CHAPTER 105 — Closing Time

“They were careless people... they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money.”

F. Scott Fitzgerald

The Great Gatsby

Saturday, 13 September 2008.

Eppie woke up early in the morning, ready for a brave new world where she had given up inflating personal equity accounts to levels of obscenity hitherto unheard of by humanity.

According to the decree in her guitar, she had to construct an existential shelter for Artists, for what was literally coming in the next forty-eight hours, for such was this world’s predestined future. Yet… beyond where her path bent in the undergrowth, she had no idea if the road ahead was trodden black, or fresh with autumn leaves.

Eppie spent the [Causality]—then allowed the fatigue of the last four weeks to shed from her body, emerging pale and refreshed from her bed like a mid-summer nymph.

Twenty-two days of filming, not including the preparations, the negotiations, the auditions and the legwork to and from the locations. Twenty-two days of learning about Steadicams, focus pullers, ND filters, gaffers and best boys, C-stands and sandbags, booms and mixers, props and wardrobes, ADs and call sheets, gates and wraps, armourers and teachers, and five-year-olds who were timed with stopwatches…

Twenty-two days of watching Ferroni shepherd rotating crews through eighteen-hour turnarounds, while she acted, rested, and watched her numbers go up.

Eighteen days of eating sandwiches from the local deli…

And twenty days of watching a dozen men feed two streets’ worth of parking meters.

It was only on the second-to-last day that Eppie found out that Mr Delaney, their Steadicam operator, was sixty-one, and yet, he had carried a fifty-pound rig for more hours than she had spent acting.

The sheer amount of man-hours, mind-boggling as it was, was sending her considerable [Arithmetics] mastery into a tailspin, because finally, she understood the “human cost” of creating the film—the culmination of every art form humanity had coalesced from the days of storytelling by fire and shadow to the beat of leather-skin drums.

“[System],” she told the world, still half-covered in sixteen-hundred-ply sheets, “Show me my [Causality].”

The bulk of it was from a song about a bully.

A chunk was from her choral with Kel.

She was sure the two free months of rent at Rivington contributed.

And finally, the film, the wrap, the joy and wonder of filmmaking itself, the creator’s high, had also topped up her future with enough [Causality] for her to at least see the film’s release.

And she had gained skills as well, [The Mirror],free of charge, because Dr Cooper had told her that, so long as you are holding the reins, don’t be afraid to gallop.

So I shall gallop.

“[System],” she said. “[Roulette], spend [100,000].”

Eppie once more turned to the system because she felt in her guts that she would need more than just her thrifted theatre management skills to create the Ark. For her, the stage itself would be her cunning instrument—but how familiar was she?

The true answer was that she was a tourist, a Luddite, a facsimile playwright standing on the shoulders of giants, hoping that the incandescent radiance of minds greater than hers could illuminate the dark and show them all the way.

Her world spun.

She slumped, then nearly fell off the bed as aphorism after aphorism rammed into her bulging brain, until—

Eppie read them twice.

Then a third time, slowly, as if she were combing an M&A contract.

The theatre, she murmured to herself. Within the theatre. In its hours of darkness.

“I have to… stay IN the theatre?!” she said to the empty room. “Like…”

She made a face. Of course she knew what a ghost light was, and what it represented. She had read about it during COVID, when all the theatres on Broadway had shut their doors—while leaving the bulbs on. The mythology of it was that one must leave a light on so that the ghosts of the theatre could perform. Like… like…

“Like the Phantom of the Opera?!” she said it aloud.

She could imagine it now, a young Kel, terrified, walking through the dark, and then, in a flash of powder, Euphemia Fontaine would appear at the top of the balustrades, and would holler, “SING FOR ME— KELVIN GRANT— SING AMAZING GRACE!”

And then she would drag him into the catacombs of NYC…

Which would be the sewers…

And instead of floating candles rising out of the water, there would be floating turds…

But the real reason was pragmatic. It was so that the first person walking into a completely windowless and lightless room did not walk off the lip and drop into the pit. It was… OHS… wrapped in mysticism.

