The Heavens

by Sandra Newman

  “Well, that was no madness,” Emilia said. “Harry Danvers hath spitted more men than he hath ever wished a good morrow.”

  “But ’twas strange,” said Southampton equably. “It made a scene of feline demons, see you.”

  “Harry Danvers having a very great hatred of cats,” Emilia explained to the Percy girls.

  Southampton then turned paternally to the girls and assured them Master Shakespeare was well restored and his lunatic capers forgot. Not two men in London knew of them. “Thus madness may pass and sin be cleansed and a man be again made whole.”

  Then trumpets played, heralding the entrance of Prologue. All the audience stilled and hushed. Their thousand faces turned and were presented to the stage like outstretched posies.

  The Percy girls were still whispering, huddled together, as Will stepped onto the stage. He wore a suit of Southampton’s old clothes, which Southampton had once worn at Cowdray. On his chest was Southampton’s old livery badge, the jewel of a hawk in enamel and gold. His hair had receded and his brow was lined, but in every other way he was the same.

  He bowed to the audience and said:

  Two households, both alike in dignity,

  In fair Verona, where we lay our scene,

  From ancient grudge break to new mutiny

  Where civil blood makes civil hands unclean.

  Then the play was strange, a pretty nothing of elaborate sex jokes in which the characters bloodily died. The house laughed itself breathless, then gravely wept. It was, she supposed, like life.

  Meanwhile, Emilia’s mind strayed and tried to understand. There was a thing she must remember, but it flashed in her mind like a fish and vanished like a fish in a river’s murk. Will was there—the same—and her desire for him, which flashed and vanished like a wise bright fish. At last, she found a memory that fit. That hurt. It was the night Harry Danvers had fled to the Continent. A party had gathered at Southampton’s London house to drink to Harry’s fortunes in exile. Because it was Southampton’s house, among the carousers were actors of Will’s company, including the reigning “boy,” still costumed as a fairy queen. The boy was getting old to be playing women and filled out his bodice with a broad-ribbed manly shape. He was beardless, with long beribboned red hair, and he wore a gilt tiara and had painted his lips but was unapologetically a man in a dress. A male queen, then, who listened to the chatter with a green-eyed, contemptuous stare and scratched his chin with an ostrich fan.

  Southampton came behind him and touched his nape. The male queen flinched and spoke to Southampton in a low, harsh voice. From only that, Emilia knew they were lovers. And Southampton stood blushing as the male queen gracefully rose and walked away.

  But the boy had only gone upstairs to a bedchamber; Southampton followed to be further insulted. And she’d gone up to another bedchamber, where Will was already lying in bed, half-asleep and annoyed with waiting. He had helped her untie the knots of her clothes. She had stood in the rushes, nude and shivering. And she’d asked, in an idle voice, as if she’d never asked before, “How wert thou freed from thy madness of dreams?”

  He said drowsily that he had been given a token that would free him from the changes of the world. It was a gift of Alexander of Macedon. ’Twas a humble thing of bronze, a kind of sword. So went his dreaming life.

  Will had closed his fist, remembering. Emilia crossed his knuckles with her finger and he wrestled her down. That was all she remembered.

  And the play wound to its funereal end. Will stood above the other actors’ splayed bodies and intoned:

  Go hence, to have more talk of these sad things;

  Some shall be pardon’d, and some punished:

  For never was a story of more woe

  Than this of Juliet and her Romeo.

  He bowed. It was done. All the audience roared. They pounded on the railings and screamed the actors’ names. The dead actors came to life and bowed or curtsied in the rain of noise. Then a little knot of men in the pit started booing, throwing nutshells at the stage; others seized them and it turned into a fight that made waves throughout the sea of heads. It was loud enough to frighten the Percy girls to their feet.

  “’Tis always thus,” said Southampton deflatingly, and herded the Percy girls back to the stairs. They went noisily, shoving and flapping their fans and accusing each other of having been afraid. Southampton yawned painfully and followed. Emilia made her excuses and stayed.

