Page 64 of Playworld
“Ah,” I said.
“So what’s John Wilkes’s solution to this predicament?”
“He assassinates Abraham Lincoln!”
Elliott gravely shook his head. “That’s just the means. He does what his brother couldn’t. He enters history.”
Elliott had a bit of the actor in him too. Most times, I didn’t mind.
“Who had the better life?” Elliott asked me. We had exited the park by now and began looping around its fence back to the office. “Edwin plays Hamlet all over the world. Manages the Winter Garden Theatre. Has a daughter by his first wife. Names her Edwina, by the way. How’s that for narcissism?”
“So who had the better life?” I asked.
Elliott shrugged. “It’s pretty obvious, but here’s my point. Back in the office you said you felt like you were speechless. That you had things you saw but struggled to communicate. Those are the two most heartfelt things you’ve ever shared with me. So maybe that’s what you’ve been put on the earth for. To come up with a language for your life.”
Admittedly, I had no idea what Elliott meant. Was finding a language for my life like a job? So far as I could tell, I had three of those. Fall through spring, I was a student, which I figured was just a way for me todo my real job, wrestling. But since I was spending the summer playing Peter Proton, and this funded the other two, maybe all of them were under the umbrella of “actor.” I did have hobbies. Since third grade I’d drawn superheroes. I’d collected comics for as long as I could remember, and I’d been working on my own comic book for nearly three years that was more than a hundred paneled pages long, contained in a binder that sat on my desk, one I sometimes caught Oren leafing through with an expression between envy and amazement. Mom called it my “magnum opus.” That Sunday, at a party at Elliott and Lynn’s house, standing before the buffet with Al Moretti and his new boyfriend, Tony, he asked me, while he loaded his plate with smoked fish and bagels and cold cuts, “So, Griffin, what do you want to be when you grow up? You gonna become a famous actor and make millions?”
“I want to be an artist for Marvel Comics,” I said.
Al frowned. “You’ll get over that,” he said.
Oren came up to me, miffed. “Sam Shah said he’d bring his Ferrari, but it doesn’t look like he’s coming.”
“When’d you talk to Sam Shah?”
“I call him for advice sometimes about my career.”
“What career?”
“Precisely,”Oren said. He had made himself the most beautiful bagel: the lox draped over vegetable cream cheese with a tomato and red onion, these topped with capers and layered with sprigs of dill. “That guy is super smart,” Oren continued, and took a bite. “He was telling me that the greatest inventors and entrepreneurs, like Thomas Edison and Michelangelo, they recognize a thing before it exists and then make what people didn’t know they wanted.”
“Like what?” I asked.
“Walkmans,” Oren said, and then shrugged. “Parachutes.”
“Who invented the parachute?”
“Michelangelo, idiot.”
“That sounds like something Elliott would say.”
“Actually, I ran that by Elliott last week. He told me the American Indians have a name for this: a ‘vision quest.’ And he said that imagination is the true form of time travel. Which makes sense, when you think about it. That you dream up something in the present and it lives in thefuture until you build it. Which was also the first time Elliott and I ever really talked about anything worth a shit.”
“I’m glad Elliott has more of yourcachet.”
“What the hell does that mean?”
“Approval, idiot.”
“Yeah, well, Elliott also said that if I didn’t bring up my grades, the only job I’d be qualified for would be one replaced by androids.”
“Do androids actually exist?”
“Not yet, but according to Sam Shah, the future’s in automation. Also free trade.”
“What’s free trade?”
Oren held up his bagel. “Cheaper Nova.”