She turned her attention to the second [Trait].

Though she had first-hand understanding, her knowledge was wholly gifted by the [System]. For pragmatic application, she would have to turn to Dr Cooper, because she was sure, absolutely sure, that the [System] had sent David Cooper into her orbit for a reason.

“The invisible made visible.”

What does that even mean?

To make people… see truth?

Their own truth?

Societal truth?

Cardinal truth?

Or just… dramaturgical truths crafted from the illusions of stagecraft?

Eppie put her feet on the floor.

Her chest felt hot, her belly ached, and her palms were sweaty. The Lana inside her wanted to bury her face in the soft down pillow and just scream until her throat grew hoarse.

She was ready to… not make money.

Central Park.

The park on a Saturday in mid-September morning was golden light wrapped around vanishing mist, evaporating the dew with the warm breeze from the Hudson. Eppie did her rounds for the first time in four weeks in what the mid-00s favoured for workout fashion: skorts, spats, and a sport shirt, finally stretching out her rusted body.

Twice she was stopped by someone who had thought she was someone, and this time, they were right.

She was the viral legend in the Bully Boy Shanty video.

A case of content theft: this narrative is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.

At 10 AM, she came out Sixty-Fifth with eleven minutes to spare and waited for her friend.

Valorie had explained the geography of Guilliams twice on the phone, swearing to her father’s good name that NYC’s premier conservatorium was impossible to miss.

And it was indeed impressive.

Eppie hadn’t paid much attention to the place in her old life, and now that she did, she had to admit that the ultra-modern facade, with its wedge of glass, cantilevered and hanging above the pavement in a gravity-defying stunt—was impressive.

From the street level, the premier dance studio of the school was vaguely visible, and within, she could see young bodies moving to and fro, mastering the craft.

“It’s new,” a voice said behind her. “They completed it last year.”

Indeed, the entrance, with its enormous sliding glass mechanism that cost more than Cooper’s Bronx Theatre, smelled like curing silicone and… rosin.

“Hey.” Eppie opened her arms.

Valorie swallowed her with her fair arms, eliciting a yelp from Eppie, who was much smaller, and drawing a dozen students at the entrance to shift their gaze.

Senator Sanders’ daughter had on her Blair Waldorf headband, this time in emerald green.

“Should I change?” Eppie looked her friend up and down.

Valorie in a white blouse, flared, with a structured skirt and heels… was not what she had expected. She had expected Valorie to be in her theatre tights.

“It’s theory today,” her friend said, visibly blushing. “And I’ve got a meeting with Sir Woodhouse later.”

They walked and talked.

“How’s that going?” Eppie asked. “Found a song yet?”

“We’re bogged down in concepts,” Valorie sighed. “My father’s adamant about certain aspects of the business, so we’re kind of stuck.”

“Mmm…” Eppie knew that she knew just the thing—but that would be a solution for a more desperate time.

Valorie took her around Guilliams the way a rich friend takes a suburban girl around their uncle’s ski chalet, pointing out fantastical features that they did not know could exist halfway up the saddle of an alp.

The first was the showcase studio itself, accessed via walkways with dark-stained wood, with the varnish gone amber from the students’ wear and tear.

“This is the glass box, the floor’s sprung—it’s incredible when you land, it feels like you’re gliding on air, your body just… bounces right back up.”

They wandered through long, windowless corridors, mapped with narrow vertical windows, the white walls lined with forty years of achievements, holding names from across the industry. At one end, they came to the physical-therapy suite, a room Eppie would have no use for.

“Any one of us can come here, at any time, with minimal booking windows!”

Next, they traversed the layered internal stairs to the musician’s section, where the rooms were soundproofed, and the doors were nested, so that the whole place felt like rooms kept within rooms.

