This pretty well defined the Pleroma that Aglaé and I found ourselves floating in: a field that was at once boundless, impersonal, indefinable, and absolutely transcendental. This was the “Ain Soph Aur” of the Jewish Kabbalah and the Tibetan and Mongolian and Buddhist “Eternal Parent, wrapped in her Ever-Invisible Robes, asleep in the Infinite Bosom of Duration.”

And that pretty well described Abraxas as well.

The Abraxas who waited for us here, the incarnation He chose to show us, held no surprises. This Abraxas was the Heavenly Chanticleer, straight from the paintings in Gnostic churches throughout the Tell: small as far as manifested Absolute Gods go—only about six feet tall, a little shorter than me—and matching our images down to his rooster’s head, curled serpent legs, and the whip he carried in one inhuman hand and the shield he carried in the other. The stars with their resplendent rays and the ogdoad symbol of the transcending seven planets were on his shield here rather than floating behind him, but the center of the large gold shield was taken up with a complicated design working the gold of the shield into the face of the sun. Abraxas’s eyes were not those of a rooster, but rather the predator orbs of a lion. His mouth was mostly beak, but the teeth and tongue were also those of a lion.

All in all, a modest visible incarnation for the God of Totality, the Lord of Opposites, who not only stands outside of time but rules outside of all mere religions as the reality of the eternally available timeless moment.

“You will perform a play,” said the dragoman.

“Yeah, yeah,” I said. “What else is new?”

When I tell you “the dragoman said” or “I said,” the words are not correct since the medium of the Pleroma, which was not a medium at all, carried no sound. There was no air in my lungs or in Aglaé’s lungs. The Pleroma satisfied our brains’ and cells’ need for oxygen, but it was exactly as if we’d drowned in the Fullness. I know that the other twenty-one members of our troupe were writhing in terror in the ship, trying to move, trying to breathe air that was no longer there, no more concerned about performing a Shakespearean play than a fish out of water would have been about working out multiplication tables as it writhed and flopped on some hostile shore.

But something the Muse or the dragoman—or both—had done to Aglaé and me allowed us to think, to move, and, by shaping the words with our mouths and minds even in the golden absence of actual air, to shape our thoughts to be heard as speech.

“Will you perform?” asked the dragoman, presumably speaking for Abraxas who floated before us.

I looked at Aglaé. She nodded, but this was redundant. After whatever we had experienced in the Muse’s room, this young woman and I were as in tune as two tuning forks struck to the same pitch and vibration.

“We will do parts of Romeo and Juliet,” I said. “However much we can do as a troupe of two.”

Now, neither Kemp nor Burbank nor any of the other elders of our troupe would have chosen Romeo and Juliet as one of Shakespeare’s pieces to perform when the future of our species—or even an important performance—was at stake. As appreciated as the old standard was by arbeiter and dole audiences around the Tell—and by the troupe itself, to tell the truth—it was earlier, easier Shakespeare: brilliant in its parts, but never the incomparable artistic achievement that was King Lear or Hamlet or Othello or The Tempest or even the Scottish Play.

What were our choices? It would have made more sense to put on The Tempest before the God of the Sun and Darkness, dealing as it does with the ultimate magus, magic, enchanted islands, captured races turned into slaves, and the end of control, probably Shakespeare’s farewell to the theater if Kemp in his cups is to be believed—literally the drowning of Prospero’s Books.

But I couldn’t have done Prospero on my best day. I’d never been understudy for Prospero and had had no regular role on the rare occasions when we produced it. And however we might abridge The Tempest, it would never make a workable two-person production for Aglaé and me.

Of course, neither would Romeo and Juliet, but I regularly played Samson in the opening scenes—“No, sir, I do not bite my thumb at you, sir, but I bite my thumb, sir”—and I’d been understudy for Alleyn as Romeo on multiple occasions. And Aglaé was wonderful as Juliet.

And so we started.

We decided to use the hull as a sort of wall behind us, better to define the stage in our minds and to reach back to touch if the pleromic vertigo became too bad. Other than the absurd rooster-headed Abraxas—solitary King, Bond of Invisibility, Breaker of the Cycles of Bondage, and First Power—there wasn’t anything to look at or hold on to out there in the Pleroma except the dragoman and the hull. And Aglaé. I looked at her, nodded, and floated forward a few yards.

Two households, both alike in dignity,

In fair Verona (where we lay our scene),

From ancient grudge break to new mutiny,

Where civil blood makes civil hands unclean.

From forth the fatal loins of these two foes

A pair of star-crossed lovers take their life;

Whose misadventured piteous overthrows

Doth with their death bury their parents’ strife.

Aglaé was watching me intently, wondering, I am sure, if I was going to do the entire Chorus’s part, but I wasn’t sure of the last part so I broke off there. Then I raised my arms and said conversationally in the direction of Abraxas, who was now seated on a gold throne that had not been there a second before, “Imagine, if you will, two young men, Samson and Gregory, of the house of Capulet, entering in swords and bucklers.”

Then I did act out all the parts between Samson and Gregory—I knew these lines well enough—and after that, quickly explaining the situation to the dragoman and the Lord of Light and Darkness in easily improvised phrases, I acted out the entrance of Abraham and a serving man of the House of Montague. In other words, I got to deliver my “but I bite my thumb, sir” line after all.

Aglaé had crossed her arms. I could read her thought. Will you be doing Juliet as well?

Instead I improvised a clumsy little summary of Montague and Benvolio’s scene—I’d played Benvolio once before when Philp was ill—and then summarized the coming scene between Benvolio and Romeo, stepping into character when it came time for Romeo’s major lines and speeches—he was smitten and love-sodden already, you remember—but, we learn, with Fair Rosaline, not Juliet. Shakespeare, never all that interested in logic or verisimilitude, was asking us to believe that in that small town where the Montagues and the Capulets had been entwined with enmity for centuries like a climbing vine on an ancient trellis, Romeo had somehow not seen, or even heard of, Juliet yet.

I stepped—or floated—back. Taking her cue perfectly, Aglaé moved forward facing Abraxas, summarized the scene with old Capulet, Paris, and the clown servingman Peter in just a few words, and then launched into the third scene where she played Capulet’s wife, the inimitable Nurse, and Juliet herself. Aglaé’s voice was never so beautiful as when she spoke for Juliet—a girl-woman only thirteen years old in Shakespeare’s mind. My Romeo was five years younger than I in real life… “real life” being the mind of the Bard.

And so our play advanced.

For the next scene, I summarized Benvolio’s parts but found that I could do most of Mercutio’s amazing lines perfectly from memory. “If love be rough with you, be rough with love: Prick love for pricking, and you beat love down.” I’d seen Mercutio performed by the best men of our troupe and now I added my own little bits of business with closed fist and thrust forearm for the pricking lines, picking up Mercutio’s madness and Romeo’s naive responses without hesitating a nanosecond between the wide shifts in tone and voice and posture and mannerism.