1.

Alvin’s scripts arrived in yellow envelopes. They were hand delivered, placed inside his letter box as if part of the regular mail, but with no address or stamps on it. The scripts were typed on unlined paper. They were short, never longer than a page, never more than a scene. The scene would be set inside a shop, or a bar. Or outside on a street corner, or in a park. The description was generic. Alvin’s name was centred beneath it, his first and last name. Alvin Symons, it said. A line of dialogue followed. The dialogue was usually four words long. Sometimes it was two or three, and occasionally, five. Once it been a single word, but only once.

After the script arrived, Alvin would memorise the line, then file it away with the others he’d received over the years. Within a month he would film the scene. The scene took place while another film was made. No one knew Alvin was doing it.

Officially, Alvin was employed as an extra. He was one name on a large list kept by an even larger agency. The scripts he read did not come from anyone in the agency, or anyone making the film that hired him as an extra. He knew that because he had been told so. Still, the scene would take place as if it had been organised by the director and their crew, as if he’d been booked for it by his agents. Alvin would stand on a street, or in a store, or before a sign. He would stand there, and he would wait for the camera to roll, and then he would say his line. He would say it silently. The line was not recorded. It didn’t matter if he said it aloud or not. Around him, a larger scene, one connected to the film that was officially being made would take place. The sky isn’t safe, he said in The Shudder. The ocean is poison, he said in Bad Saints. We have to hide, he said in Under Heaven.

2.

Alvin Symons was a shadow actor. The title was given to him by the woman who hired him seventeen years earlier. Her name, she told him, was Tynia Robbé.

3.

Alvin had worked steadily since Tynia gave him his first job. In all that time, however, he’d never met another person who did what he did, who was part of the silent performance he was, until he met Lan Nguyen.

Alvin met her on the set of a small crime film, Demons. It was shot in Chicago, in a series of narrow streets and rundown apartments not far from one of the first alien internment camps that’d been built sixty or so years ago. Alvin’s scene was in a bar. When he met Lan, he was at the back bar, in a both with Lan, while the director stood next to them and explained his vision to them. “It’s about the moral decay of the city, what came after the camps were built,” the director said. “The two of you are like paintings in the background of a film. When people see you, when the camera passes over you, they’re going to see how the camp has destroyed property value, how it has driven good people out of the neighbourhood, and left only those who are somehow tainted in their wake. When they see you, I want them to think that you’re too old for Lan, Alvin, and that Lan, you’re much too young for Alvin.” Around them people were busy setting up cameras and lights for the scene. “I want you two to build on that. I want you to pretend you’re a couple. But what kind of couple? Well, that’s up to you. Maybe you’re having an affair. Maybe you’re married to his son, maybe you’re having an affair with your daughter-in-law. Maybe you’re a prostitute and he’s your client. Whatever it is, it’s seedy. It’s dirty. It’s like this city.”

After the director left, Alvin and Lan talked a little about their newly minted parts, parts they’d never be credited or paid for. I want to be a good man who works at the camps, Alvin said. I want to be hard working lawyer, Lan said. I want to help you expose how bad the camps are. They continued like this, building upon the virtues of their new characters, of the sacrifices they were making, until the scene was ready to start.

At the bar, the star of Demons, a tall, narrow white man whose hands were much too soft for the role, sat and nursed a drink while he read an old, tattered Dostoevsky novel. The camera moved from the book he was reading, to his face, then above him.

They know who you are, Lan said.

I was never hiding, Alvin said.

At first, Alvin wasn’t sure what Lan was doing. Was she doing what the director asked, or what they’d joked about? But when the scene was shot a second and third time and Lan repeated her lines exactly as she had first done, silently but carefully after the camera cleared the actor, Alvin knew otherwise. Lan wanted the camera to capture what she said. She was doing exactly what Alvin was. By the time the fifth and final take was shot, they both knew they were doing the same thing. They were both playing a part. It was just not the one that the director had asked them to play.

They made a plan to meet later for dinner at The Blue Door. There was something almost illicit about it, Alvin thought later, thought while he was in his hotel room, while he dressed for the evening. His hands trembled a little while he buttoned up his shirt. He was lucky he had a nice shirt with him. He had only been booked for a single day. A lot of the time he didn’t bother to bring nice clothes for one day’s worth of work. But his sister lived in the area. He wanted to see her before he returned to Los Angeles, to his quiet home and his quiet life, and he wanted to dress nicely for her, to show her he was well.

Alvin thought about not going to dinner with Lan. He straightened his clothes in the hotel mirror. A long time ago, after his second year as a shadow actor, he’d started to lie about his life to others. He lied mostly to the people he met on movie sets, but he lied to his family as well. He justified it because the lies he told were small. Tynia told him that he must keep his work a secret. He wasn’t doing anything illegal, she said, but if he was found out, he’d be blacklisted from sets. For the first year Alvin avoided the topic of what he did outside films, but as he got to know more people, as he met them a second and third time, it started to become a problem. He couldn’t tell anyone he was a professional extra. No one on set would believe that, not with the way he dressed, or where he lived. He started to tell them that he was retired. If pushed, he said he inherited money and retired early. His sister was more difficult. He told his sister he was a consultant on film sets, a consultant for heavy machinery and vehicles. Did Alvin really want to stop lying and talk about his real life with a stranger? No, of course not. Alvin was very satisfied with his life. He had no debts. He had no troubles. Neither did his sister or her husband, or his nieces, one of whom had children of her own now. He was a man who was very satisfied, he repeated to himself in the mirror.

