by Mindy Klasky
Ryan reached toward me, cupping my cheek with fingers so cold a tremor rippled down my spine. “It’s all you can do, Becca.”
It wasn’t fair. I couldn’t wish However Long out of existence. I couldn’t erase all the progress that we’d made, all the things we’d learned about the script, all the art that we’d created together. I couldn’t peel back time so that our show had never existed.
And might well never exist in the future.
Oh, sure. If we wiped out the production, I could still “discover” Ryan’s play in the stack on my desk. I could bring it to Hal. I could suggest that we produce it in a future season, that we bring it into a new and healthy full-fledged existence, with proper planning, with appropriate sponsors.
But everything would be different. Hal might push the show toward a different director. Our designers might be busy with other projects. The cast might be committed to other roles.
The cast.
We’d never have Teel to play Anana. I couldn’t imagine another actress in that role. I couldn’t imagine anyone else speaking reason to Fanta, explaining life’s bitter truths.
Bitter truths. Like the one before me: the only way to avoid the Popcorn King’s suit was to wish away However Long.
I stared at Ryan, fresh tears in my eyes. He sighed, looking like he’d aged twenty years in the time it had taken me to catch up to him, to realize that we truly had no other option. I took his fingers in mine, squeezing gently.
“It’s okay,” he said. “You don’t have any other choice.”
As I squared my shoulders, Teel announced with perfect, Academy-trained respect, “I’m sorry for your loss, ma’am.”
The finality of his words made me tremble. All of a sudden, I had a terrible thought. “Will everything else disappear? I mean, after you’re gone, will they take away the condo? My clothes?”
The policeman shook his head, one firm, confident gesture of negation. “No, ma’am!” He might have been reporting on the police parade ground, for all the force that he shot into his reply. “Once wishes are granted, they cannot be withdrawn. Your domicile will remain secure.”
Well, that was one tiny thing to be grateful for, I supposed.
“Thank you,” I stammered, and then I pushed a memory of certainty into my voice. This was it. This was what I had to do. And after I made my fourth wish, Teel would disappear forever. “Thank you,” I said again, “for all of my wishes. I can’t say they turned out the way I expected them to, but I appreciate your giving me every one.”
“One hundred percent of wishers are surprised by the results of their wishes,” he said, and then he added a deferential, “Ma’am.”
“Good luck with your next wisher. I hope…I hope they get through their four quickly. I hope you get to the Garden in time, that Jaze is there for you.”
He tipped his hat at me, the very image of a respectful peace officer. “Thank you, ma’am.”
I glanced at Ryan and tried to think of something else to say, some explanation, some excuse, some way not to undo everything we’d built together. But there wasn’t any choice. There weren’t any words. We’d run out of alternatives.
I held his gaze as I spoke the words. “I wish that our production of However Long had never been.”
The policeman’s eyes blazed in fierce triumph, as if he’d just brought down the leading drug kingpin in Manhattan. He lifted one strong hand toward the bill of his dark blue hat, and I thought that he was saluting me. The flames that looped around his wrist blazed high with light, yellow and gold flaring free from their black boundaries. Teel settled his blunt fingers on his earlobe. “As you wish, ma’am,” he barked, tugging twice with firm authority.
A blaze of electricity rolled in waves off his uniform, sparking power that knocked me back three steps. Ryan was assaulted too; I saw him stagger until the backs of his legs touched my desk. My breath seared my lungs, too hot to breathe in, too hot to exhale. A cry rose in the back of my throat, and the jangle of power zipped down my spine, through my legs, into the carpet and away.
And then the policeman was gone.
No trace remained—not his uniform cap, not his tool belt with its nightstick and gun, not a loop of handcuffs, nothing. I held up my hand, turning my thumb and forefingers in the light. The rainbow tracery had completely disappeared; my flesh had no record whatsoever of the flames that had lurked just out of sight for the better part of two months.
“He’s gone,” I whispered, and the unnecessary words sounded like a shout in my tingling ears.
