"The Hypnosis Of A Tv Glow"

“Carpe diem. Seize the day, boys. Make your lives extraordinary.”
The holes in the road that made the old Ford Explorer jump up and down and made Rey unwillingly throw his head forward from its position leaned up against the dirty backseat window were getting fewer and fewer in between as the car neared Los Angeles. He rubbed his forehead, it always hurt when it got knocked back towards the window. 
Carpe Diem… Seize the day… Extraordinary.. It had an almost magnetic quality to it. As if just the sound was taking him out of the car and making his forehead not hurt anymore, as long as it rang in his head. He didn’t even know what ‘Carpe Diem’ stood for, and yet he felt fine with it not being able to get out of his head again. Dunk-dunk-dunk, the words mixed together and became distinct like the sound of steps on a red carpet, like the chatter of an audience in front of a screen before the movie had started. 

The streets they - he and his mom - walked on to get to the audition room were never especially pretty. Cracking wall paint in unnerving, almost maddeningly bland colors of yellow and grey, dark, gum-hidden pavement tiles, overflowing trash bags and bins alike lining the corners, and a stench of leftover gasoline accompanied by the mountain-high shadows of the apartment blocks. His feet hurt.
But; ‘Carpe Diem, boys.’ ‘Carpe Diem’. In the distance, he could spot the tops of the skyscrapers coming from Hollywood. They were glinting, polished, purple-stained black and darkly varnished pine, stood so tall it was like they melted with the clouds, everything that the dingy street his feet was planted on wasn’t. 
Stand tall. Keep your head high, high, so you can see them properly. 

The door to the audition studio was painted off-white, had a pane of glass in the upper-middle of it, and was slowly peeling off of itself as the years went by. 
In the main waiting room, there was sometimes a girl, dolled-up with curled pigtails and a ruffled pink dress, or sitting in a hoodie scrolling through her phone. The chairs were all cheap plastic, the floor and walls bare cement, with a whirring, old coffee machine in the corner, growing louder and louder each day, besides an anonymous-looking black door. Occasionally, a man in some form of an oversized dress shirt and off-color jeans would poke his head out, calling a name.
Over by the entrance to the room was a dark oak coat hanger.
At first, he had to have his mom help him do it. Then he could if he jumped, then if he reached, and reached and reached a little less every time as he grew older. 
The man poked his head out, and called the name again, ‘Rey Finnegan.’

‘Seize the day, boys’. 
It was slow, at first - Bunch of background roles in blockbusters, a speaking line from a cute little boy here and there. But it was like a positive feedback loop, with him. ‘Seize the day’, the more he got, the more he wanted, the more he worked until he was half-falling asleep refreshing gig sites. 
It was worth it, no question. Staring into his screen, usually with a movie playing in the background like when he was a kid, it was an escape from all the other things his life consisted of. Homework with stupid prompts and the path he took every single day to go to school, or the taste of his mother’s dinner or the feeling of his bedsheets pressing up against the bottom of his arms that felt like they had been permanently printed onto him and his skin, as if it had never known anything else. ‘Carpe Diem’; and that made the feeling go away, if only until he closed his laptop again.

After high school, he bought an apartment in LA and tearfully said goodbye to his mother on a rainy Thursday afternoon, standing outside the door to the complex. It was downtown, too, close to Hollywood. 
If he jumped, he could just spot the skyscrapers in the distance. 
In the area, there were professional workshops and courses to take, new food to buy, he had a car so he could go anywhere he wanted, and he could walk down the TCL Chinese Theatre every evening. The loud neon signs and blinking, flashy ad panels almost matched the colors of his tv when he turned it on at night.

Yet the paint in his apartment started, after just a few weeks, to peel off. It wasn’t much, it wasn’t all that noticeable - a corner here, chip there, and he told himself time and time again to just ignore it. He was in LA, for the love of god. He could just.. Go outside, and he did, and he did a bunch, sometimes until the roots of his nails were more purple than skin-colored. 
But it didn’t matter that. It didn't matter that he had to jump, or that the paint was chipping off, or that apparently the walls of his apartment still turned a maddeningly boring beige in the slight, but ever going flicker of his defunct kitchen lamp, it didn’t matter that he was still eating cup noodles that still tasted like his mothers’ dinner every day from the grocery store, it didn’t matter. ‘Carpe Diem’, for fucks sake. LA.
As had become his night routine at this point, he sat down in his apartment that Thursday and put on a movie. The old ones, from the golden age, those were always his favorites. He liked falling asleep to them, like he did when he was a teenager, the saturated light blocking out whatever beige was coming from his kitchen, otherwise he’d need to take melatonin.

His first big break came on September 6th. It had been a cloudy morning, almost what you could call ‘fog’ but just not quite, and he was sitting with his new laptop and a bowl of yoghurt in his lap, checking through his emails. 
A supporting role. The one of ‘Kyle Newman’ in a new original feature directed by Paul Thomas Anderson. All nicely printed out in an email with his name on it.
The spoon clinked as it fell down towards his yoghurt bowl. 
Finally. 
It was funny, how he’d been sitting, just this prior evening, not even 7 hours ago, thinking about his mom’s house and how maybe he should just go back. 
Of course he shouldn’t go back. What in the actual fuck was he even thinking? This was all gonna be worth it, it was worth it, right now, he was gonna be in a movie and walk the red carpet and there would be no more half-asleep nights or stupid-ass jobs. He didn’t even have to work today, finally he didn’t have to work, he’d never have to work again, he’d never have to see chipped paint or flickering light again, never have to taste the disgusting artificial chicken broth of cup noodles from Walmart or his mother’s nightly dinner again. Never. 

