With those who had showed up it counted, I mean.
Want to guess what font the assistant director’s loyal boyfriend told her would be perfect for the poster pasted up all across campus? It dripped, it bled, it told you to show up if you dared.
Only about half of the usual crowd had dared.
Herr Director was going to lay that on Janet, of course, and of course I’d try to take what of that blame I could, look over her shoulder at a point on the cabinet and try to think of nothing at all.
This is the way relationships work, isn’t it?
I leaned back so I could rest my head against the back of my chair, cocked my knees up against the vacant seat in front of me, and that big white screen Herr Director had for a back wall, that I’d thought had to just be temporary, a placeholder, it lit up. From the backside.
I smiled.
That part in the story, where the narrator’s reading John Morgan’s typings, his newsfeed or whatever it is?
Instead of having him say it out loud all stupid, they were showing us what was inside his head.
It was perfect. They’d even used an actual typewriter to do it, but what really impressed me was that they must have typed it backwards, then copied it onto a transparency, then flipped that transparency on the overhead they were using, to splash the letters up there backwards from how they were on the clear sheet, but now in the right order for us. Meaning that when you looked at it before the projector light pushed through it, it would be another language, an ancient spell. Not words at all. The illegible inside of the narrator’s head. Of H.F. Arnold’s head.
The typed words even flickered when the narrator scratched at his temple—scripted or accidental?—and it was so perfect that I wanted to clap. Except I’d been coming to these long enough to know better.
Somebody couldn’t help it, though.
Eight rows up, to the side, her heels off the ground, toes pointed in polite excitement, her already-short cocktail dress riding up her leg.
Wendy?
She kept her face forward, prim and proper, clapped two more times.
•
Because I knew to watch for it, I’d seen John Morgan slip under his desk when the spotlight was farthest away from him, our trusty narrator juggling a coffee mug with wax coffee in it that could never spill, and one time I saw Janet’s black-gloved hand come past the curtain—they were as thin as pantyhose—make a stop gesture to some crewdude in the lighting rig.
I felt the change in my lungs, too, when the fog started to drift in.
It was kind of perfect.
Good for Janet.
This is what really committed boyfriends think. What boyfriends with plans and futures think. That’s just how they are.
On-screen, now—they’d pre-recorded what was supposed to be the narrator’s point-of-view at the end of the story, fumbling through atlas after atlas. Looking for Xebico. Looking faster and faster, more and more desperate, like finding it could save everything.
It was jarring, seeing him do this from the side, on a drafting table, while at the same watching what he was seeing, on-screen and enlarged, but it was also just intensely pleasant in a way I think only the theatre can finally ever pull off.
After a few atlases of this the narrator stood, was obviously lost, this was too much for him, and from the edges of the curtains behind him—what we were to understand as the open windows, the cracks under the doors of this last outpost of civilization—the inevitable fog started to drift in. And you could tell from the narrator’s face that he knew that this fog, it carried death with it.
And then—maybe Herr Director had planted a freshman in the audience, in street clothes?—somebody from the far side of the auditorium screamed, her voice cutting through the manufactured six o’clock gloom. I knew better than to flinch but did anyway, and looked to Wendy to see if it had caught her off-guard as well.
She wasn’t there.
I cast around for her distinctive cocktail dress, that flash of leg again, but the fog was in the aisles, and rising.
Xebico, a voice said through the big speakers, and this was a haunted house now, not a play.
I loved it.
At least until a woman near the front stood in an unscripted panic, tried to step across a guy’s lap to get to the aisle and faceplanted, her glasses skittering under the chairs.
She was the trigger, the crack in the dam, the snake under the horse’s hooves. Like, when she fell she’d dissolved into a fine mist of panic. Everybody was breathing it in, passing it on, blind with it, standing just to fall, trying to claw their way up, screaming for help, until, from the stage, in a voice you had to obey: “Lights!”
It was Herr Director, glaring out at us, his hat exactly the kind he had to be wearing. That he had to have been born in.
His terrified crew turned all the lights on, and that made it worse, like pulling your brights on against a fogbank. The whole room was glowing now. More screams. A few hesitant, guilty laughs.
I hunkered down, held onto my armrests.
In the flash that I remembered to remember, Wendy’s seat was still empty. Meaning she’d never even been there. Meaning I’d put here there. In that unlikely dress. In this unlikely place. The last place I wanted to see her.
Or else—or else Janet had comped her a ticket, right?
You always whisper the worst things to yourself.
I shook my head no, closed my eyes and opened them to nothing. The crew was correcting their error, was shrouding us all in wet darkness now. The fog made it closer.
I wanted to laugh but didn’t want to open my mouth, in case somebody was about to crash into me.
“Sit, sit!” Herr Director told us all then, his voice cutting through the blindness, and, slowly and by audible degrees, the audience calmed.
The house lights rose slow, the smoke machines cycled down. The joke was over. Everybody was smiling into their shoulders, looking around for confirmation that smiling was the right thing to do, here.
