Dark Benediction

by Walter Michael Miller

  When it was finished, there was no time for another run-through, and scarcely time for a nap and a bite to eat before dressing for the show.

  “It was terrible, Jade,” he groaned. “I muffed it. I know I did.”

  “Nonsense. You’ll be in tune tonight, Thorny. I knew what you were doing, and I can see past it.”

  “Thanks. I’ll try to pull in.”

  “About the final scene, the shooting—”

  He shot her a wary glance. “What about it?”

  “The gun’ll be loaded tonight, blanks, of course. And this time you’ll have to fall.”

  “So?”

  “So be careful where you fall. Don’t go down on the copper bus-lugs. A hundred and twenty volts mightn’t kill you, but we don’t want a dying Andreyev bouncing up and spitting blue sparks. The stagehands’ll chalk out a safe section for you. And one other thing—”

  “Yes?”

  “Marka fires from close range. Don’t get burned.”

  “I’ll watch it.”

  She started away, then paused to frown back at him steadily for several seconds. “Thorny, I’ve got a queer feeling about you. I can’t place it exactly.”

  He stared at her evenly, waiting.

  “Thorny, are you going to wreck the show?”

  His face showed nothing, but something twisted inside him. She looked beseeching, trusting, but worried. She was counting on him, placing faith in him—

  “Why should I botch up the performance, Jade? Why should I do a thing like that?”

  “I’m asking you.”

  “O.K. I promise you—you’ll get the best Andreyev I can give you.”

  She nodded slowly. “I believe you. I didn’t doubt that, exactly.”

  “Then what worries you?”

  “I don’t know. I know how you feel about autodrama. I just got a shuddery feeling that you had something up your sleeve. That’s all. I’m sorry. I know you’ve got too much integrity to wreck your own performance, but—” She stopped and shook her head, her dark eyes searching him. She was still worried.

  “Oh, all right. I was going to stop the show in the third act. I was going to show them my appendectomy scar, do a couple of card tricks, and announce that I was on strike. I was going to walk out.” He clucked his tongue at her, looked hurt.

  She flushed slightly, and laughed. “Oh, I know you wouldn’t pull anything shabby. Not that you wouldn’t do anything you could to take a swat at autodrama generally, but… there’s nothing you could do tonight that would accomplish anything. Except sending the customers home mad. That doesn’t fit you, and I’m sorry I thought of it.”

  “Thanks. Stop worrying. If you lose dough, it won’t be my fault.”

  “I believe you; but—”

  “But what?”

  She leaned close to him. “But you look too triumphant, that’s what!” she hissed, then patted his cheek.

  “Well, it’s my last role. I—”

  But she had already started away, leaving him with his sandwich and a chance for a nap.

  Sleep would not come. He lay fingering the .32 caliber cartridges in his pocket and thinking about the impact of his final exit upon the conscience of the theater. The thoughts were pleasant.

  It struck him suddenly as he lay drowsing that they would call it suicide. How silly. Think of the jolting effect, the dramatic punch, the audience reaction. Mannequins don’t bleed. And later, the headlines: Robot Player Kills Old Trouper, Victim of Mechanized Stage, Still, they’d call it suicide. How silly.

  But maybe that’s what the paranoid on the twentieth-story window ledge thought about, too—the audience reaction. Wasn’t every self-inflicted wound really aimed at the conscience of the world?

  It worried him some, but—

  “Fifteen minutes until curtain,” the sound system was croaking. “Fifteen minutes—”

  “Hey, Thorny!” Feria called irritably. “Get back to the costuming room. They’ve been looking for you.”

  He got up wearily, glanced around at the backstage bustle, then shuffled away toward the makeup department. One thing was certain: he had to go on.

