by Mark Teppo
There was a gallery in Boise, Idaho, named after his wife, and it was filled with a bunch of heavy oils and strained watercolors that weren't doing much but gathering dust. A million of his dollars helped drill a large hole in the middle of a park in Spokane Washington. The drilling stopped when a large pocket of natural gas was breached, and the latest projections from Spokane's City Council said was that it was going to take ten to twenty million to fix all the structural damage on the surrounding buildings. And no one wanted to talk about finishing the pool that Metcalfe had been trying to put in for the kids in the first place. On the other side of the Cascades, in Seattle, he bought the old Heritage Building with the design of turning it into a permanent theater for the Delirious Arts Renaissance Company.
The Heritage had been on the edge many years ago, both the edge of town and the edge of cutting intellectual thought. A five-story brownstone, it attempted to meld the aesthetics of a modern office building with the space requirements of an equally modern performance center. The downside was that the theater itself took up so much of the interior space of the structure that when it closed, the rest of the building couldn't support the rising operating expenses. The Heritage became a firetrap and a hostel for the homeless until it was saved by Metcalfe's patronage.
Compared to other industries, the arts moved at a glacial pace, and Metcalfe didn't have the same patience in his dotage as he had in his youth. The Heritage had been in his name for four years now and had never opened its doors to the public. The interior design and decorations still weren't done, and they had already put off the opening production season once.
And then things hit a snag. Metcalfe had himself a permanently bad game of golf one afternoon back in September. He had been on pace to hit a 74 that day, having done a personal best of 31 on the front half, when he went for the three wood to recover from a bad shank on the 11th. Not a bad choice when you've got another 160 yards to clear but something twanged during his back swing. His heart did a little tap dance number and then went to a resting rate that was way too low for any activity other than breathing. He inhaled grass clippings for a half hour or so before the paramedics could get him hooked up to all those machines that go bing! and keep you alive. Four weeks later, Metcalfe woke up enough for the doctors to tell him that the that 31 he had posted on the front nine was probably the last golf score he was going to post.
Metcalfe got himself the best nursing millions of dollars can buy and went back to Montana to ease into the twilight. His outstanding hobbies were brutally scrutinized by the legal team hired by his half-dozen children. Anything that hadn't shown a demonstrable profit in the previous six months was put on notice, enterprises that had hemorrhaged cash for a year were cut, and projects that had never shown the slightest inclination to profitability were told to lose the Metcalfe Foundation's number. In short, all artistic funding dried up overnight.
The production scrambled for a while, trying to forestall the inevitable, but they couldn't find any other investors on such short notice and were about to close up shop when I called. One of the details in the envelope I got from Santa was a numbered account in Switzerland, and when I called the bank in Bern, a nice fellow there happily told me I had a little over a million US at my disposal.
There were some perks to working for Mrs. C.
I paid a visit to the upscale tailor in the mall and didn't even blink when he told me what it would cost to get them made in my size. I got an expensive haircut, treated myself to a mani-pedi, found some excellent shoes, and caught the morning flight Monday—parked in first class, naturally. I did, after all, have an image to maintain.
That part was easy.
Erma met me at the airport, swaddled in voluminous cotton and trailing an air of patchouli and cinnamon that left a near-visible wake. She insisted on carrying my luggage and kept up a constant stream of chatter from the airport to the Heritage Building. I had hoped to get settled at the hotel first, have a stiff drink or two, before facing what lay in wait for me at the Heritage Building, but my wishes were little more than dandelion fluff stuck to the car seat as far as Erma was concerned.
"We're thrilled to have your support, Mr. Rosewood," she cooed for about the eighteenth time as we rode the elevator to the top floor of the Heritage. She was doing a hungry pigeon dance with her head.
The paneling in the elevator car was all maple with polished brass trim. The ceiling was reflective tile, and the panel over the fluorescent lights was a single piece of scalloped glass. I wondered how much of the restoration project was done. A million plus wasn't going to go that far if there was more work to be done.
Metcalfe's office—my office—was the size of a squash court. It took up the northwest corner of the building, and the view out across the red cranes of Harbor Island to the distant snowcapped peaks of the Olympic Mountains on the peninsula was spectacular. The steel and glass forest of downtown Seattle, buildings gleaming in the weak afternoon sunlight, was on my right. The walls of the office were over-decorated with watercolors, probably on loan from his gallery in Idaho. About five old-growth trees had died to provide the lumber for the table that dominated the room. At first, I thought it was a conference table, but then I realized there was only one chair, and the chair wasn't exactly small either. Stacked on a corner of the monster desk were three piles of paper—each one looked ready to topple over if I so much as stared at it too hard.
Erma fished around that capacious head of hers for some comment to draw attention away from the stature of the previous tenant of the office. I beat her to it. "Well," I said slowly, trying not to affect a cattleman's drawl, "I'll need either a hacksaw to bring the desk down or a couple of phone books to bring me up."
