Harmony Read online

  He raised open palms to the wall as if communing with its emptiness. And then, his invocation complete, he shifted gears with a grinding sigh and faced the mound of drawings on his worktable. “I suppose that Marin bunch wouldn’t take well to finding their project off the wall so soon…”

  Micah did not want to fill that waiting space. Not yet.

  I understood his reluctance, but in my gut rather than my head. “You might want to find a spot somewhere for Cymbeline.”

  He nodded, then dutifully sorted out the Marin and Cymbeline sketches and retaped them to the right of his drawing board, allowing the wall in front of him to remain bare. Micah regarded it with satisfaction and sat down to work.

  The studio had just got peaceful again when Cris exclaimed from his console, “I don’t believe it.”

  I enlarged the Marin elevation on my desk to do details. “What?”

  “Totally amazing.”

  “What? What?”

  “I stumbled across a mention of some big Tuatuan folk hero the other day and added him to my search list. Not a scrap showed up for two days and now, all of a sudden, here it is, an entire file, all neatly put together like someone collected it for me. Like… magic.” He shook his head, almost a shudder. “I got to have twigged some library call code somewhere.”

  “For a file on a folk hero?”

  “Well, why not?” But Cris was gazing at his screen as if it really were magic. Having never seen actual awe in his eyes before, I barely recognized it. “He’s called Latooea, the Conch, after those big shells that islanders used to call tribal meetings with back when. Supposedly this Conch is invisible, he can be several places at once. He walks through walls and spirits anti-domer prisoners out of jail. He eavesdrops on Planters’ Association meetings and reveals their secret pro-domer strategies.” He looked back at me. “Dynamic, huh?”

  Was he baiting me? I couldn’t tell.

  “Of course, the planters claim the Conch is anti-domer propaganda. But according to the tribes, he always appears in times of crisis, using his magic to protect the ancient ways. Neat, huh?” Cris blinked at me, shook his head, and sank back into communion with his keyboard.

  I leaned toward Jane, hoping to jolly her at least a little. “See? Told you this play has nothing to do with politics.”

  She did not appreciate my irony. And I found my mind straying all morning. Magic Tuatuan revolutionaries, Micah talking politics—I’d never heard him express such vehement dissatisfaction with Harmony before, and undeniably, The Gift had inspired it. I didn’t know what a rich kid’s life in Buenos Aires was like, but if Micah’d grown up in Chicago, he’d be as grateful as I was for the advantages of life under Harmony’s dome. You could say what you liked in Harmony, and do what you liked, and if someone didn’t approve, they could get up in Town Meeting and tell you about it without fear of reprisal. Even then, you were required only to listen, not to come to an agreement. It was what Micah called “the encounter-therapy heart of Harmony.”

  Surely a little smugness was deserved?

  But this Closed Door thing sounded like a lot more than smugness. And why so secret? Constitutional issues had been submitted to open debate in the past. Micah’d once said the best way to defuse a hot issue was to talk it to death. Was that what the Closed Door League was afraid of?

  So here was another thing I neglected to ask Micah about and regretted later. But I did decide to lend a more careful ear to Jane and her dogged paranoia.

  CRISPIN’S RESEARCH: A CONCH STORY

  Sydney Morning Herald, April 23, 1932

  … and finally they allowed me into the hut. The child’s father glowered suspiciously, but as I was under the Headman’s protection, he jerked his head toward the corner where the older siblings sat. I didn’t mind this insult, as the children soon lost their earlier awe of me, co-exile in this inferior space. Other relatives filed in. Soon we were two dozen, packed into a 15 by 20-foot hut, hunkered in the dirt, breathing thick wood smoke and the smell of each other’s fear, for the child, for his awful disease, for what was about to happen.

  We waited fully an hour, in silence but for the fire snapping and the night sounds outside and the boy thrashing and moaning in his fever. The mother sat by his bed of palm fronds and sang to him voicelessly, her lips moving in tireless prayer. One of the younger sisters sagged in sleep against my shoulder. I worried that the boy might die before the ritual began.

