John Scalzi - Redshirts

You spent most of an hour in front of the mirror, glancing at your medical records for specific incidents of trauma and then looking back into the glass for the evidence of what’s written there. There isn’t any. You are in the sort of unblemished health that only someone in their early twenties can be. It’s like the accident never happened, or at the very least, never happened to you.

You picked up your iPad and turned it off, making a special effort not to pull up the images of your latest MRI, complete with the MRI technician’s handwritten notation of, “Seriously, WTF?” because the disconnect between what the previous set of MRIs said about your brain and what the new ones said is like the disconnect between the shores of Spain and the eastern seaboard of the United States. The previous MRI indicated that your future would be best spent as an organ donor. The current MRI showed a perfectly healthy brain in a perfectly healthy body.

There’s a word for such a thing.

“Impossible.” You said it to yourself, looking at yourself in the mirror, because you doubted that at this point anyone else would say it to you. “Just fucking impossible.”

You looked around your room, trying to see it like a stranger. It’s larger than most people’s first apartments and is strewn with the memorabilia of the last few years of your life and the various course corrections you’ve made, trying to figure out what it was you were supposed to be doing with yourself. On the desk, your laptop, bought to write screenplays but used primarily to read Facebook updates from your far-flung friends. On the bookshelves, a stack of anthropology texts that stand testament to a degree that you knew you would never use even as you were getting it; a delaying tactic to avoid facing the fact you didn’t know what the hell you were doing.

On the bedside table is the Nikon DSLR your mother gave you as a gift when you said you were giving some thought to photography; you used it for about a week and then put it on the shelf and didn’t use it again. Next to it, the script from The Chronicles of the Intrepid, evidence of your latest thing, dipping your toe into the world of acting to see if it might be for you.

Like the screenwriting and anthropology and photography, it’s not; you already know it. As with everything else, though, there’d be the period between when you discovered the fact and when you could exit gracefully from the field. With anthropology, it was when you received the degree. With the screenwriting, it was a desultory meeting with an agent who was giving you twenty minutes as a favor to your father. With acting, it will be doing this episode of the show and then bowing out, and then returning to this room to figure out what the next thing will be.

You turned back to the mirror and looked at yourself one more time, naked, unblemished, and wondered if you would have been more useful to the world as an organ donor than you are right now: perfectly healthy, perfectly comfortable and perfectly useless.

You lay on your stretcher on the set of The Chronicles of the Intrepid, waiting for the crew to move around to get another shot and becoming increasingly uncomfortable. Part of that was your makeup, which was designed to make you look pallid and sweaty and bruised, requiring constant application of a glycerin substance that made you feel as if you were being periodically coated in personal lubricant. Part of it was that two of the other actors were spending all their time staring at you.

One of them was an extra like you, a guy named Brian Abnett, and you mostly ignored him because you knew it was common knowledge on the set that you’re the son of the show’s producer, and you knew that there was a certain type of low-achieving actor who would love to become chummy with you on the idea that it would advance their own status, a sort of work-through-entourage thing. You knew what he’s about and it’s not anything you wanted to deal with.

The other, though, was Marc Corey, who was one of the stars of the show. He was already in perfectly well with your father, so he didn’t need you to advance his career, and what you knew of him from Gawker, TMZ and the occasional comment from your father suggested that he’s not the sort of person who would be wasting any of his precious, precious time with you. So the fact he couldn’t really keep his eyes off of you is disconcerting.

You spent several hours acting like a coma patient while Corey and a cast of extras hovered over your stretcher during a simulated shuttle attack, ran with it down various hallway sets, and swung it into the medical bay set, where another set of extras, in medical staff costumes, pretend to jab you with space needles and waved fake gizmos over you like they were trying to diagnose your condition. Every now and again you cracked open an eye to see if Abnett or Corey was still gawking at you. One or the other usually was. Your one scene of actual acting had you opening your eyes as if you were coming out of a bout of unconsciousness. This time they were both staring at you. They were supposed to be doing that in the script. You still wondered if either or both of them were thinking of hitting on you after the show wraps for the day.

Eventually the day was done, and you scraped off the KY and bruise makeup, formally ending your acting career forever. On your way out, you saw Abnett and Corey talking to each other. For a reason you couldn’t entirely explain to yourself, you changed your course and walked right up to the both of them.

“Matt,” Marc said to you as you walked up.

“What’s going on?” you asked, in a tone that made it clear that the phrase was not a casual greeting but an actual interrogative.

“What do you mean?” Marc said.

“The two of you have been staring at me all day,” you said.

“Well, yes,” Brian Abnett said. “You’ve been playing a character in a coma. We’ve been carting you around on a stretcher all day. That requires us to look at you.”

“Spare me,” you said to Abnett. “Tell me what’s going on.”

Marc opened his mouth to say something, then closed it and turned to Abnett. “I still have to work here after today,” he said.

Abnett smiled wryly. “So I get to be the redshirt on this one,” he said to Marc.

“It’s not like that,” Marc said. “But he needs to know.”

“No, I agree,” Abnett said. He slapped Marc on the shoulder. “I’ll take care of this, Marc.”

“Thanks,” Marc said, and then turned to you. “It’s good to see you, Matt. It really is.” He walked off quickly.

“I have no idea what that was about,” you said to Abnett, after Marc walked off. “Before today I’m pretty sure he never gave me a thought whatsoever.”

“How are you feeling, Matt?” Abnett said, not directly answering you.

“What do you mean?” you asked.

“I think you know what I mean,” Abnett said. “You feeling good? Healthy? Like a new man?”

You felt a little cold at that last comment. “You know,” you said.

“I do,” Abnett said. “And now I know that you know, too. Or at least, that you know something.”

“I don’t think I know as much as you do,” you said.

Abnett looked at you. “No, you probably don’t. In which case, I think you and I need to get out of here and go somewhere we can get a drink. Maybe several.”

You returned to your room late in the evening and stood in the middle of it, searching for something. Searching for the message that had been left for you.

“Hester left you a message,” Abnett had told you, after he explained everything else that had happened, every other absolutely impossible thing. “I don’t know where it is because he didn’t tell me. He told Kerensky, who told Marc, who told me. Marc says it’s somewhere in your room, somewhere you might find it but no one else would look—and someplace you wouldn’t look, unless you went looking for it.”