WITH THE ORIGINAL CAST

by Nancy Kress

In the summer of 1998 Gregory Whitten was rehearsing a seventy-fifth-year revival of George Bernard Shaw’s Saint Joan, and Barbara Bishop abruptly called to ask me to fly back from Denver and attend a few rehearsals with her. She was playing Shaw’s magnificent teen-aged fanatic, a role she had not done for twenty years and never on Broadway. Still, it was an extraordinary request; she had never specifically asked for my presence before, and I wound up my business for Gorer-Redding Solar and caught the next shuttle with uncharacteristic hope. At noon I landed in New York and coptered directly to the theater. Barbara met me in the lobby.

“Austin! You came!”

“Did you doubt it?” I kissed her, and she laughed softly.

“It was so splendid of you to drop everything and rush home.”

“Well-I didn’t exactly drop it. Lay it down gently, perhaps.”

“Could Carl spare you? Did you succeed in blocking that coalition, or can they still stop Carl from installing the new Battery?”

“They have one chance in a billion,” I said lightly. Barbara always asks; she manages to sound as interested in Gorer-Redding Solar as in Shakespeare and ESIR, although I don’t suppose she really is. Of late neither am I, although Carl Gorer is my brother and the speculative risks of finance, including Gorer-Redding, is my profession. It was a certain faint boredom with seriously behaved money that had driven me in the first place to take wildcat risks backing legitimate theater. In the beginning Gorer-Redding Solar was itself a wildcat risk: one chance in a hundred that solar energy could be made cheap and plentiful enough to replace the exhausted petrofields. But that was years ago. Now solar prosperity is a reality; speculations lie elsewhere.

“I do appreciate your coming, you know,” Barbara said. She tilted her head to one side, and a curve of shining dark hair, still without gray, slanted across one cheek.

“All appreciation gratefully accepted. Is there something wrong with the play?”

“No, or course not. What could be wrong with Shaw? Oh, Gregory’s a little edgy, but then you know Gregory.”

“Then you called me back solely to marry me.”

“Austin, not again,” she said, without coyness. “Not now.”

“Then something is wrong.”

She pulled a little away from me, shaking her head. “Only the usual new-play nerves.”

“Rue-day nerves.”

“Through-the-day swerves.”

“Your point,” I said. “But, Barbara, you’ve played Joan of Arc before.”

“Twenty years ago,” she said, and I glimpsed the strain on her face a second before it vanished under her publicity-photo smile, luminous and cool as polished crystal. Then the smile disappeared, and she put her cheek next to mine and whispered, “I do thank you for coming. And you look so splendid,” and she was yet another Barbara, the Barbara I saw only in glimpses through her self-contained poise, despite having pursued her for half a year now with my marriage proposals, all gracefully rejected. I, Austin Gorer, who until now had never ever pursued anything very fast or very far. Nor ever had to.

“Nervous, love?”

“Terrified,” she said lightly, the very lightness turning the word into a denial of itself, a delicate stage mockery.

“I don’t believe it.”

“That’s half your charm. You never believe me.”

“Your Joan was a wild success.”

“My God, that was even before ESIR, can you believe it?”

“I believe it.”

“So do I,” she said, laughing, and began to relate anecdotes about casting that play, then this one, jumping between the two with witty, effortless bridges, her famous voice rising and falling with the melodious control that was as much a part of the public’s image of her as the shining helmet of dark hair and the cool grace.

She has never had good press. She is too much of a paradox to reduce easily to tabloid slogans, and the stupider journalists have called her mannered and artificial. She is neither. Eager animation and conscious taste are two qualities the press usually holds to be opposites, patronizing the first and feeling defensive in the presence of the second. But in Barbara Bishop, animation and control have melded into a grace that owes nothing to nature and everything to a civilized respect for willed illusion. When she walks across a stage or through a bedroom, when she speaks Shaw’s words or her own, when she hands Macbeth a dagger or a dinner guest a glass of wine, every movement is both free of artifice and perfectly controlled. Because she will not rage at press conferences, or wail colorfully at lost roles, or wrinkle her nose in professional cuteness, the press has decided that she is cold and lacks spontaneity. But for Barbara, what is spontaneous is control. She was born with it. She’ll always have it.

“—and so now Gregory’s still casting for the crowd scenes. He’s tested what has to be every ESIR actor in New York, and now he’s scraping up fledglings straight out of the hospital. Their scalp scars are barely healed and the ink on their historian’s certificates is still wet. We’re two weeks behind already, and rehearsals have barely begun, would you believe it? He can’t find enough actors with an ESIR in fifteenth-century France, and he’s not willing to go even fifty years off on either side.”

“Then you must have been French in Joan’s time,” I said, “or he wouldn’t have cast you? Even you?”

“Quite right. Even me.” She moved away from me toward the theater doors. Again I sensed in her some unusual strain. An actor is always reluctant to discuss his ESIR with an outsider (bad form), but this was something more.

“As it happens,” Barbara continued, “I was not only French, I was even in Rouen when Joan was burned at the stake in 1431. I didn’t see the burning, and I never laid eyes on her—I was only a barmaid in a country tavern—but, still, it’s rather an interesting coincidence.”

“Yes.”

“One chance in a million,” she said, smiling. “Or, no—what would be the odds, Austin? That’s really your field.”

I didn’t know. It would depend, of course, on just how many people in the world had undergone ESIR. There were very few. Electronically Stimulated Incarnation Recall involves painful, repeated electrochemical jolts through the cortex, through the limbic brain, directly into the R-Complex, containing racial and genetic memory. Biological shields are ripped away; defense mechanisms designed to aid survival by streamlining the vast load of memory are deliberately torn. The long-term effects are not yet known. ESIR is risky, confusing, morally disorienting, painful, and expensive. Most people want nothing to do with it. Those who do are mostly historians, scientists, freaks, mystics, poets—or actors, who must be a little of each. A stage full of players who believe totally that they are in Hamlet’s Denmark or Sir Thomas More’s England or Blanche DuBois’s South because they have been there and feel it in every gesture, every cadence, every authentic cast of mind—such a stage is out of time entirely. It can seduce even a philistine financier. Since ESIR, the glamour of the theater has risen, the number of would-be actors has dropped, and only the history departments of the world’s universities have been so in love with historically authentic style.

“Forget the odds,” I said. “Who hasn’t been cast yet?”

“Well, we need to see,” she said, ticking off roles on her fingers. I recognized the parody instantly. Gregory Whitten himself. Her very face seemed to lengthen into the horse-faced scowl so beloved by Sunday-supplement caricaturists. “‘We must have two royal ladies—no, they must absolutely look royal, royal. And DeStogumber, I need a marvelous DeStogumber! How can anyone expect me to direct without an absolutely wonderful DeStogumber-”

The theater doors opened. “We are ready for you onstage, Miss Bishop.”

