The Torturer's Apprenticeby John MacBeath Watkins

It all started when I ran into Max.

Max Milligan was young, talented, arrogant and insufferable as only a genius can afford to be. I

possessed the humility only mediocrity will accept. I was one of those players always appearing in movies

and television shows for a moment and disappearing before audiences bothered to quite learn their names.

Milligan was my neighbor during a hiatus in Bellingham. I had stumbled into a crisis that comes

upon an actor when you realize that you have lived on hope too long and gained nothing for yourself, just

enough money to live on day to day without the security most people take for granted. I was ready to be

something else, to drive a bus or sell shoes or anything that would allow me the comfort of knowing

where my next paycheck was coming from for years to come.

Milligan had inherited his grandmother's house. He went there to be free of the city of Lost

Angels. The house was a small, gray structure built a century ago on the side of a steep hill, and not

repainted in at least 20 years. It roosted above the road by a good 15 feet, the lawn dropping off at an

angle that seemed almost impossible to mow. I was climbing the hill from the city one day, listening to the

arguments of crows and trying to take solace in the cool northern sun the day he spotted me.

I now wonder how long he contemplated my face before he remembered my name. He had

directed me in a forgettable thriller, one of those deals studio people put together with a lot of cheap actors

surrounding a bankable face. Had I seen him first, watched the confusion as he tried to remember me,

perhaps I would have doubted his assurances that I was anyone. Or perhaps the recognition was as

instantaneous as he would have had me believe.

I walked by when he was having a yard sale of his grandmother's ceramic knick-nacks and fake

colonial furniture. God knows why he bothered to sell it. He didn't need the money. He saw me on the

street and let out a whoop. I looked up in time to see him drop a rather large chair on the foot of a

desiccated little woman who had been bargaining for it.

"Night! Silas Night, as I live and breath. What on earth are you doing here?"

"Trying to avoid any memories of my career," I told him. "I left my agent no number and no

forwarding address."

Milligan had large, deep blue eyes and bushy black eyebrows like Edward Teller. Coupled with a

baritone voice that could penetrate stone walls, those impressive eyes and eyebrows gave him a

commanding presence. He set the eyebrows stern and horizontal and filled his powerful frame with air as

if he were about to deliver a long speech at high volume.

"Silas Night is not a cipher," he rumbled. "You've got to stop thinking that way. No, they don't

want you on the talk-show circuit, but directors do look for a `Silas Night type' all the time. People who

know acting know who you are and what you do. What they don't know is what you can do if you are

given the right part."

"Thanks," I said, “but my talent is minimal. I just have the kind of face that looks villainous. I

don’t have the villain inside me to call up in a performance.”

“You do. We all do. You just can’t accept the role of a villain. You’ve been fighting against your

looks all your life. With the right part, the right director, you could wake up that villain and make him

work. You need to find a way to be comfortable letting him out.”

“He doesn’t live here,” I said pointing to my chest. “All my life, people have expected to find him,

and no one’s met the villain within. The villain is just a mask.”

We had been aquaintances; we became friends. I learned that it isn't much easier to get a job as a

bus driver than it is to get one as an actor, especially in a small city where no one ever wants to leave.

Bellingham back then was a Venus people trap. It was a gem of a town in a beautiful setting where people

became determined to stay, even if it meant being poorer and less comfortable than they could be

elsewhere. My poverty grew more desperate, and Max proved himself generous. He also proved too

ambitious to stay out of the limelight for long.

After one of his trips to Los Angeles, he knocked on the door of my third storey walkup apartment

and told me it was time to end my retreat from acting.

"I'm casting a play now with the best part for a villain that's been written in years. Big names want

to do it. I want you instead. You can make this play, and it can make you."

Dreams I thought had been fragmented by years of bit parts and ground to dust in the bitterness of

my retreat from acting soared again. He offered a live audience, a great part, perhaps a new start. I had no

doubt Max would do something brilliant, freed from the dealmakers and allowed to choose his own script

and his own cast. I signed for a sum my agent scoffed at, ignoring the fact that a play scheduled to run in

Seattle was unlikely to make my reputation if the plays I had done in New York had failed to do so.

