Marky was an actor. He specialized in bluster, blowhards, sputtering puffed suits. He was great at saying “Now see here!”
On stage, he’d angle his face to the lights to cultivate a crop of sweat jewels. At the moment of highest tension, with a flick of his chin, he’d let fly a glistening spray, a briny nebula visible from most mezzanines. It was his “signature move.”
Castmates hated it. By closing night, everyone would have inhaled Marky’s aerosolized sweat. Most agreed it tasted like anise and starched the mouth like an underripe mango.
Jan liked looking at him. From her perch in the lighting booth she thought he looked like a dewy winter plum. She liked to crack a soda when he’d hit his first mark and sniff it. She liked to sketch the labial fold where his skull met his neck. She mouthed his lines unconsciously.
Veronica, working the sound board, watched these rituals with the practiced disinterest of a dermatologist. What did she care? She owned a gun, and God knew her name.
Marky and Veronica fucked on the floor of the control booth during lunch. It was a standing appointment that suited them both. She liked the burn of her bare back across the synthetic carpet, leaving it stippled with crumbs and the occasional fingernail. She avoided brushing herself off so that the rest of the day she could feel the grit shift against her skin.
Marky was an enthusiastic partner. He talked continuously, veins clenching out of this or that. When he’d climax, Veronica imagined striking him with a closed fist. Pow! She sometimes worried she’d actually done it, from the noises he made.
This thing she was doing with Marky gave Veronica a sense of balance. Her husband was a small and messy man who liked to rev his Kawasaki near geese to watch them startle. He’d bought up a dozen mannequins when the Sears went bust and posed them out in the brush in scenes of violence and coitus for her target practice, so she’d have no trouble clipping someone strangling him, or executing him in flagrante if he strayed. The less likely it was, the more prepared you needed to be, they agreed.
Marky had never thought about anything like that. “An A-to-B man,” he called himself. “Mister Simplicity Himself,” he called himself. Not all the time, but he did call himself these things.
Veronica was a tangle of carefully balanced systems carefully maintained, like a nuclear sub. When she fucked Mister Simplicity Himself, a needle in her head flicked back towards center dial. She did it for everyone’s sake.
Jan never said anything about how the control booth had a musk to it after lunch. Jan never said much of anything to Veronica. Veronica looked at her as though she were shrimp tails balled in a cocktail napkin, when she looked at her at all. Both felt this was all basically correct.
Just to close the loop: Marky was aware of Jan the way dogs know about lizards.
After rehearsals, Marky planted himself in a corner booth at the Egret, hemmed in by whichever of the cast and crew he’d lured with a first round on him. Marky was not popular, in that he wasn’t listened to, but people enjoyed him, sure.
On the fated night, Jan tagged along with a couple more-or-less friends from the props department. She didn’t often come. She didn’t blend well. But tonight was date night for her sister and her husband and Jan did not like the upstairs noises on date night.
She watched him from the bar. There he was, mustache beaded with well rye, motioning with tight little chops, thumping shoulders, coughing violently from a bad gulp. The picture of unruly vitality! A snowfed creek overspilling its banks!
As usual, the props women had flocked to the side of an androgynous assistant director, whose swan neck arms would creep around one waist or the other as she murmured about the poetics of longing.
Unescorted, Jan felt pinned to the barstool. She believed if she approached the booth, she’d reflexively bark out baroque masturbatory fantasies, fantasies that weren’t even hers – for example, laying nude and immobile under a clear plastic staircase as socialites pass above her on their way to some white tie gala, occasionally pausing to spit onto her through narrow slots designed just for that purpose.
It was like this: Jan had never really lived in the present the rest of us make a big show of occupying. Her mind was an outdoor cat, rangy and skittish, darting freely between vividly imagined future catastrophes and vividly remembered past ones. Scenes in canoes, visions of smeared cakes, her arm down a throat. Far better she do nothing than risk anything inside her escaping into reality.
So it was pure chance they first spoke, brought together, as we so often are, by piss. Jan had been waiting a while. Someone was on a crying jag behind one locked bathroom door, and behind the other, icy silence. Her nostrils prickled. He was beside her.
“Which’ll it be?” The slight slurring gave Marky’s words a showman’s sweep. “Door number A or door number B?”
“Someone’s crying in there,” said Jan.
Behind the door, someone said “it never ends,” and someone else said, “it does, it does.”
“I think it’s Mary-Ellen,” said Jan. “She doesn’t cry the way she does on stage but I guess that’s not so strange.”
