Cyclorama by Adam Langer

Author:Adam Langer
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Mr. Van Daan

Eileen’s message inviting Declan to help plan the abomination she was calling Tyrusfest wasn’t the only trigger, and it was hardly the first. Every time Declan drove past the North Shore campus or saw the unread copy of The Diary of Anne Frank on his son Tuan’s desk, every time the song “Amanda” by Boston came on the radio, the events of spring 1982 returned to torment him.

All that wound up happening—to Declan and everyone around him—wasn’t solely because of the election either, though those first dazed weeks in November had completely undermined Declan’s vision of how the world was supposed to work: good deeds rewarded; villains getting their comeuppance. Nearly every day, Declan still thought of that horrible mistake Densmore tricked him into making and the confession Densmore all but forced him to write in his diary. But really, he didn’t know why he kept beating himself up over what had happened when others did far worse, felt no guilt, and faced no consequences. Densmore still lorded over his Annex, treating his actors like his prisoners, and he still lived in the same lovely house and made nearly two hundred grand a year. Trump was on TV every day threatening Muslims and immigrants, and he was about to enter the White House. Declan had gotten kicked in the balls and punched in the face for mistakenly thinking someone wanted him, and where was he now? Still in his shabby Sauganash bungalow with too much clutter, not enough furniture, a wife and son who barely tolerated him, memories he would never be able to shake, and a fate he figured he would just have to endure.

The only time Declan felt free of guilt, anxiety, or self-doubt was on Thursday trivia nights at the Deacon’s Daughter, a neighborhood bar on the northwest side of Chicago. Declan and his team, the Serviceable Villains, hadn’t lost a match this season, but on the last trivia night before Thanksgiving, the topic was football, and neither Declan nor his teammates had been able to answer a single question in either the “Defensive Deviates” or “All-Pro Sex Offenders” categories. They were eliminated in the first round, at which point the whole fateful conversation began.

While the other teams competed to win free drinks and a fifty-dollar gift certificate to Hub’s Gyros, Declan sat at the bar nursing an O’Doul’s in the company of his three teammates: part-time set designer and full-time mattress salesman John Herrington, whom Declan called “John Falstaff”; John Shelley, a retired landscape architect (Declan called him “Old John of Gaunt”); and “Mistress Quickly,” aka Dr. Patricia Roebling, a prim, effervescent assistant English lit professor at Northeastern Illinois. Patricia served as volunteer dramaturge and botany researcher for the site-specific productions of Arcadia, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and The Norman Conquests that Declan had directed at Indian Boundary Park, where he worked full-time as activities coordinator. The two Johns often told Declan that Patricia was in love with him, but Declan said Patricia was

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