  The house was less than packed. A third of the customers had taken refunds rather than wait for the postponed curtain and a substitute Andreyev, a substitute unknown or ill-remembered at best, with no Smithy index rating beside his name in lights. Nevertheless, the bulk of the audience had planned their evenings and stayed to claim their seats with only suppressed bad humor about the delay. Scalpers’ customers who had overpaid and who could not reclaim more than half the bootleg price from the box-office were forced to accept the show or lose money and get nothing. They came, and shifted restlessly, and glanced at their watches while an m.c.’s voice made apologies and introduced orchestral numbers, mostly from the Russian composers. Then, finally—

  “Ladies and gentlemen, tonight we have with us one of the best loved actresses of stage, screen, and auto-drama, co-star of our play tonight, as young and lovely as she was when first immortalized by Smithfield—Mela Stone!”

  Thornier watched tight-lipped from shadows as she stepped gracefully into the glare of the footlights. She seemed abnormally pale, but makeup artistry had done a good job; she looked only slightly older than her doll, still lovely, though less arrogantly beautiful. Her flashing jewelry was gone, and she wore a simple dark gown with a deep-slit neck, and her tawny hair was wrapped high in a turbanlike coiffure that left bare a graceful neck.

  “Ten years ago,” she began quietly, “I rehearsed for a production of ‘The Anarch’ which never appeared, rehearsed it with a man named Ryan Thornier in the starring role, the actor who fills that role tonight. I remember with a special sort of glow the times—”

  She faltered, and went on lamely. Thorny winced. Obviously the speech had been written by Jade Feme and evidently the words were like bits of poisoned apples in Mela’s mouth. She gave the impression that she was speaking them only because it wasn’t polite to retch them. Mela was being punished for her attempt to back out, and Jade had forced her to appear only by threatening to fit out the Stone mannequin with a gray wig and have the doll read her curtain speeches. The small producer had a vicious streak, and she exercised it when crossed.

  Mela’s introductory lines were written to convince the audience that it was indeed lucky to have Thornier instead of Peltier, but there was nothing to intimate his flesh-and-blood status. She did not use the words “doll” or “mannequin,” but allowed the audience to keep its preconceptions without confirming them. It was short. After a few anecdotes about the show’s first presentation more than a generation ago, she was done.

  “And with no further delay, my friends, I give you—Pruchev’s ‘The Anarch.’”

  She bowed away and danced behind the curtains and came off crying. A majestic burst of music heralded the opening scene. She saw Thornier and stopped, not yet off stage. The curtain started up. She darted toward him, hesitated, stopped to stare up at him apprehensively. Her eyes were brimming, and she was biting her lip.

  On stage, a telephone jangled on the desk of Commissioner Andreyev. His cue was still three minutes away. A lieutenant came on to answer the phone.

  “Nicely done, Mela,” he whispered, smiling sourly.

  She didn’t hear him. Her eyes drifted down to his costume—very like the uniform he’d worn for a dress rehearsal ten years ago. Her hand went to her throat. She wanted to run from him, but after a moment she got control of herself. She looked at her own mannequin waiting in the line-up, then at Thornier.

  “Aren’t you going to say something appropriate?” she hissed.

  “I—” His icy smile faded slowly. The first small triumph—triumph over Mela, a sick and hag-ridden Mela who had bought security at the expense of integrity and was still paying for it in small installments like this, Mela whom he once had loved. The first small “triumph” coiled into a sick knot in his throat.

  She started away, but he caught her arm.

  “I�
��m sorry, Mela,” he muttered hoarsely. “I’m really sorry.”

  “It’s not your fault.”

  But it was. She didn’t know what he’d done, of course; didn’t know he’d switched the tapes and steered his own selection as a replacement for the Peltier doll, so that she’d have to watch him playing opposite the doll-image of a Mela who had ceased to exist ten years ago, watch him relive a mockery of something.

  “I’m sorry,” he whispered again.

  She shook her head, pulled her arm free, hurried away. He watched her go and went sick inside. Their frigid meeting earlier in the day had been the decisive moment, when in a surge of bitterness he’d determined to go through with it and even excuse himself for doing it. Maybe bitterness had fogged his eyesight, he thought. Her reaction to bumping into him that way hadn’t been snobbery; it had been horror. An old ghost in dirty coveralls and motley, whose face she’d probably fought to forget, had sprung up to confront her in a place that was too full of memories anyhow. No wonder she seemed cold. Probably he symbolized some of her own self-accusations, for he knew he had affected others that way. The successful ones, the ones who had profited by autodrama—they often saw him with mop and bucket, and if they remembered Ryan Thornier, turned quickly away. And at each turning away, he had felt a small glow of satisfaction as he imagined them thinking: Thornier wouldn’t compromise—and hating him, because they had compromised and lost something thereby. But being hated by Mela was different somehow. He didn’t want it.

