by M. L. Rio
Meredith: $$“This trusty servant
Shall pass between us. Ere long you are like to hear
(If you dare venture in your own behalf)
A mistress’s command.”
Her hand moved toward the neck of her sweater and his moved with it, hovering a hairsbreadth from her skin as she found her handkerchief and drew it out.
“Wear this,” she said. “Spare speech. / Decline your head—”
In one sudden motion he snatched the handkerchief and kissed her so hard he nearly knocked her over. She seized his shirt in both fists like she wanted to choke him, and I heard the hitch in his breath, the little answering gasp. It was violent, aggressive, the handkerchief and its delicate seduction crushed and forgotten. If they’d had claws they would have mauled each other. I felt hot, sick, light-headed. I wanted to look away but couldn’t—it was like watching a car crash. I clenched my teeth so hard my vision started to swim.
Meredith broke loose, thrust James back a step. They stood four feet apart, staring at each other, disheveled and breathless.
Meredith: “This kiss, if it durst speak,
Would stretch thy spirits up into the air.
Conceive, and fare thee well.”
James: “Yours, in the ranks of death.”
He turned, exited the wrong way, walked right out of the room. As soon as he was gone Meredith turned away from the place where he’d stood, and her words were sharp and furious as she said, “O, the difference of man and man! / To thee a woman’s services are due; / My fool usurps my body.”
The bell rang, not a moment too soon. I bolted for the hall, skin crawling with the hideous feeling of all their eyes on me.
SCENE 10
I shoved my way up the stairs, nearly hurling a philosophy student over the banister in my rush to get away from Studio Five. I dropped a book but didn’t go back for it—someone would pick it up; my name was in the cover. When I got to the gallery I threw the door open without knocking, closed it behind me, and pressed my back flat against it. A sneeze began to form under the splint on my nose, and for a moment I didn’t dare breathe, afraid of how much it would hurt.
“Oliver?” Frederick peered out from behind the blackboard, a chalk rag in one hand.
“Yes,” I said, exhaling all at once. “I’m sorry, I just—wanted some quiet.”
“Understandable. Why don’t you sit, and I’ll pour tea?”
I nodded, eyes watering from the effort of holding back the sneeze, and crossed the room to look out the window. Everything was bleak and gray, the lake dull and lusterless under a thin layer of ice. From so far and so high, it looked like a fogged mirror, and I imagined God reaching down to smear the glass clean with his sleeve.
“Honey?” Frederick asked. “Lemon?”
“Yes, please,” I said, my mind distant from my mouth. James and Meredith were tangled and wrestling in my brain. Sweat prickled on my scalp and between my shoulder blades. I wanted to fling the window open, let a cold blast of winter wind deaden my creeping fever, freeze through me until I couldn’t feel a thing.
Frederick carried my cup and saucer over, and I gulped down a mouthful of tea. It scalded my tongue and the roof of my mouth and I tasted nothing, not even the sour sting of lemon. Frederick watched me bemusedly. I tried to smile at him, but it must have been more like a grimace because he tapped the side of his nose and said, “How is it?”
“Itchy,” I said. A knee-jerk reply, but honest enough.
His face was blank at first and then he chuckled. “You, Oliver,” he said, “are truly indomitable.”
My smile cracked like plaster.
He shuffled back to the sideboard to continue pouring tea. I rolled my fingers into the tightest fists I could make, fighting an impulse to scream or maybe let that crazy laugh out, finally, even though my throat was still raw and sore from the night Alexander overdosed.
The late bell rang and I glanced up at Frederick, who was checking the little gold watch on his wrist. “Is everyone else tardy?” he said.
“I don’t know.” My voice was stiff, brittle. “Alexander’s in the clinic, and Wren’s coming back tomorrow, but…”
“The rest of them?”
“I don’t know,” I said again, unable to suppress a flash of panic. “They were all in Gwendolyn’s class.” The small rational part of my brain spat out a list of reasons they might be late. They were rattled after our last lesson, most likely. Tired. Not feeling well. PTSD.
