by Nancy Kress
The Dauphin and his consort, still onstage, did not break character. He waited until the long applause was over, then continued bullying his wife. Shortly afterward two guards entered, dragging between them the confused, weeping Joan.
The audience leaned forward eagerly. They were primed by the wonderful first scene and eager for more miracles.
“Is this the slut?” the Dauphin asked, and Mary, seeing a woman even more abused and wretched than herself, smiled with secret, sticky joy. The guards let Joan go, and she stumbled forward, caught herself, and staggered upward, raising her eyes to the Dauphin’s.
“In the name of Saint Catherine—” She choked and started to weep. It was stormy weeping, vigorous, but without the chilling pain of true hysteria. The audience shuffled a little.
“I will do whatever you want, I swear it in the name of God, if you will only tell me what it is!” On the last word her voice rose; she might have been demanding that a fractious child cease lying to her.
I leaned my head sideways against one shoulder. Waves of fever and nausea beat through me, and for the first time since I had become ill I was aware of labored breathing. My heart beat, skipped, beat twice, skipped. Each breath sounded swampy and rasping. People in the row ahead began to turn and glare. Wadding my handkerchief into a ball, I held it in front of my mouth and tried to watch the play.
Lines slipped in and out of my hearing; actors swirled in fiery paper-dry pastels. Once Joan seemed to turn into Barbara, and I gasped and half-rose in my seat, but then the figure onstage was Ann Friedland, and I sat down again to glares from those around me. It was Ann Friedland; I had been a fool to doubt it. It was not Joan of Arc. The girl onstage hesitated, changed tone too often, looked nervously across the footlights, moved a second too late. Once she even stammered.
Around me the audience began to murmur discreetly. Just before the first-act curtain, in a moment of clarity, Joan finally sees how she is being used and makes an inept, wrenchingly pathetic attempt to manipulate the users by manufacturing instructions she says come from her voices. It is a crucial point in the play, throwing into dramatic focus the victim who agrees to her own corruption by a misplaced attempt at control. Ann played it nervously, with an exaggerated grab at pathos that was actually embarrassing. Nothing of that brief glimpse of personal power she had shown at her audition, so many weeks ago, was present now. Between waves of fever, I tried to picture the fit Whitten must be having backstage.
“Christ,” said a man in the row ahead of me, “can you believe that?”
“What an absolute travesty,” said the woman next to him. Her voice hummed with satisfaction. “Poor Lawrence.”
“He was ripe for it. Smug.”
“Oh, yes. Still.”
“Smug,” the man said.
“It doesn’t matter to me what you do with her,” said Mary of Anjou, onstage. “Why should it? Only for a moment she seemed . . . different. Did you remark it?” Ann Friedland, who had not seemed different, grimaced weakly, and the first-act curtain fell. People were getting to their feet, excited by the magnitude of the disaster. The house lights went up. Just as I stood, the curtains onstage parted and there was some commotion, but the theater leaped in a single nauseous lurch, blinding and hot, and then nothing.
“Austin,” a voice said softly. “Austin.”
My head throbbed, but from a distance, as if it were not my head at all.
“Austin,” the voice said far above me. “Are you there?” I opened my eyes. Yolande of Aragon, her face framed in a wool hood, gazed down at me and turned into Barbara. She was still in costume and makeup, the heavy, high color garish under too-bright lights. I groaned and closed my eyes. “Austin. Are you there? Do you know me?”
“Barbara?”
“You are there! Oh, that’s splendid. How do you feel? No, don’t talk. You’ve been delirious, love, you had such a fever . . . this is the hospital, Larrimer. They’ve given you medication; you’re going to be fine.”
“Barbara.”
“I’m here, Austin, I’m right here.”
I opened my eyes slowly, accustoming them to the light. I lay in a small private room; beyond the window the sky was dark. I was aware that my body hurt, but aware in the detached, abstract way characteristic of EL painkillers, that miracle of modem science. The dose must have been massive.
My body felt as if it belonged to someone else, a friend for whom I felt comradely simulations of pain, but not the real thing.
“What do I have?”
“Some tropical bug. What did you drink in Bogota? The doctor says it could have been dangerous, but they flushed out your whole system and pumped you full of antibiotics, and you’ll be fine. Your temperature’s down almost to normal. But you must rest.”
“I don’t want to rest.”
“You don’t have any choice.” She took my hand. The touch felt distant, as if the hand were wrapped in layers of padding. “What time is it?”
“Five a.m.”
“The play—”
“Is long since over.”
“What happened?”
She bit her lip. “A lot happened. When precisely do you mean? I wasn’t there for the second act, you know. When the ambulance came for you, one of the ushers recognized you and came backstage to tell me. I rode here in the ambulance with you. I didn’t have another scene anyway.”
I was confused. If Barbara had missed the entire last act, how could “a lot have happened” ? I looked at her closely, and this time I saw what only the EL’s could have made me miss before: the signs of great, repressed strain. Tendons stood out in Barbara’s neck; under the cracked and sagging makeup her eyes darted around the room. I felt myself suddenly alert, and a fragment of memory poked at me, a fragment half-glimpsed in the hot swirl of the theater just before I blacked out.