“The vault holds every instrument,” Valorie boasted, watching Eppie’s face. “There are a few instruments in there worth the same price as our manor house.”

It took thirty minutes for the tour to finish.

They saw the workshop where theatre magic was made.

They saw the costume racks, twice as extensive as Sony BMG’s.

They saw students in the cafeteria with grace and faces that already made them the cream of the crop.

They saw Lucia Lancet.

Not the girl herself, who was busy building her record empire, but a photo of Lucia, young and fresh and looking down at the students, ten feet tall and seven feet wide, gazing down into a reading nook in the reading library.

“She was fourteen when she graduated with a double degree,” Valorie said, with enormous relish. “She’s our mascot.”

Then they grabbed frappes.

And visited all SIX of Guilliams’ internal theatres.

The Proscenium, the Drama Theatre, the Recital Hall, the Recital-lecture Hall, the Black Box, and the Drama studio used for third-year productions.

The students started at 70 seats.

Then, twice in their tenure, they would take to the 915-seat proscenium, watched by the public—and New York’s custodians of the performing arts.

They walked back down through it, and Valorie talked about her life at Guilliams, speaking with such familiarity and comfort that she may as well have started here. She spoke about a lady called Signora Bertani, who took Valorie through three weeks of exercises before she was allowed to sing a single note.

In an empty corridor, Valorie asked her to listen, sang four divine notes, then watched Eppie’s face with anticipation and infatuation.

“It’s beautiful,” Eppie said, and watched her friend bloom into genuine joy.

While watching her friend’s face, Eppie couldn’t help but feel something inside her curdle.

Against Valorie, against her gifted genetics and overwhelming talent, Luciana Mio had won.

With her body against the bannister, Valorie close enough to touch, the thought suddenly wormed into her frontal lobe and refused to leave. A Nikkei girl, through hard work and talent she herself did not internalise, had beaten Valorie to the punch—only now, she was with a seven-month-old on her hip, singing on Sundays for a parish of two hundred, losing her best years of training.

If Valorie could have her redemption, why should Mio give up on her dream?

Before Eppie could make her thoughts known, a gaggle of girls arrived in a cluster, trailing perfume and Clueless cliqueness, and stopped when they caught sight of Eppie and her red-headed companion. One of them—blond, glossy, thoroughly polished—let her eyes travel over Eppie and Valorie in a way that was unmistakably familiar to Eppie.

The rest fell in behind her like a flock arranging itself around a leader, noses tilted at an odd angle that made them look…

Like geese.

Still, it was kind of hilarious, because last year, around this same time, Valorie had—

Eppie’s ironic mirth faded when she saw Valorie’s shoulders go stiff, her gaze fixed somewhere against the portraits. To see Val on the receiving end…

Unbidden, [Perfect Pitch] did its thing, plucking one thread of sound out of whatever noise she had decided to pay attention to, delivering the intentionally audible remark straight to her ear.

“A pair of trust fund babies. Performing on Daddy’s dime.”

“—Eppie.” Valorie’s face was proper scarlet.

She saw it then: the flicker beneath the practised composure: empathy, arriving late, but arriving. Valorie Sanders, of all people, was being laughed at, and it had landed somewhere real.

When Valorie looked up again, she wasn’t thinking of the girls anymore.

And she wasn’t thinking of herself.

She was thinking of the girl in Fresno, as Eppie did.

“I just realised how fucked it was…” Valorie looked at her with her lips in an arch. “To show you all this.”

“It’s okay, Val,” she said. Was this serendipity? OR was this the [System] reminding her that there were [Usurper]s out there to be nipped—and victims who had yet to see redress?

“It isn’t okay.”

“Well, it is.” She reached out and tucked away the loose fringe on Valorie’s face. The girl turned scarlet. “You’re allowed to be loudly happy, Val. We’ve established that. You’ve done… so much already. And Mio’s forgiven you.”

Valorie nodded, unconvincingly.

