The Productions of Time

by John Brunner

  She forced a smile and raised her right arm to show a smear of blue paint on the sleeve of her gray sweater. "Oh, I went to give Gerry a hand."

  Half the story, Murray decided. The rest of it was in the redness of her eyes. Been having a quiet private mourn. No, this definitely was not fair. Now that he thought about it, it struck Murray that no one had made any attempt to draw Heather into either the discussions or the extemporization sessions -- not even Ida, who might have done it to impress Heather. Heather's rather appealing shyness would understandably have turned to misery by now.

  "Why?" he said finally.

  "Well -- you know!" She gave a thin laugh. "I seem to be sort of surplus at the moment."

  "What surplus? You were hired, weren't you? So it's your business to remind us that you're here, not dodge off to help Gerry. If he wants help, let him ask for it."

  "I'm terribly sorry. I didn't -- " Her mouth compressed, and she looked alarmed.

  "Oh, grief," Murray muttered. "I'm not trying to snap at you. Just advising you to push a bit harder. Come on, let's go and have lunch."

  "No, I don't feel very hungry. I think I'm going out for a breath of air instead."

  "You know, that's not a bad idea," Murray said. "In fact, it's a damned good idea. How about killing two birds? We've got," he checked his watch, "three-quarters of an hour at least. Let's go and have a sandwich in a pub. The atmosphere here is getting a bit claustrophobic."

  The girl brightened a little. "Oh, I'd love to! If you're sure I'm not being a nuisance?"

  Murray laughed and took her arm. They had just reached the exit when Ida caught them up.

  "Well, well!" she exclaimed. "Is this a private party, or can anyone come? Going to lunch, Heather honey?"

  "Ah . . ." self-consciously, the girl freed her arm. "Murray suggested going out to a pub for a sandwich."

  "In his two-seater car, no doubt." Ida tossed her dark red hair. "Watch yourself with him, sweetie. Don't you know what happens to Murray's women?"

  There was a brief electric silence. Murray turned to face Ida, his hands folding into fists like rocks, his belly suddenly taut as a drumhead.

  "I'd beat the hell out of you if you were a man, Ida," he said at last. "But you don't carry things quite that far, do you?"

  Again, silence. It was clear to Ida that she'd overstepped the mark, and she was afraid to reply in case she added a last straw. She compromised by pushing between Murray and Heather and going out.

  Murray said nothing more till he excused himself in the hall to fetch his wallet and key ring from his room. When he came back, Heather was waiting with a thoughtful look on her face.

  "Murray, can I ask you something?"

  He knew what it was going to be, but he nodded permission as he opened the front door.

  "What did Ida mean?"

  "Ida is a bitch," he snapped. "You don't have to pay attention to everything she says."

  "But -- " She bit her lip. "Murray, I don't want to be nosy. But what she said hurt. You couldn't hide it. I don't want to say anything by mistake that might upset you. So if I do, it won't be deliberate. I sound silly, don't I?"

  He paused, opening the door of the car for her to get in. She met his eyes for a moment before complying. She was a little flushed, as though surprised at what she had said.

  He went around the car and got in. After inserting the ignition key, he sat for a few seconds in silence. Then, staring at the dashboard, he shrugged.

  "What's the good of kidding myself? It's no secret. It's been gossiped about for ages. Everyone knows." He drew a deep breath. "My wife went out of her mind. She walked off one night when I was at the theater. They found her two weeks later in a house in Poplar with a couple of tarts and one of London's most prosperous pimps. The only blessing was that she'd given a false name. She's in an asylum, and she'll never come out. Are you satisfied?"

  "Oh, my God." There was no voice behind the words -- just the sound of breath. "Murray, I didn't know! Was that why you -- ?"

  "Why I drank?" Murray turned the ignition key and the engine started. "No. Not really. I started drinking to quiet my conscience. If I hadn't treated her like a willful child when what she needed was psychiatric help, she might be well by now. Murray Douglas is a first-class bastard. Better bear that in mind."

  He slammed the car into reverse, spun the wheels on the gravel so that stones rattled under the body like hail, and accelerated down the drive as though fleeing the echo of his own words. At the gate, where he pulled up to let a tractor lumber by, he spoke again.

  "And my other bad characteristic is self-pity. Suppose we change the subject, okay?"

  Yet by five that afternoon Murray was prepared to thank her for bringing the matter up. Paradoxically, the old bitterness had colored his mind during the rest of the day's work -- two run-throughs of what was shaping into a complete first act. During the lunch break, Gerry had carried in four flats, the paint still wet on them, and had arranged chairs and tables into a passable sketch of his projected two-level set. He was covered in paint, but grinning like an ape; his exhilaration, in fact, was astonishing to Murray because he had not come to ask for a shot of his drug since Monday night.

  He wasn't the only one feeling good. Murray began the first run-through unaware of how his mood was influencing his performance. Then he started to catch on, because he was in turn stimulating Ida. During his first few minutes offstage, he took a grip on himself and planned deliberate exploitation of this hint of bitterness. It felt right . It didn't belong to him, Murray Douglas, but to the man he was creating.

