Please Be Sure

I first entered the Canyon House to the flight of a symphony, mid-crescendo. All the rooms here are wired for sound. Even the bathrooms. I thought I'd interrupted an elegant brunch, but the house was empty. Terse instructions waited on an island of white quartz, along with a sleek remote to orchestrate the house's every ebb and flow. The remote is the size of a tablet, as complex as a pilot's panel of flight instruments: color-coded, zoned, a precise order of punches required to mute Beethoven's Ninth from hurtling after me, room to room.

When the doorbell rings this morning, I use the remote to retrieve the security feed from the front steps. Byron, my scene partner, squints into the camera and waves.

I don't invite anyone to the houses I sit. The success of my rotation hinges on invisibility. It takes skill to maintain the established order of things, and I am an excellent phantom. For instance, each house must maintain its own cumulative perfume: a whiff of select cleaning formulas, the corporal fragrance of dust, of what's been roasted in the oven. I come and go and leave no trace.

I pour Byron some orange juice and make sure he takes the glass with two hands.

"I can tell you right now," he says, "I can't cry tonight. I did twelve hours as an extra in a submarine movie yesterday. I'm spent."

I invited Byron to the Canyon House under the guise of preparation. Every week, we undergo an in-class exercise called Mixed Emotions. All the actors sit in a row on the floor. First, a pair at one end links eyes and begins to bubble up: laugh, laugh, laughing—uncontrollably, until the guffaw is natural and abundant. With energies in sync, the duo downshifts their laugh to a giggle, a grimace, a few fat tears, crying, sobbing. Finally: hysteria. An ebullient, weeping wave barrels down the line, two by two.

Byron sets his glass roughly on the quartz, spilling a little. He wanders to the couch and flops down on cream linen. He has a way of making himself comfortable wherever he goes—kicking off his shoes at restaurants, asking baristas to check his teeth for offending bits of food.

"How much you get paid to watch this place?" he asks. "What do you even do? Sweep?"

"There's a robot around here for that," I say. "How about a cigarette?"

Unlike the Victorian on Normal Street, the renovated warehouse space downtown, or the nine other properties I cycle between, there is little to mind at the Canyon House. No geriatric pets. No towering thickets of bamboo to drive the bees from with a broomstick. I am only here to monitor the house's stark geometry and collect. I have never met the owners in person. For the holiday, they are off on a little-known archipelago sure to be in fashion by spring.

Byron smokes on a chaise lounge with his shirt off, sunning himself as he tells me stories of love and war underwater. Behind him, the neighbors' plots are partitioned on the hillside. Decks and infinity pools face west toward an elusive flare of ocean—visible on rare occasions when the marine layer burns off and the smog blows to the valley.

Unlike Byron, I didn't come to Los Angeles to act. It always seemed like an idle dream to have, a target with a nebulous bull's-eye. I'd come cross-country to confront my father for the first time, but it turned out he was a very charismatic apologizer. I found myself crashing on his downtown couch and going out for auditions at his encouragement. There was a dog-food commercial I landed within a few weeks. This didn't seem so hard, I thought. Why was everyone lecturing me on the odds of success? I smiled and laughed and peeled open a can of gravy niblets for Fido in a southwest regional spot.

Since then, it's been a three-year dry spell of dead-end callbacks and...