Besides, I was chastened. I had learned that I had no talent for the ordinary life, no more than most

people do for acting. I had been a dishwasher, a busboy. I hadn't found a job I could live on.

Milligan said his backers would only accept casting me as the male lead if it would save money.

My agent said it had to be a lie, but I believed, and belief is the only truth the theater can create.

I was to portray a torturer in a play that celebrated a beautiful revolutionary's fight for liberation. It

was a bigger part than I'd had since college, but not different in kind than the other roles I'd landed. Or so I

thought.

Oh, but it was taxing to work for a genius, determined to drive me from every comfortable rut that

had sheltered me. We rehearsed every night in the old theater on Seattle's Capital Hill. I can still feel his

voice pounding into me. I had studied Stanislavsky's "method" acting, of course, just as I had learned to

say all the tongue twisters without tripping over them, but I had never really been a method actor.

"Dammit, man, can't you feel?" he would shout at me, the eyebrows fierce and threatening. "Reach

down and find the part of you that feels every slight, that seeks every weakness, that exults in every

humiliation of others, loves to control people. Bring it up and show us how it feels to be a torturer, don't

just remember your fucking lines!”

Of course he was right, and that unwillingness to become the characters I portrayed was exactly

the weakness that had limited my career. That speech and many like it thundered at me every night in the

theater and worse, much worse, were the averted eyes of the other actors while he tried to get from me the

performance I had always been unable to give.

Sometimes at night I wept slowly, silently, hopelessly in the long waking hours in bed as the

dreams of a new start slipped away. I would have to be replaced. I could not become Col. Guzman, the

torturer in the script. Liza Tudor was beautiful enough, rebellious enough and vulnerable enough to play

the part of his victim, Maria, as if she were living the part, but I was still acting, still Silas Night on stage

and very much aware of it. There were times when Isabel, the author of the script, would sit watching my

rehearsals then have whispered arguments with Max, and walk out looking as if she would rather face the

secret police portrayed in the play than the critics after opening night.

I was certain even Max would finally give up on me. Then one night Liza strode into my dressing

room and confronted me.

"What the hell are you doing out there?" she demanded. "You're not willing to play this part!"

She shouted it standing over me, legs apart and hands on her hips, while I sat in my chair as if tied

to it. It was exactly the opposite of our positions in one of the scenes on stage. Perhaps this is why I felt so

vulnerable.

For some reason, I opened up to her. I told her about the face I have and my unwillingness to live

up to it, of a lifetime of being looked at as if I were the villain I appear, of loves that never happened and

people who would never trust me because of the face. I expected no sympathy from her, only that she

would see the reasons for my failure and let me slink away from the play without anger.

"Silas," she said gently, "I know that face isn't you. I could see the man behind it from the first."

She pulled up a chair quite close to me and settled on it. I became aware of the little shadows her

nipples cast on her tank top, the length of her thighs and the shortness of her shorts, and looked into eyes

that were soft and brown and trusting. All unhappy people are self-involved. I think in the misery of my

daily failures on the stage, I had come to look on her as furniture. She was determined that I recognize her

humanity and sensuality, and when she wanted to she could raise the temperature of a room by an act of

will. There is an aristocracy of beauty in this world. She was a duchess at least. People like Liza have

many romantic options, more opportunities in jobs, in friendships. I was and am part of the underclass of

the ugly. Sort of a lumpy proletariat.

Liza blew a strand of hair out of her eyes. She was always endearingly unkempt offstage.

"You are quite a study," she said gravely. "Because you look the part, you're afraid to feel it."

Of course it was just the short version of what I’d told her. Yet there was something in her manner.

I had never in my life felt so well understood, so known by another. Like a child who has been very tough

with the bullies and hardened himself with anger to avoid tears, I was vulnerable to sympathy. When you

put your arm around that child and tell him it's all right, he'll cry; and so did I.

She held me while I cried, and when I started to get control she cupped my head in her hands.

"Get your coat," she said. "We're going for a walk."

