Music for Wartime

by Rebecca Makkai

  Ines and I always sit in at the back of the judgment room so we don’t have to get debriefed before the interviews. Kenneth is brilliant. He lines the five remaining artists up in front of the bookshelves, then tells them we won’t tape for a few more minutes—when really, the cameras are already rolling. He tells them to stand still for the light guys, and then says, “We’re having more digital issues. We’re gonna be here pretty late tonight, folks.” And the sleep-deprived artists, dehydrated and trying to hold still and awaiting judgment, give the most beautiful looks of disgust and despair. The cameras are getting it all. The editors will splice it in with shots of their work being critiqued, or a competitor winning.

  Kenneth has managed to pull something like this off every episode, and they always fall for it. Once he had a camera guy give all the contestants incomprehensible instructions in a thick accent, while the other cameras captured the grimaces of confusion. At the third judgment, he directed Ines to have a loud phone argument with a boyfriend in the corner of the room. That time we had enough snickering and eye-rolling to manufacture an entire implied rivalry between Leo and Gordy. It became one of our best plotlines.

  Later, Ines and I will ask the artists, one by one, to go through the whole day, speaking in the present tense and pretending they don’t know what’s ahead.

  “I’m so nervous,” they’ll say, long after the judgments are over, “because I don’t know if the new puppets are even going to hold together.”

  The glorious present tense—that blindest of tenses, ignoring all context, all past and future failures.

  Even the losers, the ones who know they’ve just been sent home, are somehow willing to talk about their work optimistically, as if they’re about to strut onto the stage of the colony’s Little Theater and show their best stuff. We’ll say, “Okay, it’s ten minutes before the show starts, and you’ve just been called in. What are your hopes? What are you excited about?”

  And off they go, like puppies who don’t get that no matter how many times they hump their master’s leg, he always swats them with the paper. “I’m so excited for the judges to see my work!” cry the artists who’ve just been mocked and upbraided and grilled for the two hours that will be edited down to five on-screen minutes. As if by trying hard enough, they can convince us to love them again.

  They remind me of someone.

  Leo should go home, it’s obvious—all his compositions are the same anemic jazz in various minor keys—but our matchmaking has spared him. It’s Markus, the sculptor, the great crier, that they eighty-six. His Love sculpture is incredible, really: a three-foot-tall heart made of bars, like a rounded cage. He coated each wire of the framework in lumpy clay, then painted the whole thing bright blue. Inside the heart was a live dove he had procured at a pet store in town with his fifty dollars in “funding.” The problem was that the dove, stuck inside the cage for six hours waiting to be judged, had made a fairly convincing public bathroom of the heart floor. The judges used that as their excuse: “You didn’t plan ahead. You didn’t think about longevity. We wanted love, and you showed us a sad old dove. We wanted excitement, and you showed us excrement.” Kenneth had written that one down for them on a note card.

  Markus gives us a nice monologue about how they can’t expect his best work when there isn’t even time for the clay to dry, how he’s more about emotional realism anyway, and you can’t do emotional realism on a schedule. He says the colony has been good for his soul, and then he cries and tells us how famous he’s going to be.

  Beth has left me a note on the refrigerator door: “Don’t eat risotto. It has my germs.”

  She hasn’t told me she’s sick, and there are no mountains of Kleenex lying around, but maybe it’s true. I’d be the last to know. I read the note again. If this is some message about the status of our relationship, or some cryptic directive as to how I can salvage things, it’s utterly lost on me. The risotto is half-gone anyway.

  I write “OK!” on the bottom of the note, and I add a smiley face and a heart. Then I think better of it and rip off the bottom edge, but some of her writing rips off too, and she’ll notice. I take the whole note and tear it into little shreds and drop them in the garbage.

