Exit, Stage Right

Imagine a space, with the essential stillness of a late night.

An enormous space — an immeasurable volume of air contained in… what? It might have been a cavern, the hollow at the center of the earth, around which the whole human world spun, unawares. It might have been an airship hangar, a dim shell so hugely empty that the imagination boggled at thoughts of what could fill it. It might have been a vacant cathedral, scoured of every frill and decoration, emptied of statuary, chapels, stained glass, and wonder. It might have been the belly of that whale Jonah lived in. There was space for an army of Old Testament prophets to rattle around and never even see each other.

It might have been anything– any space dim and undefined, shadowy in its recesses, unclear as to its identity or use or intent, blank as to its history.

It was the stage of the Extravaganza! Theater.

Airships could have docked there– they had done so, or appeared to, in Extravaganza! I, in the third number, a period piece culminating with the Hindenburg disaster. It could have been an underground kingdom, a huge, primordial space hosting troglodytes in heavy armor plotting the overthrow of those who lived above– that number had not been staged, yet, but it had been considered for Extravaganza! II. The space might have hosted a displaced Mount Sinai– Biblical epics were once quite popular in Vegas production shows, the Old Testament being so handily replete with spectacle, disaster, and opportunities for toplessness.

It might have been anything. It might have been anywhere. At the moment, hours after the show, with the atmosphere so still that the air, like the sets and costumes, seemed to have been put away, out of reach, made unavailable till it was needed again for tomorrow’s first show, the stage was Nowhere in a very official sense. It was a blank palette, it was a generic empty room waiting for furniture. It was Nothing, Nowhere, No Man’s Land.

In spite of all the emptiness, moving through the space– simply walking across the stage, for instance– was difficult. All that absence didn’t welcome movement. The stage was a place outside of time, Nowhen as much as Nowhere. The silence swallowed sound, sucked it up into the highest corners of the roof, which was so far above that its very presence, not to mention its location, could only be surmised, not observed. The ceiling was hidden, anyway, by drapes that might have been older than the whole city, by bits of hanging setpieces no one recognized or had ever used. A theater takes on history, from the first moment it’s built. Even the newest theaters have legends, myths swirling through them, ghosts and tommyknockers. When the shows are over and the casts and audiences go home, done with their mutual masturbation for another night, those spirits are all that’s left to peer down at the cleared floor. They don’t move, they don’t disturb the air. They are part of the stillness, the timelessness. But they watch.

Rachel and Testy had walked in through the audience, past the lines of booths known in the business as Queen’s Row (for good tippers) and King’s Row (for V.I.P.s) and into the Pit, where long cocktail tables jutted out from the stage, and chairs crowded in between them. There were more chairs than could really fit, more places to sit than there was room at the skinny tables. The Pit was the low-rent district, steerage for those who had neither the budget nor the sense to pay for a booth higher up. The Pit was for voyeurs, the men who dreamed of catching a droplet of sweat from a beautiful girl’s spinning torso, the bachelor parties, the trashy gawkers.

Rachel and Testy stopped in the Pit and stood with their eyes on a level with the stage. Their breathing was muffled by the quilt of heavy air around them. Testy thought they might as well have been mummified, for all the sound they made, for all the movement that felt possible.

“Are you going to go up?” she asked Rachel. The words wanted to hang back, hiding inside her lips like scared children facing the bus on their first day of school. The theater air was full of bullies who would hold them down and pound on them and steal their lunch money.

“I don’t know,” the showgirl murmured. Testy wasn’t sure, herself, whether she heard the words or whether she read Rachel’s lips. The meaning was clear, though.

“Go on,” she pushed.

Rachel took a step forward. To call it “hesitant” would have been generous. It might not even have been a step, really. She might have stumbled, fallen as she stood perfectly still there, and just caught herself. She might have merely readjusted her stance. But she moved half her body weight one foot closer to the stage, so Testy counted it as an intentional step. A hesitant one.

“Go on,” Testy repeated.

Rachel took a breath. Testy could hear her, even through the wads of cotton that the theater atmosphere had balled up and stuffed into her ears. That breath was significant, was singular. Every breath in here felt like an effort, like breathing in that cotton, like breathing through water to get to the air on the other side. But Rachel’s breath was more than that. She was breathing in her past, her history, her thoughts about her future, her misgivings, and her choices.

They were heavy, those inhalations. They were thick.