  He was expecting a word of praise from Delgado after the first climax, and he thought the others were too. It had been a tremendous advance on anything earlier. The cast was beginning to believe in itself, and the atmosphere was tense. But when Blizzard turned to Delgado and gave him a questioning look, the only answer he received was brusque.

  "Again, from the start. Cherry, let me see your notes."

  So they went back to first positions. During the repeat, Murray's mind began to drift away from his body, something that seldom happened to him before a run had reached the point where everything was automatic and the character had taken over his face, voice and gestures. Now, he could already look on with detachment. He could roam away from this first act and consider lines of development for the second and last.

  Odd, this . . . There are fifty similarities and not one hint of identity. Nothing derivative. Hints of Miller, Tennessee Williams -- transmuted! Naturalistic opening in a symbolic set with this man, me, Arch Wilde, this curious allusive way his family is a microcosm -- of course, it's the two brothers his sons, Al and Rett, which suggests Miller -- of a corrupt world when there's not one single word to make corruption explicit, only situations and statements which any audience will recognize and yet the whole, the completed pattern will turn their stomachs. . . . Subtler than Williams; no actual impotence, actual perversion, but this nagging feeling of something being wrong. Like nightmare. Yes, as intangible as nightmare. God, it's frightening.

  The inside of Delgado's mind. But he couldn't stop to consider what it must be like. He didn't dare.

  Never thought I'd be glad to look so much older than I am, but to have two sons that age, Arch Wilde/me must be forty-five and I haven't had to think myself ahead those dozen years, I've grown into them. . . . It's crying out for overt nightmare now, a Bloomsday treatment with the real characters assuming grotesque proportions and we can use Heather somewhere. . . . Hell of a note if just because she doesn't push herself her first big chance goes phffft. . . . Now I'm over-compensating. But it's true. A few passes from Ida is no substitute for --

  "Stop!"

  What? Incredulous, everyone looked at Delgado. Blizzard was the first to find his tongue; he, after all, had not been snatched back from probably the deepest level of character-identification anyone on stage had ever achieved.

  "Manuel, why in heaven's name -- ?"

  The sallow author was ou
twardly composed, but there was a veneer of savagery on his voice when he answered.

  "I said stop. That's enough. You are beginning to have some idea of the way I want you to take, so tomorrow we will begin again and make the real play."

  "Now just a moment!" Blizzard got up, fuming. There was a chorus of support; Murray raised a hand to still it, and the others complied. Blizzard was obviously going to say what they all had in mind. "Manuel, you can't mean to throw away a week's work when we're running as smooth as butter!"

  "You think so?" Delgado's seemingly lidless eyes lifted with contempt to Blizzard's purpling face. "There is nothing in it worth keeping. This Murray Douglas you sold to me with such fine words is betraying the concept -- not feeling, but acting. He is a shell, and the effect is a piece of buffoonery, not a play."

  "Well, that's a damned lie for a start!" Astonishingly, it was Ida who spoke out hotly. She strode to the front of the stage and planted her hands on her hips, glowering at Delgado. "Jesus, I'm not exactly in love with Murray, but he's turning in the best performance I've ever seen from him, and you bloody well know it. What's the idea? Are you poking pins in us to make us squirm?"

  "You are touchingly loyal," Delgado said with a sneer. "But if you're insensitive to what I'm talking about, then apparently you are not fitted to my needs either. Tomorrow, maybe, when you've recovered from your tantrums, we can get down to some work. Right now -- Cherry, your papers, please.

  The girl handed him the thick file in which all the notes and drafts for the script had accumulated; they were still working from memory and a prompt copy, but there hadn't been a single line fluffed this afternoon.

  "So!" Delgado said, getting up. "You see I am serious."

  He took the file, which held by now a good hundred sheets of paper, in both hands. With no discernible effort he tore it in half, put the halves together and tore them. In spite of everything, those watching gasped at this display of unexpected strength.

  "All right. Now go away," Delgado said, letting the scraps fall in a white shower around his feet. He whirled and strode up the aisle to the exit.

  After a few seconds' stunned silence, Blizzard hurried after him, shouting, and vanished from sight. Murray looked around.

  "Anybody got a cigarette?" he said.

  "Think he means it?" Adrian said nervously, offering a pack.

  "Of course he means it," Murray snapped. "And the hell of it is, there's not one of us here who can afford to spit in his face and walk away. Is there? God damn the man!"

  XII

  There was a pause. At length Murray became aware of an incomprehensible fact. On the faces turned to him were expressions of incredulity.

  "Walk out?" Constant Baines said at last. "Who said anything about walking out? Look, Murray, just because he picked on you there's no need to go high-horse on the rest of us."

  Murray experienced a second of discontinuity. He said, "Now wait a moment! What are you snapping at me for? This idiot Delgado -- "

  "Stop trying to palm it off on him," Constant interrupted. "I heard what he said, I heard what Ida said, and the fact remains, he didn't like what you were doing and because of that we have to start over. Fact?"