She tittered behind her hand like a pair of chickadees, and I should have paid more attention to the warning bell that went off in my head. The office felt artificial—like a movie set, and Erma alternated between overly officious and overly eager to please with all the enthusiasm of a small dog hyped up with the promise of a walk and a ball to chew on. Her laugh was shrill and forced. The walls had been recently painted—one coat too few to really cover up the glue marks left by the old wallpaper, and the shadows on the ceiling were actually old water stains.
But then the moment passed. The stains became delicate shadows thrown by the fancy glass covering the light fixtures. Her laugh became the chirping of happy birds again, and the dust bunnies under the credenza scurried away to some invisible hidey hole.
"I'll see what I can find," Erma said as she drifted toward the ornate office door.
"Thanks," I replied, and that feeling came back. Did I really want her handling either a hacksaw or a stack of phone books?
"Shall I send the rest of the staff up?" she asked.
I threw off my paranoia. "No," I said. "Not today. I'd like to get settled a bit before I meet everyone."
"Okay," she thrilled, slipping into her eager-to-please persona. She closed the door behind her, and the latch settled loudly into the frame.
I wondered where she was going to find actual phone books, and that thought led to thinking about hacksaws. I threw my briefcase up on the desk as I wandered over to the window. A hundred years ago, the Heritage might have been a real landmark, but the modern skyline of Seattle towered over the five-story building. I peered up at the black finger of the Columbia Tower, and wondered how thin the air was up at the top.
The lording-over-my-domain moment passed, and I returned to the monolithic desk. A little free climbing up the side of the chair and a death-defying leap got me to the top. For the record I paced it off: six meters by seven. You could do an elvish line dance on this thing and not fall off. The room the NPC had sequestered me in after our trip to purgatory had been smaller.
The table was more than big enough to accommodate all the paperwork in my briefcase. The theater company's accountant, Ted Laslo, had overnighted me a brick of paperwork, thinking—I suppose—that I was going to review it all on the flight out. First clas
s is pretty roomy, but not that roomy. But when I glanced at the triple stack of papers on the desk, I realized Ted had only sent me the highlights, and I ruefully wondered if the desk wasn't actually big enough.
I got started, and it took me over an hour to get the company records all neatly spread out. I left a walkway up the middle so that I could stroll back and forth as I tried to wrap my head around the copious volumes of data in all the piles. There were cash flow projections, audience outreach plans, expenditure reports, press clippings, staff backgrounds, costume designs, mechanical drawings for rigging and winches, and even a handful of holiday cocktail recipes. I have an aptitude for paperwork, but this all went way beyond my comfort level. It was going to take me weeks to figure all of this out.
I didn't have weeks—plural. I had two and a half. The show was scheduled to open on the eleventh of December. It had already been delayed once because of Metcalfe's accident. If the opening was delayed again, there wouldn't be enough days before Christmas to get in a full run of the show. No one wants to see a Christmas show after Christmas. That's worse than finding eggs after Easter.
I sat and read, because no one else was going to it, and after a few hours of parsing paperwork, I was starting to believe that the problem really was as simple as Santa made it out to be: show up, spend money, talk about the arts, keep the heat on, and make sure the doors opened on the eleventh. If we could get two full weeks in before Christmas at forty percent capacity each night, the production wouldn't be a complete wash. It was going to eat up a significant chunk of my budget, but what theater company doesn't lose money on actually putting on a show?
The only real problem was I didn't have chairs for forty percent of the house to sit in. Apparently, a broken water pipe had wrecked most of the flooring in the orchestra, and while Metcalfe had managed to get a team of industrious carpenters in to fix the floor (and support beams for the mezzanine), most of the existing seats had been thrown out. Sure, I could bring in folding chairs for the audience, but that didn't exactly match the décor in the theater, and I'm sure some local critic was going to spend most of their review bitching about the hard metal seat. That would not put more butts in those seats.
"So find more," I mused. "How hard can that be? This problem can be fixed by spending money. I can do that."
"Sounds like an easy job," someone said.
I looked up. The voice belonged to a woman with green eyes. She had managed to open the office door without making any noise, and when I made eye contact, she came all the way into the room.
The stack of papers next to my right knee was the one containing all the bios of the employees and actors. The problem with the bio sheets is that Ted—being more numerically oriented than visually driven—hadn't bothered to include any headshots with the bios. And none of them had bothered to mention eye color or predilection for fine Italian footwear.
The woman walked over to the desk and offered me her hand.
"Bernard Rosewood," I said, taking her hand. I could have stood up, but then I would have actually been taller than her, and that was a weird feeling. "I'm—"
"The money," she said.
"Yes," I said, suddenly flustered. Again, eye contact was a new thing for me. "I suppose I am."
"Unless you were talking to a mouse in your pocket a minute ago." Her peepers gave me a quick once-over. I was so glad I had gone for the Armani suit instead of the Calvin Klein. We had similar tastes in Italian designers.
"Can't remember the last time I had a tête-à-tête with a squeaker," I said.
"Not very good conversationalists are they?"
"Not really. Unless you're talking about cheese, and then they'll talk your head off."
She laughed and released my hand. "I'm Barb Prescott. I'm the set designer for the company."
"Right," I said.
A tiny smile quirked the corner of her mouth. She put a finger on the stack of bios, and started to slide them—one by one—aside. Hers came up eventually, and she left it there as she wandered past the desk to look out the window.
