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Then I hung up on Lance Hayworth mid-syllable, which nobody has ever done, and turned Mabel's ring on my finger once for luck I still don't believe in, and out the window Los Angeles began, at last, to move.

"Martin. What do energy healers actually look like?"

Martin changed lanes. "In my experience they look expensively poor."

Chapter Four

Gregory

"Expensively poor," I repeated.

"That depends," Martin said, merging with the serenity of a man who has merged into this exact traffic every day of his life, "on whether you want a guru or a photograph of a guru. They are not the same product."

"Explain the difference."

"A guru has calluses. A photograph of a guru wears expensive linen." He checked his mirror. "Rhoda Cauthorne does not want a guru, Mr. Normand. She wouldn’t know what to do with an actual holy man. He would frighten the caterers." A lane change. "Your former mother-in-law wants the photograph. Serene. Handsome enough to sit near. Foreign in a way she can't quite place, so that she can tell her friends he defies category."

I stared at the back of his head with the specific love you feel for a man who has just handed you your entire second act.

"Martin, if I were a different kind of person I'd leave you everything in my will."

"You've told me. I've asked you not to. It would complicate my taxes."

* * *

Here is a thing about casting that civilians don't understand.

Everyone thinks casting is finding the most talented person. It isn't. Casting is finding the person whose actual self sits closest to the hole in your story — so that on the day the acting fails, and the acting always fails, day four, in the rain, when somebody's blood sugar craters, the person underneath is still, by accident, correct.

You don't cast a guru. You cast a man who is already, in his soul, a little bit full of it, and then you point him toward the light.

Which is how I ended up, ninety minutes later, in a black-box theater off Melrose that smelled of nerves, ambition, and somebody's microwaved lunch, watching six increasingly desperate men pretend to be enlightened for a man who wouldn't tell them what the job was.

Martin made three calls. That's all it takes in this town — three calls and the phrase paid, cash, discretion, one week.

The desperate travel very fast toward that phrase. They can smell it from Bakersfield. I told the booker I was producing a wellness documentary and needed a practitioner type for a reenactment, which I want to note was not entirely a lie. The lie and I were about to be roommates for a while, and I've always found it's better to keep a lie small and load-bearing, like a good supporting character, than to let it sprawl into something you have to keep feeding.

The first five actors were catastrophes of a familiar kind.

A man who did a Russian accent nobody had requested or wanted.

A blond so beautiful he’d plainly never had a thought in his life; he radiated a deep peace that turned out, on questioning, to be the peace of the truly vacant.

A man who wept on cue, impressively, and then couldn’t stop. Martin walked him to his car.

A CrossFit instructor with shoulders like a doorframe who kept calling me chief. He figured out, somewhere around minute three that I was gay, and adjusted his entire audition accordingly — a slow unbuttoning of the top of his henley, a lot of held eye contact. I let him get to the second button.

"You're very good-looking," I said. "That's not the job. Thank you for coming in."

He nodded, buttoned up, and left with some dignity, and I hoped somebody would hire him for something.

And one man who I’m fairly certain was an actual guru — genuinely serene, calluses and all — whom I dismissed inside of forty seconds, because Martin was right. He frightened me.

Then the sixth one came in.

He came in wrong. That's the first thing I noticed. The other five had come through the door selling themselves. This one came through the door apologizing to it, easing it shut behind him like he was afraid of waking a baby.

Fortyish. Soft through the middle in a way that reads as either deep peace or six straight months of ramen, and I'd have bet the boat on ramen if I still had the boat. Good head of graying hair he had obviously cut himself. A linen shirt — photograph, said Martin, in the back of my head — that had been ironed with genuine hope. He was holding a single sad sheet of paper that I would later learn was a headshot from 2009.