The Emerald Light in the Air

by Donald Antrim

  For an instant, Billy looked as if he might laugh. But he didn’t laugh. He gazed at me with these big, round eyes that seemed to grow larger and more rounded; and his whole countenance changed, which is to say that, in some way that had more to do with a feeling than an actual look, his expression softened, and he lowered his head.

  “Places for act two, scene one!” I called out to Danielle and the cast. “We’re going to run the play from Puck’s line to the faerie, ‘Thou speak’st aright; I am that merry wanderer of the night.’ Puck, you’re downstage left, crawling out of your hole.”

  “Thou speak’st aright. I am that merry. Wanderer of the night,” intoned my sightless Puck.

  “Wait a minute, Martin. Do the line again, this time as if you hate life. Say this line as if you’re alone in the world and you despise yourself.”

  “Thou speak’st aright; I am that”—here he paused for an especially long time, as if thinking about a hard problem—“merry wanderer of the night.”

  “Listen to me. Puck is not some frolicking clown. He’s Hobgoblin! Beelzebub! Lucifer! Satan, the enemy of love! Puck is a wretched, willfully destructive creature. Let’s do a quick exercise. Repeat after me: I am a wretched, willfully destructive creature.”

  “I am a wretched, willfully destructive. Creature.”

  “Everything I do creates pain.”

  “Everything I. Do creates pain.”

  “No one loves me.”

  “No. One loves me.”

  “I’m fucked up.”

  “I’m fucked…”

  He was sniffling. His voice cracked. Were there tears? I could not see the young actor’s eyes because they were hidden behind dark lenses. I leaned close to my Puck, in order to growl in his ear, “I wear the number of the beast.”

  “Huh?” he whimpered.

  I smacked the blind kid on the shoulder. “Let’s run this play, Martin, I mean Puck. When we get to the section where you chase the young lovers through the forest, go ahead and swat our legs with your cane.”

  And to the cast, the Royals and rude Mechanicals, the devils and imps and lost children, I proclaimed, “This show needs to move, people. It’s a comedy!”

  Or is it? Students of A Midsummer Night’s Dream will undoubtedly be familiar with the trend, in recent years, to emphasize horror in the drama: faeries played as ghouls, Oberon as a molester; Bottom’s transformation depicted as a grotesque, literally asinine mutilation. There is a reactionary aspect to this movement away from traditional fun and games; construing the Dream as a hellish sexual nightmare rather than as an innocuous garden party is a way of making the play interestingly “modern” in the post–world war, post-Holocaust, thermonuclear and psychoanalytic era.

  “Make it ugly,” I instructed my cast in the final week before the show. It was a Sunday afternoon, our first—and only, thanks to storms blowing in—outdoor run-through. The day was overcast and unseasonably chilly, with winds from the north smelling like rain. Crows perched on tree branches and the faeries’ wooden platforms, three plywood decks connected by swaying footbridges, everything balanced precariously in the high, heavy oak limbs that reached out to shade Puck’s deep hole, dug “center stage” at the southernmost edge of the Barry College green, our theater.

  “Up in the trees, faeries, let’s go,” I called. Girls took turns climbing. A few had trouble getting up. Sarah Goldwasser, the regal Titania, marched over and said, “Reg, will you tell Oberon to stop grabbing my nipples in our fight scene?”

  “I think it’s kind of good for the scene, Sarah.”

  “He does it too hard. My nipples don’t like it that hard,” she said, and huffed off toward her bower.

  “Here comes the rain,” a boy’s voice beside me exclaimed.

  “I’d appreciate it if you would concentrate on your acting and not worry about the weather, Billy.”

  “How are we supposed to do any acting when the entire stage is nothing but a hole in the ground?”

  The boy had a point. And I had an answer. “The circular patterns sketched by our movements around the pit will illustrate mankind’s proximity to the abyss, and this in turn will be a dramaturgical reminder of the themes of revolution and renewal in English morris dancing, which, you’ll recall from the first week of rehearsal, Billy, is an acknowledged folk source for Shakespeare’s May Day comedies.”

