Luckily, at this moment, a new admin strides up. “Excuse me,” he says to the Director, bowing slightly. “I apologize. May I borrow you for a moment, sir?”
The spell is broken.
The Director puffs once, a steam train preparing to leave a station, and then allows himself to be led away. And as I am beginning to feel this modicum of relief, just as he is almost gone, his vast head, above the crowd, turns back toward me and the head says, loudly, between upraised hands: “Mr. Frobisher: we will be WATCHING.”
I’m standing there slack-jawed. I think, what a “personality” (the thought containing quotation marks, as in: “The Personality”). Then I see Dennis Royal, observing the whole thing from across the room. We meet one another’s eyes, and he shrugs, contemptuously, as if to say: see?
Now a tray is borne toward me and I’m handed a fresh drink by someone who isn’t in this story.
* * *
—
I make my excuses, and head back, alone, to the Enclave. Just me and the footlights, which illuminate the periphery of the paths. The Institute’s fountains, rippling with gradients, crackle in the darkness with watery, white noise. No one knows where I am, and I carry in my throat the illicit nausea of night.
But my feet have clearly decided on a change of plan, because I find that I’ve arrived at the edge of the property again; back at the periphery; my Observation Point.
I sit on the bench, and try to stabilize myself with the guided breathing I’ve been taught in Group. In and out, in and out. I feel ridiculous, until I don’t. It is always vacant out here. That much is guaranteed. No one will see me as no one comes to the perimeter. It is incredibly comforting somehow, to sit alone in the presence of the desert’s primeval solitude.
I pop a tablet, swallow it dry, and return my gaze to the dark desert. Return to my breathing. I sit there for a while. A long while. (Time passes.)
My mind slowly empties. And I feel comforted.
A gap.
Now, a commotion.
The sounds of muffled unrest. Sounds, coming from the path which feeds my Observation Point. My only means of egress.
Sounds of something moving chaotically through the brush, these sounds broken by occasional grunts. The noises coming from just outside the area’s perimeter. I listen, and the noises only grow in intensity. I consider my options.
Then I rise, tentatively, and begin to inch my way forward down the path, and while attempting to do so, I place my feet as slowly as possible upon the uneven, noisy gravel. I’m listening all the while, trying to calibrate the sounds of my movements to those of what surely must be a fight of some kind. It takes several minutes at this pace to reach the edge of the lawns. Thirty-some-odd steps.
As I exit the Observation Point, and emerge into the big clearing, I see the wan, dome-refracted moon again, above the black line of treetops, and below, a tangle of shadows mutating and reforming, a shadow theater, set against the inky palms. A blue-black, liquid spot which transmogrifies into several men, subduing another person, another man, a smaller man. The shadows, the several men, are licking out, grabbing at him—the other man, their victim—assaulting him with their fists and feet. All sound from the attackers is stopped, instantly muted, though their assault is not. The only sounds now come from their quarry, the small, other man, now on the ground, having been thrown there, and he makes low, inarticulate, and clearly inadvertent sounds, the sounds of air suddenly expelled from his body against his will, etc., etc., though he does not actively cry out—does not seek help in any evident manner—and seems to be putting up no resistance to his continued abuse. (I am about thirty or forty meters from them. From the attack.) The entire event is strangely muted, as if performed far away, or under a body of water. I stand there and watch passively as the assault continues. And then redoubles. But soon the assailants cease, as the body of their victim has stopped moving, is lying dead-still upon the gray green. They look down at him, the several men. (It is too dark to read expressions.)
There is an interregnum, in which nothing moves and nothing happens. Then:
Ping!
Shitttt…
My device.
Nobody moves.
Ping! Again.
Gah.
Will one of them turn and see me? It is so still in this clearing under the vague moonlight. The stillness.
(The silence.)
The assailants crouch over the body and seem to confer (though I cannot hear voices). I don’t move, barely breathe. I feel air from the distant fans blowing behind my ears.
Finally, two of the men reach down, grab the victim’s ankles, and begin dragging him down the lawn and away, thankfully in the opposite direction from where I am standing. I’m safe. The body hisses along the wet grass as it is removed offstage. Then they are all gone, as quickly and dramatically as if a black curtain had been drawn across the entire proceedings.
I remain there, pulsing, throbbing like an antenna, an antenna transmitting, and I remain for a time, until I have determined that it is safe to move.
Ping!
Mother fuck.
Without a glance, I shove my device as deeply as possible into my pocket, wring my hands in a hot, slick grip, now rub them on my trousers to dry the perspiration off, the whole time darting looks around me in all directions, and now I scurry off, anxious, back along toward the heart of the Institute.
10
(GROUP)
In the subsequent days, there are no further signs of “the Night Struggle” (as I have begun to think of it). No missing fellows, no marks on the daylit ground—the site upon which the person was beaten and from whence he was dragged.
