Kenneth Calhoun’s stories have appeared in

 Ploughshares, Tin House, The Paris Review, 

 and elsewhere. His novel, Black Moon, was longlisted for the PEN/Bingham Debut Novel Prize.

Kenneth Calhoun

W E The People entered the home of the Crisis Actor illegally. This is true. Why deny it? We certainly weren’t going to be invited in. There was the matter of him knowing  our faces, from those days when we picketed on the gum-spotted sidewalk or  confronted him at his car in a parking garage downtown, our accusations drowned out  by the scrape of skater boys. And, of course, there was the restraining order. Legal lines had been drawn and, yes, we decided to cross those lines, which resisted no more ably than strands of cobwebs stretched across a basement doorway.

In broad daylight (though it was an overcast day), we breached the iron side  yard gate with the help of a crowbar and entered through the back door, already surprised at the degree of extrusion of the structure —the volumetric, z-axis extension. That is, We The People were half certain that the Crisis Actor’s home was but a Potemkin façade, even doubting the Google satellite imagery as shopped and planted. A flat front, painted like a house, is what we somewhat expected, held up with diagonal supports from behind, like the movie set of a small Wild West town.

We The People knew, from our surveillance, that the Crisis Actor would not be home as we pried open the sliding glass door. He was at ‘work,’ or so the story went. Every weekday, now that his bereavement leave was a year behind him, disappearing into a shiny building at the heart of an industrial campus where he went through the motions of some kind of health insurance office manager. If that job even has motions.

This occupation was a smart choice by his Fed handlers. It was, no doubt, a job so exceedingly boring that no one would question it for fear of having to endure a soul-killing recital of the job description. Furthermore, his output could not be tracked in the opaque fog of banal corporate bureaucracy, where accomplishments belonged to the company and not the individual, though we were certain there was no output to track. Who knows what he actually did in there, behind the mirrored walls, to pass the time? We pictured him sitting in a barren office, feet up on the desk, reading lamestream media on a tablet or phone, watching the clock. Did the others—his co-workers—know he was a fraud? Or were they all in on it? Did they even know him?

Did they know, for example, that he had a large black object hanging, not unlike a traitorous Vice President, in his living room? It was suspended from a wooden frame—a gallows made from heavy oak beams that were possibly pillaged from ruins of the ark, they looked that old. The iron bases were bolted into the tiled floor. The suspended object was essentially a six-foot cylinder, though fluted out toward the bottom like the bell of a horn and tapered at the top. In fact, it looked like the straightened sound horn of a Victrola, though it was a light-absorbing black. Sound seemed to be absorbed as well, giving the room’s acoustics a pronounced deadness. It was an odd—even dubious—fixture in the otherwise typical household setting.

The other rooms were properly outfitted and ornamented with all the things you’d expect—or rather, what a government set designer would think you’d expect. The furniture was Pottery Barn or West Elm. A step up from post-grad IKEA or Wayfair, but still mass produced, mall grade. Fitting, given his supposed middle-manager status at the insurance firm. Also, family friendly, though his ‘family’ had been rotated out, so to speak. They were still there, visually—his ‘wife,’ his ‘daughter,’ in the framed photos on the hallway wall. It was kind of a mosaic of forced smiles, each and every image a theatrical lie.

We recognized the daughter from the news reports. One face among the twenty-two seven-year-olds that they wanted us to believe perished that day. Cute kid. Adorable, really. An E.T.-era Drew. Too young to know her role in the ruse. Probably returned to civilian life, placed in a small town on the opposite coast, where her parents were slated to receive a secret, tax-free stipend for the rest of their days.

The child’s room was left untouched behind a closed door. It was a shrine filled with stuffed animals, rainbows, plastic stars on the ceiling. Finger-paintings on construction paper stuck to the walls. Small, small shoes sitting by the door and, in an especially nice touch, a pair of tiny yellow galoshes. In general, the attention to detail both surprised and impressed us in terms of set design. Our tax dollars in action, we mumbled before undoing it all.

