Sleep Walking Now and Then

by Richard Bowes

  Everyone, cast and crew, applauded. He noticed that Keri Mayne, the charmer, and Jeremy Knight, the young lion, were talking together.

  Rosalin led forward the production assistant who’d brought his coffee. “Sonya went out of her way to be helpful when I was acquiring props, saved us a lot of money. She has theatrical experience. There’s the silent part of the maid for which we were going to use one of Jackson’s people . She can do that and I could use her assistance.”

  Cass looked at this tense young woman from deep in the artist underclass and wondered about Rosalin’s motives. But he was sure of her loyalty to this production into which she’d put so much invaluable work, if not to him. Sonya would come cheap and might be of use. So he nodded, smiled, and agreed with what was proposed.

  When she and Sonya were alone Rosalin said, “I came to this city when it was first being called the Big Arena. Thirty years ago I was where you are now.” Rosalin had learned that Sonya had no family she could go to, no close friends outside the city. “I had nobody in this world and nothing but my work.”

  TWO

  Thursday night, at the 8pm show two weeks into the run, Keri Mayne leaned against the wall of Evangeline’s bedroom. In full costume, the flowing skirts made sitting both difficult and unwise.

  She listened to Cass/Nance outside, saw his image on her palm—cameras were everywhere—heard him say, “Of course, J. P.,” into the wall telephone. Nance spoke loudly because he didn’t trust the instrument and because an audience needed to hear.

  In the play it was well after midnight in the midst of the financial crisis of 1895 and J. P. Morgan had just called. “Of course I will stand with you, Mr. Morgan. Tomorrow at ten? I will be there, sir.”

  Keri/Evangeline watched Sonya, in a European maid’s uniform, standing at the bedroom door and listening. In the intricately jealous context of a theater company Keri mistrusted and feared her.

  Outside Nance said, “Of course, sir, I too know the loneliness of losing a wife.” His voice became muffled as he turned away. But those in the room could hear the great financier describe a need a discreet hotel keeper might satisfy. Nance had left behind him some nasty rumors and Cass had used all of them.

  Keri/Evangeline heard the others in the room move closer to Nance, trying to catch the conversation. This was the moment. She nodded; Sonya threw open the door and Evangeline floated out of her room and into her father’s den.

  Evangeline light as a package of feathers, was wrapped in silk. Shimmering hair flowed down to Evangeline’s waist,. Her eyes were half open, as if she was in a trance. She had Mirabella in her left arm. The gold slippers glided across the floor.

  Half a dozen audience members were in the room. Women wore short skirts; men’s legs were concealed in trousers. These were the rich and Sleep Walking was a game as much as a play. Devices that enabled communication, blocked insects and rain, illuminated, cooled, or heated the area around one as the moment dictated were turned off. Mostly.

  By clustering around Nance in the corner, the playgoers opened the way to the outer hall door which Sonya opened, revealing a crowd of eavesdroppers. She plowed through them. Seemingly unaware of all this Keri/Evangeline floated over the threshold. and maid and mistress passed down a dim lit hall.

  Most of the windowpanes were blackened and heavily curtained. But an occasional one seemed to look onto the outside world. Playgoers on this floor could gaze out upon a 19th century night. Hologram pedestrians and horse-dawn vehicles traveled on the avenue, lanterns on ships bobbed on East River piers. Some figures in lighted windows across the way spoke intently at each other by lamplight while others seemed to grope naked in the dark.

  “Evangeline!” she heard Nance cry as he came out the office door. Playgoers followed him. Figures in 19th century clothes discreetly got in their way. Audience members accidently blocked him. “My child, where are you going?” Nance cried to his daughter, who gave no sign she was aware of him.

  Playgoers were supposed to be absolutely silent. But a man whispered, “She’s a bit taller than I would have thought.” And a woman responded, “Looks like a child and at the same time older.” Sonya kept them away.

  Though their conversation irritated Keri, she did prize her ability to alternate between radiant child and disturbed adult. All was shadows and misdirection at the end of the hall. Evangeline floated toward the open elevator door.

