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By Root 2446 0

the bundle of sticks. When thou cam’st first, thou strok’st me and made much of me, wouldst give me water with berries in it, and teach me how to name the bigger light, and how the less, that burn by day and night…. You taught me language, and my profit on it is, I know how to curse. And so it goes. Ariel flies above our heads, fades in and out of visibility. Ferdinand grunts under labor, Miranda loves him. Antonio plots, Gonzalo philosophizes, I get drunk with Trinculo and Stephano, I try to make them kill Prospero and steal his books. Spirits flutter in and out of our heads and make us say things we do not want to say. The audience disappears into the play. It is not really a play. The play is not something the audience is watching so much as something they are experiencing. The play is not confined to a stage or even a linear series of scenes following scenes and acts following acts, but rather, everything happens all at once. We disobey all rules of time and space. Everyone leaves his or her body and becomes raw floating consciousness. The play exists all at one time in the same way a book exists all at once. The object and the narrative cannot be disentangled. The play existed in a collective space of thought and feeling and dream and the world became a fog of impressions that night, of timeless immediacy, of magic and sex and fear and laughter coming together into a many-headed dream, a many-minded dream, like a dream being dreamed by the Hydra, and we had all changed our minds and had the minds of animals.

Part Six

ZIRA: What will he find out there, Doctor?

DR. ZAIUS: His destiny.

XLV

Prospero broke his staff and freed his magic. At first no one saw any distinct difference in their surroundings. But the magic was receding. It was bleeding away, like the blood from a cut throat. The people now looked around them and saw that the trees were made of plastic. The fronds of the palm trees were made of green construction paper cut into the shapes of leaves. The birds sitting in the branches? Fake parrots, clearly purchased from a novelty shop, intended as accessories to pirate costumes, with marble eyes and fabric feathers, wired to their perches in the fake trees by their thin plastic talons. The snakes and frogs on the ground? Limp rubber toys. The ground was not ground either; it was a hard flat floor with a little dirt and sand scattered on it. The starry firmament above was represented by several strings of Christmas lights tacked to the ceiling. The skies were colorful lights projected against the whitewashed brick walls of an abandoned subway station. It was a large room, but far from infinite. The stage scenery was no more impressive than backdrops for a grade school play. It was silly—hokey to the point of kitsch in its cheap fakeness.

The members of the audience glanced around themselves and at each other’s faces in mild embarrassment. They cleared their throats, they shuffled their feet, they coughed and mumbled. When the play was over, the audience applauded politely, if too briefly, and then began to shuffle en masse toward the one point of egress, the elevator door. They did not even wait for all of the actors to finish bowing before they stopped clapping. They found the friends and loved ones in whose company they had come to the performance. The barefoot ones were the most embarrassed-looking; they irritably wiped the particles of sand clinging to their sticky feet and put on their socks and shoes. People shrugged themselves into their coats and jackets, casually noticing that their garments, being as they were drenched in the sea, held notwithstanding their freshness and glosses, seeming rather new-dyed than stained with saltwater. They checked their watches and snapped open their glowing cell phones (to check the time, not to make any calls, because we were too far underground to get any reception). They had been in this room for about three hours. All of them without exception needed to pee. We had no facilities available downstairs (though from the smell of things after the performance