  Jess Aumen, who had remained at his piano, now slammed his hands down in a jagged chord, jumped up, and began to walk along the aisle to the exit. Lester Harkham emerged from the lighting booth and went after him, his shoulders hunched dejectedly.

  "You don't think he might change his mind?" Adrian suggested. "It did seem to me we were doing pretty well. Maybe he just wants to shake us up."

  "Give me one of those cigarettes, will you, Ade?" Ida muttered. "I think you're kidding yourself. I think the guy's a nut case, and you have as much chance of persuading him to change his mind as -- as making the Thames flow backward."

  "I don't know what's making you take Murray's side," Constant said harshly. "That was a very pretty speech you made, but you were all dazzled by going through the motions, and Delgado was watching from down there." He waved to indicate the seating.

  "I -- I thought it was very good." From the middle of the auditorium, Heather's voice came uncertainly. "I don't know what Delgado had to compain about."

  "Be quiet, Heather!" Constant rapped. "You've just been hanging around like a ghost since we got here. You haven't contributed anything -- you've been a complete passenger. So keep out of it, will you?"

  "Constant's right," Rett Latham said, moving toward the others from the rear of the stage. "Delgado will stick by what he said, and what made him say it was that he didn't like Murray's performance, and the result is we've wasted nearly a week's damned hard work. Makes me sick."

  There was so much hostility directed at Murray now that he could think of nothing to say. While he was tongue-tied, Gerry Hoading came on the stage, fumbling in his hip pocket. His movement attracted everyone's attention. From the pocket he drew and opened a knife. Then he proceeded, his face dead-white, to slash across the painted canvas flats he had installed with such pride a few short hours ago.

  That achieved, he jumped off the stage without a word and also strode out.

  "Well, there's one of us who takes it seriously," Al Wilkinson commented. "Rett, let's get out of here."

  "Good idea."

  One by one, then, they moved, with uneasy glances at Murray. Ida was the last to stir; before she did so, she spoke barely above a whisper.

  "I think Delgado is a nut case, Murray. But -- but hell! I guess you'll have to figure out what it was he didn't like that you were doing, or get him to spell it out, or something."

  Murray shrugged. That wasn't the point. If he'd been acting well enough to provoke such approval from Ida, who had no reason to laud him except a straight professional one, he hadn't been deluding himself. He'd been firing on all eight, and Delgado's outburst had had nothing to do with his performance.

  Which leaves personal animosity. But why me? Because I've asked awkward questions?

  In the aisle, Ida paused and looked toward Heather. In a hard, ill-controlled voice she said, "Coming, sweetie? Let's go and settle accounts with Constant for what he said to you. It was bitchy of him."

  "It was true, wasn't it?" Heather answered in a subdued voice.

  "Come on," Ida insisted, as though to a sulky child. At last Heather did move, getting up despondently and falling in at Ida's side. That left Murray alone.

  He'd predicted that this place was going to turn into a lunatic asylum. Could anyone have picked a surer means of bringing that about? God, it was going to be hell tonight -- the tempers, the squabbling, the back-biting. And most of it was bound to come his way. For no sane reason. Almost as if Delgado had decided in advance.

  He left the stage, wondering how he could escape the worst of it. No good just going out for the evening -- things would be still worse tomorrow, if Delgado stuck to his word and insisted on going back to their starting point.

  He had reached the row of seats where Heather had been, about halfway back, and a bit of white caught his eye as he was passing. A handkerchief forgotten on the seat. Absently, he picked it up. It felt damp to his hand, as though with tears.

  Poor damned kid. Why had Blizzard hired her and then been content to leave her out in the cold? It almost suggested that she was an irrelevance, laid on for Ida to get her teeth into in the same way that a supply of horse had been provided for Gerry --

  Faint but distinct, the sound of a door closing came from above his head, and instantly every other thought was gone from his mind.

  Gerry had said his room must be just about over the middle row of seating. That was Gerry's door.

  "Good God!" Murray said, and left the theater at a run.

  There was no answer when he rapped on the young designer's door a few moments later. He went on to his own room; leaving the door open in his haste, he strode to the corner of the window and felt under the valance. The little jar of heroin was still there, and at a glance the level didn't seem to have gone down. That was a relief,
anyway. Murray replaced it, and turned away slowly.

  Yet he still had a sense of foreboding. He came to a decision and went back into the corridor. He put his ear hard against the panels of Gerry's door, and listened, holding his breath.

  A tinkle, metal on metal. Another, probably glass on metal. The sound of a match being struck. The sounds built so vivid a picture that he was frightened.

  "Gerry!" he shouted, drawing back. "Gerry, stop that! Don't do it!"

  There was no answer. Murray beat on the door like a drum, shouting again.

  "Murray, for Christ's sake!" Suddenly the harsh voice of Constant broke on his mind. He had emerged from the next room, number eleven. "What are you playing at?"

  "Give me a hand to break in this door!" Murray rapped.