The evening before this
morning that Yvonne wondered about Adam and the ugly dress, the evening before,
after Adam had wrestled with Felix in the Paradise Theatre and the playwright
stood alone under the marquee, he again turned and banged at the doors and
shouted, "Felix! Felix Lord!" because he had remembered Yvonne's windchime
laughter. Felix at last reappeared.
"Who was that woman?" Adam
demanded of the old producer. "The one who came out of the theater when I first
got here?" Felix told Adam who she was and that he had asked her to direct
Adam's forthcoming play. "Yvonne Yvette! But she's very good! Wonderful!" Adam
responded.
"Yes, she is," Felix
said.
"Too bad," said Adam. And
the two said goodnight again.
Adam stood shivering in his grey corduroy suit. Rain splattered beyond the
marquee. A wino shuffled to shelter beneath the overhang. The man's face was
caked in a maze of snot and dirt and coagulated blood cut ineffectively by
streaming raindrops. Adam closed his eyes. "Go ahead, you asshole. Close your
eyes. Don't look at me and you won't have to see yourself," raged the poor man.
But Adam could see himself
with his eyes closed. He could see himself just as he was, thirty-five years
old, dressed in grey, but two inches tall and falling. Falling and falling head
over heels as he fell through the void in his brain. "There's just nothing," he
sobbed in his brain. "No ground." And he yelled "nothing" echoingly in his mind.
And he whined the word to himself. And then he sobbed it to himself. And the
little Adam in Adam's mind fell and fell through the void.
But then a peculiar thing
happened that Friday night under the marquee of the Paradise Theatre. Adam
stopped falling.
For ten years
Adam had had this two-inch Adam in his brain. The falling Adam. And in the ten
years of falling, the only way Adam had ever found to stop the falling was to
open his eyes and clap his hands violently or perform some other gross primate
display. But the falling had a ten-year career. Adam could only interrupt
the fall mid-void. The tiny Adam had fallen thousands of mental miles in ten
years. The clapping or stomping would only snip the film. Another evil or
panic-filled moment would splice the film and the tiny Adam would continue
falling through the void.
But the
peculiar thing that happened in front of the Paradise Theatre that night was
that the falling stopped without the film being broken by Adam's labor. The
fall-stop was part of what was on the film. The two-inch Adam landed on the
stage of the Paradise Theatre on the film in Adam's mind. Adam's eyes flipped
open with surprise. And he saw with a start that the wino was standing near him.
"You okay, bro?" the wino asked.
"Yes," Adam answered, assessing
whether it was safe to close his eyes for another second. When he did close his
eyes again, the two-inch Adam was falling again. Grimly, Adam was not surprised.
But in a moment the mind's tiny Adam landed again on the stage of the Paradise
Theatre. Amazed, Adam opened his eyes again and was amazed once more at the
wino's presence.
"Got'ny spare
change?" the wino demanded.
"So.
Felix wants a play," thought Adam, while his hand sought the coins in his
trouser pocket. He had thought he would only think it, but aloud he blurted,
"It's too much responsibility."
And the wino, who was grabbing change out of Adam's hand said, "You're tellin'
me, bro. Hey, man. Ya want some wine? Ya want to have some wine with me?"
And Adam blinked as the wino
weaved back and forth in front of him. "No. No, man. You go ahead," the
playwright said.
And Adam stepped
away into the rain. The wino stood rocking under the marquee and yelled,
"Elitist pig." At which Adam wondered without looking back about the man's
education. His counter-culture exposure. Adam passed another couple of winos
sharing a bottle in a doorway. "Hey. Hey, man," one of these doorway men called
to Adam. Without looking at the doorway once he'd passed it, Adam saw it written
in the rain that was falling at a wind-lofted angle to his eyes, that these
souls were the sacrament-drinking sacrifices of society. And Adam saw also that
these men were also their own mythology. Heroes of their own demise. But after
the demise? After the excruciating demise? What? What was the point?
Adam thought back to words he'd
said and heard said in the Paradise Theatre tonight. "The superego." "The play
is a healthy ego." "The place where everyday language and the unconscious needs
meet, do battle, find peace." "I can't write a play." "You don't have to write a
play." Adam's musings and walking brought him to the corner where he had gotten
off the bus. "Felix! You bastard!" Adam yelled into the rain, into the abandoned
night street. "So Felix wants a play?" Adam thought. "What if there were a
fucking play? What would it be like? What could it be like? All this nothing!"
Adam gave a deep shudder. He forgot about the bus and began to walk toward home.
"But that's even more
responsibility, isn't it?" he said to himself after a few yards of sidewalk.
"Being in charge of every detail of endless nothing, being the shepherd of
nothingness is like...like...like trying to be God. Better to take a few pieces
and pretend they are something." This line of thinking was making Adam feel
nice. Nicer than he had allowed himself to feel in years. So he jumped himself
with negativity. "So?-So?-So?...So write a play. Right now. Right here. Come on.
See? Nothing happens." He nattered at himself in his head.
But in a moment, a peculiar thing
happened. As Adam walked along in the rain, the geometrical shape of a play plot
occurred to him. And happy adrenaline fled to meet it. And details floated up
from the bottom of brain cells and gravitated to the plot. And tone began to
emanate from this unformed mass, like faint radio signals. And between the
unstructured levels, themes cried out. And the crying separated out into
distinctly ranged voices. The voices became embryo characters. Adam pushed the
other elements of the play aside and watched the characters as if they were his
fascinating dinner guests. And after a bit they evolved and they and he knew
better who they were. Then he set them back inside the play, like dolls in a
dollhouse. there the characters set to work redecorating and living a play life.
