all the world's a stage
I got us opera tickets a while back and have been insufferable since. As the date drew nearer I began spontaneously singing snippets of songs from Carmen and telling you about this one show where the eponymous heroine first appeared on stage in a gorilla suit and did a strip-tease.
Even last week I saw you laugh or smile or sing along in response to my joking around, but recently you’ve been more distant, a little sharper. I’ve watched your body grow more waifish as you’ve eaten less. I don’t understand the impulses that drive you one way or the other, but I know that hungering for flesh fuels a frenzied physical need and growing vampiric reveals a hollow ache somewhere inside you.
It wasn’t even clear that you’d come with me. You’ve been busy more frequently. The distance makes it clear how much my whole psyche resonates to your presence: when you aren’t there, I am a clock half-wound. On the occasions we meet up I am in agonies of effort not to crowd you, drive you away with neediness.
But you did come. Dressed in black, unusual for you, your lips burgundy, and wearing a little eyeliner. For myself, waistcoat, shirt and dark jeans, I smiled broadly when I took your hand at the door. Your hand was cold in mine.
I kept hold of it until we reached the Opera House, willing my heat into your body. No preshow meal for us: eating is a private thing; or dangerously public.
We spoke a little. The melancholy at your edges burned me as well as you. I asked if you would like to do something else, but you closed your eyes and shook your head. I kissed your hand.
It is now the end of the first act and I am sitting in the frankly ridiculously small chair they provide for their guests. Red rings of them arc around the hollow heart of the Grand Theatre, trimmed with gilt on elegant carven panels, lending the whole space the feel of being inside a giant musical box. The orchestra in its pit is glimpsed by the contrast of recording equipment and sharp white illumination that occasionally bleeds into the edges of the stage.
You have been gone for ten minutes. Your hand left mine and you slipped away with a murmured comment I didn’t catch.
You’re still here. I feel it like I know my right hand is here. Ever since I first fed you I have been part of you.
So I sit, and gamely try to enjoy the story of a lady of the night and her two courtiers. The woman playing Carmen is astonishingly good: I almost forget to wonder where you are.
The intermission comes and goes. I buy myself water, and look around. There are so many people here. It feels congested. I desire the bright, shining knife of your presence to cut through it all.
Lacking anything better to do, I follow the crowds as they filter back into the music-box. The great curtain goes up again and you are nowhere to be seen.
The show is a stellar success. People will be taking about it for months, and I cannot wait for the ovation to end. Alone, I follow the excited crowds, and secrete myself in a store room like I’ve done it a hundred times. Hell if I’m leaving without you.
The excited chatter breaks and fades to the casual, intermittent conversation of porters and cleaners, and then they too disappear. In the dark I lean back against a stack of costume crates, clearing my mind. As the last cluster of late-shift staff shuffles towards the back door I call for you, by the blood still in my veins and the blood that has passed your lips.
“Raven.”
The feeling of certainty that I should return to my seat makes me giddy. This is all still new to me. As I set out I laugh, amusing myself with the idea I might have called to find you behind me in the store room, like a jump scare in some horror-comedy.
The hollow theatre is achingly empty. My footsteps echo, making me excruciatingly aware of the transgression of my presence in this still and sacred space.
I sit in my seat, down in the stalls. No sign of my dark idol.
It doesn’t take long for me to grow restless again. I picture you, call your name into the empty air… but this time you are content not to answer.
My brow furrows a little petulantly. Well then. There’s a stage. Time to make a spectacle of myself.
I stomp down the aisle and hoist myself up. Stepping between stage-lights, long cooled after the show, I fling myself into the centre, wheel round on the absent audience, and with my best Shakespearian bass, boom out a line.
“All the world’s a stage! And all the men and women in it merely players. They have their exits and their entrances. And one man—”
I stop. There was a sound, behind me, so soft that only the acoustics of this place made it prominent enough to hear.
Platsch.
I look around, and then down. Three tiny red liquid jewels, dashed by their fall into long streamers, already clotting on the polished wood.
I look up. Shadows and light glinting on dull metal railing and tubing, a confusion of lights and ropes.
You’re up there, I’m certain of it. You haven’t called me but I’m called nevertheless.
Good thing I’ve got a head for heights. Half the battle is finding the correct gantry, the right stairway. Plate metal clinks as I feel my way higher and higher into the flies.
You came this way and never made a sound, I know.
There. A deeper shadow in the shadows. You’re looking past me, at the stage. I don’t wave, just continue my ascent, past racks of mechanical winches and angles spotlights.
You can hear me breathing harder by the time I reach you. Your keen senses pick up the smell of clean sweat, aftershave.
You’re squatting like a gargoyle, still watching the stage like the opera plays on. “Did you enjoy the show?” you ask.
“Yes,” I answer, moving to sit beside you. I feed my legs under the guard rails, dangle them twenty metres in the air. “Though I was worried about you.”
“You’re sweet,” you say, a smile touching your burgundy lips though your eyes don’t move. “Why worried?”
You hear me hesitate, shift my weight. “Something’s wrong, I know it. You’re… Untethered to the world. I worry you’ll float away…”
You look up, mouth a thin line and eyes fierce. I return your glare evenly, though you hear my heartrate spike.
You’re first to look away. “I couldn’t take it any more. Sitting in the audience. The illusion being spun for me. I needed to see it for what it really was.” A faint smile, this time touching your eyes, and you look back at me. “I didn’t leave you, though. I stayed, didn’t I?”
“You did.”
“But down there. This. Here.” The cold and dark comes back into your expression. Whatever you’ve been wrestling with speaks bitterly with your voice. “This isn’t what I was meant to be.”
I can’t say anything to that. You see me pale and you become aware of the fierceness of your expression. You choose not to care for a moment. Let me see the monster you keep caged up.
I seem about to reach forward and take your hand when I notice your handiwork. Suspended by several heavy ropes wrapped around wrists, a frail and desiccated shape hovers in space like a wraith, source of the droplets that led me here. Its head hands low and the hair is a different colour now freed from a stage wig, but you hear me gasp when I recognise who it is.
“You took Carmen?!”
A raucous belch is your only reply, the sweetness of her blood brought anew to your tongue, even as your larynx converts the air to a disrespectful epitaph.
I seem shaken. “She was so good…”
“Very good,” you agree. The pain of sawing at a connection twists your insides. Some part of you wants to drive me away, restore a step more solitude. There has to be more than this…
You watch me take in the wounds across the wrists and inner arms, the terrible tears either side of her throat. Your stomach churns with its glut, a part of you preparing to devour more. Desire flares as I look back to you with horror on my face.
You stand, tense legs ready to pounce.
Horror freezes and shatters. I blink like I’ve woken from a dream. Or perhaps returned to one.
“What should you be?”
Hands that were twisted into claws spasm then relax. Softness in my voice didn’t fit the script of one hunted.
“Satisfied,” you say, and the fierceness drains away in the face of the twisting loneliness. “Complete. Free. Something, I just don’t see it yet…”
I come to you, who was so close to pouring the stuff of my life down your ravenous throat. Fold you in my arms. My embrace is unmodulated by anything other than a desire to make you feel less alone, more loved. You pull in tighter: not healed, but given twenty seconds’ reprieve. Perhaps your shut eyes are wet. Mine are.
“You’re not alone. For as long as you’ll have me. For as long as you don’t take me. I’m yours.”
We release one another, pull back to see one another’s faces.
“But seriously. Carmen?”
You laugh, quietly, and bow your head. “I wanted her voice. She sang so sweetly.”
“Did you… did you get it?” A catch in my voice. What do you think I’m feeling?
“I can hear her inside me. Can’t you?”