by Hughes, Rhys
And so on forever, or at least for a long time.
For a season Groopinfoorth’s vision held sway. He was responsible for the brief revival of revivalism.
The premiere of his new and long awaited masterpiece was scheduled for the night of the next new moon. In Eclipseville the moon is one of the most celebrated celestial bodies and its phases are carefully anticipated by all and sundry, even by sundry’s servants, and those servants’ slaves, and those slaves’ pets, for many very important festivals are timed to coincide with a particular shape of moon.
During nights of a gibbous moon the inhabitants of Eclipseville like to monkey around. I speak no lie.
A crescent moon has become a symbol of Frabjal Troose, the ancient tyrant who founded half the metropolis, nobody knows which half, and a gala of grins is held in his honour.
When the moon is full, Sacerdotal Bagge blows on an oboe tinted pink and leads people outside the city for an orgy where any unloved soul may have his frustrations vented…
But shadow theatre has a more practical need for data about the phases of that buttery orb, because its waxing and waning light can affect how an actor’s shadow appears on a screen.
Complete darkness is best for a decent show.
Hence the new moon rule…
Prudence decided to use the premiere of Groopinfoorth’s latest play to protest against her treatment in public, about the bias given to her shadow over her real body. She had no intention of enduring the humiliation more than a few extra weeks at most.
The title of Groopinfoorth’s work was The Stars were Jars and it was a sequel to The Planets are Pots, and like the earlier play it called for a cast of healthy, buxom shadows.
But Prudence stopped eating. She planned to starve herself and famish her shadow into the bargain…
Yes, she wanted to punish her umbra, to castigate a silhouette that had the temerity and contrast to be more worshipped than her own erect form, that had created a situation where a solid living woman was jealous of her own two-dimensional profile!
She also deprived herself of sleep…
Reasoning that if her mind lost focus, so would her outline, she pushed herself to weird extremes, for instance using her bed as a trampoline and juggling uneaten buns until the springs and her fingers no longer worked, or laughing continuously for an entire day at the realisation that a spider’s knees are higher than its head.
Once she hypnotised herself into believing she was not a woman but a regular polyhedron, I’m not sure which one, maybe just a cube, by staring at the pendulum of an antique clock on her mantelpiece for twenty hours. The effect wore off the following day, but not before she had tried to use herself as a cutlery storage box.
The minor wounds inflicted by the forks and knives festered and grew ugly, swelling into pustules, further distorting her facial contours, but the pain of the infection meant nothing to her. She intended to put so much stress on her form, to subject it to so many odd outrages that it must begin to warp and transform itself.
In the three weeks remaining before the premiere, she abused her body to such a degree that it truly did twist and shrink; but at these changes she merely smirked. A contorted body casts a contorted shadow. It can’t help but follow the laws of geometry.
Now her shadow wouldn’t be so appealing, and even its most ardent admirers would be shocked into an understanding that beyond the profile stood an unhappy human being.
And if those admirers desired a beautiful shadow to undulate for their entertainment, they would have to pay more attention to the solid woman who cast it. Prudence wanted them to make up for lost time, to fawn over every pinch of her meat and bones.
She was confident they would…
The big moonless night eventually arrived.
Sacerdotal Bagge brought his own ladder to mount a private box that was actually a modified vegetable crate perched on a pair of ships’ masts lashed together. Groopinfoorth Crikey also had a private box, the second highest in the audience, half the height of the chief guardian’s. The third highest box was occupied by rich merchant Rimsky Mooncup, a man who kept the city supplied with chives.
The ordinary public shifted impatiently on their stools, waiting for the lutists to tune up and for the projectionist to finish wiping the lens of his projector with a crimson cloth.
Then the silk screen was lowered into place and tightened until it had the acoustic properties of a drum membrane. A deep hush settled over the audience; a lute string twanged.
The Theatre of Tangible Absences was easily the most imposing and magnificent in the city. Not only everyone who was anyone attended its premieres, but all nobodies also.