I scanned the document quickly. Canadian by birth, British by education; six years with the Royal Shakespeare Company. Married some guy with an impressive list of degrees—in architecture, of all things. And that was it. No other credits. I turned the page over, wondering if there was something more on the back.
This piqued my curiosity. The most interesting bits of any bio were the blank spots. It'd been a decade since she'd been married, and a surreptitious glance toward the window revealed she wasn't wearing a wedding band, which didn't necessarily mean anything, but still . . .
"I'm glad you could join us," she said, coming back to the desk and sitting in Metcalfe's immense chair. She filled it better than I, but it was still ginormous.
"That seems to be the sentiment of the day," I said.
"Deep pockets will do that." She looked over the sea of paperwork surrounding me and wrinkled her nose. "You aren't the type who understands all this, are you?"
"Some," I said. "Ted sent me a brick of paperwork, and I thought that was a lot, but apparently he was being cost-conscious and leaving most of it for me to find when I got here."
"Is it telling you much about the show?"
"You don't have enough chairs," I said.
"And?" she prompted.
"It's a lot of paperwork," I said.
She leaned forward and tapped me on the knee. "Come downstairs," she said. "Let me show you what you're really here for."
The house was dark, the stage lit by two banks of small footlights nestled in the floor out near the proscenium. We wove our way past towering sculptures that were hard to make out in the dim light, though I felt like I was sneaking through a forest of frozen monoliths. Barb made me stand on a taped X near the center of the stage. "Wait here," she said, then she left me there.
I lifted a hand to blot out some of the glare from the bank of lights and tried to make out the shape and style of the theater's auditorium. Orchestra—sans chairs—main floor of the house, mezzanine, and a couple of box seats on either side. Either the walls were overgrown with moss or the trim was exceptionally rococo. It was hard to tell in the dimness.
"Ready?" Barb's voice reverberated from hidden speakers, and I jumped out of my skin.
"I'm not a big fan of playing hide and seek," I said once my heart stopped pounding like a jackhammer in my chest.
"Sorry," she said. "It'll just be a minute."
"Where is everyone?"
"Dinner. We break from three to seven. Traffic is horrible in this city. We have to give them extra time to get anywhere. They'll be back in a few hours."
Tiny lights began to blossom out in the audience, gleaming points on chandeliers dangling from the high ceiling. I could make out the walls now and saw that the ornamentation was even more fifteenth-century than I had originally guessed. The lack of seating left the orchestra area a black pit, and some of the boxes on the sides were missing their front railings.
Suddenly, light spilled across the stage on my right, and all the tall figures were illuminated in stark relief. Barb kept bringing up lights, and I found I was surrounded by a field of twisted, tormented figures. They were very detailed, each one attached to the earth by a maze of wire and ribbon, each one straining and pulling to be free.
My mouth went dry. They looked a lot like statues I had seen once. On a metal plate floating on a sea of hellish air.
There were two platforms adorned with fat cones upstage from me, and as Barb dropped the spotlights down, the cones erupted with plumes of fire, aggravating the shadows on the statues and giving the tormented faces strange lifelike qualities. The fire plumes revealed the details of the platforms, and I realized they were made from thousands of plastic dolls, all melted and woven together.
I was still gawking when Barb skipped out from stage left. "What do you think?" she asked, slightly breathlessly.
"What is this? Where am I?"
"You are in Rudolph's throne roo
m. I modeled it on the original designs of Solomon's chambers. Though," she shrugged slightly, "I made some modifications. A little more Gothic."
"Throne room?" I asked. "Rudolph's throne room?"
"Oh dear," she said. "You haven't read the script yet, have you?"
November 24th
I considered drowning myself in the bathtub after reading the first two scenes of the play. I eyed the window and thought about taking a swan dive to the street when I finished the first act. And I was beyond numb when I finished.
Gothic? Gothic was a blonde Swede drinking lemonade and licking a cherry lollipop while lounging in a sun-drenched hammock beside a field of sunflowers compared to this. Imagine the blackest point of night captured in a can and dropped into the deepest part of the Marianas Trench, and you can begin to understand the darkness that overflowed this script.
The audience is lulled in the beginning, lead to believe they are about to enjoy a full family outing of Christmas cheer. ‘Twas the night before Christmas and all that. The curtain rises up on a soft winter night. Typical nuclear family sitting around a lit Christmas tree. Mom in her kerchief, Dad in his cap. The children are laughingly trying to decide which present to open first for this is a post-nuclear family that never understood the importance of patience. There is a chorus of sugarplum fairies at the edges of the stage, faces lit by candles as they sing a graceful noel. There are more candlelit fairies then, falling gently from the ceiling of the theater, roaming randomly in the aisles, turning the entire house into a sea of flickering light.
Onstage, Dad directs his young son towards a very specific package. "Open that one," he says. "You should open that one tonight." The son does so, and out of the box leaps a happy puppy. The script notes: White puppy with single black spot on face, something with short hair and very energetic. The boy is overjoyed. "Just what I wanted," he crows. "He's just what I asked Santa for."