He arrived at The Blue Door a little early. Lan was already waiting for him. She was a slim, dark haired Vietnamese woman in her mid-thirties with vitiligo splashed across the left side of her face, like a star had burst across her cheek.

“You’re the third person I’ve met who is a shadow actor,” she said after they’d sat. “Have you met many others?”

Alvin shook his head. “When I first began, I was told I wouldn’t meet anyone else. There were others. That was made clear. But we worked alone. It was the best way to protect the work.”

“The others said the same, but I was told differently.”

“By Tynia?”

“Yes.”

“I haven’t seen her in . . .” He paused, surprised at what he was going to say. “Nearly six years.”

He used to see Tynia Robbé regularly, he said. When he’d started working as a shadow actor Tynia had visited him once or twice a month, called him weekly. Tynia was like that with her now, Lan said. She made an exasperated face. Alvin laughed. Back then, he thought being a shadow actor was like being a real actor, that he was taking on real roles with performances he could perfect over time. Tynia’s job was to manage him in terms of what films he appeared in and didn’t, but it was, Alvin said, also to discourage any idea that he was part of something that would ever be shown to the public. What you do is private, she said. What you do will never be discussed in public. Its audience will always be a secret to you. You will never meet them. You will never hear back from them.

“She told me the same thing,” Lan said. “But people are watching them, aren’t they? Someone out there is stitching all our scenes together and showing them to someone.”

“Yes, but that was always happening,” Alvin said. “The only difference now is that more people getting to see them. At least, I assume it’s more. Some people have started to recognise me. About a month ago, I came across a young man who knew me. He was about your age, but white. I was in a store, a second-hand bookstore, and he was walking through the shelves. When he saw me, he stopped dead. After a moment he came over. You’re a shadow actor, he said. I told him I wasn’t but he didn’t believe me. He’d seen my film. He’d seen it a week before in an underground cinema. He called it Nine.”

“Did he say anything about it?”

“He said it was a biography about a man who helps resettle aliens.”

“From the camps?” Lan said, her hand moving in the direction of them. “Nobody gets out of those, do they? You hear stories, though I’ve never met anyone who has escaped.”

“I don’t know if they do,” Alvin said. “The man I met seemed to think that they did, but I don’t know. I said it was just fiction but he disagreed. He offered to show me Nine to prove it. He gave me his card. He said I should call. I thought about it, but when I got home, I decided against it.”

Lan was surprised. She told him that if it was her, she would’ve called, that she wouldn’t have been able to contain herself. How had he been able to?

Alvin thought about it for a while. He’d thought about it before, of course, but hadn’t yet found an answer that seemed right. “He was excited by the film, but not in a good way,” he said after their meals had arrived. “He went on about how the truth was finally being exposed, how he knew that the aliens were living among us, and that they had to be stopped. But I don’t agree with that. If they’re living among us that’s fine. It’s better than the camps. The camps are a disgrace. I wouldn’t be a shadow actor if I thought it was about saying differently. There’s already enough of that with films like Demons. The films I’m in are different. At one point I was doing forty films a year, just going from one set to the other, travelling all over the country, travelling outside it. I’ve gotten so many scripts over the years that I’ve put them together myself. I don’t know if I have the right order for all of them, but I know that the film I’m in isn’t about how aliens are evil, or need to be locked up. It says people need help. My character is helping them. He helps them find homes. He shows them how to live in our country, or another. I’ve never been ashamed of that. I’ve been a shadow actor for nearly two decades. It’s my life. It was there when my wife got sick. It was there when she died. It’s given me purpose and safety when nothing else has. I’m sixty-two now. I’ll be sixty-three this year. I’ll be a sixty-three year old black man who is financially secure because of the work I’ve done as a shadow actor. Could I live with myself if I’ve been making films that make it harder for someone to live, whoever they are?”

“Do you believe that’s what you’ve been doing?” Lan asked.

“No.” Alvin had said what he’d said in a rush. He cleared his throat, both embarrassed and relieved by what he’d said. “No, despite what that young man said, I don’t believe it. I’m proud of what I’ve done. Tynia has trusted me. I trust her. That doesn’t change because of one random man on the street.”

He thought that Lan might laugh, or question him, but she didn’t. She agreed with him. She said it was bad enough to work on films like Demons. She wouldn’t do it if she wasn’t subverting them in some way. She told him about some of the films she had worked on, and some of the things she said, all of which she believed were undermining the rhetoric of the main film.

