by Meghan Tifft
In the play, a coffin opens, and Lucinda steps into an unlit room. She is in the play right now. She wants to clear her mind—to swipe out all the webby tremors and inflections of her life, everything that swept her here and stuck her fast. She thinks of what the audience sees, which is nothing.
Sometimes somebody is there that you don’t see. Just as much, and at the same time, sometimes somebody that you see is not there. This is the part she likes best.
Now Lucinda steps through the false door into a vortex of black. She has the distinct impression that she is going to a place she’s never been before.
“Hello?” she calls out. “Mrs….?” She knows she has no name for this person. That’s how it was written from the beginning.
“Not Mrs. anymore,” says the voice pertly, or shrilly—it’s right in between and hard to tell. “Come on back, babe.” She hears the soft flump of a book, closing itself or hitting a table, and a light seems to ignite from the sound, like a struck match. “I’m just reading.”
Lucinda conveys her unease on her face.
“Hon, don’t let the whole night inside. This place is a horror to heat.” There’s some of Marty’s signature kitsch. She knows she didn’t write that line.
Lucinda has been coached to cringe imperceptibly at these endearments, to shudder as she shuts the door. She finds the lady sitting deep inside the long room with a reading lamp behind her, shadowing her face, like one of those anonymous interview subjects. Lucinda steps in, as if to an interrogation, or a play. As always, and again.
“Listen, babe. I need you to help me,” says the voice.
Then Lucinda says the line that harkens back to the previous scene, when her predecessor emerged from the coffin. Lauren was her predecessor. Her scenes are right before Lucinda’s. “Cocoa?” she says.
Suddenly she’s aglow in a pool of chilled light.
“This is my only illumination right now,” says the woman. It’s the fridge shining the light. “The whole fuse box is blown. All except the fuse that the fridge is on. Odd isn’t it?” She brushes at horsehair bangs. They remind Lucinda of Vanessa. “The last one couldn’t do it.” Lucinda glances back into the living room, partitioned now from the kitchen by a pane of lowering glass, and is reminded more of the smoothie shop and Vanessa. Cables reach to the rafters. She might herself be standing behind the ubiquitous splash guard, watching her friend go out the doors. Which doors did she go out, the last time Lucinda saw her? She’s supposed to stammer a look now like how did she get here, in a kitchen, so far from where she just was? Her face churns with the unasked question, a swirl of steam sliding off a test tube. She thinks it does that. It does not betray her awareness of the mechanical marvels of the set, in action beneath her, the stage swiveling out on its rotation of wheels and belts, iron and oiled rubber, making an orbit as old as the world itself. It juts smugly over the auditorium void.
“Modern convenience is such a sham,” the woman says, and gives Lucinda a sideways smile. “Anyway, let’s get that cocoa!”
The milk comes out. A pot. Powdered granules in an unmarked Tupperware bin. “Is this cocoa?” says Lucinda, picking it up and sniffing it.
“I’ve been waiting all day for this,” the woman says. “Now.” She closes the refrigerator door. “Let’s light the stove.”
The auditorium fills with the click-click-clicking of the dial turning and the woman says, “Here, you do it.”
A box of matches finds its way into her hand. The audience can hear it. “Open the fridge so I can see,” Lucinda bleats in haste. “Turn the dial off.”
“I can’t,” says the woman’s voice, which seems to be coming now from somewhere in the dining room. More machinations of mystic proportion: a table and chairs conjured in the umbrella gloom. “Unh,” says the woman, “be quick.”
The dial clicks like a bomb. Lucinda strikes a match in a hurry, before the gas can spread, and holds it into a dreadful emptiness. A ring of flame jumps out in famished bloom. The heat slides off Lucinda’s hand. “Okay,” she says, relieved again that the pyrotechnics have gone off without a hitch. That’s only the second time they’ve tried them. Her leftover adrenaline propels her to the pot to plunk it on the stove. The audience seems to sit in a blight of burdened silence.
