Free The Daredevils by Gary Amdahl Page B

or, how shall she put it . . . lost his balance. He is, she thinks, using one of his pet phrases, “out of joint,” and she wants to know which of these metaphors he prefers. She sees how liable he is to become an icy clown or an ironic lout if he is not understood and applauded. That a spell was woven she cannot deny, but now wants out.
    A little boy, no more than five, who has been standing very near them, only half-there, like a sprite, or a cupid, he is so chubby and pretty, like a cupid carved in the corner of a great ceiling now mysteriously between herself and Charles, says—no, sings, chants—very clearly and sweetly in the silence, “When I put a chair in my head, it’s so I can sit in my head. I take my body apart and put the pieces in my head. And then I sit in my head.”
    He is the plumber’s son. Again and again and again, he is the plumber’s son.
    Cheerful laughter chitters and laps around them.
    Charles claps his hands. She sees he is not laughing, but, to her great relief, would like to.
    â€œAnd what’s yer name, young feller?” Charles asks him.
    Suddenly shy, he looks down, then, spinning, runs stage left and disappears in the shadows of the wing, shouting for his father, who is standing and chuckling in the middle aisle of the steeply raked orchestra seats, under the chandelier, where Vera had been sitting in her winding sheet. Laughing loudly, father calls out to son.
    Allowing himself to smile, Charles addresses his actors. “I know you don’t all have all of your lines yet, but find a script and, quick as you can, let’s run through the whole play, shouting your lines as fast as you can say them and running around the theater until you run out of breath! That includes the balcony, the wings, the stairways! Run until your heart is pounding! Noémie! Lord Deepmere! Start us off, please!”
    Thus was the story told of the wealthy Californian who goes to Europe in search of art, of beauty, who falls in love with the widow of an impoverished aristocrat, and who encounters simultaneously a deep disdain for his lack of family and a deep lust for his surplus of money—in about a quarter of an hour of helter-skelter hilarity . . . while outside, a tiny, celebratory, nominally pro-war rocket rose up on a thin line of fizzing and sparking red flame, broke the window next to the one Charles had left open (there was, in the immediate aftermath and first stages of investigation, some suspicion, for amoment or two, that someone had secretly entered the theater and opened a window on purpose). It exploded loudly but without much force, and began to burn itself out smokily in the carpeting. Which in turn caught fire, spreading quickly over the floor and consuming the false dome, under which hung the chandelier that was the main source of general lighting in the theater. When they smelled smoke and looked up and saw the paint begin to bubble, the ensemble, already darting and jogging, moved in confused anticipation toward the center of the theater, their lines trailing off and the speed of their movements slowing. When it became clear that the ceiling was burning, they scrambled left and right past the velvet seats, then up or down the aisles toward the stage or the exits, from which vantage points they watched the chandelier go dark. Shouting run run run, they all ran. Some of the last, Charles included, heard the heavy, slow crash in the darkness.
    He held a novelty handkerchief—red, white, and blue, stars and stripes, mandated by his board for publicity purposes—to his nose and mouth, and bent low as he could, bringing his knees nearly to his still falsely bearded chin, and walked up the front stairway to the second-floor lobby. The haze either stung and filmed his eyes and distorted his perception of the red-carpeted, red-wallpapered stairway, making it look narrower and steeper and higher than it was; or was he perhaps simply light-headed