  I wish I could say I was pleased with this impromptu oration. Purely technical observations concerning the larger implications of stagecraft are best left in the classroom, having, out here in the field, as it were, more of a confusing than a clarifying effect. Billy looked despairing. Clearly I had been right, during that sex-scene rehearsal the week before, in supposing him to be the child of an unhappy home. I put my hand on his shoulder and said, in as fatherly a voice as I could concoct on short notice, “I know it’s a mighty big hole, Billy. We’ll all have to be careful not to fall in and break our legs. Sometimes in the theater, as in life, we do our best work when mainly concerned with not making fools of ourselves.”

  “That’s typical for a man to say, isn’t it?” declared a woman’s voice. I became immediately tense. The speaker was Carol, who had snuck up from behind and was standing with her arms crossed before her chest, the posture expressing her confrontational mode, surely an indication that she had been drinking.

  “Hello, Carol.”

  “Don’t bother being polite, Reg,” Carol said. “It doesn’t look good on you.” She was weaving slightly, actually swaying in place, much in the manner of an actor impersonating a drunk, I thought. Here was an example of a dramatic cliché’s analogue in reality.

  “We’re about to begin rehearsal, Carol. I suppose you’ve come to take a few last-minute costume measurements?”

  “Fuck you.”

  “Let’s not have one of our scenes, Carol, not out here in front of the boy, please?”

  “Look who’s talking. If it isn’t the protector of youth himself.” She addressed Billy, “I’ll bet you’re fond of your teacher, aren’t you?”

  “I guess.”

  “You guess?” She seemed very unsteady on her feet. Her voice sounded hysterical and mean. “It’s going to rain! Have you ever fucked in the rain? Your teacher likes to fuck in the rain!”

  “Jesus, Carol.”

  “He likes to fuck in the rain and he likes it on top of his desk and in cars and in other people’s houses!”

  By now people had accumulated, a circle of actors and actresses, a few passersby, no faculty or fellow academic deans, I hoped, everyone gathered to relish the spectacle of Carol crying, “I was going to have a baby! This man wouldn’t let me have our baby!”

  Billy, I noticed, wore a surprisingly composed (though somewhat glassed-over) expression, as if he were accustomed to violent exhibitionism in adults. He looked as though nothing could be more natural to him than a drunken woman’s fury.

  “I’m sorry, son,” I said to the boy when Carol eventually ceased yelling. I had the uneasy feeling that I was in some way giving an expert rendering of Billy’s real father, a man who must’ve been lacking—if our episode on the college lawn could be used as an indicator—backbone.

  “It’s cool,” sighed Billy.

  Then the rain came. The first drops were followed by wind and a great, rolling thunderclap. Tree branches swayed, and faeries scampered down from their platforms; then forked lightning struck nearby and the sky was instantly, ghostly white. Cast and crew began racing off in different directions. It was one of those thoroughly drenching gales that mark the beginning of summer—there was no point trying to stay dry. I reached out and took Carol by the arm, to comfort her and steady her. Rainwater soaked her hair and matted it in clumps. “Let’s go indoors and get you wrapped in a warm towel,” I shouted over the thunder; and she tugged her arm away and staggered to the edge of Puck’s hole. She gave me one of her powerful, inimitable, disgusted looks, then leaned over, braced herself with her hands on her knees, and vomited into the pit. It happen
ed quickly and was over before Billy or I could respond in a helpful way. A couple of heaves and Carol spat out the last. She looked terrible, like a witch in the Scottish play, I thought, or one of those modern descendants of crones on heaths, the living dead who climb from graves in horror movies. She was intensely drunk, of course. To Billy—she was looking mostly at the boy, though presumably Carol was thinking of me, or maybe neither Billy nor me—she said, “Look at you. You make me sick. You’re like your father. He does whatever he wants with people. He’s a shit. There’s no love in this family.”

  Then she reeled away across the green. Billy and I watched Carol lurch around a corner and disappear behind Lunbeck Hall; then we turned, flustered and embarrassed, two men sharing a burden of humiliation, and walked together in the opposite direction. Rain was in our faces and our hands were buried in our pockets. Wind and water forced our eyes downward. Our shoes squished. Puddles were everywhere.

