The Play’s the Thing By Stephen Whitaker

He stood straight against the brick. My God he pulsed. Brooded. In waves. Like in those old terrorist films where the camera pans in on the one anxious dark skinned man in the crowd. Something about him put the hook in me. My friend Kate could see that I had engaged his root directory.

“Really, March? Really?” She shrugged and took a hit of her vape. “Well, he’s kinda hot with the dreads. Don’t see those much anymore.”

“Not cityside,” I said.

His skin was a bit darker than most, and he wore black pants, and a cable sweater against the autumn air.

“If you’re thinking about breaking contract early, just let me know,” Kate teased, “Professor Walker has intimated that I join him in Paris for the convention.”

“Get out.” I had noticed Walker had been massaging her about the convention; he’d even asked her to stay after class. “Don’t worry, sweetie.” I squeezed her hand and leaned in to kiss her cheek. “You still have me for another month. You just might have some competition.”

“Ouch, girlfriend.” Kate laughed and walked around me so I could cruise tall dark and handsome’s root. Jack Stas. 23. Russian father, deceased. Mother, Caribbean. Professor of Proscriptive Literacy NYU. I cruised his social network as I passed by him, hoping he’d look me in the eye, but he was distracted and didn’t see me, didn’t even cruise my root. Needless to say I was intrigued.

“Well?” Kate asked, leaning close to my neck. “What does the March hare say?”

“The March hare says I need to check him out again.” I smiled. “When he’s willing to pay me some mind.”

We laughed and went out into the stream on assignment for class. Advanced social engineering, a class held in the world, in the stream.  Human interaction, that’s what we were supposed to be filming and recording. Kate and I swung through the shopping district. Getting anywhere cityside is a long exercise in patience. So many people. We went with the flow, and window shopped.

“I have no photographs for this spread,” Kate sighed, searching through her bag for a makeup wand. “I’m gonna need your refill cap, I think I left mine in the room.”

We shared everything in those days, and I was fishing through my own pockets when I saw him again. Jack Stas was walking towards In Vino Veritas, the boutique wine shop on the corner. For a second he looked over to us, but he didn’t see me. He stepped downstairs, to the basement like he was on a mission.

“Kate.”

“Yeah,” She was re-applying her eye shadow. An obsession of hers.

“Kate.”

“What?”

“Jack Stas just walked into the basement of that wine boutique.”

“And?”

“Come on.” My body was in motion and moved towards the crosswalk. Kate had no choice to follow me. She read on my root my anxious arousal. I read on her root a tepid annoyance.

I sensed her hurt as she walked behind me. The subtle way she stomped her feet, the way she snapped closed her handbag. Noises and actions that didn’t show up in root. Kate played tough; she was jealous of Jack.

The basement sunk into the street, and we ducked to enter the space, recently painted in nano-paint, currently a black satin. Thirty or so others sat on the floor or on chairs facing what appeared to be a raised floor. I didn’t know it was a stage ‘til I sat down. I had never seen one before in person.

“True love?” Kate purred in my ear. “There ain’t no such thing. Not for me. Not for you, either.”  Her vapour turned blue and curled and coiled like a snake before dissipating. “You wanna talk about true love? I can see that you are aroused. You cannot lie to me.”

“Look at this place.” I had never been in a basement before and this space was not how I pictured it. The outside world streamed by, and I could hear them, thousands of people walking by, unaware that we were inside. The feeling made my stomach feel tipsy. Strange.

Wind slammed the shutters against the cafe’s windows. Overhead, an air quad’s shuttle hummed, foot traffic increased, sounds of feet, the occasional shout. Jack hadn’t seen me yet, but he was sitting across from me, feet away. It was then I realized my root wasn’t backing up. Kate tugged on my elbow. She pointed to homemade Wi-Fi blockers, painfully obvious to anyone who cared to check out the basement.

“I’m out of stream, so are you,” she said with distaste.

“We all are,” I replied. And that was when the lights went out. We were holding our breath in the dark, and then from the ceiling, a single light shone on a stage of black. Curtains of red closed and then opened to reveal a bust of a white man on a stool. It appeared out of place until it wasn’t out of place anymore; it became a stamp upon the air. In memory, there were fat minutes where nothing happened. As if the world held its breath. If we were rooted and synched the audience would know its own tense anxious wonder. But we weren’t. There was fear from being separated from the group, and it manifested in a nervous haze. I still didn’t understand what was about to happen.

