He came out to LA to be an actor and ended up a dishwasher, something he’d made peace with by now, having tired of auditioning long ago. It hadn’t been, after all, the reality of acting that had infatuated him. He could see that now. He didn’t want to pretend to be other people, but be other people, and to be seen as those other people. And now he was another person—someone who could wash dishes for hours without complaint or even a single word spoken if not necessary. 

He could make ends meet as long as he never took off more than a few days each month. And he rarely thought of going back to Boise, which would now feel no different than settling in a completely new city. He hadn’t been in touch with his mother in years, although he sometimes dreamed that she showed up on his doorstep. In the dream, there were always vague words of forgiveness spoken, although it was never quite clear what was being forgiven, or who was doing the forgiving. 

Some days, he viewed himself as a kind of modern monk, existing within a strict routine and budget with something approximating contentment. His greatest pleasure was sleep after a long work shift. He scheduled his only two luxuries for the final day of each month, when he would purchase a professional massage for his aching feet and then go see a movie. 

He always stayed for the entirety of the credits, reading names and job titles at random, wondering about the lives attached to each name. He never thought about acting or directing or writing anymore, but he hadn’t stopped thinking about film sets entirely. He decided that if he had ended up working in the industry, he would have wanted to be a grip or gaffer or teamster of some kind. Without someone to haul and set up equipment, there was ultimately no light, no sound, no camera, no movie, no story. 

But he wasn’t a grip. He was a dishwasher. Many nights, it came to him with clarity that he was always going to become a dishwasher. The arc of a given life was both arbitrary and inevitable. The only mystery left was how he would die, and whether he would end up like the other ghosts in his apartment, the ones who moaned hauntingly and made creaking sounds and occasionally moved objects. 

Often, he wondered if the ghosts had been failed artists who’d spiraled into shame and isolation and did not have a calling like dishwashing to halt their descent into the abyss of despair. Or maybe it was the opposite. Maybe they’d loved life so much that they didn’t feel ready to move on, and hung around waiting for the next project or the next party or the next improv show or the next group outing to Venice Beach. 

His only other company in the apartment was the rotating cast of roommates, few of whom stayed for longer than one lease cycle, and all of whom wanted to work in the industry. One sold a script to a studio—a horror movie about a chicken demon terrorizing a factory farm—then moved out after rapidly developing an affinity for white powders. 

The story idea rattled around in his head sometimes when washing dishes, though he’d never been allowed to actually read the script. Still, he felt haunted by the beauty of the enormous creature, all feathers and sharp beak and bloody talons, wreaking vengeance from beyond some unseen cosmic valley. He wondered if the movie would ever actually get made. 

One month, he saw a movie about a character who moved out to LA to be an actor and wound up a dishwasher. Beyond the starting premise, the film didn’t seem very realistic. Or at least it didn’t match his experience. There were too many scenes of breathless misdemeanors and not enough scenes of washing dishes. And there weren’t any scenes at all of riding the bus, looking out the window at the red sun of evening, and imagining a world that could remake itself as easily and completely as sets on a soundstage.