Page 57 of Potion Sickness

Everybody dies at the end, including Doreen, who is laid on her side by Lily with some ceremony. Everybody gets up for a curtain call. Lily bows eleven times.

“Notes?” Lily demands.

Englebert lights up.

* * *

“Does the offer for a practice audience still stand?” Gabe asks. “I ran the banquet against the Banquo lamp four times and I started to feel like the lamp was judging me.”

“It probably was.”

We set up on the porch. He takes the rail as his stage and I take the swing as the assembled lords of Scotland. Englebert is asleep in the parlor, worn out from a day of what he called ‘production administration.’

“From the toast,” I say.

“I drink to the general joy o’ the whole table,” Gabe says, lifting an imaginary goblet.

“You just toasted a man you had killed on Tuesday. Give it some feeling.”

“I know. I’m trying.”

“You sounded pleased to see him.”

“I know.” He drops onto the rail and sits. “Here’s my problem. Everything Englebert tells me to feel… my whole career is built on not doing any of that. I’m there for everyone’s worst day and my job is to be the one person in the room who doesn’t fall apart.”

“So stop trying to fall apart,” I say. “Do what you know.”

“What do you mean?

“Play a man who’s trying not to fall apart in front of people. That’s the scene, isn’t it? He’s at a banquet. There are guests. He’s the host. He is trying to hold the room, and the room keeps getting away from him.” I shrug.

“That’s a good note,” he says.

“Don’t tell Englebert.”

He gets up and runs it again, and this time when the ghost arrives — the ghost being Maude, who has wandered out through the cat flap — Gabe plays a host with a secret, smiling too hard at his guests while his voice climbs out from under him. It almost works. It’s definitely an improvement.

“Hence, horrible shadow,” he says, to my cat. “Unreal mockery, hence.”

Maude blinks at him and begins to wash a paw.

There’s a stretch where the only sound is the swing chain until Englebert emerges through the door, rumpled from sleep and instantly suspicious.

“I heard voices,” he says. “Rehearsal voices. Someone has been running the banquet without the director.”

Englebert makes Gabe run the toast twice and pronounces the improvement “adequate, and clearly the result of my foundational work.”

He then requires the entire scene from the top, with blocking, on the porch. Gabe catches my eye over the cat’s head, grins, and does as he’s told.

CHAPTER 17

Gabe goes fully off book the Monday before opening night. This should be a good thing.

He knows every word of the play, in order. He doesn’t paraphrase or transpose. He can stand in the middle of the stage, delivering a word-perfect soliloquy… in the tone one would read aloud a home insurance policy.

“Is this a dagger which I see before me,” he says, evenly, at a reasonable volume, “the handle toward my hand?”

The delivery is perfectly informational. He sounds like he’s confirming that it is, in fact, a dagger, and that the handle is, as suspected, toward his hand, and that he’ll be with you shortly regarding the blade.