  Someone nudged his ribs. “Your cue, Thorny!” hissed a tense voice. “You’re on!”

  He came awake with a grunt. Feria was shoving him frantically toward his entrance. He made a quick grab for his presence of mind, straightened into character, and strode on.

  He muffed the scene badly. He knew that he muffed it even before he made his exit and saw their faces. He had missed two cues and needed prompting several times from Rick in the booth. His acting was wooden—he felt it.

  “You’re doing fine, Thorny, just fine!” Jade told him, because there was nothing else she dared tell him during a performance. Shock an actor’s ego during rehearsal, and he had time to recover; shock it during a performance, and he might go sour for the night. He knew, though, without being told, the worry that seethed behind her mechanical little smile. “But just calm down a little, eh?” she advised. “It’s going fine.”

  She left him to seethe in solitude. He leaned against the wall and glowered at his feet and flagellated himself. You failure, you miserable crumb, you janitor-at-heart, you stage-struck charwoman—

  He had to straighten out. If he ruined this one, there’d never be another chance. But he kept thinking of Mela, and how he had wanted to hurt her, and how now that she was being hurt he wanted to stop.

  “Your cue, Thorny—wake up!”

  And he was on again, stumbling over lines, being terrified of the sea of dim faces where a fourth wall should be.

  She was waiting for him after his second exit. He came off pale and shaking, perspiration soaking his collar. He leaned back and lit a cigarette and looked at her bleakly. She couldn’t talk. She took his arm in both hands and kneaded it while she rested her forehead against his shoulder. He gazed down at her in dismay. She’d stopped feeling hurt; she couldn’t feel hurt when she watched him make a fool of himself out there. She might have been vengefully delighted by it, and he almost wished that she were. Instead, she was pitying him. He was numb, sick to the core. He couldn’t go on with it.

  “Mela, I’d better tell you; I can’t tell Jade what I—”

  “Don’t talk, Thorny. Just do your best.” She peered up at him. “Please do your best?”

  It startled him. Why should she feel that way?

  “Wouldn’t you really rather see me flop?” he asked.

  She shook her head quickly, then paused and nodded it. “Part of me would, Thorny. A vengeful part. I’ve got to believe in the automatic stage. I… I do believe in it. But I don’t want you to flop, not really.” She put her hands over her eyes briefly. “You don’t know what it’s like seeing you out there… in the middle of all that… that—” She shook herself slightly. “It’s a mockery, Thorny, you don’t belong out there, but—as long as you’re there, don’t muff it. Do your best?”

  “Yeah, sure.”

  “It’s a precarious thing. The effect, I mean. If the audience starts realizing you’re not a doll—” She shook her head slowly.

  “What if they do?”

  “They’ll laugh. They’ll laugh you right off the stage.”

  He was prepared for anything but that. It confirmed the nagging hunch he’d had during the run-through.

  “Thorny, that’s all I’m really concerned about. I don’t care whether you play it well or play it lousy, as long as they don’t find out what you are. I don’t want them to laugh at you; you’ve been hurt enough.”

  “They wouldn’t laugh if I gave a good performance.”

  “But they would! Not in the same way, but they would. Don’t you see?”

  His mouth fell open. He shook his head. It wasn’t true. “Human actors have done it before,” he protested. “In the sticks, on small stages with undersized Maestros.”

  “Have you ever seen such a play?”

  He shook his head.

  “I have. The audience knows about the human part of the cast in advance. So it doesn’t strike them as funny. There’s no jolt of discovering an incongruity. Listen to me Thorny—do your best, but you don’t dare make it better than a doll could do.”