The wife, too, was familiar. Not only because of the news reports of her suicide, but because we were pretty sure we had seen her somewhere before. Not in a simulated attack either, but on an actual show. We went a little crazy this winter trying to find her, thinking she had been an extra or a very minor character on some streaming channel sitcom. Her hair was different then. Maybe darker? Shorter? Her general look, too. Different style of clothing? We tried to make the adjustments with a 3D mock-up, texture mapping her photo on to a face shape, playing with hair and complexion in Maya. We made a kind of ghoulish lady monster; the human form is not our thing. Didn’t stop us from speed scrolling through episode after episode, season after season, of forgotten shows plucked from the constellation of online-only content. We never found her though. She was probably digitally removed, retroactively erased, we finally realized.

Her clothes were still hanging in the closet. Lots of floral dresses. Her underwear—or, rather, some panties and a lot of black bras—was still in the top drawer of the walk-in closet dresser. It had been nearly two years since she purportedly jumped off the parking garage downtown. Were We The People to think that it would be too painful for him to have her things, and the child’s, removed and disposed of? That he was holding on to everything to maintain some kind of connection? Was that the beat here? That was one way to see it, we supposed.

The other way was that he had no connection at all. That this was a house of props. We sought out the evidence. Hoping to take pictures of what we thought would be empty rooms. Record with our phones any items that were sure tells. A wardrobe of never-worn clothing with the price tags still attached. A medicine cabinet filled with fake pill bottles. Maybe even an empty fridge, a barren pantry. Plastic potatoes and wax apples. Maybe find the guy’s real ID, hidden in his nightstand drawer or pressed between the pages of a book (which is why we threw all the books on the ground). We found some photo albums and huddled over the cellophane coated pages, flipping through, waiting for the edge of the illusion to reveal itself with a stock photo watermark or maybe a suspicious blur of pixels, misaligned shadows, clone stamped repetitions. But the photos were flawless, going back generations.

Again, we had to admire the stagecraft of the Deep State. But what did we expect? Were these not the people who staged the moon landing, a-bomb blasts in the desert, body-doubles in the White House? The only thing that felt off was found in the silverware drawer. There wasn’t a mismatched piece of flatware. Every knife, fork, salad fork, soup spoon and spoon were of the same set and there were six of each item, all present and accounted for. Suspiciously complete, we said, but not enough to start a truth revolution.

B U T what about that strange midnight thing hanging in the Crisis Actor’s living room?

We returned to it, annoyed that nothing else in the home had presented itself as evidence of his fraudulence. It almost looked like a giant bat hanging there, wings wrapped tight, or maybe the cocoon of a dragon. It had some serious goth energy. The bottom of the form, which flared outward, hung waist high. Look up in there

 we said, almost like a dare, as though to crouch and put our face in the opening could result in some kind of heart-stopping jump-scare.

But once the idea had been floated, there was no ignoring it. We got on our knees on the tiled floor, groaning a bit at the effort, joints cracking, and looked up into the dark maw. There was nothing of note, just the tunnel-like interior, black as chimney soot. The light from our phones revealed nothing more than the insides of a contoured cone. Meanwhile the hard floor gnawed at our knees. (Whatever happened to carpet?) We’re not sure what we had hoped to see there. Something that explained the object’s function. Something stashed or hanging there. Without any such signaling, to use design parlance, its affordances remained a mystery.

We stood back and ran through various speculations. The thing had to have a purpose related to government deceit, we concluded. How likely was it that an innocent person would have such a thing in their living room? Or maybe, given the object’s lack of utilitarian qualities, it was art of some kind? Its prominent position in the room supported this theory, since it occupied the center. A couch and armchair had been slid against the wall, as though hastily pushed there during the installation and never rearranged around this cumbersome obstacle. Another thought: it was a shrine of some kind, an altar piece for some dark and ancient, infant-eating god.

Now we had two questions for the Crisis Actor. The first—the original query—why are you pretending to be a man who lost his wife and child? And now this new riddle needed to be solved. That is, what the fuck was this thing? These are the questions we waited with, counting down the minutes to when the Crisis Actor normally came home. We knew his route, after weeks of watching. He would leave his supposed place of work soon after five o’clock, never staying late. And why would he? It’s not like he had work to do—a project to complete, a file to, well, file. He left and came directly home, only occasionally performing the ploy of stopping for groceries. Given that he did that yesterday, We The People believed he would come straight home today.

At 5:22 pm, the Crisis Actor entered the home through the side door which led into the kitchen. We did not reveal ourselves until he was properly inside, keys, phone and satchel on the counter, shoes left by the door. We stepped out. He stood and stared, blinking rapidly, then reached for his phone.

