One scene in a Mafia series, and then I’d have to be dead. Would I, as a favor?

A few months earlier, he wouldn’t have asked so apologetically. But I’d just played a well-received role in a limited series as a high school student having an affair with her piano teacher. In the scene in which I heard of his arrest, I threw myself into the near-hysterical distress required of me and revealed I was pregnant with his child. I sobbed so hard the earth shook from the soles of my feet downward, so hard the director and the crew clapped afterward. I went to the bathroom and gagged. I couldn’t eat for two days. It has always been hard for me to calm down after upsets real or fictional; the things that work to soothe others—the breathing exercises, the yoga, the meditation—I find irritating. During massages that are supposed to be relaxing, I feel like a cat having her fur stroked backward.

There are those—and my aunt was one, tormenting herself, and me, with memories of her sister’s unexpected death and my unenviable infancy—who enjoy emotional outbursts, exult in their own tears and feel clarity in their wake, but I’m not among them. Even as a child, I loved things in their places, loved putting things in rows, loved the game where I tipped a metal ball into a hole, and I hated the upheaval of my own tantrums even while I was having them. Nonetheless, I cried often; fits of upset surged upon me, unbidden. Even in adulthood, tears were “available” to me, so much so that my fellow acting students, who kept cut onions in baggies backstage, were jealous, and my acting teacher—the one who said all actors have a story they tell, the story of their martyrdom or their vengeance or whatever it was—declared that my story was the revelation of a hidden grief. I resisted this assessment, but as I began my auditioning life in New York, it seemed increasingly possible that it was true. I had no luck getting cast in any of the musicals, comedies, or commercials I’d hoped to do; in every role I landed, I was expected to cry. I felt—and I think Henry felt—that I was being pushed, that there was an energy behind me thrusting me forward, that I was on the verge of breaking, but I was increasingly afraid of what the career I could have, the career I could feel organizing itself in preparation for my arrival in it, would mean for me. I saw a future in which I was successful but also sickened by the emotional toll of my roles.

Henry’s call put me at a crossroads; I would miss a callback to play a leading role, a girl in mourning, if I agreed to play dead.

I said yes.

My first death was the result of a fall, or rather, a push, out a window by one of two mafiosos. I’d flirted with them both the day before in a drunken scene in the backseat of a limousine, my hair so puffed and makeup so pink I could have fit in at a strip club or in 1983. It had rained overnight, one of those misty, grubby New York rains that didn’t seem to clean the city so much as make a soup of its grime, and it was still damp when I got to the makeup trailer at four a.m.

It took hours to create, all over my body, a number of large gashes and many small wounds. While my hair was carefully disheveled, I was dotted with globs of putty, and into these globs were inserted so many shards of silicone glass that I knew how it must feel to be a porcupine. I’m not complaining; I’d always reveled in the professional tendernesses of makeup and hair, which made me feel lazy and warm. The only thing I usually found hard—painfully hard—was shifting from the passivity of the makeup chair to the activity of acting, and I was relieved, that morning, not to have to resurrect myself in that way.

Not long after sunrise, I was shielded with blankets—I couldn’t wear a robe, lest it disrupt my glassy quills—and escorted to the stretch of sidewalk where I would lie for the next several hours, nude except for a flesh-colored thong. I lowered myself onto the patch that had been cleared for me and dried, more or less, with a leafblower. These days, I’m known for my hardiness, for my willingness to die even in snow, but I now draw the line at sidewalks: the cockroaches, the tailpipes at the level of my nose, the skunky steam rising from subway grates, the rubbery gum stains from decades of mouths. I could soon feel moisture rising toward the surface of the cement; it smelled like piss. And I was so cold I wanted to cry. A small heater was set up to blow on me, but the need to keep it out of sight from the cameras meant I barely felt it. Something scuttled over my ankle: claws, a thin tail. The director promised to make this fast.

An old woman with long white hair and a long black coat—I took her for the props mistress, though she could have been in set design—kneeled on bare knees to arrange slices of unsharp glass by my head, then drew a chalk outline around me. I closed my eyes, the better to hate the director and the crew and my agent, to hate myself for not asking more questions, for saying yes to this job. I was resentful as an unprotected child, absorbed in self-pity, and shivering. How would I ever manage to look dead? “The first time’s the hardest,” the old woman with the chalk whispered to me; her breath smelled like garlic. I opened my eyes to look at her. Her silver eyes bulged; her mouth receded. She sing-songed, “I will not blink, I will not twitch, I will not move a quarter inch.” She said, “You’ll do just fine,” and, in parting, bequeathed me a toothless smile.

