THE WAY IT WENT DOWN: THE SHOW

Most people don’t even know there is a show, so that it goes on is really almost besides the point. It’s like the sun, because it’s not an outcome, it’s a cause. Unlike the sun, it’s one that few ever gain the privilege of seeing. Somewhere the show is always going, and we’re all just spinning around it, everything — wars, money, sex, life…we’re all just here to surround it. To orbit it. Components fed into it, to make the show happen. To keep it going.

This world is backstage and we are all extras.

Now you’re thinking, she’s crazy. You’re looking for the door. You’re thinking, I need to report her to the cell leader. You’re thinking, man, I hope I never sound like that. But you don’t need to worry about it. Because you won’t be, or feel, or see anything you’re not supposed to. You’re closer to the show than you’ve ever been before, and you know what? The reason you are is because I’m here. 

I’m a lead, you see. 

I started just like you, on the fringes, acting in a bit part. I saw some things. Read some things. Crept closer and closer to the stage, to the spotlight. You keep looking like you’re going to go for the door, but you won’t. I know you won’t. It’s ok. It feels like you’re off-book, but you’re not. You’re only acting that way. It’s in the script. I know you.  

Tell me if this character sounds familiar. 

Mary is 39 years old, she lives alone in Washington D.C. She works for the State Department. Two years before Mary was recruited into a special access program that doesn’t have a real name. She was called to some places. She saw some things that knocked everything that had come before in her life, down. 

Very familiar, so far. Yes? But there’s more to Mary’s story. 

One of those things was a book. A script. Mary read the script. She saw a special mark that showed her things at night. She began to understand how the world was not the world. How what we called reality was just a process that turned places into sets, objects into props, and people into actors.

One day, Mary had a breakdown, or thought she did. She drove to the Bombay Hook wildlife refuge and walked on the wooden walkways to look at the animals, alone. Birds and reeds and the wind, and the sounds of trickling water were her only companions for awhile. Pure blue sky with a biting wind that brought tears to Mary’s eyes. In her mind, a shape had been cut through the world by a mark she found on a napkin in New York nineteen days before; like a peephole to another world where everything was made of snakes. 

She waited for the sun to go down with a pistol in her hand. 

Then she saw the stage, lit. 

It floated on the water. The man on the stage was in gold, surrounded by faux-doric columns. The figures there — each dressed in purple and red, and green, moved with careful intent, annunciating lines in over-the-top thespian-fashion, but they were too far away to hear properly. Then the stage slid towards Mary, and Mary was so stunned, so taken by this vision she dropped her gun, and didn’t move. 

The stage slid until Mary was to the left of it (or did the world slide to the stage?). On the stage, the show went on and on, and Mary realized that when she looked in the direction the actors were directing their performance, despite being in the open in a wetland reserve, she could see an audience hovering in some impossible space there, floating in and beyond the water at the same time, dim, but present. Moon faces attentive to the performance.  

That’s when Mary saw the man in prompter hole on the edge of the stage. His head was sticking up from the stage, out of a small, curved opening, so he faced the actors and was hidden from the audience. The prompters’ teeth were bad, and he wore white, clown-like makeup, and when he saw Mary looking at him, his eyebrows (painted on) shot up. 

He mouthed a series of words. A name. Someone known to Mary.

Your name.

And now we’re here. Together. Me along with the name. It’s our turn in the show. To take the stage. This is our moment. 

The man in gold is here. The woman in green. The old man in purple. The boy in red. The stage is here.

Places, everyone. Places. 

Turn around now, and you’ll see it, too.