  Even after all our work, by the end of the shoot Kenneth has decided to drop the love arc. “We’re way more into Leo’s falling-out with Gordy, and I think we’ll want to paint Astrid as kind of a loner, so that everyone roots for Sabrinah,” he says. “She’s going to win.” They’ll never use the beautiful footage of Leo blushing, just like they’ll throw away 99 percent of everything that happens. Those are the last four standing: Beautiful Leo, Gordy the Mediocre Painter, Sabrinah the Shouter, and Astrid the Blonde.

  We have two days left on the shoot. They’ll be told that the final prompt is “November,” then do their last interviews and shoot the promos for the finale. They’ll go home to work on a portfolio of five pieces, preparing to come back before the judges and the almighty agent to present their work and make a case for their careers. They’ll tell us all to love them, to care about their work, to see that they alone have embodied November.

  Of course, it won’t actually be November. It’s only June now. They’ll have ten weeks off and we’ll shoot the finale the last week of September. But it will air in late November, and that’s all that counts: not what time it is here, but what time it is on the other side of the TV screen.

  By the end, I never see Beth awake. I don’t know if we’re broken up, if we’re reconciled, if we’re the same as we always were. All I have is her unconscious body, beside me in the dark when I get into bed and beside me in the earliest gray light when I roll out. It might be a nice way to fade out of things: a life-size Beth doll to wean me off the real thing.

  On the last day of the shoot, I’m up in the house’s attic, searching among piles of abandoned furniture for a rug, since one of the judges spilled coffee on the cream one. I look out the window, down to the grounds, and there, back near the woods, with no one else around, Leo and Astrid are kissing. Passionately, but slowly, like they’ve done it before, his hands in her hair, her hands in his back pockets. A giddy flood of adrenaline sends me halfway down the stairs on my way to tell Kenneth, before I stop and think. Kenneth would love me for it forever. I could maybe get someone to lug a camera up the narrow stairs and shoot them before they walk away. I wonder for a long time afterward why I don’t. It might be because I hate my job, or it might be because I still believe in love.

  Instead I walk back up the stairs, as quietly as I can, as if they could hear me way out there on the grounds. I lean against the window frame and watch them. It’s a movie, and I’m the only one in the world with a ticket.

  And then there’s this: Did we make them fall in love, or were they already on their way? And if it’s all our fault, then are they really even in love?

  Ines carries my weight for the last interviews. “Tell us why you’re going to win,” she says. “Tell us why Leo deserves to lose.”

  Afterward, she asks me what’s wrong. “I’m just not sure what I’m going home to,” I say. “Back in L.A.”

  She thinks I’m talking about jobs, and she tells me she’ll be working on the new one about anorexics gaining weight back. She thinks she can hook me up.

  We shoot the artists packing and leaving, we shoot them looking out the backseat window of a moving car, and then suddenly we’re done. Instead of going home to Beth, I stay for the party. The camera guys do actual keg stands on the lawn. Ines says, “They’re living out their fraternity fantasies.” We’re standing on the porch watching, and she’s well on her way to drunk. She says, “I’m going to sleep with Blake tonight.” Blake is the hairiest one.

  “Go for it,” I say, and attempt to get drunk myself. I won’t miss the place at all.

  In September, Astrid, I think, will bring back delicate glass leaves and gray bubbles. Gordy will paint empty city streets. Sabrinah will dance like an em
pty tree. Leo will play sad, beautiful, modern things on the piano that only I will know are for Astrid. And I’m certain I’ll be coming back here alone.

  Before the shoot starts, Ines and I and everyone lower on the totem pole will run around making the place look like November: desolate and cold and fading. We’ll stand on ladders to pull leaves off the trees. I’ve done it before. I’ve done stranger things, too. We’ll spray some of the remaining leaves yellow, some red. We’ll make everyone wear a coat. We’ll kill the grass with herbicide.

  It’s sick and it’s soulless, but it’s one of the addictive things about my job: Here, you can force the world to be something it’s not.

  We’ll take the four contestants one by one into the foyer and put them on that ridiculous chair, and ask them, Why do you deserve to win? How passionate do you feel? What do you love about your work? How much do you love your work? What is this sucker punch, love, that ruins us so completely?