  Nance, in a voice that was authoritarian and pleading at the same time, shouted, “Young lady, you must obey me. Stop!” His heavy shoes banged on the floor as he began to run.

  For a moment everyone looked his way. When they looked back to the elevator, Evangeline and her maid had disappeared.

  Edwin Lowery Nance, who managed to appear to hurry while not really moving quickly, came down the hall. He ran through the open doorway and his shout turned into a scream. His voice faded as he fell nine stories into the cellar.

  Jackson and her equally big cohort, dressed in 1890’s street clothes, were suddenly there blocking the audience members’ view. She and her partner looked into the pit. The partner screamed. “Someone get a doctor! Call the police!” Ms. Jackson shook her head sadly and pulled the elevator door closed.

  “I saw him, his body was all bloody and smashed,” a theatergoer cried.

  Keri—standing inside the door that led to the servants’ stairs—listened, amused by this. Someone was always getting caught up in the drama. She imagined Cass/Nance lying on the padding, looking up at the faded fleur-de-lis design on the elevator car’s roof and, like her, taking the cry as a kind of applause. When reviews called the show “Just a Halloween entertainment,” Cass told her, “That gets us through the next month. After that we’ll find something else.” She hoped he was right.

  Her costume made stairs difficult and the maid reached out to help her. Sonya spoke, voice low and intense: “Just after Nance fell they thought it was a tragic accident. Then rumors started that I was seen near the elevator machinery in the cellar. I disappeared before I could be questioned about the events and was never seen again.”

  At moments when Sonya identified with the part of Evangeline’s maid like this Keri wondered why Rosalin, who took care of so many things, had arranged for this person to be alone with her in two performances a night, six nights a week. She hoped Sonya was aware how vital to the production her Evangeline was. Surveillance cams were everywhere but she wondered if they didn’t just offer a greater chance for immortality.

  So she gazed at Sonya with admiration and delight (and none could look with as much admiration and delight as she). “I’m amazed at the amount of research you’ve done. You have the makings of an actor,” she said.

  Then, as Evangeline, she motioned Sonya to go first, and said in a breathless child voice, “After Nance’s death rumors got in the papers. One of my dolls was supposedly found in the elevator with his corpse. It’s when the term ‘Angouleme Murder’ began being used. Servants testified that Nance had always taken an unnatural interest in his daughter.” Here Evangeline covered her eyes for a moment. But Keri managed to catch Sonya’s expression of both horror and sympathy.

  Their destination was the sixth floor. On the landing, they paused, heard a 1920s Gershwin tune played by a jazz pianist. Privately, Keri was certain Evangeline had killed her old man, who in every way deserved it. Life with him and after him had made her a manipulative crazy person. It was what Keri loved about the part.

  But she looked at Sonya and said with great sincerity, “I try to remember what that poor child-woman went through and put that into my performance.”

  Sonya held a light and a mirror like this was a sacred ritual. Evangeline’s haunted face—just a trifle worn—appeared. Keri Mayne did a couple of makeup adjustments, held the doll to her chest, and braced herself.

  Sonya opened the door and followed as Evangeline half floated into a hallway with distant, slightly flickering lights. Keri paused, listened for a moment, then wafted toward the music.

 
Playgoers, drinks in hand, stared out a window into a hologram of a lamp lit street scene. A big square-built convertible rolled by with its top down and men and women in fur coats waving glasses over their heads, while a cop made a point of not looking. Flappers in cloche hats and tight skirts scurried to avoid getting run down. They gained the sidewalk and disappeared into the Angouleme’s main door downstairs.

  On the sixth floor it was 1929.

  It took a few moments for the well-upholstered crowd to notice the sleep walker and the woman in a maid’s uniform who guided her.

  Keri heard their whispered conversations:

  “…maybe down here trying to avoid her father?”

  “…a little older, this is long afterwards, when he’s dead and she’s still living here.”

  “We missed his big moment.”