I was walking her home, it turned out, and dipping into the supply of condoms she kept in the nightstand.

I left the next morning in time to shave and change clothes before rehearsal in the afternoon.

Walking into the theater each day, my chest would tighten and flop sweat would start to flow.

Long before I reached the stage my funk would have destroyed any chance of a decent performance.

But on that day, my soul was infused with a feeling of wholeness. I was known, I was loved, I was

valued for the person I believed myself to be. And more than that, I had discovered in myself something I

had long suspected was missing -- a capacity to love another human being more than myself.

You laugh. All right, perhaps I was only smitten like any ordinary schoolboy decades younger

might be -- except that I was older, old enough that love was becoming rarer and harder to feel.

By this time Max was glaring at me as I mounted the stage each day, irritated that I was proving

him wrong in his assessment of my talent. But that day it didn't matter. I didn't feel the slipping of his last

bits of hope in me that day. Love had made me whole.

During the rehearsal Max seldom spoke. Soon everyone was silent as I performed my part, unlike

some earlier performances when people had talked backstage as if nothing of importance might be under

way.

Max watched me that way he has, studied me as if counting every pore on my face, as if

committing to memory every inflection of my voice, every twitch of my half-paralyzed lips, every move

of my scrawny frame.

At the end of rehearsal he took me aside.

"It's working!" he said in a stage whisper half the cast could hear. "By god, I knew it would. Today

I was ready to either break you or make you act. But before the first word, from the way you walked on, I

saw it was different today. I saw this monster, this complex and hateful creature that makes us

uncomfortable because of his humanity, start to wake up today. We have two more weeks to bring him to

life. We can do it now."

Those intense blue eyes, eyes that seemed to make the person they appraised the most important

thing in the universe, held me a moment longer.

"Be ready for the torture scene tomorrow."

The torture scene. The scene I always played most woodenly, unwilling to acknowledge that I

might have the range of feelings required to call upon if one was to play it properly. Try to feel as a

torturer feels sometime yourself. How can you inflict agony on another and relish it? Or if you do not

relish it, how can you feel it morally justified? And if you can feel as a torturer feels, can you put him

back in his cell at will?

Just knowing we would work on that scene the next day was enough to make my funk return. I

walked out of the theater in a cold sweat.

Liza caught up with me.

"What did he say?" she asked.

"We do the torture scene tomorrow."

"You're not ready."

"I can't play it. I've had the feeling that this play was my last chance, that if I failed I would never

act again. That's all that's kept me from quitting. I can't play that scene. I can't be the torturer."

Silently she followed. Silently we waited for the bus. Silently she got off with me at the Undre

Arms apartments, where I lived. We walked into the worn old building together and climbed the stairs to

my room.

She entered ahead of me. It was dark in the hallway when the door closed behind me. She pulled

her top off over her head.

"I know the torturer. He raised me. For most of my life, love didn't seem real without pain,

without control, without surrender." Her head hung down as she turned, dark hair hiding her face, arms

stretched out before her. Her shirt was around her wrists as if she were bound.

The next day at rehearsal, I had lost my confidence again. I was sweating and my shirt was soaked

in fear. Max was looking at me as if he could smell the funk on me. I had no idea how I would play the

part.

Liza took her position in a straight-backed chair, wrists bound together and stretched out on a

table. I stood over her facing the audience, hands ready on the torture apparatus. I delayed my first lines so

long I thought Max would yell at me to begin.

Then I felt a tremor wrack her body as it had the night before.

I moved the apparatus.

"No," she said, "Nooooooo."

"Let them hear you," my line went. "Scream louder, so that all will know we are breaking you."

My voice broke as I said it, because she sounded as she had the night before. Even the rhythm of her

breathing echoed of the passion of the night before. The heat of her body tempted me to caress her, and I

stroked her shoulder oblivious to those watching. I recovered and forged on.

"Pain is your body's way of telling the animal in you to flee. But here there is no escape, only pain,

only agony that violates the most private part of your soul where the word `no' lies, and takes away your

`no'."

Another twist, and from her lips, another "Noooooooo." That tone from the night before.

