Chapter 6 Ryan Channing

CHAPTER 6 RYAN CHANNING

October 2006

Los Angeles

I’ve gotten too comfortable being Ry Channing, the movie star. It’s easy to be her. She is confident, poised, on top of the world. When I’m her, I feel those things. But Ry Channing isn’t a person; she’s a persona. And deep down I know these feelings are fleeting, a little dangerous. They camouflage a truth: that I feel best about myself when pretending to be someone else.

The real me is just a shy girl from Lawrence, Kansas, who loved wandering the museum as a kid. Who still hates reading aloud (but loves reading silently) because the syllables play hopscotch in her mind and messing up is so embarrassing. Who has undiagnosed dyslexia, itself a cruel word. Dick-lexia is how I can’t help but pronounce it. And, particularly relevant to this endeavor, the girl who began mimicking Hemingway’s writing after reading The Sun Also Rises in high school. Simple sentences comfort me. Apologies in advance. I’ll try to break free a few times.

Don’t get me wrong, I also love the spotlight.

We contain multitudes.

When “Cate Kay” asked me to do this, I wondered which me to bring to the page. Shiny and glossy me, or braces and lisp me? My manager said she could have someone write my part if I wanted. That I could approve it after. But I found myself rejecting the idea as soon as she was forming the words. If I kept investing in the Ry Channing facade, soon I’d have to live inside it full-time. And that’s no place you want to be. Trust me.

So, here we go. No ghostwriter. All me.

I remember the moment it all started. I was in my trailer between scenes, which could sometimes take hours, when my agent called. His name was Matt. He told me he was having a book couriered to me.

“Give it a read,” he said. “The writing’s solid, but the story’s great and apparently the author, Cate Kay, is using a pseudonym and literally nobody knows who she is; it’s causing quite the tizzy. Everyone’s on fire for it—they’re billing it as ‘the beach-read version of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road. ’ I think you should play Samantha.” I told him that tagline was the most Hollywood thing I’d ever heard, but that it sounded fantastic.

A moment later I heard a quick rap on my trailer door. A courier. He was scrawny, wearing an unclipped bike helmet. I glanced past him and around the set—we were in some small town outside Atlanta—and wondered where exactly the set security was. Not protecting me, that much was clear. I was, after all, fifth on the call sheet.

The movie that would change everything, Beneath the Same Moon , was three months from release. I was still that actor you had to snap your fingers and think hard to place. Oh yeah, the best friend from that one TV show. Then Same Moon came out. And after that it was shrieking fans and Oscar parties and endless scripts and me mostly taking refuge inside my Los Feliz bungalow.

But before that, in this small window of time, I was standing in the doorway of my trailer accepting a brown bag. I pulled out a hardcover book. The Very Last . That now-iconic cover: half-black, half-tan, the crumbling subway sign. What I liked about the cover is that it was clearly about something loud, but seemed to suggest it was going to tell you this loud story in a tender, nuanced way. And in stark lettering at the bottom, the author’s name. Just who was this Cate Kay?

I opened the book, read the jacket copy:

“The world will remember their names.”

2000: Samantha Park and Jeremiah Douglas are best friends with a shared dream, to take TV news by storm. They’ve come to love working the graveyard shift together at American News Corporation. When the city explodes around them in a nuclear blast, they are the station’s only survivors. And so it falls to them to broadcast from the rubble, to tell the world the city’s story.

2025: Persephone Park never knew her mother. To everyone else Samantha Park is a fallen hero, to Persephone she is a black hole that cannot be filled. When Persephone, lost and drifting despite her inherited fame, hears of The Core she abandons her comfortable life immediately. Drawn to the site of her mother’s legend, she will join the group of outcasts seeking to build a life where the city used to stand…

I glanced to where the author photo and bio would be. No picture, just one sentence: This is Cate Kay’s debut novel . I flopped onto my trailer’s couch and started reading.

CHAPTER 1

The Big Apple

Samantha Park loved the nooks and crannies of New York, how the city forced you to make yourself small while simultaneously promising grandiosity. In this way, New York was a perfect match for a woman who thought frequently about how humble she would remain once she became great. Fame corrupted people, Samantha knew, but she was going to be different. She would remain kind and generous; she would pause for fans, always, no matter how busy she was. That was the deal she had made with the universe.