  Bitterness came back in a flood. Was this what he had hoped for? To give as machinelike a performance as possible, to do as good a job as the Maestro, but no better, and above all, no different? So that they wouldn’t find out?

  She saw his distressed expression and felt for his hand. “Thorny, don’t you hate me for telling you. I want you to bring it off O.K., and I thought you ought to realize. I think I know what’s been wrong. You’re afraid—down deep—that they won’t recognize you for who you are, and that makes your performance un-doll-like. You better start being afraid they will recognize you, Thorny.”

  As he stared at her it began to penetrate that she was still capable of being the woman he’d once known and loved. Worse, she wanted to save him from being laughed at. Why? If she felt motherly, she might conceivably want to shield him against wrath, criticism, or rotten tomatoes, but not against loss of dignity. Motherliness thrived on the demise of male dignity, for it sharpened the image of the child in the man.

  “Mela—?”

  “Yes, Thorny.”

  “I guess I never quite got over you.” She shook her head quickly, almost angrily.

  “Darling, you’re living ten years ago. I’m not, and I won’t. Maybe I don’t like the present very well, but I’m in it, and I can only change it in little ways. I can’t make it the past again, and I won’t try.” She paused a moment, searching his face. “Ten years ago, we weren’t living in the present either. We were living in a mythical, magic, wonderful future. Great talent, just starting to bloom. We were living in dream-plans in those days. The future we lived in never happened, and you can’t go back and make it happen. And when a dream-plan stops being possible, it turns into a pipe dream. I won’t live in a pipe dream. I want to stay sane, even if it hurts.”

  “Too bad you had to come tonight,” he said stiffly.

  She wilted. “Oh, Thorny, I didn’t mean that the way it sounded. And I wouldn’t say it that strongly unless”—she glanced through the soundproof glass toward the stage where her mannequin was on in the scene with Piotr—“unless I had trouble too, with too much wishing.”

  “I wish you were with me out there,” he said softly. “With no dolls and no Maestro. I know how it’d be then.”

  “Don’t! Please, Thorny, don’t—”

  “Mela, I loved you—”

  “No!” She got up quickly. “I… I want to see you after the show. Meet me. But don’t talk that way. Especially no
t here and not now.”

  “I can’t help it.”

  “Please! Good-by for now, Thorny, and—do your best.”

  My best to be a mechanism, he thought bitterly as he watched her go.

  He turned to watch the play. Something was wrong out there on the stage. Badly wrong. The Maestro’s interpretation of the scene made it seem unfamiliar somehow.

  He frowned. Rick had spoken of the Maestro’s ability to compensate, to shift interpretations, to redirect. Was that what was happening? The Maestro compensating—for his performance?

  His cue was approaching. He moved closer to the stage.

  Act I had been a flop. Feria, Ferne, and Thomas conferred in an air of tension and a haze of cigarette smoke. He heard heated muttering, but could not distinguish words. Jade called a stagehand, spoke to him briefly, and sent him away. The stagehand wandered through the group until he found Mela Stone, spoke to her quickly and pointed. Thorny watched her go to join the production group, then turned away. He slipped out of their line of sight and stood behind some folded backdrops, waiting for the end of a brief intermission and trying not to think.

  “Great act, Thorny,” a costumer said mechanically, and clapped his shoulder in passing.

  He suppressed an impulse to kick the costumer. He got out a copy of the script and pretended to read his lines. A hand tugged at his sleeve.

  “Jade!” He looked at her bleakly, started to apologize.

  “Don’t,” she said. “We’ve talked it over. Rick, you tell him.”

  Rick Thomas who stood beside her grinned ruefully and waggled his head. “It’s not altogether your fault, Thorny. Or haven’t you noticed?”

  “What do you mean?” he asked suspiciously.

  “Take scene five, for example,” Jade put in. “Suppose the cast had been entirely human. How would you feel about what happened?”

  He closed his eyes for a moment and relived it. “I’d probably be sore,” he said slowly. “I’d probably accuse Kovrin of jamming my lines and Aksinya of killing my exit—as an excuse,” he added with a lame grin. “But I can’t accuse the dolls. They can’t steal.”