Making his way through the flats, Mangon walked up to her quietly and kissed her bare shoulder. She stood up with a flourish, an enormous monument of a woman in a magnificent black silk dress sparkling with thousands of sequins.
“Thank you, Mangon,” she sang out when he complimented her. She swirled off to a hatbox on the bed, pulled out a huge peacock feather and stabbed it into her hair.
Mangon had come around at six, several hours earlier than usual; over the past two days he had felt increasingly uneasy. He was convinced that Alto was in error, and yet logic was firmly on his side. Could Madame Gioconda’s voice have preserved itself? Her spoken voice, unless she was being particularly sweet, was harsh and uneven, recently even more so. He assumed that with only a week till her performance nervousness was making her irritable.
Again she was going out, as she had done almost every night. With whom, she never explained; probably to the theater restaurants, to renew contacts with agents and managers. He would have liked to go with her, but he felt out of place on the plane of Madame Gioconda’s existence.
“Mangon, I won’t be back until very late,” she warned him. “You look rather tired and pasty. You’d better go home and get some sleep.”
Mangon noticed he was still wearing his yellow peaked cap. Unconsciously he must already have known he would not be spending the night there.
“Do you want to go to the stockade tomorrow?” he asked.
“Hmmmh ... I don’t think so. It gives me rather a headache. Let’s leave it for a day or two.”
She turned on him with a tremendous smile, her eyes glittering with sudden affection.
“Goodbye, Mangon, it’s been wonderful to see you.” She bent down and pressed her cheek maternally to his, engulfing him in a heady wave of powder and perfume. In an instant all his doubts and worries evaporated. He looked forward to seeing her the next day, certain that they would spend the future together.
For half an hour after she had gone he wandered around the deserted sound stage, going through his memories. Then he made his way out to the alley and drove back to the stockade.
As the day of Madame Gioconda’s performance drew closer Mangon’s anxieties mounted. Twice he had been down to the concert studio at Video City and had rehearsed with Alto his entry beneath the stage to the cue box, a small compartment off the corridor used by the electronics engineers. They had checked the power points, borrowed a sonovac from the services section—a heavy-duty model used for shielding VIP’s and commentators at airports—and mounted its nozzle in the cue hood.
Alto stood on the platform erected for Madame Gioconda and shouted at the top of his voice at Merrill sitting in the third row of the orchestra section.
“Hear anything?” He called afterwards.
Merrill shook his head. “Nothing, no vibration at all.”
Down below, Mangon flicked the release toggle, vented a long-drawn-out “Fiivvveeee! . . . Foouuurrr! . . . Thrreeeee! . . . Twooooo! . . . Onnneeee. . . !”
“Good enough,” Alto decided. Chicago-style, they hid the sonovac in a triple-bass case and stored it in Alto’s office.
“Do you want to hear her sing, Mangon?” Alto asked. “She should be rehearsing now.”
Mangon hesitated, then declined.
“It’s tragic that she’s unable to realize the truth herself,” Alto commented. “Her mind must be fixed fifteen or twenty years in the past, when she sang her greatest roles at La Scala. That’s the voice she hears, the voice she’ll probably always hear.”
Mangon pondered this. Once he had tried to ask Madame Gioconda how her practice sessions were going, but she was moving into a different zone and answered with some grandiose remark. He was seeing less and less of her; whenever he visited the station she was either about to go out or else tired and eager to be rid of him. Their trips to the stockade had ceased. All this he accepted as inevitable; after the performance, he assured himself, after her triumph, she would come back to him.
He noticed, however, that he was beginning to stutter.
* * *
On the final afternoon, a few hours before the performance that evening, Mangon drove down to F Street for what was to be the last time. He had not seen Madame Gioconda the previous day and he wanted to be with her and give her any encouragement she needed.
As he turned into the alley he was surprised to see two large moving vans parked outside the station entrance. Four or five men were carrying out pieces of furniture and the great scenic flats from the sound stage.