The clapperboard clapped, the cameras rolled, and before long, the lights assisting the sun began to warm me, or maybe that was the sun itself. I heard the footsteps of actor-detectives, their words, words that were to become very familiar to me, like “forensics” and “toxicology.” I had, at first, a great urge to respond to what was said, to cooperate with whomever was lifting my hand to examine my fingernails, but I silently repeated—without meaning to repeat—the vows I’d heard from the props mistress, and very soon, I became indifferent to everything outside myself. I was, for a while, troubled by violent inner distractions, but eventually, the same repetition--I will not blink, I will not twitch, I will not move a quarter inch—which severed me from the external world, severed me from my internal world, or at least cleaved my desires from their realization. I mean that the desire to blink became separate from the blink, the desire to scratch separate from the itch, the desire to sneeze from the sneeze.

When we took a break for lunch—something I never do now; it’s easier to hold a position than to return to it—my mood had greatly improved. To protect my modesty and my makeup, a production assistant took me to the makeup trailer where she fed me apple sauce with a spoon she held quite high in the air. When I crawled back into my white chalk outline, I felt that I had found my place.

I’ve been busy ever since. Even if I’m not alive in flashback—and I’d rather not be, would rather be lifeless and lineless—I’m not paid as background, but as a principal performer. Henry negotiates for me, based on what he knows about the project’s budget, the discomforts of my death—my open eyes are, at present, earning me a good payday—and how far I must travel.

I’ve worked on many sets, but more often my career takes me to locations—in New York’s boroughs, but sometimes upstate, like today. New Jersey. Maryland, from time to time. I’ve played all manner of deaths; I’ve been drowned and stabbed, shot, strangled, and beaten. I’ve been stung by black widows. I’ve been burned, my limbs wrapped in red and black strips that go on damp, like papier-mâché, and then dry—and so disguised, I’ve played many races. I’ve washed up on beaches. I’ve been found coiled at the foot of spiral staircases. I’ve overdosed in apartments so derelict I couldn’t believe permits could be gotten to film in them—in one rowhome in Baltimore, a tree had been growing for so long that its limbs outjutted through broken windows. I died in a library—ink was the culprit—and was garroted inside a clocktower. I once met my end in a botanical garden, poisoned by a rare flower. That was a hard day: the bees.

I’m partial to the scenes that take place in funeral homes, or homes that play funeral homes, where, encoffined, I have been consoled by the heady smell of lilies, soft sobbing, and visitors whispering, “She looks so life-like.” I like morgues, too, the smooth metal trays upon which I’m autopsied, the drawer into which I’m slid like silverware, my bare torso closed up with a “Y” of stitches scalloped in putty. I was one asked out by a man who played a forensic pathologist. But he plopped my heart on a scale with such disdain. He wanted more and thought I should, too. I told him no.

I take my roles seriously. Every cyclone needs an eye; I am that center around which actors and cameras swirl. I study the script; it tells me the shape I should hold, the lines this death would draw. Every death is different. My current position—almost running—is one I chose because I know this character would have tried to escape. I read looking for clues to the attitude I should take—mirth, amazement, horror, and so on. Today, I shade my expression with betrayal and recognition. (I was killed by someone I know, someone who loved me; the pentagram, it will be discovered, is for protection, like pentagrams used to be.) I like to think that a close-enough study of my face would reveal the identity of my killer.

Yet, I feel less like an actor and more like a dancer. My dance is stillness. My performances require intense focus; sleeping, while tempting, is in no one’s best interest; too easy to jerk or snore. Amateurs, they breathe conspicuously, or hold their breath, which is hardly better: within seconds, their tension becomes palpable. I know how to breathe without seeming to breathe; I can keep my breath in a close whorl around my heart; put a mirror to my mouth, as many have, and it will not fog. I trust the invisibility of my pulse. Stiffness and weight must be adjusted by a thousand minute muscles for rigor mortis to clench or unclench its grip, or to create the waterlogged heaviness that is nothing like post-autopsy lightness. Today, I get to be supple in death, rigor mortis having come and gone, and I send a sludgy heaviness to the back of my body that is true to the first stages of liquefaction. To keep my eyes open, as they are now, my pupils steady indefinitely, is like nothing so much as twirling in place.

