Passion Play

by Sean Stewart

  It is harder to watch the strong cry than the weak. Embarrassed, I turned and pretended to examine the computer system. It was a beauty, top of the line. I stared sightlessly at the keys, an array of truncated pyramids inscribed with secret symbols, feeling the pressure behind my eyes. Tara: a square-based pyramid, strong and steady, but with the possibility for surprising changes implicit in the broad triangular slopes. Mask had charmed her, too. Heart-mysteries there.

  “Jon liked to have the best,” she said. I didn’t turn to look; I could still feel her pain, and I didn’t want to shame her. “The communications gear is first rate—black market. I guess you’ll want to take that. He wrote a lot of film criticism for The Network and Com-pact, so he wanted the transfers clean and easy. It’s got some good graphics too; I designed the Faust sets on it. That’s why I think he was murdered.”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “I didn’t say anything before—we were all upset. But the more I think about it, the more convinced I am that Jon would never have made a fatal mistake with his electronics. He knew this stuff. Obviously you think the same, or you wouldn’t be here.”

  I met her level look with one of my own. “Tara, let’s cut the bullshit.”

  That rocked her.

  I pressed the attack. “There were traces of your skin on Mask’s costume; you lied about not seeing him in the fifteen minutes before his call.” Despite her outer calm I could feel her control cracking at last. A hunted look came into her eyes, and I felt a surge of despair. “What’s more, you were seen running down the corridor after Jon’s capacitor blew.” I took a calculated risk. “You saw him all right. You left him dead in the dressing room, didn’t you Tara? You lied when we first—”

  “No. Yes.” The tears were standing in her eyes. She put her head in her hands for a moment, then looked up, pale and fierce. “Does it ever occur to you that you may do more harm than good digging up your bones? Do you ever stop and think about that?”

  Her shoulders slumped and she turned on the computer’s screen. It was cluttered with eulogies from his press-clipping program. Automatically she saved them and switched to a higher-level directory. In thirty seconds we were at the end of Mask’s Memoirs, where the legend, “Encore” stood at the top of the screen. “Read it,” she said bitterly. “Be proud.”

  As I read the words before me, I seemed to hear them in the voice of Mephistophilis: brilliant, damned and sparkling with a wit as bitter as gall.

  So at last we come to the end—I have run out of reasons to write. At some time in my life (at that first matinee or in the Minister’s barn, or at some other, crucial point) I crossed over a bridge that—like my house—looks only one way. That is the bridge of faith.

  The story of Genesis is an old one, but still instructive. Eating of the fruit of knowledge, man lost his immortality. But there are other losses implicit within that first loss. With the acquisition of more knowledge, one becomes more familiar with competing systems, and less able to believe in the supremacy of any one. In time, this must erode even our faith in God and in the Heaven that is our promised reward…In eating repeatedly from that tree, we lose at last even the hope of immortality which fortified our progenitors.

  I have tried to be honest throughout this book in explaining the reasons I championed Redemptionism (some of them based on the value of order in society, many of them admittedly based on expedience). I have also tried to be honest in explaining my alienation from its tenets. I believe I am being honest now when I call that loss a “felix culpa,” a fortunate fall.

  But then again, I do not know. I cannot be more certain of my own honesty than I am of anything else. This does not lead me to the useless philosophies of solipsism, but rather to a final acceptance of what I have proposed all along. The message, the image that we portray of ourselves (and to ourselves) is all there is. No soul, nor no “character” either; in the image is the reality.

  I do not believe this is a cause for despair. By the inevitable workings of paradox (which drive the universe more surely than gravity) it is precisely the desire to know which brings us to our final concession of epistemological defeat. The man who seeks truth finds only endless illusion. Ironically, it is only the man who has enough faith not to worry about Truth who can believe in its existence.

  What is the last implication, then? If there is one, maybe it is this: that God, as postulated by theologians, is omniscient. And, therefore, must have known, before that first Fiat Lux! that Adam would eat of the tree. And so known that Man, created in his image, would come to doubt.

