And Mik. I have to talk to Mik. She was pretty insistent about that.
If all goes well tonight, there will be talking. At some point. One assumes. I’m just not starting with it. I’m starting with a drawing. I’ve been working on it for a couple of weeks, redoing it over and over, and it’s finally good enough: a drawing worthy of launching a love affair.
Love affair. Doesn’t that sound so middle-aged? And also ill-fated. Like ill-fated is an understood prefix to love affair. Well, ill-fated is fine, as long as it’s a meaty and fraught ill-fated love affair, not a pale and insipid one. I’m not looking for fate. I’m seventeen. I’m looking for kissing, and to move forward a few paces on the game board. You know, do some Living.
(With my lips.)
The drawing’s in my bag with my other…props. A few things have already been set up around town. It all had to be ready before I go to work, and I go to work…now.
Hello, Marionette Theater of Prague. Just another Saturday. Just walking up the steps with my bag of tricks, no scheming here…
Oh my god, there he is.
Knit cap, brown leather jacket, violin backpack. Sweet, cold-pinked cheeks. What a lovely display of personhood. He’s like a good book cover that grabs your gaze. Read me. I’m fun but smart. You won’t be able to put me down. There’s a little bounce in his walk. It’s music. He’s got headphones on – the fat, serious kind, not the weenie earbud kind. I wonder what he’s listening to. Probably Dvořák or something. He’s wearing a pink tie. Why don’t I hate it? I hate pink. Except on Mik’s cheeks.
Hello, Mik’s cheeks. Soon we shall know each other better.
Aah! Eye contact. Look away!
(Did he just…blush?)
Feet, help me out here. We’re on a collision course. Unless we take immediate evasive action, we’re going to meet him right at the door.
Panic!
Hey, look at this fascinating notice on the wall! I must pause here and tear off one of these little phone-number tabs so that I can call and inquire about the life-changing effects of…
Treatments for female baldness?
Awesome.
‘It’s not for me,’ I blurt, but the danger is past. While I was staring in rapt fascination at the female-baldness flyer, Mik slipped into the building.
Close call. We almost – in Karou parlance – ‘entered each other’s magnetic fields for the first time.’ He would have had to hold the door for me. I would have had to acknowledge it with a nod, a smile, a thank you, and then walk in front of him down the entire length of the hallway, wondering whether he was looking at me. I know how that would go. I’d suddenly become conscious of the many muscle groups involved in the art of walking, and try to consciously control each of them like a puppeteer, and end up looking like I’m in a loaner body I haven’t mastered yet.
This way, I can walk down the hallway looking at him.
Hello, back of Mik.
On his violin backpack is a bumper sticker that reads:
EVERYTHING IS A MIRACLE. IT IS A MIRACLE THAT ONE DOES NOT MELT IN ONE’S BATH.
—PICASSO
Which totally does not make me imagine Mik in the bath. Because that would be wrong.
Good-bye, back of Mik.
He goes through his doorway, and I go through mine, and thus is perpetuated for another night one of the world’s great injustices: the segregation of musicians and puppeteers.
They have their backstage lounge, we have ours. You’d think someone’s afraid we might rumble. There’s a cellist on our turf – get him! Or, more likely but less interesting, it’s a simple matter of space. Neither lounge is very big; they’re just windowless rooms with lockers and a couple of sad couches. The musician couches are slightly sadder than ours, one clue to the hierarchy here. Puppeteers rule the roost, but it’s not a very posh roost. In general, musicians respect their status (i.e., easily replaceable), but the singers, not so much.
The reason I hate it when we perform operas – like now, we’re doing Gounod’s Faust – isn’t because I don’t like opera. I am not a philistine. I just don’t like opera singers. Especially sultry Italian sopranos in heavy eyeliner who go out for drinks with the strings section after the show. Ahem, Cinzia ‘fake beauty mark’ Polombo.
Anyway. It’s the puppeteers who matter around here. There are ten, six of whom are in the lounge ahead of me, pretty well filling it.
‘Zuzana,’ Prochazka says the second he sees me. ‘Mephistopheles is drunk again. Would you mind?’
Drunken devil. All in a day’s work. To be clear, I am not a puppeteer. I am a puppet-maker, a different animal altogether. Some puppeteers do both: build and perform. But my family has always stuck to fabrication, with the idea that you can be decent at two high art forms, or you can excel at one. We excel. Excellently. Still, it behooves a puppet-maker to understand puppeteering. My professor at the Lyceum – Prochazka, who also happens to be lead puppeteer here – requires practical theatrical experience, so here I am. I scurry and fetch for the puppeteers, restring marionettes, retouch paint, mend costumes, and lend a spare pair of hands for easy things like fluttering birds or clip-clopping the horse hooves.
In this case, Mephistopheles has a loose string, making him list drunkenly to one side. It’s an easy fix. ‘Sure,’ I say, and put my stuff in my locker, more mindful than usual of the contents of my bag. Once the lounges clear out – puppeteers to the stage and musicians to the orchestra pit – I have some sneaking to do. The thought of it kicks my heartbeat sideways.
I have to break into Mik’s violin case.
I grab my tool kit. First I have a devil to sober up.