She entered wearing white, a simple smock of satin with lace trim. All citywide girls own something like it once in their life. Her hair grew copper under the light, and she moved as if she were the happiest woman on the planet. Instantly I knew her to be in love.  Swelling, she sighed, and she made motions with her hands as if she were gazing in a mirror. But it was as if we were the mirror, the audience. Her reflection was all of us, staring back at her in the dark, peering closer and closer, the smell of her perfume telling us all we needed to know of her intentions.

She moved with a light beat to her spirit.

Kate held my hand, and pressed into me. Our skin flushed together. She caressed my fingers, and put her head on my shoulder.

He entered next. Tall, thin, but aged in the eyes. Dark skin, but it was a glamour. But I believed it, not because it was expensive nano make-up, but because when he entered the space he engaged her, read her body, put his hands on the right places to begin a dance around the stage. Around a room. Together.

It was when they spoke first that I felt Jack’s eyes on me.

The woman began, and her words I did not understand, so lush and open, strange. Jack distracted me, his eyes catching me deep in their spoons. We must have stared at each other for a minute or more, and I blinked and waved with my fingers. He smiled and his look made me blow a kiss, a half kiss, a puff of air. The woman’s queer words fell silent.

We turned back to the stage. The man kissed the woman full on the mouth, and his hands were on her waist, and pressing her in a way that made me jealous of her, for he was a man who knew what to do with his lover’s body.

Because they were in love.

Lights darkened. Kate pulled on my elbow.

“What the hell were they saying?”

“I…” And before I could respond.

“They are in love, a passion greater than the whole of their world,” said an older woman with plastics. She gestured to us with an open hand. “There is something lurid about it though, can’t you feel it?”

Someone emphatically grunted, and the lights faded, and the man, and the woman next appeared in plain green clothes, only the woman was a man now, her hair pinned up, and her voice a no nonsense hum. I wanted her voice to strangle me, and wrap me like a cloak for it was so pleasurable to hear her soothing cadence.

I didn’t look at Jack Stas again until the end, when the man wrapped his hands around his wife’s neck, and put her light out. It broke my heart, so many of us cried out. I heard Jack’s voice, and we looked at each other across the dark, and I whispered the words. I love you.

And his eyes fell through the world to me, and I knew he loved me back.

After the couple bowed and vanished through a small door behind the stage, we met face to face.  We did not speak.

Instead we held hands and matched our intensity.

“My name is Jack Stas.”

“I know.”

“You have me at a disadvantage.”

His skin was perfect. Its smoothness leapt from his face and his eyes were electric blue. His index finger pushed a strand of hair over my ear. “March Hayes.” My stomach felt like it had been turned upside down.

“Should I be impressed, Ms. Hayes?” He smiled, and took my hand, and drew it to his lips.  I swallowed loudly.

“Back to stream,” yelled a man in a work-shirt, and a civic work helmet. He turned the blockers off, and suddenly we were in sync, our dash flashing to life.

“In two days here, dusk,” Jack whispered, “the next show.” And then he placed his finger to his mouth to shush me.

“In stream,” I said to myself. Soon as I was backed up I locked into his root and saw that he was locked into mine.

“I must go,” I said, but he already knew.

“Yes, your father…”

And then he turned and walked up to the street, his eyes tracking me as Kate moped into my range, and regarded me with mock shock.

“Way to cut to the quick,” Kate said. She smirked, and turned, and walked ahead of me, and up out the door. “I guess I’ll say yes to the professor.”

*  *  *

Kate didn’t speak to me for almost two hours, an eternity, punctuated by the eerie time hangover from being out of the stream for two hours. The spell of the man and woman’s queer words hung in my mind like stained glass, the light amber, and bright, and blue burning through them.

I directed our afternoon towards her favourite restaurant, which she picked up on after a few moves west.

“It’s not going to help,” Kate grumbled, her heart just under her tongue. Her biometrics were within the curve of someone whose anger was waning.

“I’m sorry. I do not know what to say.”

Kate did not speak for a while. The crowds slowed things cityside. The Bear in the Pit had a line around the corner, but if we queued up, we’d be inside by dinner time. So we queued.