“Phew,” says the woman. “You know I hate that.” The glow of the burner is now smothered under cast iron. “Here’s what I need, babe.” Lucinda peers after the voice, the motions of the stage unfolding her gaze out over the audience as it retracts back like the wing of a wounded insect. Lucinda can see heads in the dark. She makes her face plaintive. It speaks her question in soundless clarity: didn’t she already do what the woman needed?
“What I need is for you to read this book to me.” Some sort of holdover from the book she had read, cover to cover, from her mother. A hand, just visible, pats the hefty volume now—a different binding. The woman has resumed her place in the living room.
“In the dark?” says Lucinda. This is only the most formable of her questions, Marty has told her. This is the question she can ask.
“You’ll find you have the light. That’s what I need. It won’t take as long as you think,” the woman adds, as if to answer for the book’s bulk.
The woman gives a cozy gesture to a spot in the dark, and Lucinda flicks her eyes to the outline of another upholstered arm. She can just see the color. A pink wingback.
“I thought you wanted me to help you fix cocoa,” Lucinda insists, stubbornly, from the kitchen. Her hand is quietly searching around in the contents of an open drawer.
“You won’t find it in there,” says the woman.
Lucinda doesn’t like this. The dovetailing, her mind alight with oily recall. Didn’t her mother do just this in Lucinda’s kitchen drawer that day? She can’t help thinking of the knife.
“Why do you have it?” she says, not knowing what it is.
“Come sit,” the woman says, “and I’ll tell you.”
Lucinda hesitates. She’s supposed to. This bit of the play has always slipped inexplicably through her grasp. What does the dispute mean? Why didn’t Marty cut it? She doesn’t know when and how their collaborations were actually taking place, and here is where the loose stitching snarls. She can’t remember what she wrote. What’s left behind seems to be the inexplicable correlations of their partnership, currents of some obscure collusion. She’s always tried to ride this moment lightly, to skip the surface of its enigma. She can feel herself sag under her own scrutiny.
The woman seems to have fallen into a sanguine silence, like she senses a hitch but can’t let on. The woman is another actress that Lucinda knows. Tonight though she’s being played by Marty—or somebody that looks like Marty. Lucinda is suspicious. She sounds a lot like Lauren’s mother. It’s a mystifying last-minute substitution that has Lucinda all up in twists and burls. She can barely see the woman’s hands, busy with a button on her jacket. The pumps the woman kicked off earlier are strewn on the rug, plain beige casings. “Come sit down,” she says, as Lucinda lowers herself on the edge of the chair. Is the woman adjusting a microphone on her lapel? Lucinda assumes the tensile posture she’s been taught and then actually feels herself ready, at any moment, to spring.
The woman smiles and picks up the book. “I don’t have what you have. You have all the light. All I have? Famine and plague. All these pills. Deadly tonics and poison tinctures.” She sniffs. “I have to eat them. They’re keeping me alive.”
The phrasing smacks her with a literal chill. Because she sees, they are. This is Lauren’s mother, filling in, and Lucinda has written her a part. Lucinda utters her line, as she should, and wonders if Marty really is going to do a curtain speech.
“Am I going crazy?” Lucinda asked the dog once, before writing the play.
“No,” said the dog.
“Of course you would say that.”
They were on the steps in front of her apartment. Lucinda had just written a note and put it on her door. Going to the librar
y. See you after dinner.
That was when Lucinda went to the library. That was when Lucinda met Vlad.
When she looked up, at that exact moment, the dog outside was howling. There was always some inscrutable synchrony between them, as if they were two notes paired to make a full chord, without need of the third note. Sometimes she thought that the third note was thrumming quietly somewhere between them, like a missing voice speaking in another tongue. Once she thought it could be the dog that was speaking to her. Now she thinks it was Vlad.
“You know, you named me after a dog that you love more than me,” he said once, the night they came home without the dog.
Lucinda frowned. She felt caved in.
“I tried to tell you not to leave it there,” he said, as she sat collapsed on the couch.
Why had she done that? “Vlad is not an it, Vlad,” she said in hassled monotone.
He put his hand on her leg and patted. He was sorry.
“What did you say he swallowed again?”