In any case, the event itself, the crime, is far less compelling to me than my memories of the incident—those imagined, reciprocal incidents which play out in my mind, enacted after the fact. My emotions upon seeing the Irl beating of the man by the gang of nocturnal marauders pales in comparison to the emotions I now feel, emotions about the event, not as it happened, but as I now imagine it happening; aftershock-imaginings in which (for instance) I have stepped in to save the man by fighting off his attacker. Or another enactment in which I imagine that I have been spotted, and thrashed as well. In the first instance, I feel a welling-up of triumphant feelings. In the second: a nauseating wave of anger and self-loathing. In both cases, the feelings spurred by my own creative endeavor overshadow my feelings at witnessing the meatspace, Irl event. What one is to make of this, I can’t say.
In fact, I do not think about the event all that much, and actually, I only recall “the Night Struggle” in order to sufficiently establish to myself that I have or haven’t imagined the whole thing.
Nevertheless, it does occur to me now that “the Night Struggle” might be of use to my project in some way. The event certainly feels as if it is sufficiently dramatic for such a repurposing. I consider everything, nowadays, in just such a light. That is, as material. As the possible spark which might set my project alight.
Tbd, eh?
* * *
—
The casual chat, the standing and shifting of weight from one foot to the next. The tapping of coffee urns, the sampling of continental breakfasts—the breaking corners off of plastery scones. Vapes. Worry beads. Small napkins. Square, little plates. The stale waiting.
Then, the bell is rung and we sit in a confluence-circle. In stylish chrome chairs. White light coming in through the plate glass. You can see the tops of the palms, in the garden below, fronding slowly in the artificial breeze.
My second Group. Admin17 is leading today. She has the wild hair and beleaguered countenance of a middle-grade art instructor. Nobody in Group seems to respect the authority she has been deputized to wield. But we observe the protocols, for the most part.
We tell our stories to one another—we testify, as we are meant to.
We do it of our own volition—ignoring her presence—and she seems savvy enough not to interrupt. The admin takes notes on her device, whispering closely to it. She doesn’t want to disrupt the natural flow of the divulgences, but needs a record. These notes eventually are pinged over to the more important admins where they are cross-referenced and analyzed.
There have been some outside presenters—inspirational prompts of various kinds (like, for instance, the kite-flying day, and the day they brought the dogs in). But normally it’s just us. Us: unburdening ourselves to one another.
Today, it’s me, the Actor, the Sociologist, the Critic, the Translator, and the Miniaturist. Everyone is further along than I am. Higher up the Ladder.
We usually move clockwise around the room. (I’m at nine o’clock.)
The Actor goes first.
* * *
—
Acting, he tells us, is the art of replication, and he believes that if he successfully portrays his characters—inhabits them thoroughly enough—the end result of his efforts will be a performance in which he isn’t merely representing his characters, but reproducing them.
For months now, in his small, mirrored studio on the third floor of the Arts Pavilion, the Actor has been preparing his one-man show. In the show, he is to play several roles: a newborn, a pirate, an old crone, a nymph, and a sylvan glade. He has worked tirelessly to perfect each of these personifications, polishing the parts. He has them all down pat. It has gotten to be that, with practice, the switching of characters is, for him, like the effortless donning and doffing of masks.
(He does a couple of these characters for us. Just a line or two for each. They are consummately performed. Perfect embodiments.)
Honestly (he tells us), his project brings him nothing but happiness. After all, as he puts it: “what could be more pleasurable than to be someone else for a while?”
Each workday begins with the Actor performing his elaborate vocal exercises, along with some light facial stretching. This is followed by the most important part of his warm-up ritual, the contemplation of the Seven Questions for Actors. In this exercise, he poses each of the seven questions to each of his characters (Who Am I? What Do I Want? Why Do I Want It? What Must I Overcome, etc.), meditating on how the answers to these questions might differ for each of the various roles.
Afterward, he rehearses the show, meticulously enacting each character in turn.
Yet somehow, the more putatively “real” his characters become, the more he is unable to separate himself from these characters, and the more of himself leaches into them. Put another way: the more the actor reaches out to understand a particular character, and the more real the character duly becomes, the more the character reaches out to understand him, the Actor—and thus becomes like him—rather than vice versa.
And so, the answers to the Seven Questions begin to worry him.
