Passion Play

by Sean Stewart

  CUT TO:

  ANCHOR: Today we mourn the passing of Jonathan Mask, the man who cleansed the temple of Hollywood and made the camera a lens to study God. We know the Lord has surely given him the reward he deserved as the great communicator of the Redemption Era.

  CUT TO: FILE TAPE

  The interviewer leans forward, letting his blandly handsome face settle into a frown of interest. “Some have called you the greatest communicator of our time. Do you feel a special kinship with the other giants in theatrical history—Severn, Olivier, Kean, Garrick?”

  Seated across from him in a leather chair Jonathan Mask smiles and crosses his legs. Mastery oozes from him: his voice, when he speaks, is rich and contemplative. “Well, to tell the truth, I don’t think so. The men you name were all involved in a theatre that defined itself as godless. They were actors: their work was consecrated to illusion, to pretending, to falsity. I do not ‘act’; I communicate. It has been my privilege to work in a theatre that—for the first time since the fourteenth century—is devoted (and I use the word intentionally) to a higher cause.”

  The interviewer nods intelligently for the benefit of the camera. “Your status as the great communicator of the Redemption Era did not at first earn you much kindness from your fellow thespians, or critics, for that matter.”

  Mask laughs, expansively, as God would laugh: from that perspective. That height. “It was to be expected; I was part of a revolution against an old and grand—and decadent—tradition. But as long as I take my cues from the Great Director, I won’t have to worry about my final curtain call…”

  CUT AWAY FROM CLIP AND BACK TO ANCHOR, A HANDSOME, SINCERE YOUNG MAN, HIMSELF ONE OF THE MANY RECRUITS OF MASK’S COMMUNICATION CRUSADE.

  ANCHOR: That curtain call has finally come for Jonathan Mask. The man whose work in cinema and television made him a saint to millions, perished today in what appears to have been a tragic accident.

  CUT TO LIVE REMOTE: THE REPORTER STANDS SOLEMNLY IN A CORRIDOR. BEHIND IS A DOOR MARKED “STAR.”

  REPORTER: Here, in the star dressing room of NT soundstage #329, Jonathan Mask lost his life.

  CUT TO: CAPTAIN ROLAND FRENCH. HEAD SHOT.

  CAPT. FRENCH: It appears that Mr. Mask died this morning when a malfunction in his highly technical costume released a large discharge of energy. In effect, he was electrocuted. The police will continue our investigation, and we are confident that a full explanation will be available soon.

  CUT TO: CLIPS FROM MASK PRESS CONFERENCES.

  VOICE OVER: Jonathan Mask was acknowledged by his peers as the greatest communicator of his era. Born Jonathan Jones in Independence, Missouri, he rose to prominence at the zenith of the Redemption movement. His outspoken morality and professional excellence combined to make him one of the most influential entertainers of the last thirty years, and a virtual saint to many of his fans.

  CUT TO: CLIP FROM BLUE STAR: THE FAMOUS SCENE OF MASK AS DALLAS GODWIN PREACHING TO THE GHETTO, SHOT THROUGH THE SNIPER SCOPE OF HIS ASSASSIN.

  VOICE OVER CONT.: Jonathan Mask will survive in the hearts of generations of movie-goers for the roles that he made his own: Iago, Caleb in A Dream of Freedom, Tallahassee in Rebel at the Edge of Hope, and of course Dallas Godwin in Blue Star.

  CUT TO: REPORTER IN FRONT OF DRESSING ROOM.

  REPORTER: Mask was engaged to play Mephistophilis in David Delaney’s production of Faustus—a role that insiders predicted would be his greatest triumph. How tragic that he did not live to glory in it.

  The death of Jonathan Mask, killed by the very technology he so often warned us to avoid, is troubling. Sources in Washington say that the double tragedy of Mask’s death and the suicide of Secretary Dobin has shaken an administration already longing for the simpler times before these shadows fell around the brightest stars of the Redemption.