After they finished dinner, after they paid the bill and walked out of the restaurant, Lan gave Alvin her phone and email. We should keep in contact, she said. We shouldn’t be strangers. Things were obviously changing within the world of shadow films. People were learning about them. We ought to stay in touch in case we need to help each other. Alvin took her details and gave her his and said that yes, that probably wasn’t a bad idea, though he wasn’t sure it was a good idea, if he were being honest.

A week later he heard that she was dead.

4.

The police called Alvin. They called him after they spoke to the staff at The Blue Door. The staff at the restaurant remembered him and Lan because of their age difference. According to the detective who called, whose name was Potter, or Porter, Alvin was the last person to see Lan alive. Alvin answered the detective’s questions over the phone carefully. No, he didn’t know Lan Nguyen very well. They met on Demons. Dinner was just two extras having dinner after work, nothing else. They talked about films. The detective wasn’t interested in film. She asked Alvin what he knew about Lan’s private life. Very little, he said. She was a journalist, the detective said. Alvin went still but he said a lot of extras had jobs. A lot of them did the work on the side. He was mostly retired, he said. The detective wasn’t very interested in his retirement. In fact, she wasn’t very interested in anything Alvin said in general. How did Lan die? he asked at the end of the call, safe in the belief that he wasn’t a suspect. The detective, whose name was still Potter or Porter, said that she couldn’t say, not officially, but they didn’t think it was natural.

After the call, Alvin searched for more about Lan but found little. Not all deaths made the news, but he thought Lan’s might have because she was a journalist. Maybe her family was keeping it out of the media. Maybe the police. Alvin looked for Lan’s online presence but struggled because her name was common. Had it been a lie? He didn’t know. He kept looking, kept adding terms, then subtracting. If she was a journalist, then she wasn’t a successful one. He couldn’t find anything she’d written. He did find a few social media accounts under her name, but he was only sure one of them belonged to Lan. It was a TikTok account. It had a short film clip on it. In the clip Lan was sitting in a crowd watching a movie. The camera wasn’t focused on her. It was focused on two actors Alvin recognised. Lan was sitting behind them, sitting on the edge of the frame next to another woman. Lan was difficult to make out. She was only in frame for ten seconds, the length of the clip. For most of it, she sat there silently, sat there watching the film, until the end. They came when you slept, Lan said, the words subtitled because no one had recorded her voice.

Alvin watched the clip again and again. It had seven views when he found it. When he closed the page it had thirty-four. He wasn’t sure what to think. It was possible that Lan could’ve been both a shadow actor and a journalist. Or, like him, she could have told her friends and family that she was a journalist to hide what she truly did. A part of him didn’t believe that. He thought she’d taken advantage of him. Alvin knew it was irrational, that he had no proof, but he couldn’t stop himself. He replayed the conversations he had with Lan. She agreed with what he said, he thought, rather than offer anything herself.

He called Tynia’s number late that night. Alvin didn’t want to call. He didn’t want to make things worse, but he knew Tynia would want to know. The number Alvin called wasn’t answered, but he didn’t expect it to be. He left a short message explaining what had happened. He didn’t know what would happen next, but he wasn’t surprised when, at ten the following morning, Tynia knocked on his door.

Tynia Robbé was a short, plump white woman with dark, wavy hair. She looked tired and rushed, but she’d looked that way since Alvin had first met her. In fact, Tynia didn’t look all that different now than she had seventeen years ago. A few more wrinkles around her eyes and mouth. A new hair dye for a different shade of brown. Otherwise she looked like she’d always looked, like a harassed mother of half a dozen children, all of whom needed to be organised because her husband was useless or dead. As far as Alvin knew, Tynia didn’t have any children, and was unmarried. She’d once told him that all she had in her life were her little shadows, actors like him. Originally, Alvin thought the project was hers, and that she was responsible for the scripts, but she’d made it clear to him that she wasn’t the owner of the company, nor responsible for what he said on film.

“I did a little research before I came,” Tynia said. She sat across from Alvin at the dining table, a cup of coffee held between her hands. “Firstly, I can say for certainty that Lan Nguyen wasn’t a shadow actor. She was not one of my actors, nor one of anyone else’s. She’s not a journalist, either, though I can see how she might call herself that. She’s a researcher. Or was a researcher. She worked for a documentary team called Good Monkeys. They publish, if that’s the word for it, they publish their pieces as videos online. They style themselves as reporters outside the mainstream, a new organisation who speak truths that others are unable or unwilling to talk about.”

“Why would they be interested in us?”

“They’re a conspiracy group. They aren’t really into news, or information. They spend a lot of time talking about aliens, the cost of camps, escapees, things like that. My theory is that they think some of our films are about those things.”

“Aren’t they?” Alvin said. “Some of my scripts, when you put them together I mean, some of them could be seen to be about that.”

Tynia laughed a little. “They’re just films. Fictions. They’re stories in the back of other stories. It’s a game played by people who have the money to play it.”

She’d told him that before. She’d never told him who those people were.