  And can you say it in a full sentence?

  THE MIRACLE YEARS OF LITTLE FORK

  In the fourth week of drought, at the third and final performance of the Roundabout Traveling Circus, the elephant keeled over dead. Instead of stepping on the tasseled stool, she gave a thick, descending trumpet, lowered one knee, and fell sideways. The girl in the white spangled leotard screamed and backed away. The trainer dropped his stick and dashed forward with a sound to match the elephant’s. The show could not continue.

  The young Reverend Hewlett was the first to stand, the first to signal toward the exits. As if he’d just sung the benediction, parents ushered their children out into the park. The Reverend stayed behind, thinking he’d be more useful here, in the thick of the panic and despair, than out at the duck pond with the dispersing families.

  The trainer lifted his head from the elephant’s haunch to stare at the Reverend. He said, “Your town has no water. That’s why this happened.”

  The elephant was a small one, an Asiatic one, but still the largest animal the Reverend had ever seen this close. Her skin seemed to move, and her leg, but the Reverend had watched enough deaths to know these were the shudders of a soulless body. The clowns and acrobats and musicians had circled around, but only Reverend Hewlett and the trainer were near enough to touch the leathery epidermis, the short, sharp hairs—which the Reverend did now, steadying one thin hand long enough to run it down the knobs of the creature’s spine.

  The Reverend said, “There’s no water in the whole state.” He wondered at his own defensiveness, until he saw the trainer’s blue eyes, accusatory slits. He said, “I’m not in charge of the weather.”

  The trainer nodded and returned his cheek to the elephant’s deflated leg. “But aren’t you in charge of the praying?”

  At home in the small study, surrounded by the books the previous Reverend had left behind two years prior, Hewlett began writing out the sermon. Here we are, he planned to say, praying every week for the drought to end. And yet who among us brought an umbrella today? He would let them absorb the silence. He’d say, Who wore a raincoat?

  But no, that was too sharp, too much. He began again.

  The Roundabout was meant to move on to Shearerville, but now there was the matter of elephant disposal. The trainer refused to leave town till she’d been buried, which was immaterial since the rings and tent couldn’t be properly disassembled around the elephant—and even if they could, their removal would leave her exposed to the scorching sun, the birds, the coyotes and raccoons. The obvious solution was to dig a hole, a very large hole, quickly. A farmer offered his lettuce field, barren anyway. But the ground was baked hard by a month of ceaseless sun, horses couldn’t pull the diggers without water, and although the men made a start with pickaxes and shovels, they calculated that at the rate they were digging, it would take five full weeks to get an elephant-sized grave. These were the men who weren’t away at war, the lame or too-old, the too-young or asthmatic.

  The elephant was six days dead. Reverend Hewlett called a meeting in the sanctuary after Sunday services, which a few of the circus folk had attended—the bearded lady, the illustrated man, the trainer himself—and now more filed in, joining the congregation. A group of dwarfs who might have been a family, some lithe women who looked like acrobats. Reverend Hewlett removed his robe and stood at the pulpit to address the crowd. He was only thirty years old, still in love with the girl he’d left in Chicago, still anxious to toss a ball on Saturdays with whoever was willing.

  He looked at them, his flock. Mayor Blunt sat in the second row—the farthest forward anyone sat, except, once a year, those taking first Communion—with his wife on one side, his daughter, Stella, on the other. The mayor had decided that the burial of the dead was more a religious matter than a governmental one, and had asked Reverend Hewlett to work things out.

  The Reverend said, “I’ve been charged with funeral arrangements for the elephant. For—I understand her name was Belle. We ask today for ideas and able hands. And we extend our warmest welcome to the members of the Roundabout.” In the days since the disaster, his parishioners had already opened their homes, providing food and beds. (The circus trailers were too hot, too waterless, too close to the dead elephant. And the people of Little Fork had big hearts.) The performers, in turn, had started helping in the gas station and the library and the dried-out gardens, even doing tricks for the children on the brown grass of the park. They were drinking a fair amount of alcohol, was the rumor by way of the ladies at the general store, more in this past week than the whole town of Little Fork consumed in a month.

