Cast me in the Downlight

Before its beams became my bones, before its hallways swelled like arteries, before its breeze replaced the breath between my teeth, the Palace Theatre was beautiful.

Imagine this. You have bought your ticket to a stage play, to an orchestral show, to a vaudeville act. Maybe, if you’re lucky, a motion picture will be playing. A Valentino or a Chaplin will smile (right at you!) and all week, your footsteps will land lighter.

When you enter the theatre, it will not be what you expected.

It will feel like stepping into open air, like stealing the ground from under you, a wondrous act of breaththeft. Like standing on a rooftop, even though you have entered a smaller space. You will pause to wonder where the ceiling has gone, until you see that its high arches are painted a shade of blue so dark that you mistake it for the night sky. Wisps of projected starlight pirouette through the space, and the chandelier lights refract and dance. You toss an apology behind you, because you’re blocking the doorway, but everyone else has stopped too. They’re as enamoured as you are.

It’s so beautiful, that you bring a date, or a stranger, or a dying relative. One last show, they say. One last beautiful thing, before they’re condemned to a grey rectangular bed in a grey rectangular room, and everything in the world becomes pale. And so you come here, and sit in a velvet seat so dark you forget you are sitting in it, forget you are in a body, forget there are worlds outside the light of the stage.

You are dazzled by the theatre. You do not look in the shadows, and you do not look at me.

*

The director’s coffee breath stung the air.

“Where’s the marking tape gone?”

“Get moving with those backdrops!”

“Has anybody seen Stephen?”

His foul breath shepherded the crew towards their work, and away from where he was standing. Later, men will call this a ‘revolutionary directorial technique.’

One of the actors (Stephen) grumbled a barely-audible complaint before shuffling past the stage curtain. I smiled to myself but kept quiet. I couldn’t get away with a complaint like that. Wasn’t that an actor’s job, after all? To say the things that regular people couldn’t (help me, please don’t go, I love you)?

Backstage, a theatre production moves like a small city. Stagehands and prop masters, set designers and costumers and electricians skittering, rushing, stopping to gossip. It held a dizzying power. I wanted to be close enough to see, to touch the same light that the performers touched.

The director had not been enthused about hiring a woman, but when I told him I’d work for less than half the usual rate, he grumbled and pointed me towards the stage. He was very forward-thinking.

I knew the building well, knew the best spots to place the stage lights, or how to move that cardboard tower on stage without damaging the rafters. I moved boxes, rigged pulleys, watched the rehearsals from the wings. Close enough to see the light, not close enough to touch.

I missed lunch one day, fiddling with the rigging of a backdrop of Paris. The scene where the two lovers finally meet. When the crew filtered in through the theatre doors, I realized I’d been alone for the better part of an hour.

The stage manager did a double take when he saw me, an afterthought. “Oh! Did they forget to tell you? There was free lunch in the lobby.”

“Oh!” I said, stung. I smiled. “I already ate.”

Actors and set dressers and other stagehands, chattering, loitering, laughing. I ignored my hunger pains until it was time to go home.

But I was spending my days in the Palace Theatre, and so every day was beautiful.

*

When a possum dies in the ceiling, it takes about three days for the deathrot smell to reach the people below.

If I still had legs, I could climb a ladder to reach it. If I still had a voice, I could call out for someone to help, and reach a gloved arm into the crawlspace to remove the creature. A job like that would have fallen to a stagehand, to someone like me.

But I don’t have those things anymore.

I am splintered wood and rotting air and cracked and peeling paint. I am the theatre, and I breathe alone in silence.

Occasionally, I get visitors.

A teenager, lithe enough to squeeze past the ‘No Trespassing’ signs, through the gap in the wire gate. He holds a rectangle of light, a magic theatre you can keep in the palm of your hand. He steps over piles of debris, around a piano with crushed legs and soundless keys. He whistles low when he sees my balcony seats, collapsed and cracked in the middle. Once, he could have mistaken the ceiling for the night sky. But now, sunlight sliced through the wood in ragged lines, and a patch of ceiling had fallen away altogether, revealing a cloudless blue downlight.