Mangon ran over to them. One of the vans was full; he recognized all Madame Gioconda’s possessions—the rococo wardrobe and dressing table, the couch, the huge Desdemona bed, up-ended and wrapped in corrugated paper. As he looked at it he felt that a section of himself had been tom from him and rammed away callously. In the bright daylight the peeling threadbare flats had lost all illusion of reality; with them Mangon’s whole relationship with Madame Gioconda seemed to have been dismantled.
The last of the workmen came out with a gold cushion under his arm, tossed it into the second van. The foreman sealed the doors and waved on the driver.
“W . . wh . . where are you going?” Mangon asked him urgently.
Th foreman looked him up and down. “You’re the sweeper, are you?” He jerked a thumb toward the station. “The old girl said there was a message for you in there. Couldn’t see one myself.”
Mangon left him and ran into the foyer and up the stairway toward studio 2. The removers had torn down the blinds and a gray light was flooding into the dusty auditorium. Without the flats the stage looked exposed and derelict.
He raced down the aisle, wondering why Madame Gioconda had decided to leave without telling him.
The stage had been stripped. The music stands had been kicked over, the stove lay on its side with two or three old pans around it. Underfoot there was a miscellaneous litter of paper, ash, and empty vials.
Mangon searched around for the message, probably pinned to one of the partitions.
Then he heard it screaming at him from the walls, violent and concise.
“GO AWAY, YOU UGLY CHILD! NEVER TRY TO SEE ME AGAIN!”
He shrank back, involuntarily trying to shout as the walls seemed to fall in on him, but his throat had frozen.
As he entered the corridor below the stage shortly before eight-twenty, Mangon could hear the sounds of the audience arriving and making their way to their seats. The studio was almost full, a hubbub of well-heeled chatter. Lights flashed on and off in the corridor, and oblique atmospheric shifts cut through the air as the players on the stage tuned their instruments.
Mangon slid past the technicians manning the neurophonic rigs which supplied the orchestra, trying to make the enormous triplebass case as inconspicuous as possible. They were all busy checking the relays and circuits, and he reached the cue box and slipped through the door unnoticed.
The box was almost in darkness, a few rays of colored light filtering through the pink and white petals of the chrysanthemums stacked over the hood. He bolted the door, then opened the case, lifted out the sonovac, and clipped the snout into the cannister. Leaning forward, with his hands he pushed a small aperture among the flowers.
Directly in front of him he could see a velvet-lined platform, equipped with a white metal rail to the center of which a large floral ribbon had been tied. Beyond was the orchestra, disposed in a semicircle, each of the twenty members sitting at a small boxlike desk on which rested his instrument, tone generator, and cathode tube. They were all present, and the light reflected from the ray screens threw a vivid phosphorescent glow onto the silver wall behind them.
Mangon propped the nozzle of the sonovac into the aperture, bent down, plugged in the lead, and switched on.
Just before eight twenty-five someone stepped across the platform and paused in front of the cue hood. Mangon crouched back, watching the patent leather shoes and black trousers move near the nozzle.
“Mangon!” he heard Alto
snap. He craned forward, saw Alto eyeing him. Mangon waved to him and Alto nodded slowly, at the same time smiling to someone in the audience, then turned on his heel and took his place in the orchestra.
At eight-thirty a sequence of red and green lights signaled the start of the program. The audience quieted, waiting while an announcer in an offstage booth introduced the program.
A master of ceremonies appeared onstage, standing behind the cue hood, and addressed the audience. Mangon sat quietly on the small wooden seat fastened to the wall, staring blankly at the cannister of the sonovac. There was a round of applause, and a steady green light shone downward through the flowers. The air in the cue box began to sweeten; a cool motionless breeze eddied vertically around him as a rhythmic ultrasonic pressure wave pulsed past. It relaxed the confined dimensions of the box, and had a strange mesmeric tug that held his attention. Somewhere in his mind he realized that the symphony had started, but he was too distracted to pull himself together and listen to it consciously.
