The premiere was set for midnight the following day. Its venue was a place Sharlo had bought with three months of applause.
At midnight, when his pocket watch stopped, he took the stage of the grey-white theatre and addressed the packed grey audience and the darkness beyond in clear, deliberate words.
"I want to borrow the stage. One night. A premiere for a fellow professional—Dreamless Street, all seven acts, by Elias Finch. He has waited thirty years for this performance."
The theatre remained silent. The spotlight hummed above him.
"I know your rules contain no provision for this," Sharlo continued. "So I came to negotiate a price. I have one ticket stub left. That can cover part. If it isn't enough—" He surveyed the dark.
"Deduct the rest from whatever applause I earn from now on. Instalments. Set the interest as you see fit. I may own nothing else, but I guarantee you performances to come."
Deep in the darkness, silence held for a long time. Then the announcing voice spoke—the same voice that had offered Finch employment from the audience of Dreamless Street the previous night. Now it was purely businesslike, with no trace of that encounter.
"Application for additional performance: accepted."
"Venue fee: no ticket stub required."
Sharlo blinked. "Then what do you require?"
"One line," said the announcing voice. "The final line of Act Seven of Dreamless Street. After the performance, that line enters this theatre's archive."
Sharlo stood beneath the spotlight for several seconds and felt a chill climb his spine. It wanted "This time I'll keep watch. You sleep."
He did not know what the sentence might become once filed in this theatre, just as he did not know what else its archive contained. But the negotiation had reached the point at which he could hear a fixed price when one was stated.
"Agreed," he said. "On one condition. Open the whole auditorium tonight. Admit every member of my audience you can seat. A full house at a premiere is the greatest honour our profession can give an author."
"Granted," the announcing voice said. Then, almost in a whisper, it added something outside official business.
"Gentleman without a script, do you know that in the whole history of this theatre, you are the first to pay another man's venue fee with your own future performances?"
"Then you should be pleased," Sharlo said. "If I'm the first, your troupe has finally recruited someone who knows the trade."
* * *
The night of the premiere.
For the first time in thirty years—perhaps for the first time since creation—the grey-white theatre displayed a playboard that was not its own. Above the stage, the scarlet ground had become warm cream, bearing neat gold letters:
DREAMLESS STREET · COMPLETE IN SEVEN ACTS
Playwright: Elias Finch
The auditorium was full.
More than a hundred grey figures occupied the rows from the rear of the first to the fifteenth, shoulder to shoulder. Along the edge of the stage stood the nine extinguished little candles. Tonight, by special exception, nine pinpricks of flame burned upon their wicks—lit by the theatre itself, though no one asked why.
At the centre of the front row, the chair that was always clean remained empty as ever. In the seat to its left sat Viola Raven. A living person entering this theatre should have been an impossibility, but tonight the old ticket marked "Reserved Seat · Valid in Perpetuity" was pinned to her cuff, and the darkness at the doors had admitted her.
Sharlo did not sit. He stood in the wings. Tonight he was neither detective nor consultant, but stage manager for the premiere.
Behind the main curtain, Elias Finch, dressed in his old frayed suit, peered through a gap at the audience. He had done the same thing thirty years ago and counted two hundred empty chairs. Tonight he counted again, seat by seat. At fifty his hands began to tremble; at a hundred he could count no farther.
"Full," he said, turning to Sharlo. Beneath the lights, the frosted-glass blur over his thirty-one-year-old face had thinned remarkably. "Stage manager, the house is full."
"Obviously." Sharlo straightened his lapels for him, as he would for any author whose hands had gone cold with nerves on opening night. "Ring the bell, Mr. Finch. Your audience has waited thirty years. Don't make them wait another minute."
Three bells.
The curtain rose.
Dreamless Street ran for three hours.
The fog lent them actors. All across Kandelburg, the city's sleepwalkers slumbered in their own beds while their "parts" travelled through the mist and descended upon the grey-white stage, taking shape as a snowy street, an apothecary, a whole streetful of living people. Sharlo watched from the wings, his throat tight from the second act onward.
The orchestra pit was full as well.
Before the performance, Sharlo had placed the old pianist's packet of hand-copied entr'actes on the music stand. He had expected nothing. Yet when Act One ended and the interval lights dimmed, seven or eight sleeping forms appeared in the pit: the city's elderly musicians—cellists, woodwind players—with the white-haired old pianist seated in the centre, eyes closed and fingers resting on the keys.
