The Rehearsal

EIGHT

The day after the Theater of Cruelty lesson Stanley ran into the victim of the exercise on the main staircase. The boy was walking quickly with his head down, taking the stairs two at a time. His hair was cropped close to his skull now, to even up the patch on the crown that the masked boy had snipped. The shorter cut didn’t quite suit him. He looked a little frightened, his ears and forehead protruding too obviously from under the shrunken cap of hair. He was wearing a new shirt.

“Hey,” Stanley said, reaching out a hand to stall him.

The boy turned guilty eyes up at him and nodded a shy hello.

“I just wanted to say that I went and complained,” Stanley said. His voice sounded huge in the stairwell, spiraling up and up to the floors above and ringing clear and hollow in the vertical shaft like the pealing of a bell. “About what happened. I went to the Head of Movement and complained.”

“Thanks,” the boy said quietly. “But it’s all right now. It was just a dumb thing.” He made as if to continue downstairs, but Stanley stopped him, moving closer and cornering him so he was trapped flat, pinioned against the banister with nowhere to go.

“I’m going to talk to the Head of Acting as well,” Stanley said. “I can’t believe that nobody else is doing anything about this. It’s disgusting. What they did to you was disgusting. And nobody cared.”

The boy looked at Stanley inscrutably for a moment. He reached back with both hands for the banister, and stood there with his arms behind him, tugging gently on the handrail. Then he said, “I was a plant.”

“What?” Stanley said.

“I was a plant. The main guy—Nick, the guy in the mask—he asked me and arranged it all beforehand. I knew they were going to pick me, and I knew what was going to happen, mostly. I knew about the water, and he said they might slap me around a bit. I thought it would be funny. Just for a laugh.”

Stanley was frowning. “But you bolted.”

“I didn’t know they were going to go that far,” the boy said. “My shirt and everything. Cutting my hair. He only told me about the water-trough. I thought it would be okay. I thought I’d help them out or whatever. I said yes.”

“Is there always a plant?” Stanley said. “Every year?”

“I guess,” the boy said. He jerked his gaze away, past Stanley’s shoulder and down the stairs. “They’d never get away with it otherwise.”

“They shouldn’t get away with it.”

“Yeah,” the boy said, and shrugged. “It was just an exercise. It was only to make a point.”

“But why?” Stanley said. He spoke with more aggression than he intended. He felt the same dawning feeling of helplessness that he had felt in the Head of Movement’s office. In his confusion he was scowling at the boy, and now the boy scowled back.

“I was just helping them out. They needed someone for their project. It’s no big deal.”

“What about your shirt?” Stanley said. “Your shirt was a big deal.”

The boy gripped the banister tighter. He was flushing. He clenched his jaw, and his shorn golden cap of hair moved angrily backward on his scalp.

“Hey look, I appreciate your concern, all right,” he said, “but I’m not like a little bandwagon, you know, or some sort of a just cause that you can fight for. It was my fault, I should have asked them what they were planning on doing. It’s no big deal. You didn’t have to complain.”

“They hurt you!” Stanley shouted.

“Yeah, and came and found me afterward,” the boy said loudly. “After they’d taken off their masks and it was all over, and we talked and everything, and we sorted everything out. It’s not your problem. You weren’t there.”

Stanley looked at the boy for a second and then stepped aside to let him through. The boy ducked his head and muttered, “Thanks anyway.” He slipped past Stanley, bounded down the stairs and disappeared.

Stanley looked up through the high mullioned window that lit the stairwell, and breathed heavily. He found his hands were balled into fists and he vaguely felt like hitting something, but he wasn’t sure what he wanted to hit, or even why. He stepped back as a flood of second-year actors thundered down the stairs, and as the crowd dwindled he looked up to see the Head of Acting descending calmly in their wake, holding under his arm a bundled mainsail, patched and rat-tailed and studded around its edge with reef-point eyelets filmed with rust. He looked preoccupied.

“Stanley,” he said as he approached. “You’re the man who wanted to see me, is that right?”

“It’s all right. I sorted it out with the Head of Movement,” Stanley said, stepping respectfully aside. “It’s all sorted out now.”

“This is an exercise in control and communication,” the Head of Movement said. “I want you all to divide into pairs and face each other. Starting with your palms together and your feet square, you will begin to move in exact tandem, each the mirror image of the other. You can move however and wherever you like, but I want to be able to walk among you and not be able to tell who is leading and who is following.”