Somewhere behind them, outside the theater and down the short corridor that provided its anteroom, where lines of gaudily-framed photos displayed girls and feathers and the wonders to be found inside, the sounds of the casino rang. The Grand Hotel casino sang and roared and belched, the world’s largest, most self-satisfied calliope screaming out its entire repertoire at once, demanding every ounce of everyone’s attention. Rachel and Testy, shielded by a small distance and a pair of heavy, carved doors, not to mention a gulf in era, in style, ignored the cacophony, could barely hear it even if they strained. They stood enveloped by the muffling cotton air inside the doors, wrapped and embraced by the dull silence of the world’s largest vacant stage.

“If I go up on stage,” she said to Testy, “then I have to come down. And if I come down,” Rachel said, “I know I’m never going to get to go back up again.”

Testy had been talking to her for the last three days. She’d been talking endlessly, it seemed to Rachel, over dinner in between shows, and over beers after second show, and on the phone between those times, during the day, which was extremely unusual, since Testy Lesbiana almost never phoned anyone at all, declaring that if her own grand presence couldn’t be present, the voice alone was just a waste. And what Testy had suggested to Rachel, over and over, was that the time had come to leave Extrav! Extrav! didn’t love Rachel, Testy reminded her, and it would, through the person of Honoré, cheerily dump her at its first chance, which was coming up quickly at contract change.

Testy had told Rachel she was leaving, leaving now, before the contract ended, heading out on a personal mission that she’d share, if Rachel wanted. She would take the showgirl with her, if Rachel would make the break and go. She should want to go, Testy had told her, over dinner and over beer and over the phone between those times. She should make her break now from the tits and feathers wonderland while the getting was good. She should leave on her terms, not Honoré’s, and disappear into the night. That way, she’d be a legend: The Great Showgirl Who Disappeared. Testy believed in legends, and she told Rachel this was her best and maybe only chance to be one.

“Do it, hon,” she urged. “Come with me. Don’t condemn your Aunty Testy to the wilds of Middle America all by herself!”

So Testy Lesbiana had brought Rachel Ferguson, who’d dreamed of dancing topless on the stage since she was twelve, and had achieved that dream at nineteen, and plumbed its depths for the next eighteen years, back to the Extrav! audience, at the very foot of the stage, to face the place whence had issued her own siren’s song, the boards and air that comprised her own personal Holy Grail. The two of them stood there and looked up at the stage’s blank, flattened-out, eerily empty and immeasurable stretches, and felt the air muffling their ears, and thought of the flash and dazzle they were used to seeing there. And Rachel sighed, as a way of breaking the silence– which refused to break, but did bend for her, this one time, generously, because the theater perhaps recognized one of its own or felt her bittersweet mood, and relaxed enough to allow her to push it over with her sigh.

“It’s not as if this is even that great a show,” she said. “It’s so stupid–” she was taking her first steps through the mob of chairs jumbled between the narrow tables. There were stairs that led onto the stage, that were used every night by the comedian who did the first act when he came out to the audience and asked the people questions. The stairs were used again by the magician, in the final act, when he ran halfway down to release a flock of doves– a whole flock, dozens of them, swirling and flapping right over the heads of the audience, appearing out of nowhere practically in their faces. It was shocking, like a scene from Hitchcock, and it always got lots of applause. Before the advent of the comedian, there’d been no stairs and the magician had simply stood at center stage and let his doves go. The audience had oohed, usually, but they’d never clapped. Those stairs had made the magician famous.

Rachel took a step up, and then paused to look around again. “I mean, Space Cowgirls,” she said, “How dumb is that? And that pas de deux? That’s not really dancing– it’s so ugly, and we stick our butts out at the audience. In g-strings!” She climbed up two more steps. “Big Bows is just walking. The only thing that even pretends to be a dance number is Hot Streak, at the end of the Opening. And then we’re wearing all those big, red feathers– the audience can’t see anything, and the girls who do it on the stairs can’t really dance, anyway. There’s no room.” She stepped up the rest of the way and stood on the wooden floor– on the boards, as they say. “I was so excited when I got moved down to the floor in that number. I thought, ‘Now I’m going to get to really dance!’ But with all those feathers, and the heels, and the whole cast on stage at once–” she shrugged, “It’s useless. Have you ever looked out from here, Testy?”

Testy Lesbiana said nothing, but clumped up the eight stairs to join her. She, too, turned and looked out at the audience.