“Thank you.” The parody of Whitten had vanished instantly; in this public of one stagehand she was again Barbara Bishop, controlled and cool.

I settled into a seat in the first row, nodding vaguely at the other hangers-on scattered throughout the orchestra and mezzanine. No one nodded back. There was an absurd public fiction that we, who contributed nothing to the play but large sums of money, were like air: necessary but invisible. I didn’t mind. I enjoyed seeing the cast ease into their roles, pulling them up from somewhere inside and mentally shaking each fold around their own gestures and voices and glances. I had not always known how to see that. It had taken me, from such a different set of signals, a long time to notice the tiny adjustments that go, rehearsal by rehearsal, to create the illusion of reality. Perhaps I was slow. But now it seemed to me that I could spot the precise moment when an actor has achieved that precarious balance between his neocortical knowledge of the script and his older, ESIR knowledge of the feel of his character’s epoch, and so is neither himself nor the playwright’s creation but some third, subtler force that transcends both.

Barbara, I could see, had not yet reached that moment.

Whitten, pacing the side of the stage, was directing the early scene in which the seventeen-year-old Joan, a determined peasant, comes to Captain Robert de Baudricourt to demand a horse and armor to lead the French to victory over the English. De Baudricourt was being played by Jason Kellig, a semisuccessful actor whom I had met before and not particularly liked. No one else was onstage, although I had that sensation one always has during a rehearsal of hordes of other people just out of sight in the wings, eyeing the action critically and shushing one another. Moths fluttering nervously just outside the charmed circle of light.

“No, squire!” Barbara said. “God is very merciful, and the blessed saints Catherine and Margaret, who speak to me every day, will intercede for you. You will go to paradise, and your name will be remembered forever as my first helper.”

It was subtly wrong: too poised for the peasant Joan, too graceful. At the same time, an occasional gesture—an outflinging of her elbow, a sour smile—was too brash, and I guessed that these had belonged to the Rouen barmaid in Joan’s ESIR. It was very rough, and I could see Whitten’s famous temper, never long in check, begin to mount.

“No, no, no—Barbara, you’re supposed to be an innocent. Shaw says that Joan answers ‘with muffled sweetness.’ You sound too surly. Absolutely too surly. You must do it again. Jason, cue her.”

“Well, I am damned,” Kellig said.

“No, squire! God is very merciful, and blessed saints Catherine and Margaret, who speak to me every day, will intercede for you. You will go to paradise—”

“Again,” Whitten said.

“Well, I am damned.”

“No, squire! God is very merciful, and the blessed saints Catherine and Margaret, who speak to me every—”

“No! Now you sound like you’re sparring with him! This is not some damned eighteenth-century drawing-room repartee! Joan absolutely means it! The voices are absolutely real to her. You must do it again, Barbara. You must tap into the religious atmosphere of your ESIR. You are not trying! Do it again!”

Barbara bit her lip. I saw Kellig glance from her to Whitten, and I suddenly had the impression—I don’t know why-that they had all been at one another earlier, before I had arrived. Something beyond the usual rehearsal frustration was going on here. Tension, unmistakable as the smell of smoke, rose from the three of them.

“Well, I am damned.”

“No, squire! God is very merciful, and the blessed saints Catherine and Margaret, who speak to me every day, will intercede for you. You will go to paradise, and your name will be remembered forever as my first helper.”

“Again,” Whitten said.

“Well, I am damned.”

“No, squire! God is—”

“Again.”

“Really, Gregory,” Barbara began icily, “how you think you can judge after four words of—”

“I need to hear only one word when it’s as bad as that! And what in absolute hell is that little flick of the wrist supposed to be? Joan is not a discus thrower. She must be—” Whitten stopped dead, staring off-stage.

At first, unsure of why he had cut himself off or turned so red, I thought he was having an attack of some kind. The color in his face was high, almost hectic. But he held himself taut and erect, and then I heard the siren coming closer, landing on the roof, trailing off. It had come from the direction of Larrimer—which was, I suddenly remembered, the only hospital in New York that would do ESIR.

A very young man in a white coat hurried across the stage.

“Mr. Whitten, Dr. Metz says could you come up to the copter right away?”

“What is it? No, don’t hold back, damn it. you absolutely must tell me now! Is it?”

On the young technician’s face professional restraint battled with self-importance. The latter won, helped perhaps by Whitten’s seizing the boy by the shoulders. For a second I actually thought Whitten would shake him.

“It’s her, sir. It really is. We were looking for fifteenth-century ESIR, like you said, and we tried the neos for upper class for the ladies in waiting, and all we were getting were peasants or non-Europeans or early childhood deaths, and then Dr. Metz asked—” He was clearly enjoying this, dragging it out as much as possible. Whitten waited with a patience that surprised me until I realized that he was holding his breath. “-this neo to concentrate on the pictures Dr. Metz would show her of buildings and dresses and bowls and stuff to clear her mind. She looked dazed and in pain like they do, and then she suddenly remembered who she was, and Dr. Metz asked her lots of questions—that’s his period anyway, you know; he’s the foremost American historian on medieval France—and then he said she was.”

Whitten let out his breath, a long, explosive sigh. Kellig leaned forward and said “Was…”

“Joan,” the boy said simply. “Joan of Arc.”

It was as if he had shouted, although of course he had not. But the name hung in the dusty silence of the empty theater, circled and underlined by everything there: the heavy velvet curtains, the dust motes in the air, the waiting strobes, the clouds of mothlike actors, or memories of actors, in the wings. They all existed to lend weight and probability to what had neither. One in a million, one in a billion.

“Is Dr. Metz sure?” Whitten demanded. He looked suddenly violent, capable of disassembling the technician if the historian were not sure.

“He’s sure!”

“Where is she? In the copter?”

“Yes.”

“Have Dr. Metz bring her down here. No, I’ll go up there. No, bring her here. Is she still weak?”

“Yes, sir,” the boy said.

“Well, go! I told Dr. Metz I wanted her here as soon as he absolutely was sure!”

The boy went.

So Whitten had been informed of the possibility earlier. I looked at Barbara, suddenly understanding the tension on stage. She stood smiling, her chin raised a little, her body very straight, her chin raised a little, her body very straight. She looked pale. Some trick of lighting, some motionless tautness in her shoulders, made me think for an instant that she was going to faint, but of course she did not. She behaved exactly as I knew she must have been willing herself to, waiting quietly through the interminable time until Joan of Arc should appear. Whitten fidgeted; Kellig lounged, his eyelids lowered halfway. Neither of them looked at Barbara.

