S. P. Somtow - Absent Thee From Felicity Awhile..

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ABSENT THEE

FROM FELICITY

AWHILE…

by Somtow Sucharitkul

Here’s a variation on a theme that a few courageous writers

have tackled before—with a certain dread and a shock of

horror. Live life over again? Yes, and then again, no. But

this story manages to turn a new direction. The right to

achieve adulthood in a cosmic community must be learned.

You remember silence, don’t you?

There were many silences once: silence for a great speech,

silence before an outburst of thunderous applause, silence after

laughter. Silence is gone forever, now. When you listen to the

places where the silence used to be, you hear the soft insidious

buzzing, like a swarm of distant flies, that proclaims the end of

man’s solitude…

For me, it happened like this: It was opening night, and

Hamlet was just dying, and I was watching from the wings, being

already dead, of course, as Guildenstern. I wanted to stay for

curtain call anyway, even though I knew the audience wouldn’t

notice. It hadn’t been too long since my first job, and I was new in

New York. But here everything revolved around Sir Francis

FitzHenry, brought over from England at ridiculous expense with

his new title clinging to him like wrapping paper.

Everything else was as low-budget as possible, including me.

They did a stark, empty staging, ostensibly as a sop to modernism,

but really because the backers were penniless after paying

FitzHenry’s advance, and so Sir Francis was laid out on a barren

proscenium with nothing but an old leather armchair for Claudius’s

throne and a garish green spot on him. Not that there was any of

that Joseph Papp-type avant-garde rubbish. Everything was

straight. Me, I didn’t know what people saw in Sir Francis

FitzHenry till I saw him live—I’d only seen him in that ridiculous

Fellini remake of Ben Hur—but he was dynamite, just the right

thing for the old Jewish ladies.

There he was, then, making his final scene so heartrending I

could have drowned in an ocean of molasses; arranging himself

into elaborate poses that could have been plucked from the

Acropolis; and uttering each iambic pentameter as though he were

the New York Philharmonic and the Mormon Tabernacle Choir all

rolled into one. And they were lapping it up, what with the swing

away from the really modern interpretations. He was a triumph of

the old school, there on that stage turning the other actors into

ornamental papier-mache all around him.

He had just gotten, you know, to that line:

Absent thee from felicity awhile…

To tell my story.

and was just about to fall, with consummate grace, into

Horatio’s arms. You could feel the collective catch of breath, the

palpable silence, and I was thinking, What could ever top that, my

God?… and I had that good feeling you get when you know you’re

going to be drawing your paycheck for at least another year or so.

And maybe Gail would come back, even.

Then—

Buzz, buzz, buzz, buzz. “What’s wrong?” I turned to the little

stage manager, who was wildly pushing buttons. The buzzing came,

louder and louder. You couldn’t hear a word Horatio was saying.

The buzzing kept coming, from every direction now, hurting my

ears. Sir Francis sat up in mid-tumble and glared balefully at the

wings, then the first scream could be heard above the racket, and I

finally had the nerve to poke my head out and saw the tumult in

the audience…

“For Chrissakes, why doesn’t someone turn on the house

lights?” Claudius had risen from where he was sprawled dead and

was stomping around the stage. The buzzing became more and

more intense, and now there were scattered shrieks of terror and

the thunder of an incipient stampede mixed into the buzzing, and I

cursed loudly about the one dim spotlight. The screaming came

continuously. People were trooping all over the stage and were

tripping on swords and shields, a lady-in-waiting hurtled into me

and squished makeup onto my cloak, corpses were groping around

in the dark, and finally I found the right switch where the stage

manager had run away and all the lights came on and the leather

armchair went whizzing into the flies.

I caught one word amid all this commotion—

Aliens.

A few minutes later everybody knew everything. Messages

were being piped into our minds somehow. At first they just said

don’t panic, don’t panic and were hypnotically soothing, but then it all

became more bewildering as the enormity of it all sank in. I noticed

that the audience were sitting down again, and the buzzing had died

down to an insistent whisper. Everything was returning to a surface

normal, but stiff, somehow; artificial. They were all sitting, a row of

glassy-eyed mannequins in expensive clothes, under the glare of the

house lights, and we knew we were all hearing the same thing in

our minds.

They were bringing us the gift of immortality, they said. They

were some kind of galactic federation. No, we wouldn’t really be

able to understand what they were, but they would not harm us. In

return for their gift, they were exacting one small favor from us.

They would try to explain it in our terms. Apparently something

like a sort of hyperspatial junior high school was doing a project on

uncivilized planets, something like “one day in the life of a

barbarian world.” The solar system was now in some kind of time

loop, and would we be kind enough to repeat the same day over

and over again for a while, with two hours off from 6 to 8 every

morning, while their kids came over and studied everything in

detail. We were very lucky, they added; it was an excellent deal. No,

there wasn’t anything we could do about it

I wondered to myself, how long is “over and over again for a

while”?

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摘要：

ABSENTTHEEFROMFELICITYAWHILE… bySomtowSucharitkul Here’savariationonathemethatafewcourageouswritershavetackledbefore—withacertaindreadandashockofhorror.Livelifeoveragain?Yes,andthenagain,no.Butthisstorymanagestoturnanewdirection.Therighttoachieveadulthoodinacosmiccommunitymustbelearned. 1...

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