The Disguise
I pulled open the theater door and stuck my foot against it to keep the wind that swirled in the street from slamming it shut. I swung my duffel bag through the doorway and followed it inside. The door closed with a forced hiss and the bright lights of the street were replaced by dim greys. The air was still.
My eyes adjusted, and slowly, as if candles were being lit, I perceived the narrow high room which was the foyer of the Rose Theatre. I crossed the room and peered in the ticket window. A thin young man, with eye sockets blacked, and white hair cropped close to his head, looked up at me I dropped my bag, pulled my card from my pocket and handed it to him.
“Pallio,” I said.
“Very good,” he said, and looked at the card. “Now when Velasquo arrives we’ll have everyone.” He picked up a cast list and put a check beside my name. After slotting my card into the register, he touched some keys, and the square of plastic disappeared. “The charge is twelve percent higher now,” be murmured. “They’re trying to tax us to death.” The card reappeared and he handed it back to me. “Let me take you to your room.”
I picked up my bag. The cashier appeared through a doorway beside the window and led me down the hail, looking back over his shoulder to talk: “I don’t trust this
Guise
play, I think that whole Aylesbury Collection is a Collier forgery…” I ignored him and watched the footprints he left in the thick blue-black carpet. Dull bronze-flake wallpaper shattered the light from a half-dozen gas jets. The Rose was in its full Regency splendor, for the first time in months. The halls felt as subterranean as before, however; the Rose occupied only a few bottom floors in the Barnard Tower, an eighty-story complex.
The cashier stopped at one of a series of doors and opened it for me. Light flooded over us. We went in and were on a different set; snapping Jacob’s ladders and colored liquids bubbling up tubes made me look for a mad scientist. But it was only a white-coated technician, at the computer terminal. He turned around, revealing a scrubbed, precisely shaved face. “Whom have you brought us?” he said.
“Pallio,” replied the cashier. I dropped my bag.
“We’re ready to give you your part,” the technician said.
The chair was dressed up like a chrome-and-glass version of the table Frankenstein’s monster was born on. “Does Bloomsman have to do this,” I said.
“You know our director.”
“Last time I was here it was a dentist’s chair.”
“Not many liked chat one, as I recall.”
I got into the chair while he tapped keys at the terminal, calling up from the artificial mind a detailed description of my brain’s structure. When he was done he wrapped the pharmaceutical band around my neck. “Ready?” he asked. He tapped a key on the chair’s console and I felt the odd sensation, like flexing a stiff muscle, of the injection—a tiny witch’s brew of L-dopa. bufotenine, and norepinephrine. As always my heart began hammering immediately: not because of the introduced chemicals, but because of my own adrenaline, flooding through me to combat the imagined danger of a primal violation.
We waited. The room enlarged and flattened out into a painted cylinder. “Now for the hood,” said the technician, his voice like tin. The hood descended and it was dark. The goggles were cold against my face, and my scalp prickled as filaments touched it.
“Time for the implant,” the technician said. “Let’s have alpha waves if you please.” I started the stillness behind my nose. “Fine. Here we go.”
In my vision a blue field flickered at around ten cycles per second, and voices chattered in both ears, creating counter-points of blank verse. In those connected clumps known as the limbic system, scattered across the bottom of my cerebral cortex, new neural activity began. Electrical charges skipped through the precise network of neurons until they reached the edge of the familiar; synapses tired in new directions, and were forever changed. I was growing. I felt none of it.
Memories came before me in confusing abundance, passing before I could fix on them. An afternoon by the window in an Essex library, watching green hills become invisible in the grey rain. In the colony off Jamaica just after the earthquake, when everyone was silent, feeling the pressure of the hundred fathoms of water above. The run of basses in the scherzo of Beethoven’s Fifth. A strong smell of disinfectant—hospital smell—and the voice of Carlos, droning quietly: “It was in the fourth act of
Hamlet
, when I as Claudius was on my knees, attempting to pray. Hamlet was above and to one side, on the balcony, and in my peripheral vision his face distorted into a mask of fang and snout. As he finished his soliloquy he turned away from the balustrade, but his head stayed fixed, twisted entirely over one shoulder, and he continued to glare down at me. My memory flooded. The moment I understood he was the Hieronomo, he jumped the balustrade, and I leaped to my feet only to meet the falling épée blade directly in the chest. I heard the cries of shock, but nothing more..”
Blackness. Then the suction pulling at my eyes as the eyepieces withdrew. The hood rose and the white room reappeared. I twisted my head back and forth.
“Got it?” asked the technician. I paused and thought. Pallio… yes. A series of exclamations marked his entrance in the first scene, a conference with Velasquo. I knew only my first few lines, plus cue lines, and Bloomsman’s laconic blocking, appropriate to the improvisational nature of the art: “Confront Velasquo center stage.” The rest of my part would come to me throughout the course of the play, irregularly, recalled by unknown cues. This was the minimum script that Bloomsman allowed one to receive; it was the preferred preparation among seasoned actors.
“Backstage is that way,” the technician said. He helped me up. I swayed unsteadily. “Break a leg,” he said brightly, and returned to his terminal. I picked up my costume bag and left the room.
The hall expanded near the gas jets and contracted in the dimmer sections. I stopped and leaned against the wall, concentrating to recover from the dissociation of the implant. The wallpaper was not actually flake—it had once been a smooth sheen, but had cracked and peeled away into thousands of bronze shavings. Chips broke off under me and floated to the carpet. I strode down the hall, uncertain how long I had stopped. My sense of estrangement was stronger than usual, as if I had learned more than a play.
The hall ended in a T and I could not remember which way to go. Acting on a dim intuition I turned right and found myself in a veritable maze of T-connections. I alternated turns, going first right, then left. One hall followed dropped several steps, then turned and became a flight of stairs, which I descended. At the bottom of this stairway were three long, dim halls, all furnished (like the stairway) with the same dark carpet, bronze wallpaper, and gas jets. I chose the right-hand one and ventured on. Just as I began to think myself inextricably lost there was a door, recessed into the right wall. I opened it and was at the back of the theater, looking across the audience to the curtain.
The audience was large, about forty or fifty people. Many times I had acted in plays which no one had come to see; in those the imaginary fourth wall had become real, and we had played for ourselves, aware only of the internal universe of the play. Most actors preferred it that way. But I liked the idea of an audience watching. And it was not surprising, with this play. It wasn’t often that one got to see the first performance of a play four hundred years old.
An usher appeared and propped the door open for me. Behind him a fully-armed security guard looked me over. He was there, I supposed, because of Hieronomo. The usher offered me a program and I took it. “I need to get back stage,” I whispered.