N.S. AHMED

The Ghost Actor 

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June in Brooklyn is a blazing blister of a month. 

The nebulous streaks of clouds loom above the streets, the trees of heaven burst with ripe purpose, the local residents are hungry for low spells of wind, and you, to your surprise, still remain nameless. 

* * * 

You’ve had a name before. 

You remember this, don’t you? But the syllables that once formed your name—courtesy of Mother, who decided on it after crying over the story of some ill-fated prophet—never surface. Perhaps a hot cup of honeyed milk or an invocation of God can ease its passage back to your memory. It doesn’t matter. You are an up-and-coming actor. Your name, whatever it may be, will soon follow. But still, you need a title. Some moniker that can nab jobs that aren’t in retail, pile up experience on that artist’s resume, remedy the assembly of bills, and offer some leverage that the other brown folks auditioning for the same roles don’t have. As the ceiling fan in the bedroom slowly churns the air into breezes, whining and creaking, you daydream about the background characters that defined your early excursions in film: Halal Food Cart Guy; Illegal Deli-Owner; Bearded Immigrant; All-Knowing Polyglot; and Accented Everyday Middle Eastern Man. Each is a brand of invisibility that deepens the guilt within you. Outside your window, the sun glows white as a skull. Pigeons gorge on mulberries. A clutch of yarrow swells beneath the underbelly of concrete. 

You roll to the cooler end of your pillow, wanting to forget the days of yesterday.

* * *

Whenever you’re restless about the profession, you remember Mother. 

You both were still living in that Paradise Heights neighborhood, still at that old tenement whose bricks were wreathed with the sullen greens of partrideberries and moss. The one that Mother thought was reasonably priced for a post-recession one-room. You didn’t see much of her then. She worked as a hired cleaner, rarely dragging you along to the addresses at the richer ends of the district. Fort Hamilton. Dyker Heights. Sunset Park. Gravesend. Bensonhurst. Stay away from those places, you remember her saying. I don’t want you cursed with their sadness too. The only times you did see her was when, after taking a long bath from an exhausting day of work, she’d settle into the living room sofa and turn on the TV, surfing between stations until she found one brimming with musalsals about love. Her favorites were ones about bitter love, married love, forbidden love, ecstatic love, undying love, and ancient love that soared beyond the sentimentality of words. Love, so thick and sweet like a spoon of molasses, that it claimed the evenings of your home. Mother would absorb these romance musalsals for hours—laughing herself into a stupor, complaining about Fate, swearing by Allah’s name, contemplating her loneliness, weeping under heartbreak—until her bloodshot eyes finally gave in to a dreamful sleep. You would stay up and watch until the light of dawn pried through the curtains, still spellbound to the screen. It was these musalsals and their Majnūn-and-Laylā plotlines that triggered your want to become an actor. Not because of those rivers of black-and-white love Mother was eager to drown in again and again, but rather, it was the characters. And it wasn’t their Casanova swagger or their quackish domesticity that fascinated you, it was the Masaris who played them. To you, when the TV finally faded to darkness, a glassy figure materialized on the display as if it were some private prophecy from the future, and you would envision this reflection, your likeness, performing in the same roles they had. 

This, you felt stone solid, was something you could pursue: an acting love.

* * *

After a series of Craigslist failures, you land your next job. 

The ad read: 

Looking: Arab Actor for a Music Vid 
Tall (5’10ish), Young (18-30), & Handsome (Ideally Egyptian) 
No Pay, but Free Food & Exposure! 
Paradise Heights, Memorial Park, Tuesday @4:00pm 

You hop the R train turnstile, curse the delay, and arrive thirty minutes late to the gig. You’ve lived in Brooklyn for all your years, and yet this is your first time stepping foot in Memorial Park. Surrounding you are flocks of aunties whose laughs teleport you back to the pavilioned days of the old country, vendors selling cheap spits of sugar-dusted mango, and shirtless teenagers chain-drinking White Claws in the safety of paper bags. As you snake your way through a dirt path, the air becomes slick with heat and American dreams, but you remain wise. You don’t spare time for distractions. You are here to perform. Soon, you stumble on set. The Director approaches and shakes your hand. A friendly, yet impatient grip. He asks for your name and, noting your worry, says he doesn’t mind the lateness. You tell him: I’m The Ghost Actor. Confused at your meaning, the Director moves on and skims down a list of dos and don’ts, says that the music video is in celebration of all the shades of Brown Power, and invites you to snack on a courtesy box of Dunkin Donuts afterward. 

Should I do anything in particular? you ask in a hollowing whisper. 

“Say that again, chief?” 

You clear your throat. “Should I do something special?” 

“Just stand there and do you.” 

You stand and do what you’ve been doing your whole life. 

* * *

The question could be one of the riddles Mother loved to tell: If your acting is turning you into a ghost, who do you consult? 

You consult yourself after a cold shower, standing beyond the spotted cheval mirror leaning against the bedroom wall. You undress and study your nakedness. The geography of your coffee-brown skin: the rivulets of sweat, the hanging crescent of your nose, the obsidian undergrowths of beard. You see and then you unsee. Lamenting past the body, your body, as the world has taught you to. Sensing submission, the reflection begins to inch toward collapse. Flickering like a waning bulb. As you stare at the unbecoming of your physique—wondering how much kush you smoked the night before—the You in the mirror breaks character and shatters the laws of your symmetry. Seeing your untethered self reminds you of that story Mother loved to tell. How the great King of Egypt, so occupied with ushering the new era of his country, became unmoored from his own shadow. In the same manner your reflection is unmooring itself from you. This leaves you with the question: what are you ushering? You begin to look past your need for celebrity, the small roles you gritted your teeth playing, and the American djinns who’ve been whirring their hauntings in your ears—motherless men are ruined dogs wandering the alleys they got beaten in—before you’re severed from the heat in your nerves. You look at the reflection. 

All it offers is a sad, soft scowl. Then, gone. 

* * *

Alone and wanting to speak to Mother, you mix up your languages and say to no one: {unintelligible} 

Outside the apartment, the wind howls a sad soprano. Leaves are full of uneasy whispers. Fireflies wink with maternal warmth. These omens aren’t her. And they aren’t suddenly answers to your anonymity, your ghost-acting, or the roads of your emptiness. But you speak and wait for an answer, fooling yourself into thinking they are. 

All you do is speak and wait… 

* * *

Nightfall. You return to a bench in Memorial Park and—while still having some tangibility left in your body—decide to archive the things that you’ve lost on a blank sheet of paper. 

The list reads: 

             The Taste of Glazed Donuts 
             Last Pay Check 
             The Feeling of Warm Winds 
             Body Temperature 
             Story of the Ill-Fated Prophet 
             Laughter 
             The Street You Grew Up On 
             The Musalsal Titles That Made You an Actor 
             Others’ Optical Perception of You 
             A Mirror’s Reflection 
             The Arabic Names of the Musalsal Actors 
             Hunger 
             The Name on your ID 
             The Shadow Beneath Your Feet
             Mot—

Before you finish writing, the paper slips through your fingers. It flutters skywards towards the cable lines, beyond the height of the neighborhood maples, over the highrises of brownstones, before finally disappearing in the lavender of Brooklyn night.

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