“The slide, that’s what my mother calls it,” Kate finally said. My biometrics gave it away, but I covered, a weak gesture. “What do you mean?”

“You know what I mean, I can tell. There’s no lies anymore.”

“I didn’t mean for it to happen.”

Her face matched the bounce of her amygdala regions, her mouth moving up into a hill

surprise.

“Really. I…something about him brought me to attention. Woke me up, I think.”

“That was,” she hushed her voice. Those near us could read our anxiety, and fear on our

root. “That was what we saw. That man and woman. Those words.” Kate looked back and forth as if the Jack Robbers were already sidling up next to us for conspiracy.

“What was that?”

“A show. Something from the old world…It made me sad.”

“Me too.”

“I liked it,” Kate said, her lips up in a grin. I treated her to dinner, roasted vegetables, protein blocks, bread, and artificial wine. Kate and I came home full, warm in the belly. We did not speak of the man or the woman, or of the strange words.

Of course Jack and I were talking, messaging, learning about each other. Until we didn’t. What was there to speak about? I counted the days ‘til next week when Kate and I hiked to In Vino Veritas again.

And Jack leaned, dreamy, his jacket draped over his shoulders. He didn’t see us. We were just another pair of rich girls walking to class on a fresh autumn morning.

“Hey, handsome,” I said.

He turned to us, and our roots matched, and locked, and I reached out for his hand.

“Kate.” He greeted her with a nod. Behind him, one of the Wi-Fi blocker’s antennae stuck up against the basement window plate glass. Any citizen walking by could ID it for what it was.

Do you know what language can do to the mind when unfettered by data? By all rights we were guilty of potential treason and conspiracy to be out of stream for so long. But the odds, just a handful of folks, off line, at irregular times, on the city floor? Not an emergency. On a quad, no way. Jacksquad would come down on irregular streams like white on rice. But not on the street. Not in the city. The old world interrupts the new every now and again.

Under In Vino, one of the shopkeeps had set up a table with a single red rose in a vase, and a few bottles of wine for the audience. We sat with little plastic cups and drank red wine and waited.

Jack and I held hands. We made plans to meet. Kate rolled her eyes, and teased me when Jack wasn’t looking. She’d forgiven me. We were almost out of contract anyway.

The lights went dark, and the man entered first this time, face bare of glamour, his eyes two sharp jets moving through us. Kate leaned into me, and whispered, “I’m gonna sign his contract, for sure.”

We laughed, and a woman in front of us, broad faced, short dark hair, light skin, turned to us. “That’s his wife, the woman. They’ve been in contract for years. That’s what I hear anyway.”

Someone shushed us. More wine was passed around.

When he began to speak it was clear that he was a lord. He wanted love, ached for it, and the broad words rolled, and echoed in the air. The woman came on next, entered as a man, and the two entertained a world, switching roles, and laughing. At times I did not know if the characters were in love or out of it, but it did not matter, for the flutter of breath, and grace of their movements gave the words wings.

The speed and dexterity of their tongues kept our eyes moving up and down as if we were clouds created by their humidity. Gender made no difference to their costume. Their emotions stirred our own.

At one point Jack leaned to kiss my ear.

I lurched into my body, and its pleasure, and I grabbed his thigh and I knew, without root, without the stream, that we were experiencing love together, at the same moment, in the throes of the alien language, and symphonic rhythm.

And time? No longer accounted, it betrayed my space and my emotions. The artificial wine did its work as well, and Jack’s caresses. And Kate’s too, her warm body next to me as the story progressed to a love knot of mistaken identity. The couple’s fire and ice did something to our bodies. The on and off again characters did not matter, it was all the same; their love, their fight, their hate, their kissing, their breaking apart…a long breath of a great love spoken in a way that made your head light.

Jack came home with me that night, and Kate went out with Cass, and we shared a night locked up together, memories of our time out of stream right next to each other, but unknown, in the dark, like our performance.

*  *  *

“Your father, is he still?”

“In it to the hilt.” I laughed at Jack.  Part of me was taken aback, just a little.  A tug of aggression. And of course he could read the elevation in my blood, and see the spike in my adrenaline.

“Is it working?” Jack asked. His naked chest was a smooth stretch of muscle. He smelled vaguely of lemon, garlic, spices. “This master plan.”

