It started with a phrase that he heard inside of his head, a woman speaking to someone else. “I am sorry” she was saying. She was thinking, “I don’t love you.” Lucas was on a hike when he heard this. He didn’t know where he was, and he attributed to that aimlessness the opening of a creative conduit through which strands of light soared, pouring from the void behind his eyes up into his hollow cranium, meeting and flocculating, glowing ever brighter. They formed a ball of light, like a rubber band ball made of white, white negative space emanating purpose as a lightbulb would heat. The work started this way, and Lucas came to understand it as his vision.
He heard his name called from behind the curtain. The director’s skeptical, accusatory tone used to scare him. His first and only play had made it onto the director’s desk only by a favor, one that his aunt would regret granting once she saw the production. In their first weeks working together Lucas explained his changes and preferences to the director tentatively, suggesting shifts of focus, refinement of details. As the work continued, though, and the play began to look something like that big ball of light in Lucas’s mind – the coalescence of his vision – he bulldozed over the theater diplomacy and politics, making sweeping, unexpected alterations to the production. He recognized the trope of the demanding artist: he wanted his story told, and he wanted it told his way. It was the story of a trillion souls.
The director watched the rehearsals from an old aluminum stool that he dragged across the stage and throughout the theater, to see the show from different perspectives. Those at the right end of the front row saw a completely different show than the middle-back (the make-out section, he called it, though nobody was ever known to make out during this theater’s performances). Some audience members had the experience of being spoken to, looked at, engaged, pleaded with. Others ran the risk of feeling entirely omitted, so that the show needed to be designed to project in what the director clumsily called “3-D.”
The stool he dragged around would scrape across the floor, the rings connecting the legs together rattling against each leg, loose at every joint, sticking out metal scraps that snagged the director’s cardigan, whose holes grew larger and more numerous with every rehearsal. Approaching Lucas, the director had actually stuck his hand through one of these holes, inadvertently, while putting his hand in his pocket.
“You’re renaming the war?” he asked, lifting his clipboard into the air with his free hand, a pantomime of frustration that petered out before it passed his shoulder.
“Yes, it’s an allegory,” Lucas said.
“Are we changing the uniform or the Truman recording?”
“No. Please update everyone.”
The director, now accustomed to these surprises, chewed it over for a moment (chewing literally, though he had nothing in his mouth) and turned away. Assistants flocked to him, lanky students who had drawn their notepads at the sight of the two of them talking.
Lucas was no great writer. The play was a patchwork of unaffected speech and bizarre hallucination sequences. Much as he was charmed by the avant garde motifs of his creation, he also knew that he needed to simplify, to make the message explicit wherever possible. His recent changes were attempts at clarification. It was important that the protagonist, Sasha, wasn’t involved in a war of trauma, something remembered and historical, a global scar. Here, it was a war of discovery. In the opening act he’s ready to show himself off, to meet his girlfriend on the tarmac in a fantasy of triumph, breaking four excruciating years of written correspondence.
(All soldiers in the cargo hold of a military plane are asleep in cots except for Sasha and his friend George.)
SASHA: (showing George a picture of Anna): She is the other half of my eternal soul.
GEORGE: (looking at the picture): How can you limit yourself to just one woman? I’m going straight to the pub when we land.
SASHA: You may think of it as limiting, but my union with Anna is a shattering of boundaries. Now that we’ve finished The War of the Self, I’m ready to fulfill my coupled purpose. Before I shipped out, we were drunk of infatuation, much like your buddies in the pub. But things will be different now. More than carnal love.
GEORGE: You’re young, Sasha. I won’t try to rain on your parade. I’m excited for you.
SASHA: Thank you. Let’s get some sleep.
(Sasha and George pull their blankets over themselves. Lights fade.)
Sasha and Anna’s first few moments together are sweet. They walk in a Parisian garden. Anna enjoys the initial bliss but Sasha is too familiar with her. His time away has incubated an out-of-proportion sense of relation, of ownership. She herself, three years previously, had questioned the value of exchanging love letters with a man she hardly knew. Though she can point to no particular flaw of Sasha’s, she is wary of his sincerity, and things begin to go awry.
The play was abstractly autobiographical, and text arrived on the page so quickly that Lucas lost control of things. His own thoughts comprised a vivid foreground that he could report with clarity and detail. This drove the work forward, an incessant engine, but he felt he was writing a journal entry rather than a work of art. He came to this conclusion after he’d already written a third of the play. Daunted by the idea of a re-write, he started mining his dreams for material. The often absurd results gave the play its color and were the sole reason the director could be convinced to put the damned thing on.