  I believe that this was His purpose in creation (if he had one, or even exists, which seems unlikely). God, whose prescience is perfect, and who knows all things, must, by the last crucible of paradox, possess the most perfect and universal doubt. He it is who creates the world with a thought, and dissolves it with a question. When He created us, those two principles of creation and destruction (call them love and reason if you will) formed the basis of our natures.

  It is the strength of their conflict which keeps us alive, as it keeps the universe in motion. We exist in the flux of their combination. Woe to the man who loses either entirely, for he is no longer a man…He is a word without content, an ass braying in the wilderness.

  I leave a last question for your (imagined) imaginations: what did God, who was all and knew all, ultimate creator and destroyer, really do on that fateful, unrecorded seventh day?

  As I came to the end Tara said “Oh Jon,” like a mother whose child had done something foolish.

  Tears were knotted in my throat; I didn’t know if they were Tara’s or my own. Oh, he was human after all, and I’d been wrong to doubt it. Even Jonathan Mask could not be the prophet, the con-man, the saint and the destroyer he had claimed to be.

  And the Devil said unto him, All this power will I give thee, and the glory of them; for that is delivered unto me, and to whomsoever I will I give it. If thou therefore wilt worship me, all shall be thine. And Jon Mask said, Get beside me, Satan. The wages of sin is death; the price of Mask’s success had been high indeed. And in the end, he tempted the Lord God.

  And are forever damned with Lucifer.

  For days now I had thrown all my will into discovering Jonathan Mask. But a shaper learns by walking the labyrinth, folding herself into the pattern she feels around her; with constant conjuration a Jonathan Mask had begun to take shape inside me, a whisper of damnation. In panic I drew back, willing it away, trying to exorcise the devil I had summoned up within myself.

  There were dark patterns building around me. Some things are better left unseen. How long before I dashed my foot against a stone?

  After this investigation—a long holiday. Any kind of a change—maybe a different line of work. Just as soon as this last case closed. Wonder if Mrs. Ward needs a disciple? I joked to myself. But I couldn’t abandon the chase this close; I could smell the blood.

  “I heard the noise,” Tara began slowly, “but I was on my way to store a camera in the equipment room. I thought I’d check on him on my way back. It isn’t far; maybe a minute and a half, two at the most.

  “When I got there I could see at once that he had killed himself. I had been afraid of it for weeks—months really, but he’d been worse since the incident with Celia. I tried to help, but he just—withdrew. He was putting in longer and longer hours with David. He was obsessed with this play.” Her throat seized for a moment, but she willed the sob away.

  She looked me straight in the eye. “You see why I didn’t want him to be found like that? I didn’t want them to crucify him, when they didn’t know the whole story, when he couldn’t defend himself.” Her face softened. Sitting before his computer she tapped the spacebar absently. Space space space. “Stupid as it sounds, I was afraid for all the other Celias, you know? Sui—…Suicide is the unforgivable sin, right? The sin against the Holy Ghost. The sin of despair.” She blushed angrily, as if daring me to contradict her. “I don’t care much about Redemption, b
ut I didn’t want that to be his legacy. A handful of suicides across the country, and self-serving ministers and hypocrites sermonizing against him.”

  My God. Tara didn’t know.

  She became aware of her hands, took them carefully off the keyboard. “I made sure he was dead, and took the taser from his hand. I knew I didn’t have much time before his call, so I ran out and ditched it in the prop box in the costume room.”

  Damn! The murder weapon had been right there beside me when Rolly was briefing me on the case. It would have been funny if it weren’t so maddening. “Is it still there?”

  I died a little as she shook her head. “Nope. The next day there weren’t any cops around, so I took it out on my lunch break and dropped it in the river.”

  Before I sent someone back that night…Shit.

