Reign

“I need it to be now. I'll never be able to… face it otherwise.'

'Then get mad,' Evan said.

'What?'

'Get mad. That's what my drill instructor tried to make me do when I was supposed to head my squad. I guess he figured that if I got mad, then I wouldn't be afraid.'

'The Marine equivalent of whistling a happy tune, eh? Did it work?'

Evan shook his head. 'I couldn't do it. Not with all those eyes on me. I tried to get mad, mad at them, mad at myself for being such a. .. such a wimp. It didn't work. I'd get the attacks. Couldn't talk, after a while couldn't breathe. But it might work for you.'

'It might,' Dennis agreed. 'If something would make me mad. I don't think I can do it on my own.'

On Friday afternoon Ann and Evan came in to the rehearsal to see if Dennis's performance in rehearsals was as bad as he had thought. They quickly discovered that it was. During a break, Dennis went to the larger studio where Quentin and Randy, his assistant, were rehearsing the chorus. Dennis signaled to Quentin, who called a five and went with Dennis into the comparative privacy of the hall.

'I want you to direct,' Dennis told him, 'not just choreograph.'

'Why?'

'Because I can't. You've sat in, you've seen the scenes. I can't bring a damn thing to them, Quentin. Can you do it?'

He thought for a moment, then nodded. 'Randy can bring the chorus the rest of the way. But first I want you to do something for me.' He put a hand on Dennis's shoulder and looked at him with sad and ancient eyes that had seen too much weary death. 'I want you to see a doctor.'

Dennis gruffly shook off Quentin's hand. 'I don't need a doctor, there's nothing wrong with -'

' Listen to me. I have seen friends by the dozens wither away and die, Dennis. And Christ knows I hate to say it, but they started the same way you are – pale, tired, as though the life's being sucked out of them. Now are you keeping something from me?'

'Are you asking me if I have AIDS?'

'Maybe. Or maybe something else. I do think you're sick. Now I know Phillips at Mt. Sinai, and she's the best internist in the city. I want you to have every fucking test known to man, and I want to find out what's wrong with you.'

'There's nothing wrong with me. Nothing physical.'

'Then prove it to me.'

Dennis looked at him for a long time before he nodded. 'All right. Set up the appointment. They can take all the blood, shit, and piss they want. They can stick tubes up me and X-ray me until my hair falls out. Just direct this show. Now.'

Quentin immediately walked to the pay phone down the hall, made a brief call, and returned. 'Monday,' he said. 'You're in at seven, be there most of the day. All right?'

Dennis shrugged. 'I'll do as much good there as I will here. You've got a cast waiting for you.'

After Quentin explained the situation to Randy, he followed Dennis into the studio in which the principals were rehearsing. Dennis said only that Quentin rather than himself would be directing the show, and offered no explanation. As he had assumed, none was necessary, and the day wore on.

At four o'clock Terri arrived at the studio to take Kelly Sear's costume measurements. She smiled at Evan as she came in and again as she went out. He followed her and found that she was waiting for him.

'I wanted to see you,' she said. 'I wanted to tell you I'm sorry. For being such a bitch.' She smiled. 'Did I need to add that?'

'You were a little… aloof. I didn't know what I did wrong.'

'You didn't do anything. I was a little confused, that's all. I was mad at you for something that… that wasn't your fault. And I just wanted to apologize.'

Evan nodded. 'Apology accepted. How's Marvella doing?'

'She's fine. I don't think she likes having a roommate much, though. She's really depressed about… what happened to Whitney. It might have been better if she was alone for a while.'

'I doubt it,' Evan said. 'Staying busy will be good for her. Help her forget.”

“She'll never forget.' For the first time Evan saw tears in the girl's eyes. They seemed out of place there. 'None of us will.'

He held her then while she cried, and her body molded itself into his. 'What's happening?' she whispered. 'What's happening? Who's doing these things? And why?'

'I don't know, Terri. But we'll get him. We will.'

Scene 5

Everyone involved with the show welcomed Sunday like a lover. They slept late, dined late, tried for several hours to banish the thought of the Empire of Waldmont and its fictions from their minds. Then some picked up sides and studied, or sat down at pianos in their apartments and plunked out tunes, or pushed back chairs and reviewed steps.

Evan Hamilton and Terri Deems had lunch together and then went to the new Woody Allen film. John Steinberg woke up, watched John Ford's Red River on his VCR while he ate a large and nourishing breakfast, then spent the rest of the day reading the Sunday Times and a T.V. Olsen western novel. Curtis Wynn and the young woman he had been dating on and off for several years woke up at noon, made love again, and went back to sleep. Marvella Johnson went to church in the morning, had lunch with some friends at their apartment, and then went back to her place, where she turned on the television and stared at the screen for several hours. If anyone would have asked her what she had seen, she would not have been able to tell them.

That afternoon, Dennis and Ann walked arm in arm through Central Park. There was a light drizzle, and they huddled together under a wide umbrella, more for the human contact than to keep the thin sheen of rain off their heads and shoulders. The air was warm for March, and here and there crocuses pushed from between the rocks by the side of the paths, their bright purples and yellows like miniature torches in the gray mist.

Dennis slowed down as they reached a bench. 'Let's sit down a minute,' he said.

Ann wiped the moisture from the wood with a handkerchief. 'You're tired.”

“A little.' They sat and Dennis lowered the umbrella. 'It's stopped raining.”

“How do you feel? Really?'

'Terribly tired. I have no energy at all. All I want to do is just lie down and sleep. It's draining away, Ann. My life. The son of a bitch is taking it. He's back there in Kirkland, but somehow he's still taking it.'

'You could be sick, you know,' she told him, almost wanting to believe it. At least sickness was something that could be either fought or accepted. At this point, the Emperor allowed for neither. 'We'll know better tomorrow.'

'They won't find a thing,' Dennis predicted. 'My blood will be fine, there will be no tumors, no sites of infection. Blood pressure will be normal, and there will be not a trace of cancer. The test for AIDS antibodies will be negative.' He smiled crookedly. 'I won't even have so much as a cold.'

He put his head back. The rain had begun again, a fine mist, and he closed his eyes and let his mouth fall open as if, she thought, he was about to receive some communion from the heavens. Then he closed it and, still looking up, said to her, 'They can't see sicknesses of the soul.'

He was right. They could not. The following day, after an evening in which he fasted and a night in which he purged himself with castor oil and Fleet enemas, he submitted himself to the ministrations of the doctors. Despite his apathy, some of the procedures were painful enough to make him cry out, and he welcomed the pain, welcomed anything that could make him feel, react, show an honest and unforced emotion.

At the end of the day, when he was dressed and feeling only dull aches, the weak memory of pains suffered rather than their sharp reality, the doctor told him that neither she nor all the vast machines of Mt. Sinai could find anything physically wrong with him, and suggested therapy to see if his condition could be of a psychosomatic nature. He declined the offer.