The technician and the historian walked out onto the stage, each with a hand under either elbow of a young girl whose head was bandaged. Even now I feel a little ashamed when I remember rising halfway in my seat, as for an exalted presence. But the girl was not an exalted presence, was not Joan of Arc; she was an awkward, skinny plain-faced girl who had once been Joan of Arc and now wanted to be an extra in the background of a seventy-five-year-old play. No one else seemed to be remembering the distinction.

“You were Joan of Arc?” Whitten asked. He sounded curiously formal, as out of character as the girl.

“Yes, I… I remember Joan. Being Joan.” The girl frowned, and I thought I knew why: She was wondering why she didn’t feel like Joan. But ESIR, Barbara has told me, doesn’t work like that. Other lives are like remembering someone you have known, not like experiencing the flesh and bone of this one—unless this one is psychotic. Otherwise, it usually takes time and effort to draw on the memory of a previous incarnation, and this child had been Joan of Arc only for a few days. Suddenly I felt very sorry for her.

“What’s your first name?” Whitten said.

“Ann. Ann Jasmine.”

Whitten winced. “A stage name?”

“Yes. Isn’t it pretty?”

“You must absolutely use your real name. What acting have you done?”

The girl shifted her weight, spreading her feet slightly apart and starting to count off on her fingers. Her voice was stronger now and cockier. “Well, let’s just see: In high school I played Portia in The Merchant of Venice, and in the Country-Time Players—that’s community theater—I was Goat’s Sister in The Robber Bridegroom and Aria in Moondust. And then I came to New York, and I’ve done— oh, small stuff, mostly. A few commercials.” She smiled at Whitten, then looked past him at Kellig and winked. He stared back at her as if she were a dead fish.

“What,” said Kellig slowly, “is your real name?”

“Does it matter?” The girl’s smile vanished, and she pouted.

“Yes.”

“Ann Friedland,” she said sulkily, and I knew where the “few commercials, mostly” as well as the expensive ESIR audition had come from. Trevor Friedland, of Friedland Computers, was a theater backer for his own amusement, much as I was. He was not, however, a co-backer in this one. Not yet.

At the Friedland name, Kellig whistled, a low, impudent note that made Whitten glance at him in annoyance. Barbara still had not moved. She watched them intently.

“Forget your name,” Whitten said. “Absolutely forget it. Now I know this play is new to you, but you must read for me. Just read cold; don’t be nervous. Take my script and start there. No—there. Jason, cue her.”

“You want me to read Joan? The part of Joan?” the girl said. All her assumed sophistication was gone; her face was as alive as a seven-year-old’s at Christmas, and I looked away, not wanting to like her.

“Oh, really, Greg,” Kellig said. Whitten ignored him.

“Just look over Shaw’s description there, and then start. I know you’re cold. Just start.”

“Good morning, captain squire,” she began shakily, but stopped when Barbara crossed the stage to sit on a bench near the wings. She was still smiling, a small frozen smile. Ann glanced at her nervously, then began over.

“Good morning, captain squire. Captain, you are to give me a horse…” Again she stopped. A puzzled look came over her face; she skimmed a few pages and then closed her eyes. Immediately I thought of the real Joan, listening to voices. But this was the real Joan. For a moment the stage seemed to float in front of me, a meaningless collection of lines and angles.

“It wasn’t like that,” Ann Friedland said slowly.

“Like what?” Whitten said. “What wasn’t like what?”

“Joan. Me. She didn’t charge in like that at all to ask de Baudricourt for horse and armor. It wasn’t at all… she was more… Insane, I think. What he has written here, Shaw…” She looked at each of us in turn, frowning. No one moved. I don’t know how long we stayed that way, staring at the thin girl onstage.

“Saint Catherine,” she said finally. “Saint Margaret.” Her slight figure jerked as if shocked, and she threw back her head and howled like a dog. “But Orleans was not even my idea! The commander, my father, the commander, my father… oh, my God, my dear God, he made her do it, he told me—they all promised—”

She stumbled, nearly falling to her knees. The historian leaped forward and caught her. I don’t think any of us could have borne it if that pitiful, demented figure had knelt and begun to pray.

The next moment, however, though visibly fighting to control herself, she knew where—and who—she was.

“Doctor, don’t, I’m all right now. It’s not—I’m all right. Mr. Whitten, I’m sorry, let me start the scene over!”

“No, don’t start the scene over. Tell me what you were going to say. Where is Shaw wrong? What happened? Try to feel it again.”

Ann’s eyes held Whitten’s. They were beyond all of us, already negotiating with every inflection of every word.

“I don’t have to feel it again. I remember what happened. That wave of… I won’t do that again. It was just when it all came rushing back. But now I remember it, I have it, I can control it. It didn’t happen like Shaw’s play. She—I—was used. She did hear voices, she was mad, but the whole idea to use her to persuade the Dauphin to fight against the English didn’t come from the voices. The priests insisted on what they said the voices meant, and the commander made her a sort of mascot to get the soldiers to kill… I was used. A victim.” A complicated expression passed over her face, perhaps the most extraordinary expression I have ever seen on a face so young: regret and shame and loss and an angry, wondering despair for events long beyond the possibility of change. Then the expression vanished, and she was wholly a young woman coolly engaged in the bargaining of history.

“I know it all, Mr. Whitten—all that really happened. And it happened to me. The real Joan of Arc.”

“Cosgriff,” Whitten said, and I saw Kellig start. Lawrence Cosgriff had won the Pulitzer Prize for drama the last two years in a row. He wrote powerful, despairing plays about the loss of individual morality in an institutionalized world.

“My dear Gregory,” Kellig said, “one does not simply commission Lawrence Cosgriff to write one a play. He’s not some hack you can—”

Whitten looked at him, and he was quiet. I understood why; Whitten was on fire, as exalted with his daring idea as the original Joan must have been with hers. But no, of course, she hadn’t been exalted, that was the whole point. She had been a dupe, not a heroine. Young Miss Friedland, fighting for her name in lights, most certainly considered Joan the Heroine to be an expendable casualty. One of the expendable casualties. I stood up and began to make my way to the stage.

“I’m the real thing,” Ann said. “The real thing. I’ll play Joan, of course.”

“Of course,” Kellig drawled. He was already looking at her with dislike, and I could see what their rehearsals would be: the chance upstart and the bit player who had paid largely fruitless dues for twenty years. The commander and the Dauphin would still be the male leads; Kellig’s part could only grow smaller under Ann’s real thing.

