Free Right of Thirst by Frank Huyler Page A

genuinely had a chance. I’m sure she had no idea that her words were precious to me.
    I’d seen him onstage a year earlier, howling and screaming in an experimental production written by one of his friends, to which, despite his resistance, I’d invited myself during a quick visit for a conference in the city. The play, at least in my eyes, was not good at all. Eric was the lead. I both pitied and admired him for struggling and storming as he did. It was something I could never have brought myself to do, yet he yelled and swore and flung himself all over the stage. Afterward, there was far too much applause in the small theater full of friends and acquaintances, and too many congratulatory remarks, and a bouquet of roses, and then the playwright himself crept with tentative arrogance out onto the stage for the question-and-answer session. The playwright blinked in the lights. He seemed both painfully young and painfully sincere, and it was hard to reconcile the torrent of brutal language in the script with the boyish authoron the stage. My heart both sank and went out to all of them, as I stood and clapped for their bows with the rest. Oh, Eric, I thought. You’ve got a long road ahead of you.
    He’d been drawn to acting in high school. We didn’t talk much about it, but that night, over dinner in an expensive restaurant overlooking the lights of the city, I did ask him why he was so compelled by it, why he kept trying while one by one his peers drifted away into the professions.
    He replied that there had been a few times, during one performance or another, when he lost himself, when he felt as if he were no longer fully conscious. It was as if he were somewhere else, in the lights, the presence of the audience in the shadows, like standing next to the sea at night—he couldn’t even remember the passage of the lines through his mouth. It felt athletic, somehow, or meditative, as if he had stepped beyond himself entirely—he said he couldn’t really describe it well, only that it was powerful and strange, and nothing else he’d ever done was like it. He understood why many felt that acting was a self-absorbed pursuit, with little practical use, but those moments made him think otherwise. Somewhere below all the pretense and falsity there was something selfless and profound. In this way, his teacher claimed, acting was a kind of metaphor for our lives. We all assume roles in the everyday world, and though the roles may vary, and though we may be unaware of them in our conscious minds, we endlessly fall into character nonetheless, and let them sustain us, and carry us along. He repeated his teacher’s words to me with the sincerity of youth, and as I listened to him it struck me that perhaps his teacher was a more interesting woman than I had thought, one who examined her choices rather than just making them, but also one who undoubtedly sought to impose significance where none, or not somuch, existed. It was only acting class, I thought, full of kids who dreamed of being movie stars. It was hardly a metaphor for life. But he meant what he said, and I could see it, and so I was careful to keep my comments as mild as I could.
    â€œWell,” I’d said, “if that’s true, then how do we tell which role is real? Doesn’t that mean that everything is just a kind of game?”
    â€œBut that’s exactly what we do,” he said, looking intensely at me. “We’re just not aware of it. We construct our own identities all the time, and our identities always change depending on circumstances. There’s no such thing as one identity, really, when you think about it. Acting makes you realize that. You can be anything. It’s liberating.”
    He took a swallow of wine.
    â€œYou know,” he said. “I can feel it. I really can. I’m feel like I’m just one phone call away, and the phone’s going to ring, and that will be