The class lumbered to its feet and Stanley found himself paired with the girl who had been sitting nearest to him. They smiled at each other quickly as they turned to face each other, and Stanley felt his heart leap. He felt a little stab of self-contempt and frowned to quash the feeling. He turned back to look at the Head of Movement, narrowing his eyes to show the girl that he was listening hard, and that he intended to take the lesson very seriously, and that despite what she may expect or believe he was utterly indifferent to the fact of her sex. In his vague peripheral vision he saw the girl watch him for a moment longer, and then turn back to the Head of Movement herself.

“Between you,” the Head of Movement continued, “choose one person who will begin as the leader. You must also choose some sort of physical signal to indicate to each other that the leader will change. You can swap between yourselves as many times as you wish, back and forth. Eye contact is essential. We will conduct this exercise in silence.”

The paired students leaned in to confer with each other in whispers. The Head of Movement turned away and pressed a button on the stereo surround system, wiping the dust off the protruding edge with his finger while he waited for the disc to load. The dust was thick and silver-gray, accumulating on his fingertip in a soft feathered wafer. He rolled it into a ball and flicked it away. The disc began to spin, and he twisted the volume knob slowly up and up so the music faded in, swelling larger and larger until it filled the gymnasium completely. He had chosen a cinematic score, instrumental and surging and overblown.

“Please take your places and begin,” he called over the opening bars. “The music is your pulse. Take inspiration from it. Detach yourself and divide your mind between watching your partner and listening to the pulse. You should feel alert but at peace. You may begin.”

Stanley turned to face his partner and held up his palms for her to touch with her own. They looked clearly at each other, and at first he squirmed and frowned, unsure as to what she might be seeing, looking at him in such a clear, frank way. She was a little shorter than him, and her chin was tilted slightly upward to meet his gaze. She had determined gray eyes and a straight thin-lipped mouth. Stanley was close enough to see the down on her cheeks, glowing soft pink in the slanting light, and the fawny scatter of freckles across the bridge of her nose.

The heavier instruments dwindled to let the strings build their own quiet plucking crescendo. Stanley peeled his right palm away from the girl’s and felt her make the same movement, slowly and carefully, lagging perhaps a quarter of a second behind. She was frowning slightly, but even as he registered the expression he realized that she was attempting to mirror his own. He relaxed into a more neutral face and saw her do the same, his movements reflected back at him in a delicate feminine echo, like a cave that threw back a finer, female version of his own call. He balled his hand into a fist and brought it up under his chin, trying to move slowly and carefully so she would see the whole trajectory of his movement and be able to replicate it simultaneously. She watched his eyes, not the movement of his hand. They were both wide eyed with the strain of trying to communicate without words. Around them the other paired couples were moving similarly, waving their hands about in a slow and measured way. As he spread his fingers out and laced them through the thin cold fingers of his echo-girl, Stanley thought to himself that from above the class must look like some sort of windswept crop, swelling up and back like tiny quivering blades thrusting up out of the soil and into a stiff and ever-changing breeze.

From the stage the Head of Movement watched them all in silence, his fingertips still resting on the stereo and filmed gray with dust. His gaze drifted over them and came to rest upon one of the boys, standing on the edge of the group and reaching out his hand to touch his partner’s neck with his index finger. The Head of Movement watched the mirrored pair trace an invisible line down each other’s windpipe and into the hollow at the center of the collarbone, and thought, The boy is leading. He could always tell.

The boy was standing with his chin high and his legs apart and wearing a solemn burning expression on his face that almost made the Head of Movement smile. It was the first time he’d had class with the boy since the teary outburst in his office following the Theater of Cruelty exercise, and when he had walked into the gymnasium that morning and called for the attention of the class he’d at once spotted Stanley bobbing on the periphery, anxious and desperate to be seen. The Head of Movement had looked away. He did not want the boy to cling to him in such a fearfully filial way, craving attention and recognition and time, unaware that all the trembled first-experiences and thought-dawnings that affected him so wholly were, for the Head of Movement, only the vicarious latest in a long line of the same.

Every year at least one of the students complained about the Theater of Cruelty exercise. The lesson fell into the Head of Acting’s domain and mostly it was he who took the distressed student into his office and soothed any lasting damage. Some years, as with this one, he contrived a reason to leave the class at the last minute, scuttling up the back staircase to the lighting booth above the gymnasium to watch the students from behind the darkened glass. The view was always different. One year the victim-student had been able to wrestle free and fight back, and several of the students on stage had been seriously hurt; another year, the watching students stormed the stage in a mass rescue. But lately, year by year, the acting students had been losing something—a readiness to act, he thought, without irony. Take this year—a shirt, a bit of hair and the water-trough, and one student crying into his shirtsleeve afterward from the pain of it.

