What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours(32)

Rowan carried me home in his rucksack—to Radha’s house, not Myrna’s. Gustav answered the door. Behind him Radha was practicing a choreographed dance with Petrushka and Loco Dempsey, jumping in and out of different pairs of shoes.

“I’m sorry,” Rowan said, as he set me down on the doorstep.

“For what?” Gustav asked, laughing, but Rowan just plugged his earphones in and sauntered off.

—

TYCHE AND MYRNA came back from Scotland with tender new constellations, one tattooed on Tyche’s left arm and the other on Myrna’s right. They’d chosen a configuration of four brilliant stars collectively called the Chameleon. Rowan looked on impassively as Myrna tucked notes into Tyche’s locker for her to read later. Tyche whispered her replies into Myrna’s ear and Myrna smiled in a way that most onlookers took as confirmation of erotic intimacy, though knowing what I did about Myrna’s aversion to flesh I doubted it. As for Radha, the fight never quite went out of her—she admired the tattoos, continued to fluster Myrna by cheerfully calling her “wife” to her face, and invited Tyche and Myrna puppet shopping, though she returned from those trips empty-handed. Music was the only thing that exposed her; she found that she was too easily brought to tears by it, and skipped so many tracks on her playlists that I lost my temper and switched the music off altogether, leaving her to work at her desk amid a silence she looked grateful for. At times she held her head in her hands and laughed softly and ruefully. She found notification of a missed call from Gustav on her phone one night and made no attempt to return the call but stayed up late, very very late, in case he tried again. (He didn’t.) Ah, really, it was too annoying how bold these ones were when they were in each other’s company and how timid they were when apart. It was beneath me to knock all their pretty heads together and shout, “Exactly what are you trying to do with each other?” but it was my hope that Rowan would. Rowan was more interested in knitting a snowflake shawl, so Radha continued writing for Gustav’s puppets unhindered. She was scripting her contribution to the school’s end-of-term show; the working title was Polixena the Snitch and all that I was permitted to know about it was that it was mostly set in a karaoke bar for gangsters.

—

THE SEGMENT following Polixena the Snitch belonged to Tyche and Myrna, who were working on an idea of Tyche’s they called The shock of your life or a piece of cheese. We, the audience, received cards in advance: One version of the card read Shock, and beneath that word was an instruction to write a name (CANNOT BE YOUR OWN). The other version of the card read Piece of Cheese, and again there was space to write a name that was not your own. These cards provoked shudders of euphoric terror that only increased as the day and then the hour itself drew ever closer. The cards spoke to a suspicion that many whose work is play can never be free of: that you can only flaunt your triviality for so long before punishment is due. A date has been selected, and on that day there will be a great culling . . .

—

WE FILED into the school theater chattering with nerves. The volume increased when we were handed pens at the entrance and informed that choices made in pencil would not be accepted. When we sat down nobody removed their coats or bags; everybody was ready to evacuate immediately. Poor Radha and Gustav . . . their performance was merely something to sit through as we got ready for our shocks or our pieces of cheese.

Gustav’s puppet troupe was already onstage, seated on chairs with their backs to us. Brunhild the shipbuilder was tallest of them, and I could see the top of her head. There was a strangeness in the way that head was positioned: I accept that this is an almost meaningless thing to say about the posture of a puppet, which is intrinsically all sorts of strange. But still. I began to mention this to Radha, but Tyche and Rowan sat down beside us and I thought better of it. Tyche asked Radha which card she’d got: shock or piece of cheese? Radha smiled very sweetly and said, “Wait and see,” and Gustav walked onstage to the sound of TLC’s “No Scrubs.” As he did the puppets’ chairs turned, and after that everything compressed into a split second; we saw that every single one of the puppets’ throats had been slashed wide open so that they erupted strings; they’d been hacked at so savagely that even those internal strings were cut. And when Gustav saw them he lost consciousness. He didn’t collapse, exactly—it was more as if he’d been dropped from a height. He fell plank straight, and without making a sound, and that fall of his was just as unreal to us as the glazed eyes with which the puppets onstage surveyed their own innards. Their expressions were the kind that couldn’t be altered unless physically dismantled, each smile, scowl, or beseeching look disappearing piece by piece. Laughter was the first response, perhaps the only natural response to such excess. It felt intended that we laugh. Puppets and puppeteer slain by an unknown hand; for about thirty seconds the scene was so complete that no one dared intrude upon it. Then Gustav’s friends began to call out to him, reminding him that they’d always known he was too serious for comedy, demanding the next scene, telling him that it was time to get up, that they needed to know if he was OK. From where we sat he seemed to be comfortably asleep, and “No Scrubs” played on and on until Radha ran onto the stage, lifted the boy into her arms, turned his head to the side, and we saw that his eyes were open. Then it became official that Gustav wasn’t sleeping. Those of us in the front row even saw his eyes; they were like a void made visible. Professor Semyonova himself climbed onto the stage, checked vital signs, and shouted for someone to call an ambulance. The professor called for his daughter too, and she arrived on the stage among a swarm of other students proffering bottles of water and Tiger Balm and scarves and asking: “Is he breathing? Is he breathing?”