“She ran out on the stage,” I said slowly “Ann Friedland. In front of the curtain. She ran out and yelled something . . .” It was gone. I shook my head. “On the stage.”
“Yes.” Barbara let go of my hand and began to pace. Her long train dragged behind her; when she turned, it tangled around her legs and she stumbled. The action was so uncharacteristic, it was shocking.
“You saw what the first act was. A catastrophe. She was trying—”
“The whole first act wasn’t bad, love. Your scene was wonderful. Wait—the reviews on your role will be very good.”
“Yes,” she said distractedly. I saw that she had hardly heard me. There was something she had to do, had to say. The best way to help was to let her do it. Words tore from her like a gale.
“She tried to do the whole play reaching back into her ESIR Joan. She tried to just feel it, and let Lawrence’s words—her words—be animated by the remembered feeling. But without the conscious balancing . . . no, it isn’t even balancing. It’s more like imagining what you already know, and to do that, you have to forget what you know and at the same time remember every tiny nuance . . . I can’t explain it. Nobody ever really was a major historical figure before, in a play composed of his own words. Gregory was so excited over the concept, and then when rehearsals began . . . but by that time he was committed, and the terrible hype just bound him further. When Ann ruined the first act like that, he was just beside himself. I’ve never seen him like that. I’ve never seen anybody like that. He was raging, just completely out of control. And onstage Ann was coming apart, and I could see that he was going to completely destroy her, and we had a whole act to go, damn it! A whole fucking act!”
I stared at her. She didn’t notice. She lighted a cigarette; it went out; she flung the match and cigarette on the floor. I could see her hand trembling.
“I knew that if Gregory got at her, she was done. She wouldn’t even go back out after intermission. Of course the play was a flop already, but not to even finish the damn thing . . . I wasn’t thinking straight. All I could see was that he would destroy her, all of us. So I hit him.”
“You what?”
“I hit him. With Yolande’s candlestick. I took him behind a flat to try to calm him down, and instead I hit him. Without knowing I was going to. Something strange went through me, and I picked up my arm and hit him. Without knowing I was going to!”
She wrapped her arms around herself and shuddered. I saw what had driven her to this unbearable strain. Without knowing I was going to.
“His face became very surprised, and he fell forward. No one saw me. Gregory lay there, breathing as if he were just asleep, and I found a phone and called an ambulance. Then I told the stage manager that Mr. Whitten had had a bad fall and hit his head and was unconscious. I went around to the wings and waited for Ann. When the curtain came down and she saw me waiting for her, she turned white, and then red, and started shouting at me that she was Joan of Arc and I was an aging bitch who wanted to steal her role.”
I tried to picture it—the abusive girl, the appalled, demoralized cast, the director lying hidden, bashed with a candlestick—without knowing I was going to!—and, out front, the polite chatter, the great gray critics from the Times and the New Yorker, the dressed-up suburbanites from Scarsdale squeezing genially down the aisles for an entr’acte drink and a smoke.
“She went on and on,” Barbara said. “She told me I was the reason she couldn’t play the role, that I deliberately undermined her by standing around like I knew everything, and she knew everybody was expecting me to go on as Joan after she failed. Then suddenly she darted away from me and went through the curtains onto the stage. The house lights were up; half the audience had left. She spread out her arms and yelled at them.”
Barbara stopped and put her hands over her face. I reached up and pulled them away. She looked calmer now, although there was still an underlying tautness in her voice. “Oh, it’s just too ridiculous, Austin. She made an absolute fool of herself, of Lawrence, of all of us, but it wasn’t her fault. She’s an inexperienced child without talent. Gregory should have known better, but his egomania got all tangled up in his ridiculous illusion that he was going to revitalize the theater, take the next historical step for American drama. God, what the papers will say . . .” She laughed weakly, with pain. “And I was no better, hitting poor Gregory.”
“Barbara . . .”
“Do you know what Ann yelled at them, at the audience? She stood on that stage, flung her arms wide like some martyr . . .”
“What did she say? What, love?”
“She said, ‘But I’m the real thing?.”
We were quiet for a moment. From outside the window rose blurred traffic noises: therealthingtherealthingtherealthing.
“You’re right,” I said. “The whole thing was an egomaniacal ride for Whitten, and the press turned it into a carnival. Cosgriff should have known better. The real thing—that’s not what you want in the theater. Illusion, magic, imagination. What should have happened, not what did. Reality doesn’t make good theater.”
“No, you still don’t understand!” Barbara cried. “You’ve missed it all! How can you think that it’s that easy, that Gregory’s mistake was to use Ann’s reality instead of Shaw’s illusion?”
“I don’t understand what you—”
“It’s not that clear!” she cried. “Don’t you think I wish it were? My God!”
I didn’t know what she meant, or why under the cracked makeup her eyes glittered with feverish, exhausted panic. Even as I reached out my arm, completely confused, she was backing away from me.
“Illusion and reality,” she said. “My God. Watch.”