* * *
Jane picked this show because it wasn’t Shakespeare, because the theater was nearby so Stanley wouldn’t be stuck in the car with her too long, and because it was opening night – a rare opportunity to go see something which had no reviews to scan, no ratings to anchor expectations. It was an adventure, in a way. That was Stanley’s word, adventure. Since Felix had gone to San Francisco for his internship, they’d been left alone together. Their couplehood was a played-out thing that came back to them in startling, uncomfortable newness. Hence date nights and sex play and saying yes to going to parties. And adventure. If she agreed with the idea, the word itself was childish: it sounded like Tolkien and cartoon shows and unemployment. She knew it was mean to think those things about Stanley’s word, but to give him the benefit of the doubt – to say that she knew what he meant, anyway – felt like the adult position, a too-large investment in preserving her husband’s worth and an uncomfortable height from which to look down at him.
The new system of reconnecting with each other was ruthlessly deliberate. But she was doing her part. She’d chosen to buy the tickets to Lucas Codd’s “Edge of Fantasy,” the play whose set photos, though nestled in a 90s-style website with a pale yellow background and typefaces her interns had already figured out how to purge from their hard drives, exploded with color and vibrancy and weirdness. Still, it felt like a chore. Without Felix in the home, their lenses were turned towards one another. Like two mirrors held parallel, the depth of reflection was near-infinite – she not only saw Stanley, but she saw how Stanley saw her. And when she silently chastised herself for letting Stanley see her unhappiness, she could see that reflected in his eyes and words and movements as well. Back and forth these impressions ping-ponged and they had to throw their attention elsewhere, slam the mirrors closed, flush with one another against the wall. But even that act felt confusing – she was skeptical of the need to turn away from each other as a way to rediscover their bond.
All of this was covered in therapy, of course. The mirrors were the therapist’s metaphor. It was a good one, so good that Jane could tell it had been used with other patients, and she’d begun to feel like a cookie-cutter failure, like her problems with Stanley were utterly common and that if she was worth her salt at all she should’ve been able to break the cycle and get out from between those mirrors that had every dysfunctional godforsaken couple on the planet incarcerated.
She took the tie out of her hair and pinched a tortoise-shell clip.
“Jane,” Stanley called from downstairs, “Felix is calling!”
“You talk to him, Stan. Tell me what he says when we get in the car.”
A pause. “You’re sure?”
“Yes,” Jane replied. Yes, she was sure. She wasn’t supposed to leap at the opportunity to talk to Felix. It would do them good to talk to each other about him, rather than basking separately in his energy, his conversation, his words that were a surprise no matter what he said. The healthier thing was that sometimes Stanley could talk to Felix, and sometimes Jane, and they would tell each other his news. As a sharing practice.
Stanley would forget the details, though. Jane preferred to be the one talking to their son so she could tell Stanley all of it and tell him how Felix sounded and weave in her own observations and hopes about what direction he was taking. Not just bullet points, forgotten names, topics that couldn’t be recovered because Felix had already hung up and slipped away into his happy, separate realm.
Jane finished her hair and waited until she heard Stanley say goodbye to Felix before she went downstairs. Stanley was wearing a gray blazer with black pants, shiny black pointed-toes and a dark green tie. His brown, thinning hair was slightly pushed up and back with wax (or oil – Jane noted that she had no idea what kind of hair product he used). He looked proud, sheepish, curious. He looked too hard at her, was a little too inquisitive. She put her hand out to him, he gripped it and smiled so big that all that worry fell off of his cheeks. He pulled her out the front door and across the lawn with the dew coating their toes and ankles.
In the car, Stanley’s hands shuffled over the steering wheel perpetually. Jane was supposed to be used to this.
“He said he joined a hiking club,” Stanley said. “Mostly people his age. One girl from work. They’re doing day hikes, trails around the coast. He says it’s beautiful. I’m not sure I’ve heard him describe anything as beautiful before.”
As Jane listened, the memory of her first cigarette in college emerged, triggered, maybe, by the sight of a convenience store out the passenger window. She did hear Stanley’s words but her thoughts were focused elsewhere: car rides mesmerized her, accessing the powerfully contemplative part of her mind. Her college roommate was impressively pragmatic and self-analyzing. She spun out rationalizations about looking cool, being able to quit at any time, smoking being a habit you would rarely take out of context. So that if they went off campus to a small convenience store one town over, they were very unlikely to bring smoking into their lives at school. They didn’t but they were making more frequent trips to that store as the semester progressed, until her roommate transferred schools. Then, Jane stopped altogether.
