Christian Bale picked a wet towel up off the bathroom floor and hung it on the hook. He muttered something under his breath. Toby was always leaving his wet towels on the bathroom floor. Dirty dishes in the sink. The other day, Christian had found a pair of Toby’s used socks tucked between the sofa cushions. He wasn’t a neat freak by any means, but it was getting ridiculous. Why should he have to live in filth just because his roommate was too lazy to clean up after himself. It was fucking ridiculous. They both payed half the rent, didn’t they? If living together was a job, Toby would be very unprofessional. Did he go around the house, tearing down Toby’s Better Than Ezra posters? No. It’s called mutual respect. Christian had half a mind to go into Toby’s room and rip him a new asshole using words.

But he didn’t have time for that. He needed to get ready for Brian Horne’s seventh birthday party.

Christian ironed the tails of his topcoat, and dusted off his tophat. He laid them out on the bed and began going through his trunk of magic tricks, ensuring that everything was in its proper place and in working order so that the show would go smoothly. He caught a glimpse of himself in the full length mirror on the closet door and paused. He was heavy set, and his eyes looked tired. There was a sallowness to his skin. He’d moved to Los Angeles as a little boy to pursue his dream of acting, and maybe it was to his credit that he hadn’t given up, but the stress of chasing his dreams was starting to take its toll. For years he’d been watching all the best parts go to other actors. Corey Haim had narrowly beaten him out for the Jim Graham role in Empire of the Sun, and since then it had been one crushing disappointment after the next. Now here he was, living in some two bedroom dump at the edge of Los Feliz with Toby, who was disgusting, and an amateur, but who still seemed to get steady advertising work and was even in a new Dorito’s ad and waiting for a call back from Verizon about the FIOS campaign while Christian struggled doing clown magic for children who would rather be playing video games. At night he would sit in a darkened theater, watching a movie like Rescue Dawn or The Dark Knight and thinking, “I could do that.” Maybe it just wasn’t in the cards for him. Maybe it would never happen. He didn’t even have a fall back plan.

Christian pulled up in front of Brian Horne’s house in his teal, 1994 Toyota Corolla, and turned off the engine. He checked the address one more time, which he had written on the back of a greasy overdue electricity bill, and then shoved it into the pocket of his Docker’s. He looked at himself in the mirror and tried to prepare himself emotionally for the day. It was time to get focused. It was time to give this performance, however humiliating or distant from his goal, everything that he had.

The party went as the party always went. The children talked and screamed and laughed with each other, completely ignoring Bale’s disappearing milk trick, or the rabbit that he had so effortlessly pulled from his sleeve. They cared nothing for the seamless rings linking and unlinking like water, or the endless silk scarves that Christian pulled from his throat for miles. But Christian Bale was above all else a professional. He poured his heart and soul into the show, up until the moment that Brian Horne’s mother turned off the overhead light and switched on a lamp in the corner of the living room.

“What are you doing?” Christian Bale asked, feeling the anger rising in his throat.

Brian Horne’s mother explained that she was fiddling with the lights in order for the children to be able to see the magic better.

For a split second, Christian Bale considered unleashing a profane verbal tirade on Mrs. Horne. He had come here to do a job, and in his opinion she was making it harder for him to do that job. She had distracted him, and the distraction had caused him to lose his place. Was he supposed to crush a bouquet of flowers into a pigeon, or was it time for the mentalism routine? Did he come to Mrs. Horne’s house and throw all her cookies on the floor? They were done, professionally. He would not be performing magic at Brian Horne’s eighth birthday party. He had half a mind to walk out of the house right then and there. If he had things his way, he would have asked Mrs. Horne to leave the living room and not show her face for the rest of his show.

But Christian Bale didn’t unleash a verbal tirade. Because Christian Bale was a human being living in a world of other human beings, and he recognized that basic mutual respect and human decency was a simple requirement for survival. Sure, maybe if he was a self-absorbed narcissistic garbage monster with absolutely no sense of emotional restraint, a raging id without boundaries and completely lacking in the critical ability to gauge its own self-interest against the obvious needs and morality of living in a communal society with rules, then he could just do whatever the fuck he wanted. He could shove his mom if he wanted. He could shove his mom and his sister in a hotel room and scream at everyone like some kind of walking disaster if he wanted, if that was the case, if he had become a dehumanized imploding star of vacuous self-importance.

Instead, Christian Bale politely asked Brian Horne’s mother to leave the lights as they were until he finished his performance. She agreed. They went on with their lives.