With a soft hum the projector turned the screen into a glowing square of magic. Then more lute chords came. A shadow moved on a corner of the taut silk. Groopinfoorth grunted muffled delight, sighs were expelled, eyes bulged, mouths watered.
The play had commenced!
But what was this? The shadow slid closer to the middle of the screen and waited there, but it wasn’t the coolly curvaceous shadow of Prudence Clearwater. How could it be?
Yet it had a certain familiarity about it. Maybe it was her shadow, but horribly attenuated, a shadow of its former self, in other words a shadow of a shadow, which as everyone knows is less endearing than the echo of an echo. There was a unanimous gasp of disapproval and even Sacerdotal Bagge muttered disparagingly.
Then the sympathies turned…
An audience member cried, “The shadow must be ill!”
“Yes, that’s right,” called another voice, “it has a disease of some kind. Poor shadow! It needs to rest!”
“Not so!” countered a third opinion. “Antibiotics are the answer! Can I inject a profile, do you think?”
“What a bizarre suggestion! Who are you?”
“An evil doctor, as it happens.”
“I thought as much. An evil doctor would suggest what you just did. A needle full of awful medicine… But this outline doesn’t want your drugs. Fattening is a better solution.”
“Really! How exactly does one feed a shadow?”
“Toast and jackfruit jam…”
“You’re guessing, aren’t you? What a fake!”
“Citizens!” boomed Sacerdotal Bagge. “Cease bickering at once! It is most unseemly. Clearly a specialist in shady ailments must be consulted and I pledge to secure the services of the right fellow within a week. The show will resume, I promise!”
“Hurrah for the chief guardian!” shouted Groopinfoorth Crikey.
“Hip hip!” added Rimsky Mooncup.
“Pelvis, sternum, kneecap!” roared an anonymous wit. There’s always one joker in a theatre crowd.
The play was halted at this point and the projector turned off, much to the fury of Prudence, who wanted to display her lamentable condition for the entire duration of the performance. For the first time in her career, she left the stage without the thunder of applause to accompany her departure. But worse was to come. Sacerdotal Bagge went backstage in person with more than a dozen attendants and fussed over her shadow in her dressing room; but still they ignored her.
An identical outcome awaited her in the street the following day. The empathies of the other pedestrians were directed exclusively at that point where her shadow glided over cobbles and walls, and nobody had even a cursory glance for the real woman. This behaviour was repeated on each subsequent occasion and the deflated actress was forced to admit that her self-chastisement had been in vain. Yet she didn’t abandon the behaviour that had distorted her physique.
Her shadow alone was the star; and she was merely the black vacuum of interstellar space that surrounded this point of light and permitted it to shine so gloriously. Ironic that a living woman should be a nobody while her own shadow was a substantial presence, but that’s how things were in Eclipseville at that time. Prudence was a malnourished void. Before she had a chance to die of starvation, she was visited one morning by a group of men who burst into her h
ouse.
They broke open her front door with hammers and rushed up her stairs before she could jump out of bed and defend herself. Hired by Sacerdotal Bagge, they included a specialist in shadows from a distant town where it is still legal to experiment on silhouettes. His assistants held her in a tight embrace while the specialist went to work. First he fitted stiff cardboard margins to her body with straps. Then he ordered a sheet to be pulled off her bed and suspended in the air.
Two men stretched the cloth between them and held it steady without a crease, while the specialist utilised his powerful portable lamp to direct Prudence’s shadow against it. The cardboard margins didn’t fail. Her new outline was the same as her old…
They left her alone then, without even an apology, and when Prudence stumbled to a window and looked out, she saw the chief guardian himself standing in the street and waving, but not really at her; no, his wave went beyond the glass to her false shadow on the wall. Doubtless he expected it to return to acting immediately.