Frederick peered out through the hall door, looking first one way, then the other, like a child preparing to cross the street. I reached for my tea, hoping it would settle my nerves, but the cup slipped from my unsteady hand. Blistering hot liquid splashed across my skin—I yelped in pain, and the china shattered on the floor.
Frederick moved faster than I had ever seen him do, starting and whirling around at the door. “Oliver,” he said, in a tone of surprise that was almost reproachful.
“I’m sorry!” I said. “I’m sorry, it slipped and I—”
“Oliver,” he said again, closing the door behind him. “I am not concerned about the cup.” He reached for a napkin on the sideboard and brought it to me. I dried my hands as best I could while they were shaking so badly and breathed in short, strange hiccups, gulping the chalky air down like it might run out. Frederick lowered himself into the chair that James usually occupied. “Look at me, please, Oliver,” he said, sternly but softly. I raised my eyes. “Now. Tell me what’s wrong.”
“Everyone’s—” I shook my head as I shredded the napkin with seared and smarting fingertips. “We’re all falling apart.”
I knew by then the way the story went. Our little drama was rapidly hurtling toward its climactic crisis. What next, when we reached the precipice?
First, the reckoning. Then, the fall.
ACT V
PROLOGUE
The climb from the first floor to the Tower takes a decade. I ascend slowly, like a man on the steps to the gallows, and Colborne comes haltingly behind me. The smell of the place—old wood and old books under a soft sprinkling of dust—is overwhelmingly familiar, though I never noticed it ten years ago when I lived here. The door is barely cracked, as if one of us, twenty-something, left it open in our rush to get to the theatre, Studio Five, the Bore’s Head, wherever. For one instant I wonder if James is waiting on the other side.
The door opens silently when I push—it hasn’t rusted the way I have. The empty room gapes at me as I step over the threshold, braced for the pain of recollection to hit me like a thunderbolt. Instead there’s only a faint whisper, a sigh like the slightest breeze on the other side of the window glass. I venture farther in.
Students still live here, or so it seems. The layer of dust on the empty bookshelves is only a few weeks deep, not years. The beds are stripped of everything, and they look naked and skeletal. Mine. James’s. I reach for one of his bedposts, the spiraled wood smooth as glass. I exhale the breath I didn’t know I was holding. The room is just a room.
The window between my wardrobe and James’s bed—narrow, like an arrow slit—squints down at the lake. If I crane my neck I can see the end of the dock, jutting into the summer’s emerald water. I wonder (for the first time, oddly) if I would have watched it happen from here, had I not spent the night of the Caesar party one floor down in Meredith’s room. Too dark, I tell myself. I wouldn’t have seen a thing.
“This was your room?” Behind me, Colborne is looking up at the ceiling, the faraway central point where all the beams converge, like spokes on a wheel. “You and Farrow.”
“Yes, James and I.”
Colborne’s eyes slowly descend and find my face. He shakes his head. “The two of you. I never understood it.”
“Neither did we. It was easier not to.”
He struggles, for a moment, to find words. “What were you?” he asks, finally. It sounds rude, but it’s just exasperation at his own inability to better craft the question.
“We were
a lot of things. Friends, brothers, partners in crime.” His expression darkens, but I ignore it and continue. “James was everything I desperately wanted to be and never could: talented, intelligent, worldly. The only child of a family that prized art over logic and passion over peace and quiet. I stuck to him like a burr from the day we met, hoping some of his brilliance might rub off on me.”
“And him?” Colborne asks. “What was his interest in you?”
“Is it so hard to believe that someone might just like me, Joe?”
“Not at all. I’ve told you more than once that I like you, completely in spite of myself.”
“Yes,” I say, dryly, “and it never fails to give me a warm fuzzy feeling.”
He smirks. “You don’t have to answer the question, but I won’t withdraw it.”
“Very well. This is guesswork, of course, but I think James liked me for the opposite reasons that I liked him. Everyone called me ‘nice,’ but what they really meant was ‘naïve.’ I was naïve and impressionable and shockingly ordinary. But I was just clever enough to keep up with him, so he let me.”