“What are you seeing?” she asked.

“I don’t know. There’s just so many tables. I mean, look way back there–” she pointed to one far back corner of the room, “that table way back there. It’s up almost as high as the top of the curtain. And it’s miles back. How can they see us? Do the waiters give them binoculars?”

Testy chuckled. “Yes, dear, very tasteful little opera glasses while they sip their Champagne and clap ever-so genteelly after every number. Just like the races at Ascot.”

“I don’t know what that is,” Rachel mumbled. “But they’re a mile away. How did I ever think that any of these people could see me? All they could see was... spectacle,” she shrugged.

“You are a spectacle, hon,” Testy said, then frowned. “That didn’t sound right. But they saw you, I promise you, baby.”

Rachel sighed again. The air, having thinned and leaned down, itself, to hear their conversation, didn’t remember to put up any resistance. “I don’t know, Testy,” the reputedly-spectacular and soon-to-be-legendary Showgirl said. “I feel like maybe I’ve been fooling myself all these years.”

Testy Lesbiana reached her arm around Rachel’s waist and hugged her. “No you weren’t,” she reassured her. “You’re gorgeous, you can dance the shit out of any number any show can throw at you, and you’ve had eighteen years of men drooling at you all over the world to prove it. Now don’t get down on me– just get out with me. You ready?”

Rachel twisted around. She looked away from the audience at the high back wall against which the staircase in Opening was anchored. She looked at the black curtains hanging two floors up, which she had to push aside to make her entrance in Finale Disco on an elevated platform. She looked off, into the wings, where bits and pieces of a spaceship and a turn of the century gazebo and unrecognizable building blocks that turned into that disco and that staircase and a hundred other venues for display and staging purposes, were broken down and stored. She turned full circle. She stared straight up, at the lights like a dulled rainbow hanging overhead. She dropped her eyes to the splintery wooden floor, which all the dancers complained about nightly. She looked out, again, and pictured all the thousands of people who had sat in those seats during her years dancing Extravaganza! and she pictured what she’d looked like to them.

She looked down at Testy.

“I guess I’m ready,” she said. “Let’s go.”

The ghost of Bugsy hung back and watched them from the farthest corner of the showroom. He hadn’t expected Testy to take along a sidekick. As far as he was concerned, she was the sidekick, his and Venus’. He’d thought she understood that, and would just go on her merry way after the big meeting without taking this extra time or making these other arrangements.

Still... it was done now, and he couldn’t foresee any particular problems. So long as she was on her way, dragging a showgirl along shouldn’t make a difference.

Should it? He wasn’t sure what she wanted with Rachel.

But he didn’t care. They’d be out of town by morning, if they followed their plans, and out of his sight for good or ill. He’d have to trust that she’d do her job, bring back her friend as promised, and provide them all with their one chance at beating down that damn god.

His lip curled as he thought of Zem, who wanted to pervert Vegas and all it stood for. But then he shook his head, breaking the shadow that fell from his hat and scattering it in all directions like a dog shaking off water.

He needed Venus to distract him. After they’d... celebrated in the wake of winning Testy Lesbiana, she’d taken to wandering again. Sometimes she was with him, sometimes not. When she was, she looked at him as if he were the only man in the whole world, and that made the other times, when she was gone... much worse. Much, much worse.

He tugged the brim of his fedora lower, and leaned back into the shadows. He didn’t want to go searching for her again. He didn’t want to find her, out with someone else or laughing it up with a whole crowd around her, or chattering to the Sphinx about her latest adventures, or...

He could imagine far too many things she might be doing.

If he had been the real Ben, if he’d been alive and his business associates had been there to see him, they would have shook their heads, clucked their tongues, and said to one another, he’s got it bad. He sneered at the thought.

He looked up to see the two figures onstage make their exit. The short, round one had her arm around the tall, pretty one’s waist. They disappeared through the stage door. Miles of emptiness made them look tiny, figures seen through the wrong end of a telescope. Then he heard the distant door slam, and the showroom was empty again, and still.

Too still. He separated himself from its dim corner and moved toward the main entrance. There was life out there, and light and fun and people laughing. Just the things he loved. He’d go surround himself with the nighttime life of Vegas, his natural habitat, and maybe he’d see...

Don’t even think about it, he told himself. He couldn’t bring himself to say her as he thought it.

NEXT POST: THE SECOND STORY (Friday 10/2)