A Wave Read Online Free Page A

behind the bar, causing it to lurch forward regurgitating blood and drop the envelope, which produced a loud report and a flash like a magnesium flare that illuminated an expression of anger and fear on Alice’s face, as she hastily clapped her hands over her ears. Then the whole stage was plunged in darkness, the last thing remaining visible being the apparently permanent smile on Mercury’s face—still astonished and delighted, and bearing no trace of malice.
    Little by little the darkness began to dissipate, and a forest scene similar to that in the mural was revealed. It had moved forward to fill the space formerly occupied by the bar and its customers, and was much neater and tidier than the forest in the mural had been. The trees were more or less the same size and shape, and planted equidistant from each other. There was no forest undergrowth, no dead leaves or rotting tree trunks on the ground; the grass under the trees was as green and well kept as that of a lawn. This was because the scene represented a dream of Mania (whose grotto was still visible in the lower left-hand corner of the stage), and, since she was the goddess of confusion, her dream revealed no trace of confusion, or at any rate presented a confusing absence of confusion. On a white banner threaded through some of the branches of the trees in the foreground the sentence “It’s an Ongoing Thing” was printed in scarlet letters. To the left, toward the rear of the scene, Alice appeared to be asleep at the base of a tree trunk, with a pig dressed in baby clothes asleep in her lap. An invisible orchestra in the pit intoned the “March” from Grieg’s Sigurd Jorsalfar. A group of hobos who had previously been hidden behind the trees moved to the center of the stage and began to perform a slow-moving ballet to the music. Each was dressed identically in baggy black-and-white checked trousers held up by white suspenders fastened with red buttons, a crumpled black swallowtail coat, red flannel undershirt, brown derby hat and white gloves with black stripes outlining the contours of the wrist bones, and each held in his right hand an extinguished cigar butt with a fat gray puffy ash affixed to it. Moving delicately on point, the group formed an ever-narrowing semicircle around Alice and the sleeping pig, when a sudden snort from the latter startled them and each disappeared behind a tree. At this moment Mania emerged from her grotto dressed in a gown of sapphire-blue tulle studded with blue sequins, cradling a sheaf of white gladioli in the crook of one arm and with her other hand holding aloft a wand with a gilt cardboard star at its tip. Only her curiously unkempt hair marred the somewhat dated elegance of her toilette. Deftly detaching the hyena’s chain from its post, she allowed the beast to lead her upward to the forest scene where the hobos had each begun to peek out from behind his tree trunk. Like the Wilis in Giselle, they appeared mesmerized by the apparition of the goddess, swaying to the movement of her star-tipped wand as she waved it, describing wide arcs around herself. None dared draw too close, however, for if they did so the snarling, slavering hyena would lurch forward, straining at its chain. At length she let her wand droop toward the ground, and after gazing pensively downward for some moments she raised her head and, tossing back her matted curls, spoke thus:
    “My sister Hecat, who sometimes accompanies me on midnight rides to nameless and indescribable places, warned me of this dell, seemingly laid out for the Sunday strolls of civil servants, but in reality the haunt of drifters and retarded children. You ,” she cried, shaking her wand at the corps de ballet of hobos, who stumbled and fell over each other in their frantic attempt to get away from her, “you who oppress even my dreams, where a perverse order should reign but where I find instead traces of the lunacy that besets my waking hours, are accomplices in all