Suddenly, through the gap between the flowers and the sonovac nozzle, he saw a large white mass shifting about on the platform. He slipped off the seat and peered up.
Madame Gioconda had taken her place on the platform. Seen from below she seemed enormous, a towering cataract of glistening white satin that swept down to her feet. Her arms were folded loosely in front of her, fingers flashing with blue and white stones. He could only just glimpse her face, the terrifying witchlike mask turned in profile as she waited for some offstage signal.
Mangon mobilized himself, slid his hand down to the trigger of the sonovac. He waited, feeling the steady subliminal music of Alto’s symphony swell massively within him, its tempo accelerating. Presumably Madame Gioconda’s arranger was waiting for a climax at which to introduce her first aria.
Abruptly Madame Gioconda looked forward at the audience and took a short step to the rail. Her hands parted and opened, palms upward, her head moved back, her bare shoulders swelled.
The wave front pulsing through the cue box stopped, then soared off in a continuous unbroken crescendo. At the same time Madame Gioconda thrust her head out and her throat muscles contracted powerfully.
As the sound burst from her throat Mangon’s finger locked rigidly against the trigger guard. An instant later, before he could think, a shattering blast of sound ripped through his ears, followed by a slightly higher note that appeared to strike a hidden ridge halfway along its path, wavered slightly, then recovered and sped on, like an express train crossing lines.
Mangon listened to her numbly, hands gripping the barrel of the sonovac. The voice exploded in his brain, flooding every nexus of cells with its violence. It was grotesque, an insane parody of a classical soprano. Harmony, purity, cadence had gone. Rough and cracked, it jerked sharply from one high note to a lower, its breath intervals uncontrolled, sudden precipices of gasping silence which plunged through the volcanic torrent, dividing it into a loosely connected sequence of bravura passages.
He barely recognized what she was singing: the Toreador song from Carmen. Why she had picked this he could not imagine. Unable to reach its higher notes, she fell back on the swinging rhythm of the refrain, hammering out the rolling phrases with tosses of her head. After a dozen bars her pace slackened and she slipped into an extempore humming, then broke out of this into a final climactic assault.
Appalled, Mangon watched as two or three members of the orchestra stood up and disappeared into the wings. The others had stopped playing, were switching off their instruments and conferring with each other. The audience was obviously restive; Mangon could hear individual voices in the intervals when Madame Gioconda refilled her lungs.
Behind him someone hammered on the door. Startled, Mangon nearly tripped across the sonovac. Then he bent down and wrenched the plug out of its socket. Snapping open the two catches beneath the chassis of the sonovac, he pulled off the cannister to reveal the valves, amplifier, and generator. He slipped his fingers carefully through the leads and coils, seized them as firmly as he could and ripped them out with a single motion. Tearing his nails, he stripped the printed circuit off the bottom of the chassis and crushed it between his hands. Satisfied, he dropped the sonovac to the floor, listened for a moment to the caterwauling above, which was now being drowned by the mounting vocal opposition of the audience, then unlatched the door.
Paul Merrill, his bow tie askew, burst in. He gaped blankly at Mangon, at the blood dripping from his fingers and the smashed sonovac on the floor.
He seized Mangon by the shoulders, shook him roughly. “Mangon, are you crazy? What are you trying to do?”
Mangon attempted to say something, but his voice had died. He pulled himself away from Merrill and pushed past into the corridor.
Merrill shouted after him, “Mangon, help me fix this! Where are you going?” He got down on his knees, started trying to piece the sonovac together.
From the wings Mangon briefly watched the scene on the stage.
Madame Gioconda was still singing, her voice completely inaudible in the uproar from the auditorium. Half the audience were on their feet, shouting toward the stage and apparently remonstrating with the studio officials. All but a few members of the orchestra had left their instruments, and were sitting on their desks and watching Madame Gioconda in amazement.
The program director, Alto, and the master of ceremonies stood in front of her, banging on the rail and trying to attract her attention. But Madame Gioconda failed to notice them. Head back, eyes on the brilliant ceiling lights, hands gesturing majestically, she soared along the private causeways of sound that poured unrelentingly from her throat, a great white angel of discord on her homeward flight.