Sometimes the Head of Movement wanted to strike them, to rush down on to the gymnasium floor and slap them and shake them until they stirred and snapped and fought back; sometimes he felt almost driven mad by this cling-film sheet of apathy that smothered them and parceled them and stopped their breath until they were like dolls in shrinkwrap, trademarked and mass produced.

He tossed his head. They were cushioned, that was all. They needed a wakeup.

Down on the floor Stanley had invisibly passed the leadership to his partner, who was now drawing away from him and fanning out, the two of them black-tee-shirted against the wooden floor like a symmetrical inkblot on an aged card. Not quite symmetrical. The male movements could never quite match the female, and vice versa: there was always something missing, some bright edge that gave the deception away. The Head of Movement sighed and looked at them all in panorama for a second, the silken apathetic crowd of sleepwalkers who had watched their classmate get stripped and shorn and nearly drowned, and had done nothing. He thought, How can I possibly wake them up? And then he thought, Who will awaken me?

“I am here to tell you about the end-of-year devised theater project,” the Head of Acting said briskly, “which is by far the most important event in the first-year calendar.”

The Head of Acting always commanded a fearful unmoving silence whenever he spoke. He did not need to raise his voice.

“First of all I must stress that you will be completely on your own. The tutors will not oversee rehearsals, scripts, lighting rigs, costume designs or concept discussions. This is your project. When we arrive in the auditorium at eight in the evening on the first of October, we want to be surprised. And shocked. We want to see why we chose you out of the two hundred hopefuls who auditioned. We want to leave feeling proud of our own good taste.

“I might add that this project has an impressive legacy at the Institute: the work that has been dreamed up as part of this project has many times been later reworked into greater productions, some of which have toured internationally. You have big shoes to fill.”

The Head of Acting brightened now, as he always brightened when talking about past students. His admiration and approval was only ever retrospectively bestowed, a fact which these first-year students did not yet know. In their ignorance they gazed fiercely up at him and champed at this new and shining chance to prove themselves.

“It is a tradition at the Institute,” the Head of Acting continued, “that on closing night the cast will choose one prop from their production to be handed on. The prop they choose will serve as the driving stimulus for the production the following year. Last year’s production, titled The Beautiful Machine, received from the previous year’s students a large iron wheel. In the original production the wheel had been part of a working rickshaw. In Beautiful Machine the wheel was redressed as the Wheel of Fate and became a central visual component of the beautiful machine itself.”

One of the boys was nodding vigorously to show he had seen The Beautiful Machine in production and remembered the wheel very well. The Head of Acting smiled faintly. He said, “The cast of Beautiful Machine, last year’s first-year students, have chosen a prop from their production that will become the locus of yours. I have it here in my pocket.”

He paused for a long moment, enjoying the tension.

“Does anyone have any questions, before I leave you all to conduct your first meeting?” he asked.

Nobody could think of a question. The Head of Acting reached into his pocket and withdrew a playing card. It was a card from an ordinary deck, thinly striped on the reverse side, pinkish and round edged. He held it up for them all to see and turned it over in his fingers to show the King of Diamonds, bearded and thin lipped and pensive, holding his axe behind his head with a thick hammy hand. The Head of Acting tossed the card on the ground, inclined his head politely, and left the room.

The gymnasium door closed softly in his wake and sent the King of Diamonds scudding sideways. The card was ever so slightly convex, shivering on its slim bowed back like a small unmasted ship lost at sea. For a moment there was only silence. Then one of the girls said, tentatively, “The King of Diamonds is one of the Suicide Kings. In case anybody didn’t know.” She spoke in an apologetic way, as if meaning to excuse herself for breaking the silence and speaking first.

“The King of Hearts is holding his sword so it looks like it goes into the side of his head—” she demonstrated “—and the King of Diamonds is shown with the blade of his axe facing toward him. It’s the same on every pack. The two red kings are always called the Suicide Kings.”

Everyone craned to look, and saw that she was right. There was another silence, a different sort of silence this time, a silence ringing with the last words spoken: the Suicide Kings. It’s always a different sort of silence once the first idea has been cast, Stanley thought.

After a few moments more the collective concentration broke. They looked up and grinned sheepishly, and laughed and stretched and shifted and began to chatter and looked around for a leader who would guide them on from there.

