“The fire and cloths,” Charles went on. “The rough and woeful music that we have, cause it to sound, beseech you.”
Brandon was an Ithaca College performance major in viola who’d grown up in the area and was staying home for the summer because his mother was ill. He had taken it upon himself to compose the moonlit air that he now began to play. Saskia lay in the coffin and listened to the music—for every performance Brandon was on stage for only three minutes, and like everyone else, he worked for free—and felt her hand being warmed by Charles as he knocked Shakespeare’s words out of the park: “She is alive! Behold, her eyelids, cases to those heavenly jewels which Pericles hath lost, begin to part their fringes of bright gold; the diamonds of a most praisèd water doth appear to make the world twice rich. Live, and make us weep to hear your fate, fair creature, rare as you seem to be.”
She opened her eyes and saw the edges of the casket like a frame, within it Charles’s rapt, wondering face looking down at her, Brandon still playing softly, and she was suddenly swamped by a wave of emotion as she realized how insanely lucky they were, this small-town gang of enthusiasts, to have Charles and Brandon, and how lucky that humans have such a thing as a viola, and the whole crazy series of episodes in Pericles, in which Fate seemed to count for everything and individual merit nothing, suddenly seemed right and true, we’re all lost and helpless and continually washing up on a shore somewhere, and we can only hope that someone will find us and pry open our lid and say that we smell good.
She sat up, wanting to throw her arms around Charles and kiss him and wrestle him to the ground and sit on him, but restrained herself, and in rehearsal she had worried about technique, about keeping clarity while conveying emotion, but all that was forgotten in a blaze of ecstasy and idiocy so complete it could only be holy. “Oh dear Diana, where am I? Where’s my lord? What world is this?”
None of which is to say that she necessarily delivered the line well. Private spasms are dangerous. But this story is about her, not about whoever had nothing better to do that evening than fork over forty bits, expecting not much and getting it. What she got was her first heroine (heroin!) glimpse of what acting might mean for her, if she could get it under control, learn to ride that breaking wave.
Where am I? Where’s my lord? What world is this?
Okay, sure, “where’s my lord,” patriarchal horseshit. What Shakespeare meant—or anyway, what she meant—is, Where’s my guidance? What is my purpose on this earth?
She sips her tea, gazes on the familiar objects of her sitting room. She’s a single mother, an unknown actor barely making ends meet. The world is overheating. Gays can marry in every state, while a third of Americans seem to have been driven literally insane by the election of a Black president. Her ambition when she was young was to know everything, to read all the great books, including the Zulus’ Tolstoy, to know French history and the human genome, theories of consciousness and artificial intelligence, the complete works of Bach and the multiple authors of the Bible. Now she thinks she’d be satisfied with understanding her daughter.
She hits the remote, streams an episode of a show with an actress she had a fling with years ago. Then a different show, and a third. She tries to enjoy the solid work she’s seeing without dwelling on how her opportunities have mostly dried up. This business has taught her that the human sin underlying all others is not pride, but envy. Pride is merely an injury to the patriarchal god she doesn’t believe in, whereas envy is an injury to one’s fellow human beings. She finishes with an episode of the old Twilight Zone. That gorgeous look of black-and-white film.
Then it’s midnight. She picks up her phone.
don’t torture your mother
Goes to bed.
When she startles awake at 6:00 a.m., she checks Mette’s room. The bed is neat as a pin, unslept in.
Wednesday, February 17, 2016
“Hello, what’s up?”
“Mette’s missing.”
“What do you mean, missing?”
“What do people usually mean when they say ‘missing’?”
“How long?”
“Since yesterday.”
“Maybe she pulled an all-nighter at Qualternion, some programming problem.”
“Of course I called. Someone there said she showed up yesterday morning and a few minutes later she walked out. Didn’t say a thing. She’s not answering my texts. Some of her clothes are gone.”
“So she hasn’t been kidnapped.”
“Don’t joke, for chrissake.”
“I’m not joking. If she went somewhere on her own volition she’s probably fine.”
“So why worry? How convenient.”
“I’m just—”
“I think she’s run away.”
“Run away? I don’t think—”
“She’s been withdrawn lately.”
“I don’t think you can—”
“I mean more than usual.”
“I don’t think you can run away when you’re twenty.”
“Mark—fuck! Could you please pass the test? I’m worried because there’s a good reason to be worried. Can you just accept that?”
“Okay.”
“I’m telling you because you should know.”
“Okay.”
“I might need to reach you, you’re not about to run off to a conference?”
“No, I’m teaching.”
“Good.”
1993–1994
Numerous studies have shown that visual memories are untrustworthy, but for what it’s worth, he remembers seeing her for the first time. He was in his second year teaching Intro to Astronomy, and back then he talked too much about his own work in the opening lecture, imagining that students would find it helpful to keep in mind his particular perspective as he guided them through the field. Also, looking back, he thinks he was nervous,