Ryan nodded, and then he pointed toward my desk. “And so is the summons. It looks like your wish came true.”
CHAPTER 17
THE SUMMONS WASN’T THE ONLY THING MISSING. Stacks of books had disappeared from my guest chair, from the floor, from my desk. I’d had at least seven different volumes on native dress in Burkina Faso—I’d borrowed them from the Fashion Institute of Technology to assist our costume designer.
Er, former costume designer.
Similarly, the books I’d collected on subsistence farming were nowhere to be seen. Photo essays on African housing—gone. Images of sunsets that I’d pulled for our lighting designer—disappeared into genie-created smoke.
So much was missing. So much was gone.
And yet all of my memories were intact. I knew precisely what we had created before the Popcorn King had forced us to retreat. I knew what we’d held in our hands, what we’d come so close to sharing with so many eager audience members.
“Ryan…”
He sighed, like a man stepping off a merry-go-round at the end of a wild ride. “All’s well that ends well, right?”
“I am so sorry,” I said.
“I thought we agreed not to say that anymore.”
He was right. We’d made that truce weeks before, after our initial disastrous rounds of fundraising for However Long.
I waved at the stacks of manuscripts on my desk. “So? Do you think it’s lurking here, waiting for me to ‘discover’ it? I could bring it to Hal tonight. Get the ball rolling all over again.”
He shrugged. “I don’t see it. It must be buried really deep. How many of these things do you have sitting around here, anyway?”
He was trying to be brave. Trying to gauge his competition as we figured out how to promote However Long in the ordinary course of business. I grimaced. “You don’t want to know.”
And then, even though I was feeling miserable, even though my lungs felt like a twenty-pound of sack of flour was trying to compress them, even though I wanted to crawl beneath my comforter and sleep for a month, my stomach growled.
I never had gotten that feta and spinach omelet. I never got any lunch at all. “Should we get something to eat?” I asked Ryan. “Maybe things won’t look so grim if we’re not starving.”
“I’m not hungry,” he said.
“Pretend.” I took his hand, laced my fingers between his. “At least keep me company.”
Wordlessly, he gave in, taking a step toward my office door. Before we could escape into the hallway, though, Jenn came rushing in, barely knocking before she threw the door open. “There you are! Hal’s been looking for both of you! He wants to talk about that final scene one last time. He’s still not satisfied with how we’re representing the blocking.”
I gaped. Jenn was talking to both of us. To me and to Ryan. To Ryan, whom she shouldn’t have known, if we’d canceled our production of However Long. To Ryan, who certainly shouldn’t have had a say in any final scene, in any representation of any blocking whatsoever, if my last wish had scrubbed his play from the Mercer’s schedule. “Y-You know him? You know Ryan?” I stammered.
She tilted her head to one side, looking for all the world like one of her pet cockatiels. “Ha, ha, ha,” she said. “So, I took an extra hour for lunch—I had to go home to feed the birds. Very funny—like I’ve been away from this place long enough to forget anything at all!”
“No,” I said, rushing to fill the strange
silence as Jenn looked to see if she really was in trouble. “That’s fine. I just thought—” I glanced at Ryan, caught the barest shrug as he told me he had no idea what was going on. “Never mind,” I trailed off.
It was Jenn’s turn to give me a funny look. “So? Should I tell Hal you’re on your way?”
“We’ll come with you.” Utterly confused, I followed my assistant down the hallway, trying to take some comfort from the touch of Ryan’s palm, firm against the small of my back. Something had happened in that final wave of electric power. Teel had erased the production—that was the only reasonable explanation for the missing legal papers, the absent books. But whatever my policeman genie had accomplished with my final wish had not been quite what I expected…
The lobby was familiar, sedate in its classic burgundy and navy furnishings. Actors’ head shots were displayed on one wall, all of the men and women who’d become familiar in the past two months. All but one, I quickly noted. Teel was missing, Teel as Anana.
