the tail of her shirt, and he walked away and they never said a word to each other. A few hours later, he sat in the public library and tried to write and then looked at flights to West Virginia on Kayak.com. He thought about his father jumping from the bridge. What would it feel like to hit the water below? Would it hurt, or would your heart stop on the way down? Something was running down his cheek. He wiped it away with the back of his hand.
THE NEXT MORNING, a Monday, at nine, Jamie went to work at his boss’s apartment, a $6,000 rental, which was located on the Upper West Side and served as the set for Monster Media, the advertising company that created videos for other companies and that he wrote scripts for. The videos were very short, only three to five minutes long, all very simple. The company was quite a respectable one, or at least that’s how it presented itself, and the project that he and the crew and his boss were hired to do concerned a manga convention that was to be held in Manhattan mid-July the following year, so he sat on the futon beneath the framed anime poster that hung on the wall and began flipping through pages of the script he’d written. His boss, a tan fortyish man with gray in his hair, sat at a table in the corner, talking about “specific changes” that’d occurred to the script after going over the e-mail log with the client. He assured Jamie that he’d be pleased with the edits even though Jamie didn’t care about the project and he kept insisting that they could film a convincing “magna” (he kept saying magna instead of manga) convention without having to rent a convention center. And then the conversation took a more somber tone: if they didn’t get the magna convention right, then Monster Media would go out of business. After that, Jamie looked at him and felt ashamed and needed a cigarette.
Within the time it took him to smoke, his coworkers and the two hired actors had changed into their costumes and hit their marks, and all of it—the giant katanas, the gloved fists, the Dragon Ball pompadours, the super short skirts with the faintest hint of crotch—seemed to suggest that it was thought out when it actually wasn’t, and the anime projected onto the shõji chroma-key screens showed the eye of the “Great Mollusk,” its pinhole pupil dilating, and a rodent with huge testicles dressed in a kimono, shamisen slung over his back, dancing and eating a bowl of ramen on the roof of a geodesic dome, and Jamie knew his world had become a fantasy because none of it really had anything to do with him.
At some point he realized the voice actor hired to do the narration hadn’t shown up, and he didn’t say anything and was kind of relieved since they’d have to postpone the shoot, but then his boss asked him if he’d ever done any voice work and if he’d want to do it. Jamie was good with his choice of words and body language, but his voice, that Appalachian twang, was the one thing he could never fully change. For years he tried desperately but couldn’t quite strike the right natural tone, and he had a lying inflection that he himself could hear and he knew that when he was asked a question and had to give a straight answer his voice would betray him.
“I’m probably not the best choice,” he said.
His boss laughed. “You don’t have to do that much.”
Jamie said, “OK,” and flipped through the script to the voice-over and didn’t know what he was doing there, and he was supposed to read the line “The time has come to return to Dimension Z” but was so nervous he tried to think of some way to get out of it. The director set up a microphone and some recording equipment and his boss sat him down in a chair and positioned him nearer the microphone and then the director, satisfied, said, “Action.”
“The time has come to return to Dimension Z,” Jamie said, and the i in time wasn’t a long i but a shorter-sounding one, like an ah sound. It was the way he’d always said it.
The boss shifted his eyes from Jamie to the director and then back to Jamie.
“Let’s try that one more time,” he said.
The director reset the microphone and hit record.
Jamie told himself he could leave, that he could simply say to his boss that he wasn’t a voice actor, but the words didn’t—couldn’t—come out and he sat there at the microphone, and the need to hear his own voice began to grow more intense and he didn’t know why.
“The time has come to return to Dimension Z.”
“You’re saying ‘time’ a little funny,” his boss said. “Let’s try it again.”
“Yeah, I’m just nervous…” Jamie’s voice trailed off. He was about to say something, mouth opened. He could hear a helicopter flying overhead.
The director reset the microphone and hit record.
Jamie kept staring at the script until it began to blur, and when his vision became clearer he tried to say it again—“The time has come to r-return—goddamn it”—then closed the script.
The director just stood there and said something like “Wow.”
His boss came over and asked, “Is everything OK, Jamie?”
Jamie tried to smile and said, “Yeah,” and looked down and realized that he didn’t have anything to say and tried to shake the thought from his head.
But it stayed there.
On a break and leaving his mother a voice mail on his iPhone, he noticed the director of social media, Laura, staring at him from the mirror as she reapplied the anime pencil lines on her cheeks and the garish blue lipstick on her lips. She was usually in conservative vintage dress that for some reason made him weak with desire, but that day she was wearing a Victorian military uniform with fur accents and a mystical amulet with a “moth” kanji.
“Don’t you find the blasé sexuality of the rat groundbreaking?” he said.
“Yes,” she said, and laughed, “a landmark.”
“I wonder if everyone gets this much shit at the office.”
She laughed again and walked over, and he was happy to see her laugh.
“They even wanted us to wear these fake double-D balloon tits,” she said in her Australian accent, “like these weird gravity-defying tits. Can you believe that?”
“Now why would they do a thing like that?” he said.
She smirked but said nothing and he took a long look around the apartment. “We should kill them and make a hentai horror movie about it. A nihilistic Australian kills everyone at her job, buck naked, standing around with Goku and whatever. I’ll write the screenplay. Make a million bucks.”
She cracked up and he could see the roof of her mouth.
“So were you just nervous reading that thing earlier or…?”
“I don’t know,” he said, and looked at his iPhone. “I need to get out of here.”
“What’d I miss?”
“Nothin’ to say, really. I’m havin’ trouble with this girl who stole my jacket and some stuff and I feel humiliated, and, just between you and me, my dad died last week, so…”
“Oh