On the evening before the world changed, she and Jeremiah were walking the last blocks toward work as daylight escaped the city. Samantha looked up and saw the faded orange of the New York City sunset. Most nights, she was taken aback by the beauty of the city’s final hour of daylight. People didn’t give Manhattan enough credit for its sunsets, she thought, but didn’t say. Just last week, Jeremiah had pointed out that she said this, or something like it, most nights as they walked to work.

“Do I?” she had said, genuinely surprised. But each day since, she had noticed the thought as it crossed her mind.

Jeremiah noticed her small smile; he leaned into her for warmth and said, “What is it?” They were California kids who couldn’t get used to the cold weather.

“Nothing,” she said.

“Let me guess, the light in New York doesn’t get enough credit?”

“But it doesn’t!” Samantha hooked her arm through Jeremiah’s, shoving him playfully.

“I think you give it plenty of credit,” he said. “Every night, really. Endless amounts of credit.”

She looked at Jeremiah now, as they waited at a crosswalk. He brought his coffee to his lips and blew into the small opening in the lid, glancing over at her as he did. Then he smiled a big cheesy grin as they walked the final few steps into the ANC studios—a shiny glass building on the bank of the East River…

By the time the assistant director called me to my next scene, I’d read two-thirds of The Very Last. I thought Matt had it wrong: I shouldn’t play Samantha Park. I should play Persephone, her daughter. I was intrigued by Samantha, her endless ambition and brave (or reckless) choices in the aftermath of the explosion. But the world Persephone inhabited lit up all my senses. She was such a perfectly drawn character. The mommy issues, the need to prove something to herself, the curiosity and wandering. I’d loved the cartoon Tom and Jerry as a kid. And there was Persephone pulling on a well-worn sweatshirt of the animated duo that I could imagine myself having worn. Plus, I was intrigued by the setting of The Core.

I’ve heard journalists talk about the benefit of assignments in far-flung locales. How the story can write itself because of the unique backdrop. It can be like that for an actor. Find a character set in a distinct, interesting world and you, as an actor, can often find clearer, simpler ways to reflect their humanity. That’s how it had been for me, anyway. The reason my performance in Moon went to a new level was because of the intensity of the concept. Rogue scientists, far outside the system, testing potential cures on patients. What my role as Patient Zero didn’t need was for me to escalate and escalate and turn the thing into a B horror movie. Rather, I needed calm and discipline in the face of madness.

I saw a similar opportunity in The Very Last . Seven Oscars and $4 billion in box office later 8 and I think we can agree I was right about something.

“Persephone,” I told Matt, calling on my way to set. “Not Samantha. I want Persephone.”

“So, you like the book?” He seemed pleased with himself.

“The Core, it’s the richest setting I’ve read in a while,” I said.

“I agree, and it’s so visual, too: the rotting wooden boats they take through the water, the contamination zone, and that last subway stop. Damn—”

“Exactly why it needs to be Persephone,” I interrupted.

“But Samantha, she’s absolutely the lead in this,” he said. I knew he was thinking about how much more money the lead would make and how much bigger his cut would be as a result, but he would pretend it was about the creative . “Imagine the set building for her world, traversing a simmering and smoking Manhattan with a camera. I mean, this is a character obviously motivated by ambition but hailed worldwide as a martyr. What a mindfuck. It’s so, so… allegorical.”

He loved using fancy words and acting like a movie’s social commentary mattered to him.

“It’s certainly parabolic,” I said. I wanted him to know I could play ball.

“But…?”

“I want Persephone.” To his credit, he didn’t hesitate, just said, “On it.”

And that was the first conversation I had about The Very Last. That one book would become a trilogy of books and a trilogy of films, and would break box-office records. But for me, the legacy of this cultural phenomenon had nothing to do with A-list or popularity or numbers. Whenever this project comes up, I think immediately of one thing. Or, rather, one person: Cass Ford, known to the world as Cate Kay.

And how she broke my heart.

I . Note from Cate: I’m feeling squeamish. Boasting (and about money!) is antithetical to my Irish Catholic upbringing—even when it’s someone else doing the boasting. But I understand the need to highlight the books and movies, put them in proper context. So I offer here a clinical timeline for The Very Last trilogy: Book one was released in 2006, book two in 2009, and book three in 2011. The movies were each a year after: 2007, 2010, and 2012, respectively. Deep breaths. Okay, let us continue.