The set was, at first, awe-inspiring. All the cameras, lighting equipment, greenscreens, actors and staff zooming about in their respective costumes and uniforms, it was like Singin’ in the rain, only with 100+ years of technology development, of course. Green, blue, black, mainly, but also every other color under the rainbow, no grey or beige in sight, it was as if they’d got triumphed over in a battle of power by an all-consuming swirl of pure saturation. 
He’d taken a lot of acting classes in his life, a lot of them, and how fun it was usually heavily depended on the teacher he had. Now, he didn’t have one, only his co-stars who were focused on their own performance and the endless repetitive loop of doing the same two dialogue scenes over and over again. Of course, he’d kind of known acting wasn’t his passion from when he first decided to try it when he was a kid. But this was bad, even for that, at least when he was a kid he didn’t have to repeat the same dialogue so many times it turned into mush into his mouth that he had to physically swallow before he could exert them from his lips again. 
He still practiced them at home, however, every single day. ‘Carpe Diem’.

He had to, he had to be at his very best. 
He wasn’t the most heartthrob looking guy ever, he was in a supporting role, he was charismatic enough to not be a laughing stock but never stood out in any of the promotional interviews they’d gone on. If he wanted to continue his career, he’d have to impress with his acting skills.
It was even more difficult at his apartment. On set the words would turn into mush, sure, but it was saturated, soft mush that he could force himself to swallow and start over. 
At home, it was more like a clump of ripped up paper pieces. Tore into his throat and made him unable to breathe, until he either forced it through and had to deal with the bleeding cuts he got, or puked it all up on the living room floor, or on the table where his manuscript laid open. 
Luckily, he had a digital copy. It was easily fixable. Just ripping the ruined pages out, printing new ones, and setting them in instead while cleaning up and taking out way too many bags of trash so it wouldn’t smell the next day when he woke up. The temperature outside varied a lot, from cold that would make the hairs on his forearms stand straight up, to sticky heat where even at night, in the breeze, he felt claustrophobic in his t-shirt. 
He’d often stand there, staring at the back alley his shitty apartment complex turned towards with the dozens of overflowing trash cans and the smell of puke infesting everything around him, paint on the walls surrounding him constantly chipping and growing beige, knowing he’d stand here tomorrow too. 
And then, he’d hear the voice. See the picture, ‘Carpe Diem’. And for a moment, he’d get a glimpse of the colors of the film set, and it’d scare away every single thing that had ever been beige or grey or chipped or smelled like puke or felt like his childhood bedsheets pressing up against the bottoms of his arms. 
And then, that moment would be over. And he would go back into his apartment, and put his manuscript out so he could practice, knowing he’d stand there tomorrow, too. 

Sometimes, when he came home after a long day, his eyes had been so filled up by the saturated swirl that was whatever set they were working on that day that he needed to stare at the corner of his dinner table for a good minute or two before he could see clear lines and angles again. Then he’d sit down on his couch, his old, peeling-off itself faux leather couch, and watch a movie. 

It was kind of strange. He hated everything about his apartment, hated the beige and grey and peeling wallpaper, really all he wanted to crawl into the screen of 50’s Hollywood, and yet… 

Occasionally, on set, he’d hold up his hand to his face. And it would be nothing but a blank void of color going in circles. It wasn’t even beige, none of his skin was, it was some weird changing combo of white and orange and yellow, as if they desperately wanted to merge into one uniform shade but their parents would yell at them if the color ‘beige’ was ever even as much as mentioned in whatever household they lived in. Every time he did that, he’d blink a couple times, try to get it to go back to being normal, and then look up at his fellow co-stars to see if they, too, had skin that had split over multiples. And always, to his horror, they did. 
And then he would think of his mother’s skin. And try to see, in his inner eye, if it was as neon bright as his was. And always, right after realizing, the next ‘cut’ would be yelled and the next mush he had to swallow. 
And such were the days. More endless repetition, colored, beige, colored, beige, apartment - set - apartment - set, dunk-dunk-dunk. There was a motel right beside it, where he started sleeping most days. At this point he could afford it easily, and last time he went into his apartment, his eyes had dried out from looking at his kitchen wall. 
It was only a little better at the motel, at this point, as he’d discovered just a few weeks ago, if there were no colors to bounce off of the walls in the little, enclosed, paper-dry room he’d want to claw his eyes out with a spoon there, too. Luckily there was a tv which would absent-mindedly play at night when he was trying to sleep. Like when he was young. 

So, watching the colors reflect in the cheap plaster ceiling, he thought of his mother. Of her house, of LA, of his apartment, of the audition room where they used to drive as a kid. He thought of their old car. And he thought of how he would never be able to lay eyes on any of those places again. For him, for his sickly-neon-orange-white skin, there was now only the set and whatever puke-rainbow swirl of saturation the premieres he was going to attend were.

Yet, in this glinting reflective muted moment which felt like it was stretching on forever in an unescapable loop, he was still laying in a bed, surrounded by beige walls. The sheets were still pressing up against the bottoms of his arms, like they’d never known anything else. 
He was starting to think that no matter how bright they got, they never would. 
His mother. His mother. His mother, his mother, his mother, his mother. Was he even able to see her again? 
Would her skin, the skin that had held him and shined in the fresh Leona Valley sunshine make him want to claw his eyes out? 
He was going back to the set tomorrow. Going back to the set, and impress with his acting skills, and on his deathbed his eyes would dry out from the walls in the hospital, his old, crinkled-up-in-maddening-California-waves skin would still be neon orange, and the feeling of his bedsheets against the bottom of his arms would as strong as when he was a child who had never seen the skyscrapers of Hollywood. 
‘Carpe Diem. You seized the day, boys, look at you. You made your life extraordinary. And look at you.’