“You’ve actually done us a great service,” Tynia said before he could ask. “I know it sounds terrible when I say that, especially after what has happened to Lan, but none of us knew that this group existed before you called. We had no idea they were paying attention to us. In a little time we’ll be able to do something about that. Right now, we’ll have to keep a low profile because of all the authorities involved, but when that passes we’ll be able to send in our lawyers and ensure that their interest stops.”

“Do you know how Lan was killed?”

“It looks to be an ex-boyfriend. It’s not too much of a concern for me. I know it sounds callous, but my focus is on protecting our work, as yours should be.”

Alvin agreed, though he did so mostly out of politeness. He was thinking about the young man he met in the bookstore, the one who’d told him about Nine. Should he mention that to Tynia? He thought he should.

“In the meantime,” she said, placing her cup on the table. “In the meantime, I’m sorry to say this, Alvin, but we’ll probably have to stop using you for a while. I don’t want to do it. You’re my favourite. You’ve worked for me for years now. You’ve been reliable and discreet. You really understand what is required in this job. But Lan and her friends did find you. She didn’t find anyone else, despite what she said to you. It might be that you’ve just been in too many films. It might be that we just need to step back a little. It might be that after a few months things change and it’ll be safe for you to go back to work again.”

Was he being retired, or fired? Alvin asked himself after Tynia left. He couldn’t decide which version of what happened was more accurate. He knew there would be no more shadow films. There would be no more scripts. But was Tynia wrong? He couldn’t continue to be a shadow actor if people knew he was one.

Alvin didn’t sleep well. At around two he got out of bed and walked out to his kitchen. The dishes were piled up in the sink. He’d put them there, left them dirty. It bothered him now. He filled the sink. He had a machine but he wanted the physical task, wanted to do something because he felt like he couldn’t do anything. Alvin washed everything three times. It took him half an hour. He kept thinking about the camp in Chicago. There hadn’t been anyone new brought to the camp in years. It was full, too full. It was said that there were children inside, children who’d been born into captivity who went on to have their own caged children who went on to have their own caged children. It was awful. His wife had protested the camps. She had gone to demonstrations, written letters, done all the things that had, in the last decade, disappeared. She’d had pictures of the alien spacecraft from blackout sites, old battered things bordering on being derelict, ships scorched and broken that he’d hardly been able to believe they could fly. They’re fleeing wars, planets that are crumbling, his wife said. The government hides these ships from everyone because only the desperate would get into them.

5.

For a while, Alvin continued to work as an extra. The money wasn’t great, but that wasn’t the reason he continued. Alvin took on the jobs because he wanted to be in the background of some ordinary films. He was in three quickly, first as a man on a corner, then a man in a hardware store, and finally a man drinking coffee. After the last, the offers became slower and slower until finally they stopped, and he was forced to ring the agency that handled his bookings.

A young woman he’d never spoken to answered the phone. Her name was Emily. Emily told him that a lot of people were passing on him. “There’s a sense,” she said diplomatically, “that you’ve been overused, that an audience can recognise you in the background of a film.” There were jokes online, she said, and a sense that he was a mark of poor quality. She assured him it was nothing that he was doing, that he hadn’t done anything wrong, that in fact it was because he was successful that this had happened. Alvin asked about work in commercials, or television, but there was none. Emily then said, rather firmly, that she would call him when work was available. He didn’t need to call her.

Alvin rang Tynia after. He wasn’t angry. She wasn’t responsible for his work drying up. She wouldn’t do that, he knew. But he wanted to explain what he was doing, wanted to leave her a message so that she could see that he was trying to fix the situation, trying his best to do what he could so that he could go return to work. Before Alvin called Tynia, he talked himself through what he was going to say. He didn’t want to sound unreasonable. He wasn’t angry, after all. No. All of this was a misunderstanding, a difficulty that he could overcome, that he would overcome. When the new year came around, he would be back on sets standing against walls, or sitting in bars, another man in a crowd that no one noticed, saying lines only a few cared to hear. Alvin told himself that as he dialled Tynia’s number.

A recorded voice told him that the number had been disconnected.

He tried it again, tried it again multiple times, but each time the number remained stubbornly disconnected. Had the number just been for him? It was possible that Tynia kept a collection of numbers she routed to her phone, with each of her shadow actors going straight to a message bank she checked later. Alvin didn’t like it, but it was possible. Tynia was a busy woman. Still, Alvin didn’t need a phone number. Calling her was just what he always did. He had an address. He had it in his files. When he’d first started working for Tynia, he had signed a contract and sent it back in the mail. But where was it?

Alvin was in his office. His cabinets were open, the same cabinets that held his details for taxes and insurance, that held the scripts he’d gotten over the years. The last were all carefully filed in his cabinet. He was sure he’d put the contract in with the scripts, but it wasn’t there. The only thing with them was a business card from a used bookstore.

The card was from the store where he’d met Marc, where he met the young man who had seen Nine. Alvin was sure he’d thrown the card out. He thought it might’ve been a different one, one from the store that he’d picked up earlier or later, but when he turned the card over Marc’s name and number were there. They were written in borrowed black pen. Alvin turned the card over and over in his fingers and leaned back against his cabinets. He hadn’t thrown out his original contract, had he? He hadn’t confused the contract and the card in his mind? He was getting old, but he wasn’t old like his parents had been at his age. He’d just made a mistake. He probably threw the contract out accidentally years ago, an absent-minded act, or a confident one. Yes, that was probably it.

