named

"We wish that the situation involved you, only it doesn't," I told the editor of the Lookout. He stood as a man standing in the past. "What is that crawling behind you?" I asked. It was some rodent. "Only a humble zombie, let's hope. Or did you bring a guest? In that case let her treat you with silence, and tell the tale of what brings you here. Strange."

"I shall make it hopeful and emphatic, including the price adjustments that will occur later today, but from the perspective of a riotously silent Sunday morn."

"Can you tell me the prices as they stand at the moment?"

"They don't actually matter." But after a moment he was visibly in a state of acceptance. "It's a Marxist text, yet." He paused again, the moon shed its last slice of influence, and Ray decisively began. "In short, flies stuck in the intermission soup and the effect they had on the reviews. 'Need a Head Shave?' ran one in particular, in my own paper. 'You'd like to make sense of her lines--but they're tangled inside this ineffectual Hairdressing Studio. Says one actor, 'We didn't know when to begin the Weird. Before, her work was very clever with cues for awkward behavior, as in they weren't exactly part of the script, or even a part of the plot. Just the arc, the curve--one ought not to say "the mood," because that...comes and goes.' Does this actor know her earlier work like we do? Was he ever cast a special role, one made just for him? Of course not. The only real person to ever appear in her work was you. Genius! And now I find you here! Forget that I'm the one in the garden at 5am. I have a right to be here. I'd never been discovered and all I'd ever seen was my own fate on the perimeters of what I'd thought was her most absorbing hobby--as if gardening had replaced writing! At any rate, the structure, the reviews were saying, was there in the Hairdressing Studio, but--and I quote--'not its translator.' What could that mean? Were you her translator? Why should something written in the common language need translating?"

"I know all about this but thanks, thanks for the new perspective," I said.

He went on, "The wave of activity of misguided actors, quoting the devil who would take their sentences backstage. As for me," he coughed, "I've been living in the fog, waiting. I've been leaving my lights on but not necessarily sleeping. I fear I'm obeying a dozen masters and their friends' voices. 'Find the strength to publish these reviews and do not mention them in you editorial, tell your opinions on other matters. And think not of how she works the stubby green pen made of wood and silver that shades and glares the glossy photos she signs!"

"Alarming!" Dolores said from the window, a balcony I had forgotten overlooked the garden from the far corner of her room. I felt as if I were in a control group, the one not given the questionable substance yet convinced it has been--and this is almost how the obvious concept of a placebo worked its way into my head, after a meandering sentence preparing me for it. I wasn't narrating, I was barely thinking in words, but out came the phrase "romantic individualism," and I was sure I had concluded my role in this suddenly fanatical love triangle. Strange, the editor of the local (intellectual) newspaper committing himself to the illusions his star writer stirred in him...

Dolores repeated my phrase verbatim, as if it were a soliloquy rather than a puncturing quip in the night: as she enunciated each syllable it fell to the grass and sprouted intimations, very colorful in the accumulating sun. But then as if she had said nothing, she pushed her smart little head further out the window and asked what this was all about, as if the silence she was assuming to have been only now interrupted could be mended by a dutiful explanation by one of her suitors. The falseness of this attitude struck Ray instantly; he seemed about to fall into the pit he was about to claim was the source of evil in Dolores's garden. He began to recite this foolish bit, only to be told by the playwright herself why his peculiar role in the writing process was certainly not to be neglected but never to be overstated. "We have an editor in the garden" she ended, "a decision maker. Now, to excise is...not all that this fellow does, just most of it. But he won't revive his paper by trying on new hats in front of old friends."

This baffled both of us. The disgruntled magic of the moment seemed obliterated; but as dolorous loyalists, we insidiously justified this witticism, making our own meaning, leading ourselves into it all over again.

For me, this exercise in hidden logic told of a courage in Dolores' distant urges, to write a play about a matriculating housewife because she'd realized that at one point, she'd wanted to become one, and was now resting her chin on the window sill like a pie that needed cooling. "Ray, please return later, then go away."

Nothing obstructed his retreat, but he was caught. Talking was his salvation, as if regardless of what he would say we would still appreciate the effort; furthermore, we'd feel obligated to respond. And so he went on with it. "Tonight I have called the site, the active burning opening, the source of all poetry, to finally discover what it's got--the last thing I'd expected was considerate behavior on the part of those intruded upon! For I am, at bottom, a caricature. I came here to make myself less substantial, to excite the enterprise of managing a paper and, it turns out, to contribute to a smoldering love affair between writers. Myself, however, I am--as you say, Dolores--excised."

I wondered whether Ray had had to sit very long for these hypothetical caricatures or if he had visited a carnival artist even less dedicated than Dolores. He had no idea what he was about; she was complacent on the matter; I was faithfully disinterested, so much so that I was the only actor willing to put a name to the travesty, the rhetorical monstrosity, of his presentation. Yet my intention was to wait until the scene had ended.

Ray took out a thought from his pocket to help him insist she was her own actor from the play. "Did they sell you to an auto shop to be lent to strangers who generally went for mudding, leaving trails over the hills? What did the parents think? You were too deliberate for a machine that responded well to children."

Uncomfortable, I interrupt. "What...in what direction lies the office of Dr. Benway?"

"A phenomenal artist," answers Ray. "All hands off, man. No one's left to say what anything's good for."

Dolores shifted ground. "Start talking like me--you're nothing to reach around with. I'm just fine with my own voice imitating me."

"That's why, incidentally," I say, "there's so much shown on the dolorous show, going back mostly to a bottomless pit."

Ray: "I've come, I think, to fill it in."