  Tara stood up and turned to face me. “But what does it matter? Please.” She put a hand on my shoulder. It was as close to begging as this woman would come. “Let it go. It would be so much better that way.”

  Her fingers stiffened as I shook my head. “I’m sorry,” I said. “There’s something you don’t know. We impounded Mr. Mask’s taser very efficiently, thank you.” Her eyes widened as the implication became clear to her. “Either he shot himself with someone else’s taser, or else—”

  “My God,” she whispered. “My God. Someone set Jon up. To make it seem as if…Sweet Christ.”

  It was a good show. I thought it was sincere, but I couldn’t be sure. “Ms. Allen, can you think of anything you might be able to tell me about your co-workers that might not be common knowledge? Anything unusual in the last six or seven months?”

  She started to shake her head, then stopped.

  “What?”

  “It’s—I’d rather not say. Just personal stuff.” She was frowning, uncertain. She wouldn’t want to betray a trust.

  But her conscience wasn’t my business; her information was. “Listen Tara, I get told a lot of things. It’s my business to be quiet about them except when they’re needed for evidence. But often I find a killer—like the person who murdered Jon,” I said, manipulating ruthlessly, “—from clues that aren’t about the murderer, and never come up in court. They just help set the stage.”

  She nodded slowly. “It isn’t really important to the case, but you said you wanted to know unusual things. Well.” She took a breath and plunged in. “There were rumours that David was suicidal; I guess you’ve heard that by now. That’s partly why when I saw Jon, I assumed…Well, a month ago I was working late. I went into David’s office to lock up, and found a gun on his desk. When I picked it up to take it back to the prop room, I knew it was too heavy to be fake. It was a .32. I checked the cylinder; there was one bullet.” She answered my question before I could ask it. “Not one bullet and five cartridges; he hadn’t fired off five shots. He only loaded one bullet.”

  “Russian roulette.”

  “I thought maybe so, given the talk. I didn’t mention it; he wasn’t really serious.” Of course she wouldn’t think so because he was still alive. If Ms. Allen were going to commit suicide, there would be no need for second efforts.

  “Thanks,” I said. “I know how unpleasant it is to tell that to a stranger.” And she wasn’t happy about having done it, either. Quickly I moved on to my final set of questions. “Tara, did you know about the provisions in Mr. Mask’s will?”

  She had regained most of her composure. We went down to the kitchen; neither of us wanted to stay up in the study, and Tara wanted a Coke. “We talked it over,” she said over her shoulder.

  “How did you feel about it?”

  “I get steady work, Celia lives from job to job. It made as much sense to me as anything Jon ever did.”

  “So he just wanted to be fair?”

  She smiled; the disbelief in my voice hadn’t been well disguised. She paused, then said, “You know how you can become attached to a person just because you’ve known them forever? I think Jon felt that way about Celia’s image of him. It had never been true, but he had spent a lot of time with it. I think he wanted to ensure that it got on all right after he died…That’s why I didn’t want that Jonathan Mask thrown away, when I had the chance to protect it. Stupid though it was. I should have known better than to bullshit. I won’t make the same mistake again.” She took a swig of the Coke; its thick glass bottom left little circles of moisture on the cherry-wood kitchen table. “And I think it was a penance. His way of offering something to innocence. Jon loved integrity, and faith. Because he didn’t have any himself.”

  Tara finished the bottle and put it on the counter. She was watching me with honest, aching eyes. “I’m not…I’m not telling you anything that I didn’t say to him,” she said. “If someone killed him I hope you get the bastard, and I hope you hang him, Fletcher. And I hope I help.”

  And Mask said, I loved them, and shocked me. I loved them. How does that fit with your smug analysis, Diane? Am I Mephistophilis or Faustus, tempter or damned?

  I remembered the video of the will and realized for the first time Mask hadn’t been acting. His uneasy gestures, so out of keeping with his words, had the graceless, rough-edged quality of a man struggling with an unpleasant truth: a glimpse of pain behind ice-cold eyes, a cough of nervous laughter.