Though I have played a crystalline stillness, today I am more like moss, wide and porous. Early this morning, when a soft wind carried the mushroom smell of early autumn from the surrounding forest, the coolness of the dirt seeped into me; now the wind has stilled, and the topmost layer of soil is sun-warmed, like a blanket, and there is different warmth coming from somewhere farther down. Sounds that are not mine move through me: I register the steps of detectives, their words, and the unmatteringness of those words. Closer, in my buried ears, I hear a kind of wind that comes through insectile tunnels. It whistles. The movements of white beetles and small worms deep in the earth tug at my skin. A hair on my forearm stirs; an ant is turning over a grain of sand somewhere. If I am convincing and convinced enough, if, one day, my death is sweet and large enough, perhaps shy insects will come from great distances, called by its presence in an invisible web. And I think, for some reason, about my aunt rapping on my mother’s door, not leaving, as if she sensed what was behind it, as if she was connected to death, to my mother, to me, by a net of feeling and knowing.

The hem of a trench coat brushes my nose, and I come nearer my surface. This actor is too close; if he takes even the smallest step backward, his heel will clip my cheek. It’s dangerous to be so helpless: I have been stepped on more times than I can count, have been kicked by shoes crime-scene covers did nothing to blunt; scars from a drunk actress’s stilettos still fish-scale my right thigh. She didn’t know she hurt me; I’ve never given any sign, never let my character slip, even when the feet around me seemed as large as the feet of the gods, even when those gods kicked me. But I’ve never been struck with my eyes open like this; they could betray me by watering. I will not blink; I will not twitch; I will not move a quarter inch. All of me waits. What lands on my face, though, is not the back of a heel—the actor has stepped away—but something else, so much lighter, so dusty and delicate that I can hardly bear it, the test of it, the tender blessing of it: a moth is trundling along my cheek with immense gentleness. I know it’s a moth even before I see its underside atop my open eye.

I hear a gasp, not mine. “Keep rolling,” the director commands. Seconds go by as slowly as the moth tiptoes across my eyeball. At last, it presses its tiny, bristled feet into my brow and takes off like a thought. The director cuts and thanks me, but I don’t stir. I keep my self-satisfaction secret. The actors lean over me with compliments. “Poor thing. She’s filthy,” one says before leaving. It’s not time for me to go, not yet.

When I do die—a real death—if I’m lucky, if the afterlife is what it should be, I will go through a door like the one to my Brooklyn brownstone. I’ll head straight to the bathroom, rip off latex wounds, and step into the steaming shower, where the special soaps painters use will be waiting in a row; I’ll scrub myself until the tub is a mess of red paint and black grit and I’m clean; and then I’ll relax in the haven of a crisp-sheeted bed, in a clean and empty room, everything around me perfectly quiet and white: tea cozy on the teapot, teacups nestled in their saucers, white book jackets on all my books, white sheet draped over the vacuum in the corner forever.

The cast has gone; the few remaining crew members have hidden themselves so they won’t be caught by the drone shot. It is the magic hour; the sky is turning pink and violet, shadows are disappearing, and I can see myself as the rising camera sees me; the camera is getting higher and higher, and I am getting smaller and smaller inside my white star. The widening view reveals the vast forest cradling this scorched patch of meadow, dauntingly distant from civilization. The earth curves, and I am alone on it; I am small and alone on this big earth. This last shot is the one that will come first. In shows like this one, death is the beginning, not the end; everything starts with a body.

As I so often do when the camera takes flight, in the pit of my mind that’s all mine, I see myself, when I was very small, just a baby, lying on a warmer, softer globe, lying atop my mother on a large white bed in a quiet place. Thanks to my aunt, who paints a vivid picture, I seem to remember even what I can’t possibly remember—the two days I spent in an unearthly embrace, tucked in the crook of my mother’s arm as it cooled, then stiffened, then softened around me, and to my tongue clung the taste, bitter and salty, of my newborn screams and the milk of the dead.

Amber Burke is a graduate of Yale and the Writing Seminars MFA program at Johns Hopkins University. She teaches writing and leads the 200-hour yoga teacher training at the University of New Mexico in Taos. She wrote over 100 articles for Yoga International, and her creative work can be found in many literary journals including swamp pink, The Sun, Michigan Quarterly Review, Flyway, Okay Donkey, and Quarterly West, and on her website: https://amberburke3.wixsite.com/amberburkewriting.