The Acrobat by Edward J. Delaney

Author:Edward J. Delaney
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Turtle Point Press

HE LEAVES HIS DRESSING room and walks across the darkened expanse of the soundstage, ready to go home. He’s shot more of the predictable scenes of another predictable picture, the easy success of doing what you do well. The gaffers have shut down all the main lights so that he follows a dim trail of illumination toward the red of the stage-door light.

He opens the door and goes through. But he’s now on another soundstage. The sheer size of the movie business’s great spaces so daunting, so able to create any world inside its walls, to replicate vast cities and lost civilizations. Far across the way, the red light of this stage’s exit door. He rather enjoys the solitude of the building sometimes. He hadn’t intended a stroll, but he feels relaxed and in no hurry.

A movie set is made of two sides. On one side, it is a dazzle of brightly lit illusions, glistening and convincingly real to the eye. Actors live their lives in this half shell, the day side of a hemispherical planet. Then, across a line is the darkness behind the lights, and the jumble of the machinery that fuels the illusion, and the people unseen in the world of the picture, who exist within inches of the image but will never be in the image. And then all the lights go out and the world ceases to exist.

He opens the next door and is now in a dark hallway. At the end of it is the exit door. He’ll need to get his bearings once outside, and to find his car. But the studio is familiar terrain and he’ll get where he needs to.

But through that door, he finds not a parking lot but another empty soundstage. Now he’s confused. Where has he made his wrong turn?

He turns around and goes back through the door, but he’s not back in the hallway, but on another darkened stage. It seems as if he’s miscalculated, or misremembered.

“Hello?” he calls. “Is anyone here?” The echoes peal back at him from the black vastness. But no one calls back.

But there’s another door he didn’t see and he walks to it and opens it, to find another darkened stage. The darkness seems even deeper. He has no sense of how far the walls are from him, or how high the rafters. He has no idea which direction to take.

“Can someone please help me?” he calls into the darkness.

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