  Then the time in which the theater slowly emptied and became a great gaudy roofless barn. The sun had declined and all the place was in shadow. The last stragglers kicked through rushes and nutshells, looking for fallen coins. Mice emerged and started nosing for apple cores. The noise was all gone. She heard birds overhead.

  And Will came back onto the stage. It was his habit (as Emilia knew) to return while the play was fresh, to pace and write in air. Today, of course, he knew she was there.

  She rose to meet him, and they both were impatient while she courteously praised the play and remarked on the years that had passed since they last met. Then she said, “But thou knowest I am come for no play, however it be well made. I am come to speak of dreams.”

  His eyes became evasive and cold. He looked past her and nodded at someone in the wings.

  “Dreams,” she insisted. “And a sickness of dreams.”

  His eyes returned to her coldly. “I know naught of thy dreams and Jewish riddles. They are pastimes for a lord, who hath time for every idleness.”

  “Nay, thou hast told me of thy dreams.”

  “I told thee, madam? I remember it not.”

  Then she thought of grabbing his sleeve but didn’t. They were frowning at each other as another actor passed behind Will, raised the trapdoor in the stage, and climbed down without giving them a glance. They were still frowning silently when he came back up with a little black dog in his arms and walked off into the wings, bouncing the dog in his arms and whistling. Her hand had gone to her waist, where she wore the little dagger. It was jeweled and slight, an unthreatening bauble, but it still had a working blade.

  She said quietly, “Dost not remember thy dreams? Thy horse that went in blood, thy cuirass? Alexander?”

  He flinched at the name but said, “So thou hast come for … Well, I know not. Must I dream thee a horse? A cuirass, that thou feel not the stings of love?”

  “Thou know’st of what I speak. When I wake, ’twill be in a world disfigured. It is made so by mine own dreams.”

  “So thou art mad.”

  “I am mad as thou wert mad. I would know how I may heal my madness, sir.”

  “Purge thyself with hellebore,” he said, “and wear an agate.”

  Her hand clenched on the hilt of the dagger. “As I stand before thee, I dream. Thou know’st it. Thou hast spoken of a token that thou hadst from Alexander.”

  “Indeed?” His voice was glib, but his face was tense and miserly. “Then thou art come far for small cheer. For, as to the token, I have it no more.”

  She drew the dagger. “Wilt thou give me my answer, or must I seek thy life?”

  Then he threw back his head and laughed. All his body changed and was suddenly easy, as if she’d released him from a physical weight. And easily he bent to the floor, plucked up a nutshell, and offered it to her on his palm.

  She frowned, still clutching the dagger. “Dost thou mock me?”

  “How? ’Tis thy token. Hadst thou thought to have a coin?”

  She lowered the blade. But when she reached to take the nutshell, he threw it away, and as she startled, he seized her other arm and wrenched the dagger from her hand.

  For a moment they were grappling, Emilia still looking after the nutshell. He caught her against him so she cried out. Then she tore herself free and took a step toward the nutshell—but of course it was nothing. A decoy. She stood foolishly with nothing in her hands.

  “Fear not,” he said. “Thou shalt have thy token. But I will be paid for it before thou be free. So: tell me bu
t one thing of the place of thy waking.”

  “’Tis not a place,” she said, hoarse. “As thou knowest, it is a time.”

  “Ay. And in that time, are there theaters?”

  She laughed unkindly. “Thou wouldst know, do men remember thee there?”

  He was silent. But still he waited on her answer, his fist on the dagger tense and white.

  “Well, be of good cheer,” she said. “Thou art remembered. For four hundred years and more, men will go to theaters and applaud thy works. They will repeat thy name as a shibboleth; every good household will keep thy books. And then, as thou knowest, the world will burn and all be forgot in the general pyre. Is it all thou wished’st?”

  His jaw was set, but tears grew in his eyes. “Ay. I thank thee, madam.”

  Then she wanted to hate him, but her own eyes softened. At that moment, the sun broke through the clouds, and the air became lucid, empty, strange. It was as if only she and he were real, and stood alone in a tempest of shopworn semblances.

