by Dessa
On this trip, I did score a window seat and I can see my reflection in the scratched plastic pane. My new china doll haircut looks like a wig—like I’m a poorly protected witness or a cartoon spy. Sometimes people ask if my hair is real or if what was my signature braid is somehow tucked beneath it. When I get offstage after a concert, flushed and sweating, sometimes a fan will try to pull to check.
Over the PA, a regal baritone voice informs us that we are in a holding pattern over JFK. We are not allowed to land, but we are not supposed to leave. Idle circles, like a woman’s finger on a wineglass in a second-rate seduction scene.
I have come to New York because back in Minneapolis I have been asked to write an opera—a thing that I have no idea how to do. I’m a rapper and a pop vocalist; my first association with Carmen would be Sandiego. But when the director approached me, I said yes because he seemed smart and I was flattered. Also, I was afraid to say no; I’m mid-career now and miles away from where I hoped I’d be. I’d imagined that by the time I hit my thirties, I’d have paid my dues on the club circuit and upgraded from a rattling passenger van to a tour bus. I’d have a home somewhere and in it I’d have a dining set with matching chairs. I imagined laughing during interviews about the days of piling five musicians into one hotel room or hiding hard-boiled eggs in paper coffee cups to smuggle them out of the continental breakfast room and into the van for lunch. But I’m still playing the same clubs every year, still foraging at the breakfast bar. At this point, I’ll jump at most opportunities to write or perform for a big audience. So I made a Spotify playlist of famous operas to get to work. And I found myself wishing there were more choruses.
I asked if I could cast the production with pop singers. The director said I could have a few, but would need opera voices too. I asked if I could stage it in a warehouse or something. He said go to New York. See Sleep No More. Then we’ll talk again.
I’ve rarely spent so much on a ticket for anything, except for maybe the open-bottle ticket I got on tour for a forgotten bottle of whiskey in my backpack. The production had been sold out for months. The website said I’d have to wear a mask for the whole show.
Circling over JFK, I offer the nervous white-haired woman beside me a piece of gum. Gum is the remedy for every malady of air travel—pressure in the ears, restlessness, boredom, fear. Like the leeches of medieval physicians, Doublemint does everything.
We are cleared to approach and touchdown is gentle. I go to Midtown and check into Pod 51, a hotel with impossibly tiny, modular rooms. The square footage allows for one twin bed, a desk exactly the dimensions of an open book, and a strip of carpet wide enough for sit-ups. I do a set of twenty. There’s a sink the size of a soup bowl and an aluminum hook that folds out of the wall to hang a jacket. It’s like living in a pop-up book. Lights above the door conveniently indicate which of the bathrooms on Floor 4 are occupied and which are vacant.
When I’m not touring with Doomtree, I usually travel by myself. It can be lonesome: there’s no one to split lunch with, no one to help with the schlepping or the navigation, no one with whom to marvel at the sites or commiserate after the pickpocketing. But traveling alone also makes a person fully available—to chat with the bartender and maybe go to the after-hours hang, or make faces at little kids on the bus, to arrive at your own assessments of the street food or the museum piece without the influence of someone else’s commentary. You can scrap plans, or wedge into a full tram, or have another drink, or say nothing at all for hours, without consulting or offending or boring anyone. On the occasions that I feel blue on the road, I’ll often tell myself Loneliness is the fare that you pay to be free. Visiting New York to see Sleep No More, however, felt like a great adventure. The sense of purpose squared my shoulders and lifted my chin. Purposeful might be my favorite feeling—even better than happiness.
One of your artsy friends has probably seen Sleep No More, or maybe you have seen it and you are the artsy friend. It’s an adaptation of Macbeth that’s been running for years in an old hotel. There’s no stage; the characters rove freely through the floors, and audience members follow whomever they please. Couples are encouraged to split up. No speaking allowed.
