"How about strapping this on the front?" I smirk.

"Don't you wish." Sheila smiles wearily and shakes her head. Boys, the mother of unruly boys. Then she helps me into Lab Rat's trousers, threading the tail through a hole in the seat and tucking my shirt in. She allows me to zip on my own.

We strap on my paws, first the feet, then the hands. Finally, Lab Rat's head. Sheila climbs onto a chair and lifts the huge head from the dressing table where it has been staring at me with beady, blank malevolence for the past twenty minutes. A tie dangles loosely from its neck. She hoists the monster above my own head, but before she can lower it, I grab her wrists, surprising us both. A chilly sweat has popped out of my pores.

"Could we wait on the head?"

Her eyebrows lift.

"Just until we get onto the set?"

"Suit yourself."

Half-man, half-rat, I follow Sheila down the hallway. I have a sudden, powerful empathy for the death-row prisoner being led to his execution. The fact that my dread makes no sense does nothing to lessen its insistence, and by the time we get to the soundstage, my heart is fairly skittering inside my ribs. There are several more people milling around than were here earlier, and the set is throbbing with hot light. I'm feeling a bit woozy and have to close my eyes for a moment against the light and noise, the buzz of voices. Under the drumbeat of my heart, I can hear Pitney's voice issuing instructions to the cameraman, and another voice saying we need to get those cables taped down before someone breaks his neck.

"Is he okay?"

"I dunno."

"Dan?" I open my eyes and Pitney is standing directly in front of me, silhouetted darkly against the glare. "Ready to rock and roll?" he asks. Sheila is behind him, and she's got one arm wrapped around Lab Rat's snout, the other grasping its open neck. I can't speak, but I attempt a smile and a nod. Sheila, my executioner, holds out the empty head. When I peer inside, there is nothing but blackness and, in the distance, two pinpricks of light, the eyeholes. They are impossibly far away, and I realize with a heart-jolting certainty that there's no way I can get enough air in my lungs to make it that far. I take a shallow gulp, though, and I try. I shut my eyes, and I swallow another breath and then another and then, God help me, I pull the head down over my own, but just as I feared, I'm not going to make it. Waves of panic crest over me, my air is running out, and I can't find the eyeholes. When I try to extricate myself, one of my damn claws gets hung up on something. I am on the verge of passing out before I finally yank myself free.

"You okay there?" Pitney asks.

I find enough breath to whisper the word "fine." This is so clearly a lie, I have to amend it. "Just give me a minute," I wheeze. "I'm a little dizzy is all." I shrug my shoulders as though to suggest I'm just as mystified as he is.

Teeka swims into view. Her head is shaking slightly, a little tremor of disgust. "Are you claustrophobic, Dan?" She might as well be asking me if I have gonorrhea. I study the question carefully. Claustrophobia? No, I wouldn't call it that, exactly. Perhaps some discomfort in dark, enclosed spaces. I try to avoid being trapped in dark and enclosed spaces, how's that?

I was five or six years old, and my brother, Ricky, and I were playing magician. Ricky tied our mother's red skirt around his neck, drew a mustache on his upper lip with what turned out to be an indelible laundry marker, and christened himself the Truly Amazing Ricardo. Being the younger sibling, I was assigned the role of magician's assistant, the one who picked a playing card out of the deck (a card, any card, not that one) and stood against the wall with a handkerchief tied around my eyes while he threw silverware at me. Anything to be in the show. Then Ricky got the brilliant idea to lock me in the hope chest at the foot of our parents' bed. This was thirty years ago, but I can still vividly recall the suffocating blackness of my blanket-lined coffin, the sharp smell of mothballs, the muffled voice of my brother explaining to our imaginary audience that he had nothing up his sleeves. And then his voice was drowned out by screams. Mine, as it turned out.

Someone has found a chair, but I can't sit down, not with my damn tail, so they instruct me to bend over at the waist. I stare down at the floor and see paws where my feet should be, paws at the center of a circle of human feet. "Take slow, deep breaths," a voice is saying. I overhear another voice, farther away. "What's the problem?" and then "You gotta be kidding me."

I try again, valiantly, but each time I descend into the interior of Lab Rat's head, I am engulfed by fresh panic, a panic exacerbated now by the fear that my career is crashing before my eyes. When I reemerge, gasping and blinking away my blindness, I am confronted by a gallery of stone faces, the veneer of patience worn thin. I try again. It's no use. Even if I could stay inside the head for a few minutes, there is no way I could simultaneously remember to move and breathe, much less climb the exercise wheel. While this is not a demanding role, it does require motor skills.

By now, the news has spread to everyone on the set: the actor is freaking out and can't get his head inside the rat costume. An impromptu powwow is called a few feet away. Because I am the subject of discussion, they are careful to lower their voices, so I can't make out most of what is being said. But I can guess. I hear Pitney issue orders to find the stand-in, and there is more murmured discussion, punctured by a crackle of laughter before the group breaks up. Preparations are underway to move forward without me.

My panic has begun to subside, and I'm pretty certain I could stand up without getting woozy. But I stay bent over all the same. I can't bring myself to face anyone. Besides, it would be unseemly to recover so readily. Indeed, I'm guessing it will be viewed by some as bad taste on my part not to expire right on the spot. I would happily accommodate them if I could. If this is not the most humiliating hour in my life, it's right up there.

Sheila appears again at my side, and as though she is talking me off a ledge, she explains that they'll need to get me out of the costume. It's all right, she says, no need to move just yet. She's brought my own clothes from the dressing room. First the paws, she says. When I lift my head, I see my street clothes in a heap on the chair. She means, I realize, to strip me right here.

"I can walk to the dressing room," I say. I intend my tone to convey steadiness, but it must sound angry to Sheila because she steels her gaze and looks right through me.

"They need the costume."

And sure enough, the stand-in, who has been recruited to take my place, is poised just on the other side of the set, behind the giant pellet dispenser. He is talking with Pitney and nodding intently.

I pick up my clothes and walk away, not as far as the dressing room but far enough to get out of the circle of broiling lights and into the relative anonymity behind the cameras. Sheila strips me of Lab Rat's costume, piece by piece, and returns me to my human state. She gathers up the costume, and I am alone. I watch at a distance as she suits up the stand-in. He snugs on that rat's head as though it were a stylish hat and hops up onto the wheel, ready to work. Pitney instructs him to lie back on the wheel and bicycle his legs, and the stand-in obliges, looking more robotic than frantic. Still, let's be frank, there's not much acting required here. He can put on the suit and follow instructions, and in the end, that's what counts.

I'm at a loss what to do now. I wait for a while, vacillating between the hope that someone will appear and direct me and the hope that, mercifully, I have been forgotten. Finally, I search out Teeka, moving around the edges of the soundstage from one clump of people to the next. As I pass, there is a perceptible ripple of awareness, but they each do their best to pretend I don't exist. Only Sheila actually makes eye contact, and she lets me know with a look that, as much as she would like to sympathize, I have brought this on myself. Now, it goes without saying that there are a lot of people here who would just as soon I'd never shown up this morning. After all, they have to rehearse the new guy, and this little fiasco is going to set back the schedule a couple of hours. By the same token, though, there should also be at least a few union people on this set who would have a generous thought for me, as I will no doubt be responsible for some overtime, possibly even golden time. If so, they keep it to themselves. I am being shunned, as surely as if I had a scarlet A on my breast for Actor.