Final chapter of a 4-part poetic mystery
Where there are no mountains, a balcony will do. See you at eight. J.
Strange message, but the ticket for the play called “Transfiguration” was free,
and I hadn’t seen Jack and his three lusty friends since the day he pretended
to spill his cup, and our luck overflowed. The sale of saints had been slow,
so I closed up early. Everyone wants horned gods these days and long-limbed
goddesses of sea foam. I send them to the airbrush artist down the street.
On the stage was a fountain with a beam of light aimed at the center
beside the wall of a medieval church with plumes of mist swirling from
cracks in the stone. The theatre was filling with no sign of Jack.
In the box seat of four, there was only me with a bottle of water, sitting
under a sign I couldn’t read, that must have been important, since people
below kept looking up and pointing. Precisely at eight, where there’d only
been space on the stage, a woman appeared in a loose khaki vest
like a female Che, hands in her pockets, relaxed. Before we begin this
phenomenal play, she announced, I would like to present the one
who made this production and all that surrounds us not only possible
but infinitely probable. The spotlight then swept from the stage to the box
seat across the auditorium, crowded with so many people I wondered how all
of them didn’t collapse into the orchestra pit. Letters carved above their box
read “Tragedy”. In the ominous silence, a few people coughed. Then the light
moved on, across the lower balcony toward me. The beam was so bright
that I couldn’t make out what was happening. A rumble began that sounded
like thunder from under my feet. It was only applause, but the sound had a
strange sort of surging and roll coming at me in folds. I thought of the icons
I painted with illustrious names of faces that change, and the customers
who said they’d never felt better than when they displayed what I sold,
but before I could place where I’d known this before, the roar settled down,
and the spotlight returned to the stage where the play had begun. A small
group at the fountain had gathered to speak of a quest to expose what they
called the Pretender. Do we know he’s a he? asked the woman in khaki, while
spinning a blade. When we find him, then what? said the man who looked
kind of like Jack. The one in the middle who said, she is he, he is she,
I couldn’t make out. Were there four at that fountain or three? I squinted
to see. While lifting the bottle of water, I noticed my palms had grown hot
and the plastic was warping. The liquid inside was beginning to boil. Shocked
and surprised, I tossed the container, which flew in an arc across the theatre
to the box seat named Tragedy. In the very next instant, a jet stream of water
shot out from the crowd. The plaster collapsed. The wood and the metal that
held them in place contorted. I watched in horror while the box seat dissolved,
and the people fell out in slow motion as if they were in outer space or an
ocean. While they floated and gathered their bearings, the rest of the seats
in the theatre rolled into cylinders, squirming and surging like red velvet
serpents in search of—I don’t know, a meal or exit—the shapes rearranged
and turned toward me. I jumped up with what remained of my sanity, yelling,
“Jack, what the hell kind of play…?” Jack, Jack, Jack…the name kept repeating,
a nickname for John and a nickname for James, the icons I’d painted so often
I knew them by heart…even more. They were men that I knew, had come to
adore—hardly saints—with a leader who taught us pretending is what
we have all come to do. Just do it with grace and with ease. So for aeons,
we practiced pretending until, as with too much of any good thing, it outgrew,
overtook us. We chose the wrong box, went crazy and crowded. Conspiracy,
a.k.a. unity, turned into something we tried to deny—would have gone on
denying, until that day we three met again at the fountain of the court
of St. James with our leader, who taught us on a mountain long
ago to breathe as one, conspire. Only this time, he said, you won’t tire.
And you’ll see that the play goes on and on. The cast of “Transfiguration”
took twelve curtain calls. I can’t explain the special effects, and there’s
no point phoning Jack. He’s locked in his study writing poetry. The master of
blades, she’s learning some new martial art. Me? Like my transfigured friends
I do what I want. As for the sign above my box seat? Clue: It’s a C word.
The End
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© Elaine Stirling, 2014