“I’ll play Joan,” she said again, a little more loudly.

Whitten, flushed with his vision, stopped his ecstatic pacing and scowled. “Of course you must play Joan!”

“Oh,” Ann said, “I was afraid—”

“Afraid? What is this? You are Joan.”

“Yes,” she said slowly, “yes, I am.” She frowned, sincerely, and then a second later replaced the frown with a smile all calculation and relief. “Yes, of course I am!”

“Then I’ll absolutely reach Cosgriff’s agent today. He’ll jump at it. You will need to work with him, of course. We can open in six months, with any luck. You do live in town? Cosgriff can tape you. No, someone else can do that before he even—Austin!”

“You’re forgetting something, aren’t you, Gregory, in this sudden great vision? You have a contract to do Shaw.”

“Of course I’m not forgetting the contract. But you absolutely must want to continue, for this new play… Cosgriff…” He stopped, and I knew the jumble of things that must be in his mind: deadlines, backing (Friedland Computers!), contracts, schedules, the percentage of my commitment, and, belatedly, Barbara.

She still sat on the bench at stage left, half in shadow. Her back was very straight, her chin high, but in the subdued light her face with its faint smile looked older, not haggard but set, inelastic. I walked over to her and turned to face Whitten.

“I will not back this new play, even if you do get Cosgriff to write it. Which I rather doubt. Shaw’s drama is an artistic masterpiece. What you are planning is a trendy exploitation of some flashy technology. Look elsewhere for your money.”

Silence. Whitten began to turn red, Kellig snickered—at whom was not clear. In the silence the historian, Dr. Metz, began timidly, “I’m sure Miss Friedland’s information would be welcomed warmly by any academic—”

The girl cried loudly, “But I’m the real thing!” and she started to sob.

Barbara had risen to take my arm. Now she dropped it and walked over to Ann. Her voice was steady. “I know you are. And I wish you all luck as an actress. It’s a brilliant opportunity, and I’m sure you’ll do splendidly with it.”

They faced each other, the sniveling girl who had at least the grace to look embarrassed and the smiling, humiliated woman. It was a public performance, of course, an illusion that all Barbara felt was a selfless, graceful warmth, but it was also more than that. It was as gallant an act of style as I have ever seen.

Ann muttered “Thank you” and flushed a mottled maroon. Barbara took my arm, and we walked down the side aisle and out of the theater. She walked carefully, choosing her steps, her head high and lips together and solemn, like a woman on her way to a public burning.

I wish I could say that my quixotic gesture had an immediate and disastrous effect on Whitten’s plans, that he came to his artistic senses—and went back to Shaw’s Saint Joan. But of course he did no such thing. Other financial backing than mine proved to be readily available. Contracts were rewritten, agents placated, lawsuits avoided. Cosgriff did indeed consent to write the script, and Variety became distressingly eager to report any tidbit connected with what was being billed as JOAN OF ARC: WITH THE ORIGINAL CAST! It was a dull theater season in New York. Nothing currently running gripped the public imagination like this as-yet-unwritten play. Whitten, adroitly fanning the flames, gave out very few factual details.

Barbara remained silent on the whole subject. Business was keeping me away from New York a great deal. Gorer-Redding Solar was installing a new plant in Bogotá, and I would spend whole weeks trying to untangle the lush foliage of bribes, kickbacks, nepotism, pride, religion, and mañana that is business in South America. But whenever I was in New York, I spent time with Barbara. She would not discuss Whitten’s play, warning me away from the subject with the tactful withdrawal of an estate owner discouraging trespassing without hurting local feelings. I admired her tact and her refusal to whine, but at the same time I felt vaguely impatient. She was keeping me at arm’s length. She was doing it beautifully, but arm’s length was not where I wanted to be.

I do not assume that intimacy must be based on a mutual display of sores. I applaud the public illusion of control and well-being as a civilized achievement. However, I knew Barbara well enough to know that under her illusion of well-being she must be hurt and a little afraid. No decent scripts had been offered her, and the columnists had not been kind over the loss of Saint Joan. Barbara had been too aloof, too self-possessed for them to show any compassion now. Press sympathy for a humiliated celebrity is in direct proportion to the anguished copy previously supplied.

Then one hot night in August I arrived at Barbara’s apartment for dinner. Lying on a hall table was a script:

A MAID OF DOMREMY

by

Lawrence Cosgriff

Incredulous, I picked it up and leafed through it. When I looked up, Barbara was standing in the doorway, holding two goblets of wine.

“Hello, Austin. Did you have a good flight?”

“Barbara Bogotá what is this?” I asked, stupidly.

She crossed the hall and handed me one of the goblets.

“It’s Lawrence’s play about Joan of Arc.”

“I see that. But what is it doing here?”

She didn’t answer me immediately. She looked beautiful, every illusion seeming completely natural: the straight, heavy silk of her artfully cut gown, the flawless makeup, the hair cut in precise lines to curve over one cheek. Without warning, I was irritated by all of it. Illusions. Arm’s length.

“Austin, why don’t you reconsider backing Gregory’s play?”

“Why on earth should I?”

“Because you really could make quite a lot of money on it.”

“I could make quite a lot of money backing auto gladiators. I don’t do that, either.”

She smiled, acknowledging the thrust. I still did not know how the conversation had become a duel.

“Are you hungry? There are canapés in the living room. Dinner won’t be ready for a while yet.”

“I’m not hungry. Barbara, why do you want me to back Whitten’s play?”

“I don’t want you to, if you don’t wish to. Come in and sit down. I’m hungry. I only thought you might want to back the play. It’s splendid.” She looked at me steadily over the rim of her goblet. “It’s the best new script I’ve seen in years. It’s subtle, complex, moving Bogotá much better even than his last two. It’s going to replace Shaw’s play as the best we have about Joan. And on the subject of victimization by a world the main character doesn’t understand, it’s better than Streetcar or Joy Ride. A hundred years from now this play will still be performed regularly, and well.”

“It’s not like you to be so extravagant with your praise.”

“No, it’s not.”

“And you want me to finance the play for the reflected glory?”

“For the satisfaction. And,” she added quietly, but firmly, “because I’ve accepted a bit part in it.”

I stared at her. Last week a major columnist had headlined: FALLEN STAR LANDS ON HER PRIDE.

“It’s a very small role. Yolande of Aragon, the Dauphin’s mother-in-law. She intrigued on the Dauphin’s behalf when he was struggling to be crowned. I have only one scene, but it has possibilities.”

