A Yemeni and I crawled southward through the city, though not at all in the manner of my last ride down, when I’d shot through Fifth Avenue nearly unimpeded with the Filipino, courtesy of a run of green lights and the late hour. Tonight’s driver kept apologizing for the traffic and the delay in an accent that put me in mind, foremost, of cholera, the scourge that had eaten its way through his country not long ago, after the Saudis unloaded their American bombs for months onto the tiny country. He was here as a refugee of just that crisis, he told me. But the little bearded man’s apologies were misplaced: our inertia gave me time to savor the trip. My phone shivered in my pocket now and then, yet I never even considered taking it out, not while the cityscape mutated through a multitude of forms as we jerkily made our way across Macom’s Dam Bridge and down through Washington Heights and Harlem, toward that radical disjunction occurring where Harlem’s Spanish sector gives way to the Upper East Side. It was as if we’d crossed continents in passing from 110th Street to Ninety-ninth, at which point we entered into the gilded world of Whent. Next came the commercial glamour of midtown, all those boutiques, and the great park by our side, through to the Flatiron building and its surrounds, down into the narrow, light-starved lanes of the Financial District.
Finally we came to the Manhattan Bridge. I closed my eyes as we crossed over to Brooklyn and tuned into the buzzing of the tiny motor of our Fiesta and the blaring of car horns all around us, horns just as various as each engine’s whine. Dominating both, though, was the backbeat of the chirpy dance-pop that evidently kept this Yemeni going, the same stuff, in fact, that kept gym rats going, and that suffused corner bars. Every year, there were half-a-dozen of these songs that flooded the cabs and watering holes of New York, keeping you apprised of pop trends, whatever your interest in them. They were written by musicians who never saw the stage, who had no real identity per se; that’s just not what was asked of them. A catchy melody, a few non-specific rhymes about lust or heartbreak, that was all. Songs of this sort were really lifestyle advertising jingles, and in fact the same pool of musicians wrote both of them.
Ordinarily I would have experienced tripe like this with some annoyance, and although I was loath to interfere with a driver’s carefully maintained ecosystem—one engineered to create maximum comfort for him, not the passenger, for it was he who had to be in the car all night—I might well have gone as far as telling him I required silence, that I had to think over something or other. Instead, tonight, I let him enjoy himself. I also didn’t stop him when he tuned into a fiery exchange between pundits on an Arabic radio station. He even translated bits of it for me, numbers about the humanitarian crisis in Yemen, the number of bodies, the numbers infected, the number of functioning clinics, the number of bombs. He framed everything in a maudlin sort of way, though, obviously designed to garner maximum sympathy. It was tragic, really, his presumption that the facts themselves, all those numbers, could never persuade someone like me to think the plight of his people important enough to interrupt his ride.
He dropped me off at the juncture of Downtown Brooklyn and Fort Greene, outside a large hall, and we shook hands like old friends. He was thanking me for my indulgence, but it wasn’t necessary. Through all the horror he’d related, I’d simply enjoyed the drive; nothing could have ruined it for me. Before me now was a vast auditorium that gave the impression of having been built solely for freshman survey classes. As I entered through its towering doors, I was startled to find the stage not above the audience but down below it, in a central pit, a bit like the ancient Greeks would have it, but with the seats arranged in a curve that spanned only 180 degrees, not 270 or more. Capacity must have been several hundred at least, and as I surveyed this amphitheater, finally peering at the stage that seemed quite small from here, I couldn’t help but rock vertiginously forward. I’d been anticipating black-box neutrality tonight, not architecture that would so strongly color affairs. The hall was also far fuller than I would have expected for a work of experimental theater. The director, Nik Volger, was a larger name in underground drama and film than I could have appreciated at the time, though I certainly knew he was a figure of some import. The last of my faulty surmises was this: although the chilly crispness of my suit did make me stand out from the group, ultimately I had overdressed by a smaller margin than I’d hoped. The crowd was young but not particularly bohemian; everyone looked well put together, sensible. Insouciance was less and less the fashion, it seemed, even on the left.
I began my descent of the theatron, with gray-backed seats rising up steeply on either side of me. I felt as though I had to slow myself, as if I were picking up too much speed and on the cusp of tumbling down to a stage that now felt like the bottom of a well. My imprudence, should I indulge it, would be on full show: my body would end up in a heap, to be examined under the stage lights forensically, and dramatically, too. It intrigued me, this thought of small disasters, given John’s close call and my own daily tangles with gravity, pushing myself halfway out my window, always vying for a better look at things.
About a quarter of the way down the aisle, a woman with blonde dreads and pearl earrings waved a clutch of playbills. These red leaflets were printed on heavily veined paper, rough to the touch, but thin and flaky, too. I saw the quirkily styled woman from some way off, but (no surprise) she wouldn’t look the guests in the eye, which left me to snatch a program as I passed like a marathoner grabbing water. But then, hadn’t I deliberately avoided reading up on the play beforehand? So that I might be led by my eyes tonight, not my mind? I set the pretty red papers on an empty seat and continued my descent.
About a third of the way from the stage I turned down a mostly full row and homed in on my seat. While the patrons stood in sequence to accommodate my passage, I could feel them staring at me, or at least at the steely perfection of my suit. In keeping with this, I declined to engage them, leaving my eyes firmly locked on the block of five empty seats toward the end of the row. The seat one from the far edge was mine. I pushed the seat bottom down and settled into the narrow, low-slung space between the armrests, my knees rising up slightly in front of me. Did the four empties surrounding me all belong to Garrett? Each time I would see someone coming down my row, prompting the same people to rise and fall before me, I felt the briefest flicker of dread. Nothing serious, just what you feel when, say, someone dawdles near an open seat beside you on an airplane. There was more guilt involved tonight, of course, inasmuch as theater, unlike transport, had some right to be regarded as an essay in communion. The guilt didn’t last long: I was relieved to find that while newcomers had plugged many of the gaps in front of and behind me, my block of seats—I thought of them as mine—remained an island for one.