4
Drastic
It’s Act II. I can hear Mephistopheles singing. I text Karou: Kindly confirm: If someone’s evil, then killing them isn’t murder. It’s SLAYING, and not only legal but encouraged. Correct?
No reply.
After a minute, I text again: Taking your silence as a YES. Sharpening knife. Text now to stop me. 3–2–1…Okay then. Here I go.
Still no reply.
One last text: It’s done. Am currently dragging an opera singer to the taxidermist by her hair. Plan to have her stuffed and mounted above Aunt Nedda’s TV.
For a moment, my frustration over the soprano is undercut by anxiety as I ponder what Karou might be doing in South Africa that she can’t answer her phone. Poacher, or witch doctor? I have no success imagining either, and resume frustration.
ARGH! Prochazka kept me scurrying during Act I, then there were sets to change, and just when I was going to slip away, Hugo had to pee and handed off Siebel to me, even though I am not cleared to operate a marionette in a show! I didn’t have to do anything but make it stand around, at least, and when Hugo came back, I made my escape – back to the puppeteers’ lounge to grab my drawing, and then…just as I was about to creep into the musicians’ lounge…
‘Excuse me. Girl!’
Cinzia Polombo appeared in the doorway. Girl? She actually snapped her fingers to get my attention. Oh yes. But it gets better. She handed me her empty coffee cup and, because she doesn’t speak Czech, said in English, with a luxuriant and imperious R roll, ‘Hurrry.’
Oh. I hurried.
If anyone has ever filled a coffee cup with cigarette butts faster than I did tonight, I would be very much surprised.
‘Is that not what you wanted?’ I asked her in purest innocence when she gasped and looked aghast.
‘Coffee! I want coffee!’
‘Ohhh. Of course,’ I said. ‘That makes so much more sense. I’ll be right back.’ And I was right back. I handed her the cup, now full of cigarette butts and coffee, and kept walking.
‘Disgraziata!’ she shrieked at me, dashing the contents to the floor, but I just kept going, back into the puppeteers’ lounge, where I sit now on the sadder of two sad sofas, thwarted. Cinzia is still in the musicians’ lounge, where she should not be. Her cue is any minute. What’s she doing in there, aside from cursing in Italian? I’m going to lose my chance!
My phone vibrates. It’s Karou. Finally. She texts: Go to the taxidermist on Ječná. They’re the best with humans.
—Perfect. Thanks for the tip. Find that poacher?
—Much to his dismay.
—Wishes?
—A slot-machine jackpot of shings. Nothing stronger, though.
That sucks. She’s looking for more powerful wishes, and shings, I know, are only a little better than scuppies. I text: Well, better than nothing?
—Yeah. So tired. Going to sleep now. GO FORTH AND CONQUER!
Again, whatever went down in South Africa, I can’t begin to imagine it. As for the taxidermist, for a second I consider checking to see if there really is one on Ječná, but I dismiss the thought. If Karou was in the habit of having humans stuffed, that jackass Kaz would not still be walking around.
At the thought of Kaz, and to the continued sound track of a high-strung soprano cursing in Italian, I can’t help but imagine what I might do in this moment with a limitless supply of scuppies. Really, Karou was incredibly restrained. I could not be trusted. I would be afflicting people with itches every second, at the slightest provocation. Think about it. With the power of itch – even better, the power of cranny itch – you’d be master of any situation.
Maybe not any situation. It wouldn’t really help me with Mik.
Anyway. I’m not going to waste a single scuppy on Cinzia Polombo. I will preserve them for Mik-enchantment.
IF I EVER GET MY CHANCE TO INVADE HIS VIOLIN CASE, DAMN IT.
Finally: a door slam, and stomping, and Cinzia is out of the way. I take my drawing – it’s rolled up like a scroll, edges burned, and tied with a black satin ribbon – and creep to the door of the musicians’ lounge. It’s ajar, and I can see that there’s no one inside. No sense waiting. A flash and I am in, opening locker doors, mindful that if anyone were to walk in, I would absolutely look like a thief. I don’t know which locker is Mik’s, and it’s impossible to open and close metal doors quietly, and some of them have locks on them, so I can only hope for the best.…
And then I find it. Everything is a miracle. It is a miracle that one does not melt in one’s bath.
Everything is a miracle, is it? Ask me again at the end of the night.
I open the violin case and put the scroll inside. I close it, shut the locker, and back away. Time to escape. I flash back out the door, skirt Cinzia’s coffee-and-cigarette splash, and slide back into the puppeteers’ lounge, where I take a deep breath. Another. Another. Then I put on my coat, gather my things.
This is the moment when I walk away from the Marionette Theater, possibly forever. I feel like a brave Resistance worker who has just planted a bomb, and will now walk away, cinematically, without a backward glance. Because here’s what I’ve decided: If things do not go well tonight, I am never coming back here. It’s the only way I can do this, by removing the inevitability of embarrassment. I never have to see Mik again. There will be no awkwardness, no blushing.
No blushing.
I’m struck suddenly by the very real possibility of never seeing Mik blush again, and…my heart hurts. My heart has never hurt before. It’s real pain, like a bad bruise, and catches me off guard. I always thought people were making that up. It makes me wonder about kissing and fireworks and all the other stuff I always assumed was made up. And the pain comes again, because this is it, things are set in motion, and soon I’ll know, one way or the other. He’ll come or he won’t.