The Actor

Cut...

So audience, what do you see? There wasn't one, of course, neither human nor electronic, but had you been there, what would you have observed?

On one side of the table a man giving vent to a torrent of talk. It may well be that I flatter him, in my portrayal, in my holding to certain standards of my own when it comes to dialogue and performance. The truth was, these ideas he was expressing had fermented away through months of isolation, never written down, never entirely settled into words but rather bounced around in an endless spin cycle of abstract thought. So when they finally burst forth, would it have been as a mature wine with its many flavors integrated into a pleasing whole? Or, more likely, as a flow of pig slops sluiced into a trough from which Jenny must pick out for herself which were the tastiest morsels?

And on the other side of the table? How could Jenny so quickly have shed that aura of competence, the inertia and gravitas, that her analyst job title implied? She had undressed herself for him. The formality and grace at which the professor had playfully tugged, earlier in the evening, Jenny had now voluntarily disrobed, giggling instead like a teenager, keeping only a thin veil of skepticism that scarcely covered the depth of her credulity. Why, we must ask, would Jenny give herself up to the first voice that offered?

The answer, dear reader, is that in her twenty-four years of living this was the first such offer to have ever come her way. Claims on her body she didn't count; religion delivered her no value; she could not have fathomed, had she ever given the question a moment's thought, how party politics could ever stir anyone to passion; and as for her career at Internal Security, for all that it had opened the bidding with a demand for her unrequited love of country, once she had been recruited it made no further effort to hide the transparency of this bluff, nor that its real bottom line was complicity in the game of career advancement in return for being allowed one's self to play that game. When the threat of restructuring came along and took even that away, Jenny did no more than shrug. Older now, her patriotism fading, she believed she had put away childish things.

But what else was there to pick up in their place? True love? Yes, perhaps. But of that Jenny could only dream.

So when this intriguing foreigner came along, with his polite manners and his far too many words for his mouth to hold – when he suddenly offered to go halves with her on saving the world, well it wasn't as if she could expect another proposal like that any time soon. The questing tendril of his audacious vision had snagged her by the ankle; threatened now to loop higher.

That's what you would have seen: two skin-lonely strangers in a strange encounter.

And so he kept on talking, relentless like a television in the corner of the room. She would look at him then look away. He would look at her, then back down at his hands on the table before him. No doubt he was thinking of his feet, up there on the bench seat, so short a distance from the fabric of her dress and beneath that the warm skin of her legs. The potential for casual body contact. Some part of his brain calculating were he'd been today, what he might have stepped in.

He was thinking, too, of her feet, how close were they? Was she socked or stockinged? Had she shed her shoes, the way girls do, when feeling comfortable? He couldn't see, not in the dim light of the café, not without twisting around, overtly to peer into the darkness. And all the time he kept talking.