Laini Taylor - Night of Cake & Puppets

Love affair. Doesn’t that sound so middle-aged? And also ill-fated. Like ill-fated is an understood prefix to love affair . Well, ill-fated is fine, as long as it’s a meaty and fraught ill-fated love affair, not a pale and insipid one. I’m not looking for fate. I’m seventeen. I’m looking for kissing, and to move forward a few paces on the game board. You know, do some Living.

(With my lips.)

The drawing’s in my bag with my other…props. A few things have already been set up around town. It all had to be ready before I go to work, and I go to work… now .

Hello, Marionette Theater of Prague. Just another Saturday. Just walking up the steps with my bag of tricks, no scheming here…

Oh my god, there he is.

Knit cap, brown leather jacket, violin backpack. Sweet, cold-pinked cheeks. What a lovely display of personhood. He’s like a good book cover that grabs your gaze. Read me. I’m fun but smart. You won’t be able to put me down. There’s a little bounce in his walk. It’s music. He’s got headphones on – the fat, serious kind, not the weenie earbud kind. I wonder what he’s listening to. Probably Dvořák or something. He’s wearing a pink tie. Why don’t I hate it? I hate pink. Except on Mik’s cheeks.

Hello, Mik’s cheeks. Soon we shall know each other better.

Aah! Eye contact. Look away!

(Did he just… blush ?)

Feet, help me out here. We’re on a collision course. Unless we take immediate evasive action, we’re going to meet him right at the door.

Panic!

Hey, look at this fascinating notice on the wall! I must pause here and tear off one of these little phone-number tabs so that I can call and inquire about the life-changing effects of…

Treatments for female baldness?

Awesome.

‘It’s not for me,’ I blurt, but the danger is past. While I was staring in rapt fascination at the female-baldness flyer, Mik slipped into the building.

Close call. We almost – in Karou parlance – ‘entered each other’s magnetic fields for the first time.’ He would have had to hold the door for me. I would have had to acknowledge it with a nod, a smile, a thank you , and then walk in front of him down the entire length of the hallway, wondering whether he was looking at me. I know how that would go. I’d suddenly become conscious of the many muscle groups involved in the art of walking, and try to consciously control each of them like a puppeteer, and end up looking like I’m in a loaner body I haven’t mastered yet.

This way, I can walk down the hallway looking at him .

Hello, back of Mik.

On his violin backpack is a bumper sticker that reads:

EVERYTHING IS A MIRACLE. IT IS A MIRACLE THAT ONE DOES NOT MELT IN ONE’S BATH.

—PICASSO

Which totally does not make me imagine Mik in the bath. Because that would be wrong.

Good-bye, back of Mik.

He goes through his doorway, and I go through mine, and thus is perpetuated for another night one of the world’s great injustices: the segregation of musicians and puppeteers.

They have their backstage lounge, we have ours. You’d think someone’s afraid we might rumble. There’s a cellist on our turf – get him! Or, more likely but less interesting, it’s a simple matter of space. Neither lounge is very big; they’re just windowless rooms with lockers and a couple of sad couches. The musician couches are slightly sadder than ours, one clue to the hierarchy here. Puppeteers rule the roost, but it’s not a very posh roost. In general, musicians respect their status (i.e., easily replaceable), but the singers, not so much.

The reason I hate it when we perform operas – like now, we’re doing Gounod’s Faust – isn’t because I don’t like opera. I am not a philistine. I just don’t like opera singers . Especially sultry Italian sopranos in heavy eyeliner who go out for drinks with the strings section after the show. Ahem , Cinzia ‘fake beauty mark’ Polombo.

Anyway. It’s the puppeteers who matter around here. There are ten, six of whom are in the lounge ahead of me, pretty well filling it.

‘Zuzana,’ Prochazka says the second he sees me. ‘Mephistopheles is drunk again. Would you mind?’

Drunken devil. All in a day’s work. To be clear, I am not a puppeteer. I am a puppet- maker , a different animal altogether. Some puppeteers do both: build and perform. But my family has always stuck to fabrication, with the idea that you can be decent at two high art forms, or you can excel at one. We excel. Excellently. Still, it behooves a puppet-maker to understand puppeteering. My professor at the Lyceum – Prochazka, who also happens to be lead puppeteer here – requires practical theatrical experience, so here I am. I scurry and fetch for the puppeteers, restring marionettes, retouch paint, mend costumes, and lend a spare pair of hands for easy things like fluttering birds or clip-clopping the horse hooves.

In this case, Mephistopheles has a loose string, making him list drunkenly to one side. It’s an easy fix. ‘Sure,’ I say, and put my stuff in my locker, more mindful than usual of the contents of my bag. Once the lounges clear out – puppeteers to the stage and musicians to the orchestra pit – I have some sneaking to do. The thought of it kicks my heartbeat sideways.

I have to break into Mik’s violin case.

I grab my tool kit. First I have a devil to sober up.

It’s Act II. I can hear Mephistopheles singing. I text Karou: Kindly confirm: If someone’s evil, then killing them isn’t murder. It’s SLAYING, and not only legal but encouraged. Correct?

No reply.

After a minute, I text again: Taking your silence as a YES. Sharpening knife. Text now to stop me. 3–2–1…Okay then. Here I go.

Still no reply.

One last text: It’s done. Am currently dragging an opera singer to the taxidermist by her hair. Plan to have her stuffed and mounted above Aunt Nedda’s TV.

For a moment, my frustration over the soprano is undercut by anxiety as I ponder what Karou might be doing in South Africa that she can’t answer her phone. Poacher, or witch doctor? I have no success imagining either, and resume frustration.

ARGH! Prochazka kept me scurrying during Act I, then there were sets to change, and just when I was going to slip away, Hugo had to pee and handed off Siebel to me, even though I am not cleared to operate a marionette in a show! I didn’t have to do anything but make it stand around, at least, and when Hugo came back, I made my escape – back to the puppeteers’ lounge to grab my drawing, and then…just as I was about to creep into the musicians’ lounge…

‘Excuse me. Girl!’

Cinzia Polombo appeared in the doorway. Girl? She actually snapped her fingers to get my attention. Oh yes. But it gets better. She handed me her empty coffee cup and, because she doesn’t speak Czech, said in English, with a luxuriant and imperious R roll, ‘ Hurrry. ’

Oh. I hurried.

If anyone has ever filled a coffee cup with cigarette butts faster than I did tonight, I would be very much surprised.

‘Is that not what you wanted?’ I asked her in purest innocence when she gasped and looked aghast.

‘Coffee! I want coffee!’

‘ Ohhh. Of course,’ I said. ‘That makes so much more sense. I’ll be right back.’ And I was right back. I handed her the cup, now full of cigarette butts and coffee, and kept walking.

‘ Disgraziata! ’ she shrieked at me, dashing the contents to the floor, but I just kept going, back into the puppeteers’ lounge, where I sit now on the sadder of two sad sofas, thwarted. Cinzia is still in the musicians’ lounge, where she should not be. Her cue is any minute. What’s she doing in there, aside from cursing in Italian? I’m going to lose my chance!