“For you? What does it have possibilities of —being smirked at by that little schemer in your role? Did you read how much her agent is holding Whitten up for? No wonder he could use more backers.”

“You would get it back. But that’s not the question, Austin, is it? Why do you object to my taking this part? It’s not like you to object to my choice of roles.”

“I’m upset because I don’t want you to be hurt, and I think you are. I think you’ll be hurt even more if you play this Yolande with Miss Ann Friedland as Joan, and I don’t want to see it, because I love you.”

“I know you do, Austin.” She smiled warmly and touched my cheek. It was a perfect Barbara Bishop gesture: sincere, graceful, and complete in itself—so complete that it promised nothing more than what it was, led on to nothing else. It cut off communication as effectively as a blow—or, rather, more effectively, since a blow can be answered in kind. I slammed my glass on the table and stood up. Once up, however, I had nothing to say and so stood there feeling ridiculous. What did I want to say? What did I want from her that I did not already have?

“I wish,” I said slowly, “that you were not always acting.”

She looked at me steadily. I knew the look. She was waiting: for retraction or amendment or amplification. And of course she was right to expect any, or all, of those things. What I had said was inaccurate. She was not acting. What she did was something subtly different. She behaved with the gestures and attitudes and behaviors of the world as she believed it ought to be, a place of generous and rational individuals with enough sheer style to create events in their own image. That people’s behavior was in fact often uncivilized, cowardly, and petty she of course knew; she was not stupid. Hers was a deliberate, controlled choice: to ignore the pettiness and to grant to all of us — actors, audience, press, Whitten, Ann Friedland, me, herself — the illusion of having the most admirable motives conceivable.

It seemed to me that this was praiseworthy, even “civilized,” in the best sense of that much-abused word.

Why, then, did it make me feel so lonely?

Barbara was still waiting. “Forgive me; I misspoke. I don’t mean that you are always acting. I mean — I mean that I’m concerned for you. Standing for a curtain call at the back of the stage while that girl, that chance reincarnation…” Suddenly a new idea occurred to me. “Or do you think that she won’t be able to do the part and you will be asked to take over for her?”

“No!”

“But if Ann Friedland can’t —”

“No! I will never play Joan in A Maid of Domrémy!”

“Why not?”

She finished her wine. Under the expensive gown her breasts heaved. “I had no business even taking the part in Shaw’s Joan. I am forty-five years old, and Joan is seventeen. But at least there — at least Shaw’s Joan was not really a victim. I will not play her as a pitiful victim.”

“Come on, Barbara. You’ve played Blanche DuBois, and Ophelia, and Jessie Kane. They’re all victims.”

“I won’t play Joan in A Maid of Domrémy!”

I saw that she meant it, that even while she admired the play, she was repelled by it in some fundamental way I did not understand. I sat down again on the sofa and put my arms around her. Instantly she was Barbara Bishop again, smiling with rueful mockery at both her own violence and my melodrama, drawing us together in a covenant too generous for quarreling.

“Look at us, Austin — actually discussing that tired old cliché, the understudy who goes on for the fading star. But I’m not her understudy, and she can hardly fade before she’s even bloomed! Really, we’re too ridiculous. I’m sorry, love, I didn’t mean to snap at you like that. Shall we have dinner now?”

I stood up and pulled her next to me. She came gracefully, still smiling, the light sliding over her dark hair, and followed me to her bedroom. The sex was very good, as it always was. But afterward, lying with her head warm on my shoulder, I was still baffled by something in her I could not understand. Was it because of ESIR? I had thought that before. What was it like to have knowledge of those hundreds of other lives you had once lived? I would never know. Were the exotic types I met in the theater so different, so less easily understood, because they had “creative temperament” (whatever that was) or because of ESIR? I would probably never know that, either, nor how much of Barbara was what she was here, now, and how much was subtle reaction to all the other things she knew she had been. I wasn’t sure I wanted to know.

Long after Barbara fell asleep, I lay awake in the soft darkness, listening to the night sounds of New York beyond the window and to something else beyond those, some large silence where my own ESIR memories might have been.

Whitten banned everyone but actors and tech crew from rehearsals of A Maid of Domrémy: press, relatives, backers, irate friends. Only because the play had seized the imagination of the public-or at least that small portion of the public that goes to the theater — could his move succeed. The financial angels went along cheerfully with their own banning, secure in the presale ticket figures that the play would make money even without their personal supervision.

Another director, casting for a production of Hamlet, suddenly claimed to have discovered the reincarnation of Shakespeare. For a week Broadway was a laser of rumors and speculations. Then the credentials of the two historians verifying the ESIR were discovered by a gleeful press to have been faked. The director, producer, historians, and ersatz Shakespeare were instantly unavailable for comment.

The central computer of the AMA was tapped into. For two days executives with private face-lifts and politicians with private accident records and teachers with private drug-abuse histories held their collective breaths, cursing softly under them. The AMA issued a statement that only ESIR records had been pirated, and the scandal was generally forgotten in the central part of, the country and generally intensified on both coasts. Wild reports were issued, contradicted, confirmed, and disproved, all in a few hours. An actor who remembered being King Arthur had been discovered and was going to star in the true story of the Round Table. Euripides was living in Boston and would appear there in his own play Medea. The computer verified that ESIR actually had uncovered Helen of Troy, and the press stampeded out to Bowling Green, Ohio, where it was discovered that the person who remembered being Helen of Troy was a male, bald, sixty-eight-year-old professor emeritus in the history department. He was writing a massive scholarly study of the Trojan War, and he bitterly resented the “cheap publicity of the popular press.”

“The whole thing is becoming a circus,” Barbara grumbled. Her shirt was loose at the breasts, and her pants gaped at the waist. She had lost weight and color.

“And this, too, shall pass,” I told her. “Think of when ESIR was first introduced. A few years of wild quakes all over society, and then everyone adjusted. This is just the aftershock on the theater.”

“I don’t especially like standing directly on the fault line.”

“How are rehearsals going?”

“About the same,” she said, her eyes hooded. Since she never spoke of the play at all, I didn’t know what “about the same” would be the same as.

“Barbara, what are you waiting for?”

“Waiting for?”

“Constantly now you have that look of waiting, frowning to yourself, looking as if you’re scrutinizing something. Something only you can see.”

“Austin, how ridiculous! What I’m looking at is all too public: opening night for the play.”

“And what do you see?”

She was silent for a long time. “I don’t know.” She laughed, an abrupt, opaque sound like the sudden drawing of a curtain. “It’s silly, isn’t it? Not knowing what I don’t know. A tautology, almost.”

“Barbara, marry me. We’ll go away for a weekend and get married, like two children. This weekend.”