  It was Billy who spoke first. “I doubt if I could run like that if I’d just barfed.”

  This comment made me like young Valentine immensely. I told him, “You should have played Puck.”

  This was said not so much to avoid the subject of Carol, her outburst and her vomiting, as to assuage feelings of guilt and shame by making an offering of some kind, however small and meaningless. Billy replied, in the right spirit, “Demetrius rocks.”

  “I’m glad you feel that way, Billy. Do you have any more of that good, strong dope?” I asked, dripping.

  “No, sir. Not on me.”

  “That’s too bad.” For reasons I could not name, I went on: “When I was younger, I figured I’d grow up and get married and have children. But now years have gone by, and I’m not young.”

  “That’s cool,” said Billy. And he said, “Anyway, you shouldn’t marry someone with a drinking problem.”

  “You’re right about that.”

  “Mr. Barry?”

  “Reg.”

  “Reg, do you think she knows about my father?”

  “Knows what? She wasn’t talking about your father. She thought I was your father, and you were our son that we never had, and you were growing up to be like me.”

  “That’s crazy.”

  “Yes,” I agreed. But it was true that I’d had the same notion as Carol. “See you tomorrow, Billy.”

  “Later, Reg.”

  Rehearsal, however, was not to be, not the next day, or the day after that, or the afternoon following. The storm worsened over the course of the first night, causing trees to fall on power lines, disabling phones and cutting off electricity to homes and college buildings. Classes were canceled. By morning of the second day, Tuesday, the thunder and lightning had stopped, though the sky remained gray, pouring heavy rain. The country around here is veined with creeks; these grew into deep, fast-moving rivers. The college, safe on high ground, operated minimally on generators. A party spirit prevailed. New couples would subsequently date their union to the week of the flash flood. The disaster occurred on Thursday, when natural dams in the nearby hills gave way, releasing torrents of water derived primarily from melted winter snow. The water crashed down into the valleys, washing away roads, trees, cars, and about twenty people. The National Guard and the International Red Cross landed helicopters on the Wm. T. Barry Gymnasium parking lot. Student volunteers collected cast-off clothing, canned food, blankets, etc. A short time later, it was learned that Harrison P. Mackay, a chemistry professor with forty years at the college, had been a flood casualty. The professor, not well known to me except as a red-faced personage wearing a bow tie, was found lodged in an embankment near the town of Chesterford. An emergency meeting of deans and the president convened; sadness was expressed and a few important memories were recalled. After the meeting, President Farnham took me aside and said, “Reginald, I want you to do that play if the weather clears. Right after our service for Harrison. We’re all going to need cheering up.”

  It was in this way that we came to perform A Midsummer Night’s Dream on a wet field before an audience of mourners wearing black.

  “We’re going to have a tough house,” I said to my young company on the evening of the show.

  Folding chairs were set up on the mushy ground. Organ music, a gloomy Episcopalian dirge, drifted in from the church at the college green’s distant end. Harrison’s memorial, under way. Skies remained partly cloudy, and a light breeze blew from the south. Together we stood, cast and crew, in a circle around Puck’s hole. We weren’t holding hands, though we should have been—there was a noticeable feeling, in the group, of apprehension, a communal dread and excitation only partly attributable to normal stage fright. The hole, in the wake of the week’s rains, was a muddy pond. A duck, possibly blown far from home in the high winds a few days earlier, paddled on the surface. Fallen leaves looked like twisted miniature lily pads. These elements—water, duck, vegetation—combined to create a disturbingly powerful scene, a vastly reduced water vista that stood in relation to actual lakes as an artist’s easel studies do to fully realized, complex paintings. It was, in other words, an excellent stage-set pond, not at all unlike a classical folly from an English garden, scaled down, deceptively simple, unreal enough to seem mysterious, primordial, sad.

  The funeral music was not helping my mood. Jim Ferguson, our sexually aggressive Oberon and a zoology major, pointed out, “That’s a female mallard. She’s injured. Look at her—she’s all crooked.”