“Nobody does. An actor protects himself in this way. I should know. I’ve spilled tears on stage enough to fill a hedonist’s tub.”
“Wow,” said Jan. It was true. Anise. She could taste it.
“But did you know this?” Marky was breathing heavily now, though Jan couldn’t say when he’d exerted himself. “Off the stage, I’ve never once cried.”
“Never?”
“Never once.”
“As a baby, though.”
“Deadly silent. I came out like an owl on the wing. From there I expressed my needs through gesture.”
He gestured, and Jan could see the baby he’d been.
“Needed a moment,” said Gary Taupin, stepping out of door A. He pounded his chest to dislodge a cigarette burp.
Marky waved her in with a deep bow that knocked the candle off the hall table. He was gone when she came out – he was being towed – and it would be weeks before they spoke again, at her moment of ascension.
The next day, Jan woke up different.
Her moment by the bathroom with Marky had been unremarkable. A meat and potatoes sort of memory, and yet it alone stood firm while her other thoughts whipped around like shrapnel. Jan could plant a foot there and at last have leverage against the world which constantly threatened to destroy her.
Yes, this was a new Jan, and everyone took notice. At lunch, the props women, Maggie and Annie, felt their hackles raise as Jan punctured pasta salad and spoke unprompted.
“I’m reading about the great men of history,” said Jan, tapping out a boléro rhythm, “Bismarck. Blackbeard. That awful Hitler, of course. Martin Luther, for example.”
“Germans,” said Maggie.
“I’ve been going for night walks. I peer into windows. I feel creature instincts.” Jan chewed as she spoke.
“I don’t think I know what that means, creature instincts,” said Annie.
“Like the mind of the beast,” offered Maggie, “Primeval.”
“Exactly, Maggie. Yes.”
“Well, I don’t know about any of that,” said Annie. “Is this from your home life? Has your sister’s husband been coming on strong again?”
“No, no, Declan loves my sister very much,” said Jan. “When his love overflows these days he ‘sorts it out’ on the screen porch. We have an understanding. Look, you don’t have to worry about me. I haven’t taken drugs or read any leaflets. Yes, I am different. Now I sleep on my back with my heart exposed. I eat dark meat and drink cold wine. My eyes dart around. I see it all! But I’m still basically myself. And I’m working on that. I’ll crush her soon.”
Here she knocked her pasta salad off the picnic table, to show her resolve.
“But for practical purposes, I’m still just Jan. Your friend, Jan.”
And here Jan smiled, though her face resisted it, and Maggie and Annie smiled too, to avoid wincing.
Behind all this, the play limped on. Advance sales were flaccid. Donors were cagey. And to top it all off, the soul of American drama itself was in crisis!
So going into previews a mood settled over the set. Trust ebbed. Trust had been cast to the dirt. It was a season of betrayal. Knives flashed in the dark. Where was trust? Yes: the dirt.
And so it was that the cast and crew sat around the Frances Klatch Memorial Lower Atrium eating a pizza lunch. Marky was drunk, just a little, at the level he called “snow tires.”
“I’ve got my snow tires on,” he said to Gary Taupin, less quietly than he thought, as they rooted among the boxes. “Strap on a chain or two with me?”
He fired off an effortful wink that involved his shoulder.
“Rain check,” said Gary, “Got to stay alert. Jan’s on the wing.”
“Who?” said Marky.
“Ebbets. The light woman.” Gary jerked his head backwards, PEZ-like, towards the Misty Klatch Memorial Seating Hutch, where Jan sat startlingly upright, her eyes ancient coins, cutting a grid into her pizza with hands that seemed completed by the knives they gripped.
“Jan, sure. The land bird. Loves to stare,” said Marky, his chains rattled. “She’s ‘on the wing’? Is that a bird joke?”
“She’s saying things. She’ll say anything to anybody. She told Astrid that–“
“Who?”
“Gowry? Shouts ‘That’s no husband of mine!’ after the chandelier falls?“
“I’m in the chandelier scene.”
“I know. She told Astrid that clinging to what little status she has keeps her from ever having more. That’s word for word.”
“When was this?” The men had drifted to the Gina Caskey-Klatch Memorial Alcove – tragedy indeed stalked the Klatches. From this vantage, it was clear a magnetic field rippled through the room, emanating from Jan. Marky sneezed.
“Just an hour ago. Cornered her coming out of notes. It’s been all day, though. Boom, boom, boom. The dominoes are falling. Just watch.”