He didn’t call the number on the card straight away. In fact, he wasn’t going to call it at all. Alvin told himself he didn’t need to. He dropped the card on his desk. He was going to throw it out, but that night, almost involuntarily, he found himself thinking about Nine. He should watch it. He had a right to watch it. What did Marc say when he met Alvin? Nine was a life’s work. Alvin had laughed. He hadn’t been an extra for a lifetime. Yet it was the major work of his adulthood, a piece of art he’d been making for nearly twenty years, everything he’d done since his wife died.

He called Marc. The young man was excited to hear from him. He told Alvin he was free that night. Alvin could come over after Marc finished work. The two of them could watch Nine and talk about his work as a shadow actor. He had a podcast, Marc said. Alvin wasn’t interested in that. “I don’t want to be the public face of this work,” he said. “I’d just like to watch the film. Nothing more. Certainly nothing for public consumption.”

Marc was disappointed but he understood.

Marc’s directions took Alvin down to Venice, not to a small house, or apartment, or anything like what Alvin imagined, but to a converted warehouse. There was a fence around it. Marc buzzed Alvin through the gate after he’d stood beneath a camera, after he’d introduced himself and waved.

Marc met him inside. He was a skinny white man in black jeans and a black t-shirt. He apologised for the security. Theft. Violence. You never know who is who in this country, he said. He led Alvin inside, where a huge archive of films were kept in wire cages and on shelves. The films were not just DVDs or Blu-rays, but in every format that had ever existed, from videotapes to 75mm prints, all of it neatly packaged and shelved. “I make videos,” Marc said as he led Alvin through the rows. “A lot of what I do is with what I call invisible film, making instruction guides, directions, things like that. I make films that thousands of people watch without ever thinking about who the writer or director is.”

“And you need all of this to do that?”

He laughed. “No. No, this is my hobby. I collect films. I make new films from them. We all need an artistic outlet, right? Mine is sampling from other films to make new ones.”

“That’s how you discovered the shadow films?”

“It’s like my art, but it’s also something very different. It’s something very planned and very subversive.”

The back quarter of the warehouse had been split into two floors and converted into a living space. The downstairs had a kitchen and a bathroom, while the upstairs had a living room and bedroom, all of which was divided neatly by walls. It was in the top half of the warehouse that Marc showed Nine.

Alvin didn’t enjoy it. He sat on Marc’s couch, his hands nervously digging their way into his pockets and sleeves as the film played, always shifting and moving. Alvin hated watching himself. And Nine . . . Nine was a mash of styles, of lighting and genres and clothes and settings. It was cohesive, but barely so. The cuts between scenes were rough, and many jarred, but Alvin’s small bits of dialogue were woven into a monologue that held it together. The film had been given subtitles to make it clearer for the audience to understand but Alvin didn’t need them. He watched himself describe how he helped people find housing and jobs, nearly always talking to the screen, talking as if he was responding to questions someone asked. War is not a way of life, he said at one point, said it while he stood outside a series of condemned buildings cut from two different films. There was a seriousness to what Alvin said, an earnestness, but he didn’t disagree with anything he said. People needed homes. People needed food and clothing. People needed to be supported. His greatest fear, he realised while he sat there, was that the film was a bigoted, ugly rant, but that wasn’t true. It was a relief Alvin didn’t know he needed.

6.

“This is the ninth shadow film,” Marc said after the film finished. “There are twelve shadow films. The first started in the 1960s, in 1962. It doesn’t have a title, but the person who found it, who put it together, called it One. One took a decade to complete. It’s a guide to living off the grid. It’s about seventy minutes long. The narrator is a young woman who talks about cities throughout the world. She talks about where you can live for free, how you can get food, things like that. When One was first discovered, people thought it was a counterculture thing, a little subversive piece of cinema, but now people don’t think that. One is part of a larger body of work, a work that is linked to the alien community on this planet. I know how that sounds. I laughed when I was first told that. We’re told that they’re all locked away, that they’re not mingling with us. But after you’ve watched a number of the shadow films, you see it. In fact, by the time you get to Nine, it’s not even something that the shadow films themselves are trying to hide.”

Alvin wasn’t really paying attention to Marc. He was thinking about how, after his first interview with Tynia, he’d come home and told his wife about the work, about how he was going to be paid enough to cover her medical bills. She’d been so happy. So relieved. Neither of them had asked if he shouldn’t do it, if it was illegal, or unethical. She was sick, she was so much in need, that he would have done anything for the money he was going to be paid.

“Hey, you there?” Marc asked. “I’m not talking to a wall, am I? You’re listening to what I’m saying about your work, right?”

“My work is fine,” Alvin said, more gruffly than he intended. “It’s a film. It’s fiction. It’s not real.”