“I thought you had to fly back to Bogotá this weekend.”

“I do. But you could come with me. There is a world outside New York, you know. It isn’t simply all one vast out-of-town tryout.”

“I do thank you, Austin, you know that. But I can’t leave right now; I do have to work on my part. There are still things I don’t trust.”

“Such as what?”

“Me,” she said lightly, and would say no more.

Meanwhile the hoopla went on. A professor of history at Berkeley who had just finished a — now probably erroneous — dissertation on Joan of Arc tried various legal ploys to sue Ann Friedland on the grounds that she “undercut his means of livelihood.” A group called the Catholic Coalition to Clear the Inquisition published in four major newspapers an appeal to Ann Friedland to come forward and declare the fairness of the church at Joan of Arc’s heresy trial. Each of the ads cost a fantastic sum. But Ann did not reply; she was preserving to the press a silence as complete as Barbara’s to me. I think this is why I didn’t press Barbara more closely about her rehearsals. I wanted to appear as different from the rest of the world as possible — an analogy probably now one made except me. Men in love are ludicrous.

Interest in Ann Friedland was not dispelled by her silence. People merely claiming to be a notable figure from the past was growing stale. For years people had been claiming to be Jesus Christ or Muhammad or Judas; all had been disproved, and the glamour, evaporated. But now a famous name had not only been verified, it was going to be showcased in an enterprise that carried the risk of losing huge sums of money; several professional reputations, and months of secret work. The public was delighted. Ann Friedland quickly became a household name.

She was going to marry the widowed King Charles of England. She was going to lead a revival of Catholicism and was being considered for the position of first female pope. She was a drug addict, a Mormon, pregnant, mad, in love, clairvoyant, ten years old, extraterrestrial. She was refusing to go on opening night. Gregory Whitten was going to let her improvise the part opening night. Rehearsals were a disaster, and Barbara Bishop would play the part opening night.

Not even to this last did Barbara offer a comment. Also silent were the reputable papers, the serious theater critics, the men and women who control the money that controls Broadway. They, too, were waiting.

We all waited.

The week that A Maid of Domrémy was to open in New York I was still in Bogotá. I had come down with a low-grade fever, which in the press of work I chose to ignore. By Saturday I had a temperature of one hundred four degrees and a headache no medication could touch. I saw everything through slow, pastel-colored swirls. My arms and legs felt lit with a dry, papery fire that danced up and down from shoulder to wrist, ankle to hip, up and down, wrist to shoulder. I knew I should go to a hospital, but I did not. The opening was that night.

On the plane to New York I slept, dreaming of Barbara in the middle of a vast solar battery. I circled the outside, calling to her desperately. Unaware, she sat reading a script amid the circuits and storage cells, until the fires of the sun burst out all around her and people she had known from other lives danced maniacally in the flames.

At my apartment I took more pills and a cold shower, then tried to phone Barbara. She had already left for makeup call. I dressed and caught a copter to the theater, sleeping fitfully on the short trip, and then I was in the theater, surrounded by firstnighters who did not know I was breathing contagion on all of them, and who floated around me like pale cutouts in diamonds, furs, and nauseating perfume. I could not remember walking from the copter, producing my ticket, or being escorted to my seat. The curtain swirled sickeningly, and I closed my eyes until I realized that it was not my fever that caused the swirls: The curtain was rising. Had the house lights dimmed? I couldn’t remember anything. Dry fire danced over me, shoulder to wrist, ankle to hip.

Barbara, cloaked, entered stage left. I had not realized that her scene opened the play. She carried a massive candle across the stage, bent over a wooden table, and lit two more candles from the large one, all with the taut, economical movements of great anger held fiercely in check. Before the audience heard her speak, before they clearly saw her face, they had been told that Yolande was furious, not used to being so, and fully capable of controlling her own anger.

“Mary! Where are you sulking now, Mary?” Barbara said. She straightened and drew back her hood. Her voice was low, yet every woman named Mary in the audience started guiltily. Onstage Mary of Anjou, consort of the uncrowned Dauphin of France, crept sullenly from behind a tapestry, facing her mother like a whipped dog.

“Here I am, for all the good it will do you, or anyone,” she whined, looking at her own feet. Barbara’s motionless silence was eloquent with contempt; Mary burst out with her first impassioned monologue against the Dauphin and Joan; the play was launched. It was a strong, smooth beginning, fueled by the conviction of Barbara’s portrait of the terrifying Yolande. As the scene unfolded, the portrait became even stronger, so that I forgot both my feverish limbs and my concern for Barbara. There were no limbs, no Barbara, no theater. There was only a room in fifteenth-century France, sticky with bloody shed for what to us were illusions: absolute good and absolute evil. Cosgriff was exploring the capacities in such illusions for heroism, for degradation, for nobility beyond what the audience’s beliefs, saner and more temperate, could allow. Yolande and Mary and the Dauphin loved and hated and gambled and killed with every fiber of their elemental beings, and not a sound rose from the audience until Barbara delivered her final speech and exited stage right. For a moment the audience sat still, bewildered — not by what had happened onstage, but by the unwelcome remembrance that they were not a part of it, but instead were sitting on narrow hard seats in a wooden box in New York, a foreign country because it was not medieval France. Then the applause started.

The Dauphin and his consort, still onstage, did not break character. He waited until the long applause was over, then continued bullying his wife. Shortly afterward two guards entered, dragging between them the confused, weeping Joan. The audience leaned forward eagerly. They were primed by the wonderful first scene and eager for more miracles.

“Is this the slut?” the Dauphin asked, and Mary, seeing a woman even more abused and wretched than herself, smiled with secret, sticky joy. The guards let Joan go, and she stumbled forward, caught herself, and staggered upward, raising her eyes to the Dauphin’s.

“In the name of Saint Catherine —” She choked and started to weep. It was stormy weeping, vigorous, but without the chilling pain of true hysteria. The audience shuffled a little.

“I will do whatever you want, I swear it in the name of God, if you will only tell me what it is!” On the last word her voice rose; she might have been demanding that a fractious child cease lying to her.

I leaned my head sideways against one shoulder. Waves of fever and nausea beat through me, and for the first time since I had become ill I was aware of labored breathing. My heat beat, skipped, beat twice, skipped. Each breath sounded swampy and rasping. People in the row ahead began to turn and glare. Wadding my handkerchief into a ball, I held it in front of my mouth and tried to watch the play — Lines slipped in and out of my hearing; actors swirled in fiery paper-dry pastels. Once Joan seemed to turn into Barbara, and I gasped and half-rose in my seat, but then the figure onstage was Ann Friedland, and I sat down again to glares from those around me. It was Ann Friedland; I had been a fool to doubt it. It was not Joan of Arc. The girl onstage hesitated, changed tone too often, looked nervously across the footlights, moved a second too late. Once she even stammered.