  “…looks like she’s been on opium for years.”

  “Morphine, actually.”

  “Creepy, just like the Angouleme!”

  “But delicious!”

  “…like a ghost in her own hotel for decades after the murder.”

  The illicit, low-level whispering was the audience telling each other the story they’d seen and heard online. Cass had wanted that. “Makes it like opera or Shakespeare, where the audience knows the plot but not how it’ll be twisted this time.”

  On the sixth floor Keri was Evangeline in the long years after her father’s death and before she died in 1932 addicted, isolated. Even before the First World War the Angouleme was called “louche” when that was the word used by people too nice to mention any specific decadence.

  “She looks like she’s hurt!” murmured a playgoer in a lavish, shimmering suit as he moved toward Evangeline. Keri lurched the other way, Sonya got between them.

  Always in these audiences were ones like this who wanted to be part of the drama. If there was a long run, their faces would appear again and again. Certain people would start going out in public dressed like characters in the play. Great publicity, but a warning that no one should get too immersed in a part.

  “Oh, who are all these ghosts, Marie?” Evangeline asked her maid in a whispery child voice and looked around at the faces staring at her. “People like these weren’t allowed in the Angouleme when Father was here.” She held up the doll. “Mirabella was his last gift to me.”

  She could hear the crowd murmur at this, felt them closing in. And in that moment, the character Jacoby Cass’s script simply called “The Killer” came down the hall. This young man wore a leather jacket and a red silk kerchief tied around his neck. The butt of a revolver was visible in a pocket. The actor looked at Evangeline and the rest of the crowd with a cold, dead-eyed stare.

  “How did he get in here?” a man whispered. “Where’s security?”

  This amused his partner. “More than likely he’s a fugitive from the Jacky Mac Studio downstairs,” she said. “We must pay a visit.”

  For a moment all attention focused on The Killer. Evangeline wobbling slightly, continued to the jazz piano.

  By the 1920s, a louche, scandalous hotel had become attractive to certain people. Artists stayed at the Angouleme and entertained there: French Surrealists and their mistresses, wealthy bohemians poets from Greenwich Village, Broadway composers looking for someplace out of the way but not too far.

  Something between a party and a cabaret went on in the living room of Gershwin’s suite. Around the door, slender, elegant flappers leaned towards smiling men in evening clothes. The lights were soft; it usually took a couple of glances before someone would recognize them as manikins. But then the silvery figure, you were sure was a statue, would turn slightly and a pair of dark eyes would hold yours for a moment.

  Inside the room a musician who looked not unlike Gershwin sat at a baby grand and played the sketches that would become An American in Paris.

  The suite was set up as a speakeasy where audience members bought drinks, leaned on furniture, listened but also watched. Evangeline shimmered before them, exchanged a long kiss with the silver flapper. All eyes were on the two and Gershwin played a slow fox-trot. As they danced he turned from the piano, looked to the audience as though asking if they saw what he did.

  When theatergoers from the hall began to crowd into the room, Evangeline floated through a bedroom door and her maid closed it. When people opened it to follow her, they found the room was empty and the door on the opposite wall was locked.

  Some at that point would realize that the sixth floor was a diversion, a place to spend money and waste time that would have been better spent up in the penthouse or downstairs where a murder was brewing.

  Sonya brought Keri/Evangeline down to the third floor where her next scene would be. The maid character didn’t appear again in Sleep Walking. “I feel like I should stay with you,” she said, and opened the door.

  Keri grasped her arm, looked into her eyes and said, “You’ve done enough. You’re wonderful.”

  The next day Sonya was setting up antique wooden folding chairs in Studio Mac on the third floor. She said, “I wish my part was bigger. I want to be in every minute of this play. I know that’s how actors feel.”

  Rosalin believed the intensity could possibly be of use. “The Big Arena is a savage place, run for the very rich and full of the superfluous young. Most of them will never find something larger than themselves as you are doing. It takes a certain kind of personal sacrifice to fully achieve this. But it will live in others’ memories.”

