Richard Weiner - The Game for Real

He presented the moribund backroom of a suburban tavern. At one table sat Giggles. She sat there mournfully and was smiling indescribably. Across from her, John. They were eating with broken-tined forks and nicked knives; they ate from chipped plates. “Why hasn’t Mutig arrived?” Giggles asked. — She spoke with that light conversational tone that, like a somnambulist, heads straight for the trap of sobs where she will drown. John swallowed a morsel and smiled. The smile of a bearer of bad news who is ashamed at being just that. “Have you seen Mutig?” Giggles asked. “I have,” John said, smiling the whole time. “Is he coming?” “He can’t,” John said, going stern. To himself he was saying: Let’s drop the friendly mask. Giggles leaned in slightly. Warmly: “I don’t know what it is, John, it seems as if my life were drifting away from me on the sly. I feel like it already did a long time ago. What do you say to that?” — John’s gaze transformed into a noose; he took it and tossed it at her anxiously. “Perhaps,” he said. — “You think so? Maybe you didn’t understand?” — “I understood perfectly,” said John. — “What do you think?” — John let it out with a discomfiture that only Giggles believed. — “Nothing. Life is drifting away from us all. . That’s the standard fate of mankind.” — “John,” she pronounced, almost inaudibly, “so what do you think for real, that I’ve gone mad? So why are you steering me away from a truth that I feel?” — “But I’m not steering you away from anything,” John said with strained compassion.

“Why did she let herself go? Why was she staring so?” Mutig spoke with mournful emphasis, and his hand slid down the blackamoor’s chest, whereupon it went dark.

But the lights came right back up.

The stage as in the first image, but with a partition dividing it in two. One could see Mutig, Andrew, Paul, John, Peter, two ladies with unobligatory, fetching smiles. Giggles was there as well. She was standing as if in shame, off to the side. The seven were having a lively discussion. They were speaking as if they were stenographers: each word a chapter heading, and even their most fleeting glances were crammed with as much content as there was in an instant of dreaming. They were a gathering of the enlightened. But behind their mirth, their laughter, their gestures and words, there stretched a sardonic line, like periods at the ends of incomplete sentences. None of these seven was evil, but the sum of their kindnesses came to grudgingness. But who among them minded? I sought it in their eyes. Giggles’s were filled with a skittish, guilty conscience. The group coiled into a knot, hardening so much, by all appearances, that it held their irritation in check; some unwelcome presence was irritating the group, the way a wet diaper irritates a small child; it didn’t know how to acquit itself of this oppression; it tried by exuding a grudging scorn. Thus was the atmosphere poisoned. Giggles was forced to breathe it in. It corrupted her blood; the corrupted blood budded upon her in the form of an unattractive case of ringworm. Giggles was becoming more and more dilapidated because of it, and she was eventually so wretched that even I was disgusted. — Finally, Andrew broke off from the group, crossed the partition, and retired to the rear half of the stage. There he found some kind of album and started turning its pages mechanically. After a moment he called out, “John, this is interesting.” This was a ploy; it reeked like burning sulfur. John went to join him. Now they were looking together, with mournful disinterest; the sulfur burned on. John approached the doorframe. “Renée, have you seen this?” Renée looked up with such nonchalance that it wafted of an unfulfilled contract. She looked up silently, with prearranged surprise. Now there were three in the back half. They formed an embryo of a group, blithe and aggressive. The mass in the front half, dealt a mortal blow, was rotting. It held on, but it was done for. It was waiting for the signal to fall to pieces. The only point of its holding on now was the draw of the embryo expanding in the back. “Paul,” Renée called at last. Paul left, withdrawing as though on guard. The group behind the partition swelled, it swelled with a lively will to harm that alien thing still standing in its way. It was smothering it: Giggles was somehow shrinking the whole time; she was less and less a nuisance; the group sensed it; the group was suffused with a satiated hatred and was rejuvenated by it. In front of the partition there were now only individuals. They were wracked with nostalgia. Their eyes wandered back behind the partition. They stole away, they trailed off: Peter, then Giselle, looking back like thieves. They leaped through the partition’s breach as though from a burning house into a safety net. — In front there were now only Mutig and what was left of Giggles. Mutig picked up some bibelot and was weighing it in his hand. He said, without looking up, “Giggles, if you’d like, today you can sleep with me.” — He served her the word today as if on a golden platter. “Of course,” Giggles said; something jerked her hard; she went to the window; she leaned her head against it. Mutig looked up sadly, and upon noticing that Giggles was not looking, his guilty face brightened; now he’s stealing off on tiptoe toward the others. — Giggles has turned around. — She sees she’s alone; she’s waiting for them to call for her. Nothing. — Past the partition, past the divide, the group is regenerated. It is complete. Is anyone missing? Anything? — Nothing and no one. The group is pleased with Giggles’s regret, it feeds on it, it suits it. The group becomes aware of having a raison d’être : it is; therefore, it is against someone. It is happy. — Here and there, a sidelong glance at Giggles. Giggles waits. Nothing. Nothing. Finally, she is plucking up the courage: two steps forward, one back; again; and about face; again. . Now she, too, is at the partition. She proceeds quickly, like across a blazing line of fire, and stealthily, like a leper. — A moment. The conversation dies down. Andrew has broken off and is moving forward across the partition.

“Enough, that will do,” Mutig announced impatiently, “why did she let herself go, why was she staring so?” And the chest went dark.

But the lights came right back up.

But this time one needed to strain one’s eyes, for it was only a false twilight. There was a sort of torture chamber. Five friends sitting on low stools formed a circle. In the middle: Giggles. No one spoke. Nothing. Nor any movement. And unrest germinated. They turned quizzically toward one another. Their gazes wandered, and they all strayed toward Mutig’s face. There they found the answer to some enigmatic “why,” knowing only that it was because of him that there was this wedge of awkward oppression that had slowly inserted itself among them. There they found the answer, and they immediately cheered up, for they learned that they were headed for something that would be ritually decisive. Mutig consented mutely beneath their convergent eyes. Giggles noticed this, and she attempted a kind of very moving gesture whose purpose I did not ascertain. But an attempt it remained. The five friends stood. All at once. Giggles sat down obediently on one of the now-empty stools, raised her head, turned it back slightly. All of this had an air of carefully contrived ceremony, yet above it there dwelled an accent of tragic improvisation, so much so that there was a chill. It was a comedy that had imprudently crossed a forbidden limit and become something real, somehow, as real as catastrophe. They withdrew, except for Andrew, who came forward. “If you think,” he said. “. . If she wants,” Mutig elaborated. Andrew blinded Giggles.