His watch beeps midnight, and for a moment he feels sick with fear, sick to the point of vomiting, but he shoves it back into that long-forgotten nook in the pit of his stomach that he hasn’t needed since med school—those nights he woke in cold sweats in the dark, convinced he didn’t have the hardwiring to pass the boards.
-21-
In the cold, snowy silence, Ron walks up the sidewalk, his cheeks beginning to burn again, clutching in his right hand a wicked-looking ice ax with the price tag still dangling from the blade.
He’s slept outdoors in the desert waste of Canyonlands National Park, in the immense sweep of Denali where it got so quiet those Alaskan autumn nights (after the mosquitoes finally shut up) that he imagined he could hear the stars humming like distant generators.
The silence this winter solstice as he walks the empty streets of Lone Cone seems something else entirely—more a mask than an absence, and not a shred of peace contained within it.
The tracks turn down 3rd Street, Ron’s legs aching as the snow melts and seeps through his khaki slacks. He wishes he’d thought to outfit himself in new, dry clothes from the hiking store, but it’s too late for that now.
Around the back of a late Nineteenth-Century brick building, he turns into an alley, and after twenty feet, arrives at a pair of doors without handles—the termination of the four sets of tracks.
He beats his fists against the doors, shouting, “Jessica! Can you hear me?”
If she can, she makes no answer.
Ron spins around, stares at a Dumpster capped with snow, at the power lines above his head, dipping with the weight of several fragile inches that have collected on the braided wire, hears a rusty door several blocks away swaying in the wind, hinges grinding.
It occurs to him that he might be losing his mind, and he sits down against the building and buries his head between his knees and prays for the first time in many, many years.
-22-
As he rounds the corner of Main and 3rd, searching for something with which to break through the front of that brick building his wife has disappeared inside, light just ahead stops him in his tracks.
He feels certain it wasn’t there before, this soft glow of firelight flooding through windows onto the snow, and at least fifty pairs of skis leaning against the front of the building.
Ron jogs over, glancing up at “Randolph Opera House” painted in ornate red lettering that arches over the entrance, and the marquee above it which displays: “Dec. 22 - Midvinterblot.”
Through the windows that frame the doors, he glimpses an empty lobby illumined by candelabras.
The doors are unlocked, and he steps inside onto red carpeting darkened by the soles of wet shoes, sees a vacant concessions booth, coat closet, walls covered in framed posters advertising stage productions, autographed photos of musicians of modest fame who’ve played this opera house over the years.
He proceeds through the lobby into a darker corridor lined with closed doors that access the theatre, hurries through an archway on the right, and quietly ascends two flights of squeaky steps.
-23-
The balcony is sparsely peopled.
He slides into a chair in the front row, peers down through the railing, the opera house lit by three hundred points of candlelight, the lower level packed with what Ron estimates to be the entire population of Lone Cone, everyone extravagantly, ridiculously costumed as if they’ve come to a carnival or a masque—headdresses of immense proportion, the details lost in the lowlight, only profiles visible, and the room redolent of whiskey and beer and the earthy malt of marijuana smoke that seems to hover in the aisles below like mist in a hollow.
The stage is the spectacle, forested in real, potted fir trees, with a painted backdrop of the mountains enclosing Lone Cone in every season, all surrounding the strangest object in the theatre—a life-size golden bear which appears to have been forged of solid bronze.
It stands on its hind legs in a metal recess at center stage, and a line of people shuffle past, contributing pieces of firewood to the pit before returning to their seats.
This goes on for some time, while on stage left, a trio of men on guitar, fiddle, and mandolin enliven the theatre with bluegrass.
When everyone has taken their seats and the musicians abandoned their instruments, a tall man rises from the audience and takes the stage. Clutching a long candle and costumed like a Spanish conquistador, even though his silver helmet conspires to mask his identity, Ron pegs him for the sheriff who threw him out of the Lone Cone Inn several hours ago.
The conquistador raises his arms and shouts, “Come forth!”
At stage right, the red curtains rustle, then part, and two figures emerge dressed all in white, even their hoods, each holding an arm of Jessica Stahl, and at the sight of her, the crowd roars, Ron feeling a ripple of nausea until he notices his wife smiling, thinking, Has this all been some devious game?
They escort Jessica around to the back of the golden bear, step down into the pit, and one of them lifts a hatch in the back of the beast, while the other whispers something in her ear. She nods, accepting a clear mask attached to some kind of tank.
Jessica holds the mask to her mouth for a moment, then stumbles back, the crowd cheering, and she waves to the audience and blows kisses, the applause and whistles getting louder, long-stemmed roses spitting forth from the front rows onto the stage.
Jessica climbs into the golden bear, and the men in white close the hatch and return the way they came, vanishing through curtains off the stage.
The sheriff-conquistador raises his arms again.
The audience hushes.
He turns and approaches the golden bear, ducks down into the recess.
After a moment, he climbs back onto the stage and strides across to the left side, where he grabs a thick rope and pulls.
A trapdoor in the ceiling swings open, snowflakes drifting down onto the golden bear.
“Lights!”
A collective exhalation sweeps through the theatre, candles extinguished, the room pitch black.
Ron leans forward, squinting to raise some detail in the dark. A moment ago, he felt a passing twinge of relief, thinking there was some reason or logic behind this bizarre, awful night, but that is falling out of orbit now.
The room becomes silent, no sound but the occasional whisper flickering down below.
At first he mistakes them for lightning bugs—motes of ascending light down where the stage should be, but the snap of boiling sap and the sudden odor of woodsmoke corrects the error.
Out of the darkness surfaces a single image—the golden bear—though it’s no longer golden but the deeper reddish hue of molten bronze, and as the flames underneath it intensify, the bear glows brighter and brighter.
Ron says, “Oh, Christ.”
The bear bellows, a high-pitched, Jessica-sounding roar, her voice channeled through a complex of tubes that curl to the right of the bear’s glowing head like a brass tumor, and words mix in with the screams, but the tubes and the pain slur them into nonsense, the bronze clanging now like a huge cymbal as Jessica desperately beats against it from inside, her juices dripping through holes in the bear’s haunches, sizzling on the stage.
Someone in the crowd shouts, “Another year of plenty!”
“No avalanches!”
“No cancer!”
“More tourists!”
And they are clapping now, down below, the applause building, stoned and drunken toasts being proffered from every corner of the theatre, fighting to be heard amid the tortured commotion emanating from the stage, the golden bear smoking as snowflakes fall through the ceiling onto the brilliant bronze, instantly vaporizing.
Somewhere in the darkness behind him, a woman weeps, and a man whispers, “Shut the fuck up!”
Ron jumps out of his seat and stumbles back down the stairwell, spewing vomit on the walls, reemerging into the dark corridor, racing toward the nearest door, throwing it open to wafts of woodsmoke and a sweeter-smelling incense that he knows is his wife, roasting inside the golden bear.