Veronica watched the two men from a high-backed chair. Her brain whirred and clicked. That morning Jan had sat down next to her in the booth, and then her head had turned smoothly, like a doll’s, and when she spoke the sound seemed to lag behind her lips. She said, “You’re very afraid of me, I think.”
Veronica didn’t know what to say to that. What does anyone say to that? It’s a scary thing to hear, and even if it wasn’t true before, it probably is now, at least a little. Veronica realized Jan was an irreducible remainder. She did not fit in the equation; she upset its balance.
Veronica said, “What a disturbed thing to say. Take it back.”
Jan said nothing, only tapped at the lighting board to cause distant winks.
Veronica in the atrium, alone, eyes flicking about. Afraid? Of Jan, of her power over these people and their little dramas? She could have laughed. She would, later, in the comfort of her car.
The director was giving a speech, recounting the late nights and early mornings, the trap door issues, the coyote. Veronica found Marky’s gaze, tipped her head boothward. The director was on a tear now, her eyes gone wet. She was chanting and it wasn’t catching on. Veronica slipped out before hearing if she stuck the big landing.
Marky and Veronica in the booth. They were mission-driven and got right to work. In! Out! In! Out! The classic stuff. Marky groped with the effort of the never-quite-sober. Veronica imagined a bladder inside him inflating, distending him until his pinkish membrane pressed against the carpeted walls of the booth. Would she suffocate first, or would he burst, pulverizing her with a shower of bone?
The door to the booth had a little window, and Jan was in it. With her cheek pinned to the carpet, Marky’s hand leaving smears down the side of her face, it was the only place Veronica could really look, at that square of soft light with a woman’s head in it. Oh, hello there. She’d probably dropped one of her knickknacks by her chair leg. Pathetic.
They looked at each other, Jan’s face kaleidoscoping through the infinite variety of the human experience. Veronica had never been great at reading people’s emotions and she wasn’t about to start trying now.
Jan opened her mouth, shut it. The dim light from the vacant theater scooped out the hollows of her face. Her skull, Veronica thought, was really very beautiful. She could easily imagine it in a reliquary, on yellowed lace, calling to sun-stroked pilgrims with whispers of ancient power. Veronica wanted to take her skull and put it there.
“Call me Jan,” she said, without really thinking about it.
“Sexually?” said Marky, sweating freely. “No. It’s odd.”
“It’s normal. It’s playful. People do things like this all the time, for new pleasure. Tell me I’m Jan, like you would to Jan.”
“I wouldn’t tell her that. Why’s everyone suddenly so crazy on this woman?”
“She’s very interesting. Call me her.”
“Jan.”
“Say it like you would to her.”
“You’re Jan.”
“Like you would to her!”
Could Jan hear this? Veronica thought so, and anyway, she was making sure to really enunciate, in case she was a lip reader.
“Yes, Jan. Oh, Jan.”
“Like that, yes.”
“And but in this scenario, I’m still—“
“Yes.”
“It’s sort of an acting challenge.”
“If it helps, sure.”
“Jan! Oh, Jan! Nobody does it like you! Your body is so long. Your body is so long and interesting. You’re very different! Different than most!”
Yes. This was it. To inhabit her. To be the remainder, the unsolvable variable. To know the Mind of Jan and supplant her. She focused her mind at the Mind of Jan. Do you see? Do you see what I’ve become? Do you see why God knows me personally, and marks my tread?
“Wow! Wow! Jan, what a special thing! This is such a wild and special thing for us, Jan!”
Why should I fear you? I’ve held the bullet that will cut me down. Who but Veronica can know the truth of the grave? I contain you. The existence of Jan must necessarily presuppose Veronica.
“Heauuurghh! Huuuaaaaahhhh!”
Do you see and understand? Will you surrender your essence to me? Will you crawl inside the skin I’ve shed to swaddle yourself in my leavings? As she climaxed she realized she didn’t know Jan’s last name.
Marky’s convulsions took longer than you’d think. Veronica heard them as through a velvet shroud. Jan’s face had stilled. Her eyes were fixed now, as if injected with an incredible new plasticized resin. They looked beyond the sordid world of flesh.
What, Veronica wondered, did she see there, in that realm of pure spirit that arced and sizzled with vast belts of white wet light? What structures revealed themselves to Jan alone, what lattices braided dense with the crystallized murmurs of the sephirot and the qlippot hatme’ot, their sinister reflection? What did other people think about in situations like these?
And then, between blinks, she was gone. Some new feeling squirmed up through Veronica to peck at the base of her brain.
“Where is she?” she said, scooching back. Marky made little throat noises of displeasure. “Where is she?”