  CUT TO: ANCHOR

  ANCHOR: Citing the impiety of having machines mimic men, the President has backed a Senate motion that would see a moratorium on research into computer-generated voice synthesizers, and would ban a wide range of voice-activated programs. Speaking before the Bethesda Benevolent Society, the President explained that…

  DISSOLVE

  A phone call from Central interrupted the six o’clock news. Rutger White was being arraigned the next day and his trial date set. They would appreciate it if I could come and sign the necessary forms as the arresting citizen. White was charged with incitement to violence, premeditated murder, and attempted murder. The prosecution was asking for the death sentence.

  Four

  I slept badly.

  Pre-dawn memories, dream-rich and confused. Brief flashes of childhood honeysuckle, drowsy and murmurous with bees, secret even in the sunlight. Spade-shaped leaves, dark green and glossy.

  I can barely remember a time I didn’t know that I was different. A group of children running a tricycle over a wounded sparrow in our back alley taught me something about cruelty. I started watching, the way children watch, and I discovered that most people could learn not to feel another’s pain. A trick I never mastered, that would have saved me from my father’s grief when Mother died. He did the best he could of course; he was a Classicist, he knew something of stoicism. Something, but not enough.

  My father was the first one to understand. This was years before Joseph Tapper’s studies revealed that there were tens of thousands of shapers worldwide. Back then, I felt so alone, terribly alone. How desperately I wanted to tell someone, to let someone in on that tremendous secret. How desperately I wanted to.

  “History teaches the cruelty of men to those different from themselves,” my father warned. “Keep it private! One man’s blessing is another man’s curse.” The one who knew first, and the only one who didn’t let it change him. The only one. “The hope of a new age…If only we all had to feel the pain we caused!” he would say, and then fall silent.

  To feel what other people feel, with the same strength and intensity and personal stake they do. You can’t imagine how badly you need to share a secret like that.

  It was my life, you understand. Other children’s days were made of sandlots and shopping trips, television and fights with their siblings: my life lurched from one emotion to another, waves of sparking scarlet anger, drifts of grief the colour of dead leaves. Like some wide-eyed, fearful cat crawling through the jungle I crept through a tangle of adult emotions.

  And the need to share that was a pressure from inside, a balloon swelling in my chest. Every time I felt close to someone it ruined the moment, scarred it with the desperate question: could I possibly tell this person, now? Someone? Ever?

  God, the fear. Because it’s not as easy as all that, you know. You can’t just tell people. They think you’re lying, acting, making it up from a wish to be important. Or they believe you, and you can feel them slip away, draw back, smile and think: don’t touch me. Or worst of all, the friendly ones, the hangers-on, the ones who wished they had a “secret power.” Who wished they were as special, as different, as wonderful. Who asked you (it made my skin crawl, remembering) to spy for them. A gift of God, they said, that I must use to see God’s commandments kept.—To be a peep-show for them, the bastards: a scum of self-righteousness over a black pool of voyeurism.

  Sickening. All I wanted to hear was that I was all right, acceptable, normal. Not a freak or a monster or a genius. Who can carry that kind of weight? Only a madman can bear the loneliness of walking apart from men. Only Christ could endure temptation in the desert.

  God, my life has been full of so much pain, so much anger and resentment. Maybe even too much joy. To be cut with someone else’s happiness is sweet—but it is still a wound. Sometimes all I want is peace, peace and rest. I want to know, I have to know that it isn’t all upon my shoulders. No-one makes a monster of an athlete or an artist or a talented businessman. Why should I be condemned to the shadows, the half-light? It’s a talent, maybe, like any other talent, nothing special. Only, deeper. Harder to stand, a two-edged gift li
ke a blind man’s hearing. Maybe I’m a cripple, but I’m just another person. Just…human.

  Being a shaper makes you look behind the surfaces of things. It was my father and his discipline of History that first showed me the patterns running below the skin of life. But where he studied the march of nations, I followed the twisted ways of the individual heart. Under the eye of God there can be no such thing as disorder. Even a madman is reacting the best way he knows to what he perceives. The trick is to walk inside his footsteps until you find yourself within his labyrinth: then you see that he turns and twists the only ways he can.

