New York (N.Y.) -- Fiction; Science fiction; Theater -- Fiction; Time travel -- Fiction
I don't know how they work it so that some Traverse-Three cop or park
official doesn't find out about me and raise a stink. Maybe Sid just
throws a little more of the temperament he uses to keep most
outsiders out of the dressing-room. We sure don't get any janitors or
scrubwomen, as Martin and I know only too well. More likely he squares
someone. I do get the impression all the company's gone a little way
out on a limb letting me stay here--that the directors of our theater
wouldn't like it if they found out about me.
In fact, the actors are all so good about helping me and putting up
with my antics (though they have their own, Danu digs!) that I
sometimes think I must be related to one of them--a distant cousin or
sister-in-law (or wife, my God!), because I've checked our faces side
by side in the mirrors often enough and I can't find any striking
family resemblances. Or maybe I was even an actress in the company.
The least important one. Playing the tiniest roles like Lucius in
_Caesar_ and Bianca in _Othello_ and one of the little princes in
_Dick the Three Eyes_ and Fleance and the Gentlewoman in _Macbeth_,
though me doing even that much acting strikes me to laugh.
But whatever I am in that direction--if I'm anything--not one of the
actors has told me a word about it or dropped the least hint. Not even
when I beg them to tell me or try to trick them into it, presumably
because it might revive the shock that gave me agoraphobia and amnesia
in the first place, and maybe this time knock out my entire mind or at
least smash the new mouse-in-a-hole consciousness I've made for
myself.
* * * * *
I guess they must have got by themselves a year ago and talked me over
and decided my best chance for cure or for just bumping along half
happily was staying in the dressing room rather than being sent home
(funny, could I have another?) or to a mental hospital. And then they
must have been cocky enough about their amateur psychiatry and
interested enough in me (the White Horse knows why) to go ahead with a
program almost any psychiatrist would be bound to yike at.
I got so worried about the set up once and about the risks they might
be running that, gritting down my dread of the idea, I said to Sid,
"Siddy, shouldn't I see a doctor?"
He looked at me solemnly for a couple of seconds and then said, "Sure,
why not? Go talk to Doc right now," tipping a thumb toward Doc
Pyeskov, who was just sneaking back into the bottom of his makeup box
what looked like a half pint from the flask I got. I did,
incidentally. Doc explained to me Kraepelin's classification of the
psychoses, muttering, as he absentmindedly fondled my wrist, that in a
year or two he'd be a good illustration of Korsakov's Syndrome.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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