She crossed the room to the door, closed it, and pressed the dimmer on the lights. The room faded to a cool gloom. She stood with her back to me, her head bowed. Then she turned slowly and raised her eyes to a point in the air a head above her.
“In the name of Saint Catherine—” she began, choked, and started to weep. The weeping was terrifying, shot through with that threat of open hysteria that keeps a listener on the edge of panic in case the weeper should lose control entirely, and also keeps him fascinated for the same reason. “I will do whatever you want, I swear it in the name of God, if you will only tell me what it is.” On the last word her voice fell, making the plea into a prayer to her captors, and so the first blasphemy, I caught my breath. Barbara looked young, terrified, pale. How could she look pale when a second ago I had been so conscious of all that garish makeup? There was no chance to wonder. She plunged on, through that scene and the next and all of Joan’s scenes. She went from hysterical fear to inept manipulation to the bruised, stupid hatred of a victim to, finally, a kind of negative dignity that comes not from accomplishment but from the clear-eyed vision of the lack of it, and so she died, Cosgriff’s vision of the best that institutionalized man could hope for. But she was not Cosgriff’s vision; she was a seventeen-year-old girl. Her figure was slight to the point of emaciation. Her face was young—I saw its youth, felt its fragile boniness in the marrow of my own bones. She moved with the gaudy, unpredictable quickness of the mad, now here, now darting a room’s length away, now still with a terrible catatonic stillness that excluded her trapped eyes. Her desperation made me catch my breath, try to look away and fail, feeling that cold grab at my innards: it happened. And it could happen again. It could happen to me.
Her terror gave off a smell, sickly and sour. I wanted to escape the room before that smell could spread to me. I was helpless. Neither she nor I could escape. I did not want to help her, this mad skinny victim. I wanted to destroy her so that what was being done to her would not exist any longer in the world and I would be safe from it. But I could not destroy her. I could only watch, loathing Joan for forcing me to know, until she rose to her brief, sane dignity. In the sight of that dignity, shame that I had ever wanted to smash her washed over me. I was guilty, as guilty as all those others who had wanted to smash her. Her sanity bound me with them, as earlier her terror had unwillingly drawn me to her. I was victim and victimizer, and when Joan stood at the stake and condemned me in a grotesque parody of Christ’s forgiving on the cross, I wanted only for her to bum and so be quiet, so release me. I would have lighted the fire. I would have shouted with the crowd, “Bum! Burn!” already despairing that no fire could sear away what she, I, all of us had done. From the flames Joan looked at me, stretched out her hand, came toward me. I thrust out my arm to ward her off. Almost I cried out. My heart pounded in my chest.
“Austin,” she said.
In an instant Joan was gone.
Barbara came toward me. It was Barbara. She had grown three inches, put on twenty pounds and thirty years. Her face was tired and lined under gaudy, peeling makeup. Confusedly I blinked at her. I don’t think she even saw the confusion; her eyes had lost their strained panic, and she was smiling, a smile that was a peaceful answer to some question of her own.
“That was the reality,” she said, and stooped to lay her head on my chest. Through the fall of her hair I barely heard her when she said that she would marry me whenever I wanted.
Barbara and I have been married for nearly a year. I still don’t know precisely why she decided to marry me, and she can’t tell me; she doesn’t know herself. But I speculate that the night A Maid of Domremy failed, something broke in her, some illusion that she could control, if not the world, then at least herself. When she struck Whitten with the candlestick, she turned herself into both victim and victimizer as easily as Lawrence Cosgriff had rewritten Shaw’s Joan. Barbara had never played the part again. (Gregory Whitten, no less flamboyantly insensitive for his bashing with a candlestick, actually asked her.) She has adamantly refused both Joans, Shaw’s heroine and Cosgriff’s victim. I was the last person to witness her performance.
Was her performance that night in my hospital room really as good as I remember? I was drugged; emotion had been running high; I loved her. Any or all of that could have colored my reactions. But I don’t think so. I think that night Barbara Bishop was Joan, in some effort of will and need that went beyond both the illusions of a good actress and the reality
of what ESIR could give to her, or to Ann Friedland, or to anyone. ESIR only unlocks the individual genetic memories in the brain’s R-Complex. But what other identities, shared across time and space, might still be closed in there beyond our present reach?
All of this is speculation.
Next week I will be hospitalized for my own ESIR. Knowing what I have been before may yield only more speculation, more illusions, more multiple realities. It may yield nothing. But I want to know, on the chance that the yield will be understandable, will be valuable in untangling the endless skein of waking visions.
Even if the chance is one in a million.
TALP HUNT
The future will offer humankind marvels, as we explore the worlds of the stars and find new ways to explore ourselves. And as wonderful as those new worlds may be, perhaps their very strangeness will make it necessary for some to strengthen their abilities by understanding themselves in the fullest. If so, that will be a problem common to all people of all ages, as Nancy Kress suggests in this thought-provoking story.
Nancy Kress appeared in Universe 11 with “Shadows on the Cave Wall,” and her first novel, The Prince of Morning Bells, was published last year by Timescape Books. She teaches in the English Department of the State University of New York.