  The palm log fire burned yellow and bright against the darkness past the doorway. The flames mesmerized me, all of us, I think, waiting in that closed-packed silence. I made sure not to doze or lose my concentration and with it this extraordinary opportunity to observe the tribal magics. Even so, the creature entered the hut without my notice. I was first aware of her easing around the fire toward the delirious child. I say “she” because the creature moved with such feminine grace and quiet. Otherwise, it bore the stature of a man, tall with lean, muscular limbs stained a peculiar blue with mud and ash mixed so smoothly to seem the skin’s own natural color. It wore a mask of blue bird feathers with white cowrie shells for eyes, sewn in tight concentric rings.

  This strange apparition seated itself and took the boy’s feet into its hands. The silence continued, as if nothing more unusual than another relative had joined the circle. But soon the mother’s chanting became audible, and those around me, even the children, took it up. Latooea, Latooea, they sang softly, over and over in ceaseless incantation. My legs ached horribly, bent under me on the hard-packed floor, but I did not stir. But I must have dozed again. Next I recall, the Headman rose and kicked at the dying ashes of the fire. Birds were singing dawn songs outside the hut, and the little boy slept peacefully in his smiling mother’s arms.

  The blue-skinned apparition was nowhere to be seen, but the relatives, filing out of the hut, one by one paused to touch the sleeping boy’s head in awe and gratitude, each murmuring as he did the name of Latooea.

  THE ARKADIE:

  Micah settled down to work pretty well after the ritual purging of his corner. Once he’d allowed as how he’d gone about his revisions a little too freely and that it wasn’t worth setting the Marin project back another six months, we spent the rest of the morning restoring his weekend spree of damage and disorder.

  “Okay,” Cris called from his console. “I’m clear on the sequencing up to Captain Seraglio breaking into the Sorcerer’s secret library and burning the rune book. But then…”

  “Don’t forget the magic sword,” Songh put in.

  I was glad someone was interested enough in Marin to keep track of the more baroque details.

  “The sword, the sword…” Cris fiddled at the keyboard, peering at the holo miniature on the model stand. “Got the sword. After then I’m lost, when the fire spreads to the royal nursery.” His glance at Micah dared a faint reproach. “We never set the point where you want to switch from live flame to the projection, or which walls you want to be real—”

  “Or for that matter,” replied Micah, “how to prevent some overly involved viewer from reaching into the cradle and rescuing the damn princess.”

  I laughed out loud. It was okay to laugh at Marin. Even Jane was snorting quietly to herself, while Songh pouted in confusion.

  Micah made a grand effort to pay attention, but by noon he was terminally restless. He sharpened his pencil again and again, insisting the machine was jammed and he couldn’t get a point. He complained about his brush and the quality of the paper he was forced to use “nowadays.” It was soon clear that the rest of the Marin restoration would be up to us.

  But that was okay. You always learn more when you have to make a few design decisions on your own, and Marin was the perfect project to school apprentices with, where maturity and subtlety were clearly not required or even desirable. If Songh’s grasp of the CADD system had been better than hopeless, I’d have assigned him to draft Marin. Enchanted princes, love potions. It was just his speed. I decided I’d trust him to take charge of the mo
del, and in that little burst of optimism, I began to think we might actually get Marin done in time for bids.

  But Micah wanted me to go to the Arkadie with him. By twelve-thirty he was waiting in the doorway.

  He’d been inviting me to design meetings lately, ostensibly to take notes on schedule and budget figures, those crucial data directors so often hope to gloss over. But mostly I was along to learn “the process,” that mysterious and touchy method whereby a design is developed and agreed upon.

  I turned off my desk and told Jane to do anything she could to hurry Deo Gratias along.

  We squeaked out just as the first tourists came nosing around the courtyard gate, searching through the beech branches for the nonexistent sign.

  “This is the place,” I assured them, though the real place to visit, if you wanted to understand where the work came from, would be the inside of Micah’s head.