Her thoughts slid along separate pathways, linking the memory to recent events. Sometimes reveries have a reason. It sounded like Felix was growing up. His transplant to San Francisco enabled new habits, like replacing the word “cool” with “beautiful.” Probably he wouldn’t take those habits home with him, and would start to see life with his parents as a thing that held him back. With the absence of their son, Stanley and Jane were looking to find those old habits – the touches and the smiles – that had disappeared when they became a household of three.
“Did he say anything about Olivia?” she asked.
“No,” Stanley said. “I didn’t want to push him if he wasn’t going to bring her up. I’m sorry. I know you want to hear how that’s going.”
“You boys got to talk. That’s enough.” She pressed her forehead to the window, silent for the rest of the ride, thoughtless except for regular estimations of how much silence remained before they arrived at the theater.
* * *
Assistants padded around backstage, rolling setpieces across the boards and whispering instructions to one another, their notepads always on hand. The director was outside, talking to influential audience members. Lucas’s aunt had a front row seat. Felix walked past the wardrobes. A rack of period clothing from the 40s and 50s. Humanoid animal costumes. Scuba suits. Double-length pants for stilts. Behind these were two sedan-sized shimmering orbs made of wire and wrapping paper. He tapped his knuckle on one, watching the paper ruffle, waves of motion sending convulsions of light across the body of the jellyfish.
Lucas felt warm. He attempted to triangulate the source of his nerves by deciding where they were not coming from: he did not think the actors would fail, he was content with the writing, as far as it had gone. His expectations for the play’s reception were not high. He was done with the work, though. It was no longer in his hands. To see it stand on its own, without the props of his mind – this was something new. This, he thought, was a bit like parenting. Of course, he knew nothing about that.
It had been 16 months since he’d met Victoria, whose part in the creation of this play was undeniable. She worked for a marketing group one floor below his office and they became familiar over sandwiches in the food court in the building’s lobby. On their second date she’d reached across the table at a coffee shop to touch his arm, laughing. On their third she’d kissed his neck. Those moments always came to him first, then the review of the plot: they’d only gone on three dates when Lucas had to travel out-of-state on a contract. She agreed to be his girlfriend even though he’d be absent for three months. She halted contact after one, apologizing for being impulsive, for misleading him. She was never in the food court after that but he occasionally spied her in the mornings, squeezing into the elevator with a tin lunch box. The magnitude of the resulting turmoil was unexpected, and he picked up a habit of walking for hours every chance he got. He walked until he was exhausted, then turned around and went home. He’d walk what felt like halfway across the state. He once decided to walk due north. Aiming to ignore roads and barriers and rivers he even brought his passport, thinking he might cross a border. He was stopped by the fence of a huge naval air base.
These walks put him into a trance. Most of his thoughts bounced around in his skull until they lost momentum and were silenced. If he listened to music he would stop hearing the words. Inevitably, he began telling stories in his mind. They started off as imagined conversations between himself and his boss or Victoria or his aunt. They became more solid, opaque, and turned into narrative day-dreams. In a pivotal moment he was no longer a character within them. When he landed on the character of Sasha it stuck, and he memorized Sasha and Anna’s story word-for-word as he paced. He’d get lost, paying no attention to his direction or surroundings, surprised to find himself arriving on his own doorstep at two in the morning, having left after breakfast. When the story got too large, when the plot of what would become the first two acts of the play was spun out, he started putting down the words. At work the lines of code, like the words in the music he listened to when he walked, lost meaning and his thoughts turned to Sasha and Anna. So he wrote.
Then the thing lost steam. He hadn’t decided what would take place between his characters. And he was very aware of the autobiographical element: he was living out a fantasy, or revisiting trauma. It was self-serving, introspective and unappealing. Each word that came out dragged on the floor of his mind like a kite that couldn’t take off. Outside of those trance-like walks his imagination was a dry, colorless thing. Looking for another source of inspiration, something that could fuel a novice writer, he pulled a malaria prophylactic out of a suitcase in the attic. He’d been given it when he went to Phnom Penh on business. His coworkers told him the drug induced particularly vivid and strange dreams. This spooked him more than the prospect of malaria, a disease he didn’t know and couldn’t imagine contracting.
He began taking the pill – twice a day with meals – and waited for the dreams to come. Before bed he would prepare himself by reviewing Sasha and Anna’s current plight: by the end of Act 2, Anna has told Sasha that she doesn’t love him, and he’s returned to his family’s farm in the countryside to recover from what felt like a physical wound. His father had died during the war so he takes on the old man’s duties around the house, but finds himself ill-prepared. He can’t get the tractor running and loses sheep often when he takes them out to pasture.