A poster was displayed beside the photographs. The abstract design was eye-catching, shards of black and white and gray that just hinted at a coherent whole. However Long, announced bold type. By Ryan Thompson.
“What—?” I started to ask, but there wasn’t anything to say, wasn’t any way to pose my questions without sounding like an idiot. Or a madwoman.
I could hear Ryan’s harsh breathing beside me. Without making any conscious decision, I raised my hand in front of me, stared at the whorls of my fingerprints.
No tattoos there. No trace of the flames that had summoned Teel so many times.
Jenn opened the door to the theater, utterly oblivious to our confusion. Curious despite myself, I stepped inside, telling my brain not to think, just to move forward, just to accept.
Hal and Kira stood onstage. A dozen chairs sat around them, loosely grouped in a semicircle. No set lurked upstage—no corrugated metal roof, no behemoth wall, no doors and windows marked with rolls and rolls of glow-in-the-dark tape.
Definitely no hint of the orange and yellow cacophony that had shouted from our set less than a week before.
The dirt floor that had plagued everyone’s lungs and laundry for the past three weeks was gone, as well, without even a trace of dust on the audience seats. I glanced at the pipes above the stage. They were bare of lighting instruments. I could see the rolling metal racks that normally held costumes waiting in the wings, empty. The prop tables, which had held cauldrons, a walking stick, a torn sack of cornmeal, were bare.
“We’re doing a reading,” I breathed.
Jenn stared at me oddly. Ryan stepped forward, clearing his throat before he said, “Of course we’re doing a reading. What did you think? Jenn was going to surprise us with a fully staged production, after an hour’s lunch break?” I heard the false cheer in his voice, the note that everyone else was supposed to take as his gently teasing me. The note that I read as a warning, an admonition not to give away our secret, not to disclose the memories that only he and I shared. “That’s exactly why Hal wants to talk about how we should handle the stage directions for the final scene.”
As if my lines were printed on the air in front of me, I realized what I had to say. “I know those directions are important to you, Ryan. But I just don’t think there’s a way to convey them in this setting. They’ll be there for the next company to use, though. When However Long is fully staged.”
Somehow, I managed to sound normal enough to satisfy Jenn. She crossed to the foot of the stage, waiting until Kira gave her a nod, acknowledging that my assistant had done her duty by retrieving Ryan and me. Then Jenn turned back to the two of us. “Bec, if it’s okay with you, I’m going to head back to my desk. I want to take a look at the stalking list before everyone heads over to the Pharm.”
The stalking list. The online tangle of websites and blogs and discussion groups where Jenn had first found Ryan. Where she must be searching out another new playwright, another brilliant discovery for some future Mercer season. “Sure,” I said. “I’ll see you later.” I barely remembered to take the three-ring binder that she thrust into my hands. My copy of However Long. Annotated with my notes, from the weeks we’d spent rehearsing this staged reading.
I bit my tongue to keep from saying anything else until she was out of earshot. Then, I hissed in Ryan’s ear, “Do you see what’s happened?”
“I don’t believe it,” he said. A couple of actors wandered onto the stage, crossing to their chairs as if they’d been working on this show for weeks. Which, all genie interference aside, they had been.
Genie interference.
Sure, Teel had worked my wishes for me. He’d saved us from Ronald’s restraining order, from expensive litigation and potentially crippling damages. But Ryan had made his own wishes; Jaze had been tasked with meeting his demands. My wishing us free from the Popcorn King’s tyranny hadn’t negated Ryan’s own magical demands. At least, not entirely.
I clutched Ryan’s arm. “What did you wish for?” I whispered, afraid of drawing too much attention from the group gathering onstage. “Your fourth wish! How exactly did you phrase it?”
“I don’t know.” His voice matched mine, urgent but suppressed. “I asked for…I think I asked for…” He shook his head. “I can’t be certain now. It’s been too long. But I probably said something about staging However Long. I asked Jaze to have the Mercer stage my play.”
I nodded. “And we are. We’re staging it. A staged reading.”