Colborne gives me a queer, evaluative look. “That’s all there was to it?”
“Of course not,” I tell him. “We were inseparable for four years. It’s not something you can explain in a few minutes.”
He frowns, pushes his hands into his pockets. My eyes automatically flick to his hip, searching for the gold glint of a police badge, before I remember he’s changed jobs. I glance up at his face again. He hasn’t aged so much as discolored, the way old dogs do.
“You know what I think it was?” he asks.
I raise my eyebrows, intrigued. People often wanted my explanation of my relationship with James—which seemed inherently unfair, expecting one half of an equation to account for the whole—but no one has ever offered their own diagnosis.
“I think he was enamored with you because you were so enamored with him.”
(“Enamored.” I note that this is the word he chooses to use. It doesn’t feel quite right to me, but it’s not entirely wrong either.)
“It’s possible,” I say. “I never asked. He was my friend—much more than that, truthfully—and that was enough. I didn’t need to know why.”
We stand facing each other in a silence that is awkward only for him. There’s another question he’s itching to ask, but he won’t. He gets as close as he can, starts slowly, perhaps hoping I’ll leap in and finish the thought for him. “When you say ‘more than friends’ …”
I wait. “Yes?”
He abandons the attempt. “I suppose it doesn’t matter, but I can’t help wondering.”
I give him a smile nondescript enough that he will probably go on wondering—about this much, at least—for a good long while. If he’d had enough nerve to ask, I would have told him. My infatuation with James (there’s the word, never mind “enamored”) transcended any notion of gender. Colborne—regular Joe, happily married, father of two, not unlike my own father in some respects—does not strike me as the sort of man who would understand this. No man is, perhaps, until he experiences it himself and deniability is no longer plausible.
What were we, then? In ten years I have not found an adequate word to describe us.
SCENE 1
As soon as the third-years finished Two Gentlemen of Verona, the set was ripped down with unceremonious haste. Three days later, the set for Lear had overtaken the stage, and we walked through the transformed space for the first time. During what normally would have been combat class, we shuffled in through the wings, one by one, numb to the usually exciting prospect of a new set. (Alexander was back from the clinic by then. He brought up the rear—hollow-eyed, stiff and lifeless, a walking cadaver. He looked so utterly broken that I hadn’t yet had the heart—or perhaps the nerve—to confront him, about anything.)
“Here it is,” Camilo said, as he flicked the work lights on. “They’ve really outdone themselves this time.”
For one precious moment, I forgot my tiredness, the weight of constant worry that had settled on my shoulders. It was like wandering into a dreamland.
Taped out on the floor, the set was deceptively simple: a bare stage and the narrow Bridge stretching down the center aisle like a runway. But the artistic design seized the imagination like a drug. An enormous mirror covered every inch of the floor, reflecting the deep shadows beyond the border curtains. Another mirror rose at the upstage wall where the backdrop should have been, tilted just enough that it, too, only reflected black and emptiness—not the audience. Meredith was the first to venture out onto the stage, and I fought a ridiculous urge to grab her arm and pull her back. Her identical twin appeared upside down, reflected in the floor. “God,” she said. “How did they do it?”
“It’s mirrored plexiglass,” Camilo explained, “so it won’t crack and it’s perfectly safe to walk on. The costume crew is fitting special grips to the bottoms of our shoes so we don’t slip.”
She nodded, gazing down a sheer vertical drop to—what? Cautiously, Filippa stepped out to join her. Then Alexander, then Wren, then James. I waited in the wings, uncertain.
“Wow,” Wren said, in a small, awed voice. “What does it look like with the stage lights on?”
“Why don’t I show you?” Camilo said, turning to the monitor in the prompt corner. “Voilà.”
Wren gasped as the lights came up. It wasn’t the hot, sweltering yellow we were used to, but bright dazzling white. We blinked, blinded, until our eyes adjusted. Then Meredith pointed upward and said, “Look!”