“I know how this all sounds. In fact, I’m reassured to hear you say it. I like you, Alvin. I don’t want you to be someone who was willingly part of this, who knew that aliens were living outside the camps and thought that was okay. But it’s true. They’re out there. This is how they’re talking to each other. They’re using our media to make guides, to tell each other histories, to help them infiltrate us.”

Alvin stood. He couldn’t remain sitting. He heard himself again in Nine. We tried to live in the clouds, he said. To hide in the sun and the stars. The dialogue was pulled from five different films. In a sixth, Alvin said, But they found us. In a seventh, he said, Some were caught. In an eighth, ninth, and tenth film, he said, But we can make homes here. We deserve that.

“Why don’t you bring me your scripts,” Marc said. “You still have them, right? Bring them around tomorrow, and we’ll assemble them, match them to the film, see what’s missing, what’s not. I’ll show you the other films, as well. The other shadow films. You’ll know you’ve been used once you see them.”

Alvin told him he would think about it. Marc tried to get him to stay but he insisted. He drove home in silence and let the traffic carry him. He once asked his wife if she had ever met an alien. She hadn’t. No one gets out of the camps, she said. They tag those in them. The government does. Then they force them to live in squalor. They try to make it worse than the homes they’ve fled. They make videos of how bad it is and beam it into space so others won’t come. It’s so awful. So inhumane. They want to treat them worse than whatever conditions they left. The aliens are refugees, she said. They’re not invaders.

Alvin knew before he entered his house that something was wrong. He’d been robbed before. He had never forgotten the way his home felt disturbed before he stepped into it, as if he’d been moved from one reality to another, and everything was just slightly askew. The door was unlocked. The house was quiet. Alvin stood in the doorway and turned the lights on. He left the door open as he went further inside. If someone was still here, they could leave. He wouldn’t stop them. He didn’t want a fight. But there was no one in the house. Nor was anything obviously disturbed. His television. His computer. His record player. All of these things could have been taken and sold for money. His wife’s jewellery, her rings and bracelets, her earrings and few necklaces, the modest pieces she had so cherished. They were still in the cheap box she’d kept them in when she was alive.

It wasn’t until Alvin walked into his office that he saw what had been taken. There, at the bottom of the cabinet, one of the drawers wasn’t shut properly. It was the drawer with the typed scripts in it.

All that remained now was the card with Marc’s handwritten phone number on it.

7.

Alvin called Marc. His first thought was that Marc was responsible, even though he’d been with him the entire time, but the other man was so apologetic and so concerned that Alvin had to repeatedly tell him that he was fine. Marc wanted him to come back to the converted warehouse, to stay behind the fence and the cameras, behind his walls, in case whoever broke in came back, but Alvin declined. He would be fine, he was sure.

“Don’t treat this lightly,” Marc said. “Treat it seriously because it is serious. Shadow actors like yourself have been killed. I didn’t tell you about them earlier because I didn’t want to worry you, but after this—look, Alvin, shadow actors have been involved in some strange shit. Take the woman who was in One for example. Her name was Kristen Lynn. She died when she was thirty-eight. She was in a car accident. The accident took place in broad daylight, on a road that was well travelled, where over two dozen people saw her car suddenly explode. She was driving it at the time. The explosion damaged the cars around her. At least five people ended up in hospital. Those who saw it reported it to the police, told reporters about it, but within days, all those reports of the explosion were gone. In its place was a police report that said Kristen had been in a car accident, and that she had died when it rolled, that it had been a manufacturing error within the car. There was no mention of the explosion. No mention of other people hurt. Nothing. It was covered up within days. We wouldn’t even know about it if some of the people who’d seen it hadn’t come forward years later.”

Despite himself, Alvin thought of Lan, of the disinterested police officer who had called him, of Tynia’s casual dismissal of what had happened to her.

“I’ve got a friend,” Marc continued. “He knows more about shadow films than anyone else I’ve ever met. He’s seen things, seen documents, photos, videos, you name it. He has this huge collection of evidence that he’s been gathering over the years. You can help him. He’s a journalist. He runs an organisation called Good Monkeys. If you call him, he’ll be able to help get somewhere safe, or at least get you some security. You can’t just sit around and wait for whatever’ll happen next. You don’t want to be in a car that explodes.”

Marc’s friend called himself Phillip Ngo. He called Alvin and introduced himself before Alvin could decide if he wanted to call, before he could walk through the rest of his house, even. Alvin tried to put him off, but Phillip spoke confidently and quickly. He told Alvin that those who ran shadow actors like him were ruthless. He compared them to spymasters. They’d killed before, he said. The stars of One, Three, and Seven all died in suspicious circumstances, Phillip said, like he was giving a lecture, like he was on a podium and not holding a phone and speaking an hour before midnight. He retold the story of poor Kristen Lynn almost word for word what Marc said before he broke his lecture and told Alvin that he was sending him a car. That he had already sent him a car.