The lights fell very gradually—so slowly, in fact, I wondered how long it had taken me even to notice that they were fading. When they were gone, though, they were truly gone: you couldn’t see your own hands. The pre-show whispers of the crowd grew into a distressed murmur. Feeling around in my coat pocket, searching for my sketchpad, I came upon a crumpled receipt or wrapper and unthinkingly tossed it to the ground. Who was going to see me do this? I suppose the absence of all light had already begun to affect me. Into my lap I delivered the long, bound strip of pages I’d recovered, the same sort of pad I sometimes took with me to bars and parks and such. Technically it was designed as a reporters’ jotter, though a bit wider than normal, with a creamy stock and—this was truly silly—gilt edges. A vanity notebook is what it was, like those leather diaries one buys and finds too nice to actually use. No journalist could have taken this into the field without earning scorn, but for my purposes it served quite well. The stock took ink beautifully while the format made it easy to stuff in a pocket. The sheets’ narrowness did mean I had to rotate it into landscape even when drawing portraits, but this wasn’t much of a compromise.
It occurred to me, quite suddenly, that orchestral music was playing, though almost sub-audibly: pianissississississimo—as softly as humanly possible—a purely theoretical concept for me until now. The melody, for which you had to listen ferociously to detect, was actually spiky and strident. I couldn’t make out the full instrumentation, it was all so utterly soft. Yet the bare fact of this music’s presence, however diaphanous, seemed to settle the audience a bit, convince them that things were indeed underway.
Soon, however, the dread noises of people rising near me came back. There were muted apologies, too, besides the shuffling of cloth and the seats springing closed and opening again in my row. The narrow beam of a cellphone light knifed through the darkness to my left. As the only empty seats here were on my island, I knew the bluish spotlight would press ahead until it reached me. When it did, the ray froze at my feet before striking me in the face. Apparently I was being assessed. When it finally blinked off, I heard those stretching springs again: whoever it was had sat down in the seat two from mine. I squinted hard, hoping to see something of him, anything, but after he’d blinded me, all I got were afterimages. Strangely, I could actually hear him breathe—was it a him?—and these long, steady breaths, suggestive of health and calm, not weakness, would accompany me the rest of the show.
I smelled perfume, or else a floral cologne, with a distinctive leading note of rose. Nothing much could be deduced from this, really. Scents had grown too unisex for that. Whatever it was, the rosiness was pleasant and gentle, perhaps with sandalwood beneath it, and soft like the music. I settled back into my chair, resigned to the obscurity of the presence next to me, and returned my attention to the music. While remaining a whisper, it was now more cleanly articulated, and more than that, distinctly spatialized. I could imagine a violin on the left side of the stage, and a clarinet along with an alto saxophone, I believed, to the right, and in that order.
There were, I knew, sound systems with the vividness of live orchestras. While I might have had a home theater, it was Rick who had a listening room, and an audiophile’s rig. Long an obsessive about music, he’d never wandered from painting into sound sculpture or its ilk. Still, as an abstractionist, he appeared to me irremediably Paterian, aspiring always toward music in his paintings, even if he’d admit no interest in pure art and avow that he was as finished with Modernism as anyone else. His abstraction was, after all, of the post-historical sort: abstraction after the end of Art. It meant you’d never hear him defend Greenberg by name. Yet he knew I knew he was only playing with words, seeking cover, and that in truth he was something of a belated crypto-modernist. Rick also had the good fortune to know when he was beat, which between us generally meant when discussion advanced to an extra-painterly plane. He admired me for this, all the various knowledges represented in that library of mine; but it was also something he despised, which, to me, was merely to despise the complexity of the world, all that wouldn’t oblige materialist or formal reduction.
As for music: little by little, Rick had assembled an enviable sound system: a Rega RP6, Sonus Faber floorstanders, and a vintage tube amplifier he’d found at the Brooklyn Flea, an event he thought no less serendipitous than Claire’s discovery of a Chagall print in the rummage bins. Rick had turned his one-bedroom in Sunset Park—which he now shared with Lindy, another of Cosquer’s artists, and to my mind his soulmate, however damning that was—into a soundstage, with the musicians in holographic touch as you sat on his couch having Fernet or whatever microbrew he fancied that week.
Now here it was once more, I thought, just as the lights came up ever so slightly from absolute dark: an almost frighteningly detailed auditory image. In this extraordinary dimness, sight again became possible—or something sight-like, anyway, given that the picture I was able to form of the stage was so impoverished that I couldn’t be sure it wasn’t a hallucination, the mind merely imagining light, anticipating it, the very ground of sight, owing to some panicked desire to see, which you could only experience when thrust into the pitch dark unexpectedly. I was unsure where exactly things were taking place: solely within my mind, or out in the world as well.
A pyramid of light defined itself before us, emanating from a central hive of swiveling fixtures mounted low above the stage. What was there within this volume of light and the triangular base it laid upon the stage? In this zone, one thing seemed to run into another. The very word thing felt out of order. My field of vision appeared as a continuous body, amoeba-like and pre-objectual, shifting without fully differentiated parts. Color and texture, position and extension, all this was unknowable. I saw only vaguely bounded apparitions within the light, and the figures I made out (or constructed) first were in dress even more formal than my own: tuxedoed musicians at each point of the tetrahedron’s base—the violinist and saxophonist out in front on the edge of the stage, and the clarinetist recessed in the middle—all as quiet to my eyes as their instruments remained to my ears.
