Fallow Park Today

by Joseph Glenn

  And then too soon she was being ushered out of her dressing room. An assistant director and other team members surrounded her like a secret security team, nudging and pointing and prodding to keep her moving down the corridor. At the end of it was a staircase that would take her up to the stage. She pulled Tyler along beside her.

  “Wait!” she shouted three quarters of the way down the hall.

  The assistant director and the production assistants stopped.

  “I never go onstage without performing my ritual. Tyler, you know what I’m talking about. I need my moment of meditation before I can face an audience.” She pointed to a door on the hallway. “What’s in there?”

  “I think it’s storage,” the assistant director said. “Props and costumes, that kind of thing.”

  Meredith expected it to be locked, but the door opened at her touch.

  “This is perfect. Excuse me for a minute. Tyler, help me.” She pulled him in and definitively pressed the door closed on the assistant director and the rest of the entourage.

  She was unable to find the light switch by the door. There was a dim light coming from the other side of the room, behind boxes and bric-a-brac from previous events. It provided light enough to carefully navigate the room. They stepped further in, in case the ensemble they had ditched was listening at the door.

  “Listen to me and don’t interrupt,” Meredith began. “Sybil is taking my place.”

  “What? No! What will you—”

  “Shh! I said don’t interrupt. There’s no time for an argument about this. This will work better, because I’ll still be here while you’re making your escape. This way no one will be looking for me. That might actually buy you some time. You’ll meet Sybil as soon as she finishes her dramatic bit. You and Carl will act like fans-slash-assistants. But then you’ll follow the basic plan—the way I outlined it before—the way you would have done it with me. You’ll walk her directly out to the loading dock. Jack will already be in the van.”

  “But what’s going to happen to you?” Tyler asked.

  “But identification? A passport? She must have surrendered hers when she first went to Chester Park. I gave mine up when I came here.”

  “That’s been taken care of. After I told her she was going, I tracked down a friend of mine, a gentleman I’ve come to know this week. He used to make the badges here and was able to fashion Sybil’s into a reasonable facsimile of a passport.” Meredith intentionally declined to offer further details about Ansel. “Here it is,” she told him, pressing Ansel’s handiwork into his hand. “Give this to her when you take her to the van.”

  “If I can get out on bail while waiting for the trial, though I’m clearly a flight risk, I’ll get out of the country then and meet you in Canada. If that doesn’t work, I’ll get two years, three max. I’ll probably be out in a year, maybe eighteen months. But don’t wait for me in that case. If I can’t find a way to communicate, Jack will figure something out. If not, you’ll just have to follow the story in the media. Press on to Paris and I will meet you there. If it goes down as badly as that, there’ll be substantial expenses related to my legal defense. Jack will find some way to have you send the necessary funds back to me. That’s not an issue. We’ve got plenty of it. You’ve already got access to the account numbers, Jack knows how to get that stuff to you tomorrow when all of you are safely ensconced in your suites in Toronto. You’ll be fine—and so will I. Take care of Sybil; she’s one of us now.”

  “I think you’re making a huge mistake. Particularly because the press will be all over this one. The Feds might have to make an example of you. And this is not a single crime; it’s the same crime times the three, now four, people you’re helping. Not to mention being an associate of Jack Harbour’s. Your legal difficulties could be greater—”

  He paused and cocked his head. A muffled sound seemed to interrupt him. Meredith heard it, too. The room was silent now.

  “—greater than you realize,” he said, completing his sentence in a softer voice.

  A dull scuffle in the dark caught both their attention. Meredith held up a hand to caution him. She strained to hear, but once again the room was completely silent. They looked at each other.

  “Do you think someone’s here?” Meredith ventured in a whisper.

