The Stone Loves the World

depths at the north end of the Greenpoint Avenue Station, into arctic winds. Jumping Jehosaphat! She shrivels, turns her shoulder upwind, hobbles homeward. She got a tiny bit inured to the cold during the past two winters when all that polar-vortex shit was going on, but this winter has been mostly milder. I may be some time, she says to her tentmate and fellow explorer, heading out to her plucky British death. God save the Queen, and damn the torpedoes! Her apartment is only a block away, but the wind is against her. She turns around and leans backward into it, pushing with her feet against the peanut-brittle ice on the sidewalk. She fumbles with her keys through her mittens at the door, shoulders in, mashes it shut behind her. On through the inner door, past the door to the ground floor apartment, which belongs to the family she rents the second floor from. Sounds of television. True to Greenpoint’s Wikipedia paragraph on demographics, they’re Polish American, an old woman and her middle-aged bachelor son. His divorced sister and her two young children lived upstairs until they all died from carbon monoxide poisoning in a snug little cabin in the Poconos eight years ago. The old woman, Aniela, used to be talkative in her grief, and Saskia sat with her on a number of afternoons in the early months of her rental. Aniela lived in Krakow until she was twenty-six, and Saskia’s generic Polish accent is a shameless full-bore imitation of her.

She unlocks the door at the top of the stairs. “Mette?”

She walks through the sitting room, glances in the kitchen. Knocks on her daughter’s bedroom door. “Mette?” Cracks the door. (Mette would prefer to lock it, but the fire escape is through her window, and Saskia vowed to never under any circumstance step across the threshold when Mette wasn’t there, unless a roaring inferno convincingly blocked the stairway.) “Mette?” Swings the door open.

Damn that girl. (Woman.) Nothing for breakfast tomorrow, and Saskia’s not going back out into that cold. Why can’t she answer her texts?

Saskia makes tea, grabs the remote, settles on the couch under a chenille bedspread she rescued from the attic of the old house upstate. Something from her mother’s childhood (which Saskia knows nothing about, beyond rumors of family wealth, six older brothers, and Grand Guignol). It’s coming up on nine-thirty. She’ll wait up. She sips the tea and listens to the wind against the window.

There was a line today, toward the end of the session. If the player decides to bring the Hispanic cutie along in the escape pod, apparently the oxygen runs out and they have to make an emergency crash landing on an uncharted planet (these people have faster-than-light travel, but pre-Columbian mapping technology). Phil explained there’d be a cutscene, so Saskia imagined a descent through atmosphere, red haze of heat-shield burn, clouds parting, jungly riverine valley, looming treetops, kaboom! Compressed-air sound effect as hatch opens. Player stumbles out. Cue the cutie, bloodied and dazed (tits, thank God, intact): “Wh—where are we? What is this place?”

She did the usual three takes on the line, then asked Phil if she could do them over.

“Um, sure,” he said, sounding surprised. “Those were good.”

“I can do it better.”

“Go for it.”

In the previous takes she’d been distracted trying to fight the shivers running up and down her body, but now she cracked open the door to the memory, which lent to her voice an authentic thrill of awe. She asked to hear the playback. She was delighted. No, it isn’t all tricks. (In other words, tricked herself again!)

Years ago, she acted in a Shakespeare company in Ithaca. It’s how she caught the bug. She’d dropped out of college and popped out Mette, was living with Lauren on the old commune. Brainless besotted baby worship was just giving way to the willies: she would end up like her mother, waiting tables in Ithaca and selling produce at the Farmer’s Market, wrapping her lonely self in a New Age crazy quilt. She’d disliked college, so going back wasn’t the solution. It never occurred to her that acting might be, she just had to do something to get her sorry ass off the property. She saw a notice about auditions, went into town and read, and they gave her Ursula in Much Ado.

She didn’t get paid, of course. This was a bunch of amateurs, for whom friends donated five dollars at the door. They used the money to rent a space in a small defunct movie theater. Costumes were pieced together from the Salvation Army store. Sets were minimal, and therefore pretty good: ships were ropes hanging in swags, thrones were tall chairs, woods were shadows of paper leaves hung in a mesh over the stage lights. Looking back, Saskia has no idea whether she could act, but she could tell right away that some of her fellow actors couldn’t. The younger ones weren’t bad, because most of them hailed from the Ithaca College theater department. Additionally, there were two former Equity actors who had fetched up on the town’s shores (“Wh—where are we? What is this place?”) and decided to stay. But there was a coterie of old codgers with only three ways of delivering any line given to them: angry (incomprehensible shouting), neutral (rotely cadenced, deaf to meaning), and distressed (like angry, only scrunch-faced). There was also the occasional smug young jerk with one or two tricks up his sleeve (95 percent were “he”), such as a naturally rich voice or the ability to produce tears on cue, that sufficed so well for his self-esteem that he could otherwise sleepwalk through his part.

Observing all this, Saskia discovered a mission—she could dedicate herself to not sucking as an actor.

They gave her scraps: Third Servant in Henry IV, Second Murderer in Macbeth, Mariana in Measure for Measure. Progress toward bigger parts was slow, because Dorothy, one of the founding members of the company, took the best roles for herself, and