I caressed her hair. My hand was trembling.

And on like that for the whole scene. Guzman was coming to life in me, showing a side of

humanity, of sensuality, that most of us fear to acknowledge. One reason torture is not an efficient means

of interrogation is that doing the work turns the people who do it into sadists. Guzman, a tortured human

being living out the urges we forbid ourselves, submitting to human darkness while forcing submission

from his victims, makes the audience identify with the evil in him. I'm ashamed that I play it so well.

Max, on the other hand, was delighted. He heaped praise on me, said I had found the key to the

entire play in a way that would change the way he directed it.

I told Liza about my shame, how I feared this monster that had lain dormant in me since birth and

now had come to life. She said, "No Silas, it isn't you, it's only the part. I know the real man."

I wish she had known the real man. The play's sexual tension comes in part from the similarities

between rape and torture, forcefully violating the most private right, the right to flee from pain. To play

the part well, to play it with feeling, you must touch parts of yourself that make you recoil, seeking the

motivations of a monster.

Milligan worked hard to bring out the sexual tension between Guzman and Maria as rehearsals

continued. That was the change in his direction; the play became more about people trapped in their

passion and in their roles and less about politics. He never understood the irony of that.

Guzman in the play falls in love with Maria, tries to save her, but in the end kills her because he

can't bear to lose control of her and not have her in his life. His love is not redemption for the character. It

is tragic without being noble. In fact, the most controversial thing about the play is that Guzman kills her,

rather than her killing him. Murder on her part would have been noble and liberating. A Hollywood

ending.

I tell you this so you will see how difficult it is to make people feel any empathy for the part. Even

today, with a movie offer that could make my career and fortune, I don't think I can play the part and

retain my sanity.

Taking off my makeup and khaki uniform at night became a ritual of returning to humanity,

returning to the comforting identity of Silas Night, an ordinary actor in above his head. I think I

deliberately started letting Liza dominate me offstage as a poultice to my soul.

The play opened at last, and it seemed to me on that opening night that the audience sat in a

terrible silence while my voice echoed from the rafters. But I was feeling what Guzman would feel, doing

what he would do.

When the curtain fell there was a stunned pause, then thunderous applause. I felt like a giant as the

curtain calls continued. It was a sensation I'd never felt before.

That first night the crowd was not large. Few people would admit that they wanted to see a play

about torture. But the reviews were fantastic and word of mouth brought in more people. We are all

complicit in torture now, the collective unconcious whispered. Our elected government, that instrument of

our will, made it a matter of policy. Now how shall we deal with the guilt?

Our crowds grew, and there was talk of taking the play to New York. Some Seattle plays had done

well there, and backers with substantial money were starting to take the idea seriously. They were also

taking me seriously, saying that Liza and I were the key to the play's success.

Liza gave me some extra time every night to strip away Guzman and return to Silas Night. It took

an hour sometimes to return to my own identity, but always I knew that the lifeline was there -- Liza knew

me, the real me that had nothing to do with Guzman. She could always pull me back if I needed it.

It's hard to say why one night I went to her dressing room only minutes after the curtain fell. I felt

strange about it, as one does when breaking a routine that has become ingrained. That's why I paused in

front of her door before opening it.

Through the door I heard the unmistakable sounds of lovemaking. I knew the sounds she made too

well to be wrong.

Back down the hall I went, seeking the shelter of my own dressing room. I sat there trying to

convince myself I was wrong. It didn't work. I stepped into the hall in time to see a stagehand, back to me,

close the door of Liza's dressing room and strut down the hall away from me.

When I opened her door Liza, always languid after lovemaking, was still lying on some cushions

naked, with her legs apart, moist with pleasure and perspiration.

"Oh, God," she said, and hung her head to hide behind a black curtain of hair. "Oh, God. And

you're still Guzman."

I realized I was still wearing the uniform. As much to be free of Guzman as to be free of her, I

stormed back to my dressing room. Changing quickly into my street clothes, I skipped the ritual of

becoming Silas Night and even left my makeup intact.

