Trust Exercise(74)
“Jesus!” said Martin from down on the floor. “Is that the gun you just dropped?” Karen felt she’d crashed back in her body the same way the gun had crashed onto the floor.
“Yeah, sorry,” she said, snatching the gun off the floor as the lights came back up.
“Let’s do it again with the quick-change!” called David, which meant, That was perfect, let’s keep the fuck going and finish.
“I need to reload it to do it again,” Karen said. “I’m only loading one blank at a time. For safety.”
Everyone stood around the props table watching as she opened the cylinder to confirm that the chamber was empty, loaded the new cartridge, pressed the cylinder back in the frame. Doing these things she’d done many times before and had total confidence doing Karen’s hands felt shaky and unruly and she wished they wouldn’t watch her so closely. She wasn’t performing fucking brain surgery. To distract attention, theirs and her own, Karen talked through the steps the way Richie had done. “You always have to confirm the cylinder is clear after each time you use it. Basic safety. Your finger should be nowhere near the trigger and nowhere near the trigger guard until you’re ready to shoot. Never point the gun at anyone, even if it’s unloaded. Never squeeze the trigger, even if it’s unloaded. The safest thing in our situation is if no one touches this blank gun but me. I’ll bring it to and from the show, I’ll move it to and from the props table, I’ll load it and clean it. No one else should touch it at all, even if they’re just trying to help. That’s how accidents happen.”
Then Martin and Karen and the gun all returned to their marks. Karen as the Girl again stood with Martin as Doc on the stage with the lights blazing on them. They spoke their lines again. They did their seizing embrace again. Through the door, stormclouds, door closed, find the marks, pick up the gun. Martin clapped his hands over his ears.
“What’s that?” David called from the house. “Why are you doing that? We can see it, man. Doc’s supposed to be waiting for death!”
“It’s bloody loud, are you hoping that I should go deaf?”
“I think he’s right,” Karen heard herself saying. “We’ve done it once and I know how it feels, let’s go back to ‘bang’ for the rest of rehearsal or we’ll all end up deaf.”
David was unhappy with this. He came up onstage, opened the set door, and stood scowling at them. “You’re the safety expert. Seems to me like you should get used to shooting it for real in rehearsal. It’s gotta go perfectly in performance.”
“I am used to it. It will go perfectly. We’ve got the angle, I’ve felt the recoil. It’s less safe to shoot the thing off every time we rehearse.”
“You didn’t think so before.”
“I hadn’t thought it all through.”
“Well. You’re the one holding a gun.”
“Then let’s take five so I can unload it again.”
“For fuck’s sake!” David said.
After that it mattered even more that the quick-change go smoothly. Karen remembered the quick changes she’d done years ago when they all were in school, the cold intimacy of pulling open Melanie’s zipper, yanking down her dress to a pool at her feet, pulling the doughnut of the new dress swiftly over her head and her arms while she stepped out of the old dress, dropping onto all fours to grab her feet one at a time, push them into her shoes while she did up her buttons, all breathlessly fast in the dark. It was all business, it was not sexy, you were not meant to feel excited or strange as you roughly handled someone else’s body and clothes as if they were a doll you didn’t love. Yet it was sexy, exciting, and strange, or maybe only Karen felt that way, back when their feelings were so sternly policed that you got in trouble if you didn’t feel one way on command and also in trouble if you felt another way that had not been commanded. And now it was Sarah grabbing hold of Karen’s body in the dark, tugging her jeans down and holding them flat to the floor so that Karen could quickly step out, Sarah casing Karen’s body in the tight dress, swiftly zipping it up with the flat of one palm running up Karen’s back so the zipper does not bite her skin. Shoes, bag, a tiny light-up compact that Sarah snaps open so Karen can put on lipstick. The lipstick transforms the waif-Girl into something sharper and harder when she reappears onstage minutes later. Sixty seconds and Karen has sprung to her bit of glow tape. They’ve done it, first try. Karen even has time for her heart rate to settle back down.
During the quick-change something else has changed. It’s happened just as quickly and just as wordlessly. Whether because they shared a task, or because they did it well, or just because they had to touch each other’s bodies too efficiently to leave time to think, somehow the static between Karen and Sarah is gone. It’s as if someone turned off a white-noise machine Karen hadn’t remembered was on. While David gives notes, Sarah comes out from backstage and drops down in the chair next to Karen, and she isn’t sitting opposite to Karen, haunting or besieging, she’s just sitting there. She looks tired and slightly green beneath her permanent tan. Karen tries to recall her obsession with Sarah but can’t retrieve the feeling-state. Losing that is like losing a limb. She feels light, not a lightness of heart but the lightness of being cut loose and set adrift in a void. At last, says Karen’s inner therapist, so much more cost-effective than a real one. At last you’re done crawling around inside Sarah, measuring all of the ways that she wasn’t a good friend to you.