“A key.” She noticed he didn’t ask what key. “I didn’t name you,” she said, putting her hand on his hand. For a while, sitting, they couldn’t seem to bother with the gaps and chasms of that impasse. And later, they couldn’t seem to find a good time to go back to where they had buried it.
Now the woman has reached over and shut the book. Lucinda looks down at the cover. “Well babe, I hate to break it to you.” Lucinda recognizes the book. “It’s time.”
That is the last drifting tendril. The arm that goes into the void unpossessed. Just like the woman’s arm, dangling limp over the chair. She gets that she is the woman’s spirit, but what does that final summons mean? That’s why it’s a musical, Marty has said. That’s when the music cues.
Lucinda watches the woman’s eyes glimmer and gutter out. She stifles a gasp. She’s supposed to. It is time, now, to walk to her breakfast.
She finds that with an audience watching, the play seems to fetch too far, to speculate way outside of what really matters. Marty had never so much as hinted at how or why he salvaged it.
“The body tells the spirit what it knows,” Marty had said, during his backstage speech. “The spirit tells the body what it doesn’t.” He was so fervent. He went on to say, with his arms outstretched and looking around, “There are doors all around that open and close.” Was he talking about here, the theater? “How do we know that heaven and hell aren’t here, or right through those doors?” He must have been talking about the stage. Or more precisely, acting. “The search for salvation is always through an open door. But it is always a study in trespass,” he said. “Sometimes,” he lifted his finger as if to a group of guilty pupils, “we don’t search for salvation. We go through the door and come out somewhere else.” Lucinda wondered, as she always does, why this wasn’t something she could talk to Marty about. It just doesn’t seem like it could ever have been her play, from the way he carries on.
When the scene ends, the play ends. Lucinda notices that it takes the audience a long, laden pause. She looks sidelong at Marty, in the wings. The woman does not stir. Marty’s chin is cocked back, holding on to these final moments. She’s pretty sure the rumors are wrong. There will be no curtain speech tonight.
The lights blatt off. There’s a sound, like a scattered flapping of wings. She thinks of a bat caught in the eaves. It’s Dracula. No, it’s applause. Unsure and insincere. Lucinda feels it all the way down to her hollow bones.
The Room
Dracula has had dreams. He dreams of waking up and being without this weird, festering urge, this unsatisfied thing he can’t even explain. He dreams of walking ruthlessly into daylight, of seeing great bright distances that outlast the eye, of tacking along under winsome white clouds. He dreams of the cherry blooms of birdsong, so different from the mad claustrophobia of every hacking magpie. He dreams of bumblebees slowly blimping over flowers, stewed open in sultry sunlight. Some of these dreams he has in the daytime, when he’s sleeping, and some he has at night, when he’s awake. He would call the dreams he has at night daydreams, except technically they’re not. Often the TV sets him off. Sometimes he falls asleep in front of it and then he has real dreams. One of them he has over and over.
This recurring dream is of plunging deep into water and continuing to breathe. He floats around, past expiration, wondering what to do with himself. If this were a story being told it would be anticlimactic. As a dream it feels suspenseful and invigorating, as if he’s stuck somewhere but also unhindered, endlessly sifting the unnatural waters of himself. He only hates the sensation after he wakes up. He gets out of his coffin grayly, shaking a leg, letting it stream off him and sensing he’s already drifting back, swimming around in something that doesn’t have any vital provisions to give him, and yet here he is.
Like right now for instance. He thinks he’s woken up, but he’s not sure. He can’t get out of the box. He’s awake inside the coffin and this never happens. He has no memory of falling asleep or dreaming at all, which might make this a dream, and he has no clear sense of where he is. His coffin for all he knows could be tossed into a rented dumpster trundling off to a landfill, or stabbed sideways on a spit and roasting like a slow pig, or sliding through the ageless maw of a whale sifting its freezing leagues of uncharted water. Wherever he is, he can feel movement. He can also hear breath and exertion, chopping through some steady gush of unrelenting sound, a slurpy drone like a helicopter or a boat engine. Is he in the room?
