The Emerald Light in the Air Read Online Free Page A

“Reginald, I want you to do that play if the weather clears. Right after our service for Harrison. We’re all going to need cheering up.”
    It was in this way that we came to perform A Midsummer Night’s Dream on a wet field before an audience of mourners wearing black.
    â€œWe’re going to have a tough house,” I said to my young company on the evening of the show.
    Folding chairs were set up on the mushy ground. Organ music, a gloomy Episcopalian dirge, drifted in from the church at the college green’s distant end. Harrison’s memorial, under way. Skies remained partly cloudy, and a light breeze blew from the south. Together we stood, cast and crew, in a circle around Puck’s hole. We weren’t holding hands, though we should have been—there was a noticeable feeling, in the group, of apprehension, a communal dread and excitation only partly attributable to normal stage fright. The hole, in the wake of the week’s rains, was a muddy pond. A duck, possibly blown far from home in the high winds a few days earlier, paddled on the surface. Fallen leaves looked like twisted miniature lily pads. These elements—water, duck, vegetation—combined to create a disturbingly powerful scene, a vastly reduced water vista that stood in relation to actual lakes as an artist’s easel studies do to fully realized, complex paintings. It was, in other words, an excellent stage-set pond, not at all unlike a classical folly from an English garden, scaled down, deceptively simple, unreal enough to seem mysterious, primordial, sad.
    The funeral music was not helping my mood. Jim Ferguson, our sexually aggressive Oberon and a zoology major, pointed out, “That’s a female mallard. She’s injured. Look at her—she’s all crooked.”
    It was true. The duck listed in the water. Jim explained, “Ducks are vicious when they’re hurt. They host human influenza and other dangerous viruses.”
    â€œDuck?” asked Martin Epps, waving his cane, straying precariously near the water’s edge.
    I told him, “Don’t worry about the duck, okay?” To the cast in general, I said, “I’ll need a couple of volunteers to lower Martin into the water when the time comes.”
    â€œWater?” said Martin, splashing with his cane, poking to find the hole’s bottom.
    The duck paddled weakly. All around me, kids in little groups stared down at it and smoked in that self-consciously erotic way—the dramatic puffs and the stagy, side-of-the-mouth exhalations blown upward into the air like steam escaping so many hot engines—that seems to be an advertisement for the carefree life. I couldn’t take it. “Do you kids think you’re going to live forever?” I shouted at these innocents. “Do you think life is some kind of holiday ? You think that one day you’ll stop being depressed! You won’t ever stop being depressed! No matter how much sex you have!”
    As if on cue, bells rang out from the chapel spire. Big wooden doors were flung open, and the first few mourners emerged from the church.
    â€œPlaces!” cried Danielle.
    Faeries tossed away cigarette butts and Royals crouched behind bushes while Mechanicals popped open their first-act beers. Billy Valentine passed Mary Victoria Frost an enormous joint. Martin Epps alone remained before his watery lair. “Billy, Mary, give me a hand with Martin,” I said. “One, two, three.” Up went the blind boy. He was light for a fat kid. He entered the water and said, “Ahhh.”
    â€œStay put and don’t piss off the duck,” I directed him.
    Billy and Mary and I crawled beneath the stage-left shrubs. Billy was about to stash the joint when I stopped him. “Hey, don’t put that away. I need a hit.” Fireflies blinked on, off, on. The audience settled into seats. Sounds of weeping rose from the house. I peeked up and could