A Calling for Charlie Barnes

by Joshua Ferris

Being alive was, as far as he could tell, an unrelieved nightmare of strange twinges and mysterious growths.

Dust as ancient as a Greek chorus swirled in the spotlights, and the musty odor of antique costumes hung in the air backstage. Charlie could still reconstruct on his retinas, forty years later, the sharp negative of the makeup mirror lights, the hot blinding lights of the main stage, and those gentle pools of blue light backstage that cut the sacred darkness on nervy opening nights. The thick clotting smell of pancake makeup and the toxic catch of wig glue in the dressing rooms were, back then, all he required to become drunk with excitement. But it was his ears that best recalled the delicate magic of Red Mask: the whispers of jitters backstage, the sudden shushes, the rude crashes, the soft murmur from the house before curtain, the roar of shared impressions during intermission, and the muted laughter behind the stage doors while outside the wash of oblivious traffic continued in a steady rain—there was simply nothing to compare to it even now.

His charisma as a director was of the negative variety: by assuming the role of agony itself, he enlisted in his discontent those who longed for his praise and would work doubly hard to realize their native talents if it were on behalf of Charlie Barnes.

Imagine that: for every life, not one history but as many as there are people who observed and participated in that life; hundreds, if not thousands, of accounts for just one of the billions of human beings who have lived and died, a staggering proliferation of competing narratives that, no matter how close, can never be reconciled.

“You can’t read a book wrong anymore, Chuck. Not in the age of Amazon reviews.”

I have always consigned the desiderata of religious concepts, with their dry abstractions and dubious utilities, to a junk drawer of the mind, where inevitably they went to get all jumbled up and die of unholy neglect.

Real life makes for good novels because it’s lived as a bunch of lies, and because fictions of one kind or another are the only things worth living for.