We took it anyway.
COMPANY:
It was said that you could get it through household contact.
SIMON: “I guess that depends on what kind of contact is going on in your household.”
It was said the employees of a London switchboard had quit the phones en masse: they were afraid of catching it from the wiring.
It was said that when a PWA had gotten into a fender-bender in midtown, they’d called in an actual hazmat team.
It was said to have spread to a grandmother in Long Island, a housekeeper at Bellevue.
It was said, by SIMON: “The infectious disease of the people!”
It was said, by JOHNNY: “Just like La Traviata!”
(He starts to sing an aria. Tonight, the actor playing Paulie sounds so freakily like him that Brookie and I both begin to cry.)
CHORUS:
We watched PSAs.
We watched a tumorous burl grow to the size of an eggplant on a human face.
We watched a special where Barbara Walters told a man that he was positive.
We all agreed this made for great TV.
We wore tortoiseshell glasses over eye patches, stage makeup over KS lesions.
We wore pins proclaiming We Would Survive.
We wore Jeane Kirkpatrick masks for Halloween.
(Actor appears in mask, stilettos, and nothing else. Though the script calls for all roles to rotate, they have a very good reason to use the same guy for this one: the audience whistles and claps and hoots for a full minute.)
We went to fund raisers at the Saint; we went to the St. Vincent’s ER. We went to see Amadeus, and held forth about the superiority of the stage version.
(Knowing laughter, here, from the audience.)
We still went walking, sometimes. We walked past turquoise buildings in SoHo; we walked past doormen watching portable TVs. We walked across the Manhattan Bridge, where someone else was walking in the distance: for a long time it was not clear if the figure was moving toward us or away.
* * *
—
It’s always strange to watch this play: I know every word, and still never know what I will see. Up close, the set’s resurrections are uncanny: the boat to Fire Island, the flickering candles on what’s meant to be a distant beach. The abattoir of the St. Luke’s–Roosevelt ER, circa 1984. I don’t know how the design people do this stuff. They manage to conjure many things that I’ve forgotten: the way, for a while, almost every couple looked like some kind of outrageous May–December romance. The pump-top dispensers of lubricant at St. Mark’s. The way the sick faces looked strange in the beginning, until there were so many that the healthy faces started to look strange, too. How I must have looked strange, with my pretty unblemished face, as I moved through certain circles. I knew it, of course, but I’d never seen it: now that I have, I know it differently. I’m lost in this for a while, ghosts and memories on the stage and off, and when I tune back in, the show is nearly over.
Every night begins with a big cast and ends with a small one. This is true even when time within the play is moving backwards, as an acknowledgment that real time is not—a fact also reflected in the high turnover of the cast.
There are four actors on the stage now, doing another section about spectacles.
COMPANY:
We watched intubation and agonal breathing.
We watched freezing feet turn purple; we watched last rites of every kind.
We watched the massacre of the innocents: the hemophiliac children, the family whose house burned down in Florida.
RIVER: “What a shame. The first civilian casualties.”
(“You gave me one of the last lines!” Brookie whispers. “It isn’t you,” I say. “It’s the character. And anyway, this isn’t the ending every night.”)
We watched the McMartin Preschool trial on Rivera.
We watched the baby in the well on CNN.
We watched the dying stare into the darkness and see their parents and their partners, their gods and their dogs.
We watched the dying stare into the darkness—
And stare—
And stare—
And, finally, see nothing at all.
* * *
—
The show ends tonight with a tableau: the silhouette of Reagan, paralyzed at the podium, with the entire resurrected cast sitting cross-legged before him. I’m always squeamish about beginning or ending with Reagan—it seems too dramatically stark for a story about how there are many ways to tell a story. But then, this is why there have been other versions before tonight, and why there will, for at least a while longer, be more. And I do like the elegant recursiveness of the image—the audience watching an audience watching just another audience.
And so tonight, ten years into the plague, this is what we are left with: the freeze-frame of a man who could have acted, but did not.
And Brookie, staggering unbelievably up from his wheelchair, to start a standing ovation.
* * *
—
Afterward, it seems, Matthew Miller is standing in the lobby.
When I see him, I do a double take. It seems I’m not the only one: the lobby is a mass pantomime of ignorance—no one in this room wants to admit to knowing who he is. This is how he’s managed to get away with standing there, in plain sight, while he waits, presumably, for me. This is the kind of tactical thinking that might have been useful in a politician: in a person without a cause, it just seems sneaky.
“You came,” I observe, when I finally reach him.
“I said I would.”
“Did you? I find a lot of people say a lot of things.”
“Well, you don’t have to take my word for it, do you?” he says. “We’ve got it all on tape.”
I lower my head. Matthew Miller is here—again and finally—and in any other life, I think I’d be too amazed to stand it. But the weir defending reality from possibility has collapsed long ago, and I accept this as one of the many ways things can go.
