October

In the foyer there were two porcelain masks rising like glassy conspirators out of a porcelain basin filled with water. Comedy was turned away, staring with gleeful dead eyes down the corridor past the secretary’s office and the trophy cabinet and the loos. Tragedy craned upward. The tragic mask was supported by two brass pipes that ran up out of the water behind the jaw and the cheekbone and into the porcelain under-rim of each staring tragic eye. When the fountain was turned on, these pipes sucked the water up out of the basin and forced the tragic mask to cry.

There was a film of brassy grime around the waterline and at the bottom of the basin a few hopeful silver coins. On the pedestal underneath the basin was a plaque which said:

The Mind Believes What It Sees

and Does What It Believes:

that is the secret of the fascination

October

When he saw the pair of masks Stanley’s first thought was that some people turned the corners of their mouth down when they smiled and some people smiled when they were very unhappy. He was not looking at the masks now. He stood by the fountain with his hands in his pockets and frowned into the basin as he tried to dull the sick thump of his heart. The water had not yet been switched on and the surface was tight and smooth like the skin of a drum, the blue-veined porcelain masks dry and discolored in the still of the morning.

Stanley was almost an hour early, unable to bear any longer the tiny orbit around his bedroom as again and again he flattened his hair and checked over his application form and felt in his bag for the hard laminated edge of his audition number that he would later pin to his chest with a pair of tiny golden safety pins. The foyer was empty. The secretary’s office was closed and shuttered and all the arterial corridors were dark. He stood very still and tried to ride out his nervousness, as if it were seasickness or hypochondria or a phantom chill.

He heard the soft thud of the auditorium door and turned to see a boy approaching, red faced and disheveled and carrying an ancient disc gramophone, the fluted brass horn angled over his shoulder. It looked heavy. He was clutching the gramophone against him with both hands underneath its felted base, peering around it to check his way was clear and stepping delicately as he picked his way down the dark corridor.

“Hey,” he called, “are you a techie? You don’t have a key to the main office, do you?”

“Sorry,” Stanley said. “I’m here for the audition.”

The boy peered at him. “Oh, you’re one of the hopefuls,” he said dispassionately. “I forgot it was that weekend already. You nervous?”

Stanley shrugged. “Yeah,” he said. He flapped his arms a couple of times and tried to think of something adequately general to say, but nothing came. “Are you an actor?” he asked instead.

“No, I’m Wardrobe,” the boy said. “We’re just packing out The Beautiful Machine. Closing night last night and they need the theater tomorrow.”

“What’s The Beautiful Machine?” Stanley asked. The boy had halted at the foyer’s periphery, and it felt a little odd, the two of them calling out across such a large and marble space.

“The first-year devised theater project,” the boy said. “It’s kind of like proving yourself to the Institute, going off and doing something completely on your own in your first year. The things they come up with would blow your mind. They put it on properly at the end of the year, lights and everything.”

“Oh,” Stanley said.

“You should have gone,” the boy said. “Closing night last night. It was kickass.” He nodded toward the gramophone he was carrying. “Lots of musical guys in the batch this year so we went with a sort of a musical thing, really diverse and abstract. If you’d seen it, it would’ve blown your mind.”

Stanley watched the boy inflate, and noted the shift from they to we. He sensed that diverse and abstract were key words, buzz words that had the power to set the speaker apart and mark him as one of the chosen. This boy was studied in his carelessness, tossing his head like a pony and turning his hip out so he stood like a model in a menswear magazine.

“This your first time auditioning?” the boy asked. He moved now, walking over to the secretary’s office door and bending at the knee to place the gramophone carefully on the floor below the wall of oiled golden pigeonholes. Stanley heard the voice of his high-school drama teacher: Move as you say your line, not after you say it.

“Yeah,” he said. “Should I be worried?”

“Nah,” the boy said coolly. “Just relax and have fun and don’t try too hard. It’s way less of a big deal than everyone makes out.”

“Did you have to audition for Wardrobe?”

“No.”

Stanley waited, but the boy didn’t say anything further. He straightened up and tried the door of the secretary’s office half-heartedly, but it was locked. He looked again at Stanley.

“The thing that’s strange about this place,” he said, “is that nobody has anything terrible to say. Even the ones who don’t get in—have you talked to the ones who don’t get in?”

“No,” Stanley said.

“They always say, I know I want it now. I’ve seen a glimpse of what goes on in there and I might not have got in but I’ve got a fire in me now and by God I’m going to work and work and try again next year and I’m going to keep auditioning until I get in. They say, What an honor and a privilege to have been able to audition with these amazing people, spend a weekend at the Institute and get a glimpse into where real talent comes from. They say, That place is truly a place of awakening. Do you find that weird?”

Stanley shrugged uncertainly. He had stepped back a half-step while the boy was speaking and he could feel the radiating cool of the porcelain basin against the small of his back.

“Nobody gives the finger as they walk out the door. Nobody says, Thanks a fucking heap. Nobody says, I didn’t want to come to your pissant ugly school for dicks anyway. Nobody says, Bullshit I’m not as good as that guy, or that guy, you tell me exactly why I didn’t get in. Nobody says anything terrible at all. Do you honestly not find that weird?”

“It’s a prestigious school. I guess people just feel really strongly about that,” said Stanley.

“Yeah,” said the boy, contemptuous all of a sudden, and visibly dismissing Stanley as a person with nothing to offer and nothing to say. “Anyway, good luck. Might see you round here next year.”

“Yeah,” said Stanley. He felt ashamed of his own dullness but he was too preoccupied with his anxiety about the audition to care. He turned back to the fountain and shoved his hands viciously back into his pockets, listening until he heard the boy’s footsteps dwindle away down the corridor and finally the heavy velvet thump of the auditorium door.

THREE