The teenager treaded up to the stage, the orchestra pit. He wrinkled his nose in disgust at the smell.

*

After work, I used to walk to the steel mill to meet up with Thomas. We had been married for three years.

He finished work fifteen minutes after I did, and so it was more out of politeness that I waited for him, rather than my want of his company.

I spotted him when he walked outside the factory, following the source of bellowing laughter. He grinned at the other workers, all just as sweaty as him. I tightened my grip on my purse, swept a curl of hair back into place. As usual, Thomas’ smile dropped a fraction when he saw me, when he had to tear himself away from his buddies. As if I were physically dragging him home, rather than patiently, quietly waiting for him in my usual spot along the gate.

An obligatory peck on the cheek, and we both tried to stretch polite conversation for the length of the walk to our house. Thomas made a sheepish excuse to work in the back garden, I said that I’d better get dinner started, and then I wouldn’t see him until just before bed. We made love when our bodies desired it, but we never desired each other. We were props in each others lives.

Thomas wasn’t cruel, he would never even hint at a threat, like some husbands might. He was funny, he was well-liked, he was respectable. But I don’t think he ever knew what to do with me. I don’t think he ever saw me.

*

Once, a young girl smashed one of my windows and crawled into the cavity of the orchestra pit, breathless, tear-stained. I shielded her from the circling terrors outside. Another time, a couple found refuge under the dim arch of the lobby, smoking and dreaming and laughing. Once, a sweaty and nervous man dragged a lumpy shape up down the basement staircase, and never came back.

The teenager with the glowing rectangle has returned with friends. They jump on my stained velvet seats, loosened from their rows, and crushed across the floor. They wobble on the snapped floorboards of the stage, as if they are balance beams on a playground. They pull the keys from the piano, like prying off fingernails.

They fill the theatre with echoes of obscenity and cruel sharp laughter. This space isn’t for them. They do not tread lightly. They do not see.

*

I was in charge of holding up the moon. A heavy, wooden crescent that took the space of at least a third of the theatre backdrop, and was suspended by rope. I cranked the moon high and watched the lovers, the actors, the stars of the show, collide clumsily underneath it. Like they did every night, the audience laughed gently at the lovers’ first meeting.

Actors replicating a falsehood, perfectly, each time. And each time, they sparked a new genuine joy in the audience. But I’d seen this moment hundreds of times before, and it didn’t feel real anymore.

The thick rope was smoothed over from the grip of so many hands. I looked at the not real moon, at the not real lovers, and at how easily the audience was falling for it. The same trick, over and over.

And suddenly, I needed to feel real. I needed someone to look around the room and find me as the answer.

There was applause, and the curtains closed and the lights dimmed, and I grabbed hold of the rope just a second after I’d realized I’d let it go.

*

A teenager with firehair rummages in a backpack for a cannister and she walks along my walls. She stops at a place just near the fire exit, where my walls are stripped back to exposed brick. She shakes the cannister, screws her face up in concentration, and makes bold red slashes across the brick, inscrutable letters and symbols. The red shines pearly and luminescent, and drips like blood.

Claiming me. Reimaging me without my permission.

I am not here to be drawn over, or laughed over, or spoken over, and as the teenagers leave, I am trembling with rage, beams shaking loose from the rafters as they walk underneath my doorframe.

*

“What was that? You could have hurt someone!” The director was fuming. I was surprised he remembered who I was. “You were lucky the curtains had been drawn.”

“I’m sorry,” I said, over and over, stunned. “It slipped. It won’t happen again.”

That night, Thomas was particularly quiet. I didn’t bother making small talk and didn’t bother making dinner. Of course, Thomas didn’t pick up on it, didn’t ask. He would defend me at the drop of a hat, but he could never figure out how to reach me. And I never showed him.

I retired to the swinging chair on the porch and wondered at the thrill I’d felt when all eyes were pointed on me.

