Eshtine

Nemain (part 5 of 5)

My sister arranges for another babysitter so I can go see the opera she's starring in. I'm to meet her friend Cindy at the door of the State Theatre and give her the other ticket. While I wait for her I amuse myself by scanning the crowd. One woman has come for the All Hallows Eve Eve performance wearing a black and orange feather boa. A whole pack of priests arrives, six or seven Roman collars. I idly wonder what the appropriate collective noun would be until it hits me that, of course, I should call it a mass of priests.
Then Cindy appears. She took lessons at the same time my sister did in Chicago; currently she's the soprano understudy at the Met and that's what's brought her to town. Opera singers have complicated social lives but they are bound to run into each other every so often. Cindy is petite, pretty, vivacious, highly outgoing, the sort of person I take to immediately. We make opera-related small talk (I can fake it with the best of them) and I anticipate a pleasant evening.
Before we go in she says, "I need to call my husband. We've been having problems with our internet access and I should check in." She flips open a cell phone and dials. I wait. "Hi...Angela says the first act is an hour and 45 minutes. Should I call back at intermission and walk you through the setup?...No, what?...I haven't heard anything, what have you heard?...Madison Square Garden? Not far enough."
I look at her. "What is it?" I ask.
She looks at me, her eyes wide and serious. She speaks into the phone with a sudden note of authority in her voice. "Okay. In that case, I'll grab them both and get the hell out of here."