“Do we get to a stage, do you think, as teachers,” the Head of Movement said, “when the only students who can really affect us are the ones who most remind us of a young version of ourselves?”

The Head of Acting laughed. “And always a very flattering version, too,” he said. “Only ever the vigor and the ideals. And the bodies. The supple, fit young bodies that we all imagine we must once have had, before everything else set in.”

The Head of Acting was some ten years older than the Head of Movement, and he had not aged well: his pale eyes were rimmed on their undersides by a wet pink rind that always made him look rather ill.

“I think it’s sadly true for me,” the Head of Movement said. “There’s this one acting student this year—a boy. He’s very much like how I was, I suppose. How I imagine I must have been. When I’m teaching his class I forget all my doubts about… about everything, really. I watch him so closely and I really delight in his progress—I mean really—I keep seeking him out and watching him change, little by little, and I feel excited and generous and all the things that teachers are supposed to feel.”

As a teacher the Head of Acting had always maintained a deliberate distance from his students, but his withdrawn and profoundly unmoved manner seemed to cause them, strangely, to worship him the more. It was the Head of Acting who most of the students sought to impress, and it was the Head of Acting who most of them remembered in the years that followed. His coldness and his deadness attracted them somehow, like puppies to a master with a whip. The Head of Movement did not possess this gift of indifference, the Head of Acting thought now: he showed too much of himself, wore his skin too plainly; he was too contemptuous of his students when they let him down.

“The illusion of depth in a character,” the Head of Acting had said only this morning to his second-year class, “is created simply by withholding information from an audience. A character will seem complex and intriguing only if we don’t know the reasons why.”

The Head of Movement was stroking his knuckles with his fingertips. He shook his head.

“And I keep reminding myself that in all probability it’s just vanity,” he said, “my seeking out a younger version of myself and watching so greedily, like someone in a fairy tale bewitched. It’s a sad thing. I don’t think I can connect in the same way with the other students. I just don’t—” He spread his arms and shrugged. “I just don’t care enough,” he said. “I don’t care enough in what makes them different. They’d never know. I get up in front of them and teach and it’s like any stage performance, knowing the role back to front and getting on and doing it. But underneath it all it’s just an act.”

“Maybe you’re being too hard on yourself,” the Head of Acting said. “Putting too much of an expectation on yourself that you actually have to care. Maybe you don’t have to care. Maybe you can not care and still be a great teacher.”

“Maybe,” the Head of Movement said.

“Who is the student who captures you?” the Head of Acting said. “The younger version of you.”

The Head of Movement hesitated, squinting up at the light fitting above the Head of Acting’s head.

“I’d rather not say,” he said at last, a little shyly, as if the boy was a crush that he held still too close to his heart.

“All right,” the Head of Acting said. “But if you let me, I bet I could guess.”

“My dad has this theory,” Stanley said. “He reckons schools should take out insurance policies on the students they think are most likely to die.”

There was a pause, then all six of them put down their forks and turned to look at Stanley properly.

“What?” they said.

“Because there’s always one kid who dies,” Stanley said. “In any high school, right? During your time at high school, any school, you can always remember one kid who died.”

His smile was faltering now. He had intended the remark to be flippant and amusing and slightly shocking, but his classmates were looking nauseated and confused. He tried to let a surprised and disappointed look flit across his face, as if to communicate that his audience was not as debonair and outrageous as he had hoped, that the six of them had let him down somehow by this pinched and prudish outlook, by their backward and unfashionable scope that left no room for wit or scandal. He tried to make his eyebrows peak in the center and his smile turn down slightly, a worldly look that was contemptuous and cheerful and uncaring. He tried not to care.

“That’s retarded,” one of the girls said.

Stanley smiled wider. He could not rightly retreat now. He was committed to voicing, and thus partly owning, a point of view that wasn’t his own. He felt trapped, and so tried to redeem himself by becoming jolly and charming, like his father could be, and amplifying his own part, his own sponsorship of the idea, until it seemed as if the idea really was his own.

“You can take out an insurance policy,” he said, “for something like two hundred a year. Insurance policies on kids are really, really low. Making money is all about seeing something’s going to happen before it happens, right? So if you can get in there and make something good of it—if you can pick the kid who’s most likely to die—”

He spread his hands and shrugged, as if the logic were self-evident.

“And you reckon the money should go to whoever takes out the policy,” a boy said. “Like, it should go to the school as a reward for being clever enough to spot the kid that was likely to die?”

