We Were Hostages
BY COURTNEY BILL
We met at a warehouse in downtown Vancouver in the blink of night. We were background actors shooting a cop pilot that would never air. It was the end of the episode—cops rushed in, shouts gutted to the rafters, gunfire popped—and we collided to the ground. James the dental hygienist went left, Marty the kids’ speech therapist ducked behind a barrel. There were twenty of us playing hostages. We all needed a paycheck. It was four a.m.
On the sixth take, our backs were stiff and knees sore, but we played the roles that had been choreographed for us. Duck, fall, shudder into yourself. Be the victim that doesn’t know they’re about to be saved. Look afraid. When the doors swung wide and the cops rushed in, the cameras wheeled to capture the brutality, and for the first time, we looked at each other. Our eyes struck each other like glass breaking.
They couldn’t get the shot right. We played that take over and over again. Each time, in that moment of surrender, bodies buckling to the floor around us, we looked at each other. When the director sent us home for the night, the sun was rising above the warehouses. We walked side by side, shoulders skinning, and we knew, intuitively, that we would go home together. It was so violent, the way we fell.
We auditioned together for the part of older sisters in a network show about spy kids. The panel asked us whether we were related and we said no, we just met. They squeezed their eyes like they didn’t believe us. They said they would be in contact.
We attended a mutual actor friend’s Christmas party not long after. We sat on his front steps and chewed fiber gummies we’d found in the bathroom and ranted about production companies and failed agents and D-list actors who had cold shouldered us at a traffic light two years ago. We moved in together three days later.
Our first item of business was to spread out a watercolour set on the carpeted floor and backslash empty notepads until something emerged. The meaning was always evasive and abstract. We painted sawtooth sharks and modular synthesizers and each other’s eyes. We tried to paint God.
In those months, we stippled our days full of auditions. We received rejections in line at the grocery store and on the bus route to roller derby. When money ran tight, we obtained a newspaper route. We stole garden gnomes from front lawns and gave each other bouquets with our neighbour’s blue daisies.
At night, we monologued to each other, voices indistinguishable and overlapping: what is the difference between discipline and devotion? Our mothers, and how they failed us. We should go to that place on Cadmorry. They have good Thai. Remember that time we went to Johnny’s and everyone asked us if we were twins so we said yes, three months premature, little pink aliens wrapped in tubes, our mother with her penchant for watermelon-themed-everything. We don’t even look alike, that’s the funny part, but everyone thinks lesbian couples are identical. We laughed so hard on the taxi ride home, and made up stories about our communal childhood, the way we’d talk to each other in our sleep, wear the same outfits on the same day without meaning to, how cute we were as babies, and our fingernails—oh my god, our fingernails—they were so small. Our lives were so close together, so enmeshed, they were almost the same.
One Thursday in January, we returned home from a night spent clubbing. We unpasted ourselves in the bathroom, removed layers of glitter and dirt until we were corn husks giggling at our unpeeled reflections. Lights shimmered on our naked shoulders like we were angels. We silked fingers through each other’s hair in the sink, washing out the last of the night. Mitski played in a neighbour’s speaker, voice corded through the thin walls: I will take good care of you. I will take good care of you.
In bed, limbs combed through limbs. We were everything that we needed. We were roommates and we were sisters and we were daughters and we were lovers and maybe, if we tried, we were mothers.
In April, we went on a road trip to Los Angeles. The line to cross into Washington took forty minutes longer than it said it would online. We scowled and drew Tic Tac Toe on each other’s thighs with pen. When the car crawled up to the booth, the border officer looked like a frat boy turned lawyer, a hint of debauchery beneath his tough upper lip. His gaze was firm, almost physical.
“What is your reason for visiting the United States?”
“We’re attending open casting calls in California.”
He chewed the inside of his cheek. “How long will you be staying?”
“Six days.”
“Is it just you two in the vehicle?”
We nodded. He looked at the backseat strewn with t-shirts and empty water bottles. Eyeliner in the cup holders, loose lipstick between the seats. Wrinkled headshots, folded resumes, too many pillows.
“Are you family?”
We didn’t know how to answer that. Yes. Not completely. Spiritually, sort of. In a way that he wouldn’t understand.
He asked again. “What is your relation?”
We looked at each other and something shifted, the dark vacuum of what we were to each other. In some way, it felt as though it was a territory that language could not trespass anymore. “You don’t know?” He fisted the door frame and tipped closer to us. Spit formed a line between his lips.
“We live together.”
When the car wheels edged into foreign land, we stuck our hands out of the windows as we drove away like teenagers in a bad coming-of age movie. “Fuck borders,” we said. We laughed, a trilling sound like metal. We could feel it in our teeth.
We drove from Vancouver to Los Angeles—twenty-one hours over two days. When we drove through a tunnel, we held our breath until our faces went blue, until we looked fishbowled and our mouths gurgled open of their own accord, until we thought we would die.
Each audition was the same: a monotony of sugared smiles and straightened postures and men who nodded at us with their stubbled chins and said thank you for your time (they never meant it). Production will contact you if you’ve been chosen for callbacks.
We drove through streets crusted with half-dead palm trees and went to all the bars we’d never heard of. On the last day, we went to the ocean. It was blue hour. Maybe we could feel that something was coming, or maybe we didn’t, but either way we were quiet. Bikes velcroed past. A rush of wind.
We climbed down the steps to the shore. Our knees clicked rhythmically like windchimes. When we arrived at the beach, we sat with our legs tight against our chests and watched the moon ringlet through the water. The tide looked so soft we could almost feel it on our cheeks. Smoke unfocused the landscape, the line between sky and sea so smeared, it became indistinguishable. The horizon disappeared into itself.
We did not think about limerence. We did not think about our parents. We did not think about after. There would be no after, we told ourselves, as though it was something we could promise. We watched the sky bleed into the ocean, both losing more and more of themselves to each other.
Twelve days after returning to Vancouver, we received a call. We were fixing the microwave, instruction manual in disarray—page six on the kitchen table, page eleven balancing on the back of the couch, page twenty-eight between our teeth.
Usually, we never picked up the phone when it rang. This time, when the screen lit up, the area code was from LA. We lost feeling in our fingers. We hadn’t expected a call.
We knew it meant trouble, but we picked up anyway.
They had good news, they said. And also bad news.
There were two names connected to this number, they said. While we appreciated both of your time and your auditions, we only have one person we’d like to move forward with at this time.
We splintered.
Suddenly unsure
who was you, who was I.
Whose mother collected tin dolls and whose mother made peach jam every September? Whose childhood Siamese was named Geronimo Stilton and whose dream was it to visit Cairo? Whose sheets—whose copy of Simone Weil—whose blackberry chapstick?
We divided most things along the middle.
One day you’re consumed with love and the next you’re picking up the pieces of yourself you didn’t know you’d lost.
A month later, you left. Back turned to the open door. Your shirt tag stuck out against the back of your neck like a tongue. I moved to touch it but stopped myself. (Myself?)
You didn’t close the door behind you and I waited until you were in the cab, until the wheels’ screech had died away hours ago, until the sky had shouldered into darkness, until my feet were cold on the welcome mat, until I understood that nobody was going to close it for me.