David Hopson: All the Lasting Things

My name will be the last to go. If the doctors are right, if the last memory in is the first one out, then yesterday disappears before anything else. Yesterday, then last week, then, like sandcastles meeting the tide, the months. The years. My wife, my children, my work, even her, even Jane, all of it swallowed and churned. No less gone than if I’d dropped my life into the sea. But Henry. They’ll have me in diapers before I forget my name. Henry, they’ll say, and up I’ll look, not knowing who is speaking or why. Just Henry. Before another wave rolls in and the last castle falls.

There would be no ghost, not tonight.

No “Adieu! Adieu!” Benji thought. No “Remember me.”

He stood in front of the mirror, arms spread wide, as a strange man rushed to dress him. Jerry, the man who usually dressed him, had called in with a migraine, which Kay, the Stalinist stage manager / code cracker, immediately deciphered as “too drunk to stand.” Now, as inquisitor, she used her considerable hip to hold open the door of the men’s dressing room and waited for Benji’s bloodshot eyes to meet hers in the mirror.

“Headaches,” she mused. “You never know what’s going to bring them on. Weather. Bright lights. Caffeine.”

“Voices,” Benji added. “Certain voices.”

The more modest members of the cast shied in their underwear at Kay’s appearance, hurrying into their doublets and hosen, but Kay continued, unfazed. “A bottle of Canadian Club. It doesn’t bother you that Jerry’s in rehab? Was in rehab. Who knows how much your little lunch date set him back.”

The obvious responses spun through Benji’s mind — the bottle belonged to Jerry; Jerry, a scant year away from a senior citizen’s discount at the Beverage Barn, was responsible for his own rehab — but the words, as if set on a lazy Susan, were in front of him, then gone before he could choose. He blinked to keep Kay from doubling in the mirror, twin flannel shirts and Elvis pompadours merging fitfully into one. “Too bad you didn’t know the kids on Diff’rent Strokes ,” she said.

It was a setup. Of course it was a setup. There Kay stood, unshrinking as Serena at the net, just waiting to smash the ball into Benji’s pickled face. “Why’s that?” he asked, lobbing the question at her with a slump-shouldered show of fatigue.

“You could have started your own newsletter. Notes from the industry type stuff. Best bars for drinking away your unemployment check. How to make bail. Transition into porn. Too bad they’re all dead.”

“They’re not.”

Static burst from the fat walkie-talkie that was all but surgically attached to Kay’s hand. “Right. There’s Danny Whatshisname.”

“That was The Partridge Family .”

“ The Partridge Family, ” Kay repeated. “I bet he’d do a column.”

“If he has anything to say about makeovers, I’ll pass it along.”

Benji felt himself becoming stiffer and heavier with each plate of armor the costume dresser fastened to him, but a sense of spryness, certain as the whiskeyish warmth that spread from his center, took hold of him. He imagined springing through the air and slamming the door in her face.

Weeks ago, when he walked into the theater’s small, shabby green room, Benji found Kay among the band of cast members he privately thought of as the Kiss-Ass Crew. Membership was exclusive to those whose disposition soured in direct relation to the number of lines they were given to speak and who, during rehearsals, snuggled up to the director to discuss motivation or deliver lengthy monologues about their “method.” Naturally, Hamlet was their leader. Tall, toned, appropriately Nordic, he regularly invited the cast to join him in breathing exercises. On this day, the Crew stood gathered around their diaphragm coach as he clicked his way through what appeared to be a particularly amusing website. As Benji entered the room, they all looked up in a way that made clear to him that he was the subject of their search. For a bunch of actors, they did a lousy job of hiding their guilt. He grabbed a yogurt from the dorm room refrigerator that shuddered and dripped between two filing cabinets and, eyebrows arched, made a stand. He may have been defeated, but he refused to retreat. The gaggling sputtered to a stop. A blush crept into Ophelia’s cheeks, and in awkward, shuffling silence, the meeting of the Crew adjourned.

The computer, a grimy, loudly whirring beige beast, looked like it predated the Internet by at least a decade, but connected it was, and a quick review of the browser’s history confirmed that his castmates had, in fact, been laughing at him. Benji pulled up the Wikipedia page last visited.

Benjamin Fisher

Benjamin “Benji” Fisher (born October 21, 1972) is an American actor best known for his portrayal of Andy Osgood on the television sitcom Prodigy . Soon after a talent scout spotted him in a JCPenney fashion show, Fisher was cast in a few commercials, most memorably as the boy astronaut for Moonflakes cereal. In 1981, he earned his first television appearance in Little House on the Prairie . Three years later, he landed the part of the young genius in Prodigy . Fisher’s trademark line—“That’s what you think!”—can be heard in almost any Prodigy episode and in his cameo appearance in Dickie Roberts: Former Child Star . Since Prodigy ended in 1987, Fisher has had small roles in four feature films: Lickety-Split; The Truth About Charmaine; On Comet, On Cupid ; and Snow Day 2 . He has appeared in VH1’s series I Love the Eighties ; played Arthur Rimbaud’s older brother, Frederic, in the never-aired PBS miniseries Rimbaud ; and also provided the voice of Solomon in the animated feature A Hamster for Hannah . His father is the reclusive Pulitzer Prize — winning novelist Henry Fisher.

Kay brought Benji back into the dressing room with a tepid laugh. “All I’m saying is next time you feel like taking my prop master on a bender? Don’t.”

“Who still says bender ?” Benji snorted. The same sense of injury and outrage that had seized him as he snapped off the computer and threw his uneaten yogurt into the trash returned to him now, but the idea of leaping across the room and introducing Kay’s scolding face to the door withered on the vine.

The costume dresser lifted the gorget into place and asked Benji to tilt his head forward, but Benji could no more comply and forfeit what had become a deadly serious staring contest than admit that, yes, maybe the afternoon’s bender had gotten out of hand. Kay made a considerable opponent, obdurate and unflinching, but Benji had an unexpected leg up. It helped that he couldn’t actually see her or, more accurately, that he couldn’t decide which of several Kays to focus on. The three-hour lunch of Canadian Club shots had reduced Kay’s blockish, beflanneled form to a smear of blue-and-green plaid, a trippy fractal of thick rectangular glasses and shiny black hair.