This was no audio system; it was the thing itself. But the longer I studied the three players, the less sure I became of what I was seeing. Musicians are, of course, what it made sense to see, given how lifelike the sound was. Somehow this tidy fit between sensation and belief only made me dubious of the actuality of what I experienced; it was, in its way, too convenient. Whenever this thought strengthened in me—and my thoughts seemed to pulse through me now—the apparitions at the points turned from players into shimmers. The stage illumination had long ago plateaued, stymying any attempt to see with confidence, stranding me between illusion and reality. In this purgatory, the refined scent of rose seemed to surround me. I turned sharply to my left, as if needing to catch the rosy source before he had time to hide himself, and there indeed, in the recently occupied seat, was a man, though he was hardly clear to sight. The stage-lights cast only glimmers this deep into the audience. More grizzled than his delicate scent would suggest, I was just able to make out his thick, patchy beard, of what shade I couldn’t say, and his jagged nose. Somehow I also caught the distinct whiff of youth, exuded even by those who, through overdoing it, have prematurely aged their bodies. Perhaps he spent his free time out on the ocean, boating under endless sun. I wouldn’t have been surprised; he kept his sleeves rolled back very far. Or perhaps it was down to that steady breath of his, the breath of an athlete at rest, which proceeded metronomically while expressing the possibility of sudden and decisive action, should the need arise. I examined his face as best I could. His eyes were only slits, not because he was from the Far East, although I couldn’t rule that out yet, but because my eyes—and everyone’s in the building, I assumed—were just the same: squinting to make out anything at all. The bearded man never turned toward me, not for an instant. He was too busy peering at the stage, as if, against the odds, he’d managed to cotton on to what was happening there. For a moment it made me wonder whether he could see more than I was able to, if he was possessed of twenty-ten vision, say, and the show was aimed at super-seers, the patrons of a blind theater, exactly parallel to those diners who ate in pitch black to heighten the sense of taste. Anything was possible. Weren’t some books, after all, written solely for the 160 IQ set?
As time went on, my eyes did seem to adjust slightly to the dark. Certainly I kept willing them to see, and my presumption that the rose-scented man was getting more out of the production than I was, well, I found the notion motivating. The players began to come into a kind of focus, the violinist drawing his bow at quarter-speed and the saxophonist puffing his cheeks while barely making a sound. Yet soon these two dissolved again into ghostly quivers of light, and it was only the correspondence between the shifting of this light and the rhythms of the music that made me believe I was genuinely in touch with something. Substantial tracts of the audience had lost patience with these ambiguities of experience: they’d refused to quiet entirely and, feeling themselves to be toyed with, were growing more defiant by the minute. I myself wasn’t much vexed, to tell the truth, not because I had any more comprehension of events than they, but because pleasure wasn’t a priority for me tonight. This was work. Sooner or later, I knew, the girl I had come to see would make her appearance onstage, and that would be reward enough, to set eyes on her finally.
I unfocused my gaze. I was free, really, to drift in and out of the production. I wasn’t going to be quizzed on it, and if I were, I didn’t have to have answers. In the darkness I let my pen slide idly across the pages without properly seeing the shapes I inscribed on them. I might end up with only a mess of lines for my trouble, I thought, and that was fine. I was happy enough to listen to the bearded man breathe, in then out, in then out.
Eventually a woman, or a really a very young girl, took the stage. That’s what I thought I saw, anyway: a playful little girl, judging by her height, with long dark hair and a dark dress fringed with white. How slender, how frail she seemed waddling into the pyramid of light still resting upon the stage. The triangular base defined upon the floor grew firmer, its vertices linking the three musicians even if they now seemed worlds apart musically. I was put in mind of Charles Ives and his marching bands passing each other in the town square, playing different tunes, rallying different causes. All three of the musicians I could just about make out, but beyond them, I saw, or rather, believed I saw—or really heard—still more musicians, many more, all playing gently with consummate control.
The girl, though—she was real, or anyway realer. She wandered awhile at the fringes of the light, observing the players, who paid her no mind, before darting to the base of that triangle of light, right along the lip of the stage, on the edge of the black. The abruptness of the dash, the ground being covered so quickly, struck a note of terror against the dark hush, heightening her claim to reality, this creature almost skipping across the stage, apparently unfazed by the abyss on all sides. The rose-scented man’s breath, previously so steady, grew shallow and tight—proof of her power. I was reminded of my own breathing, already constricted by the waist retention of my coat and my oxford starched like armor, the way my father always preferred to wear his: to give him, he said, the feeling of going into battle.
The girl was as close as stage-light would permit me to see, and she was looking right through all of us in the seats. She swiveled her head, turning away from us back toward the stage, and her body soon followed, first her torso, then her legs and her glossy shoes, shining like varnished instruments. With her back to us, she became us, gazing into the same twilight.
She rocked back and forth to a beat we couldn’t hear, twisting her hair around her fingers, swinging the hem of her dress. The musicians kept playing, the ones within the light and the ones in shadow, yet they seemed to have further diverged from one another, occupying distinct keys and time signatures. Hadn’t they originally been in sync? Now the discrepancies piled up, all the more given the sea of players manifestly cloaked by darkness. There must have been a chamber orchestra back there, outside the illuminated pyramid. Still, just enough unity obtained between the players to suggest that, if they weren’t quite playing together, their universes ran parallel to each other.
