SQN - Sine Qua Non - Issue Two - Journal - Page 87
(What's her name?) at last week's cast party. Her lips had tasted of licorice, maybe some
residue from a vape pen. It would be nice to taste that again. He blinked, extinguished the
thought, sharpened his eyes and concentrated on the sound of footsteps approaching.
The door swung open and a woman stood there with an annoyed look on her face. She
wore thick-framed glasses and a white lab coat with a name tag—Dr. Luz—and her dark
hair gathered back in a bun. “I must have forgotten to turn off the sign,” she said even as he
stepped through the door frame and went past her into the room. In here, the floorboards
still sloped downwards. Where the fourth wall should be, empty space opened on the great
darkness where the spotlights were coming from. Those spotlights, twinned now, fell one on
him, one on her.
“I need a doctor,” he said, breathless, even as he skittered around the room searching for
another light source.
“I'm sorry, sir,” she said, still holding the door open as if willing him to go back through
it, “but I'm closing. I'm not taking any more appointments tonight.”
“Look at me!” he blurted. He flung out his arms, extending his satin wings. Their
markings were bold and abstract, like twin eyes. “Isn't it obvious I need help?”
Her hesitation struck him as a touch too theatrical. This actress had a tendency to play
to the back row, but he believed in the power of drawing the audience in through softspokenness and underplaying key moments. Just because this production was a mash-up of
a long-form comedy bit with a dash of Gatsbyesque yearning and Shakespearean mooning
from balconies didn't mean it wasn't worthy of playing it all straight and true. These were
differences in philosophy which—
—but now he was getting up in his head when he ought to be solidly in his body, this
costume, this moth's body that was also a man's body, this man who was not himself but who
was, for the duration of his time on this stage under these lights (six performances a week
except Mondays), more than himself. So much so that when he repeated the line, a touch
softer, he sounded like he really meant it: “I need help.”
Dr. Luz's shoulders fell as she gave in. She closed the door and motioned for Darius to
look around. “As you can see, my selection is limited.” She touched a switch which illuminated
three racks of eyeglasses along the back wall. A vision chart hung near a patient's seat where
the owl-like apparatus of a phoropter dangled on a swiveled boom. A couch and chairs and
coffee table made for a waiting room where they stood. Darius paced the floor without even
glancing at the selection of eyeglasses. “I don't have trouble seeing,” he said. “The problem is,
I have trouble not seeing. It's the seeing that seduces me every time.”
Dr. Luz scowled. “Well, in that case, it looks like you're in the wrong place—”
“Listen,” he cut in. “I have to start at the beginning.”
“No, actually, you don't. You see, I was just closing up—”
But he'd already turned away. Facing into the dark void where hundreds sat unseen
in silent witness, he spoke into the beam of light that gilded him. “It was a full moon that
night—I remember it quite clearly.” As he spoke, he removed his satin wings, let them fall
onto the couch. From the corner of his eye, he saw the eyeball/monocle sign transform into
the image of a fat, full moon, golden and majestic, stippled with craters and smooth maria.
From the darkness to his right, a pair of tall French doors came rolling onto the stage, pushed
by a stealthy figure in all black. The doors included the waist-high grillwork of a railing. This
suggestion of a balcony was positioned directly between himself and the glowing moon sign
even as he spoke the words: “I was looking out my window because of that moon, and I was
wrapped in a blanket because I had a fever. Deathly chills, shivering and sweating at the same
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