Around me the audience began to murmur discreetly. Just before the first-act curtain, in a moment of clarity, Joan finally sees how she is being used and makes an inept, wrenchingly pathetic attempt to manipulate the users by manufacturing instructions she says come from her voices. It is a crucial point in the play, throwing into dramatic focus the victim who agrees to her own corruption by a misplaced attempt at control. Ann played it nervously, with an exaggerated grab at pathos that was actually embarrassing. Nothing of that brief glimpse of personal power she had shown at her audition, so many weeks ago, was present now. Between waves of fever, I tried to picture the fit Whitten must be having backstage.

“Christ,” said a man in the row ahead of me, “can you believe that?”

“What an absolute travesty,” said the woman next to him. Her voice hummed with satisfaction. “Poor Lawrence.”

“He was ripe for it. Smug.”

“Oh, yes. Still.”

“Smug,” the man said.

“It doesn’t matter to me what you do with her,” said Mary of Anjou, onstage. “Why should it? Only for a moment she seemed… different. Did you remark it?” Ann Friedland, who had not seemed different, grimaced weakly, and the first-act curtain fell. People were getting to their feet, excited by the magnitude of the disaster. The house lights went up. Just as I stood, the curtains onstage parted and there was some commotion, but the theater leaped in a single nauseous lurch, blinding and hot, and then nothing.

“Austin,” a voice said softly. “Austin.”

My head throbbed, but from a distance, as if it were not my head at all.

“Austin,” the voice said far above me. “Are you there?”

I opened my eyes. Yolande of Aragon, her face framed in a wool hood, gazed down at me and turned into Barbara. She was still in costume and makeup, the heavy, high color garish under too-bright lights. I groaned and closed my eyes.

“Austin. Are you there? Do you know me?”

“Barbara?”

“You are there! Oh, that’s splendid. How do you feel? No, don’t talk. You’ve been delirious, love, you had such a fever… this is the hospital. Larrimer. They’ve given you medication; you’re going to be fine.”

“Barbara.”

“I’m here, Austin, I’m right here.”

I opened my eyes slowly, accustoming them to the light. I lay in a small private room; beyond the window the sky was dark. I was aware that my body hurt, but aware in the detached, abstract way characteristic of EL painkillers, that miracle of modern science. The dose must have been massive. My body felt as if it belonged to someone else, a friend for whom I felt comradely simulations of pain, but not the real thing.

“What do I have?”

“Some tropical bug. What did you drink in Bogotá? The doctor says it could have been dangerous, but they flushed out your whole system and pumped you full of antibiotics, and you’ll be fine. Your fever’s down almost to normal. But you must rest.”

“I don’t want to rest.”

“You don’t have any choice.” She took my hand. The touch felt distant, as if the hand were wrapped in layers of padding.

“What time is it?”

“Five A.M.”

“The play —”

“Is long since over.”

“What happened?”

She bit her lip. “A lot happened. When precisely do you mean? I wasn’t there for the second act, you know. When the ambulance came for you, one of the ushers recognized you and came backstage to tell me. I rode here in the ambulance with you. I didn’t have another scene anyway.”

I was confused. If Barbara had missed the entire last act, how could “a lot have happened”? I looked at her closely, and this time I saw what only the EL’s could have made me miss before: the signs of great, repressed strain. Tendons stood out in Barbara’s neck; under the cracked and sagging makeup her eyes darted around the room. I felt myself suddenly alert, and a fragment of memory poked at me, a fragment half-glimpsed in the hot swirl of the theater just before I blacked out.

“She ran out on the stage.” I said slowly. “Ann Friedland. In front of the curtain. She ran out and yelled something…” It was gone. I shook my head. “On the stage.”

“Yes.” Barbara let go of my hand and began to pace. Her long train dragged behind her; when she turned, it tangled around her legs and she stumbled. The action was so uncharacteristic, it was shocking.

“You saw what the first act was. A catastrophe. She was trying —”

“The whole first act wasn’t bad, love. Your scene was wonderful. Wait — the reviews on your role will be very good.”

“Yes,” she said distractedly. I saw that she had hardly heard me. There was something she had to do, had to say. The best way to help was to let her do it. Words tore from her like a gale.

“She tried to do the whole play reaching back into her ESIR Joan. She tried to just feel it, and let Lawrence’s words — her words — be animated by the remembered feeling. But without the conscious balancing… no, it isn’t even balancing. It’s more like imagining what you already know, and to do that, you have to forget what you know and at the same time remember every tiny nuance… I can’t explain it. Nobody ever really was a major historical figure before, in a play composed of his own words. Gregory was so excited over the concept, and then when rehearsals began… but by that time he was committed, and the terrible hype just bound him further. When Ann ruined the first act like that, he was just beside himself. I’ve never seen him like that. I’ve never seen anybody like that. He was raging, just completely out of control. And onstage Ann was coming apart, and I could see that he was going to completely destroy her, and we had a whole act to go, damn it! A whole fucking act!”

I stared at her. She didn’t notice. She lighted a cigarette; it went out; she flung the match and cigarette on the floor. I could see her hand trembling.

“I knew that if Gregory got at her, she was done. She wouldn’t even go back out after intermission. Of course the play was a flop already, but not to even finish the damn thing… I wasn’t thinking straight. All I could see was that he would destroy her, all of us. So I hit him.”

“You what?”

“I hit him. With Yolande’s candlestick. I took him behind a flat to try to calm him down, and instead I hit him. Without knowing I was going to. Something strange went through me, and I picked up my arm and hit him. Without knowing I was going to!”

She wrapped her arms around herself and shuddered. I saw what had driven her to this unbearable strain. Without knowing I was going to.

“His face became very surprised, and he fell forward. No one saw me. Gregory lay there, breathing as if he were just asleep, and I found a phone and called an ambulance. Then I told the stage manager that Mr. Whitten had had a bad fall and hit his head and was unconscious. I went around to the wings and waited for Ann. When the curtain came down and she saw me waiting for her, she turned white, and then red, and started shouting at me that she was Joan of Arc and I was an aging bitch who wanted to steal her role.”

I tried to picture it — the abusive girl, the appalled, demoralized cast, the director lying hidden, bashed with a candlestick — without knowing I was going to! — and, out front,, the polite chatter, the great gray critics from the Times and the New Yorker, the dressed-up suburbanites from Scarsdale squeezing genially down the aisles for an entr’acte drink and a smoke.