  He said softly, “I was once as thou art. I came to my madness with great vaunting, as a hero that would deliver the world. And yet the world burned. And thus was Alexander once the lady Cassandra, who tore her hair and wailed truth—and yet Troy fell. Yet all the world burned. And there may be a thousand other such wights, who dream the green world out of shape. Yet the world will burn as the sun will rise.

  “I am a fool, and my greatness is the mumbling of fools; a paper greatness that will burn and be naught. But there is no greatness else. Thou shalt know it. There is no greatness else.”

  For a moment, she was dizzied. “Well, thou hast got thy greatness, sir. ’Tis well.”

  He laughed and raised the dagger. “And the wind goeth over it, and it is gone, and the place thereof shall know it no more.”

  Then he turned the dagger in his hand and held it out to her by the blade. “Here is thy token, if thou wouldst be free. ’Twill burn in the throat, but it is quickly done.”

  She understood in an instant. She took the dagger. He was watching her with his customary weariness: a weed-brown man; a morose, plain man. The stage makeup he wore was scored through on the brow with runnels of sweat. Behind him were the painted heavens of the stage, their yellow-tentacled sun, their bright blue cloth. She loved him as she might have loved a difficult brother. She drew a last clean breath.

  And it was still her dream, her Albion, where recorders played to the splashing of oars, where she’d hunted with a hawk in lime-green woods, where she’d galloped through a meadow on a black-maned horse and a fairy-tale palace had appeared on the horizon, where she’d lived half her life. And it had been a greater life than life.

  But she knew.

  She touched the blade’s point to the apex of her throat. She shifted the hilt to hold it with both hands. Well, it was only a dream. She would wake in bed.

  Will said, “Be not afeared, my love. ’Tis but a sting, to spur thee home.”

  She braced and drove the blade into her throat. The blow jolted in her skull, a numbing agony. Will stepped back as she swayed. She snatched at hot blood that struck her hand like a breeze. Her hand went numb. The dagger clattered, far away. There was a teetering moment, a refusal to believe. Then she fell hard, like being kicked hard here and there. On her back, and the searing. The last thing the painted heavens. Blue cloth, and beside it real sky that was gray and translucent as if it might be soft to the touch. She blinked her eyes. The painted heavens and the gray heavens. Still alive.

  Then she was watching the scene from above, like a bat, like a beetle that clung to the painted heavens. She saw Emilia kicking as she struggled to breathe. Will suddenly crouched and pressed his hand to the wound. He pressed his sleeve against the wound and cried for help—a coward after all, who was panicked by blood, who could tell his lover to kill herself but could not watch her die. And still she hadn’t died. She was choked, she was in agony. Pounding footsteps came that she felt in her flesh as an intimate vibration—and Kate lost her grip. She couldn’t bear it. She was gone.

  (Then a time where she was nothing. She was no one in the world.)

  (And she woke into a dream about Kate’s own life, in a timeline Kate had never visited before. In the dream, she was sitting with Ben in a bus. It was a chartered bus, going to a protest in Washington, a protest against the war. In the dream, she didn’t know what war it was. She only knew it was a terrible, unjust war, and they were bombing helpless people from the air.

  But the Kate in the dream was happy. She was sitting with Ben and it could all still be all right. And the people on the bus were happy; they were singing “No Pasarán” in gringo accents, pressing their protest signs to the windows, very happy because they believed in themselves. They thought they could make it all all right. Kate laughed, understanding, and sang until the song was over somehow and time had passed.

  Then in the dream, she was telling Ben about the dream of the apocalyptic city. She said, “It’s like the movie Terminator 2. Like the worst version of the Skynet future, a planet of machines where all the people are dead. But in my dream, the machines didn’t kill the people. We killed each other in a nuclear war. And the machines don’t inherit Earth. They rust and fall apart. Then Earth becomes completely uninhabitable. It doesn’t even have bacteria. It has no life.”

  “So not very similar.”

  “Well, it’s an apocalypse.”

  “And does anybody send a robot assassin back in time to prevent the apocalypse?”

  “I wish,” said Kate. “That would be great. But what happens is, they send me.”)