Were we ten or fifteen minutes in? That’s what I would have guessed, though light has a way of affecting time’s passage. Fifteen minutes, let’s suppose, and by then I had the distinct impression that although everything so far had the air of a preamble about it, nothing full-throated was on the horizon. For all I could tell, the entirety of the performance might continue under just these conditions of... blindsight. So I opened my pad again in earnest, knowing that I might not just be drawing blind tonight—sketching without observing my mark-making was a practice I was already quite expert at—I might have no choice but to blindly draw things I could hardly see in the first place. Double-blind drawing, if it needed a name. I started with the clarinetist at the triangle’s peak. Really, I couldn’t see much of him, mostly just his instrument jutting into the pyramid of half-light. Whereas he himself—it must have been a he, from the build, the cut of the coat—there was only the vaguest suggestion of his body, aside from occasions when his hands came into view as he fingered the instrument or applied tremolo. Often it seemed as if the instrument were playing itself, bobbing to its own music. That’s exactly how I drew it, or tried to, anyway, seeing nothing of my pad.
I finished with the clarinetist, whatever I could intuit of him, and shifted to the saxophonist, who was out in front and on the right. Tall but sitting in profile, the light caught more of him than of the clarinetist, though his instrument, being brass, shone brighter than the player. Provisional strokes were all he got before I moved on to the final figure I could see: a timpanist, who seemed to have replaced the violinist at the front-left, his mallets pattering on the drum’s head, which was starkest white and quickly the most defined presence in this shadow world.
By the time I’d made these more or less geometric preparations for sketching the subject—the little girl—she’d actually crept out of the light. I could still hear her shoes clatter as she fidgeted, though now she was too close to be seen, beyond the reach of light. Other presences superseded her: a flutist took form to the clarinetist’s right as the light finally evolved, shifting dimensions, the pyramid turning more classical, with a four-sided base. This rhomboid landing on the stage brought out, along with the flutist, an oboist, both of whom I thought I’d been hearing, and finally several other musicians to either side of the clarinetist.
While I flipped through the sheets of my pad, getting down something of this scene, the faint rustling of my paper and the scratching of my pen made the bearded man beside me turn my way. I gave him all I could think to, a simple nod. I suppose I looked at him then so I wouldn’t have to look at him again—this emissary of Garrett’s, I presumed—establishing that special sort of rapport that would let us forget about one another. My nod said no more than, Yes, I see you, and even that was a half-truth, since the light from the stage carried so little. For this same reason, I’m also not sure what he took from my nod, whether the exaggeration I put into it made him think I was mocking him.
He leaned forward in his seat, curious. I’d like to say he nodded back at me, though if he did, his nod was far subtler than mine, and, in truth, probably just a response to a twinge he felt in his neck. He had swung around to me, though, the first discernible movement he’d made since settling in, and after shifting forward a bit, I saw him back in profile again, which signaled an end to our exchange. He groped about in his pocket and took out his phone. What for?
An enrobed man, substantially aged, breached the rightmost edge of the pyramidal field projected onto the stage. Or, rather, the edge of light broke over his body—lights were shifting, not the bodies they fell on. He wasn’t wearing a robe, either, just loosely draped cloth, giving him a Biblical air, the look of a sage or soothsayer. He stood with a pronounced stoop, bending over without trying to, arthritically, at mid-spine, his head thrust downward and his neck craned back in the extreme merely so that he could face straight-on. Given his L-shaped posture, the man’s remarkable size, or rather length, if you were to straighten him out, took some time to deduce. How tall the actor must have been—and what excruciating contortions he was going through for the stage.
My eyes jumped left involuntarily, toward someone fully enclosed by light. The figure, while no less illuminated than the old man, was somehow too universal to make any judgments about. Gender and age were inscrutable. All clothing was tight to the body, so tight that this character couldn’t have come from the same era as the girl and man. Rather, he or she, or it, came from the future. Thresholds of vision, manipulation of eye pathways—this was Volger’s game, I knew. Soon enough, my gaze was dragged off elsewhere, to the front edge of the pyramid. Not by the little girl, it turned out—the only person with real physical charisma, and so the one I’d been waiting for and expecting to return from just that blackened spot—but by two women falling into the light. Instantly I knew, before even properly laying eyes on the pair, that the one I was supposed to be looking for tonight was present. She was facing away from me, they both were, but her hair, it had to be her hair, even if it wasn’t at all red, it luminesced. It must have been bleached. It was shorter now, too, above shoulder length, and thicker. Standing barefoot, she wore a light dress, thin and reedy: you could mistake it for a slip. But the real giveaway was her forearms and wrists, the way they seemed to twist slightly outward and leave her hands out and open, even at rest, which I recalled well from The Sort. It was an odd signature, yet it’s these apparently incidental qualities that often take deepest root in memory.
I suppose Daphne’s arrival effectively concluded the play’s muddled introduction—for me, anyway—even if the little girl had drawn me away with her petulant charms; and the odd formal aspects of the production had distracted me with the pressures they put on perception itself; and the gentleman next to me, though he’d now dispensed with his phone, kept up his song of breath. I pulled back my focus and took in the whole of the stage, a fresh sheet of paper before me, only to find that the three musicians had vanished, presumably having receded into darkness as the light’s borders further evolved. Was the music really loudening, despite this retreat? And was the light brightening, or did it simply seem stronger owing to the accretion of human forms fully within its compass? There were exactly four figures, all in white: the old man of the past, the androgynous figure of the future, and the two women from some time in between. The old man was still pretty much where he’d first appeared, except he’d seated himself in a chair newly visible in the shifting light. The chair, for its part, was a sticklike thing built from spindly metal bars, and clearly designed with certain orthopedic peculiarities in mind: he sat very deeply in it, almost within it, as if it were his exoskeleton, and it propelled his bent legs high into the air. Comical as he appeared like this, it might have been the only way of getting the old man’s torso perpendicular to the ground, like that of any ordinary man. If I were to have sat in that chair, for instance, I would have been staring straight into the lights. He, though, could now see just what was coming—no craning back necessary. Some of the agony seemed to have come out of his face, and indeed some of the years. Maybe he wasn’t so old after all, just the victim of a congenital deformation.
