Oliver was married when I met him, when we were testing for the first Archangel movie. He was twenty and his wife was forty-two, a theater director from London who strode around in studded boots and asymmetrical jackets by avant-garde Japanese designers, as noble as a Roman senator. He didn’t leave her for me. He didn’t leave her at all. According to Oliver, after their second anniversary she announced that her passion for him had burst like an overfull balloon, destroying itself.
I didn’t know about light, not really, until Oliver and I first held hands in public. It was at the premiere for the second film. We’d been secretly sleeping together for three months, but we were sick of all the spy craft and rumor-quashing. He got out of the car first, and the thousands of crazy bitches behind the barriers screamed like they were being burned alive. When he reached back and pulled me out and didn’t let go of my hand, the noise and the light seared me. I thought I would be vaporized, nothing left except my shadow burned onto the red carpet. In the pictures, I’m glaring like a war criminal facing a tribunal. Oliver smiles, waves. Light is the medium of his beauty. In person, he is excessively handsome, obviously, but on film he transfixes. Between the projector and the screen he is changed into something almost unbearable to look at.
The sound and the light on the red carpet wasn’t for us, though, not really. By getting together, we were making the story seem real, and the crazy bitches wanted the story to be real so badly they lost themselves. An especially radicalized splinter sect were the ones who wrote the hard-core erotic fan fiction. They tunneled through the internet, digging a labyrinth where they could pile up their desires and nurse them like larvae.
They were ruining it for themselves, and they didn’t even know. They didn’t realize they wouldn’t like the books if the story gave them exactly what they wanted. People like stories that leave them a little frustrated, that have an itch. The bitches wanted Archangel to be tailored to all their most secret kinks, but they wanted it to be inviolate, too. Whenever we changed any tiny thing in the movies, they got in touch. Lizveth’s house is sky blue, not blue-green, you morons. Or, Gabriel is wearing an Arctibear hat when he and Katerina kiss for the first time, which should be WHITE not GRAY, which you should KNOW because it SAYS in the BOOK.
Not that Oliver and I didn’t get greedy, too. The characters lingered in us. We thought we could ride all the longing and passion we’d been acting like an updraft. We felt magnanimous when we got together, like we were fulfilling an obligation to the story. But the crazy bitches wrote about us, too. Us, the people, Hadley Baxter and Oliver Trappman, the actors in L.A., not Katerina and Gabriel, the figments of Gwendolyn’s imagination who live in the nonexistent empire of Archangel.
Oliver and I once read some fan fiction about ourselves, just to see. At first we laughed at the typos, and then we got quiet, me sitting on his lap while we read a clammy-palmed fantasy about us fucking for the first time. “I only want you,” Oliver said to me in that story, like Gabriel says to Katerina a thousand times. “Forever.” But then, in a move that would have scandalized dear polite Gabriel, fan-fiction Oliver pulled up my “expensive couture designer gown” and got me with his “throbbing cock.” Give it to me, moaned Hadley. Oh ya. You are such a hot and famous movie star and I live you so so much.
Oliver closed the computer. Out the window, a hummingbird appeared, attracted by the morning glory that grew on that wall of my house. It hovered and looked in at us quizzically, its iridescent chest hanging still in space, its wings nearly invisible with speed. We were sitting at a busy intersection of realities. We could feel the celestial wind.
“I live you so much,” we started saying to each other.
We is safer than I when you’re inside it, but it’s a tippy thing, unreliable, ready at any moment to toss you away and leave you exposed as an I after all. Once you are a we, you are also a them, a target to be spotted and photographed. A prize. A quarry, by which I mean something to be stalked and also a pit mine. We were spotted and photographed together in New York, Paris, Saint Petersburg, Cabo, Kauai, on a yacht off Ibiza, partying après-ski in Gstaad, at the grocery store, at the gas station, hungover at Umami Burger. They mined us for stories, tidbits, truths and lies, lies and truths, fashion tips, fitness tips, diet tips, hair tips, relationship tips, c’mon, baby, just the tips. They rated our outfits, scored our beach bodies, announced I was pregnant with twins, announced, sorry, correction, I wanted to be pregnant with twins, announced I was going to rehab, announced we were engaged, announced our engagement was off. They wanted to know what was in my purse, in my closet, on my list of beauty must-haves. They scraped away at us, made us into something ransacked and empty.