The car arrived within ten minutes, driven by a young black man. Alvin didn’t want to get in, but he was so overwhelmed by everything that had happened that he found himself sitting in the back instead. His hands shook a little. Someone had been in his house. They’d broken in to take his scripts. Outside, the city passed Alvin in a series of lights and signs that were, suddenly, foreign to him. He knew that it was just the aftermath of the break in. Nothing had really changed. He’d grown up in Los Angeles. He had lived in it his entire life. He belonged to it, and it to him. He wasn’t one of the famous people who populated it, who were like landmarks, but he was part of the art that defined the city, part of the cinema that gave it such fame.

His phone began to ring.

He didn’t recognise the number. He thought about not answering it. “Hello?” he said.

“This isn’t safe,” Tynia said. “You shouldn’t be in that car, Alvin. Ask your driver to take you back. He will. He’s just been hired to pick you up, that’s all. Go home and lock your doors. I’ll come and see you in the morning. I promise I will explain everything to you.”

Alvin disconnected the call without responding. A short time later, a private estate appeared before him. The gates were made from iron and patterned in the shape of birds and leaves. A long, dark drive ran after it, ran up to the front of a large house that was lit dimly. A young Vietnamese man was standing out the front. He was wearing an expensive long-sleeved shirt and suit pants. He wasn’t wearing shoes. He opened Alvin’s door when the car stopped, and introduced himself.

“The thing that’s hardest for us all to understand is that they’ve been living among us for years,” Phillip said while he led Alvin through the sparse, dark halls of his expensive house. “Everything you hear about how it’s all contained is a lie. Nothing is contained. Our world is being pulled apart. The shadow films are just one part of it.”

Alvin wanted to leave. He should’ve listened to Tynia. He was angry at her but he should have listened. It was a mistake to come here. Phillip continued his endless stream of conspiracy. It made less and less sense the more he talked. You didn’t make films in the back of other films if you had true power. If you were in the highest positions of power, if you could command huge budgets, hire big stars, and sell your ideas on cans of drink and toys for children, you didn’t need to work secretively.

“I should go home,” he said. “I should just call the police. I don’t know why anyone would take those scripts, but maybe—”

“I know this is a lot,” Phillip said, interrupting him. He had led Alvin to the door of a private cinema. “I would struggle with it if I was you as well. I wouldn’t know what to believe. After all, you’ve worked for these aliens, these things that masquerade as humans, for years. You wouldn’t willingly be a traitor. No one would. I know how it sounds to be told you’ve been part of it. But I have something that will make this a lot easier for you to believe me. You see, not so long ago, your employers sent one of their own to spy on me.”

There was an image already on the screen. It had been set up before Alvin arrived. The image was of a room that looked like it was somewhere in this house, to judge by the tiles on the ground. But it was not the tiles that drew his attention.

It was the white sheet that did.

The sheet that was stained with blood.

On the screen, the video began to play. Alvin watched as Phillip stepped into the frame. He watched as the young man reached down and took hold of the sheet and drew it back.

Lan lay beneath it. She was lying on the ground, dead. Beside Alvin, Phillip began to tell him how Lan came to work for him a year ago. On the screen, a second Phillip took out a big kitchen knife and cut down Lan’s chest. Phillip wasn’t a doctor. He wasn’t trained in what he was doing. If he was, he wouldn’t have used a kitchen knife, Alvin knew. But Phillip persisted. He cut open Lan and began to pull back her skin, to expose what lay beneath it. As he did, the first Phillip paused the video, paused it so that Alvin could clearly see the green organs and the black bones that looked like cinder. But it was Lan’s face that Alvin found himself returning to, the face swollen from Phillip’s attacks. Alvin thought the injuries looked like they had been done with a bat, or maybe a club.

“There are monsters in our world,” Phillip said, and he might have said more, if the police hadn’t chosen that moment to crash through the doors.

They were heavily armed and dressed in black tactical gear. They screamed for the two of them to get on the floor.

8.

In the early hours of the morning, Alvin was given a cup of bad coffee. He was still in the sterile interview room, then. Two police officers had come in to see him, to talk to him about Phillip Ngo, to talk to him about Marc Sensation, to talk about what he’d seen inside Phillip’s house and inside Marc’s warehouse. The first of the officers was called Detective Potter. She was a middle-aged black woman, friendly and calm. The second was a younger white man, Detective Porter, who mostly stood against the wall while Detective Potter talked. Alvin answered them as well as he could, as truthfully as he could. He had only just met Phillip, he said. He had met Marc earlier in a bookshop, but today, or yesterday, he corrected when he realised what the time was, yesterday was the first time he’d met him properly. He didn’t know that the two of them had worked with Lan Nguyen until tonight.

“We have security footage that shows Phillip Ngo breaking into your house earlier,” Detective Potter said. “We found the scripts that you mentioned in his house, in an office upstairs. Unfortunately, I think the two of them were trying to take advantage of you, Mr. Symons.” He had been Mr. Symons since he had arrived at the station. He was beginning to suspect that they meant it respectfully. “Our belief is that the two of them were trying to take your money. They’re known hustlers. They convince people to believe all kinds of outrageous things, about invasions and wars, everything you could imagine. They bought that house you were in tonight with the money they’ve taken from honest people like yourself.”