The first place I looked, of course, it wasn’t to Janet’s usual place just off of stage left. It was to Wendy’s seat.
She was back, delivered by the fog, by the darkness. But—her dress.
Where had she been?
It was dirty. She must have fallen, I told myself. Into a grave.
I shook my head in affected disgust—this stunt was too much—rubbernecked for other grimed-up theatregoers. Everybody was still just wearing their normal going-out clothes, though.
I came back to Wendy. Who wasn’t Wendy at all.
Her hair, it was a different color. How had I not noticed? Brown where it had been streaky blonde. And it was higher up on her head, old-fashioned. The kind I associated with those cat-eye glasses from sockhops and malt shops, from movies with races in concrete culverts.
But then she turned to get a line on the door, and her face, it was grey, and hollow, and not timid. No cat-eyes, no glasses at all, just a sloughing off that suggested decay, and—but it had to be the lights—no irises, no sclera, no pupils. Just those terrible egg-whites.
My lips went numb, my eyes hot, my fingers digging more into my armrests.
First-year make-up student, I told myself. Too long in the chair. Contacts, it was Little Orphan Annie contacts.
But I knew better.
•
In H.F. Arnold’s story, the one thing I could never—until that moment in the theatre—wrap my mind around, it was how it must have felt to be dead in your chair but typing anyway.
When that thing looked back to me, though, I got a taste. A whiff.
In a flash like cards shuffling, a face in there that shouldn’t be, the world shifted around me. Under me.
Was I still in Janet’s living room, plugged into my laptop, trying to ignore the phone?
Kind of, yeah. Opening night was still weeks away.
It was just a defense mechanism, just my way of making the theatre something on an index card, something I could report on from
the safety of a faraway second-floor apartment, but still. It felt as real as anything, and I think it might have been. Like I actually was in two places at once. Until I had to choose.
Or until the choice was made for me.
I pushed up into the worn-out cushion of row 19, seat M, and the seat retracted up under me, creaking alarm.
Nobody heard.
Like it was her duty, her exit fee, her camouflage, the woman in Wendy’s seat started a round of applause that swelled through the house. Everybody standing behind it like they do, Herr Director staring back at them, his teeth set, his neck gills surely open, to drink all this in.
I started to stand with them but a clammy thick hand came down on my shoulder, held me down.
I looked up into the dead eyes of John Morgan.
He patted me once and was wide enough that for too long, for agonizing pieces of a single second, I couldn’t see the seat I needed to see. Where Wendy who wasn’t Wendy was. If she was going to be there waiting for me when John Morgan’s hulking form was gone. If she was going to be right there.
I pushed back into my seat, ready to…I don’t know, take her hand when she offered it? Run? Collapse?
All of the above.
After John Morgan had shuffled his way past, the woman was just then standing from Wendy’s seat, her dress one she had to have been buried in, except I knew better than to be thinking like that. I knew better than to allow that kind of thinking.
But then the night trespassed on itself. Went beyond all thinking.
The woman, when she stood it unbalanced her, so she reached out with a veiny arm to steady herself, her waterlogged bare breast flashing through the tattered side of her dress, my eyes locking on it as it moved under its own skin, the puckered nipple pale, drawn back, retreating like something that doesn’t want to strike, but will.
It made me see her as a girl, standing at the end of her dirt driveway.
It made me see her as a bride, her husband in his dress greens beside her.
It made me see her in what they once would have called her dotage, her eleven-year widowhood. Holding for a moment too long the magazine one of her stories had shown up in, then burying it on the shelf with the rest, pushing her cart on down the aisle. Me the next aisle over, tracking her through the dead space between the books.
Wendy.
She was crying and trying not to.
She was coming up the aisle of the theatre at me, older now, placing one foot intentionally in front of the next.
I fell back into my chair, and when I turned to leave and never look back, to not let her touch me like I knew she was going to, like I knew I was going to let her do, everybody else was making for the door as well, their breath close to me, their bulk surging me ahead with them, the rush of shoulders and elbows and shuffling feet delivering me to the parking lot, to the last bits of the surprising daylight.
I stood there blinking, the crowd suddenly gone. Or else me standing in place long enough for them to drift off.
It’s always like this after a good play. Like the world’s been remade, and just for you.
I shook my head about it all and only turned back to the theatre when somebody called my name.
Janet, in the doorway, her pantyhose hand raised, calling me to the after party. Telling me the night had been a success. That I was part of that.
In my pocket was a pair of earrings for her.
I lifted my hand to her and it was an awkward enough move that it unbalanced me, made me reach down for the hood of the car I was parked by.
The alarm didn’t go off and the dog inside didn’t explode against the glass.
I started to step away, to the after party and then the rest of my life, but found myself hesitating. Like I’d heard something. Or—not heard something.
The dog. It wasn’t barking.
I angled myself politely away from the car and came closer at the same time, the way you do in case the owner’s watching, and leaned over to cut the last of the glare.
The dog was on the front seat, slit open from throat to tail. Like something had been torn up from it. Like something had been birthed. Like something had been waiting there all along.