Mangon watched her sadly, then slipped away through the stagehands pressing around him. As he left the theater by the stage door a small crowd was gathering by the main entrance. He flicked away the blood from his fingers, then bound his handkerchief around them.
He walked down the side street to where the sound truck was parked, climbed into the cab and sat still for a few minutes, looking out at the bright evening lights in the bars and shop fronts.
Opening the dashboard locker, he hunted through it, pulled out an old wrist-pad, and clipped it into his sleeve.
In his ears the sounds of Madame Gioconda singing echoed like an insane banshee.
He switched on the sonovac under the dashboard, turned it full on, then started the engine and drove off into the night.
Billenium
All day long, and often into the early hours of the morning, the tramp of feet sounded up and down the stairs outside Ward’s cubicle. Built into a narrow alcove in a bend of the staircase between the fourth and fifth floors, its plywood walls flexed and creaked with every footstep like the timbers of a rotting windmill. Over a hundred people lived in the top three floors of the old rooming house, and sometimes Ward would lie awake on his narrow bunk until 2 or 3 a.m. mechanically counting the last residents returning from the all-night movies in the stadium half a mile away. Through the window he could hear giant fragments of the amplified dialogue booming among the rooftops. The stadium was never empty. During the day the huge four-sided screen was raised on its davit and athletics meetings or football matches ran continuously. For the people in the houses abutting the stadium the noise must have been unbearable.
Ward, at least, had a certain degree of privacy. Two months earlier, before he came to live on the staircase, he had shared a room with seven others on the ground floor of a house in 755th Street, and the ceaseless press of people jostling past the window had reduced him to a state of chronic exhaustion. The street was always full, an endless clamor of voices and shuffling feet. By six-thirty, when he woke, hurrying to take his place in the bathroom queue, the crowds already jammed it from sidewalk to sidewalk, the din punctuated every half minute by the roar of the elevated trains running over the shops on the opposite side of the road. As soon as he saw the advertisement describing the staircase cubicle (like everyon
e else, he spent most of his spare time scanning the classifieds in the newspapers, moving his lodgings an average of once every two months) he had left despite the higher rental. A cubicle on a staircase would almost certainly be on its own.
However, this had its drawbacks. Most evenings his friends from the library would call in, eager to rest their elbows after the bruising crush of the public reading room. The cubicle was slightly more than four and a half square meters in floor area, half a square meter over the statutory maximum for a single person, the carpenters having taken advantage, illegally, of a recess beside a nearby chimney breast. Consequently Ward had been able to fit a small straight-backed chair into the interval between the bed and the door, so that only one person at a time need sit on the bed—in most single cubicles host and guest had to sit side by side on the bed, conversing over their shoulders and changing places periodically to avoid neck strain.
“You were lucky to find this place,” Rossiter, the most regular visitor, never tired of telling him. He reclined back on the bed, gesturing at the cubicle. “It’s enormous, the perspectives really zoom. I’d be surprised if you hadn’t got at least five meters here, perhaps even six.”
Ward shook his head categorically. Rossiter was his closest friend, but the quest for living space had forged powerful reflexes. “Just over four and a half, I’ve measured it carefully. There’s no doubt about it.”
Rossiter lifted one eyebrow. “I’m amazed. It must be the ceiling then.”
Manipulating the ceiling was a favorite trick of unscrupulous landlords—most assessments of area were made upon the ceiling, out of convenience, and by tilting back the plywood partitions the rated area of a cubicle could be either increased, for the benefit of a prospective tenant (many married couples were thus bamboozled into taking a single cubicle), or decreased temporarily on the visit of the housing inspectors. Ceilings were crisscrossed with pencil marks staking out the rival claims of tenants on opposite sides of a party wall. Someone timid of his rights could be literally squeezed out of existence—in fact, the advertisement “quiet clientele” was usually a tacit invitation to this sort of piracy.
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