  Tyler shrugged. He motioned her to stay where she was. He stepped further into the dark room, gingerly, as the room, appearing to be as big as fifteen by fifteen, presented obstacles at every step. A number of boxes were scattered about the floor. They were opened, as though recently raided. Multiple props—eyeglasses, evening gloves, stilts, a judge’s gavel—spilled out of them. Some items were discarded, haphazardly, on shelving in the middle of the room. The perimeter was lined two rows deep with stage knickknacks and furniture. Any of the precariously placed items could have just fallen. The rush of air into the room when they entered might have set such a spill into motion. Meredith rejected this hypothesis; there was something human, or at least animal, about the sound she had heard.

  Meredith followed Tyler’s progress as he moved deeper into the room. She noticed the room’s light source. It was a small night light, possibly left on for days. Beside it was a statue she had not laid eyes on in fifteen years. Lit as it was, for the night light was just above the baseboard, its shadow stretched over the distant wall and reached the ceiling. Were it a saint, and were she a praying woman, she might have been inspired to whisper something respectful.

  “Is anyone there?” she asked boldly, giving Tyler a start. She was directly behind him, having ignored his instruction to stay put. She had posed the question to the room in a demanding, aggressive tone, but Tyler answered it: “I don’t think so,” he told her, pointlessly whispering after her auditory assault on the room.

  She pointed, turning his attention to the statue. He stared at it for several seconds.

  “I wonder why they moved it in here?” she finally asked. “It used to be in front of the Administration Building. It was the first thing you noticed when you drove through the gates.”

  “I’d almost forgotten about it,” Tyler reflected. “When it first disappeared, a lot of us were quite pleased.”

  “Was it public opinion that prompted the move?”

  “Hardly,” he scoffed. “It was subject to a great deal of vandalism; you can see the scratches on it. You’ll notice that the entire crotch area has been chiseled away. He served as a great stone effigy. He was often covered with shaving cream and toilet paper. Sometimes you’d see excrement that looked decidedly human. Signs were put around his neck: ‘Traitor,’ ‘Judas,’ ‘Hitler,’ etcetera. You could count on a new sign every Sunday morning. Desecrating the old guy was a popular Saturday night pastime. Just so much quiet rebellion; harmless and cathartic. I don’t think any of that had anything to do with its removal. Popular opinion at the time was that the park had tired of cleaning the pigeon shit off of it. That, I suspect, was one job they couldn’t get any of the residents to do.”

  “Peyton Fallow,” his mother said, reading the plaque at the base of the statue. She skipped over the brief description of his merits and offered her own: “The man who proved that homosexuality is genetic.” She addressed it in an almost accusatory tone. “You should have been a great man. It was said you’d be remembered as one. Your discovery ushered in a great deal of hope. There was a sense of progression—no! transcendence—into a world of increased understanding. This was supposed to be science at its best: explaining God’s work, a keyhole-sized peek into His design.”

  “It was supposed to be a new era,” Tyler agreed. He dug at a chip in the bronze finish until it came loose in his hand. He did not seem to know what to do with it and let it drop to the floor. “The world was going to get better. And I guess it was, for a time. Bible thumpers stopped blaming people for their genetic make-ups.”

  “A brave new world,” Meredith said with irony. She searched for and found an emery board in her purse and began filing at the sleeve of the statu
e’s left arm, held Napoleon-style across his midsection. “The problem with his important discovery was that, with the isolation of the gene came genetic pre-selection.”

  “I wonder if anyone on his team foresaw that gay rights activists and the pro-life groups would end up aligned on the same end of an issue. You had the gay rights people fighting to keep a percentage of the population gay, protecting their heritage, their legitimacy almost.”

  “The pro-lifers were fighting against what they considered to be murder,” his mother stated with a disillusioned voice that matched his. “Interesting, volatile times.”

  “And with the shroud of anonymity removed—coming out was no longer an act a gay man or lesbian did by choice, or at a time that was right for him or her,” Tyler reflected, as though he were saying it for the first time.

  This was familiar territory for both Meredith and her son. In the months preceding Tyler’s move to the park, they had said these words repeatedly. But standing in the presence of this monument to the scientist, Meredith felt a compulsion to spit out the man’s legacy. “You ushered in an era of wholesale discrimination, an era of legally sanctioned prejudice and oppression. It was no wonder the first park was named for you. I wonder if he’s in Heaven,” she mused. “And if so, I wonder whether he’s disturbed or disappointed—or pleased.”