“My name will guarantee me a government job, if I want it, or a private sector gig.” He rubbed my back. “So yeah, I guess it is working.” I gave him a fake scowl, and he swatted me with a pillow.

“All those brothers and sisters,” he laughed. “And you couldn’t see my pillow attack. I don’t buy it.” He swatted me again.

And then, of course, it was on.

We ended up in the floor, and each other’s arms, on top of the pillows. After, we agreed to meet the next week. At night, this time. For the next performance.

*  *  *

When you feel attracted to someone time contracts. Even in the stream, time shrinks, and enlarges its own account. Waiting for Jack’s IM, waiting to interact with his root, which pricks the heart to touch, waiting to hear his voice in the ear. Waiting to feel his skin on my skin.

Where Jack found the paper I cannot say. The letter, a small square of white parchment, was left under my door. I knew it was him, that the letter was for me. Kate knew too, and rolled her eyes when she saw it.

“You must be worth it. Must have cost him a month’s work,” she said. It was one of the last moments we shared in contract. She and Cass were hitting the bars. Though I believe Kate did so to make me jealous, or perhaps to seek a respite from my feed. She knew how I felt, and I knew how she felt, and she wanted a firewall between. “Letters. I know I don’t rate that high.”

I had never touched paper before, and when I opened it I was afraid it was going to fall apart in my hands. Kate watched me, and her root showed that her anxiety and anticipation matched mine.

The writing was careful, all the lines straight and precise. It had an odour; cologne, and something else. A distinct smell. I know it to be ink now, but the smell was alien to me and sharp as his words of love for me. When he wrote it, I cannot say. I found no images of it on his root, and deduced that he must have written it out of stream. My love for you has turned me inside out, and upside down. I am an empty bottle, poured out, without your sweet wine.

            No one had ever written me before, and I had never seen handwriting, which looked so fragile, as if a tear, water, or a finger could swipe across those lines and ruin it.

“Your root,” Kate reminded.

I waved her off. I cared not if anyone could see what he had written. But there are no private thoughts in the stream.

My father contacted me shortly after, the spell of the words and the letter still running through me.

“End it before it begins,” my father said. He was working at the state office, interacting with air quad water filtration regulation officers. “I urge you to avoid a long term contract with this young man. I remind you of your family obligations.”

“Dad, it’s…”
“Avoid a long term contract. No children with this man.”

“I don’t know what to say.”

“You don’t have to say anything.  Your mother and I are following your root carefully.”

“And what does she say?”

“She’s in line with the Hayes tradition. She favours a six month contract. Her idea. Not mine. I like Kate, personally. You should extend with her until you are ready for children.”

“Mother hasn’t said anything to me.”

“Does she ever?”

Mother was in Paris, hanging above the city in her comfy quad with my youngest sister.

He did not ask any further questions. Whether he had backtracked through all of my feed or if he had read my highlights, I do not know. The information was his to know if knowing was what he wanted.

*  *  *

The night before the performance Kate met Cass for drinks before a date, and then left Cass to her fun. This freed me up to meet Jack early, to spend an extra hour in the basement with him, unfettered.

The cityways throttled with people. Ten abreast on the walks, the streets crammed with humming trolley cars. Professor Walker had been dropping into our streams all week, commenting on what was in our feed. His IM flashed in my corner as I passed the state shelters. “Conflict and interaction everywhere. You have some promising material to incorporate into your presentation.”  My father IMed me about my obligations. So did two sisters, and my oldest brother. Lip service. Polite conversations. Nothing out of the ordinary.

The sun went down on the old brownstones, and roasted meat hung the air. The hanging vines of the heated garden buckets in the windows, the arching beanspreads in the little corners of the city. It enabled my love, all of those people, those hearts beating right next to yours. Another mind, sometimes a few inches from your own mind, I could read their root, and still not know the passion behind the body.

It was being out stream, and being in love with Jack that brought forth my spike in biometrics. I should have foreseen problems. I should have used the stream.

But I didn’t.

I did what they tell you is treasonous to do: conspiracy.

I went underground into a buffer zone to see the play. To meet my love.

The jackrobber blackouts were bent at angles, like handwriting, a slanty I, a longing Y. And I thought of my letter as I entered the basement of In Vino Veritas. At first I worried, for my root flickered and did not go offline, and I grew fearful that I had made a mistake, a tactical error. That I would be picked up in a stakeout. But then the root went silent and cycled into buffer.