“She went on and on,” Barbara said. “She told me I was the reason she couldn’t play the role, that I deliberately undermined her by standing around like I knew everything, and she knew everybody was expecting me to go on as Joan after she failed. Then suddenly she darted away from me and went through the curtains onto the stage. The house lights were up; half the audience had left. She spread out her arms and yelled at them.”

Barbara stopped and put her hands over her face. I reached up and pulled them away. She looked calmer now, although there was still an underlying tautness in her voice. “Oh, it’s just too ridiculous, Austin. She made an absolute fool of herself, of Lawrence, of all of us, but it wasn’t her fault. She’s an inexperienced child without talent. Gregory should have known better, but his egomania got all tangled up in his ridiculous illusion that he was going to revitalize the theater, take the next historical step for American drama. God, what the papers will say…” She laughed weakly, with pain. “And I was no better, hitting poor Gregory.”

“Barbara…”

“Do you know what Ann yelled at them, at the audience? She stood on that stage, flung her arms wide like some martyr…”

“What did she say? What, love?”

“She said, ‘But I’m the real thing!’”

We were quiet for a moment. From outside the window rose blurred traffic noises: therealthingtherealthingtherealthing.

“You’re right,” I said. “The whole thing was an egomaniacal ride for Whitten, and the press turned it into a carnival. Cosgriff should have known better. The real thing — that’s not what you want in the theater. Illusion, magic, imagination. What should have happened, not what did. Reality doesn’t make good theater.”

“No, you still don’t understand!” Barbara cried. “You’ve missed it all! How can you think that it’s that easy, that Gregory’s mistake was to use Ann’s reality instead of Shaw’s illusion!”

“I don’t understand what you —”

“It’s not that clear!” she cried. “Don’t you think I wish it were? My God!”

I didn’t know what she meant, or why under the cracked makeup her eyes glittered with feverish, exhausted panic. Even as I reached out my arm, completely confused, she was backing away from me.

“Illusion and reality,” she said. “My God. Watch.”

She crossed the room to the door, closed it, and pressed the dimmer on the lights. The room faded to a cool gloom. She stood with her back to me, her head bowed. Then she turned slowly and raised her eyes to a point in the air a head above her.

“In the name of Saint Catherine —” she began, choked, and started to weep. The weeping was terrifying, shot through with that threat of open hysteria that keeps a listener on the edge of panic in case the weeper should lose control entirely, and also keeps him fascinated for the same reason. “I will do whatever you want, I swear it in the name of God, if you will only tell me what it is.” On the last word her voice fell, making the plea into a prayer to her captors, and so the first blasphemy. I caught my breath. Barbara looked young, terrified, pale. How could she look pale when a second ago I had been so conscious of all that garish makeup? There was no chance to wonder. She plunged on, through that scene and the next and all of Joan’s scenes. She went from hysterical fear to inept manipulation to the bruised, stupid hatred of a victim to, finally, a kind of negative dignity that comes not from accomplishment but from the clear-eyed vision of the lack of it, and so she died, Cosgriff’s vision of the best that institutionalized man could hope for. But she was not Cosgriff’s vision; she was a seventeen-year-old girl. Her figure was slight to the point of emaciation. Her face was young — I saw its youth, felt its fragile boniness in the marrow of my own bones. She moved with the gaudy, unpredictable quickness of the mad, now here, now darting a room’s length away, now still with a terrible catatonic stillness that excluded her trapped eyes. Her desperation made me catch my breath, try to look away and fail, feeling that cold grab at my innards: It happened. And it could happen again. It could happen to me.

Her terror gave off a smell, sickly and sour. I wanted to escape the room before that smell could spread to me. I was helpless. Neither she nor I could escape. I did not want to help her, this mad skinny victim. I wanted to destroy her so that what was being done to her would not exist any longer in the world and I would be safe from it. But I could not destroy her. I could only watch, loathing Joan for forcing me to know, until she rose to her brief, sane dignity. In the sight of that dignity, shame that I had ever wanted to smash her washed over me. I was guilty, as guilty as all those others who had wanted to smash her. Her sanity bound me with them, as earlier her terror had unwillingly drawn me to her. I was victim and victimizer, and when Joan stood at the stake and condemned me in a grotesque parody of Christ’s forgiving on the cross, I wanted only for her to burn and so be quiet, so release me. I would have lighted the fire. I would have shouted with the crowd, “Burn! Burn!” already despairing that no fire could sear away what she, I, all of us had done. From the flames, Joan looked at me, stretched out her hand, came toward me. I thrust out my arm to ward her off. Almost I cried out. My heart pounded in my chest.

“Austin,” she said.

In an instant Joan was gone.

Barbara came toward me. It was Barbara. She had grown three inches, put on twenty pounds and thirty years. Her face was tired and lined under gaudy, peeling makeup. Confusedly I blinked at her. I don’t think she even saw the confusion; her eyes had lost their strained panic, and she was smiling, a smile that was a peaceful answer to some question of her own.

“That was the reality,” she said, and stooped to lay her head on my chest. Through the fall of her hair I barely heard her when she said that she would marry me whenever I wanted.

Barbara and I have been married for nearly a year. I still don’t know precisely why she decided to marry me, and she can’t tell me; she doesn’t know herself. But I speculate that the night A Maid of Domrémy failed, something broke in her, some illusion that she could control, if not the world, then at least herself. When she struck Whitten with the candlestick, she turned herself into both victim and victimizer as easily as Lawrence Cosgriff had rewritten Shaw’s Joan. Barbara has never played the part again. (Gregory Whitten, no less flamboyantly insensitive for his bashing with a candlestick, actually asked her.) She has adamantly refused both Joans, Shaw’s heroine and Cosgriff’s victim. I was the last person to witness her performance.

Was her performance that night in my hospital room really as good as I remember? I was drugged; emotion had been running high; I loved her. Any or all of that could have colored my reactions. But I don’t think so. I think that night Barbara Bishop was Joan, in some effort of will and need that went beyond both the illusions of a good actress and the reality of what ESIR could give to her, or to Ann Friedland, or to anyone. ESIR only unlocks the individual genetic memories in the brain’s R-Complex. But what other identities, shared across time and space, might still be closed in there beyond our present reach?

All of this is speculation.

Next week I will be hospitalized for my own ESIR. Knowing what I have been before may yield only more, speculation, more illusions, more multiple realities. It may yield nothing. But I want to know, on the chance that the yield will be understandable, will be valuable in untangling the endless skein of waking visions.

Even if the chance is one in a million.

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