He froze, then withdrew his hand. Honestly, he did not look especially surprised to find us in his home. This was disappointing.

He jerked around, as if to catch someone sneaking up behind. 

The Crisis Actor was dressed for work in a blue suit, white shirt. The suit hung loosely on his wiry frame. His socks were oxblood red, maybe burgundy? He slowly raised his hand to his throat and pulled at the knot of the striped tie at his neck. He tilted his head back and continued to watch us as he pulled the tie free, jerked it through the buttoned-down collar, then rolled it up and placed it on the counter with precise movements.

He really had lost a ton of weight. At the time of the staged shooting, you might have even described him as chunky, maybe puffy. But all that padding had melted away since. That’s probably standard procedure. Change your appearance before the next big show. We had wondered before, watching him from the car, how he had done it. Maybe low-carb diet or keto. Those things work, we knew, but it’s hard to keep the weight off. In fact, it seemed to come back with a vengeance, the fat. And it brings friends along so that, when all is said and done, you’re way fatter than before. That was how it went for us, anyway. That’s why we were considering Ozempic.

 he said, nodding at the Liberator that we had aimed at his chest.

It’s not. It’s a real gun. 3D printed. Ghost.

He looked doubtful. We considered putting a round into the ceiling, to demonstrate the lethal capabilities. But then we’d have to reload, given that we 

had printed a single-shot version. Instead, we said, 

Believe us, this’ll put a hole in you. Two. And it’s the exit wound that’ll be messy. We know because we shot through a ham. Bullet went in cleanly, but came out dragging meat and bits of bone.

He winced at the image, shut his eyes for a beat. As if the word picture had stirred up the silt. Acting.

g at us now in the eye. Casting a glare that marked us for near-future murder.

Charcuterie for weeks. We had to buy two j

ars of those tiny fucking pickles. And, anyway, shut the fuck up.

We led him to the dining room and ordered him to sit down. Instead of sitting at the head of the table, he chose one of the side seats. He leaned back so he could see down the hallway, where all the framed pictures had been pulled from the wall and now littered the floor, just as all the plates and glasses from the dini

ng room buffet were now in shards at his feet. He took this in with a soft sigh. 

at gravitas you’re giving right now is pretty convincing at close range, we had to admit.

, ignoring the compliment. He looked beyond us, as if expecting someone else to enter the room. His gaze was so insistent that we turned around too, half expecting to see some big dumb Fed standing there, confirming that we had been on surveillance cameras this entire time. But there was no one. We stepped into his line of sight.

Now, we’re going to capture your confession with this phone,

An actor. That you never had a daughter or a wife. That they are actors too. That the whole thing was just a show, a fake crisis staged by the government. Pure propaganda. That you’re an employee of the government and that pretty soon you’ll be off to guest star some other supposed massacre.

He listened, crossing his arms, jaw clenching. 

He looked at us for a long minute, noting the details of our faces, we could tell. Attempting to gauge our seriousness. Sizing us up physically. Wondering if he could overpower us as his eyes came to settle on the bulky plastic pistol in our hands.

Hahaha. We get that a lot. Double it. Practically.

He raised his eyebrows at this, finding it hard to believe, apparently. It was our spotty beards that undermined a mature appearance.

So are you going to show us the proof or what?

You do that, you show us proof, and we’ll just walk out of here. Better yet, we’ll videotape that and show the world how we were wrong all along.

He was tuned out now, staring at his hands. There was a wedding band on his ring finger. Gold. Is that what he was looking at so intently? Maybe he thought he could trade it, could offer it up and buy us out. Ha. Or maybe he was just noting the veins, the bony knuckles. Newly thin hands that he didn’t even recognize. Before we could stop him, he got to his feet suddenly, pushing back from the table. The chair screeched against the tile, a stab of sound. We winced. Again, carpet would have been a good idea for the room. Without it, the acoustics were sharp, ringy.

But he didn’t come at us. Instead, he stepped into the hallway. 

 he muttered. Maybe addressing himself, maybe us.

We had the Liberator raised, aimed right at his eye. But he didn’t blink. In fact, he smiled in a sad, resigned way. We knew then that we wouldn’t be able to control him. Fear was not the choke chain We The People had counted on.