My gaze shot to the edge of the stage. Every time I refocused on other aspects of the scene, it seemed to occur just this way: by dramatic movements of the eye. There, right alongside Daphne, was the other woman, who’d finally come out properly into the light. She was tiny, perhaps younger than Daphne, and with much longer hair that was nearly Asiatic in its straightness and tone. Yet she was dressed just the same, in wispy cotton garments somewhat out of time, so that the pair of them put one in mind of sisters (although the blonde’s bleached hair made things odder, I’m not sure what it signified). Without the common index, the face, to hold the attention, emphasis was thrown onto their bodies, which seemed to have moved further upstage—though of course they’d never taken a step; it was another trick of the light. This was clearly a theme tonight, the relation between frame and subject. If there was one thing that struck me as genuinely ingenious here, it was this living light. Now the women drifted deeper into it, but this was genuine movement: they were closing in on the seated sage. Daphne’s partner glided so fluidly forward, with tiny steps beneath her billowy dress, that she moved without seeming to, like an apparition, making Daphne appear ambivalent by comparison. Together they crossed the midline of the stage, and from upstage on the left, someone new passed by the tightly-clad, undifferentiated figure and descended quite far into the light, with small, forceful footsteps: a young man in dark trousers and a well-fitted button-down. He wore boots, though, and if he’d had a hat you might have thought him a cowboy. But I took him for a musician straight off, owing to the hardshell case he held that seemed suited to a guitar.
My pen had been working quickly upon the page for some time now. I was doing well with it all, charting the flow of forms, the flow of the frame itself—the light—all to my neighbor’s rhythmic respiration, which I was intermittently conscious of, whenever the music lulled. His breaths were neither erratic nor labored, but always deep: each time he was done filling his lungs, I’d already exhaled. It was unnerving at first, sitting abreast of this cold-blooded man. Ever since he’d put away his phone, I had the peculiar sense he was studying my drawings as they came into being. Of course this was impossible, the theater was far too dark; I myself couldn’t see the drawings and they were right there in my lap. But impressions only sometimes answer to reason, and over the years I’d learned not to force them into conformity with it, only coax them into accession when possible. So I permitted myself this conceit, this departure from reality, to fill my being as I drew. I imagined freely that those thick-framed glasses of his, which I’d caught glinting in the light of his phone earlier, must have given him rare visual powers; and eventually, as my pen and his breath intertwined, I drew as if he were actually seeing and evaluating what I put to paper. Rather than generating anxiety, this fancy of mine smoothed my strokes, gave them new assurance. I felt much as an actor does: skittish and fussy in rehearsal, where the stakes are nil, and fully fluent only during the show, when failure comes alive as a possibility. An appraising eye can drive a performer to a steady stream of choices made without hesitation. Missteps are unavoidable, of course, though nearly any choice, taken cleanly, without too much niggling, yields more profit than persistent deferral and equivocation, and indeed can elevate what might have amounted only to a painstaking fidelity to something true enough into a seamless imagining faithful only to itself. Self-confidence, it seems, can be easiest to find when you’re on trial.
On several occasions I thought the man actually might have whispered a few words to me. Whether these were only imaginings I don’t know; once you begin to let go of the world, you can’t really say what’s left of your grip. Although generally steady, there was, I realized, a noisiness to his breath: wheezy harmonic notes induced by minute variations, accelerations and decelerations, crescendos and diminuendos, in his manner of inhaling and expelling air. Add to this the frequency with which he cleared his throat, the occasional ferocity of it, in fact, and you’d have to say he had a terrible smoking habit. It would explain his grizzled appearance. Amid all these noises, though, sometimes I felt sure I heard words, specifically remarks about what was materializing at the tip of my pen—complimentary remarks: oohs and aahs and yes, yeses and right, I sees. Paranoid delusions, we know, tend the other way; I was grateful for the aberration. It freed up my hand, and I began to whip the pen around like a tennis racket, striking winners at will. I’m sure the performance itself played a role in deepening my hallucinations. I wondered who else around me in the seats was also seeing things, and if their visions were anywhere as productive as my own.
Of course, none of this exactly acquitted the man one seat from me, nor did it promote any sort of trust between us. Why, I wondered, should he be encouraging me in this way, given the plain truth that he couldn’t have seen anything at all of my drawings? Granted, I had some idea of what was there on the pad, but that was through kinesthesia, an unshareable experience of the position of one’s own limbs. No, I thought, all this positivity must have been delivered at Garrett’s request, to entice me to carry on with a project that was hardly sure to succeed, in part because what exactly I was participating in was still so obscure. I looked down into the darkness of my lap. I was trying not to capture too much in any one sketch: in conditions this unusual, you’d arrive, for all your exertions, at a garble of lines that added up to something less than nothing. Maybe the whole page would come back solid black.