Overhead, between the backdrop mirror and the grand drape (where normally there were only a few bare battens and long vines of rope), a million tiny fiber-optic cables hung, burning bright blue like stars. The mirror beneath everyone’s feet had been transformed to an endless night sky.
“Go on,” Camilo said to me. “I promise it’s safe.”
I obediently inched out of the wings and set my foot down, worried it would simply go through the floor and I would plummet. But the mirror was there, deceptively solid. I walked gingerly to center stage where my classmates stood in a tight little group, alternately looking up and down, faces slack with amazement.
“They’ve done actual constellations,” Filippa said. “That’s Draco.” She pointed, and James followed her gaze. I glanced down toward the Bridge, where another line of fiber-optic wires hung from the ceiling in the house.
“Trippy,” Alexander said, softly.
Below us, our reflections stretched down into a starry abyss. My stomach rolled unpleasantly.
“Take your time,” Camilo said. “Walk around. Get used to moving on a three-dimensional floor.”
The others dispersed, drifting quietly away from me, like ripples on the surface of the lake. I realized, with a funny little jolt behind my solar plexus, that this was what it reminded me of: the lake in middle winter, before freezing, the vast black sky reflected like a portal to another universe. I closed my eyes, feeling seasick.
The last few weeks had passed in a whirl and rush, time sometimes moving so slowly it was unbearable, sometimes so fast that it was impossible to catch our breath. We had become a small colony of insomniacs. Outside of classes and rehearsals, Wren rarely left her room, but more often than not the light stayed on all night. Alexander, once released from the hospital, spent two hours every week with a nurse and the school shrink, and lived under threat of expulsion should he put another toe out of line. In the Castle he was constantly observed by Colin and Filippa as he suffered through withdrawal. They suffered with him—watching, worrying, not sleeping. I slept fitfully, at strange hours, and never for very long. When I spent the night downstairs with Meredith she lay cool and quiet beside me, but always kept one hand on my arm or my back or my chest while she read (sometimes for hours without ever turning a page), perhaps just to be certain I was there. If I couldn’t sleep in one room, I crept to the other. James was a fickle companion. Sometimes we lay on our opposite beds in companionable quiet.
Sometimes he tossed and muttered in his sleep. Other nights, when he thought I was already dreaming, he slid out of bed, took his coat and shoes, and disappeared into the dark outside. I never asked where he went, worried he wouldn’t ask me to follow.
I still saw Richard, almost nightly, more often than not in the undercroft. Blood leaked out from underneath the locker door, and when I opened it I found him crushed inside, red dripping from his nose and eyes and mouth. But he was no longer the only player in my oneiric repertory; Meredith and James had both joined the company, cast sometimes as my lovers, sometimes my enemies, sometimes in scenes so chaotic that I couldn’t tell which. Worst of all, sometimes they clashed with each other and seemed not to see me at all. In my subconscious dramas they, like violence and intimacy, became somehow interchangeable. More than once I woke with a guilty start, unable to remember which bedroom I was in, who else’s breath stirred softly in the silence.
I opened my eyes, and my own vertiginous reflection stared up at me. My cheeks were gaunt, my skin blotchy with fading bruises. I lifted my head, looked from one friend to another. Alexander had made his way to the end of the Bridge and sat staring out at the empty house. Meredith stood at the very edge of the stage, looking down into the orchestra pit, like a jumper contemplating suicide. Wren, a few paces behind her, put one foot carefully in front of the other, arms outstretched, tightrope walking. Filippa had retreated to the left wing; her face was turned up toward Camilo, who had leaned close to whisper something without interrupting the lull.
I found James standing against the backdrop, one arm outstretched, palm to palm with his own reflection, his eyes slate blue in the cold cosmic light.
I shifted and my shoes squeaked on the mirror. James turned and caught my eye. But I stayed where I was, afraid to move toward him, afraid I might lose my footing on solid ground, detach from what had anchored me before and drift out into the void of space—a vagabond, wandering moon.