Free Belonger (An erotic novel): Part One by Daniel Six

anticipation of the night’s
entertainment. The Merkin continued down a long axial walkway to
the great round platform at the center where his Stage M anager was attending to details with
several dox of smartly clad crew. He straightened at the Merkin’s approach.
    “ The scene has been set for
the game of hide-and-seek,” he confirmed.
    “ Very good, Martial,” the
Merkin replied, stepping onto the deck. Everything seemed in place.
“Was there any trouble with the auditioners?”
    The Manager shrugged. “Just the usual. They
have no problem with the notion of an audience till they’re
onstage. But the change in context with their fellow employees in
the crowd always unbalances them.”
    “ Well, let’s hope tonight’s
scenario identifies someone who can make the transition. Then we’ll
have a method for finding more,” the Merkin promised.
    Martial sighed dubiously.
    They traded observations for a while till
everything was ready. The Merkin made a final inspection of the
arrangements. “Bring the illumination down slightly and tint it
more to crimson,” he decided.
    The Manager called up instructions to the
curtained loft above the stage using a terse, functionally derived
argot and a crew member stationed there promptly adjusted the
emanation of various glow gnomes to a more seductive result. This
efficient-seeming communication belied a great challenge.
    It was the Merkin’s gift to
be understood by anyone hearing his words— in any context of interaction —and his
authority over the society of the Tent was rooted in this singular
faculty. But his servants were limited in expressiveness to their
role in his organization, excluded at some point on a progressively
subtler gradient of communication that only Martial could negotiate
with a nuance and sophistication approaching his own. The Manager
was consequently the one person with whom he regularly interacted,
and even then mostly within the shared context of their
craft.
    As a result of this situation, the Merkin had
no cast. He had long ago identified denizens of the Tent who could
follow directions and memorize lines. But the theater was
ultimately a creative domain, not a technical one, and the
employees who auditioned for his play exhibited an incorrigible
staginess, unable to transcend the functional basis of their
participation to act and interact naturally. Their narrow
distinction of ‘self’ and ‘other’ was grindingly unsubtle in
action, hardly sufficient to the aspirations of art.
    There were other ways to
cultivate talent however, so in place of reading from the script
itself, the Merkin had undertaken to experiment with stage
games inspired by
his play. In the throes of competition bolder personalities
sometimes emerged—a starting point for the casting process, even if
it was something of a game just to devise such
experiments.
    “ Let us proceed,” he
directed.
    “ Heads onstage! Merkin’s
cloud coming down!” shouted the Manager.
    “ Thank you!” the collected
personnel of the stage roared in acknowledgement, stepping clear of
the center.
    Up in the loft one of his
crew turned a winch and a matrix of
counterweighted hemp lines delivered an
unseen mass to the deck; a billowing,
couch-like furniture dressed in grey and
black linen—his narrator’s seat.
    It arrived with a muted boom
and t he Merkin settled himself cross-legged into its voluminous embrace, script carefully hammocked in his lap. He
surveyed the crowd a last time, saw that all the closest seats were
occupied.
    “ Heads onstage! Merkin’s
cloud going up!” the Manager called.
    He was quickly lofted to a place among the glow
gnomes that command ed an unobscured view of the deck
without being directly visible to the
audience . This arrangement was crucial , as the Merkin was the
narrator for his play. No other role granted such influence over
the stage, for as narrator he controlled the context of whatever was happening
below. This empowered him to flexibly