If Jan wasn’t in the window, she could be anywhere. She could be jogging towards Veronica’s husband with news. She could be smearing poison on Veronica’s car. It wasn’t likely but it was possible and she couldn’t rule it out. Veronica felt lightheaded from thinking about Jan too much.
Jan did not reappear. There was a brief search. Nobody really wanted to find her. Her sister’s husband’s car was still in the lot, but Jan had a fast lope, and it was agreed she could be zipping around anywhere really at this point.
In her absence, the mood lightened. The parking lot that evening was rich with jokes and smiles. Anyone watching from a high perch would surely be stirred to smile themselves. Hey everybody, what about a celebratory nightcap at the Egret? This was Marky’s one idea, but he nailed the delivery, so everyone figured, the Egret, hey, why not!
Veronica tried to demur. She hovered by her car, keys in hand. She saw herself at home tonight instead, with her small and messy husband butchering seasonal vegetables and yammering away about man’s many drives. Intolerable.
So instead, she was at the Egret. Teeth gleamed, liquid sloshed. The hits of yesteryear and endless chitchat surrounded her like a choking mist of the swamp.
These people! These people! Touching arms, swallowing foreign pilsners, laughing in long and weird ways with multiple phases, doing “act outs,” doing little bits of singing, flitting around in drapey fabrics, lean of neck and long of finger, who could love these people? Veronica believed she had infinite capacity for love, piped into her from love’s inexhaustible source, and even she could not love them.
The music switched to the hits of today, and the lighting from regular night to deep night. People settled into the very serious task of flirting in stupid and inadvisable ways. Veronica had somehow been folded into a conversation with stage hands about what happens after death.
“Did you know there are more people dead now than have ever been alive? And all that energy is building up somewhere. I think in space but it doesn’t matter. A rupture has got to be coming, right? I think in our lifetime. All the dead, all at once, rushing back in a great big bolt. Boom!”
This made sense to Veronica on a deep, intuitive level. She found herself looking forward to it. So it felt fundamentally right that at that moment there should be shrieks from the front of the Egret, and a great sound, the sundering of glass and the tearing of metal, and a sudden press of people running stumbling from it, fringed with searing light. And there followed a voice, high above the animal noises, clean like a cathedral bell:
“I am evolving! I am different! Faster and faster, so fast your head would spin! I am different than I was this morning, and different than I was yesterday! There are no consequences, only change, and there is no change I cannot handle! I am confident! My body is long and interesting! I am the invincible summer from the quote! I am brave and my personality is rare!“
Jan strode over the glass fragments and tumbled stools with arms outstretched. Beside her, like a loyal beast of fable, her sister’s husband’s car at a steady roll, driverless and inevitable, its high-beams blinding in the Egret’s sensual gloom. Glass slid from its hood and things crunched under its tires.
Jan spoke words of perfect knowledge, and Veronica drank them in.
“None of you like me! None of you think anything of me! When you think about me at all, you imagine me looking like a muppet or pinocchio. I don’t look like that! I see everything from the light booth! I feel every vibration! I am the spider in your web of secrets! I am not who I was and I am not who you thought I am! I am ice in the river and fire on the cliffside! I am a knife with a human mind! I am the most important person in the play! I am light and darkness, vision and blindness, my name is Jan, and I live nearby!”
“I’ll handle this,” said Marky, and then more loudly, “I’ll handle this.”
“I know her,” he added.
By now the crowd had clocked that the car’s inertial roll was easily avoidable, and quieted to take in the tableau. Marky parted them easily, repeatedly clearing his throat. Finally he stood facing Jan and cleared his throat. The car was starting to list now and scraped against a booth with a squeal, knocking Marky out of his groove and forcing him to clear his throat again.
“Jane,” he began.
Veronica moved with a surety that scared her. She pushed an actor aside, stepped around another. She felt fixed, that it was time and space that flowed around her. And borne on the headwaters of that flow was Jan, radiant with glass in her hair. Veronica felt the training in her reflexes, the precision of a hundred hours drilling in the brush, her muscles tuned for execution.
She rounded Marky. She saw him in totality, every fold and facet, and dismissed him. He collapsed, his strings cut.
And then there was Jan, just Jan, her mind vast and infinite, her head full to bursting. Veronica felt she could cry if she wanted to, but she didn’t want to, but after so long, it was nice to at least have the option. She stepped forward, let Jan flinch, stepped forward again. Her arms were wide. She knew what to say. It was so obvious! It was obvious to anyone of elevated mind. She spoke the perfect words in perfect order, and Jan smiled.