  We edged away through the crowds streaming up from the village and took the Tube four stops to Fetching Green, home of the Arkadie Repertory Theatre. Fetching was larger than BardClyffe, being one of the “cardinal villages,” the four original settlements ranged crosswise around Founders’ Park. The green spaces between had filled in more rapidly than anyone had dreamed, but BardClyffe was one of the last villages to be incorporated and remained, along with Underhill, the least developed.

  The Tube was packed with tourists. Residents no longer used the Tube during Open Hours unless they absolutely could not walk or bike to their destination. But it was a two-mile hike to Fetching, and Micah had never been seen on a bike in his life. Mind you, everyone rode bikes in Harmony. Apprentices passed them down like antique furniture, from generation to generation. But bikes were one Harmonic eccentricity that my boss steadfastly refused to adopt. Probably he wasn’t much good on a bike, and his refusal indicated how highly he valued his personal dignity.

  So highly that we stood pressed like sardines in the narrow, bright-lit car, suffering the one-way conversation of a skin-headed young man visiting from BosDome, where he attended a school which from his account was teaching him everything there was to be known in the universe and beyond. He had seen Micah’s design for Grasses last season at the New Avon on the other side of Town. He had a great deal to say about how marvelous the production was, but you know, he could offer a few ideas for how it could have been done better, no offense of course.

  I looked for the chance, during a convenient lurch, to crush his foot as flat as his nasal twang. But Harmony’s Tube is magnetic. It doesn’t lurch like the Chicago monoel, or clatter madly enough to drown out conversation. And Micah, however much he avoided converse with tourists and strangers, once accosted was unfailingly polite. He even contrived to look placidly entertained, which I thought was carrying civilization just a little too far.

  “What an asshole,” I breathed, when we had been released from our torment at Fetching Station.

  “Just another theatre critic in the making,” replied Micah, stepping heavily onto the escalator.

  At street level, we crossed the broad circular plaza ringed with booksellers’ stalls and picture galleries. Only through great exercise of the will did Micah pass the rare-book dealers by. I would have happily lingered in the galleries. Two-dimensional black-and-white photography was undergoing a major renaissance. Reproductions of old work and new originals were both selling well. During one of our weekend wanders, I spotted an ancient picture postcard of the Wrigley Building in one of these shops. Crispin bargained persuasively enough to be able to buy it for my birthday, even promising to remember the dealer after he became famous. He complained about it afterward, but I knew he’d enjoyed the contest and its victory. He hadn’t gone to all that trouble just for me. Anyway, it was good for him. No matter how much his father leaves him or how famous he becomes, there’ll always be this bit of Crispin’s life when he knew what it meant to have no money.

  The sun always felt hotter to me in Fetching Green, perhaps having something to do with Fetching not being all that green anymore—another vote for BardClyffe’s runaway plant life. The market plaza was paved in alternating circles of bright red and white marble. I couldn’t look at it without thinking of the expense. Heat shimmered above the polished stone, which never seemed to age or crack. Had we been anywhere but Harmony, I’d have wondered if the stone was genuine.

  The august edifice on the far side of this marble ocean was the Arkadie, tall, cylindrical, and white, very much the image of a cultural citadel. The facade was windowless and faced with smooth curved stone. The only detail was in the fluted columns flanking the pedimented entrance, consciously classical in both style and scale, scrupulously weathered as if flown in from the Parthenon itself. The name “Arkadie” was chiseled in block Roman above the door. No gaudy posters, no informational marquee. Nothing. I never could quite decide whether this plainness was the ultimate in taste or presumption.

  In the center of the plaza, a clutch of street cleaners were hard at work scrubbing the already gleaming marble. As we passed, I caught, with a jolt of déjà vu, a glimpse of big red lettering disappearing under their push brooms.

  I slowed. “… lose the… oor?” Not enough to make sense of, but clearly it had read the same as the graffito on the sign in BardClyffe. “Micah, you ever seen graffiti in Harmony before?”