The entire city wanted a Prudence Clearwater revival, and there might have been one, but suddenly a bad moon rose in her head. In Eclipseville a bad moon is any moon deemed unsuitable for a festival of any kind. As every possible moon shape is good enough for a gala of some description it can be seen that bad moons are rare or even impossible. It simply meant that she couldn’t take any more…
This happens to actors all over the world.
Prudence decided to clear out for good, leaving in her wake the fates of everyone connected with her career in any way. And so she did. And this is how some of them fared:
Groopinfoorth Crikey’s meteoric rise fizzled out before the end of the summer. During the opening night of his third epic, The Quasars shall be Spoons, he was forced to run from a disgruntled audience that turned into a crazy mob. Seats were ripped up and hurled at the screen and expensive projectors tinkled into oblivion.
He never wrote another play and his obscurity was so profound that he later became famous for just that.
Sacerdotal Bagge, on the other hand, managed to persuade one of the less salubrious theatres to stage a work of his own, but he gave the actors no script to rehearse with. The premiere has been postponed until after his probable death at the hands of an assassin, maybe next year. Until then he refines his role as chief guardian of the metropolis and the shadows of his ears and jowls are everywhere.
Meanwhile, the Literalists begin to question the significance of their given name and whether it has any hidden meanings; and the Symbolists realise that if symbolism represents adherence to a truism that something might not represent itself, they can’t continue to exist until the meaning of symbolism becomes less literal.
That’s the standard of inner struggle among intellectuals over there. I hope you’re not like that yourself?
Even if you are, you’ll be interested to know about one theatre fanatic who doesn’t care about such matters. The anonymous wit in the audience was killed when the office tower of Hyperbole Inc collapsed on him, all twenty thousand floors of it, in a hurricane featuring winds stronger than any recorded before by anyone.
As for Prudence, she married chive merchant Rimsky Mooncup and took his surname. Much safer that way. The couple left Eclipseville on a steam-driven tandem bicycle and settled in Huknibonk-on-Stench, a city with its own special disasters.
But the marriage didn’t last very long and Rimsky ran off with the six sultry shadows he discovered in the highest room of their new house, and Prudence didn’t get the chance to tell him they were his own outlines, cast by lamps positioned in alcoves.
It didn’t matter. She enrolled in the local university, where she decided to study aeronautics, because that science has no obvious connection with acting or shadows, but she didn’t graduate. She ended up flying away on a magic carpet instead. Curious.
(2009)
Discrepancy
It must surely have come to the attention of certain scholars that increasing numbers of people are appearing in more than one place at the same time. Individual scientists, travellers, pirates, geniuses, fools, musicians, and all other kinds of characters have been recorded living multiple lives in sundry locations; and some of them have even been observed dying several deaths instead of the usual single death that is our proper allowance. These inconsistencies of time and space must be explained and this brief account will attempt to do that.
High in the Alps at a point almost midway between Vaduz and Chur may be found the quaint city-state of Chaud-Mellé. It occupies an entire valley where also glitters a mysterious lake that tastes like wine. But this tale is not concerned with bodies of water; it wishes instead to focus on the body, and mind, and doings, of the lovely Coppelia de Retz, a maker of toys by trade who specialises in the design and construction of cunningly wrought automata. Coppelia is skilled at creating life-size puppets that are perfect working replicas of real men and women.
For many years Coppelia accepted commissions from rich aristocrats to duplicate them in order that they might send the clockwork puppets to boring soirées while they stayed at home; but some of her customers clearly also received a thrill at the idea of using their own doppelgängers as butlers or more lowly kinds of domestic servant. These commissions made Coppelia a wealthy woman but they failed to fully satisfy her hunger for mischief. She began making puppet doubles of unwary citizens at random and turning them loose in the world to comic effect.
