In the Court of the Yellow King

by Tim Curran

  She turned the flashlight up toward the low ceiling. White ceramic knobs looped with wire dotted the crossbeams. Julia frowned. It was hard to imagine that restoration work would have left old wiring in place, especially in a theater, where concerns about fire bordered on the paranoid. They restored the whole place, top to bottom, Nicole had told them; either Nicole was wrong, or there was some other reason that an electrical system a century old was still in place.

  Julia held up her phone so that the beam of light shone along the wire, which turned sideways and ran left along the seam of wall and ceiling, into the darker recesses of the room. She followed it a ways until it struck a wall, curved down, and paralleled a doorframe, disappearing through a hole drilled into the wood of the frame. The hole was fringed with some kind of sticky cloth, protecting the wood from the electric wire. It was too close for her to peer through to the other side. She moved the light to the door and illuminated dark, heavy-grained wood. Light sparkled on an old-fashioned glass doorknob, its facets caked with gray dust. Julia turned the knob, expecting the mechanism to be rusted shut, the door warped into its frame. To her surprise, it moved. She tucked the phone into her back pocket and used both hands to twist the knob harder. There was resistance, and then something metallic snapped, letting the knob spin all the way over. She tugged at the door. It opened with surprising ease, the old hinges grating but doing nothing to hinder her.

  Without thinking she reached inside the door for a light switch, felt something under her fingers, and flipped it up. There was a humming, crackling sound overhead and the room flooded with dusty yellow light. Julia stared up at a light bulb, the size of her fists put together, mounted in the ceiling inside a faded green-bronze dome of metal. Not only had the old wiring been left in it place, it still worked. Possibly the electricians just hadn’t gone this far into the building.

  The light in the ceiling was hardly brighter than her phone’s light, but at least it left her hands free. The secret room was disappointing; more of a storage closet than a proper room. The damp-dog smell of old books, poorly cared for, was everywhere. Sheaves of paper overflowed rickety wooden shelves. Julia flipped through a few, saw nothing of interest, put them back haphazardly. Other than the usual copies of Shakespeare, they were plays she’d never heard of, none dated any sooner than fifty years ago.

  The room was poorly ventilated and uncomfortably hot. Julia pushed a stray wisp of hair out of her eyes and left a streak of dirt and sweat on her face. She wiped her filthy hands on her jeans and reached for the switch to turn the light off as she went out. Her gaze rested on a cardboard box that she hadn’t noticed before, high up on a shelf, pushed so far back that it was barely visible. She stood on tiptoes to reach it. Her fingers just brushed the corners of the box; she stretched up, using her fingertips to inch it towards her little by little, and before she could get her hands fully around it the box tipped forward, showering her with musty paper.

  Julia stood, stunned, the now-empty box in her hands. It was perhaps three inches deep. Its dimensions were slightly unfamiliar, not quite right to fit a standard piece of paper. She kneeled down to start gathering up the papers that had tipped out, and saw that they were also odd-sized, maybe a European size, or paper so old that it had come out before standard dimensions. They were yellowed and crackled under her touch.

  She turned the papers written-side up. At first glance she thought they were sheet music, covered in long, lined boxes that looked like musical staves; on a closer look, the markings on the staves weren’t musical notes, but stick figures. If it was dance notation, it was a form she’d never seen before. The figures moved up and down on the grid behind them, and the staves had seven lines, not five. Their limbs and posture contorted in positions that didn’t flow from one movement to the next. Twisted in pain, she thought, then dismissed it as fancy. No system of dance writing illustrated how uncomfortable any position would be for the dancer.

  There was tiny, faded writing everywhere around the papers, too; some neatly printed above and below the figures, some in the margins. Entire paragraphs of dense scribbling were crammed between staves. Most of it was illegible, possibly not even in English. Julia sighed and piled the papers back into the box. There were no page numbers or titles, no way to find any sensible or orderly arrangement of their proper sequence.

  Julia picked up the last stray sheet and dropped it back on top of the others. Printed squarely in the center of the page, surrounded by a margin of white, was the word CARCOSA.

  She squinted at the page. She couldn’t tell whether the word had been printed in the only block of available space, or whether it had been put there first and the other writing around it. The scribbles did seem more compressed at its margins, almost as if they were crowding away from the word.

  Julia carefully fitted the grey cardboard lid back over the warped edges of the box. She decided that she would look it over later, after she’d had some rest and wasn’t squatting on the floor of a dingy and probably dangerous old storeroom, working herself up into a melodramatic lather over an obsolete stack of papers that had nothing at all to do with her current work. For all she knew, it was some long-dead choreographer’s idiosyncratic notation for Swan Lake.

  On the way back up the stairs, box tucked under her arm, she paused to shine her light on the near end of the wiring system, tracing it up to find where it tied into the building’s electricity. At the last knob, the wire hung loose, its end frayed, attached to nothing at all.