At first, the answers in the exercises come out as expected. For the Pirate, for instance, the answer to the first question, “What Do I Want,” was: “riches.” And the answer to the question “What Must I Overcome” was: “mutiny,” or “a torn and illegible map.” But several months into his rehearsals, the answers to these questions have begun to shift, such that the response to “What Do I Want,” for his Pirate character, is now: “to better emulate my fellow pirates.” And his (the Pirate’s) answer to the question “What Must I Overcome” has become “my growing fondness toward my mutinous crew,” or “my begrudging admiration for all of my enemies and rivals.” He admits that the more he injects these roles with his own empathies, his own neurotic misgivings and actorly sympathies, the more real the characters now seem. Finally, the ambivalence with which he answers these questions irrevocably has contaminated all of his characters—including the sylvan glade—and in the end, the show he has prepared so carefully, which was to show off an unprecedented sweep of characterization, has become nothing more than a monologue about a struggling actor.
(Though it is, as such, we all reassure him, highly successful.) We thank him for sharing.
* * *
—
The Sociologist goes next. She tells us that she has performed a careful analysis of her new data, and, dismayed by the results, has found it necessary to reanalyze her findings.
When she does so, she discovers that certain conclusions are unavoidable. The Sociologist has confirmed beyond a doubt—according to the complex and rich semiotics of social capital which she herself has established in her Institute project—that she is: 1. the exact type of person who would choose Sociology as a profession, and 2. fated, bound by her class and type, to create precisely the complex and rich semiotics of social capital she has, in fact, produced. Furthermore (and more disturbingly still) she draws the conclusion that 3. her very selfhood—not just her taste-profile, or her sets of positions, but her actual self—is predetermined, encoded inside of her very own theory. Faced with this irrefutable and self-reflexive conclusion, she has decided to spend more time in Group.
We applaud this decision and thank her for sharing as well.
* * *
—
The Critic goes third. The Critic’s testimony is brief: but complex. He is stuck in the most excruciating kind of reductio ad absurdum. His particular problem stems from his critical faculties themselves, which are so devastating, so acute, so uncompromising, that as soon as his opinions are transcribed, written down, they instantly become subject to his own penetrating gaze. Which is to say that the Critic’s own skill precludes publication, and so his expertise goes entirely unrecognized.
Nobody knows of his talent. But he knows, he tells us. He knows….
(We all just smile and nod, as we don’t, in fact, “know.” But we thank him for sharing all the same, as that is the kind of support we are expected to provide in Group.)
* * *
—
Now, the Translator is hard at work on her Institute project, which is a translation of a work by a prominent fantasist. The work that she is currently attempting to render concerns a great jungle cat; a puma or some such.
In this tale—so ineffably beautiful and strange in its original language—the predator terrorizes all the other beasts of the rain forest. It lives a generally wonderful life, at the apex of its small ecosystem, although it has a single and intractable problem: it finds it impossible to drink from the jungle pool. Every time it attempts to drink the pool’s clear water, it is prohibited from doing so by a large predatory animal, which it sees snarling in the water’s surface. The cat eventually dies of dehydration.
Unfortunately, every time the translator looks over her rendition of the fable, unlike the original, it seems trite, poorly written, and ends with a dubious moral. She knows that this is because, in the original, the word for “jungle cat” is the same as the word for “translator,” and she has yet to find a word or formulation in English which would express both meanings. Thus, she is clearly not doing justice to the work of such a great writer. She begins again. Nevertheless, every time she retranslates the work, something new is lost. She loses either the visceral effect of the cat, or the satirical edge of the piece as a whole.
We point out that, of course, the Translator, the Critic, and even the jungle cat all share a similar affliction, but neither she nor the Critic wants to admit that this is the case. An argument breaks out, briefly—though it is more a display of unchecked snippiness than an argument as such. Admin17 shows her mettle by calming everyone the hell down, reiterating the rules of Group (no judgments), and “moving the show along.” Everyone settles again.
* * *
—
A clear sky and hills of sand. A few small rocks. Blazing heat. A bright city. A dome. Wind. The sky is wrinkling. Literally puckering, long veins pipeline across it, bubble up, force it off its cardboard backing.
The paint is drying irregularly. The cutout edges of t
he foiled city are crinkled, and it is only by squinting our eyes that it begins to resemble its Irl counterpart. The sand is sand. It blows around, thanks to the fan, and the Miniaturist realizes that it will all blow away and she won’t have any desert left. She reaches for the scoop inside of the bucket and delicately pours more onto the scene.
(The Miniaturist has brought her diorama in to share with the rest of us.)
She adjusts the heat lamps. The paper had begun to smolder in some places, so she moves the lamps back and away. So that it is suitably hot, but not close to combustion.
Her diorama contains all of us, me, the admin, the Actor, the Sociologist, the Critic, the Translator, and the minuscule Miniaturist, sitting, head-in-hands, frustrated by her project. She rendered herself as accurately as she could, looking through high-powered magnifying lenses, etching a furrowed brow on the figurine with a diamond-tipped needle. Unfortunately, the tiny Miniaturist seems more bored than frustrated.
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