“What does it mean, ‘most likely to die?’ ” snapped the girl. “That’s retarded. How can you tell if a person’s likely to die?”

Stanley was feeling hot now. He started to feel resentful, not at his father, whom he was instinctively moving to protect, but at this nauseated audience, who were scowling at him across the mirror-glaze of the linoleum tabletop as if he had mentioned something truly dreadful. He forgot that he himself had met his father’s insurance idea with something a little like nausea; he forgot that his father’s deliberate provocations often gave him a tight feeling in his chest and a helpless clenching anger that lingered for days and weeks afterward. He glared back at the six of them and said, “Who’s to say something good can’t come out of a death? Who’s to say it’s wrong to make something good out of something terrible like a death? To spot it before it happens, and pounce?”

He was imperfectly paraphrasing, and the words were lopsided and unlikely in his mouth.

“Something good of it—like making a million dollars off some kid coming off his skateboard on the way home from school?”

“Maybe,” Stanley said. “Maybe, yeah.”

“That’s the stupidest idea I’ve ever heard of,” one of them said. “Life insurance is all about having a backup in case the person you depend on dies. Like if my dad died, my mum would be screwed because she needs his salary to survive, to pay the mortgage and the bills and all that. So life insurance would pay out if he died, just so she wouldn’t be screwed for a few years until she found someone else. Why would they let you take out life insurance on a kid? It doesn’t even make sense. They’d know you were up to something.”

“I’m just talking about the possibility, though,” Stanley said, slipping into first-person ownership after all. “I mean, the idea’s possible. Something to think about. If you could pull it off.”

All in an instant he remembered a scene from two restaurants ago, La Vista, the two of them silhouetted against a wall of frosted glass and ivy and an artful water fountain that dribbled and never ran dry. His father wiped his mouth on a bunched handful of linen and said, “Want to hear the worst dirty joke I have ever come across in my entire life? I promise you won’t have heard it.”

The restaurant was quiet. The couple opposite were chewing and looking out the window. Stanley dabbed at his mouth. He said, “Yeah.”

“I’m warning you. It’s pretty bad. Shall I tell it?”

“Yeah.”

“All right. What do you get if you cover a six-year-old kid with peanut butter?”

“I don’t know,” Stanley said.

“An erection.”

There had been a long pause, Stanley’s father grinning with his eyebrows up, unmoving, like a clown. The woman opposite had looked across at Stanley casually, meeting his gaze and then lazily drawing her eyes away and returning to the silent dissection of her meal. He wasn’t sure if she had heard. He slid his gaze back to his father, his grinning expectant father, and switched on a smile. His own smile felt horribly false, as if the corners of his mouth were clothes-pegged or fish-hooked, and for a second they were both silent, both of them grinning, both of them still. Finally Stanley nodded, and his father said, “It’s pretty out there. Right?”

“Yeah.”

“That the worst one you’ve ever heard?” His father’s head was tilted at a jaunty angle, and he was rocking merrily in his chair.

“Probably,” Stanley said. “Probably the worst.”

The memory came unbidden into Stanley’s mind and he scowled more deeply now, feeling freshly betrayed. His audience was scowling back at him across the mirrored depth of the tabletop which showed them waxy and foreshortened.

“Nobody would ever let you profit from the death of some kid,” one of them said. “It just wouldn’t happen. Nobody would allow it to happen.”

Stanley shrugged his shoulders and looked away, out over the other tables in the cafeteria, as if the conversation had finished and he didn’t care. “You’re taking it the wrong way,” he said, without looking at any of them. He scratched his cheek carelessly, his eyes roving around the room and his mouth bunched and faintly sneering in the defiant pout of a child. He said, “You’re taking it too literally. It was just meant to be a joke.”

“What is a taboo?” the Head of Acting asked, his voice ringing out in the vast room. The group was sitting cross-legged in a circle, clutching their cold white-dusted toes, their faces grayed and ghostly in the diffused light.

Somebody said, “A taboo is something you want but you can’t have.”

“A taboo is something that’s forbidden because it’s disgusting.”

“Or because it’s sacred.”

“A taboo is something we’re not allowed to talk about.”

“A taboo is something that makes people feel uncomfortable.”

“A taboo is something that we’re not ready for.”

This last interjection was from the girl sitting on the Head of Acting’s right-hand side. When she spoke he started in surprise and sought her out with his clear pale eyes, and after a moment he smiled a rare and unexpected smile. “Something that we’re not ready for,” he repeated. “Good.”