  The sounds through the cheap walls of the hotel room were not soothing, but they were predictable. Through one wall of Julia’s narrow room, Nicole’s voice rose and fell like the surf as she berated Kai, for some failing in the day’s rehearsal, or perhaps for showing too much enthusiasm in her scene with Catherine. In the room that shared the opposite wall, Taylor was practicing her monologue from Scene Two, halting mid-sentence, starting over with a different intonation, hours of the same two minutes of speech, a broken record that would continue until nearly midnight. Outside, breaking glass heralded drunks pitching empty bottles into the nearest

  dumpster. Julia had learned to ignore the sounds as best she could. Neither the company’s budget nor Julia herself could afford any better living accommodations.

  The floor was strewn with the papers she had found in the theater basement. Ever since returning to the hotel, she had puzzled over the dance notation, trying to find their correct order, to spot a page number or direction that would permit her to see the full pattern of the dance. The noises from the rooms next to hers did not help her concentration. A few times she thought she could discern a connection between the end of one stanza and the beginning of another page, but when she looked a second time there was no consonance; she could not imagine why she had placed those pages together.

  To her left, a repetitive thud against the wall: the headboard of Nicole and Kai’s bed punctuating their post-argument lovemaking.

  Julia gave up. She picked a paper at random and taped it to the mirror that backed the door of her hotel room. It was hopeless to expect that she could properly reconstruct the entire dance; perhaps rehearsing at least one of the pages would give her a sense of what sort of dance it was, a clue to what movements would logically follow. She spread her arms, wrists canted, mimicking the posture of the first stick figure on the page. It was slow work, stopping and adjusting her position, sometimes painfully, none of the movements recalling any dance familiar to her. Julia concentrated on matching each stance before moving to the next, the sounds of the women to either side of her a bizarre metronome to her efforts.

  Halfway through the page she broke out in sweat; before the final stanza she stopped and let her arms drop to her sides. In spite of the aches and exhaustion, she felt elated. It was a distraction from the tedious personal drama around her, but more than that, the excitement of learning something new, something difficult but promising, something that with enough effort and practice,
she could understand, perhaps even master.

  She looked down at the floor and her eyes lit on one of the papers scattered there. She recognized it immediately as the next in sequence, the position of the first dancer clearly the natural progression after the last one in the page on her mirror. Julia couldn’t imagine why she had not seen it before. She taped the new page next to it, paused to drink a glass of water, and began again.

  When she arrived at the theater the next morning Nicole was, to her great surprise, waiting for her. Less surprising was Nicole’s cold fury.

  “Where have you been? We’ve been rehearsing for hours. Jarré sent more changes last night.” She thrust a paper-clipped script at Julia. “You have a few more lines. Learn them.”

  Julia eased herself into the nearest seat; under Nicole’s sharp gaze, she did her best to hide her stiffness and aches from her work the night before. She had a few more lines, true, but none of them were very good, the dialogue not merely short, but banal. She glanced up at the other women; they seemed to share her view, though Kai was careful to wipe the surprise off her face before Nicole saw it.

  “What is this?” Madison asked. She tapped one long white-tipped fingernail on the page. “Iambic pentameter? Bad poetry? Is he writing this stuff drunk? It’s awful.”

  Nicole’s mouth twisted. “This is what he sent. Perhaps it was meant as satire. It’s what we have. The man is a genius playwright, who do you think you are to criticize him?”

  “Someone stuck having to memorize this crap,” Madison said, but the fight had drained out of her voice. All of them were nervous and off-balance. Their excitement at being chosen to act in Jarré’s first new play in decades, even with a partial script, gave way to anxiety about his delay in finishing the material. Now their relief had turned sour.

  Julia broke the silence. “We shouldn’t rehearse today until everyone has time to look over the new material. Right? Why don’t we all take a break. My ankle’s better, I can practice some of my dance. It’ll be easier on an empty stage.”

  She was surprised to hear the confidence in her voice; almost as surprised to see Nicole respond with a curt nod and a gesture herding the other actors out of the theater. Julia rarely spoke when the director was around, and certainly never told her what to do; even hesitant suggestions were ignored, or shut down with disdain. Perhaps it was the uncertainty over the new material that distracted Nicole, but at least it meant that Julia had the stage to herself for practice. She planned to add some of the new steps from the manuscript to her routine, and it would be easiest to do that without anyone telling her to move this way or that to accommodate the other players.

  This time, the tilted stage gave her no trouble at all.

  Everyone’s nerves were stretched by the end of the week. Jarré made daily changes to the script, sometimes adding entirely new blocks of dialogue or throwing out difficult lines that the actors had finally mastered. Taylor’s monologues next door were more subdued. Kai and Nicole’s arguments were longer and punctuated by tears; sometimes there was silence, as if the women had gone to bed without speaking.

  Julia hardly noticed. She had assembled more than half of the manuscript in what she was sure was the correct order. She could no longer see her mirror, covered in paper taped neatly together, the pages spilling around the corner to the adjacent wall. The movements were still difficult at times, even painful, but they formed a cohesive whole. With more of the dance assembled in its proper order, Julia could see that there was more than simple choreography. It told a story, one that she could only glimpse in fragments, conveyed through even small details such as the angle of an elbow or the tilt of the head. She might have called it interpretive dance except that the dance was the language, itself; the dancer was the interpreter, the conduit for the power and meaning of the dance.