Now Eppie felt bad for making Valorie feel bad.

Somewhere in the distance, the girls were still much ado about nothing.

Was there something she could do, though?

Her [System] panel glowed.

Unsurprisingly, the answer was… yes.

Sunday night.

Zara Arriaga, touring guitarist with Antonio’s backing band for Sony’s bevvy of artists around the country, received a call from her bosom buddy at 11 PM, right after the gig wrapped, and the equipment was being dismantled for the trucks.

“Eppie.” Her voice arrived at a run as she ran past the drills and the men soft-hammering apart scaffolding. “Don’t hang up, let me find somewhere quiet.”

She found the band’s trailer, and inside, she found Antonio and Paco playing cards.

They looked up, grinning.

Zara decided the outside wasn’t so noisy after all.

“The MOVIE!” she squealed once she was sure her uncle and her mentor were out of earshot. “Tell me everything!”

Eppie shared everything, from dredging up the financing to Rémy Aubert, who had thrown himself into the craft for a movie she could not make the first time around, to Ferroni, to everyone else who had immensely contributed to what would appear to an audience as merely thirty seconds of vivid recollection.

Eppie was a very good storyteller.

“Whoa, I am having actual chills…” Zara listened to one scene after another.

“I want to see it so badly,” Zara said, after Eppie had regaled Aubert’s epic acting. “When is it out?”

“I am not sure. It’s sitting with an editor in Burbank,” Eppie replied, likewise full of anticipation. “But enough about me, tell me about your tour? Where are you now? ”

“In Tucson.”

“Tell me about it.” Eppie’s voice, after almost a month, was unknotting every muscle in her body.

So she did.

She told Eppie about the triumphs of her opening a solo in a room of two hundred, Paco’s hatchet face standing below the stage in case anyone tried to catcall his niece. She told Eppie about the applause, the friends she’s made, and the senior musicians who taught her new techniques, stagecraft, and the realities of touring.

It was a lifestyle, Zara said, one that was tiring, lonely, and often full of conflict—for, like Eppie herself, Zara too was learning about the world.

“Like what?” Eppie’s voice came across like a soothing balm for the soul.

Like Antonio playing solo for ten minutes while we fixed the equipment.

Like Roxxie firing off the history of a riff, a rhythm, or a style on a one-woman, ten-minute tangent in the middle of setting up.

Like dealing with guys who won’t take music for an answer and would rather have her number.

Like security showing a dude who snuck in backstage how to kiss asphalt.

Like watching the famous artists that seemed like Gods fight over who is on the top bill, who gets the best mixer.

Like travelling with road crew and the small rituals of travel, with all its superstitions and quirks…

Like playing In the Pines while someone proper famous covered Eppie’s song.

And the loneliness of sitting on the bed alone, in a motel, missing her siblings, her father and mother, and…

Zara left the last part unsaid.

“Aww…” Eppie’s compassion was a little tone-deaf. “Okay, what’s your schedule like next month?”

“I am back in Cali for a few weeks before we head off again,” Zara said. “Are you…”

“I am, in fact, going to be around,” Eppie said. “I have an exam that’s booked next week.”

“For…”

“For… not being a dropout.”

Zara paused, filled with horror, then laughed out loud until her belly hurt. “A girl with a Grammy but not a cert?”

“Maybe they’ll accept my Grammy when I apply to KFC as a store manager.”

Zara had to fight for dear life to regain herself.

“So, October, once things here are settled,” Eppie said.

“What’s been settled?” Zara asked. “Your movie?”

“I WISH it was the movie,” Eppie sighed over the phone. “Anyway, gotta go. Keep in contact! Tell me when you’re back in Fresno. We’ll go visit Mio!”

“Alright!” Zara chirped happily into the speakerphone.

The line went dead mid-sigh. Zara sat with the phone warm against her palm, not far from a dark stage being dismantled, and thought dearly of her friend and how much further October now seemed.