"What happened?" I croak. She just clutches my arm, this woman I've never met, and says into the phone, "It's a stone building, would that help? Wouldn't it have to be lead-lined?"
For a horrible, horrible thirty seconds while she finishes her conversation I am certain the bomb has already gone off and the black wind is sweeping toward us and we are the only ones in the whole theatre who know and there is nothing to be done, how can you move faster than an explosion? But still I am ready to make the run for it, I know the way to the dressing room, we will have to get my sister in full costume and tear out of here, grab my nephew...I have no clear idea what we will do next.
Cindy gets off the phone. "Nothing's happened," she reassures me. Then she says, "The rumor is that with Michael Jordan at Madison Square Garden and the President in town for the Yankees game, this is the night they're gonna do something. They say 11:30--I don't know why--and that it's gonna be a small nuke."
I feel the surroundings burning themselves into my memory so I'll always have a clear image of where I was when I found out the world was coming to an end. We're standing in front of a curved wall--it's grey and has a rough texture, like a raked Japanese sand garden. We're standing on wine colored carpet surrounded by ugly statues. Priests are walking by. Cindy puts her hand to my back and we head for our seats.
She mentions her husband said Halloween's the other possible date for an attack.
"No use in worrying about it," I hear my voice saying.
"There's nothing we could do anyway, if something happens," she agrees. She sounds lighthearted but her tone jumps up and down in all the wrong places, like she has just learned to talk.
My first reaction might seem strange to anyone who did not grow up during the Cold War's last gasp. I can't help but associate a nuclear attack with the end of the world. It is part of my conditioning. Thanks presumably to Ronald Reagan, in my mind a nuclear bomb equals World War Three equals Apocalypse.
Now, a part of me has always hoped I'd be on the planet to witness the end of time, the sky curling up on itself like a torn scroll, all of that. Who knows why. Self-centeredness, perhaps--if I have to go I want everyone else to go with me. But here at three and half hours left on the countdown I am suddenly, startlingly, hopelessly in love with Earth, everyone and everything on it. All I want is for someone to please tell me the grand madness isn't over yet. It's so beautiful. It can't die.
Gradually my viewpoint shifts. A small nuke, Cindy said. My Cold War-conditioned brain thinks that's a contradiction in terms, but what if it isn't? What if the world doesn't come to an end? What if all we lose is New York City?
Thanks to this line of reasoning, for the first time on this whole trip I absolutely regret coming here. I am desperate to be in St. Louis. Good old, boring, of-no-interest-to-terrorists St. Louis. Fallout wouldn't travel that far, would it? Can I get a plane out of New York tomorrow? Will my sister disregard the rumors and elect to stay for her final performances? Will anyone even come to operas when they think a nuclear bomb will hit New York?
The seats are filling up around us. Cindy is talking about something inconsequential. I try to listen but with every movement of air I'm expecting fallout wind to come whipping past my face like the wind the subway trains push through the tunnels. I think of the goodbyes I wish I could be saying and entertain the thought of borrowing Cindy's cellphone to call Mom, to call Jim, Stephanie, Ali, Reiko...There are too many. There's too much to say. Three and a half hours--three and a half years wouldn't be enough.
I'm trying very hard not to give in to panic. I think, "Perfect love casts out fear." I whisper it to myself like a mantra. But I'm still jumpy as hell. I see a flash out of the corner of my eye and I think it's the bright explosion seen through a chink in the building. It's an usher using a flashlight to guide someone to his seat.
The opera begins. The first character on stage is Human Frailty, a longhaired blond countertenor clad in a loincloth. On a normal night I'd be amused by this. Instead I feel deep, deep pity as he sings a quavering line about how mortals get tossed about by forces they can't control. Above him looms Fortuna, her spinning wheel a glittering mirrorball in this production. She sings a gloating song of how she distributes pleasure and pain at her whim.
Her voice is supplanted by Kahtah's. "Go on. Ask me. Go on. Ask me if I have finally won the unbreakable sword."
My greatest fear. "You told me I'm in love with destruction," I say to her. "But I read about what happened at Hiroshima and I found very little beauty in that, whatever you may think."
"I remember you reading about it. You were fascinated by the way the flash of the explosion burned shadows of people and buildings so they could still be seen years later."
I don't answer.
"Do you want to know my victory song?" Her voice is a wasteland. "If I have the sword I will want a victory song. There are no bards anymore but I remember the precision of their meter.
'She, the haunter of battlefields, she,
Whose cries are harsh music, she,
Fatal wind lover,
Lover of shadows scorched in the ground.'"
"'Perfect love casts out fear,'" I quote at her, but my heart isn't in it. I try not to listen to her and concentrate on what's happening on stage.
It is no escape. Everything in the opera, Monteverdi's "Return of Ulysses," is taking on double meanings. Ulysses has made his way back to Ithaca and his faithful wife Penelope--that's my sister--after a twenty-year absence. He'd angered Neptune a decade back, and in his anger the god of the sea had kept him from his home. So there is much about the way gods toy with human beings that seems terribly applicable to the current situation. Much talk of war, too, and suffering that has gone on too long. Ten years of war. I am trying to not imagine it. The vengeance of an angry god toward men arrogant enough to believe they steer the course of their own lives. I can't believe how trapped I feel, having to listen to something so raw and sad now of all times.
Ka-Re's voice. "The worlds should not draw this near."
"Every story I've written about you, you wanted less communication between the worlds, while Kahtah wanted more. Why?"
"You see the answer for yourself," she says.
I had thought the meeting would be gentle, the boundary like gauze. Now I can only picture massive spheres colliding, propelling shards of the real and unreal in all directions like shattered glass.
The unreal is babbling inside me. Ka-Re's voice and Kahtah's voice can no longer be distinguished. Kahtah pulls at Ka-Re and Ka-Re tugs at Kahtah; words float through my mind to describe it: "she strikes at your head..." They are wrapped in each other and cannot be torn apart. Onstage Ulysses meets a stranger who unmasks and reveals herself as Minerva, the goddess who has protected him all along. As he falls down in worship he tells her what he now understands: "It is a grave sin to fear the world when defended by heaven."
These are the first words that have made sense all evening. One can't know, of course, if one is defended by heaven, but if I am, there's nothing to worry about; if I'm not, there's nothing I can do. There are no bombs or swords or crows or hawks in the rest of the evening. There is only Ulysses firing arrows to defend his home, only Penelope, who had long since given up hope, believing at last the war is truly over and her husband stands before her. Joy breaks into her face like the slowest, grandest sunrise.
---
Halloween night my sister tells me there's a parade in Greenwich Village. We eat dinners of shrimp and shredded beef at a Cuban restaurant before I head out on the train. The subway stations are crowded with police officers ready for the worst, but Minerva is still on my mind and I am fearless. At the parade the drag queens are all in red, white and blue, which is touching in a way I find difficult to describe. I know I'm near Irving Street so I try to find the Gothic Revival building where Irving is perched. But as I head south and the numbers get smaller--Seventeenth, Sixteenth, Fifteenth--there's an acrid smell in the air. If it is what I think it is, and it smells like that this many blocks away, I don't want to be any closer. So I head back underground.
A little boy about nine years old comes to sit next to me to wait for the train. "Happy Halloween," he says. I can't figure out his costume, which is just a black cape with ragged edges. He's there with a friend, who is dressed as some modern superhero, and his friend's mom. The little boy and I become fast friends chitchatting on the bench. When the train comes the mom beckons, but he just points to me. "I wanna sit by her." So we sit together on the subway. He tells everyone who passes us to have a happy Halloween. He demonstrates to me how quickly he can eat a lollipop. I tell him I'm very impressed. He shares some of his candy with me--I'm even more impressed by his altruism until he says he's allergic to chocolate. "I'm a monster," he tells me.
"Are you?"
"I'm really a killer. I'm that guy from 'Scream.' 'Cept I lost my mask."
Our conversation has reached a lull. He chomps on a second lollipop. "What does 'Halloween' mean?"
"It's short for All Hallows Evening," I tell him. "It's the night before All Saints Day, which used to be called All Hallows. Like "all holy." But really it was around long before there was an All Saints Day. Long, long, long ago, this used to be New Year's Eve."
He nods. Time to begin again, I think. Each in her own place, separate and uninfluenced. A veil between, or a shroud, but nothing to be afraid of.
It's my stop. "Happy Halloween," he says again as I get up.
"Happy New Year," I tell him. He clamps his teeth down on his candy and smiles.