Macbeth arouses a lot of superstitions among actors. Some think the spells written into the dialogue are real, that they summon evil spirits into theaters. A string of performers, stagehands, and audience members have died during performances. (The onstage combat scenes provide ample opportunities for injuries.) Many performers won’t even say Macbeth aloud in a theater before the show starts—bad luck. Instead, the production is referred to simply as “the Scottish play.”
The night of the performance is brutally cold. Navigating on my phone, I fast-walk from the subway with my head down. At the specified address, there’s no sign, just a tall door and a single overhead light. When I come near, however, a long-haired white woman with a clipboard approaches, asks what I’m looking for and then says, “If you’ll just show your ID, we’ll get you inside.” She looks away from me and the door swings open. Inside, I join a long, quiet line of people. The orderly hush makes it feel like we’re on the jetway to a play.
After tickets are taken, we’re all routed into in an old-world barroom: red velvet curtains on the walls, a little stage with a silver bullet mic, and tiny cocktail tables—really just coasters on stems. The bar staff is outfitted in speakeasy attire with vests and armbands like newsies. Okay, fine, I think. There’s a familiar smell: the airborne sweetness of chemical haze, which smells a little bit like what I remember paste tasting like in preschool. I order a beer and elbow through the chattering crowd to take a seat at one of the little tables. A newsie finds me—I’d forgotten my credit card at the bar like an amateur. He returns my Mastercard, flipping it at me with a flourish as if he’d pulled it from my ear.
A camera flash goes off and the nearest waiter lunges, like a fencer, to slice his drink tray down over the offender’s iPhone as an enormous lens cap. They are serious about the no-photo policy. The room fills to capacity.
I am aware of sitting alone in a room full of couples.
What a dress, says a female voice beside me. A blonde with Monroe curls and matte red lips has taken stage. She wears a flesh-colored slip with vertical black stripes and a deep V that precludes the possibility of a bra. She is illegally beautiful. She leans over slowly, bringing her red lips to the silver microphone.
I reach into my pocket and pull out a Pod 51 ballpoint pen, ready to take notes. Monroe sees me. I know she’s now likely to assume I am a critic. It’s funny how a stolen hotel pen and some scratch paper can tip the seesaw of power, sliding it from a showstopping blonde in a lethal dress to a woman in a charcoal sweater who cut her own bangs before leaving her rented room.
In small groups, the blonde calls us into a corner of the room. She hands me a white mask, fluted at the bottom like a beak. When I fasten it behind my head, it amplifies the sound of my breathing.
I’m ushered into an elevator with a dozen other attendees. We ascend one story standing like a phalanx of storks, white faces deadpan and identical. The door opens to a dimly lit hallway and we’re free to go as we please. I wait for my eyes to adjust. Somewhere to my left there’s the sound of a scuffle. Barefoot and crazy-eyed, a woman storms past me—Lady Macbeth. I follow her at a jog, along with the rest of the flock. Lady Macbeth, when she’s not Lady Macbething, is clearly a trained dancer, her muscles are like tree roots grown over the trellis of her skeleton. I skim the plotline of the play in my head, wondering what scene I could be running into. If memory serves, at the beginning of the play she should have an exchange with her husband, who she’ll scold for his cowardice.
But then I break away from her and trail a pair of fighting men whose roles I can’t recall. Who are these dudes? They’re very fit—in their duel they tumble over each other and sometimes up the walls. It occurs to me that in a traditional production, these characters might not make an
entrance so early in the play. But here at the hotel, it seems every performer plays his or her role all evening, with no sense of being on- or offstage. That’s how our real lives unfold, I think. It’s impossible to know which moments are crucial to your narrative until the story is over. The character you now know as the leading man might, in the final draft, be referred to only as The First Husband. That week of stomach flu is actually morning sickness—a minor subplot, because you never find out you’re pregnant and miscarry only three days later. The opera funding will fall through in the next round of budget cuts and you will be back playing nightly gigs in midsize venues, struggling to pull the sail of your ambition up the mast of your career.
* * *
—
At the end of the performance, audience members wind up in the same barroom. We remove our masks, shake out our hair. The crowd churns as separated dates recouple, eager to compare their evenings. Pushing through the heavy door, I head into the wind, hood pulled low.
