Story: Role Play

It started off as a sexual thing. She played nurse and he played patient, she played teacher, he played pupil. She played guy, he played girl... But it became more than that. They had an idea to meet in a bar and pretend that they didn’t know one another; would spend hours, several nights a week, working their way around neon-lit rooms until they found one another, for the first time, again.

At first they made it easy for one another: they joked using inside jokes, allowed themselves to be parodies of what they assumed singles were like (just one word about space pants was enough to woo her in those early days). But they got harder on one another, until there were some nights when they didn’t go home together at all. If one of them was off his/her game, they did the only thing a pair of self-respecting players could do: they went home separately. At the end of the night they climbed into bed together without ceremony, and slept facing opposite walls, though those were just the bad nights. For the most part it was like they were kids again. All they needed was a starting point, a scenario, one far-fetched premise and they were off on an adventure that sometimes lasted entire days.

They would spend the weekdays brainstorming fantasies, writing them down in a journal kept specially for that purpose. Then on the weekends she would hide and he would scour the city for her, following the trail of clues she left and looking in the places he knew to look.

He played hero and she played damsel.

He played chef, she food critic.

She played priest, and he church boy. They confessed to one another, honestly, so that afterwards they could not speak for several days. When they did finally, it was not as themselves, but as Mr. and Mrs. Claus, Wild Bill and Calamity, Odysseus and Calypso.

She played a politician one time, and he wrote to her long naive letters about how they could make the world a better place, which she read and—straddling his lap—dropped quietly into the bin.

He played Adam and she played Eve, though he changed his mind halfway through and decided to be the serpent, then the apple...

Sometimes they had disagreements. For instance, he was fond of moss—entire forests of it; the kind that was thick and dry and reminded one of great terrestrial clouds—and he fantasized about playing the moss on the ground while she, a nymph, walked barefoot across it. She didn’t like that idea. Said she couldn’t “see it”.

Likewise, she was interested in the sub-particle lives of cells. Especially the way chloroplasts transformed light into energy. She dreamed of a scenario in which she would play the light, and he would convert her to sustenance. Although this, he assured her, was not at all practicable.

They spent the entire afternoon one Saturday with him lying very still on the living room carpet, while she stood in the window and allowed the sun’s warmth to seep into her sweater and her skin. After a while she grew tired, and melted into the floor with him, and they reasoned then that even moss required sunlight, though their differences continued.

One time he went around town all weekend, alone, in search of a fire so that he could play the smoke-charred survivor stumbling into the street, and there taste that first clean breath of air. Meanwhile, she deposited herself into one of the drainage ducts at the local dam, to satisfy a strange and inexpressible urge she felt to know what a Champaign cork felt like, just once.

Scene by scene, their various acts began to pull them apart. They would go on benders sometimes, and not see each other for days. They played the people on the street, and trailed after them like wraiths, or like those airy facsimiles you see behind objects in pictures when the shudder speed is turned way down. Sometimes they included strangers in their acts—as lovers occasionally, though not always—and after a while they hardly saw each other at all. When they did, it was by accident, and they would try to ignore one another like you ignore the guy creeping around a party with his camera, who tries to catch everyone in their element but whose stealth always fails him a moment too soon, and all he captures are these vague purgatorial gestures, halfway between natural and pretend. Not quite real, yet not quite imagined.