Lucas started a dream journal. The first few silent nights left him with shapeless impressions. He waited patiently for the visions to come. When one finally did, he found himself watching events unfold on a mountainside. Watching from the fisheye, occasionally wobbly perspective of Sasha’s tired old horse.
(In a pasture, a horse stands downstage left facing upstage. Sasha kneels in front of a baying sheep.)
SASHA: It’s foot is broken. It could be our dinner tonight if I kill it and bring it down the mountain.
(Sasha cuts the sheep’s throat and blue smoke billows from the incision. It forms the shape of two huge faces in the sky above him. One is clearly Anna’s while the other is dark and featureless.)
SASHA: Anna! Anna? Who is that man? Is it me? Was it someone else? That you come to me now tears my heart open again. I don’t know where I fit in. I don’t know who to look for. Wait! Wait!
(As the two faces dissipate, the horse sits down and whinnies. The dead sheep deflates, turns to ash and is blown offstage by a gust.)
SASHA: I’m no use here anyway. I’ll go back to the city one more time. I need to know for sure.
(Sasha stands and looks downhill, pulling his scarf around him. He walks offstage, whistling for his horse to follow. Lights fade.)
For this scene the director had two large plastic faces custom-built and a smoke generator filled them with blue fumes. Clever lighting illuminated the curvature on the plastic and the faces’ contours were vaguely visible, near-perfectly matching Lucas’s vision. The faces separated at the seam to disperse the smoke.
Journaling his dreams imparted some lucidity to them, and Lucas discovered that he often thought of Victoria while he slept. She didn’t take a central role: she was an element of the dream only insofar as he thought about her while he watched his visions unfold. Her presence was a distracting reminder that no matter how abstract he made the play it would always be about his story. His dreamer-self floated through valleys of giant jellyfish and burned alive in village fires, all the while getting snagged on thoughts of Victoria. This was evidence to him that things between them were somehow unfinished.
Seating lights were down and curtains were drawing up. Lucas took a paperclip from his pocket and began unfolding it. He walked near a pile of chairs in the backstage corner, pulled one down, and sat, repeating to himself the play’s first line as he heard the actor playing Sasha’s mother proclaim it from the stage:
MOTHER: (pushing a pen and notebook into Sasha’s hand) If your hand cramps, my Sasha, don’t stop writing. Nobody could fault you for an extra word. Each one is precious to us.
* * *
The play had Jane at turns confused, skeptical, and bored. The language was plain and uninviting and the set pieces were comically exaggerated. If it weren’t so broken and inconsistent Jane would have wondered if the storyline was a satire. There was one phenomenon, however, that held Jane’s rapt attention.
The actor playing Sasha looked just like Felix. Not all of their facial features were the same but his welcoming green eyes and slouched shoulders were an exact match. Between lines he often combed his neck-length black hair to the side with his fingers and Jane remembered their son doing the exact same thing on a video call two weeks before. The resemblance transfixed her the moment Sasha was visible on stage, bent-over, sitting cross-legged next to a coop of live chickens and tossing bread at them while looking off above the crowd. A red searchlight swept across the stage, always just barely missing him. She had looked at Stanley to see if he’d seen Felix as she had, but he just smiled at her.
While throughout the play Stanley’d been moving in his seat, exhaling deeply, often turning to Jane to lay down an inquisitive look, he now stared hard at the actor playing Sasha as the fourth act opened. Jane thought it was because he’d finally noticed the resemblance. Sasha wore jeans and a white t-shirt now, sitting centerstage on an egg crate, strumming a guitar. He was playing slow, sad chords and mumbling incoherently. The rest of the stage was pitch black until light bulbs began flaring on, glowing dimly. They dropped slowly from above the stage, lighting up at random points in their fall. Jane thought of raindrops in low gravity. Dozens of bulbs were dropping now and Jane had to squint as their collective glow grew. All above and around Sasha these dim bulbs hovered while he played the guitar. She realized that he had been incrementally emphasizing his words more and more until finally, suddenly, they were all-at-once distinguishable.
“When you fly tomorrow,” he sang, “above the skytops and the trees, will you spot me way down here, alone with my dreams?” The lights above his head to the left brightened and illuminated a balcony. From under the balcony a cascade of fluffy, gray feathers was falling continuously, pouring down into the darkness of the unlit stage floor. A window beside the balcony was open, green wooden shutters with flaking paint swung out to the sides, and Anna’s face was visible within.
“When you fly along, will you carry me with you, will you take my words on to the valleys beneath you?” He played and sang while Anna stared out of her window, expressionless, looking out at the first few rows of the audience, avoiding eye contact with Sasha.