  THREE

  In New York it was shortly before midnight of Halloween 2060. Over the years, this holiday had surpassed New Year’s Eve as the city’s expression of its identity. Especially at times like this when the legendary metropolis was short of cash and looking for some new idea to carry it forward.

  In the Angouleme it was time for a special midnight show. Playgoers entered Sleep Walking through the lobby. From there they either went up the stairs, waited for the elevators, or just looked for a place to sit while getting acclimated. Rosalin had managed to exploit the lobby’s disreputable, fallen majesty. It was a place made for loitering. Upstairs each floor was set in a different decade. The lobby celebrated the entire sordid past. Here, a cluster of 1960s rent boys lingered in the shadows next to the main staircase and several 1900s ladies of the evening in big hats and bustles stood near the ever-vacant concierge desk.

  Jeremy Knight waited in a side doorway of the building. At exactly five minutes after the final stroke of twelve he got the one-minute signal, walked a few feet down the sidewalk to the front of the hotel, and was flanked by security.

  They threw open the doors and Knight/Jacky entered the lobby: tall and wire-thin, his eyes hidden behind dark glasses, his blond hair in a ponytail down almost to his ass.

  Knight was irritated as he always was at this moment by the sight of Jacoby Cass, who, with his speech about the God-given 19th century being finished, was making a grand exit with his party. A few patrons tried to follow but found themselves blocked by Jackson and company.

  Jeremy Knight marveled at the number of scene-stealing opportunities Cass, that shameless ham had managed to insert into the script.

  Knight surveyed the crowd. The show was booked solid for the Halloween weekend. Advance sales were another matter and his guts turned cold whenever that crossed his mind. So he didn’t think about it.

  In fact, Cass’s distraction allowed Knight to be through the crowd before they were aware of him. He turned then to face them and they saw Jacky Mac—couturier, poet, playwright, in a classic outfit of his own design: V-shaped, slim-waisted jacket; bell-bottom trousers; a wide tie with bright pop art flowers that looked like faces. Jacky Mac had been known to wear miniskirts and silver knee boots, but not on this occasion.

  On cue, the public elevator’s doors opened. Customers hesitated as always about getting on board because of the legends surrounding the place.

  Of Jeremy Knight it had been written, “He was born to wear a costume; put him in anything from a 1940 RAF u
niform to a pink tutu and he is transformed.” He despised the description but had found that in roles like this an actor grabbed inspiration wherever it could be found.

  Without missing a beat, Jacky Mac stepped backwards onto an elevator and seemed amused by the audience’s fear. “Oh, it’s safe!” He somehow murmured and shouted in the same breath. “And if it begins to fall, just do as I do: flap your arms and fly!”

  From the elevator doorway, Mac gazed at the manikins in the corner, saw something, and nodded. The audience watched fascinated as one of the figures, dressed in leather and a blood red kerchief stepped out of the shadows and walked unsmiling into the car. “I was crucified just now by his glance,” Jacky announced as The Killer joined him and the door closed.

  Alone, without an audience to overhear them, Jeremy and Remo, the young actor who played The Killer, didn’t exchange a word. Each got off on a different floor, and over the next hour made rehearsed appearances in dark halls and bright interiors.

  Forty minutes into the play, Jeremy Knight/Jacky Mac listened to Gershwin’s piano and heard Nance’s death scream. Ten minutes after that he did a huge double take when he passed the ghost of Evangeline on the tiresome seventh floor where it was always 2010 and the well-lighted halls were lined with display windows offering overpriced Sleep Walking souvenirs. Coming down the servants’ stairs five minutes later, he passed Sonya trudging up carrying costumes. He smiled and she looked at him as wide-eyed as any fan.

  * * *

  Halloween week was great. Capacity crowds were willing and able to laugh and scream at every performance. On the third floor of the Angouleme two weeks later, at about an hour and twenty minutes into Sleep Walking, Knight/Jacky climbed onto the small stage in the Mac Studio and felt the difference.