They talked about magic and ritual and sacrifice for a few minutes, and then the Head of Acting asked, “Is death a taboo?” He looked searchingly at each of them in turn. “Once upon a time death was a great taboo. Is it still?”

Stanley sat and frowned at the floor. The Head of Acting’s pale darting gaze unnerved him. The tutor asked every question with majesty and a pointed reservation, as if emphasizing the profundity of the issues at stake and reminding them that none of them was really capable of a meaningful answer. The cold simplicity with which the Head of Acting spoke made something flutter in Stanley’s pelvis, as if the forbiddenness was amplified somehow by the tutor’s detachment: it was as if the Head of Acting was being deliberately casual, Stanley thought, like a veteran reprobate offering a cigarette to a child and pretending not to notice the child’s blush, and shrug, and stammer.

There was something powerfully strange about the conversation as a whole, as if taboo itself was a forbidden subject. Stanley had the vague sense that they were being tempted, and none of them quite understood how. He squirmed and waited for the flutter in his pelvis to pass. Most of the students, like him, were looking uncomfortable, sitting with their eyes cast down and waiting for the tutor to pounce.

“Stanley,” the tutor said, pouncing. “Is death a great taboo?”

Stanley made his hands into fists and pressed his knuckles into the floorboards as he thought.

“No,” he said at last. “Not anymore.”

“Why?”

“Because people pretend to die all the time,” Stanley said. “I watch people pretending to die every time I turn the television on.”

“So?” said the Head of Acting, but he looked eager, and his lips were drawn back.

Stanley said, “If death was a great taboo, then pretending to be dead would have consequences.”

The Head of Acting gave a brisk satisfied nod and turned back to the group. Stanley drew a breath. He was sweating.

“Let me tell you about my father’s death,” the tutor said. “He died in his own bed, and after his death my family spent one evening with his body before he was taken away. I had heard about rigor mortis. I found it an interesting concept, but I was also a little suspicious of it, as if it might be an old wives’ tale, something archaic that didn’t happen anymore.

“I sat by my father’s bed and watched over him, and every hour or so I would sneak forward and give him a little poke, just a little poke with my index finger, in the fold of skin underneath his cheekbone where his skin was all pouchy and soft. I kept touching his cheek like this, routinely, waiting for the stiffness to set in. And after a while it did. I leaned forward and poked at his cheek and it was hard as a board.

“It was the delay that I found frightening,” he said. “He was soft for so long, and then it was like somebody flipped a switch. The delay frightened me. The delay between two of death’s symptoms—rigor mortis and the stopping of the heart. All of a sudden I saw death not as something solitary and final but as an incremental process, a slow accumulation of symptoms, a gradual stepping-down. I had never thought of death in this way before.”

They were watching him warily now.

“This is a very personal memory for me,” the Head of Acting said, “because I had always imagined that at the death of my father I would feel very great sadness, even hysteria, that I would cry and cry like I’d seen my sisters cry, that afterward I would feel a deep longing for what was irreplaceable about my father, and I would have to work to rebuild my life as normal. I imagined that after it happened I would take time to think about my own mortality, but with a new appreciation and reverence for the brevity of life.” The Head of Acting’s voice was steady but his voice was very soft, and somehow intensified by the hush, like the savage clear-blue flame of a gas hob turned low.

“But that didn’t happen for me,” he said. “I didn’t cry. I didn’t feel a great sadness, and I quickly replaced everything about him that I needed to. My own mortality was just as it had ever been, that was all. I thought I knew how I would react to the death of my father, and I was wrong.

“Like Stanley,” the Head of Acting said, quickening and shifting into a new, brisker gear, “any one of you can turn on your television set and watch somebody pretend to die. You all will have seen thousands of deaths which are not deaths but merely people pretending. If I said right now, ‘You have been shot!’ you would all roll around on the floor and clutch your bellies and twitch and moan, and what you would be doing—all you would be doing—is copying a copy.

“What I am asking of you for homework,” he said, “is not to prepare a performance of death, for most of you have no first-hand knowledge of what it means for somebody to truly die. Instead I would like each of you to prepare a performance of your most intimate experience. You will place yourself at the mercy of this experience by showing this intimate moment to the rest of the group. The aim of this exercise is to see how we can use these terribly private experiences as a form of emotional substitute when we come to act a scene or a situation that we don’t understand.”