  Was I not once most dearly loved of God?

  From “Euclid’s Understudy” in The World’s a Stage: Commentaries on the Logic and Method of Acting. Jonathan Mask. By permission of the publisher.

  …What the actor must understand is not only the author and the director but the audience as well: all participate in the co-constitution of the character. The failure of method acting is in its reluctance to recognize this important principle; its emphasis is on understanding the character rather than on communicating that understanding.

  There are several important corollaries of the Axiom of Co-Creation. The two most important of these are:

  1) Any characterization that strongly contradicts the directorial instincts of the audience is doomed to fail, and deservedly so. This is the “Give ’Em What They Want” principle.

  2) Any interpretation that fails to communicate itself to the audience is also a failure. This is the fallacy of “Stage Solipsism.”

  The directive implied by these theorems is, of course, radical, since it contradicts our beliefs about everyday character and morality. Nonetheless, any intelligent thespian must recognize the ineluctable conclusion. Understanding the character is in fact important only to the extent that it aids in communicating that character. Style is substance; the medium is the message.

  In other words, feeling it doesn’t matter; looking like you do is what counts.

  We are not, whatever I may have said for public consumption, engaged in a higher cause. It is not Christ we serve when we act, my friends: it is Rome. We are bread and circuses, and our job is to entertain the populace. We are the fiddlers in a burning Rome, and our ashes will dance over the pyre of our times.

  Here endeth the lesson.

  And the evening and the morning

  were the fifth day.

  Nine

  I told myself many times that afternoon how happy I would be when the case was over. I hated lingering around Mask’s corpse, catching what festered there. Corpses: too many, many dead.

  Queen E drifted into the front room and stared at me, eyes filled with blank feline reproach. She didn’t understand why I was reading when I should be on the hunt. Maybe she could still smell the templar on my fingers and hair. She had it easy, going where her nose told her, without worrying about the heart-paths of her victims.

  My hunting was different. I stepped in the killer’s footprints, trying to find my way to the centre of the labyrinth around Jonathan Mask.

  I had it down to three possible suspects—Celia, David, and Tara.

  Celia would hold the taser away from her body: too many years of Red propaganda not to hate touching such technology, even though she went to break the great Commandment. He had bligh
ted her faith, and he would pay for that.

  Seeing her armed he would instantly grasp the situation and remove his mask, know how much harder it would be for her to shoot him if she had to see his face.

  But then he’d start talking…Yes, that would be it. He could not grasp how much she hated that, hated his words, his lies. He would smile; and she would shoot.

  Afterwards she would do what she always did to calm down: go to the ladies’ room, cry a little. Check her make-up. Prepare to act.

  But could I believe it? Celia was not like Rutger White; could she break God’s most terrible commandment? Surely such a hatred would have left a deeper scar in her; there is a mark of Cain that can be touched on all people who feel that they are damned.

  Then there was the added difficulty of getting a taser; so much easier for someone who already had one. Civilian tasers are stun only; would Celia, the good Redemptionist who shunned all technology, even realize that the taser charge would kill Jon Mask by overloading his capacitor?

  David would know, of course. He carried a taser himself sometimes, and while not a technical genius, I was sure he would realize how it could be done.

  He would be quite, quite calm. He would enter the room firmly but not noisily—as a director had the right to do. Irritated by the interruption, Mask would say nothing and look away.

  For Delaney, the problem would be sighting accurately and pulling the trigger. His world would have to be erased in a whiteout like the heart of a star. Otherwise how could he bear Mask’s agony and the shock of his death? No, the dressing room would fade before David’s eyes into a haze of white static.

  Delaney had no strong alibi, but no motive either. I couldn’t believe a few rating points would drive a man like that to murder. And Delaney was an empath: even with all the shielding he could erect, how could he have borne the torture of Mask’s last moment?