  “Maybe he’s at peace,” Tyler conjectured. “He refused to take a stand on gay rights. Maybe he has now. Or maybe, detached scientist that he was, perhaps he remains utterly indifferent to it all.”

  The statue exhaled as though it were exhausted by this well-trod debate. The scientist’s bronze image had probably witnessed many such debates, many denouncements. It seemed as if it was telling them it would not allow itself to be dragged into polarizing analysis and dissection of his work.

  Meredith turned to Tyler. Had he heard it too?

  “Alright,” he said, “come out of there!”

  There was no mistake about it now. They were not alone.

  There followed some shuffling of feet and the sound of a zipper. A moment later another zipper was quickly pulled—up, presumably.

  Alex, the intern stepped out.

  He was visibly embarrassed. He shuffled his feet as he walked and kept his focus on them and the small bit of floor space between him and Tyler. Why such a display? Meredith asked herself. A couple of kids—young adults, technically—in their early to mid-twenties who were caught sneaking off for a quickie in a storage room. Who cares, she thought. She and Tyler, by contrast, were compromised, particularly if their whispered conversation about Sybil and the van had been discerned.

  “Ms. St. Claire. Mr. Travers,” Alex finally said, somewhat sheepishly. Despite the gravity of the situation, the possibility that she would have to extract a favor from the arrogant young man, Meredith found herself distracted by the fact that the boy remembered Tyler’s last name. Alex stammered on: “I, uh, guess this looks pretty bad. You can understand why we didn’t say anything,” he mumbled. “And we didn’t hear anything!” She doubted him. He had made the declaration too quickly and too vehemently. If he had not heard anything, he would have no reason to make the reassuring statement. “I didn’t. I can’t speak for…I shouldn’t speak for…” He left his sentence incomplete.

  “Holly?” Meredith asked after the other intern. “It’s alright, come on out. The gig’s up. I need to talk to both of you.” What she would say, and how she would keep them both quiet, she did not know. Alex could probably be bought off with the promise of a job, or the opportunity to make some connections in the business. Holly was another story; she was efficient and serious minded; she had also conducted herself appropriately the whole shoot; in short, she was immune to coercion. Meredith wondered how she could be silenced. Probably an appeal to her decency was the best tactic.

  “Oh, no,” Alex said. In a flat, defeated voice, continents away from his more customary, self-assured manner. He added, “It’s not her.”

  Bradley Waldren, Ph.D., emerged from the darkness behind the statue.

  “Wow. Ha!” Meredith made no effort to disguise her pleasure. Her sense of relief took a back-seat to her appreciation of the situation. “A straight man and a bisexual man getting it on in the shadow of this statue. Of all the places you could hook-up. This is great! This, this is the man who said, ‘the world divides very neatly into just two kinds of people.’”

  “What’s the big deal?” Dr. Waldren asked in almost a shout. He was clearly enjoying the fact that he was the only one in the room who was not compromised. He could be as loud as he wished—and he was making no bones about the hand he held.

  “Shh!” Meredith commanded. “There are four people right outside that door.”

  “I don’t know how I can explain this,” Alex said. “I guess you could say I was curious to see…”

  Meredith stopped listening. What in the world did it matter? It was, she recognized, so typical of the young man to be preoccupied with how he was perceived. She did, however, appreciate how his sense of shame could be an advantage.

  “There isn’t anything to explain,” Doctor Waldren cut him off, speaking softly, but still booming in comparison to Meredith and Alex. “You’ve done nothing wrong, son.”