  21

  Ben brought Oksana because there wasn’t anyone else. José was in Afghanistan and Martin was in London. Kate’s mother wasn’t coming until she took Kate back to Ohio at the end of the month. Sabine was busy wining and dining donors and making calls for the Soros people; since the war began, she’d had no time. He was the only one there when Kate gave birth, and since then, it was only Ben.

  Even the hospital was trying to get rid of her. She’d gone into labor in the psychiatric ward, and the maternity ward hadn’t wanted to take her. They’d said they didn’t have security for mothers who “might grow agitated and harm themselves.” That was one fight. Then, when the baby was born, the psychiatric people didn’t want her back. They’d said they weren’t set up to accommodate the mothers of newborn babies. Meanwhile, her insurer had cut her off. Ben had to take a day off work and go to different offices and shout at people, and even so, he ended up paying for a week of her hospital stay up front.

  Kate was a money suck, a time suck, an energy suck. As Sabine put it, she was human quicksand. Ben blamed other people for neglecting her but knew his own loyalty was perverse. They’d only been together a year. She’d cheated on him. At the end, she’d been unhinged and cried all day and didn’t think Ben was real. Still, he kept rehearsing every childish illusion: that their sex had been supernaturally good and their first months together his one real happiness; that she was kind, funny, magical, as no one else was; that if he tried hard enough, he could save her life.

  So he went to the hospital three times a week. Every time, he swore it was going to be different and every time it was the same. When he arrived, Kate attempted to be cheerful and normal, but her eyes were plaintive and she couldn’t understand. She wanted Ben to take her home, or at least to be solicitous, to show her love. But Ben couldn’t show her love, because he couldn’t take her home. So instead, he found himself asking questions designed to expose her as insane, to prove to himself he wasn’t a monster for leaving her in that place. Kate tried to guess the right answers. It was torture for her. That made it torture for Ben, and how that manifested was anger.

  At last, Ben always broke his promise to himself and asked her why she’d fucked José. Then Kate was amazed and said she didn’t remember that. She was shocked when he said the baby was José’s. Once she’d said thoughtfully, “That’s so weird.” Then Ben would lose his mind and berate her fo
r the months she’d let him think the baby was Martin’s; she’d let him think she’d done this altruistic thing, when really she’d been fucking José. Kate would cower and sob. The baby would wake up and shriek inconsolably. Ben was exposed as a monster after all. It happened every time.

  And then, every night now, he slept with Alicia—Alicia whom he still called, behind her back, “the ExxonMobil person,” even though saying it gave him a thrill of shame. And she wasn’t just an ExxonMobil person; she was secretly addicted to romance novels and had been a semipro skier in college and still went skiing in places where she had to be helicoptered in, where she was sponsored and the money went to multiple sclerosis. She spoke Japanese but couldn’t speak it on demand without blushing and covering her face. She was smart, even if she never really made jokes and she had no political opinions. She was kind. She deserved to be loved.

  Ben couldn’t love Alicia. He was doing things purely because they weren’t other things, the things he couldn’t face. He was spinning his wheels and hurting people—despicable. He knew it but he couldn’t stop doing it. He couldn’t sleep alone.

  Oksana met him at the street door to psychiatric, where the junkies were already lined up waiting for the methadone clinic to open. Ben had to dislodge a junkie from the doorway to clear their path to the security desk. Ben paid the visitor’s fee for them both, and—because Oksana insisted—for another man who didn’t have the money and said he was desperate to see his son. Oksana was wearing only jeans and a bra; the security guard wouldn’t let them in until Ben gave her his jacket to wear, and then Oksana made a fuss about having her picture taken for the visitor’s badge. Ben talked her down, but by then the guard was angry and insisted on patting them down.

  Inside the hospital, no one cared. There was no one there. No nurses, and the patients on that level were all locked in. There was occasional, directionless moaning. Half the lights were out. The smells were urine and bleach and pesticide. The floor was always wet from being washed, and the cheap gloss paint looked perpetually damp; in the semidarkness, everything glistened and swam.