Whatever the man may have been whispering to me, the two women, still faceless, were the first to bring language into the play, twenty minutes after it had begun. But they spoke simultaneously, so that, aurally, you were still squinting: Just what are you bringing? I was reasonably sure the blonde, Daphne, said this, though her voice startled me, as it didn’t mesh with what I’d heard in The Sort. Here her tone and cadences were less quizzical and anxious, and more forward; and while her speech remained profoundly feminine, it was also mildly repellent, perhaps for lacking any hint of the erotic. Eros, of course, was the only sort of desire or force men happily ceded to women, even while scorning them for relying on it; anything else, say, desire simpliciter—desire without wiles—seemed somehow sinister, even in an otherwise unremarkable snippet like this: Just what are you bringing? What could I carry of this aural aspect into the visual realm? Plenty, it seemed. How many times had I drawn a scene that was intrinsically silent, and then come to rather different results when I imagined the same scenario animated by sound? Though I wasn’t especially musical, my ears, I liked to think, could sometimes deliver to me the same vividness as my eyes.
As for the longhaired brunette, what was it she’d said? Is this for me? That might have been it, I couldn’t say. I know that she spoke somewhat indistinctly, her syllables being less precisely shaped than Daphne’s, and with the indirection that made her more familiar as a woman. Which is to say, as a child. Hers was recognizably that singsong tone, the one so many women shielded themselves with in adulthood, and then, if they were lucky (and shrewd), turned to great profit, the shield’s edge becoming a sword. And the brunette’s question, if that was in fact her question—Is this for me?—was precisely the question of a young child. She’d not indicated an object while speaking, just a generalized this. With an adult, with a man, you might have deduced she was referring to the cowboy’s hardshell case; but with a child you can’t assume this. So it was with this girlish woman: her this could have meant the entire scene, or the carefully shaped light, or the old man’s curious chair. A child has the distinct power, and it is a form of power, of sensibly posing such ambiguous questions. You can’t be sure exactly what is intended by them because you can’t say to what degree the child’s grasp of language, of convention, of appropriateness, has solidified yet. This is the great privilege of youth, and many try to extend it right into adulthood. Artists especially. Actors, perhaps, most of all.
Having let them speak, the musician responded—if it was a response—by dropping the case onto the stage. It fell with the bang of a drum, heavy and dull. Yet no heads turned, no-one seemed to notice. Did any of these people exist together, in the same space or time?
“My life,” he declared eventually, this musician, but in a manner that stripped his words of portentousness or pregnancy. It was merely a fact for him. The blonde, who in comparison to the small-made, childlike woman beside her seemed strangely mature for one whose physical form still bore the imprint of youth, appeared incredulous at his pronouncement.
“An instrument,” Daphne either said or queried. Some kind of channel existed between the two of them—and the old man, perhaps him as well, given he was chewing syllables now. In the event, the musician-cum-cowboy didn’t respond to Daphne; he didn’t seem to hear her at all. A one-directional channel, then, like mirrored glass? He traced his way implacably, imperturbably, downstage along the left edge of the light, unburdened of the case, while Daphne wheeled around, down toward us in the audience, to keep him in her sights. With this, the blonde had given us her face. And yes, never mind the new hair, it was her.
Finally, I flipped to a clean sheet and began charting Daphne in the flesh—the lights must have been brighter now, or maybe I’d just made a profound adjustment to the dark—while her sister stared off away from us, toward the androgynous figure, indeterminate in most ways (what race, even?), who said and did nothing, remaining a cipher. “Here?” the longhaired woman said. Again the referent of her question was inscrutable: was her here the same here as anyone else’s? Daphne, without turning back, touched the tips of her fingers to the girlish one’s shoulder, a gesture too distant to give succor but sufficient to convey that, yes, she was listening. The girl turned around and now both of them faced the audience.
Meanwhile, the musician—I felt sure he was more than that now, a sort of troubadour, maybe, though he’d offered no lyrics, not yet—the musician reached the front edge of the light, which was in fact a few yards short of the edge of the stage. Just how many yards, at this point, was unclear; the light had been shifting so much. For a moment the man hesitated on the brink of darkness. Daphne and the brunette peered toward him from center-stage, and you knew by the direction of their gaze, the slow back and forth of their swiveling necks, and, finally, the placement of their hands as they shielded their eyes from the light, absurdly so, as if there were a noonday sun and a great distance separated them from the man—you knew they were searching for him, or for something in him. The man himself, though, was looking only toward us, through us, weighing his choices.
Daphne didn’t look much older than her sisterlike companion. Their faces both had a girlish aspect, as well as a sharpness of form gifted only to the young. The lines of the human figure inevitably lose a certain crispness over the years, in deference, perhaps, to the inevitable fraying of the spirits; though something about Daphne’s posture, perhaps the way she thrust her hands slightly forward, as if at the ready, suggested a kind of preparedness, a maturity, which the other woman seemed to lack as she clasped the long pleats of her dress.
I played with this thought as the chamber orchestra—the one I imagined, anyway, deep in the shadows—returned to its pianissississississimo, so that that strange polytonal music was barely present now as the young man stood in contemplation. A new music, a sort of delicate drumming, filled the amphitheater: I turned toward the source and there he was, Garrett’s man, tapping at his phone again. His broad screen—how much bigger would these devices get before customers balked?—was a brilliant white field with writing at the bottom and fresh text beginning to form along the top as his fingers pattered. Replying to an email right now? At a show built around the rationing of light? I looked up at him in the white blaze he’d created and I could see, in the halo cast, muttering patrons turning toward him. And though he must at least have heard them, he never once flinched; he just doggedly thumbed the screen. What could be so important to communicate that it was worth being upbraided like this? Certainly this languid production left me ample time to speculate. Perhaps, I considered, he was Garrett’s regular assessor, sent to each performance to be attended by Antral staff, to keep tabs on which members did indeed show up and which merely lied about it. Or was he here to assess the merits of the event, whether it was worth including as part of Antral’s education program? His presence could even be a one-off, I realized, and he was here simply to take the measure of Daphne, a proto-star of our proto-campaign. But then wasn’t that why I was here? Could that mean he’d been sent to provide an independent check on the quality of my results?