  It was true. The duck listed in the water. Jim explained, “Ducks are vicious when they’re hurt. They host human influenza and other dangerous viruses.”

  “Duck?” asked Martin Epps, waving his cane, straying precariously near the water’s edge.

  I told him, “Don’t worry about the duck, okay?” To the cast in general, I said, “I’ll need a couple of volunteers to lower Martin into the water when the time comes.”

  “Water?” said Martin, splashing with his cane, poking to find the hole’s bottom.

  The duck paddled weakly. All around me, kids in little groups stared down at it and smoked in that self-consciously erotic way—the dramatic puffs and the stagy, side-of-the-mouth exhalations blown upward into the air like steam escaping so many hot engines—that seems to be an advertisement for the carefree life. I couldn’t take it. “Do you kids think you’re going to live forever?” I shouted at these innocents. “Do you think life is some kind of holiday? You think that one day you’ll stop being depressed! You won’t ever stop being depressed! No matter how much sex you have!”

  As if on cue, bells rang out from the chapel spire. Big wooden doors were flung open, and the first few mourners emerged from the church.

  “Places!” cried Danielle.

  Faeries tossed away cigarette butts and Royals crouched behind bushes while Mechanicals popped open their first-act beers. Billy Valentine passed Mary Victoria Frost an enormous joint. Martin Epps alone remained before his watery lair. “Billy, Mary, give me a hand with Martin,” I said. “One, two, three.” Up went the blind boy. He was light for a fat kid. He entered the water and said, “Ahhh.”

  “Stay put and don’t piss off the duck,” I directed him.

  Billy and Mary and I crawled beneath the stage-left shrubs. Billy was about to stash the joint when I stopped him. “Hey, don’t put that away. I need a hit.” Fireflies blinked on, off, on. The audience settled into seats. Sounds of weeping rose from the house. I peeked up and could see, above me, faeries’ legs dangling from platforms in trees, pair after pair of young legs.

  “Good dope,” I whispered to Billy.

  Then Danielle gave the signal, and Greg Lippincott walked onstage and exclaimed, “Now, fair Hippolyta, our nuptial hour draws on apace; four happy days bring in another moon.” Who can listen to that kind of stuff? A moment later came the cue for the young lovers to stumble out and stand before their elders. There was not much ground to stand on, only slippery grass beside the hole, where Martin was sunk in black water to his chin. The crooked duck regarded Martin with cr
azed eyes. “Full of vexation come I, with complaint against my child, my daughter Hermia,” growled Egeus, as faculty, alumni, and a few undergraduates and parents wept tears for Harrison Mackay. Understandably, I felt the need to get a laugh. “The course of true love never did run smooth,” I proclaimed morosely, and at that instant the duck began flapping its maimed wings, and Martin waved his cane wildly, and a gust of wind blew in like a sneeze from God, shaking the trees and blowing hats off heads in the audience. I looked for Carol among the mourners. Where was she? Did she truly love me enough to have a child with me?

  “It’s going pretty well, don’t you think?” I asked Billy when we came offstage at the middle of act one. We listened respectfully as Helena rattled off her famous speech about being sexually unattractive; and then Bottom and his men took over, rushing out and tackling one another and flubbing their lines—but it didn’t matter what they did, because these characters are probably the most indestructible comic team in all of English literature, and, sure enough, when Bottom crunched Lion in the windpipe with his weight belt the audience let out its first decent belly laugh of the night. Billy and I hid behind the backstage trees and waited to run out, lie down to sleep on the cold ground, get drugged by Puck, wake up with our hard-ons, and begin chasing each other and/or Mary Victoria Frost and/or Sheila Tannenbaum through the haunted woods. Billy whispered, “Can I talk to you, Reg?”

  “Call me Lysander during the show.”

  “I didn’t want you to think, after the other day, you know, that I don’t love my father.”

  He seemed maudlin, not at all like a happy comedian eager to chew the scenery. “I didn’t think that. I’m sure you love your father very much,” I assured him.