Margaret Atwood - Hag-Seed

And let’s shove it down the throat of that devious, twisted bastard, Tony.

That devious, twisted bastard, Tony, is Felix’s own fault. Or mostly his fault. Over the past twelve years, he’s often blamed himself. He gave Tony too much scope, he didn’t supervise, he didn’t look over Tony’s nattily suited, padded, pinstriped shoulder. He didn’t pick up on the clues, as anyone with half a brain and two ears might have done. Worse: he’d trusted the evil-hearted, social-clambering, Machiavellian foot-licker. He’d fallen for the act: Let me do this chore for you, delegate that, send me instead. What a fool he’d been.

His only excuse was that he’d been distracted by grief at that time. He’d recently lost his only child, and in such a terrible way. If only he had, if only he hadn’t, if only he’d been aware…

No, too painful still. Don’t think about it, he tells himself while doing up the buttons of his shirt. Hold it far back. Pretend it was only a movie.

Even if that not-to-be-thought-about event hadn’t occurred, he’d most likely still have been ambushed. He’d fallen into the habit of letting Tony run the mundane end of the show, because, after all, Felix was the Artistic Director, as Tony kept reminding him, and he was at the height of his powers, or so they kept saying in the reviews; therefore he ought to concern himself with higher aims.

And he did concern himself with higher aims. To create the lushest, the most beautiful, the most awe-inspiring, the most inventive, the most numinous theatrical experiences ever. To raise the bar as high as the moon. To forge from every production an experience no one attending it would ever forget. To evoke the collective indrawn breath, the collective sigh; to have the audience leave, after the performance, staggering a little as if drunk. To make the Makeshiweg Festival the standard against which all lesser theatre festivals would be measured.

These were no mean goals.

To accomplish them, Felix had pulled together the ablest backup teams he could cajole. He’d hired the best, he’d inspired the best. Or the best he could afford. He’d handpicked the technical gnomes and gremlins, the lighting designers, the sound technicians. He’d headhunted the most admired scenery and costume designers of his day, the ones he could persuade. All of them had to be top of the line, and beyond. If possible.

So he’d needed money.

Finding the money had been Tony’s thing. A lesser thing: the money was only a means to an end, the end being transcendence: that had been understood by both of them. Felix the cloud-riding enchanter, Tony the earth-based factotum and gold-grubber. It had seemed an appropriate division of functions, considering their respective talents. As Tony himself had put it, each of them should do what he was good at.

Idiot, Felix berates himself. He’d understood nothing. As for the height of his powers, the height is always ominous. From the height, there’s nowhere to go but down.

Tony had been all too eager to liberate Felix from the rituals Felix hated, such as the attending of cocktail functions and the buttering-up of sponsors and patrons, and the hobnobbing with the Board, and the facilitating of grants from the various levels of government, and the writing of effective reports. That way — said Tony — Felix could devote himself to the things that really mattered, such as his perceptive script notes and his cutting-edge lighting schemes and the exact timing of the showers of glitter confetti of which he had made such genius use.

And his directing, of course. Felix had always built in one or two plays a season for himself to direct. Once in a while he would even take the central part, if it was something he’d felt drawn to. Julius Caesar. The tartan king. Lear. Titus Andronicus. Triumphs for him, every one of those roles! And every one of his productions!

Or triumphs with the critics, though the playgoers and even the patrons had grumbled from time to time. The almost-naked, freely bleeding Lavinia in Titus was too upsettingly graphic, they’d whined; though, as Felix had pointed out, more than justified by the text. Why did Pericles have to be staged with spaceships and extraterrestrials instead of sailing ships and foreign countries, and why present the moon goddess Artemis with the head of a praying mantis? Even though — said Felix to the Board, in his own defense — it was totally fitting, if you thought deeply enough about it. And Hermione’s return to life as a vampire in The Winter’s Tale : that had actually been booed. Felix had been delighted: What an effect! Who else had ever done it? Where there are boos, there’s life!

Those escapades, those flights of fancy, those triumphs had been the brainchildren of an earlier Felix. They’d been acts of jubilation, of a happy exuberance. In the time just before Tony’s coup, things had changed. They had darkened, and darkened so suddenly. Howl, howl, howl…

But he could not howl.

His wife, Nadia, was the first to leave him, barely a year after their marriage. It was a late marriage for him, and an unexpected one: he hadn’t known he was capable of that kind of love. He was just discovering her virtues, just getting to really know her, when she’d died of a galloping staph infection right after childbirth. Such things happened, despite modern medicine. He still tries to recall her image, make her vivid for himself once more, but over the years she’s moved gently away from him, fading like an old Polaroid. Now she’s little more than an outline; an outline he fills with sadness.

So he was on his own with his newborn daughter, Miranda. Miranda: what else would he have named a motherless baby girl with a middle-aged, doting father? She was what had kept him from sinking down into chaos. He’d held himself together the best way he could, which was not too well; but still, he’d managed. He’d hired help, of course — he’d needed some women, since he knew nothing about the practical side of baby care, and because of his work he couldn’t be there with Miranda all the time. But he’d spent every free moment he could with her. Though there hadn’t been many free moments.

He’d been entranced with her from the start. He’d hovered, he’d marveled. So perfect, her fingers, her toes, her eyes! Such a delight! Once she could talk he’d even taken her to the theatre; so bright she’d been. She’d sit there, taking it all in, not wriggling or bored as a lesser two-year-old would have been. He’d had such plans: once she was bigger they would travel together, he could show her the world, he could teach her so many things. But then, at the age of three…

High fever. Meningitis. They’d tried to reach him, the women, but he’d been in rehearsal with strict orders not to be interrupted and they hadn’t known what to do. When he finally got home there were frantic tears, and then the drive to the hospital, but it was too late, too late.

The doctors had done everything they could: every platitude had been applied, every excuse offered. But nothing worked, and then she was gone. Carried off, as they used to say. But carried off where? She couldn’t have simply vanished from the universe. He’d refused to believe that.

Lavinia, Juliet, Cordelia, Perdita, Marina. All the lost daughters. But some of them had been found again. Why not his Miranda?

What to do with such a sorrow? It was like an enormous black cloud boiling up over the horizon. No: it was like a blizzard. No: it was like nothing he could put into language. He couldn’t face it head-on. He had to transform it, or at the very least enclose it.