I thought that his eyes, in the screenlight, might give away something of his intentions, of what he was typing out, but I found it impossible to see them through the glare thrown by his glasses. Eventually, he finished with the phone, although he left it in his lap this time, ready to report.
“Your life?” both women called after the cowboy-troubadour on the precipice of darkness, but only one of them, I couldn’t say who, inflected it as a question and not a declaration. At the same time, and possibly as an effect of these words, although causality in this play was obscure throughout, the musician, apparently having made whatever decision he’d needed to make, carried on sharply downstage, toward us, into the darkness. And as soon as the man crossed into shadow, the old giant stopped muttering, and the women stopped searching. He’d crossed, in fact, just where the little girl, at the opening of the performance, had done so. Was she still there now, in that blackness? Had he gone looking for her? Or would any encounter between the two from here on be a matter of chance?
“You’re sure?” the blonde said, though I couldn’t know to whom she was speaking—perhaps to the musician now absent. The little woman by her side lost interest at that point, almost the instant the man left the field of light, evidently the boundary of her attention; she turned toward the old man, who was rising with difficulty from his skewed chair. Because of his great hunch, and the fact that his legs were actually rather short, he was far less fearsome once he was on his feet. He shuffled ahead, leaning over his feet, concealing without choice his true proportions. His frailty completed a visual contradiction: a crumbling giant.
Daphne also turned around to face up to the old man, who appeared to be tumbling forward in slow motion, and I was struck, as I would be many times over, by the simple rightness of her movements. Even when they were ungainly or awkward, within a role or outside it, as they could and would be sometimes when she would try to make a particular impression on me through some species of ineptitude—there were endless ways of playing dumb, for instance, the kind her companion was playing tonight, through her apparent incomprehension, which was merely one type; but there was bodily dumbness, too, and sometimes this is just what one wants to project, a kind of discomfort in one’s own skin, as we say—even then, Daphne’s body, clumsy as it was, seemed to move the way you felt it ought to. In her you detected the great variability there can be in our expectations of others’ movements; whereas for most of us, the bottleneck on this kind of kinetic expressivity manifests in the rudimentary quality of our body language. We certainly don’t all speak it with the same fluency, or follow the niceties of its grammar. Some of us are worlds apart, and it takes people like Daphne, true savants, to illuminate our deficiencies.
The woman who would rather be a child turned away from the old man, bored, it seemed, and clearly unattuned to any wisdom to be found in his mutterings—he certainly looked the part of the sage—and began to twirl her impossibly long hair, straight as can be, taking up big fistfuls of it, totally unconcerned by the giant’s approach, his tragic shuffling dance. The grimace had returned to his face since he’d rolled himself out of the chair, swinging back and forth until it turned far enough forward for him to slip out. His blousy shirt no longer flowed much, its drape stifled by the same sweat that shone on his forehead. None of this troubled the small woman, who was back to staring off at the spot where the troubadour had disappeared. The giant, limping along like that, wasn’t going to reach her for quite a while still. His real concern, for all we knew, might not even be the women. Who could tell from his almost-words, which might have only been the noise of his lungs straining?
“He’s ready,” the brunette said to Daphne (possibly?), who pulled on her arm but soon gave up, seeing that the little longhaired fool wasn’t going be diverted from her visions of the vanished man. Daphne hastened toward the panting, grumbling sage at three times his pace, in strides sure and quick. I too was scudding along, crowding one sheet after another with impressions of everything, relishing the newness of seeing both nothing of my drawing and hardly anything of my subjects, merely hoping that something of use, across all these pages, was being picked up—especially some sense of Daphne’s weight in the world.
“What is it you need?” the blonde said as she reached the old man, attending to him with a sternness permitted by familiarity, history. “Sit,” she said, “I’ll help you,” with a patience not yet tried beyond its limits. It was as if she could decode his complaints. It seemed to me doubtful he had much interest in returning to the chair, even if he’d hardly managed to move beyond it. He reared back at her words, briefly straightened his gnarled spine, flashing his true height before being forced back down by the pain that was behind his grimace, so that his face, which was relatively small and mean next to the scale of his body and its presumably epic past, ended up near hers again. Daphne tugged at him as she had at the small woman, but his slow progress couldn’t be arrested, nothing could drive him back. He seemed to be limping straight through her, and in the weak light their forms merged into a mess of limbs.
One bit of clarity had been achieved at least: it was the troubadour’s black box that interested the old man, not the women. I wondered why it had taken me so long to consider this possibility, since the case was in fact closer to him than either woman had been when he first rose from his throne. It must be, I thought, because I understood the giant to be grinding on with a blind animality that had survived the dissolution of his mind, so that he didn’t have the capacity to “take an interest” per se. And it looked as if Daphne, or rather her character—no-one onstage tonight had names, so it was easy to think of the blonde under the actress’ name—it looked like Daphne had made the same assumption. Actually, the giant was more alert to circumstance than this. For one, he clearly found her a nuisance, and began taking more urgent steps, even strides, if one was feeling generous, toward the box. Daphne didn’t stand in his way. She was looking off-stage, like her brunette sister, in the direction of the vanished troubadour (why, though, wasn’t anyone looking for the little girl lost to the dark?), while the old man made more reasonable time now, no matter that his great size still made his strides look comically cramped.
