Arthur Roeder

Role

Factory Manager

Status

Incomplete

Production

Radium Girls

Finding

Technically Sound. Emotionally Absent.

Priority

High

• Precise.
• Controlled.
• Prepared.
• Understood the lines. Missed the life.
• Never broke. Never bent. Never quite became.

Factory manager. Cast member of the upcoming Radium Girls. The role made flesh and then unmade. He existed only inasmuch as someone had been preparing to play him. Someone had been. Now no one was.

• Cold Open
• Finale

Cold Open

He opens the rear hatch with one authoritative pull. The hatch yields like a curtain, almost too smoothly as if it had been recently encouraged. As the hatch swings open, Arthur Roeder, factory manager, a role someone had been working very hard to inhabit, spills onto the pavement, with a sound the captain will think about for a very long time.

Cold Open

And in the dim evening light, something unusual, the body glows faintly, barely perceptibly. The kind of glow you might dismiss as a trick of the streetlight, unless you happen to know what radium does to a person over time. Clutched in Arthur's hand, crumpled but unmistakable, is his script for Radium Girls. Margin notes in handwriting that is not his. Whoever was preparing to play him was still learning the lines.

Scene 2

Arthur Roeder, factory manager according to the wallet in the vehicle, driver's license, library card, a coupon for a pretzel. A coupon for a pretzel? Expired. He almost made it. Also, he is clutching a script.