“Almost a piece of New Art all by itself,” Sybel said, grinning.
“Beautiful,” Duncan said, staring up at it. “Absolutely beautiful.”
“Horrible and shocking, I would have thought,” Mary said—a distant murmur, a whisper lost in a current of air.
“Quite a climb up there that would be,” Sybel said. “I think I could do it, though.”
“You’d climb a rainbow if you could,” I said, earning a halfhearted scowl.
I tore my gaze from the ceiling. I had to. Otherwise my thoughts would have remained up there, trapped, during the entire opera. {It stunned me to see such a thing aboveground. It reinforced a thought that had come to me more and more frequently during the war: if that which belonged belowground came aboveground, why should I remain aboveground? I was like a sailor who falls overboard and reaches for the light, only to find that the light is false, and he has descended into even greater depths.} And yet, haven’t we all seen things much stranger since the beginning of the Shift? Thinking of that ceiling now, I’m oddly unmoved. I’ve been undone by too many miraculous sights, both holy and unholy.
No one had tickets, but that didn’t mean we had good seats. Even during the war {especially during the war!}, there remained hierarchies, and hierarchies within hierarchies. Lacond could have sat in the orchestra area with one guest, but that would have meant leaving the rest of us behind. Guided to the top row, we had to lower our heads for fear of bumping them against the balcony ceiling {a comforting white, that ceiling, at least}. The seats were hard wood—hard indeed for an opera that promised six acts and only one intermission. Above us, the dome; below, the fatal curving lunge down to the ground floor seats {which, from that perspective, seemed to go on forever}, then up and through them to the orchestra pit and the stage. The balcony smelled like old rotten books. No one had cleaned it for ages. That which from afar had looked both smooth and spotless was, up close, tawdry and sad. Only Sybel, with his lithe frame, seemed comfortable.
Perhaps I remember the opera so clearly because it was the last time anyone saw so many enemies occupying the same space without trying to stick a literal or figurative knife into one another. Agents from both sides of the conflict attended the opera that night, carefully guided through separate entrances, one of which consisted of a large hole in the wall. Anyone considered neutral had been positioned in the middle section of the ground floor, farthest from the exits. {Which made me laugh—should the two sides lose composure and attack each other, the neutrals in the middle would suffer greatly for their nuanced stance.}
Imperious members of the House Hoegbotton, already resembling scions of Empire in their somewhat presumptuous frocks and pleated trousers—if made a bit cadaverous, cloth sliding off elbows, from having to ration their food—made the forced march to their seats. Fixed stares. A few nervous smiles. Many of them wore medals they had awarded to themselves for wartime bravery.
The Frankwrithe & Lewden side was entirely different. They sidled in, wore mostly black, tried to stay in the shadows—except for their leader, L. Gaudy, who entered in what I can only call a “costume” of bright red, transformed by the green glow of the fungal light to a pulsating, brackish purple. He stood for several minutes, staring over at the Hoegbotton side, hands on his hips. A wide grin had seemingly paralyzed his face. {There was some discussion as to whether this bold figure truly was L. Gaudy, or one of the many actors hired by Gaudy to portray him at official events, the real Gaudy having developed an understandable fear of assassination attempts over the past two years. Regardless of whether it was Gaudy or pseudo-Gaudy, a healthy shiver of fear fled down my spine at his appearance.}
In the neutral section, we saw Martin Lake and his lover Merrimount take their seats, surrounded by the remnants of the New Artists, all looking rather tattered and downcast. {Their day was done. No opera could resurrect them.}
Martin and Merrimount had chosen to wear half evening gown, half formal suit, and I could almost smell the aggressive cologne that had become Martin’s “signature smell,” even though his sponsorship of it gained him no monies during the war. {You make it sound like an actual ceasefire, this opera. Janice, we were all armed to the teeth, like pirates sailing down the River Moth looking for a ripe place to build a city. You couldn’t move through the hallway toward the restrooms without bumping into someone’s concealed bulge of a gun or knife, or worse. And when you did get to the men’s room, it was full of spies exchanging information.}
We took the sadly amateurish hand-printed playbills off our seats and sat, Lacond still occluding all sight of Mary on the other side. In the expectant green light, the muted chatter of people still entering the opera house, the pauses in conversation as three or four times it appeared the opera was about to begin, I had a glimpse, an echo, of my former life. For an instant, sitting there, my bu**ocks rapidly beginning to ache from the hard seat, I had the illusion that I had conjured up the resources, out of full-on ruin, to create an opera. For just that period between taking our seats and curtain rise, I felt powerful again. An awful feeling. I could see Edward’s slack face in the insane asylum, feel the ribbon of red rising from my wrist. I did not want that life back, not really.
Besides, the illusion was ruined anyway by a brief encounter on the way to the bathroom before the opera began. Narrowed and wrinkled by the years, Merrimount’s jester face suddenly came into view.
He nodded and said, “Did you have anything to do with this opera, Janice?”
“No,” I said. “Not me.” Caught. Accused.
“Ah, right,” he said. “I thought maybe you had.” A pause, and then, “Do you think this is what the New Art has all been leading up to? An insane opera performed during wartime?” His smile was all teeth, and then he was gone.
I hated the elation that made my face flush, brought out a little shiver of happiness. Merrimount had talked to me. {Very sad, sister.}
I told Duncan about the encounter, across Sybel’s thin chest and Lacond’s broad belly, and before he could respond, out of the darkness I heard Mary say, “If so, it’s been a waste. Everything leading up to this one performance. They should have saved it up for after the war.”
I laughed, and Sybel, like a good former manager, said to Mary, “Merrimount means that except for him, Martin, and Janice, every member of the former New Art movement of any consequence is involved in this opera. It’s the only thing they’ve been able to agree on long enough to bring to the public attention.”