  “Tourists sometimes carve their names on the trees, but that’s about it. Nothing on this scale.” Micah waved to his colleague Max Eider, who waited in the Arkadie’s shadowed entry. Eider carried a fat roll of drawings beneath one arm and a pencil behind one ear. He was frowning darkly over the plaza.

  “Well met, Max!” Micah trudged up the broad steps to join him.

  Eider gestured with his drawings. “Ach, Micah! Look what goes on these days!”

  Micah glanced around inquiringly.

  “Slogans on the stone!” complained Eider heatedly.

  I hung back. Eider scared me, though I hardly knew him. He was a diminutive elderly man of ferocious mien, with an accent, not like Micah’s faint Latin rolling of the vowels, but a real accent, as if he had not been born speaking English as well as his local tongue. He kept his white hair long and combed straight back without a part. His dark suits were worn but always well pressed, and his black eyes could pin you to the wall. It was a surprise to me each time he opened his mouth that fire did not issue forth. In fact, he was usually very soft-spoken, which conspired with the accent to make him often hard to understand.

  “Slogans?” Micah turned back with renewed interest. “What did it say?”

  Eider shrugged, as if text were irrelevant compared to the outrage of defacing the perfect marble. “Howie, he says a piece of street art.”

  Micah laughed expansively. “Very likely. The empty space… the broad and glistening stone… I was often tempted myself in my Young Turk days. We’ve settled in too much, don’t you think? A little street art would do us good. But, Max, how are you? Have you been in there giving Sean the business?”

  I thought Micah let go of his curiosity very easily, but he was so amused and satisfied that I was left wondering what the devil was “street art” and why didn’t I know about something Micah obviously regarded with such fondness.

  The mention of Sean deepened Eider’s frown. He shook his roll of drawings like a fist. “He is very hard to convince, this boy.”

  “But he’s the best, Max. They don’t come better. Did he tell you we’ll be sharing the shop, you and I?”

  “Ja, Micah, but don’t worry—I am already onstage before he must start with you.” The old man wagged his head disapprovingly. “This Howie, he does not think always his schedule so well.”

  “Sean’ll work it out,” Micah assured him. “He bitches and complains, but he always works it out. Is Crossroads a big show?”

  Eider spread his arms until he looked like a frail and angry bird readying for flight. “What is big, Micah, these days? You know we must be always doing more and more each time, or they say, “ ‘Hein, this was
fine but too much like last time.’ ”

  “Oh, I don’t know, Max. Maybe it’s our fault for allowing the bigger-and-bigger syndrome to persist for so long.”

  Eider’s black eyes narrowed as if he suspected a joke. When he saw Micah was serious, he grasped his sleeve and drew him close to murmur so low that I had to sidle up behind to hear. “Watch out with Howie talking these big ideas of no scenery. No one asks the director ever to make do with less. He will go on and do the play as he wants, and only you will be left with egg on your face.”

  Max Eider had survived a long and bumpy career before arriving as a guest artist at the RoundHall some seasons back. His work was so instantly popular that his special application for residency was voted through Town Meeting on its first round. To listen to him, you’d think everything bad that could happen in life and the theatre had happened to him. Who knew? Maybe it had.

  Micah briefly borrowed Eider’s frown. “Howard’s already out telling the world what the show’s going to look like, is he?” He smoothed the folds of his loose white shirt as if brushing away doubt, then smiled. “To tell the truth, Max, I’m looking forward to being less distracted with the technical details of a big production. Howard and I want to create a truly integrated work.”

  Eider nodded, patting Micah’s arm rather gloomily. “Well, you are still young. As for me, I cannot afford these risks.”

  “Nonsense, Max.”

  “No, I am known for what I am known for.”

  Micah’s smile tightened. “Every once in a while, there comes a time—I’m sure you’ve been there, Max—when you can’t afford not to take a certain chance, so that you’ll be able to move on to the rest of your career.” He paused. “So there will be a rest of your career.”