The entr'acte began. In the fourth measure, the modulation that had defeated an entire orchestra turned its corner cleanly, like a stream slipping around a stone that had lain in its course for thirty years.
Behind the wing, Finch gripped the curtain and listened to the whole piece without moving. When it ended, he scrubbed his sleeve across his face and said something to Sharlo without beginning or explanation. "They practised. Did you hear? For thirty years, some of them have been practising in secret."
There was one more favour Sharlo had requested before the performance.
"There's an old gentleman on the list." He gave Finch the name from the almshouse. "Consumption. A month or two left, at most. He asked me to pass on a message: before the curtain falls, he wants to remember once. Only once. Let him take one play with him."
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Finch listened and was silent for a long time before answering in theatrical jargon. "We'll make an exception and open one 'waking scene.' His body isn't fit for the audience. Put him onstage. A walk-on. Company rules say a person who takes the stage does not forget the play."
And so, in Act Three, at the end of the queue of neighbours waiting to buy medicine outside the apothecary on the snowy street, a thin old character appeared. He had no lines, only one action: upon receiving his packet of medicine, he removed his hat and bowed to the shopkeeper. The old man performed it with grave attention and bent very low. A man who had hauled coal for forty years and never entered a playhouse made his sole appearance on any stage into the most solemn gesture of thanks in his life.
Watching from the wing, Sharlo knew that when the old man woke on his cot at the almshouse the following morning, he would remember this scene. He would remember it to his final day.
It was a fine play. Sharlo had known that the night before. But knowing was one thing. Watching it rise in a real theatre before a full house was another.
When the heroine knocked on the apothecary's shutters in the snow, the grey figures in the auditorium leaned forward together. When the old shopkeeper said, "Each dream you tell is one dream fewer; but if you tell none, not one can remain," a grey figure in the ninth row raised a hand and wiped its face. Grey figures had no tears, but in every theatre under heaven, that gesture meant the same thing.
Act Six: the funeral. Everyone in the street laid a dream in the coffin. Viola sat straight-backed in the front row. When the girl in the scorched-sleeved nightdress placed her thimble inside, Viola raised a hand to her own cuff, where her father's pen was pinned.
During the change of scenery between Acts Six and Seven, a small difficulty arose behind the wing.
Elias Finch refused to ring the bell for Act Seven.
He stood beside the bell rope, one hand raised and trembling in mid-air. When Sharlo approached, the playwright whom no one had remembered in thirty years was staring at his transparent hand with an almost boyish bewilderment.
"Stage manager," he said hoarsely, "I suddenly want to delay a little."
"Delay what?"
"You know." Finch smiled bitterly. "When Act Seven ends, I will... leave the theatre. I waited thirty years for this premiere. It came; I sat within it; the house was full; there was applause. And now I discover that even the waiting itself is something one can hate to lose. For thirty years, 'It isn't finished yet' kept me standing. Tonight that will be gone."
He gazed at the warm light from the audience beyond the curtain.
"Could we wait the time it takes one stick of incense to burn? Only one. Let me stand inside 'It isn't finished yet' a little longer."
Sharlo did not hurry him. He leaned against the post beside the bell rope and kept him company. Behind the wing, it was quiet enough to hear the fine, expectant silence of a full house of grey figures, like snow falling upon snow.
"Finch," he said after a while, "back in my last li—when I was studying theatre, there was an old gentleman in our company who saved one piece of wisdom for special occasions. He said the hardest skill in the theatre was not song or speech, movement or combat. It was 'letting the curtain fall without clinging.' At the instant the curtain comes down, the people onstage must know how to let go. If they cannot, the play sours on the boards."
"That old gentleman of yours," Finch said softly. "Did he manage it himself?"
"No." Sharlo smiled. "On the day he retired, he sat in the empty theatre until well past midnight. The cleaning woman had to throw him out. But before he left, he told her something I've always remembered. He said: 'Miss, carry on sweeping. Those things on the floor aren't rubbish. They're my company. They don't cling to the stage; I do. They all left long ago. I'm the only one still sitting here.'"
Behind the wing, silence held for a long time.
"...So letting the curtain fall without clinging doesn't mean one must feel no attachment." Finch spoke slowly, tasting the thought. "It means recognising that the only one still clinging there is oneself."