  Drowsing, I imagined the barrio, rearranged its tenements like blocks, repatterned their secret geometries. From above, I constructed the neighbourhood maze, tracing its paths in mind. Should there be an exit? Daedalus, builder of the Labyrinth, who lost first Icarus and then himself. Is the maze shaped by the walls or the paths? Both, of course; each calls out the other. The spaces between the enlacing strands are what make the web, trapping its victims with the illusion of freedom…

  The cat jumped on my side, claws like electrodes, jolting me awake. Sudden adrenalin: superconductive, the immediate sensation piercing my skin, deep and painful, crackling within my private blood. They hammered her to death with bricks and blocks of concrete. Dying for the love of a man. Killed by a love of mankind. Thou shalt not commit adultery: the seventh commandment and the seven deadly sins. White #7.

  O Jesus.

  I slapped the switch beside the bed, flooding the room with white light and humming silence. Queen E plumped warm and heavy on my side. The metal of the lamp gleamed silver-bright. Twisted chrome, eyes fixed on hell. Tiny knobs of black on the end-threads of the carpeting where the synthetic pile had melted. Char-black, the wick of a candle.

  Queen E regarded me with massive contempt. 4:47 was chiselled in luminous blue numbers in the darkness above my dresser. “O God,” I groaned, knowing I would not sleep again. “Okay. You win.” People who live alone talk to their cats entirely too much. “But you’re losing your heating pad for it, you know.” Queen E’s ears stretched back to say, “Of what possible consequence can this be to Our Personage?” As I struggled up from the covers she gave me a last look, now perfectly indifferent, before settling into the warm hollow where my back had been.

  The hunting was on me again, and with it the urge to feel. The pure animal pleasure of being, to be so alive and so much yourself you are consumed by the moment: that is hunting. To be nothing, and purely yourself.

  I slipped on a pair of pants, a cotton quilt shirt, flat-soled silent shoes. My hunting jacket slid on like a holster around a gun; I was a predator once more. As the elevator doors (old-fashioned, automatic) opened into the lobby of my apartment building I slid my left hand into my pocket. I nodded to the sleepy nightwatchman as my thumb lingered on the taser’s power setting, then pulled it firmly to the bottom: light stun.

  Outside the air was crisp and dry, like old autumn leaves awaiting the first snow. Beneath a waxing moon the boulevard was a complex geometry of light and shadow. Odourless electric engines purred through the streets; pairs of automobile eyes fled from one another. Occasional streetlamps, nocturnal flowers with vivid amber blooms, magnified the surrounding darkness.

  I listened to the faint swash of my shoes on the sidewalk; I felt the chill brightening my eyes. Enormous cages towered around me: apartment buildings gargantuan and rectilinear, quilted with smaller squares, some lit, most dark. Straight-edged tangles of condominiums and tall, graceful stands of office buildings clumped together, separated by house-scrub and thickets of cement. My habitat, my forest, and I its hunter.

  Fragments of the day’s interview came back. I saw with a quick sting of fear Mask’s twisted body on the carpet, a car crash lapse of scarlet and chrome. Why? What had Mask been like? I didn’t know, and I was intrigued. There were—spaces, hollow points in the way the others had talked of him which spoke of things unsaid by the eulogizers on the late night news. And what about the reporters’ insinuations about his private life? Bitter, beautiful Celia Wu, the Innocent Betrayed; Tara Allen’s grief. The outline forming was sharp with paradox.

  Uneasy, I felt the case patterning around me, inexorable as a labyrinth, leading me step by step to a dark secret that waited at its heart. My mood darkened. I looked at Orion overhead, and it seemed I was peering up at a murder investigation, a chalk outline made where some enormous angel had been hurled off the earth and dashed against the floor of Heaven.

  A pane of glass no thicker than a TV screen is all that stands between Heaven and Hell, between justice and slaughter: one mistake can smash your universe to splinters.

  “There is nothing in which deduction is so necessary as in religion.”—Sherlock Holmes said that. How true, how horribly true that was! Because if I made one slip, one tiny mistake in knowing what the greater pattern had to be, then down I fell like Lucifer to hell. “He that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone.”—That’s what I had said.

  When a man kills a woman with his hands I call it murder, but when I send him to be hanged it’s Justice, right?

  Right?

  And how else can we call a thing just, but by saying that it is pleasing to the eye of God? What does it mean to be a shaper, except to struggle to understand that Greatest Shape?

