Margaret Atwood - Hag-Seed

Now Dylan says, “What’s this in the bag? You been trapping, Mr. Duke?”

“Just my costume,” says Felix. “Magic cloak. Magic staff.”

“Like in Harry Potter ,” says Dylan. “Cool.”

He thought they might veto the cane, but they don’t. The luck of Felix is holding.

Everyone’s already in the main room, awaiting directions. Anne-Marie has brought the three goddesses with her in her large purple tapestry knitting bag, dressed in their new woollen outfits. “Will these do?” she asks Felix.

“What’s the verdict?” Felix asks the assembled cast. He holds up Iris, who’s wearing a rainbow gown made of long braids of wool with beads along their lengths. Her face has been painted orange, and she has a headdress of cotton-wool clouds.

“Pox, it’s the Rainbow Nation,” says Leggs, and everyone laughs.

“I assume that’s a Like,” says Felix. Ceres is next, in a dress of vine leaves and a knobby headdress of what are supposed to be — he guesses — woollen apples and pears. Her face is green, and she has a bee sticker on her forehead.

“I saw a stripper like that once.” Leggs again. More laughter, growls of “Take it off!”

“This one is Juno, patron goddess of marriage,” says Felix. Juno’s wearing a knitted nurse uniform and carrying a miniature knitted bottle of blood. She has a painted frown, and tiny fangs have been added to her mouth. She’s wearing a necklace of skulls.

The cast is not so favorable to Juno. “Red plague, she looks like my wife,” says Shiv. Murmurs of agreement.

“Whoreson ugly,” says Leggs.

“Back to the drawing board,” SnakeEye adds.

“Suck it up, dickhead,” says Anne-Marie, “or you can make your own fuckin’ goddesses, plus no cookies.”

Chuckles. “Swearing! Swearing! Points off!” says Leggs.

“I’m not collecting points, so you can suck that too,” says Anne-Marie. They all laugh.

“What kind of red plague cookies?” says PPod. “Is it okay to suck them ?”

“All right, order!” says Felix. “Puppeteers, off to your rehearsal room to practice. Caliban and the Hag-Seeds, we’re reshooting your number again today to see if we can get better angles. First up, Act I, Scene 2, my scene with Ariel. We’ll shoot it now.”

8Handz is in his Ariel gear. His face is already blue. He tweaks the raincoat, adjusts his scalloped bathing cap, lowers his goggles, puts on his blue rubber gloves. They go through the scene once, from “All hail, great master.” 8Handz is word-perfect, but he’s nervous.

“Can we do it again?” he asks. “I was hearing this weird feedback thing. Like someone was saying the lines at the same time as me. It, like, got in the way. Maybe it’s the recording mic.”

Felix’s heart lurches: his Miranda, doing her prompting. “Male voice or female voice?”

“Just a voice. Probably only mine. I’ll check the mic.”

“Could be that. Some actors hear their own voices, anyway,” says Felix. “When they’re keyed up. Relax, deep breaths. We’ll shoot another take.”

To Miranda he says, sotto voce , “Not so loud. And only if he misses.”

“What?” asks 8Handz. “You want me to pull it back?”

“No, no. Sorry,” says Felix. “Talking to myself.”

Thursday, March 7, 2013.

The clock ticks inexorably. The planets are converging.

Palm trees and cactuses have been cut from paper, using kids’ safety scissors. The plastic rowboat and the sailing ship have been defaced, drenched in water, sailed on the shower-curtain sea. Songs have been sung, discarded, rewritten, sung again. Insults about the singing voices of others have been exchanged.

Chants have been chanted, feet have been stomped. Minor injuries have been sustained by dancers, due to the use of muscles long dormant. Crises of confidence have been surmounted, grudges incurred, hurt feelings soothed. Felix has berated himself for his own lunacy in undertaking such a hopeless enterprise, then congratulated himself on his judgment. His spirits plunge, then soar, then plunge again.

Normal life.

Almost all of the play has now been filmed. There are a few scenes to go, and more edits to be done and effects to be added, and some retakes and voiceovers where the quality’s not clear. The three goddesses are spectacular on video, and the black-clad puppeteers add a dimension: it’s clear that the goddesses are merely apparitions, acting out someone else’s script. PPod has composed a musical background for them, some eerie whistling noises with chimes and flute notes. For the moment when they vanish in confusion, 8Handz has used a multiplying effect: the image is doubled and redoubled and also slowed down, so it looks as if the goddesses are disintegrating in mid-air. Altogether a fine effect, and Felix congratulates 8Handz on it.

Less than a week before zero hour. If this were an ordinary occasion he’d be relaxing by now — they have enough time left for polishing — but as it is, there’s more to do.

Felix has taken another train into Toronto. He needed to get the costumes for Stephano the drunken butler and Trinculo the jester: a battered dinner jacket for the first, red long johns with a bowler hat for the second, whiteface for both. He sourced the red long johns for Trinculo at Winners, in men’s underwear, and the dinner jacket for Stephano at Oxfam. He also picked up some more Godzilla headdresses, for the Hag-Seeds.

Those purchases complete, he met with a mild-mannered, bespectacled forty-year-old who was possibly Korean in a discreet corner of Union Station. This was risky — what if this man was being followed? — but in the crowd of commuters they were surely inconspicuous. The contact was courtesy 8Handz: each side could trust the other like a brother, he assured the contact via a recorded message smuggled out by Felix on a memory stick.

Money was exchanged, and Felix received a packet of gel-cap pills, a packet of powder, a hypodermic needle, and some very precise instructions.

“Don’t overdo it,” the contact said. “You don’t want to kill anyone or drive them batshit permanently. These gel caps are the Mr. Sandmans. Break them open, empty them into the cup, you’ll get a fast dissolve in the ginger ale. It’s a quick out even if they only drink half. Doesn’t last long, you get maybe ten minutes. That enough?”

“We’ll find out,” said Felix.

“The other one’s the magic pixie dust. Quarter of a teaspoon in a teaspoon of water. Don’t overload the grapes.”

“I’ll be careful,” said Felix. “What exactly is the result?”

“Like you say, let’s find out. But it’s gonna be some trip,” said the contact.

“Not harmful though?” said Felix. “Permanently?” He was nervous: what would happen if he was caught with this stuff, and what was it exactly? Was he being reckless? Yes, but the whole operation was reckless.

“If anything happens, this never happened,” said the contact in a soft but convincing voice.

Today Felix is working from home. He has his boiled egg for breakfast, then turns on his computer. He’s tracking the royal progress of Tony and Sal as they eat their way through one rubber chicken dinner after another in the small-town sticks, promising favors, pocketing contributions, marking down rabble-rousers and dissenters for later banishment. He has a map on the wall into which he’s been sticking red push pins, charting their course. It pleases him to see his enemies drawing ever nearer, as if they’re being sucked into a vortex of his own creation.