"Exactly," Sharlo said. "Your play will leave cleanly tonight—cleanly and completely, its account settled in full. Don't let it look back and find its author still loitering onstage."
Elias Finch drew a deep breath—a being with no need to breathe putting all his strength into one inhalation. Then he reached for the bell rope.
"Stage manager," he said, "thank you. Open Act Seven."
The bell rang.
Act Seven.
The old shopkeeper returned every dream he had collected, one by one, closed his door, went upstairs, and slept. The heroine weighed the price of her medicine on the windowsill and left her dream. Everyone in the street filed past the window, each leaving one dream. The snow stopped.
The heroine looked up at the darkened upstairs window and spoke the play's final line.
"Shopkeeper, this time I'll keep watch. You sleep."
The curtain fell.
The theatre was silent for three seconds. In the wing, Sharlo clenched his fist. He had lived through such seconds in his previous life. Every premiere under heaven contained those three seconds, and they were longer than any eternity.
Then the applause exploded.
More than a hundred grey figures rose at once. They could not cheer—grey figures had no human voices—but they applauded, flinging their whole bodies into it. Wave upon wave of sound lifted the darkness of the grey-white theatre.
The nine small flames along the stage leapt together. In the front row, Viola stood and applauded, her face upturned, her six-year-wakeful eyes astonishingly bright in the light reflected from the spotlight.
"Author!" she called toward the wing in a Duskwarden's command voice. "Author to the stage!"
Sharlo pushed Elias Finch out from the wing.
He stumbled to centre stage and stood beneath the spotlight and applause he had awaited for thirty years. Under the light, everyone saw the dingy, frosted-glass layer upon him peeling away in great sheets, like applause polishing the age-long tarnish from bronze. When the last piece had fallen, a young man stood onstage, his face clear: thin, dishevelled, and transparent as a page held to the light—
But clear. Every member of the audience saw that face clearly now. They could remember it. They could not forget.
Finch bowed. Once, twice, three times. By the old rules of the elegiac form, an author spoke no words at his curtain call.
But when he straightened, he made a gesture toward the audience that only an author in the company was entitled to make. He cupped both hands and extended them: giving the play to its audience.
From this night onward, the play belonged to those who had seen it.
The applause rose again. At its height, Finch turned toward Sharlo in the wing and shaped words with his lips. No sound came, but Sharlo had spent two lives reading actors' mouths from offstage. He understood.
—Stage manager. Say my closing words for me.
Sharlo went onstage. The applause slowly subsided. He stood beside Finch and cleared his throat.
"Ladies and gentlemen, tonight's play, Dreamless Street, has been performed in full," he said. "By old custom, before you leave, we shall announce the next production—"
He stopped and turned his head.
Because Elias Finch, beside him, was coming apart.
Not peeling, not disappearing—leaving the theatre. Like the crowd flowing from the doors after a performance, Finch's outline dissolved from the edges inward into tiny luminous motes, lifted gently and irresistibly above the stage by a wind that did not exist.
"There is no next production, stage manager." Finch smiled. His voice too was growing lighter, like words called back by someone walking away.
"It was written. It was performed. Someone watched it. Someone wept. One line was even kept for the archive. Young man, this is what it means—to have one's account settled in full."
"Finch—"
"Don't." The half-dissolved man raised one hand to stop him. "I should have gone thirty years ago. I loitered for thirty and gained a fine play from it. A bargain. Thank the young lady for me. Tell her to keep the ticket to that reserved seat. The plays of this world are long yet, and a good audience is rarer than a good author."
He looked one last time at the standing grey figures, one last time at the theatre. With everything that remained of him, he inclined himself toward the depths of the auditorium, toward the chair at the centre of the front row that was always empty.
"And you," he said softly. "You old thing who's watched without paying for thirty years. This time, your ticket is settled in full."
In the direction of the empty chair, the darkness stirred lightly, almost imperceptibly. Like a nod.
Elias Finch scattered completely.
Glittering dust fell over the stage like snow. At some point, the applause had stopped. More than a hundred grey figures stood in silence. Along the stage, the nine little flames bowed low together, then rose together—like a toast.
Sharlo stood for a long time in the half-emptied spotlight. Then he bent and recovered two things from the dust covering the stage: the crooked-framed spectacles, and a stack of pages. The ink on the manuscript's title page was still fresh.
Dreamless Street. Playwright: Elias Finch.
For the only audience—everyone willing to sit down.