I cocked my head, tracked past this locked door, these unbroken windows. Tracked over the vinyl top of the car to Wendy.
She was standing on the grass that leads to the lake, and was young again. Herself, except for the ragged dress. A slightly smaller, still-wet dog on a leash by her side, licking its side, its eyes missing like they’d never been there. Like it didn’t need them, where they were going.
That Winters girl, I heard in my head.
That dirty-kneed Winters girl.
But still.
I tugged at a sudden hot point just under my throat, perfectly between my collarbones, and looked back once to Janet, still holding the door open, parentheses around her eyes now, and then I didn’t look back anymore, just stepped forward, around the car, into Xebico.
lor had been older, say, even a year old, if he’d made it to his first birthday, would I then need more time to grieve, as presumably, I would have had more time to become attached? More than two months, I mean.”
Dr. Corinth leaned back in his high-backed chair to study Maddy.
She kept her face pleasant, her hands still.
Like the bowler, watching his ball hurtle down that slick lane.
“Maddy,” Dr. Corinth finally said—a playful, fatherly scold to his voice.
“I need to work,” Maddy said. “The experiment is in a crucial phase.”
“And you’re sure you can—”
“I’m fine. Thank you for your concern.”
It was a lie, of course, but everything had been a lie for the past two weeks. Why should work be any different?
•
That afternoon, Maddy used the ten-inch forceps to help a butterfly unfold from its cocoon.
The light in the terrarium was meant to simulate sunlight, and, while it cycled at the proper times—not an off-switch, but gradually fading, then slowly warming again hours later—Maddy was increasingly certain there was some vital element not reproducible with light bulbs. Thus the forceps, the help.
“There you go, there you go,” she cooed to the butterfly.
The butterfly was twenty-eighth generation.
Sixteen generations ago—twelve generations in, so Maddy could record what was baseline, chart what was to be expected—Drs. Romin and Chang next door in Commercial had introduced an amino acid to the brood of caterpillars.
Maddy’s task now was what it had been for the past year and a half: monitor, record, and report at prescribed intervals, so Romin and Chang could write their reports for Commercial’s director to approve, forward on to the make-up company.
While some of the science that went on in this wing was maverick and revolutionary and potentially paradigm-toppling, a bigger portion was corporate lipstick jobs—a term in play well before Maddy had hired on.
Zenomarque Laboratories had been contracted to push the caterpillars through forty generations, for what the eventual packaging would probably call “quality control.”
The amino acid now cycling through this cultivated variant of Hemiargus isola was nothing new, either; she was pretty sure it already had cousins on the shelf in cosmetics. But butterflies of course don’t stop by the beauty counter. They don’t need anti-aging creams.
However, to keep her vision properly tunneled—let others interpret, hypothesize—she didn’t research or otherwise prejudice herself. Otherwise the results would always be suspect, at least to her.
In the artificial sunlight, now, specimen G44H3a was drying its wing luxuriantly.
Maddy stepped over to check the patterning on the wings, see if it was still symmetrical, and gasped a bit.
Eyes.
And then she laughed at herself.
Eyes like a peacock’s tail feathers, eyes like some moths’ wings, eyes like the Mycalesis patnia were faithfully expressin
g in the other terrarium generation after generation, “eyes” like the Bicyclus anynana Maddy had read about: mimicry-as-survival strategy. All this Hemiargus wanted to do was fend off its eventual predators. It was designing itself well.
Except—these “eyes” were distinctly hazel, and seemed to be striated concentrically, even.
An almost familiar pattern. One only a mother would know.
Maddy slapped herself on the wrist, shook her head no.
She had had long enough to grieve, she told the Dr. Corinth in her head.
She had.
Still, it was her assignment to record every last minutiae, so she did, even lightly sketching in the suggestion of pupils, and noting how they seemed to track the viewer.
You never know what’s going to matter.
•
Sixteen days later, at what should have been the end of G44H3a’s life—the lab had ordered this particular strain for its advertised brevity, allowing them to reach forty generations quicker—instead of fluttering around with senility, its stimulus-response little brain winking out cell by cell as nature intended, a grand torpor settling in across its light frame, G443H3a instead began to form a cocoon.
Maddy tapped her pencil against her lower teeth and puzzled over this.
This is why she’d gotten into science, she finally told herself, allowing herself a grin.
To artificially extend a butterfly’s life, discover that the world had never known the butterfly at all. At least not in its true form. Either it was programmed to cocoon at regular intervals, some undiscovered alarm clock in its metabolism telling it now, now, never knowing that this cocoon was to be a mausoleum, or else it was escaping death by transforming again and again—into what? Meaning all along it had had multiple instars coded into its DNA, just waiting for this particular combination of amino acid and artificial light to express them.
But to what end, finally?
Maddy started a new log, a private log, and, though it was policy to leave the terrarium key on the hook by the specimen drawer, that night she left them in the back of the file cabinet. As if she’d forgetten them there while looking for some paperwork.
After the People Lights Have Gone Off Page 15