  I had been thinking about Rutger White (without naming him, even to myself) for the better part of an hour. He would be hanged because he knew there had to be justice, there had to be a reason.

  And if our actions must have some basis, some guarantee, what must that be? God, of course. Without faith, there is no God. Without God, there is nothing: a cat’s scream at midnight; the wind circling in a deserted street, dragging tatters of newspaper through the darkness.

  And so the Deacon had slain Angela Johnson.

  He had erred, and he had murdered. He was a danger to society.

  And yet…

  Nobody feels pain more keenly than an empath. I became a hunter to minimize that pain, to take the murderers and the madmen away and so reduce the suffering. Yet because of me, in a few days time, Rutger White would drop through a small square in the floor of an execution room and hang from the neck until dead. Kill them all: God will find his own.

  Vengeance is mine, saith the Lord.

  I had been through this argument with myself before, each time a make came up for a death sentence. And each time, I had to believe that my judgement was better than the murderer’s. I was right, they were wrong. I still believed that. I rehearsed the list in my mind. Hardy, Scott, Umara, Chaly, Vin, Wilson, Guerrera.

  I do not cry: but I have cried for them. I do not pray: but I have prayed.

  Standing on the tower, one most dearly loved and one most hated in the sight of God; and Satan’s eyes have the hard cold glitter of a serpent. He offers the world as an item of business, but can’t close the deal. Then a different tack; If thou be the Son of God, cast thyself down from hence: For it is written, He shall give his angels charge over thee, to keep thee: (and here Lucifer’s eyes flash, a frozen flame of anguish and hilarity, and he must look away before he can continue) And in their hands they shall bear thee up, lest at any time thou dash thy foot against a stone. And Jesus answering said unto him, Thou shalt not tempt the Lord thy God.

  A boy ran to the door. He called an actor’s name. The actor didn’t answer. The boy opened the door.

  On the carpet lay a dead man with his eyes fixed on hell.

  I walked without direction, or so I thought. But shock tingled in me, a touch of premonition when I raised my eyes at last: some subtle Fate had directed me to the foot of the NT building, the temple of Jonathan Mask.

  I tried to fit the pieces together in every combination, but at the centre of each was Mask’s face. What had happened before the door opened that last time?

  Jonathan Mask had been murdered. I was sure of that now. I didn’t know how, I didn’t know why, and I didn’t know by whom, but that was not the fa
ce of a man caught unaware by accident. He had known he was about to die. Known it so clearly, with such horror, that hours later his fear had cut me like shards of flying glass.

  I sat a long few minutes in front of my terminal when I got home, and finally gave in to impulse. I typed GO TO FRIEND with self-conscious jabs, then entered my ID and resigned myself. There was no use approaching this with a negative attitude; that would doom the whole process from the start. Just as well I had never upgraded to a vocal model.

  Hello, Diane. Since you signed on, I take it there’s something bothering you. What is it?

  > I feel listless and too easily fatigued. Plus the usual embarrassment of telling my problems to a machine.

  I was programmed by people guided by God, just as you were, Diane. So, you feel listless?

  > Yes. Tired and…oppressed. It’s just that my job is so goddamned unpleasant th—

  It really disturbs me when you take the name of the Lord in vain, Diane.

  > Sorry.

  I can understand how you might feel upset. If you find your job unpleasant, why not consider changing it? There are many opportunities available to someone with your skills, Diane.

  > I don’t know. I’ve thought about it. But it’s hard to start over, and in many ways my job is perfect for me.

  How so?

  > The chance to help people. The feeling that what I do really matters. The idea of working towards justice…

  Anything else?

  > Well, there’s also the excitement. I often feel that the rest of my life is drab and empty by comparison. Without my work I think I would become very depressed.

  It sounds like there are many positive aspects about your work. What is it that bothers you about being a freelance detective?

  > I don’t know. I guess the responsibility. In my heart I long for fairness. A straightforward if difficult form of justice: catching bad guys, righting wrongs. And yet, as time goes by and I am responsible for the deaths of more and more of my fellow human beings, I am losing my faith in that kind of simplistic approach. Moral and ethical questions are complex, many-valued and ambiguous. I’m not so sure that the validation of my license by the State justifies usurping God’s control over justice and the fates of men.