I feel sorry, in a way, for all the minor characters who worked so hard all night. Each one would perceive himself as the axis of the action. For the sitting king, the play isn’t called Macbeth, it’s called Duncan. For the heir it’s Malcolm; and for The Porter it’s, well, it’s whatever his name is, which wasn’t even dignified with a mention in the script.
But a play can’t have a dozen leads; there aren’t enough spotlights. And there’s a story arc—the profile of a church bell—that must be adhered to. In Macbeth, there’s a prophecy to fulfill. Those old plays always have the decency to subvert their characters with fate. And fate at least knows what it’s doing; there’s some semblance of a plan. Even if you’re mowed over in the execution of it. In life we are more often matched against chance and circumstance: blind, mole-like circumstance, burrowing dumb and mute and unaware that we exist at all.
Life is strewn with landmines that can blow you out of your own story. I’ve slept with three moderately famous men: a musician, a photographer, and a military figure. I admired each of them, and was admired back. But I recognized the implicit danger: with famous men, one risks being cast as a Zelda. The first man used to tap my thigh in bed, fretting the chords to what would become a song on the radio. The second took my photo half-dressed in a hotel room, then developed it in the bathroom in a tumbler full of silver nitrate. The third is retired from combat, mulling over a bid for political office. And if their trajectories go skyward, I’ll be rendered a footnote in their biographies.
Even if you dodge all the landmines and retain the starring role, you might find yourself in a story that wouldn’t interest you. That’s why I don’t buy lottery tickets: I’d hate to win. A million-dollar jackpot would pivot my whole narrative on five random numbers—that would be the biggest story of me, the one I’d be asked to tell at cocktail parties with my new rich friends and it’d be one that would strain all my phone calls with my old poor friends too. A story signifying nothing.
My concern isn’t about legacy, exactly. That’s an old man’s game. It’s more about agency, about trying to minimize the role of chance and maximize the role of will. If you can’t parse the merit from the luck, it’s hard to know what to think of yourself.
I arrive at my hotel room: a prop closet with just enough room to stow my sleeping body. I set my mask on the narrow ledge at the foot of the bed. I shut my eyes. Overhead, tiny lights blink on and off as other hotel guests shuffle to and from the lavatories.
In real time, you go through life like an actor from whom her role has been kept secret. Is my character a hard-touring pop singer with a crooked smile? Could she be one break away from something bigger? Or maybe she is only the nameless half-dressed model in a portrait, posed in a hotel room to re-create an Edward Hopper painting she had never seen? You never feel the spotlight sweeping over; it’s impossible to know when you’re on stage and when you’re off. Maybe I have no speaking lines at all. Maybe I am only crossing through someone else’s drama and a name I’ve never heard will be rendered in the italics of the title role, letters falling forward toward the future, the eastern margin of the page.
A Ringing in the Ears
—
When my dad looks through his telescope he says, Hello, Jupe, on a first-name basis with every moon and planet. He’s learned Morse code, Latin, and Irish jigs arranged for accordion. He’s interested in almost everything but money—left Mensa after deeming it a confederacy of snobs who met to congratulate one another on cheating people at their own garage sales. He talks to himself, in full voice and often in third person, while executing any multistep task. When he was in his thirties, my age now, he was lean and dark haired, preoccupied and tired. Almost every waking moment of his life was accounted for: during the day he struggled as a trader on the grain exchange; most evenings he cooked dinner for me and my little brother, Maxie; at night he studied to earn a degree in audiology. And every spare, interstitial moment he devoted to his passion project in the dim confines of our garage. There he was building the Woodstock—a real airplane that he intended to fly.
Gliders are motorless aircraft. They ride thermals—invisible columns of rising warm air—to stay aloft. They’re silent and sleek and they sail around like stingrays in the sky. The Woodstock is a single-seater; the lone pilot tucks himself inside it, half-reclined, the stick between his knees. My dad’s model had a thirty-nine-foot wingspan and weighed about 250 pounds. He started building the plane just before I was born. He estimated that it would take a year and a half to complete.