  Adolph Pitt, of Pitt’s Funeral Home, stood. “I called on my fellow at the crematorium, and he says it’s nothing doing. Not even piecemeal, even if the beast were—forgive me—even if it were dismembered.”

  “She,” the elephant trainer said from the back. “Not it.” The trainer still carried with him, at all times, the thin stick he’d used to guide the elephant, nudging it under her trunk, gently turning her head in the right direction. No one had yet seen him without it. Reverend Hewlett imagined he slept with it under his arm. The man slept alone in his scorching trailer, having refused all offers for a couch and plumbing. Hewlett was an expert now in grief—they hadn’t told him, at seminary, the ways his life would be soaked in grief—and it wasn’t the first time he’d seen a man cling to an object. Usually he could talk to the bereaved about heaven, about the warm breast of God, about the promise of reunion. But what could he say about an elephant? The Lord loveth the beasts of the field? His eye is on the sparrow? Surely the burial would help.

  Reverend Hewlett saw it as his duty to raise an unpopular option the men had been mulling over the past few days. The mayor couldn’t bring it up, because he had an election to win in the fall. But Revered Hewlett was not elected. And so he said it: “The swimming pool was never filled this summer. It’s sitting empty.”

  Some of the men and women nodded, and a few of the children, catching his meaning, made sharp little noises and looked at their parents. The circus folks didn’t much respond.

  “It’s an old pool,” the Reverend said, “and we can’t dig a hole this summer. We can dig a hole next summer, and that can be the new pool. This one’s too small, I’ve heard everyone say since the day I got here.”

  “There’s no dirt to bury him with!” Mrs. Pipsky called.

  “Maybe a tarp,” someone said.

  “Or cement. Pour cement in there.”

  “Cement’s half water.”

  The mayor stood. “This town needs that pool,” he said. The youngest Garrett boy clapped. “We’ll find another solution.”

  And before the meeting could devolve into argument, Reverend Hewlett offered up a prayer for the elephant (the Lord loveth the beasts of the field), and a prayer that a solution could be found. He invited everyone to the narthex, where the women of the Welcoming Committee had laid out a sheet cake.

  The Reverend made a point of greetin
g each visitor in turn, asking how they were enjoying their stay in Little Fork. “Not much,” the illustrated man said.

  The Reverend thought, with awe, how God had a plan for everyone. Some of these people were deformed—a man with ears like saucers, a boy with lobster-claw hands—and yet God had led them to the circus, to the place where they could find friendship and money and even love. And now He had led these people to Hewlett’s flock, and there must be a purpose for this, too.

  In the corner, the fire eater chatted with the mayor’s daughter. Stella Blunt was sixteen and lovely, hair in brown waves, and he was not much older, with a small, dark beard that Hewlett figured was a liability for a fire eater. Stella leaned toward him, fascinated.

  The following Sunday, most of them returned. They sang along with the hymns and closed their eyes to pray, and one of them put poker chips in the communion plate. The fire eater sat in the rear next to Stella. They looked down at something below the pew back, giggling, passing whatever it was back and forth.

  Over the past week, the smell of the elephant had crept from the tent and over the center of town. It was a strangely sweet smell, at least at first, more like rotting strawberries than rotting meat.

  Reverend Hewlett had planned a sermon on the beatitudes, but when the time came for prayer requests, Larry Beedleman asked everyone to pray for enough food to last his guests (all five trapeze artists were living in the Beedlemans’ attic), and Mrs. Thoms asked them to pray for the Lord to take away the stench of the elephant. Gwendolyn Lake wanted them all to beg forgiveness for the sins that had brought this trial upon them. So Reverend Hewlett preached instead about patience and forbearance.