  The other thing Julia realized was that the drawings illustrated the movements not of one dancer, but two.

  This took her by surprise — the figures were so similar that she did not realize there was more than one until she had assembled many pages. So many revelations in the dance were like that: utterly opaque until enough of them were placed together, and then the pattern was so obvious a child could have seen it. It seemed less choreography than a wonderfully complex puzzle.

  The second dancer appeared early on, simply materializing halfway through a stanza, the first figure accommodating its presence as if it had always been there. The second figure grew more prominent until the two were virtually indistinguishable. Julia could not put her finger on why she believed there were two dancers when only one was drawn, but she was nonetheless sure it was the case.

  By the last page, only the second dancer remained. It was difficult to tell if the first had simply been removed from the manuscript, or was still present, the second dancer superimposed so that they had... merged? Julia hoped that the solution would reveal itself once she assembled the entire dance.

  Her exhaustion and soreness were partly the fault of trying to dance both parts at once, when she had mistakenly thought there was only once dancer. She began with the first, then switched to the second when it appeared. Technically it appeared more difficult, yet as she practiced it became easier, or at least, less stressful to her body; she was able to get through two or three pages at a time without having to stop to rest.

  Julia’s one frustration was the text. No matter how she turned the pages or peered at the words, nothing was coherent other than the single word, CARCOSA, that she had seen in the theater basement when she first discovered the play. She could pick out a letter here or there, and very occasionally, groups of letters that turned into nonsense words: DEMHE. PTAHYL. There was meaning here, words at the edge of her memory like the name of a forgotten friend.

  She sighed and stretched her limbs. It would become clear to her, in time, just as the strange notations of movement had been incomprehensible at first and then so obvious that she wondered she could have ever failed to understand it. Until then, she would master the dance.

  When Julia wandered into the theater late the next morning, there were so many new pages that the play was almost a different script, and Nicole was on the verge of tears. “I don’t understand what he’s doing,” she repeated, as the actors bickered and complained about days of wasted rehearsal, wondered aloud whether the bad writing was some kind of Dadaist feint, the play’s true brilliance reserved for the yet-unwritten Act Two, or whether it was nothing more than Jarré’s descent into alcoholism and dementia.

  Julia picked up her copy of the new script and turned to the final scene of Act One. Her brief exchange with the Queen had become a conversation; her insistence that something was wrong growing more strident, the queen’s commanding words turning fearful. There was a mistake, she thought; writing in a hurry, Jarré had confused his pronouns, muddling when the Queen addressed the Dancer and when she spoke to the Masked Stranger. She pointed the lines out to Nicole, who merely shrugged.

  “I have a suggestion,” Julia said. “I’ve been practicing a new dance routine, I think I should do more than a few steps on stage during the masque. A real dance, since I have more of a part now. It will make the masque seem more believable.”

  Nicole looked at her, opened her mouth, then turned her gaze away, as if she thought better of her reply. No one, other than Julia, rehearsed that afternoon.

  There were no more changes the following day, which muted some of the grumbling about the poor quality of the script. They worked their way through the leaden dialogue, some with better humor than others. Julia hardly cared. Her lines were perhaps not as bad as those of Kai, who played the Queen, or Taylor, whose monologue was almost now a comedy; and besides, the important thing was the dance.

  Nicole stood up quickly and interrupted Kai halfway through a line. “Julia, we have a real problem here. I’m stopping rehearsal for the day so that you and I can go over this one-on-one.”

 
; Julia looked at her with mild surprise. Nicole seemed less angry than... afraid? Kai, too, noticed something was wrong, her gaze flickering from her lover to Julia as she reluctantly filed out of the theater with the others.

  Julia sat down cross-legged at the edge of the stage and waited patiently.

  Nicole paced back and forth. “The play—” she said, and then seemed to reach a decision. She stood in front of Julia and looked up at the smaller woman. “It isn’t Jarré.”

  “Of course it’s him. That first scene, nobody else could have written it.”

  “The first scene was his writing. All his. And so were parts of the others.” Nicole glanced over her shoulder at the entrance to the theater, as if she feared eavesdroppers. She lowered her voice almost to a whisper. “You understand, Julia, he was not a very pleasant person. He is – he was – almost eighty, and he managed to piss off a lot of people over the years. I was the only person left he didn’t have to pay to deal with him or his problems.”

  “Was?” Julia said. She stared at Nicole, not quite sure if she thought she had heard correctly.

  “Very few people knew where he lived. He was a recluse, everyone knows that. He hated e-mail and faxes. All of his new material, he mailed to me. When there was nothing, for days, I drove out to his house. I thought he’d gone on a bender or had some kind of artistic fit. I thought if I met with him face to face, I could bully him into getting his act together.” Nicole smiled without humor, her eyes looking to one side of Julia as if just remembering something. She gave herself a little shake. “I knew something was wrong as soon as I arrived, the house—the lights were all on. He was notoriously cheap. When it got dark he’d only have one room lit at a time, to save on his electric bill.”