“It’s a beautiful play,” he says.
“It’s about ten years too late.”
“You wonder if you’d written it earlier.”
“I wonder a lot of things.”
“If, if, if,” says Matthew softly. “Don’t start counting or they’ll drown you.”
I remind myself he is not hurting me; that there are no wounds that he can open. Or maybe it’s that there are only wounds, all cauterized long ago.
“Sometimes I think none of it would have mattered,” I say. “Sometimes I think we’ve just entered an age of nihilism. Sometimes I think your show is actually helping us acknowledge that. To that extent—well, it’s honest, anyway, which is more than I thought I’d ever say about you.”
“You sound like Suzanne Bryanson.”
“Who’s that?”
“My nemesis, apparently.”
I wonder where Brookie has gone; I wonder dimly if someone thought to wheel him home.
“Speaking of which,” I say. “How’s Alice?”
“She’s well. I hear.”
“You split up.”
“It took a little while.”
“Amazing,” I say, and shake my head. “How did you ever manage to hang on to that woman?”
Matthew says nothing for a moment, and I realize he’s decided, for his own inscrutable reasons, to take this question seriously. An isosceles of failing light has insinuated itself onto his face: why does it keep having to stay so light, for so long, regardless of the circumstances?
“I think she decided that she could look at our life as a kind of truth, or else a kind of lie,” he says. “She knew she was still going to have to decide which one to believe in.”
Have I ever dared to dream of a life where
I knew anything for certain? Would I even want to, anymore?
“Or behave as though she believed, was how I think actually she put it. I suppose that’s when I should have left.”
“Oh, that was when?”
“But I didn’t, and so we lived in one version of the story.”
“Until she stopped believing you.”
“Not exactly.” That voice: I can still remember its precise sonority through a rib cage. “I think she never believed me any more or less than she did on that first day, when I first told her about you. She knew then—she probably knew already—that a life with me could only take place in some strange space, between two incompatible realities. She knew that one of those realities was happy. And she said when she was young, this was the version that felt—not necessarily likelier, but more alive to her. She said she wanted my love more than she feared my contempt.”
“But then, one’s calculus shifts.”
“Hers did. She found she wanted to know she was not pitied more than she wanted to hope she was loved. She said she wanted to face the second half of her life with all of her premises clarified.”
Alice: oh, poor Alice. For the longest time I’d assumed—no: also? I had hoped—that she was very, very stupid.
“Or maybe it just took her that long to figure out I wasn’t worth the trouble,” says Matthew.
Was he worth the trouble? This is a question asked only of the young, by people who think they’re already old. But the truly ancient know that everything is trouble, that the opposite of trouble is death. And so in the end, we make our peace with trouble, as a sign of having lived a little while upon this earth.
“I have something I’d like you to have,” says Matthew.
“Not roses, I hope.”
Matthew doesn’t laugh. He seems driven by a strange impulsion and—for one sweet, atavistic moment—it feels like absolutely anything might happen. Then he opens his briefcase. It looks exactly like the one from the seventies, though it cannot possibly be the same one. Then, he pulls out an envelope: this he handles with the delicacy of a breviary.
“What is this?” I say.
“A letter.” He hands it to me.
“For me?”
“No,” he says. “But I think that you should have it.”
A beat passes between us, and I begin to understand.
“I think you’ll find it interesting,” says Matthew.
I laugh. “I bet I’m not the only one.”
“No,” says Matthew. “But you’re an artist. I think you’ll know what to do with it.”
Dear Mattie,
I don’t really know why I’m writing to you. Well, I do, sort of. I guess it’s kind of a joke, though I don’t know who’s going to be laughing. Not you, because you won’t ever read this. Not me either, because I don’t really laugh anymore. But it started when kids at school started calling me a Mattie M guest. Because I’m Goth and into death metal and wear cat ears. Before the Mattie M thing they sometimes called me Bilbo (like Baggins—I’m not that short anymore but Blair McKinney told everyone I have hairy feet), Muller the Goriller, which is AT BEST what Ms. Stinson would call a slant rhyme; Lurch (from the Addams Family), or freakazoid, fag, or Fatty (because everyone here is a genius). They started the Mattie M thing a couple years back. I actually hadn’t seen your show too much then—another point for freakazoid!—but I guess I knew what they meant, especially when they started saying things like “On today’s episode, Mattie M talks to Ryan about his sex change operation/900-pound scrotal abnormality/losing his virginity to a VCR/having man-titties we can all see right now through that terrible T-shirt!!” whenever they passed me in the halls.
So that’s when I started watching, I guess partly to see if there actually WAS someone like me on your show—like someone into death metal or wearing cat ears or whatever—even though I didn’t think there would be because I sort of knew that someone like me wasn’t actually freaky enough to make national TV. Even if the geniuses at my school think so because they have absolutely no imagination whatsoever.