“Phillip wanted to show me a film,” Alvin said. “It was a film showing Lan Nguyen’s murder. It was a truly terrible thing.”

“Unfortunately, that film was damaged in the raid,” Detective Potter said. “We’re trying to salvage it, but I don’t know if that will be possible.”

“Phillip Ngo is trying to convince us that it showed an alien,” Detective Porter said, breaking his silence. “Did you see that, sir?”

“I saw a poor woman who had been beaten to death by someone she trusted. There was, sadly, nothing alien about it.”

“Would you testify to that?” Detective Potter asked.

“Yes.”

Both detectives smiled.

Alvin’s lawyer arrived with Alvin’s coffee shortly after. He was an elderly Chinese man who wore a very fine, handmade suit and even finer, handmade shoes. He introduced himself and apologised for the quality of the coffee. He said that he had been employed by Ms. Tynia Robbé to represent Alvin. Ms. Robbé, the very expensive lawyer said, was very concerned for him. Alvin drank his bad coffee while the lawyer talked to him. When the two detectives returned, they released him and his lawyer ordered him a taxi to take him home.

Alvin knew things were being smoothed for him. He knew that Tynia was using what power she had to ensure that Phillip and Marc bore the full weight of their actions. Alvin was someone they were simply moving out of the way to ensure that they got what they wanted. In the taxi, Alvin saw Lan’s face in the reflection of the window, saw again what had been done to her. She shouldn’t have had to suffer like that. No one, no matter who they were, or where they came from, should be subject to such violence.

Tynia was waiting for him when he got home. She had the lights on and the door open. Alvin wasn’t surprised. He found her cleaning his floor. The police had left muddy tracks, she said, when he asked her why she was doing that. He thanked her. He thanked her for the lawyer, as well. After that, the two of them stood awkwardly, until finally, Tynia invited him to sit in his own living room. She made coffee in his kitchen.

“This is a disaster,” she said, after she placed the coffee down, after she sat. “I apologise, unreservedly. You deserve better than this, Alvin. You’ve deserved to know the truth about our films for a long time. I suppose it was cowardice on my part that kept me silent. I thought you knew and I thought it was better to not openly discuss it. There aren’t many of us who live outside the camps, I’m afraid. A couple thousand throughout the world, no more. To lose someone like you who has been helping us would be devastating.”

“Did you know my wife?” he said. “Her name was Vanessa.”

“I never met her. I knew about her. People spoke fondly of her. It was one of the reasons I reached out to you.”

It pleased him to hear that. “She would have been very proud of the films.”

“We’re all proud,” Tynia said. “They’re ugly, rough things, but we’re all proud of what we do. They’re our history. Our history here. It was an idea that Lan and I came up with years ago. They play films in the camps, you see. Both of us were in a camp originally. We watched every kind of film you can think of. We made our escape plan from what we saw. But that was back before the chips, back when you had a better chance to escape. So few do now. So we smuggle our films in other films for them. Its always had to be a secret, though, because if they knew they’d stop bringing in the movies. When Lan found out that our films were being played in underground cinemas, she started an investigation to find out who was responsible. It led her to Phillip and Marc. She thought you were part of it as well, at first, but after meeting you she said you weren’t.”

“You used me,” he said. “You used me to draw them out, didn’t you?”

“Only after Lan died. She deserved justice.”

Alvin nodded slightly. It was true. He didn’t think otherwise. For a while, the two of them sat in silence. Outside, the world was beginning to wake up. Alvin could hear the birds and cars that were part of his neighbourhood. The people as well. Finally, he said, “The film, Nine. Is it a biography like I was told?”

“No,” Tynia said. “Some of the first films were guides. They taught you how to live outside the camp. Lan wrote them. But the ones after are just stories. We try to make them so that they’re positive, to give those who haven’t gotten out hope. We don’t have a lot to work with, we can’t have big action scenes or chases, so we tell stories like this, stories of people who are waiting to help them once they get out. And it’s true. There are people waiting to help. People like us and people like you.”

She left a little while later. After she was gone, Alvin thought about what she said. He didn’t forgive her for what she had done, for how she’d betrayed his trust, but he understood.

After a couple of weeks, Alvin’s understanding started to become a kind of forgiveness. He thought about calling Tynia to talk about it. Who else could he call to talk to? He couldn’t talk to his sister, who called him as she usually did, or his niece, who called him unexpectedly, but pleasantly a week ago. Still, he didn’t call Tynia. He wasn’t ready to call Tynia.

It was around then, on a Thursday, that Alvin went out to collect his mail and found a yellow envelope inside. There was no address on it, no stamp. Alvin took it inside with him, but didn’t open it straight away, as he previously would have done. Instead, he made lunch. He looked at the envelope as he cut his bread. He looked at it when he poured himself a drink. He looked at it when he returned the dirty plate and empty glass. A part of him thought he wouldn’t open it. He thought about what Tynia had said to him, and about how the film was about giving hope to people in the camps. He thought about Lan, and then Phillip and Marc.

A little later, he thought about his wife.