  “Good God, child,” Meredith, addressing just Alex, asked contemptuously, “don’t you have enough sense to shut up? Oh, you’re a complete hypocrite, make no mistake about that. Your open disdain for everyone who lives in this facility has made an impression. You are not in a position to be critical or self-righteous. But I’m not interested in your sexual proclivities or appetites. You are less than nothing to me. I owe you my deepest apology if I’ve failed to convey that. I suspect Tyler feels the same way. I think Dr. Waldren—Brad, if I may—has shown where he falls on the subject. No one cares if you choose to engage in a little hot, man-on-man action.” She added with continued contempt: “You do understand, don’t you, that you have broken no laws.”

  “You’re not going to tell them?” Alex asked cautiously. By “them” she assumed he meant the other members on the crew, chiefly Austin and the assistant directors.

  “Well, I suppose there must be some rules about engaging in something like this while you’re on the job, but I see no reason to blow any whistles.” She knew this was the moment to capitalize on his fears. “Let’s agree to keep our mouths shut,” she told him. “None of us has any incentive to share this—except Mr. Waldren—Dr. Brad—I suppose.”

  “Let me put it this way,” Tyler interjected on his own behalf, “the story is too juicy to keep to myself. Therefore, you have all the incentive to see that we get out of here as we’ve planned.”

  This was a gamble, Meredith thought, essentially conceding whatever the pair suspected. But she did not flinch at Tyler’s tactic, and immediately picked up where he had left off: “And you, Brad?” she asked. “Can you sacrifice the bragging rights of bagging this virile young man? At least until midnight?”

  “Bragging?” Alex interjected in a hurt and questioning voice. He turned to the psychologist. “This was supposed to be just between us, I assumed.”

  “I won’t breathe a word,” Dr. Waldren said after appearing to ponder the matter. “At least not until after your plan has been carried out. After they arrest Ms. St. Claire, I assume it won’t matter. But I certainly won’t say anything before that. I support getting people out of this place.”

  “Thank you,” Meredith said. What negotiations Alex would have to make to the psychologist, what concessions were to be elicited from him, were things he would have to work out on his own. “Let’s file out of here as a group.” To Waldren and Alex she offered the instruction: “If anyone out there asks, we’ve all been meditating.”

  Chapter Nineteen

  As they reentered the hallway, Meredith thanked Dr. Waldren, Alex, and Tyler as though all had participated in her pre-performance ritual. She climbed the spiral stairs to the stage, turning at one point to point out to Tyler where he should stand. She spotted
Carl above her and waved him over. “Talk to Tyler,” she said at the top of the stairs and directed him to go down. She lost track of Dr. Waldren, but felt confident he would keep his promise of silence. Alex, she noted, was whispering to one of the assistant directors. She suspected it was a work-related exchange, but in light of his newly acquired information, and the possibility he now considered himself to be in a position of power, she found unsettling. Perhaps she should have been nicer to him, she reflected. There was something almost pitiable about him. He was a hypocrite of the purest form, and he deserved to be confronted with the discrepancy between his words and actions. At the same time, he was on different ground from the medically determined gays of the park; even the Alexes of the world were entitled to be left alone to engage in perfectly lawful behavior. Was it not his business exclusively to decide what behavior best suited him?

  If Meredith was uneasy about the turn of events, it was because Alex was undoubtedly, in his own estimation, hopelessly compromised. She would feel more at ease with him if they had formed a better working relationship. Would he be cooperative, or would he lash out like a cornered animal? Odd, she noted, how roles can shift so quickly, and one can be completely beholden to someone like him. She checked herself at this; she suspected this burst of philosophically-based understanding was a trick her mind was playing on her, a self-defense mechanism deliberately distracting her from the unpleasant matter at hand.

  But the reality of her immediate circumstances could be suppressed no longer. Despite her trepidation, she was compelled to continue moving forward. She stepped out to the stage, though scarcely noticeable with the houselights down and just a single spotlight on the center of it. Basking in it was Dr. Makepeace who had only begun his introduction.

  “It seems so appropriate to be introducing our hostess to this particular stage. Anissa Culligan was herself a great entertainer. Though it’s true she never made any donation to Fallow Park, when it came time to name the auditorium, she was the obvious choice.”