Summer rain pattered outside the theater when I stepped out into the night. Liza exploded into the

dark alley through the theater's back door a moment after I'd let it swing shut behind me.

"Stop, dammit, don't just walk away," she called.

I turned, and saw that she looked more angry than contrite.

"Don't you care enough to yell at me? At least I deserve some jealousy."

The cool rain was soaking her dress, making it clear that she wore nothing underneath it. She came

close enough for me to feel her warmth.

"Silas, listen, I know this hurts, but you don't own me. I like you, that's all. Can't that be enough?"

Liked me. She had been my anchor to humanity so that I could go beyond the edge and not just act

that monster Guzman, but be him for a few hours a night. She changed my life with what I thought was

her love, and now she only liked me. Silas Night, loved and loving human being, was more an illusion

than Guzman. I turned to walk away.

"I'm not your prisoner, Guzman!" she yelled at my back. "I can do whatever I want!"

Perhaps the line between theater and life had faded for her; perhaps what she did with the

stagehand was an act of personal power that she needed after her role on the stage. Such things have

occurred to me since then. At the time, I just hurt inside and walked away.

"Silas, you chickenshit! You leave your balls on stage!"

I stopped and turned. She ran to me and grabbed the front of my shirt, just as she did in the final

scene in the play, where I kill her, and she spat in my face, just as in the play.

Guzman grabs her by the neck and pushes her backward. In the play. In the alley. She hit the

Dumpster. She crumpled silently on the ground and didn't move.

I stared stupidly for a minute. I'd never struck a woman in my life. Horror at what I had become

for a moment drove me away. I walked, then turned a corner at the end of the alley, then walked, then

stopped and stood numbly in the rain.

I was soaked to the skin when I heard a diesel grumble, saw lights and reflections of lights on the

wet road and the storefronts. The bus stopped in front of me and the door opened. Until that moment, I

had not realized that I was standing at the bus stop. My feet, like a riderless horse, had headed for home.

"You getting on the bus?" The driver knew me, knew I always caught her bus. I stepped aboard.

"You were waiting for someone?" the bus driver asked.

"I guess she isn't coming," I mumbled.

A ringing telephone woke me the next day. It was Max.

"Don't worry about anything," he said without preamble. "I told the cops I saw Liza alive after you

caught the bus. I'll swear to that to my grave." Then he hung up. My half-functioning brain couldn't put

what he said in context. Puzzled, I put the phone down and went back to sleep.

The phone woke me again. Detective Edward White told me Liza was dead, and wanted to know

if I remembered anything that might help.

"I waited for her," I said. "I waited at the bus stop."

"So the bus driver told me. Did you think it was strange when she didn't arrive?"

"She's very spontaneous," I said, unconsciously speaking as if she were still alive. "She wouldn't

necessarily tell me if she got a ride. I'll ask her -- I mean, I was going to ask her about that."

A few more questions, then he left me alone. When he hung up, I was fully awake. I realized that

he'd gone easy on me as a suspect because Max had covered for me. All the time I was talking to the

detective I was looking at her purse on the coffee table, where she'd left it the morning before I killed her.

After hanging up the phone, I stuck it in an old valise.

Incredibly, as the days wore on, it became clear that no one had seen us or heard our voices during

that final argument. Detective White set great store by the fact that no one had found the purse. He

decided that she had been hit with a blunt object by someone who had then robbed her. The rain had

apparently washed the corner of the Dumpster clean, and strangely, my fingers had left no bruises on her

neck.

"I don't like Capitol Hill," he told me. "Queens and punks everywhere. Junkies and tweakers will

kill you for a few bucks."

It seemed to me that he hated Capitol Hill, probably because it has a large gay population. His

feelings seemed to blind him to the possibility that someone in the show might have killed her.

Coincidence and White's incompetence conspired to conceal my guilt. And the show, of course,

went on. Max Milligan said I saved the play by turning a brilliant performance into one of genius.

Every night in my dressing room I would see Silas Night and Guzman in my mirror, but all

distinction between them was lost. The man, the method and the mask at last were one.

Finis.