The egg crate was sliding to the right and the balcony to the left. They were moving apart so slowly that Jane only noticed it when Anna’s face had almost slipped behind the curtain completely. Just before she was gone, though, Anna put her hands through the window and slammed the shutters closed. A gust blew the feathers at Sasha, getting caught in his guitar strings while he still played, interrupting his chords. The lights dimmed and rose once again out of sight. Sasha strummed with one hand and with the fingers of the other he combed his hair, now staring straight out at the audience. Straight into Jane’s eyes.
When Felix was six he asked Jane why she loved him. The day before she had shouted at him for breaking a lamp as he dashed around in the living room with a ribbon in his hand. She was so used to forgetting what happened day-to-day, since this was the only way to keep up with her son, that she hadn’t at first connected the wrenching question to the incident with the lamp. She’d told him what she could – that he was hers, that he was sweet and smart and funny and she wanted to be together always. She was angry with herself for making him question that bond. He said “okay” and turned away to his colored pencils.
* * *
(Lights up. Sasha is stepping down from a floating stone pathway into a narrow, smoky street. Buildings are lit by orange sunset glow. A bus rolls forward obscuring Sasha, stops to let off a single passenger, and moves on. A woman stands in the street with Sasha.)
HOPE: Do you know where I could catch a cab?
SASHA: No. I’m not sure how I got here.
(Hope is uncomfortable and backs away from Sasha, turning to look for someone else to help her.)
SASHA: But that’s not to say I can’t call you a cab! Just one moment.
(Sasha runs inside a record store with dusty windows and a dim interior called “Spun Out” and returns a minute later.)
SASHA: They’ll arrive in 5 minutes.
HOPE: Thank you.
SASHA: What’s your name?
HOPE: Hope. What did you mean you don’t know how you got here?
SASHA: I’ve been spinning about like an object in space. All that spinning and you kind of forget what direction you’re headed in the first place.
HOPE: Have you stopped spinning?
(Sasha steps closer to Hope. She puts her bag down and holds out her hand. Sasha takes it. Smoke blows across the stage and when it disperses Hope is gone, her suitcase remains on the ground. Sasha leaves his hand hanging. The buildings behind him fall away to reveal the earlier mountainside scene. The sheep with the broken foot is baying. Sasha runs his fingers through his hair and kneels by the sheep with his back to the audience. Lights fade.)
Lucas was sweating, noticing incongruities in the delivery of lines and the positioning of set pieces and the way his metaphors fit together. It was over now, though, and he felt those waves of energy subsiding. He wrote down a few notes for the director and slipped them in his files backstage, then started putting on his coat to make a quiet exit. As the curtains fell he heard a noise from the audience. A man and a woman were smothering laughter. It wasn’t everyone, Lucas told himself later. He told himself this not because he believed it, but because he was having a hard time getting his bus pass from his wallet, and he had to calm down to fit his fingernails behind the leather. The laughter had not been entirely drowned out by applause when the actors returned for their bow.
Two weeks later – the bare minimum – the performances were halted and Lucas had drafted an email to send to Victoria. He wrote about the show and the laughing couple. He called it cruelty, and said that cruelty made him feel nothing. Victoria hadn’t been cruel, really. Her actions made him feel anger and self-hate, emotions that began something useful and culminated in a vision, built on-stage. His letter was more cathartic for him, he thought, than it would be useful to her. If he hadn’t been so insulted, he might have felt pity for that couple in the audience, that their eyes were so shut.
* * *
At the end of the play Stanley had grasped Jane’s wrist and she realized he was shaking with laughter. She started laughing, relieved that Stanley’d found the show as juvenile as she did, glad to embrace the joke with him. They covered their mouths and stumbled out of the theater.
“Hope! Hope?” Stanley said as they got in the car. “Blown away in the wind.”
“I bet they shut it down within the month.”
Then they were home and Stanley’s arm was around Jane and they were warm under the blankets and she asked him if he’d noticed that Sasha looked like Felix. Stanley laughed and said he hoped Felix was having a better time with Olivia than all of that. He didn’t answer her question, really. He slept. Jane did not. She alternated between keeping her eyes open and then closed. She shut them carefully. In the solitude of still-awakeness her introspection found a sour taste. Laughing at the play had been part of a barricade strategy, keeping them from diving too deeply into the subject of love. They kept themselves near the surface so they could come up for air. She wondered what it would be like to sink as low as Sasha, to tie oneself to stones and glide down and convulse without air and tap into the unthinkable. She shut her eyes and willed herself to dream it.
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