Redshirts

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