We would probably have to disable him somehow. Hurt him badly. He picked his way down the cluttered hall, glancing into the office where we had thrown all the books on the floor. A lot of fiction. Snooty literary novels. Probably his fake wife’s, since she was cast as a librarian. He paused there in the doorway, scanning the mess. It occurred to us that he could have a weapon of his own stashed somewhere, though we hadn’t found one during the ransacking phase. Still, best not to let him get too far ahead. We stomped over the framed pictures, glass crunching under the thick soles of our boots, to reach him as he  entered the master bedroom.

We looked into the space with him, over his shoulder, as his head slowly panned the mess we had left. His eye caught on the clothing we had flung about: his suits, shirts, her dresses on the floor like some ladies were raptured at a cocktail party. Her undergarments were hanging from the drawer, panting black tongues. Had they been intimate, we wondered? This fake husband and wife. Probably it was not

 recommended. Otherwise, you’d risk becoming attached to someone who was likely to be written out, cast in another performance on the other side of the country. 

Bet they fucked anyway. After all, consider the wispy moral fiber of someone  who would choose crisis acting as a profession. They were, we believed, an even more vile species of actor than those you find in Hollywood, or even in the poor, overtrained and underemployed thespians of the local playhouse variety, smugly insisting you always say ‘the Scottish Play’ even when outside the theater. They were lowly scum, in other words, so it seemed likely that they broke the rules and sometimes got on top of each other.

Our guy, our Crisis Actor, looked both capable of seduction and devoid of  scruples. Especially lately, since he had lost quite a bit of weight, revealing a muscular frame under the Dad Bod he sported at the time of the supposed shooting. Think Pratt after 

. We had overheard him claim the weight loss was due to grief—that  the classroom execution of his seven-year-old daughter followed by the suicide of his  wife—had ‘killed his appetite.’ He claimed that he was clinically depressed.

This line was delivered angrily to a group of supposed ‘friends’ at a restaurant,  after they had tried a bit of an intervention, encouraging him to eat. At this point, you could use his jawline as a ruler. You could nearly hang a red hat on his cheekbones. He was definitely becoming seriously low-poly, practically faceted. His will to live, he insisted, was 

. To the casual observer this made perfect sense, if they knew and believed the backstory. Most did. All within earshot hung their heads. Sad sheep.

Were you guys even allowed to fuck? we asked. Was that in the job description?  Nice work if you can get it.

We watched the back of his head for some kind of reaction, a slow dismaying  headshake, but there was no such movement, no shudder of outrage in the shoulders. Just the slow swivel. He was too tired to perform it seemed. And for whom—what  audience? Us? Who already knew the truth? Why bother, was probably how he felt  about it. The jig is up.

Or maybe he was saving it for the kid’s room. When he approached it and noted  the door slightly ajar, he stopped in his tracks. Did you go in here? he asked with his back to us.

And so began his performance. The slow walk towards the door, as though  fearing a monster hiding there, then the rushed steps. Door swinging open to reveal how we had upturned the small bed, toppled the tiny desk and dresser, kicked in a dollhouse, the fake kid artwork in shreds, torn off the wall. Toys in pieces all over the floor. A tiny pink tutu was hanging from the overhead light where we had flung it.

He took it all in, his body tightening into a clench. We could see the pulse of  muscle in his jaw, hear his breathing quicken. We braced, gripping the Liberator and taking aim between his shoulder blades. At any second, we expected him to spin around, to lunge at our throats. Instead, he bent over in front of us. Not retching or clutching at his heart with some kind of panic attack, not slipping down to his knees for  a real why-me sob, fists flailing at the heavens as God’s eye cranes up and away.

Was it a bow, signaling the end of his performance? No. What he did is pick up  one of the small yellow rainboots. An understated gesture that was pretty effective, optically, we had to acknowledge. He did something with it, using both hands, at chest level. Something we could not see standing behind him. Maybe he squeezed it,

 crumpled it, only to see it return to its proper form. Or possibly just pressed it into his  chest. A tiny yellow kick to the heart.

We didn’t need to see it. In terms of performance, it was more powerful that  way. It left room for our minds to fill in the blank. That’s what he was going for, it seemed. Of course, we weren’t moved ourselves, being armored with the truth. But we could see how it might have worked on others, who would fill in the blank with  sentiment and meaning. The Crisis Actor was, it seemed, a pretty good actor after all. Bravo, we said. Bra-fucking-vo.