*

The teenager did not die.

He heard the crash and screech of metal and dove out of the way before the beam could hit him. Really, I only brushed the back of his calf. But I could have done more. I could have easily done more.

People say the Palace Theatre is frozen in time, an abandoned relic of a past era. But they don’t see that a building holds memories, holds an imprint of the lives that pass through it. It’s changing, always changing, and when you walk its halls you leave echoes, impressions, that sink into foundations long after you’ve left.

*

To everyone’s surprise, the incident with the moon did not cost me my job.

It was mostly because there was no time to replace me, no time for the reshuffling. This wasn’t Broadway, and the show’s budget was limited. I was, after all, working for less than half the regular rate.

After that, I felt tethered to the theatre in a new way. I felt the ropes as if they were tendons, I inhaled applause and exhaled with the release of the curtains. I met every cue with alarming precision.

Thomas must have noticed the shift, but it took him a while to figure out how to ask about it.

“You stopped cooking,” was his eventual approach.

I turned. I didn’t want to explain it to him. “What would you say if I told you I wanted to be an actress?”

He chuckled, and it wasn’t intended to be unkind, but he saw the change flicker across my face, and his smile dropped. He cleared his throat.

“Honey, I’m so proud of the work you do at the theatre. But, and I’m sorry to say it, actresses have to have a certain look. A spark.”

Then he smiled gently, put his hand on my shoulder. “Some of us just aren’t built for that.”

I wanted to rip that hand off me.

*

The teenagers are gone. Now there is a man in a yellow vest and helmet standing in the lobby. He looks at water damage stains, at stalactites of mineral deposits, at doors that float in the middle of the wall, their staircases crumbled away. He hums and writes on a clipboard.

Outside, a solar eclipse, but the shadow is attached to a crane.

*

The lovers were on stage again, colliding under a fake moon, whispering in fake moonlight. The man recognized her first, because it never is the other way around. Why can’t the woman be the one searching, the one looking down on the world until something catches her eye?

I felt the grip of the rope, the weight of the moon. I heard piercing laughter, missed jokes, quiet assumptions. I smelled the sour breath of the director, felt the firm grasp of Thomas’ hand on my shoulder, and then I was seeing the lovers from above, the view of a star, and I was bitter, radiant heat. I became so bright and so unignorable that I pressed myself into the walls, into the ceiling and the floor and the lights, and the pulleys became my joints, and my hands disappeared from the rope, and the moon crashed into the earth.

They tried to find me in the wings, but I had outgrown them. They thought I had disappeared, but I had become permanent and powerful. I breathed and the curtains shifted. And from then on when the audience clapped, the applause was partly for me.

*

“Don’t see how this place wasn’t already condemned.” The man in the yellow helmet folds the clipboard under his arm. “It shouldn’t be supporting a whole second level with just a few columns. It wasn’t built for that.”

He looks at me and sees nothing. No perfect balcony, no walls made of starlight, no halls made of song.

The eclipse looms outside, casting the stage in shadow. Soon they will demolish me. Soon, I’ll be made small again.

I am old, but I will not be irrelevant. I will not disappear.

I rustle the rafters. The doors rattle on their hinges, the piano gives a strangled scream, piping falls from the ceiling in a cymbal crash, and everything shakes with a metallic crunch. Behind the man, I loosen a concrete column, let it finally slide out from under the roof, over his head. I lurch, and I realise it was the last support beam that hadn’t been eaten by rust or time. I don’t care. I don’t care. The man screams, and I come crashing down in rage and rage and rage.

*

Imagine this.

You find someone special, a date or a friend or a relative, and you decide to go for a walk in the park. It’s night time, so you stumble over a small sign, almost trip over it. It’s so close to the ground that you have to lean down to read it. The sign tells you this park is new. A community project.

I wonder where our memories go. I wonder if they seep into the ground, like I did.

You point up at the starlight, admire the moon, and when the wind hollows through the trees, it almost sounds like music.