The Ensemble by Aja Gabel

Author:Aja Gabel
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2018-05-15T04:00:00+00:00

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The result was unquantifiable. There was the way they felt during—lost, unreal, having dreamt the same dream in front of hundreds of people—and the way they felt after—depleted, used, but by each other—and the way everyone else felt after—elated, celebratory, brimming. It was hard to tell where their feelings ended and others’ began, not after the hour or so they’d spent on stage, tapping into each other, deliberately eliminating the boundaries between their bodies and their brains, making porous their expressions.

That performance exhaustion was why, as soon as they stepped off stage and the stage manager walked up to Henry with a fragile urgency and stood so close to him their noses practically touched—and told Henry it was his sister who had collapsed in the audience, who had been taken to the hospital, who had halted the performance, and it was her wife who had cried out, and that his sister was now in the hospital down the mountain, in some kind of condition no one knew, but his whole family was there (had missed the performance), and there was a car waiting for him, and his presence was requested immediately—Henry’s reaction was flat, unreadable. There was no expression left.

The group stood around Henry, shoulder to shoulder, breathing the same hot breath for a few seconds before anyone said anything.

“I’ll go with him,” Daniel said, and proceeded to give out instructions. Brit would call Kimiko and Jana would call their manager to talk about next steps. Jana took Henry’s viola out of his hands and packed it up for him, and it was only as Daniel and Henry walked out the back way, down an empty delivery hall to a town car waiting outside, that Henry said, “Wait. What? What happened to Jackie?”

Daniel didn’t know, but he said, “Something with her heart.”

The car was the same kind that had driven them there from the airport, and what had felt cramped then now felt too big and empty, the air steel-cold. Henry’s face fell into an impatient frown.

“It’ll be okay,” Daniel said, reaching his hand out to the space around Henry’s knee, though not quite touching it.

“I didn’t even know,” Henry said. “Someone should have told me. We should have stopped playing.”

“I don’t know,” Daniel said. “Maybe. We did stop, I mean. But then we started again.”

Daniel’s words, pointing out the obvious, hung in the air long enough that he thought perhaps Henry was going to lash out at him for saying, once again, nothing. For having nothing to say. For committing to nothing. But he saw, in the flash of streetlights as they approached the bigger town at the bottom of the mountain, that Henry’s face barely registered him. Henry’s face, and his mind and body, were in another place entirely, one Daniel couldn’t have gone to if he tried his hardest.

At the hospital, Daniel waited outside the room where Jacqueline was while Henry went in. The blinds in the window to the room were partially open, though, and he glanced through.

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