He didn’t respond, other than freezing up, as though suddenly remembering  that we were there. He rose to his full height. Kept his back to us, doing nothing other than standing up straight, wavering slightly in his socks.

You know what? You’re pretty good, we said, practically into his ear. How’d you  end up with this lowly gig? You’re good enough to be on a show, maybe even the movies. You have the look, now that you’ve shed the pounds.

We did not tell him that, in some small way, we could sympathize with his  predicament. We, too, had hoped to be in the entertainment business as 3D animators, having always enjoyed movies by Pixar and Blue Sky. We even went to an online school, borrowing a fuck ton of money to pay for it, only to be unemployable when all was said and done. Yet, the loan payments loomed. Turns out, hardly anyone does 3D animation in the U.S. anymore. It’s all happening in India and Korea. We could only find work in the video game industry as freelancers, making stadium grass or fire. Fucking hair. Who wants to do that? We wanted to tell whole stories, make whole worlds, not just some tiny piece of it. So, yeah, in some way we could understand why the Crisis Actor ended up doing what he did. Still, we didn’t respect him. His work, and

 that of those like him, was ruining the world even faster than the woke bullshit  Hollywood puts out.

Suddenly he was facing us, trying to get past, but we were standing in the  doorway.

Nah, we said. We should shoot the confession in here. It’s a great backdrop. He stared at us, his face blank. Move out of my way.

Get back, we said, holding the Liberator to his sternum. Instead of following our order, he pushed us aside, barreled past.

We The People charged after him down the hall, shouting, We 

He turned suddenly, stopping the corridor. 

 he asked, still holding the small yellow rainboot.

If someone else is here, bring them out. Because if it’s just you—you and your toy—well, that’s not much. Not enough.

We didn’t respond. We hid in the silence as though his gaze, now scanning the air around us, was a spotlight on the door of a cruiser.

I’m seeing now that you definitely have a screw loose,

Is that it? Your brain broken? Your delusions run deep.

We considered shooting him right then and there. Right in his gaunt fucking face. But before we could bring up the Liberator and take aim, he turned and resumed his journey, striding down the hallway only to duck into the living room.

When we caught up with him, he was pulling a cushion off the couch. To attempt to smother us, perhaps. But no. He dropped it on the floor and nudged it with his feet so it sat directly under the hanging black husk thing. We watched now, curious to see where this was going and hoping his actions would explain the function of this mysterious fixture, forgetting for the moment our desire to send his teeth out the back of his head. He, too, was singularly focused. The Crisis Actor ignored us as he sank to the floor and positioned himself cross-legged under the opening of the long black blossom, so that his head disappeared under it. So that he was wearing it like a tall hood. It covered his face entirely, stopping just below his chin.

He raised his hand, insisting on silence with the white of his palm. Weirdly, against all compulsion, we obeyed even as we braced ourselves for some kind of shocking outcome. Would he be somehow sucked up into this thing? Or would the mouth of it suddenly close in around his neck, an aperture slicing off his head? He took three deep breaths, his chest expanding, and formed his hands into a cup around the boot, before setting it on the ground before him.

Then, fists like mallets, he struck the sides of the hood producing a low, gong-like tone. The sound filled the room, expanding like a warm pool. It had a low end that was beneath the ears, but felt in the chest. The initial tone was then followed by humming reverberations. Waves that slowly washed outward, the interval quickening until he struck it again. Our hearts wobbled strangely as each wave moved through us.

After the third strike, he brought his hands down to his lap and unfurled his fists. We watched as he swayed slightly taking in the sound. What must it be like to have your head in there while it was ringing? We remained silent, watching, as his breathing slowed and his hands curled, at ease. The swaying stopped and he remained perfectly still. Several minutes passed. Now he, and not the—bell, should we call it?—looked like art, sitting cross-legged in his suit and loafers with the black inverted cone covering his head, the yellow boot on the floor. A painter came to mind whose name we couldn’t recall. The one who did all the businessmen in derbies falling from the sky, or the apple floating in front of the suited man’s face. But, given the way the bell tones caused our own 

bones to hum, even though we weren’t under it, inside it, we figured it must have some kind of therapeutic function.

 we asked after several minutes of stillness and silence.

Kenneth Calhoun

Kenneth Calhoun

Fiction

Fall 2025 - Diagnosis

Bad Actor