Her method was as follows… She found an obscure alleyway near one of the city gates and she converted it into an optical trap by renting a house at a point halfway along the crooked street. Most newcomers to Chaud-Mellé proceeded down the main thoroughfare after passing under the gate; a curious or reckless minority close to explore the alley instead. Up the steep gully they puffed, resting for breath at the sharp bend that led to an even steeper stretch of cobbled gloom, and this inevitable pause was exactly what Coppelia required.
Her house was positioned on the bend itself and she had transformed it into a workshop full of remarkable devices relevant to her work. Lenses studded on the outside wall captured the image of her latest victim; while a hidden metal plate under his feet measured his weight as he stood immobile; the quality of his wheezing was also recorded by an artificial ear in order to gauge his probable manner of speaking. The lenses and ear were concealed by the natural darkness of the alley and not once did a passing traveller suspect any theft of vision or sound.
With this information Coppelia was enabled to create a perfect clockwork replica of her subject. At first she laboured at this task with her own hands but she soon realised the expediency of automating the process. In the centre of her workshop stood a machine resembling an iron octopus that possessed a rudimentary mechanical brain and was easily able to process the data collected by the lenses, ear and metal plate. The riveted tentacles moved unerringly, building each puppet double in less than an hour and delivering it to the world through a hatch.
The octopus selected suitable materials from the boxes full of springs, cogs, camshafts, levers, wheels, crystals and relays that stood around it in profusion. Coppelia’s instinct for domestic neatness was defective: the workshop was so cluttered with spare parts that her living space was cramped in the extreme; but in fact she only visited this house to monitor the octopus and make occasional repairs. She estimated that it produced ten puppets every week, which demonstrated the unpopularity of the alley as a public way and was a safely modest quantity.
One afternoon, while she was engaged in tightening a loose screw on the tip of one of the tentacles, a traveller happened to arrive in Chaud-Mellé. He passed through the gate and instantly rejected the broad avenue that stretched before him, preferring the picturesque ascent of the alley. Up he went, pausing for breath on the bend as they all did. His weight, voice and angles were captured by the monitoring devices, and in the very instant that Coppelia finished her adjustment, the octopus sprang into action, constructing his perfect double, while Coppelia watched with a fr
own.
Fifty minutes elapsed before the puppet was ready and functional. During this time Coppelia’s frown deepened; there was something about the clockwork being in progress that unnerved her; but she considered it an act of moral weakness to halt the process on the basis of nothing more substantial than an uneasy feeling. As a consequence the octopus continued working until it was done. Then it wound up tight the mannequin and released it through the hatch. Coppelia relaxed her frown but the corners of her mouth sagged with accuracy in the direction of the antipodes.
Her gloominess had suddenly increased because now she thought she recognised the face of the puppet. She needed to be certain. Examining a bookshelf in the darkest corner of the room, she finally selected a thick volume entitled THE LUNATIC INVENTORS OF EUROPE. She turned the pages rapidly, scanning each one. Long before reaching her own entry she found the page that confirmed her worst fears. The traveller was none other than Karl Mondaugen, originally from Munich, a fellow who was no stranger at all to the art of making deceptively realistic clockwork puppets.
Coppelia slammed the book shut with a growl. Creating spare copies of ordinary citizens, with or without their assent, was a pleasurable hobby for her; but she had absolutely no intention of increasing the number of her competitors and rivals. She had unwittingly ensured that the book of mad inventors would require an extra page in its next edition, unless the single entry on Mondaugen could also be said to represent his double, for they were identical in form, character and ability. But it was still Coppelia’s duty to rectify her mistake, with the aid of a blunderbuss.
There was one hanging by its trigger-guard from a nail in the wall. She had anticipated the necessity of destroying the occasional rogue puppet, but not for this particular reason. She took it down and loaded it with calcified teeth and fossilised bone fragments: a blunderbuss full of cogs and brass nuts might suffice to kill an organic being but the arbitrary insertion of such components into a machine could conceivably improve its function. At any rate, the symmetry was satisfying. Thus armed, she operated the hatch and hurried off in search of her prey.