“You’re early,” said a tall man, his eyes looking right into me. He had stacked a few crates of artificial wine next to a service entrance.

“Yes, I’m sorry. I’m meeting someone here.”

“Happens all the time.” He smiled. He looked familiar but I could not place him.

“You came last week,” he said.

“And the week before last. I loved it.” Then I understood, blushing, embarrassed. “It’s you.”

He laughed. “Right now I am only me. Small and ordinary. But in an hour or so, I shall be transformed.” He bowed and bent to his task, and opened a crate, and took out the bottles, and placed them on a table.

I was about to ask about those wonderful words he spoke, I had so many questions, but could not think to ask him, so shocked was I to find him unmasked, doing drone work. Then, Jack entered with flowers, and his own bottle. He looked dashing in his forest green, and black, the grey trim brought out the metal in his eyes.

He took me in his arms, and I must admit, time slipped into a trance. A lovely moment of hunger, and ache. I cannot explain it any other way. I cannot recall a few minutes, for we kissed, and touched, and I could hear and feel his heart beat next to my own, so passionate we were. Like falling through the bottom of a wave into a warm clear lagoon.

“My God it has been so long,” he said, his hands fluttering across my face.

I leaned into him, wanting to be enveloped by his warmth and safety. Like I fit there, like we fit each other.

He took me by the hand, and we went into the dark corners where the wine shop stored boxes, and crates; a long corridor of storage that stretched beyond into a cave.

“The shop is built into the earth, and long ago there were storage rooms dug out of rock. To think the city built into the earth, before the streets, before the overcity, and the quads. My apartment is over Midtown. The top of 40 Rock is a small point below the lowest deck of my arch. Weird to think that below buildings, not so long ago, people lived and worked, and stored wine.”

“Yes, it’s…”

He shushed me, and leaned in for a kiss, and I lost my breath in his, and we fed each other breath in our embrace. He touched me on the neck, and my knees quivered. We made love on his jacket, our skin goose fleshed from the cold basement air, and the shivers of our pleasure. By the time we joined the crowd we were buzzing on each other, and the real red wine he had spent a week’s worth of salary on, a dusky red. The old city sung in my bones that night as we took our seats in the packed crowd. I did not see Kate, nor think to look for her.

They entered together, in the dark, by candlelight, and the shadows played across our faces as we listened to their doublespeak. Troubled families in the wake of hate, and malice. And again we slipped into their world of switching character and position. The throated breath tightened, and loosened the words as they slipped, and knotted, and cried, and loved from their mouths. I didn’t see the jackrobbers slip in behind.

And there was no black feed, their calling card when they spread their cloak through the stream. We simply just didn’t see them coming.

On stage, the woman was slipping away from a bloody accident in the street, some fight over name, and pride, and the man was crying from his friend’s death when the lights snapped on, and our signals started to rebuffer and stir to life.

“Jackrobbers!” Someone shouted, and we rose at once to bolt for the exits. The woman and her husband slipped the knot, for when the jack cops started cracking skulls and arresting citizens, they had vanished into stone.

Jack took my hand and we broke towards the cellar, the stores of wine. We entered its throat and started to run.

“Stop!” Voices behind us blended into chaos.

I had never ran anywhere but the gym, and hit my arms and shoulders against the sharp corners of the storage racks and cabinets. Jack looked back at me. “Tunnels. The old city will save us again.”

From behind, the jackcops started to fire the riot guns. The burst of electric bolts turned the air blue, fried ozone filled the air.

Jack led me by the hand and we turned the corner and ran behind. The stone floor bottomed out, and ahead I thought I saw a flashing dash of red. The woman, her husband! Ahead, we ran into darkness, where there were no windows and no lights.

Heart in my throat, and pounding in my ears, I thought we were going to die. We were not in the stream, and to my untrained eyes we ran at low stone walls, and around old stone wells, for there was the sound of water dripping, and the dank smell that hangs about the river.

Behind, the call of a jackrobber. A single shot rang and bounced against stone.

Jack led me in the dark for a stretch and we ascended a small flight of stairs that led to the alley on the other side of the street. And in a flash we were up above the dark.