There was a grudging silence. Everybody tried not to look at everybody else. They quickly tried to think up all the relatively unpainful moments of their lives that they would be prepared to re-create in front of the class and pretend that it was the most intimate experience of their lives.

The Head of Acting let the silence gather for a moment. Lazily he thought, What would happen if one of them performed a scene from one of my classes? What if the most intimate moment in one of these kids’ lives was actually a connection with me, some kind of precious moment with me, and they had the gall to re-create it in class in front of the rest of them? He pursed his lips as he weighed the possibility in his mind. He thought, It would never happen. None of them would dare.

“I myself have used the memory of my father’s death many times in my acting career,” the Head of Acting said at last. “I have recalled it, I have re-imagined it, I have replayed it until the memory is sucked of all useful juice and I have learned something. I used it as Løvborg. I used it as Kent. I used it as the Chief Tragedian, believe it or not. I used it as Algie.”

On the floor, Stanley was thinking of his own father: he pictured him with them now, leaning against the barre with his hands in his pockets and winking solemnly at Stanley as he caught his eye above the sea of nodding heads on the gymnasium floor. He would hate the Head of Acting, Stanley thought, and he imagined what his father would say now: That’s right, worship the things that break you down. Worship the deaths and the divorces, and learn to listen to your own sufferings above all other noise. That’ll put everything into a nice healthy perspective for you. Just the ticket. Stanley imagined his father shaking his head and laughing in a disgusted, helpless sort of a way, shrugging his shoulders under the gray pilled sports jacket he always wore when he was with a client at work.

But perhaps he wouldn’t. Perhaps his father would jerk his thumb at the Head of Acting and say, I have to hand it to him. It’s people like this guy who eventually give employment to people like me. Let him screw you all up, slowly but surely. After you’ve robbed yourselves of everything that’s spontaneous and good about your lives, after all that, I’ll have twenty new clients to fix. So go ahead. I’m right behind you, son. I’m right behind all of you. Dig deep.

“If the memory is one of sin,” the Head of Acting was saying, his voice ringing out now as if he were quoting from a beloved text, “afterward you will be free of this sin. It is a kind of redemption.”

Stanley wondered whether he had done anything in his life that required redemption. He felt ashamed that nothing came to mind. He wished he had a secret, a dark blooming ink-stain of a secret that he could brood over and shrug away.

Finally, with the minute hand on twelve o’clock, the Head of Acting said, “I have one final question before we close. What is the last taboo? The taboo that is graver and more sacred than all others?”

“Sex,” somebody said. The answer sounded cheap, and some of the students frowned and shifted and looked at the floor and thought hard. Stanley felt a stirring in his groin again, and he stiffened, wanting very much to leave the room and disappear. Then the girl sitting on the Head of Acting’s right-hand side looked up and said, “Incest is the last taboo.”

The bell rang. The Head of Acting said, “You may go.”

It took the best part of a morning for twenty students to reenact the most intimate scene of their lives. Most of them chose a key moment from their parents’ divorce. Some attempted a sexual encounter or a scene of public shame. One of the girls brought a pile of pizza boxes on to the stage. She chewed through each slice until it was mush and then spat it out into a white bowl she held under her arm. She wept and wept, and had chewed her way through three cold pizzas before the Head of Acting finally clapped his hands and said, “Good. Thank you. We can work with that.”

A bleakness descended on the class as the morning wore on. Stanley was one of the last to perform, and he clutched his little paper bag of props against him as he watched the performers replace each other, one after another, all of them weeping and shouting and caressing invisible lovers with the backs of their trembling hands.

“When I was sixteen,” a girl was saying now, “I was going through the drawers in my dad’s desk to find a compass for a math project. I came across this photo of my dad in the bath with a little kid. I didn’t recognize the kid, or the bath. I flipped it over but there was nothing on the back. I showed my mum.”

She yanked down the handle of an old retractable map affixed to the top of a spattered freestanding whiteboard. The map unrolled. The girl had stuck an enormous painted rendering of the photograph to the map-roll. Her father was bearded and laughing, throwing his head back and showing the secret scarlet of his throat. The girl affixed the handle of the map to a hook at the bottom of the whiteboard to hold it open, and stepped back.

“He had two families,” she said. “That’s how we found out. He’d had this affair with this woman years ago and she got pregnant, and then she got pregnant again, and again, and all of a sudden he had two families, two batches of kids. He divided his time between the two, I guess. When we found out, he didn’t try and explain or anything. He just up and left. I haven’t seen him since. I wouldn’t want to. Mum destroyed the photo so I had to make a copy. So this is him with the third kid of the new batch.”