The engineers who designed the Woodstock sold prefab kits to be assembled by dedicated amateurs like my dad. However, by the time he’d set his sights on making one, the kits were all gone. The designers had some paper plans left in stock, but building a plane from those would require cutting every wooden part by hand. It’d be like stopping at the grocery store for hamburger patties and receiving, instead, a live calf to raise to maturity for slaughter next season. He cut the check for a hundred and fifty bucks and bought the plans anyway.
He was still working on the plane when I started grade school. One had to tread carefully with Dad during the Woodstock years: he had a hair-trigger temper and a particular sensitivity to interruptions. But his good side was great if you could make your way onto it. I was a precocious stick figure of a kid then, gap-toothed, hungry for praise, and just starting to exhibit some benign neuroses, on course for the high-strung adult I’d become: step counting, symmetrical touching, later a brief infatuation with prime numbers. Childhood never suited me very well; when my parents’ friends came over, I ate the raw garlic spread and asked for sips from my dad’s tumbler to demonstrate my refinement. I laughed at their jokes and used big words and considered myself unjustly exiled from the adult world on the trifling, circumstantial pretense that I was seven.
When my dad made his irreversible decision to build a wooden plane, he owned only a hacksaw, pliers, and possibly a pair of socket wrenches. His most recent carpentry project was the Popsicle stick box he’d glued together when he was twelve. He had never made a square cut through any piece of wood unassisted.
When I asked him many years later why he went ahead with it after finding out the kits were unavailable, he told me, “The only way I would ever get my hands on a new aircraft would be to build it myself. There was no chance whatsoever I would ever earn enough money to buy a new aircraft made by a factory.” Fine, I thought, my dad never had a lucrative career path—before studying audiology, he’d earned his living performing and transcribing Elizabethan lute music—but why not just build a different glider? Why did it have to be the Woodstock? My dad’s voice dropped a register. “I had made the decision that I was going to build this aircraft.” My father can do many things that most people cannot—maritime navigation, an entertaining PowerPoint, a decent rendition of the Japanese song “Sakura Sakura” on a small medieval instrument called a psaltery—but it’s as though he gained these unusual powers by relinquis
hing the ability to do some things that almost everyone else can do. My dad, like kangaroos and emus, cannot go backward.
A certain strain of absolutism runs through the whole side of my father’s family. They—we—still use phrases like man of his word and compliment people by calling them the genuine article. Part of it, I think, is attributable to my grandfather’s time in the navy. He enlisted young and served as a ranking officer on a destroyer. Duty and integrity loomed large in his worldview and in his household. All of his surviving sons inherited his values, my dad especially. When I was little, even small changes of plans—eating dinner at eight instead of seven—could take on a moral dimension. We said the stir-fry would be served at seven P.M. central time and we will uphold that pledge. Once he’d committed to the idea, building the Woodstock became a matter of honor.
To obtain the necessary raw materials, my dad introduced himself to the night watchman at a wholesale lumberyard in Saint Paul. After a small bribe changed hands, he was allowed to handpick the four finest boards from their inventory. He inspected thousands before selecting those that would become the wings of his airplane.
He hauled these old-growth boards to Roosevelt High School and enrolled in an eight-week community education class. Most of the other students were retirees. When the instructor asked what sorts of projects they planned to build, they answered, A birdfeeder or, A jewelry box. “And, Mr. Wander, what are you making?” Over the heads of his classmates and their shoeboxes full of birch chips, my dad answered, “I’m building an aircraft.” He’d brought several hundred pounds of high-grade lumber balanced on a handcart, some of it twenty feet long.
His first task was actually to build the long table on which the other building could be done. Then he used the shop’s machinery to mill and cut and plane the hundreds of parts he needed. At the end of the course, he mounted the freshly shaped wing spars on the roof rack of his station wagon and brought everything home to the garage for assembly.