Dracula feels stiff and reluctant to find out. He has never been stretched this way from sleep, tugged like a string of gum from the sole of an unsuspecting shoe. Neither is he used to this much resistance on his lid, being accustomed to pushing it out like a door in an upright position. Is someone sitting on it? It feels like someone is sitting on it.
Now there’s a knocking. Nowhere, ever, in his long and legendary history, can he remember this sound of knocking on his lid. Not even living with Lucinda.
“I have a letter for you,” says a voice. A letter? “Special delivery.” The way it wings up like bent aluminum is oddly familiar.
“Dear Dad.”
Oh boy.
Now the voice is quoting the letter, and it seems to be condemning him, Dracula, for something that he sewed in his own home. Sewed or sowed? What has Dracula ever sowed? He has done a lot of sewing—all those patches, and that one fur muff. Somehow he doesn’t think that’s what the voice is talking about. It’s very lordly, the voice, and full of itself. Now it’s complaining about an insatiable sensation that craves only itself. It sounds like a suicide note written for an audience. The voice is really projecting, stirring the soup of this person’s pain. “It’s pain,” admits the letter now, as if it just read his mind. “I can’t stand the pain.” Now this is getting a bit syrupy. Are suicide notes really like this? Why is he hearing it? Obviously he didn’t write it. Obviously he doesn’t know who did.
Dracula pushes peevishly at his coffin as the letter bucks into a rant about how unreachable he is. Or this Dad person. Dracula is not a dad. “You suck. Why did you have to fuck up so bad?” The voice seems to trip unexpectedly into that outburst. It sounds like it’s talking to itself.
If the lid did anything at all it gave a puny lurch that went entirely unnoticed. Dracula shoves harder. A creak in the wood gets the attention of his messenger clearly because the voice stops in the middle of a word. It feels oddly as if the voice is now absolutely vanished, like it belonged to the coffin itself, so crisp it was in its disappearance. Dracula tries the lid again. It swings right up, so fast he had to have help. Dracula sits up.
A single light illuminates the blackness, like a spotlight. Or—it’s his flashlight. Turned on its end and aimed up, barely denting the darkness. Some shadow or waxwork is right there not turning around. This is chilling. It feels like it’s supposed to be chilling and it is. The figure is hiding by holding still. Is it? Dracula’s making enough noise now—catching his breath, scuffling up from the wood, holding on like a d
runk in a dinghy. Is this who was reading to him? At first it seems to be drawing its very powers of disregard from Dracula’s panic. Then it looks like it’s going through some letters. Reading them. It’s doing it mightily and with a knotted intake of breath. Something conks Dracula’s head.
Somehow he hadn’t noticed a boot hanging in his periphery. He flinches back, looking up into the recesses of the ceiling, wondering if that too is part of this performance. That is how it feels. It’s hanging right beside his coffin, just like a grunt’s duffel in a barracks. A body.
“Christ,” says Dracula, reeling away. It looks real.
“You missed the play,” says the hulking mass, in a voice surprisingly reedy.
Does he recognize it? The body? All he can see are the feet.
Dracula suddenly has the feeling that something terrible is happening. Obviously one terrible thing has already happened. “Who is that?” he says, looking up.
The figure smacks its mail on the ground. “I don’t think we’ve met.”
“Is it real?”
The figure lunges from the shadows as if to answer him with violence. Seeing him in full bloom almost makes Dracula belch a stunned laugh. He’s like a big turkey drumstick, protruding over Dracula’s head. “What did you do to her?”
“Do—what?” Dracula recoils. “To who?”
“She left before I could take her home.” This person has incomprehensibly just assumed a gunslinger posture, peeling the flaps of his coat to reveal a tool belt full of—what? A gold cross. Before Dracula has reacted he has jutted it into the air with a look of fierce embarrassment.
“You mean—” Dracula is trying to put two and two together. “From the play?” Is this Rory? The one who was giving her rides? “Are you Rory?”
There’s an actual rope of garlic knotted down his thigh and assorted wooden stakes. “It doesn’t matter. Forget the play,” says Rory.
Forget the play? Wasn’t he just harping on the play? Dracula already feels bad enough about the play. “What are you doing?” he says. “What time is it?”