It was so simple. A staged reading would fill the hole in the Mercer’s production schedule. Sure, it was an unusual move; audiences would be surprised. But I was certain that Hal had found a way to spin the decision, to make it a positive adventure. I’d seen him work a room of hostile board members. By comparison, it would be a breeze to convince eager theater-lovers that they wanted the novelty of watching a show in the very throes of creation.
The reading would bring Ryan’s language into stark focus. At the same time, it would meet the Mercer’s budget requirements—even the strict budget that Dean’s misdeeds had thrown our way. With a staged reading, we didn’t need to hire designers, didn’t need to pay for sets, for costumes, for lighting, for makeup. We’d have no need for a sponsor, for the Popcorn King or anyone else.
But most important, a staged reading would meet Ryan’s needs. His play would see the light of day. New York theater cognoscenti would be bound to take notice of a reading at the Mercer—the very unusualness of the venue would attract attention that might have been missing in smaller theaters. Producers from around the country could be invited to see the play.
I glanced down at my three-ring binder. I recognized my printing on the cover, my neat label with the play’s name, with the dates of our abbreviated run. Catching my breath, half-fearful that the magic would buckle and I’d see only empty pages inside, I opened the cover.
However Long was there, sticky notes sprouting from almost every page. But there were other documents in the notebook, as well. Tucked into the front pocket was a guest list, a compilation of names and addresses. My own printed notes told me that I’d sent invitations to the Minneapolis Repertory Company, to the Lifewise New Plays Festival, to a dozen other theater companies that prided themselves on nurturing new playwrights. I clutched the notebook tighter when I saw the notations beside each name. Every one of our targets had accepted our invitation.
However Long was going to be seen by the movers and shakers at every leading theater company in the United States. I’d be astonished if it didn’t receive a full staging within a year. Maybe two would pick it up, simultaneously. Or more.
I shoved the binder into Ryan’s accepting hands, directing his gaze to the invitation list. I saw the precise instant that he realized what I was showing him, that he recognized our success.
His smile was brilliant, like sunflowers bursting into golden halos.
As he handed the notebook back to me, a postcard slipped free from the pages. I grabbed it before it could fall
to the floor. The picture on the front showed a mother zebra and her foal, nuzzling each other against a backdrop of tall, bleached grass. I flipped the card over and saw that it was from the San Diego Zoo.
More important, it was from my mother. Her bold cursive filled the left half of the card. “Break a leg, darling. Wishing you and Ryan all the best for opening night. Dad and Pop-pop send their love. XOXO, Mom.”
Tears welled up in my eyes. My mother had never sent me a card before, had never acknowledged one of my shows. Or, for that matter, one of my boyfriends. I wondered what I’d done to earn such a booster-wish from Teel. Maybe he’d felt guilty about manipulating Ryan and me, about using us to entertain himself and Jaze. Whatever the reason, I wasn’t going to complain.
“Ryan,” Hal called from the stage. I hastily tucked the postcard back into my binder as my boss said, “Let’s go through this one more time. We need to figure out once and for all what we’re doing with the dream sequence stage directions.”
Ryan grabbed my hand, making sure that I stayed beside him. Hal watched us approach, his brilliant blue eyes seeing everything, knowing nothing. Kira gave us a curious glance as we drew near, and for just a second, I thought that she must know the truth, she must be aware of the changes that Teel had wrought in the production. Whatever concerns she had, though, drifted away before she could say anything, as if she were forgetting some vague dream, even as she woke up. I suspected I was seeing the last demonstration of Teel’s power.
Hal spoke with the diplomacy that had made him one of the most successful artistic directors in town. “Ryan, I know we’ve gone back and forth on this. I understand that the stage directions are important to you. They’re part of the script, part of the play that you created. But I just don’t see how to represent them for this reading. We’ve tried everything. When Kira reads them out loud, they sound flat against the fully interpreted dialogue. When an actor reads them, they sound fanciful. People aren’t used to hearing stage directions at all. I’m afraid we’re only going to confuse the audience, no matter what we do.”