Light abruptly disturbed me then: Garrett’s man was back at his phone, and now he was going at it brazenly, typing so sharply his fingernails clacked against the screen. Theatergoers right around us were exasperated, no longer bothering to mask their indignation. As if in response, the bearded man turned to me with a smirk, daring me to do something, say something. But he didn’t linger. He was firing off another dispatch on me, or Daphne, or the absentee employees. I nearly walked out there and then, but decided to remain once he’d put his phone away properly, in his pocket. I drew a deep breath to steady myself before returning to the task at hand: sketching the giant towering over Daphne. I left out of frame the object of his obsession—the black case, or whatever it was he saw in his mind’s eye. The drama onstage, to the degree that there was one, certainly centered on the case. All lines of dramatic force converged there, yet its contents would never be known to us. When a key was finally put to it by the blonde—by Daphne—only she gets a look inside. At that point, the vanished troubadour, or really a precursor of him, since the actor who came into the light from the darkness was somewhat younger than the original, yet he was still recognizably him, and not merely because of markers like clothing but because of a genuine physical resemblance (the actor’s younger brother?)—this younger version of the troubadour was suddenly put under intense light, sitting on a stool and very soon facing away from us, and still dressed in the rough manner of his older self. His only company was the jarringly incongruous instrument he began to play, and play poorly: a bassoon, more befitting the men in tuxedos consumed by the shadows everywhere around this beam of light descending on the troubadour. It was ugly, out of tune, a little absurd, and it was the only music left. The ever-present concert music, so faint, so gently atonal—redolent of early Schoenberg, in fact, as if nodding to Dumas’ film—had given way to a silence that this out-of-place man filled so terribly.
The case, I thought, would have nicely fit just the bassoon he played; but wouldn’t it have equally fit a sniper’s rifle, disassembled into its components? The notion wasn’t so odd: it would explain the man’s dress, in particular, his heavy boots, which had a military aspect to them. Here was another idea further down the same line, and with strong contemporaneity: an improvised explosive device. Wouldn’t this explain his hasty flight into shadow earlier, and even his hesitation over which direction to flee after leaving the thing at the center of the stage, with a maximum radius within the light?
Ultimately, there were too many possibilities to sift through. A narrative-conceptual relation with the Pied Piper was being forged, I knew, but I never puzzled out exactly what that relation was supposed to be (had Volger?). For this reason, The Vegetable Gender registered as something closer to dance than to theater—a sort of prose dance, though, as the performers’ movements had a plainness to them, notwithstanding the quasi-allegorical setup. This fact distanced the work from anything like dance of the more self-consciously lyrical sort, and the allegory was only allowed to peak through the formal elements of movement and light here and there, in a rather unsatisfying way. For one thing, the small child, I was sorry to see, never returned. Her one minute at the start was an excruciating red herring. Perhaps one of the other women was meant to be her reincarnation; or the vanished man, depositor of the case, might well have discovered her in the dark.
Daphne’s dialogue remained sporadic and banal to the very end: everyday phrases, assertions, and questions taken out of their quotidian contexts. It was, finally, the plainness of the language (if not its use) and the ordinariness of the characters, excepting the giant, that kept things from tailing off into the surreal, where dramatic stakes are lowest. This work struck me as embodying a quite robust realism, but with gaps in it; and it was these gaps, in dialogue, in action, rather than anything intrinsically fantastical, that made the production resistant to conventional interpretation. Strange: you attempted the usual sorts of psychological readings appropriate to narrative drama, but then, finding yourself more or less thwarted by the lacunae riddling the thing, you switched over, without even noticing it, to a more sensory-symbolic hermeneutics, the sort of thing one deploys in fathoming, say, kabuki.
I was already aware, from The Sort, of Daphne’s startling powers over the eye. The shortcomings of The Vegetable Gender stood no chance of dimming those intensities: the way she emptied herself, became a body of simple sensation operating mostly outside the bounds of literary sense, within an arena of arational cause and effect. Whenever the action of the play ran through her, you could almost forget that there were any gaps, that anything was missing. She became all surface, shunting her entire self into her flesh without remainder, and the effect was so potent that near the finale, when she opened the case—the old giant had secured the key in a screaming match with some sort of Arab nomad whose time onstage was severely crimped and whose relation to the rest no-one could have determined—both she and we, the audience, were barely interested in seeing inside. She peeked half-heartedly, shook out her hands as if they were stiff, and, without a word, simply walked toward us, like the musician before her, and the child, too, straight into the black.
The whole show was over in just forty-five minutes, though some of us would have surely headed for the exits if it had gone on any longer. Almost all of it occurred either in half-light or absolute darkness, save the last five minutes, which occasioned spasms of brilliant light illuminating the whole of the stage. Everything froze at those moments, the orchestra, the actors, except for the incompetent “playing” of the bassoonist. I never got a clean look at so much as the outside of his black case, for even the lights, when they finally arrived, were blinding. Each time they rose and I studied the black box, it seemed to have moved elsewhere, as if handled in the dark. And each time I probed for insight there, hoping my eyes wouldn’t give out this time in the overwhelming glare, I neglected to explore, in the heavy glow that hung over the seats, the source of my real concern—Garrett’s man, still stinking of rose (it’s surprising what you can come so quickly to hate).
As I realized my oversight, the show headed for its close. Just before everything went white for the final time, we were left with a tableau: the blonde kneeling beside the brunette, who stood there mute and stupid; the bassoon discomposed into its elements near the foot of the stage, with the musician long gone, as were the transhuman and the Arab; and the old giant still enduring, even if he’d collapsed in a heap next to his chair.
We were, actors and audience, buried in darkness for some time before uncertain applause rippled through the seats. We ended up clapping in the pitch dark, long and loud, mostly, I thought, to mark our imminent return to the world and the end of the night’s privations.
Yet the light—it wouldn’t come back.