So I tuned in one day and it was a show, sure enough, about this brother and sister who were also boyfriend and girlfriend. And at first, I felt, like, I don’t know. Mostly grossed out? But in a way that made me kind of want to keep watching. And I think maybe there was a little bit of relief, too. Like if I’d tuned in and immediately seen a kid like me, some fat boy in all-black and ears, with you asking him questions in this really sympathetic way about his awful life—I guess in a way that would’ve been nice. But in another way it would’ve been terrible, because it would’ve been confirmation that I’m the weirdest sort of person in the world, and that would have been so depressing, not because I’m scared of being that weird but because I’m scared of the world being that boring.
So I guess I was kind of glad that they were weirder, and I was sort of interested in the way they were weird, and then I realized that those feelings were getting tangled up in this sort of angry way—like I was looking down on them. I was thinking, like, “I can’t believe these people!!” and “how can they BE this way??” and “I would never, never, NEVER do what they do!!!”
You can probably tell from reading this that I was thinking they were FREAKS (ha ha), though I didn’t realize it at the time. It’s like a dramatic irony, I think, looking back?
At the time, though, I was just sort of absorbed in the show, and this brother and sister. You were asking them some pretty good questions, I thought, about their lives and this whole weird thing they had, and the way you were asking was different than how I was expecting. I guess I imagined it would be really judgmental or fake-concerned, like saying a lot of things meant to show them how wrong they were and show us how wrong you knew they were while pretending that you were saying those things BECAUSE YOU CARED. Like if my guidance counselor had to talk to these people, that’s how she would talk. Or I guess on the other hand you might have been really weirdly solicitous (SAT prep word!), like how TV anchors are when real people come on their shows to TELL THEIR STORY. But you weren’t like that, either. Instead you were just sort of calm and thoughtful and you let them talk, and you were polite to them without seeming like you were saying what they were doing was either OK or not OK—it was like you weren’t weighing in on that, like that wasn’t what your job was about to you.
But then meanwhile through all this, the crowd is starting to go nuts. The brother and sister are talking about the first time they did it, and the jeering starts—first a little but then more and more, like the wave or something at a fucking pep rally—and maybe it was that, the way it started to feel like sports, that made me snap out of it and realize that, wait a minute, this whole time I’d been going along with the crowd. I was just doing in my head what they were doing out loud. And that made me sort of sick and mad and all of a sudden I was feeling VERY on the side of the brother and sister. Not because what they were doing seemed so great or even particularly OK—I don’t even know what I think of it, still, to be honest, I mean it definitely gives me the profound heebie-jeebies and almost nothing makes me feel that way, but I’m not sure how important that is, because I know I give everyone the heebie-jeebies too, and anyway this is sort of a victimless crime? But anyhow I could see that they were the kind of people who will always make everyone around them feel like they are somehow REQUIRED to take a side about them, and then have a big parade about which side they picked, and obviously everyone was going to pick against them, always.
And so I could sort of feel myself changing sides, and all my anger and grossed-outness was going in the other direction—toward the audience, not the guests. And by the time things settled down and the brother and sister started talking again, I was thinking like, yeah, they’re total fucking freakazoids, but in a choice between the freakazoids and the people whose idea of a good time is laughing at freakazoids, I’ll take the freakazoid
s any day, thanks.
I don’t know if that’s part of the point of your show, but I think maybe it is.
In conclusion, I guess I could say that the good thing about all this was that it made me understand a little about how those kids at school feel about me, how easy it is for people to feel that way in general. But that’s also the bad thing. Because you know how it feels to be treated badly but I guess you don’t think about how it feels to do it, and this made me think about that—and it was such an ugly feeling, I was embarrassed afterward for having felt it, even for like five minutes while watching a television show when it didn’t matter at all anyway. And I know that I have ugly feelings too, but I also know that I’m trying to get AWAY from them (counselor-suggested letter-writing, case in point!!). And so this made me think about how the kids at school must LIKE living in those feelings—I think maybe most people do. And knowing that didn’t make me hate the kids at school less, it kind of just made me hate people in general even more.
But one good thing is that now when they tell me I’m like a Mattie M guest I say, yeah? You’re like a Mattie M AUDIENCE MEMBER. And that usually shuts them up while they think about it, because as always they have no fucking idea what I mean.
Sincerely,
Ryan Muller
* * *
—
You’ll know what to do with it: this was, of course, a bluff. I do not know what to do with it. But I know what not to do. And I know that Matthew is either baiting me or trusting me.
Are these somewhat the same things, in the end?
Or maybe the whole thing’s a sort of trap. Here’s my radical vulnerability, Matthew is saying: you may choose vengeance or simpering Christian mercy; turning the other cheek or biting me right in the ass. Well, I choose neither, pal! I choose inertia!
Maybe character is destiny, I think, as I read the letter again and again, back in my apartment. And maybe, after all, Matthew Miller knew my own.
The Spectators Page 32