Stanley stared up at the fleshy father in the bath, grossly out of proportion, with his fingers wrapped thick and pink around the small figure of a baby, laughing in the pale soapy lagoon between his legs. The Head of Acting was nodding and writing furiously on his jotter pad. Stanley watched the girl roll up the giant painting and descend quietly from the stage.

A boy began to describe the worst fight his parents had ever had. He was one of the comedians of the group, cheerfully self-deprecating and witty and successful with the girls, and as he spoke the class visibly relaxed and brightened, and sat up with a new generosity and willingness to laugh. The Head of Acting turned to a fresh sheet and looked up at the boy over his glasses, his head tilted and his finger-pads splayed on the desk in front of him.

“And that was the point,” the boy was saying, “where Dad goes, You are a neurotic, compulsive woman and one of these days you are going to need to accept that. He really screamed it, and it was a bit frightening just for a moment because my dad’s a really quiet, patient sort of a person. After that something just broke. Mum ran off, she really ran away from him, right down the corridor into her study, and slammed the door. We thought the fight must be over, but ten minutes later or so she opened the door again with her head so high and proud, like this—” he demonstrated, holding his arms out like a ballerina “—with her arms full of paper, and she’d typed it out, the whole phrase, in thirty-six point, and she’d got fifty copies printed. She put it up everywhere. She hid copies in his briefcase and in all his pockets. She pinned it to the noticeboard in the kitchen. Everywhere in our house there were these signs that said, You are a neurotic, compulsive woman and one of these days you are going to need to accept that.”

Everybody laughed. The boy gave them a quick thumbs-up and then made as if to return to his seat on the floor.

“Stay there a second, Oliver,” the Head of Acting said. He wasn’t smiling. “Why did you choose this as your most intimate memory?”

The boy shrugged and shoved his hands into his pockets. “I guess because it was the day I learned about revenge,” he said, and everyone laughed again.

“Really?” the Head of Acting said. “Or was it because the easiest thing in the world for you is to make everybody laugh? And you chose the easy option, took the easy way out, instead of choosing to actually share yourself in a sincere and honest way?”

The room had gone quiet. Everyone picked at the floorboards with their fingernails and avoided looking at the comedian Oliver, who was still standing with his hands in his pockets and scuffing the soles of his shoes upon the stage. Stanley watched the defensive smile flicker like a flame at the corners of the boy’s mouth.

“Everyone else here has really shared something,” the Head of Acting said. “They have willingly shown themselves at their most vulnerable. They have relived the most painful and most sacred moments of their lives, and laid them out for us to see. That’s a brave thing to do. There’s been a lot of trust in this room this morning. I don’t see a lot of trust in you, Oliver. Playing to your strengths isn’t brave. You knew everyone was going to laugh, big deal.”

Oliver was nodding now, chagrined and visibly straining to get down off the stage and melt back into the seated crowd so he could ponder his disgrace in private. He had known this was coming. All the first-years endured a breaking-in of this sort, a forcible public fracture of their ego-mold in the interest of rebuilding a more versatile self. About half the first-years had been targeted so far, and the rest sat glumly and waited for their own turn.

“Do you have a girlfriend, Oliver?” the Head of Acting asked.

“Yes.” She was part of the first-year batch and his eyes sought her out briefly in the crowd.

“Is there any aspect of your relationship with your girlfriend which you would not want the rest of the group to see?”

The boy turned back to the Head of Acting. He paused and looked at the tutor suspiciously for a brief moment. “Yes,” he said again, but Stanley thought to himself that he could not very well say no. The girl looked faintly stricken, as if anticipating some forced revelation that would cheapen or destroy her, but all the same the boy’s admission gave her a rush of pleasure and she almost smiled, looking quickly around at her classmates to see if they were jealous.

“That is what intimacy means,” the Head of Acting said. “Intimacy is all the moments that you would be unwilling to share.”

The Head of Acting looked at the boy Oliver and tapped his fountain pen against his desktop in a disapproving way.

“You can get down,” he said at last. “But I haven’t finished with you.”

The Head of Acting was sitting behind the students, arranged sideways behind a small writing-desk, with his long legs folded and one palm absentmindedly stroking his calf as he wrote. He watched the shamed Oliver return to his seat next to his girlfriend on the floor, and then capped his pen crisply.

“Stanley,” he said. “Up you get.”