Escapology

Escapology

1. Escape artist.

There is the audience, the arteries and eyes. There is the sharp intake of breath. The clasped hands. He is bound up like an important package, hands and feet, and his expression is not the calm of cattle at an abbatoir; it's the calm of a storm before the storm shatters everything. The audience conducts electricity like a live wire. The escape artist breathes. Smiles at the girl in the second row. Jumps into the water.

2. The girl in the second row.

She had invited the escape artist into her home. They sat at her kitchen table, without speaking, drinking cup after cup of peppermint tea. When they ran out of peppermint teabags they brewed tea from old newspaper clippings, reports of fires, and their tea tasted fine and newsworthy. When they ran out of newspaper they drank cups of air. "Take me with you," she said, finally. "Please. I want to go with you."

The escape artist smiled sadly, and shook his head.

3. Flood.

Is this Noah? When God flooded the world, did he make the water to love earth the way earth loves water? Was the flood a kiss? Did it feel the way this feels?

4. Metamorphosis.

In the second row, she breathes for the escape artist, offers him her bronchioles and alveoli, wants him to disappear forever, wants him to reach out his hand for her, aches for his breath, aches. If he comes back, he comes back for her, and will always come back. If he drowns, she will drown. It is how these things work. It is a mathematical theorem.

The escape artist blinks water.

Days before, she had kissed him on his collarbone, that breathing shelf. She said, "You live in another country." The escape artist looked bewildered. "I live right here," he said. But she thought of that moment before he stepped into the water tank, and knew it was somewhere else entirely. A quiet island. A botanical garden. Flowers grip his silence.

In the blank of his solitary flood, the escape artist pulls water into his lungs. The audience gasps. The girl in the secnd row watches the escape artist fall apart, watches his shape burst, his skeleton split wide, until his molecules turn and swim away, a thousand tadpoles, a thousand blind underwater eyes. She ignores the audience's disapproval. She steps out of her velvet seat, sheds her high-heeled shoes and her silk scarf, climbs up onto the stage, and presses her hands to the glass of the water tank. The tadpoles gather for her, spell out words and symbols. Apoptosis is a strange science. This small, she could carry him with her, her pockets full of him, handfuls of him. Each swimming eye is a story she wants to tell.

5. Denouement.

The trick is, there was a loose knot in the ropes. The trick is, there is a trapdoor underneath the escape artist's water tank, and he falls away to safety. There is no water at all in the tank. It is a trick of light.

The escape artist stalks through the crowd like a wild animal, dripping, proud and calm, waving to show his unbound hands. The audience exclaims. He is a master of slipping away. The girl knows the trick is in the eyes, the heart; anatomy's failure. She removes one elegant evening glove to clap. The escape artist bows. He disappears.

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