The street air hit us in the face. Jack leaned over and kissed me, pushing his hands over my breasts and thighs. “Kiss me back. We’re in the stream now. They must not read our fear.”

And I understood. We were in stream now and IMs flashed across my sight. My own biometrics showed me in fight or flight.

“They’ll be on us in a second!” Jack said, panicked. He pushed his tongue into my mouth, and I bit his lips and dipped the bowl of my groin into his.

And then we were trapped, live and in flux, two jack cops combing the alley entrance behind us. But there was no black feed. No emergency bulletin. Across the way, the jackrobbers lined citizens up, and pushed them into a car bound for prison. The magistrate, judge warden, and the legal team milled around smoking vapes on the street. They would make short work of the treasonous, and the careless would be unlicensed, and forgotten.

I moaned with pleasure and sent my biometrics into the pleasure zone.

Jack took my hand. We hustled out the back of the alley.  And when we hit the main drag, we tried to laugh, to fake it until our emotions steadied into invisible plainness.

“Time, perhaps to take a break from this side of the city.”

I didn’t respond. I scrolled through my dash, pretending that my life was normal, uninterrupted: Where did you go? Are you alright? Your feed? You didn’t respond? There is a raid near your location! I ignored them all and kissed Jack.

“Are our houses so different?” I asked, pulling away for a moment. I wanted to kiss him.

“Too much, I’m afraid. Time…it’s time.”

“What are you going to do?”

“I’m for the European border states. A job, or more likely, a studentship.”

“Just like that?”

“It’s better this way,” and he looked back to In Vino Veritas. When I looked my throat leapt up, and I coughed to clear it. Jackrobbers leaned against the buildings, cruising the feeds of the men and women who passed them by. A man I recognized from the show was being yanked into the street and cuffed. In pairs they searched for those who escaped.

For us. And the couple.

“We must go.”

We said no more. When he kissed me the last time, I knew I would never again feel such

passion. I’ve been alone in the stream ever since.

*  *  *

“The world depicted in “The Play’s The Thing” is a futuristic, over-populated, over teched world. This world government has outlawed many things, including live theatre, and Shakespeare. In “The Play’s the Thing” a couple (consisting of two female grad students–we are post-gay in this world, btw) nearing the end of their romantic contract, stumble across an underground staging of Shakespeare. The magic of Shakespeare intrigues them, and one of the girls falls in love with a fellow audience member, much to her lover and her father’s dismay.  She risks her relationships, and possibly her freedom to be with this man, and to continue seeing the underground, illegal plays, whose alien language holds her in thrall. The title is taken from a line from Hamlet; the dark prince is plotting to lay a trap for his Uncle Claudius.

“The Play’s The Thing” was inspired by overheard conversations between friends who were discussing how they stalk potential romantic partners via Facebook and Twitter.  In the story, the characters exist in a world where there is no privacy. The world is crowded, expensive, and held together by “the stream,” which essentially the internet, or what a future permutation of the internet. To be “out of stream” is to commit treason. When you are out of stream the government assumes you are up to nefarious deeds and villainy. Hackers, instead of trying to infiltrate systems and infrastructures, are trying to keep the infrastructure from infiltrating private life.

In this futuristic world (dare I say dystopia?) everyone is directly rooted into the stream. When you get close enough to someone you can read their feed. For example you walk to the store to buy milk, and if you choose, you can “see” what everyone you come into contact is doing, thinking, feeling (by way of biometrics), and reading, who they are interacting with, what kind of web activities they are into and up to, etc.  It’s not explicitly stated, but this feed can be seen without the use of wearable tech. It’s hardwired into you. You are the stream. This is a world without secrets. Everything is out in the open, your political leanings, your sexual fetishes, your private particulars can be accessed by anyone. All for the better good, eh? Be careful what you google.”

Stephen Scott Whitaker is a member of National Book Critics Circle, and literary review editor for The Broadkill Review. His poetry, fiction, and essays have appeared in dozens of publications. His previous chapbooks include the steampunk inspired The Black Narrows, the award winning Field Recordings, and The Barleyhouse Letters.  Whitaker teaches theatre, literature and psychology in rural Maryland. In 2004 he was the recipient of an NEA grant to adapt Romeo & Juliet into a rock musical. He lives on the Eastern Shore of Virginia with his family.