All this happened, Adam had to
deduce, during the several mile walk home. He found himself standing in front of
his apartment house. The hundred-year old structure looked brand new to Adam.
He'd never noticed before that it pulsed with potential. "Oh, it's only the play
making me see it like this," Adam thought, and his heart sank. His heart rose
again when he realized he'd been working on a play. But it sank again because he
doubted he could get the play into written words. A plot is not a play. "But
enough already with the yo-yo heart," he commanded. He decided he was going to
make the damned thing go into words by brute force if nothing else. What else
but words had he already been thinking the play in? Tuna fish? Had he been
thinking in tuna fish? Chopped liver? No. Words. Goddamned, wonderful words.
"And, really, Adam," the playwright told himself, "you really are a terrific
bore. Really creepy. Just write your play, huh?" And he flung himself into the
lobby and pushed the elevator button before he could have another change of
heart.
With jaw set, he stepped
onto the elevator, determined not to banter with Fred, the elevator operator.
Determined not to spend a drop of language until he could get to his word
processor. "The landlord said to give you these," said Fred, handing Adam a set
of keys.
"What are these?" Adam
asked.
"Keys," said Fred.
"Oh," said Adam.
"To your apartment. The Robinsons
moved out." Adam had forgotten. He had paid deposits on an apartment down the
hall from Jamie's. It had been six months since the Robinsons had mentioned they
were trying to move to the country and Adam had sent money to the owner of the
building. A few moments later Adam was standing in the empty apartment. It was
dark and the switches brought no light. Adam shivered the old darkness shiver.
At first he thought the power was off, but then he detected the hum of the
refrigerator.
He ran down the
hall to Jamie's apartment, fumbling for the right set of keys. "Jamie! Jamie!"
he called breathlessly. But Jamie was out for the evening. Adam realized
flashingly that it was good. That if Jamie ere home he would probably blurt the
plot to the play and then have nothing to put on paper.
Adam went to the utility closet
in Jamie's place and took down two boxes of lightbulbs, ran back to the
livingroom and grabbed the chair from the antique oak executive desk that Jamie
had given him. He struggled with the chair and bulbs back down the hall to his
new apartment. He stood on the chair and screwed a bulb into the ceiling socket
in the small foyer. The switch was on, so Adam was blinded by the light.
"Fiat Lux!" said Adam. "Let there be light!" And Adam jumped off
the chair. "And there was light. And God saw that the light was good," spoke
Adam.
Adam ran out of his
apartment, down the hall and punched the elevator button to summon Fred. then he
ran back into his rooms, leaving the door open so he could hear the elevator
when it arrived. Adam ran around, dragging the chair, screwing in bulbs,
listening for the elevator. A bulb for the bathroom, a bulb each for the kitchen
and little hall, three bulbs for the enormous livingroom/diningroom, and one
more for the tiny sleeping alcove. "And one for the little boy who lives down
the lane," Adam laughed.
And the
place dazzled. The whole apartment was painted in a rich, semi-gloss off-white
and it throbbed excellently in the light from the hundred watt bulbs that swung
in the chandeliers suspended from the fourteen-foot ceilings. The ceilings in
Jamie's apartment had been dropped to a modern level sometime in the 'fifties.
But Adam was in possession of a testament to the soaring hopes and
ecology-lessness of the nineteenth century. "Coal was cheap, and Man stood
upright between earth and heaven," Adam said editorially. the floors of the
place were hardwood with some ancient stain that stood just short of ebony. But
the floors, new waxed and buffed, danced with light. And the great ten-foot
windows, four of them in the livingroom, each four feet wide, were shining
blackly. "Here it all is in black and white. The universe. Now I'll create a
world. A play's a little world! What power!" Adam laughed. Then he whined,
"Where is that screwy elevator?" And then he heard it land on his floor.
"Come on, Fred. Help me move a
couple things," he said after dashing down the hall.
"I gotta watch the elevator,"
whined Fred.
"Come on. It won't
take you as long to help me as it took you to get up here."
He and Fred moved the word
processor, the printer, and the heavy desk out of Jamie's and into the new
livingroom. Adam paid Fred a few bucks and then was alone.
He cranked up the computer. But
there was something missing. He dragged a six-foot avocado tree from Jamie's
place, putting it in front of a window where he could see it from his desk,
which stood in the middle of the room. Then he went to Jamie's kitchen and put
on a pot of coffee. All this time, though he worked with speed and the grace of
purpose, he chided himself that he was procrastinating. He pulled down reference
books from Jamie's shelves and took several trips to his apartment with these.
He checked the coffee. He dragged the Oxford English Dictionary on its
stand into his apartment. The coffee was done. He made a tray of the full pot,
cup, spoon, cream pitcher and sugar bowl and took this to his new apartment. He
prepared a cup and sat at his desk.
But he got up and drank the cup
looking at the city lights through a grand window. "I don't think I can do it,"
he thought. But the play came back to him. A line from it played with him. Then
he played with it. "That's a good line," said Adam aloud, and the room echoed
nicely. "Fiat Lux!" he called, and the room echoed beautifully.
"Let there be play!" And there was a play because Adam sat down and wrote one.
Or, at least, he began a play.