Chương 169: CHAPTER 97 - When the Levee Breaks (2)

Sunday. The new day dawned bright and happy, which somehow felt like an insult. A whole chapter of her new life was over—LAPA, the drama block, the smell of the Playhouse in the hour before a rehearsal, Kirby's classroom, McGregor's fitting room, and now, Kiritani-sensei. And now she missed the cats. Mr Chin. Mrs Catch'em… and Lim, her tiger-sized Munkustrap. They had been her steadfast companions through it all. Central Park remained indifferently beautiful.

The sky sat blue as her eyes, and the trees scattered their pollen, teasing the city's growing incidences of allergy. Rain, which was plentiful in late June, seemed utterly unenthused. As expected, Kiritani's exhibition was once more packed. It was ironic that those who had little interest in seeing him while he was alive were now fully passionate about his passing. Such, Eppie supposed, was the nature of consumers and artists. Around the park, New York breathed.

A man in a traffic-cone-orange shirt ran the reservoir loop three times while she sat there, sweat spreading a little further each pass. A woman set up an easel and painted the same stretch of elms, badly and happily, channelling Bob Ross. Two boys lost a frisbee in the lake, then ran crying to their helpless parents, who promised to buy another. A busker two benches down worked through something on a violin that made her [Perfect Pitch] wince.

A perfect Sunday, like Seurat's A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte. A painting the Met would love to host, were it not held in perpetuity by The Art Institute of Chicago." Potential."

Euphemia Fontaine Causality Strength 21 Athletics 509114 Agility 21 Acrobatics [Physicality] [Instrument: Guitar] Health Vitality 21 Endurance Pain Suppression 38 / 38 Wisdom 27 Insight Emotional Intelligence Perception [The Sublime] [The Clockwork Pulse] Legalism [Script Analysis] [The Empty Space] Stamina Intelligence 35 Arithmetics Accounting and Finance Business Acumen [Composer] [Memorisation] 35 / 35 Charisma 25 Persuasion [Act Natural] [Hitting the Mark] Intimidation Larceny [The Facial Landscape] [Songstress] [Vocality] [Gospel] Dasein Comeliness 25 Seduction [Love the Light] 35 TRAITS:: [Prophet of Profits] [Noblesse Oblige] [Perfect Pitch] [El Duende] [All the World's A Stage] [The Giving Tree] Inactive:: Even after two performances, she was up [99, 204] [Causality].

That was the final gift of Henry Kiritani. What was she to do with all this life? Euphemia Fontaine went for a walk. Her [System] wanted theatre. So she would go to the theatres. Eppie walked west and then south, past the pump without breaking stride, down, down, down into the theatre district on a Sunday when the matinee crowds had already come and gone and the evening ones hadn't started queuing yet. In the late afternoon, the marquees sat dark and panting, waiting out the gap between the shows.

Walking between the new and ancient theatre spaces, she noted with some alarm that, indeed, a small section of the district was already dark, permanently dark. If you stumble upon this tale on Amazon, it's taken without the author's consent. Report it. As a feature of urban New York, litter was ever-present. In the theatre district, receipts and wrappers were replaced by playbills along the gutters, traversing across the pavement for the river, face-up and face-down, travelling by wind.

Ticket booths sat shuttered behind grilles built for an era of brass and glass rather than plexiglass, gold lettering flaking gently off painted plaster, regardless of whether the show behind the door was running. She hadn't planned to end up here.

Her feet had simply stopped thinking somewhere around Fiftieth and carried her through the forties like a moth toward the big houses with their lobby lights already burning for a show that wouldn't start for hours, past Shubert Alley, all the way down to Forty-Fourth, where the street was loud and alive. She turned around and walked back north, slower, on the other side. That was when she saw the dark ones. Not dark for the gap between shows. Dark the way a house is dark when nobody is coming back for it.

Forty-Seventh had one. Forty-Eighth had three in a row. One house on West Forty-Eighth in particular held her a while longer than the others did, for no reason she could have named at the time. It was smaller than its neighbours, older, set a little back from the building line as though whoever designed it had wanted room enough to be looked at properly.

The facade, composed of cream terracotta and fluted pilasters and a frieze of dancing women worn faceless by the weather, hinted at a more glorious time of girls with tassels and men in waistcoats. A notice was taped over the box office glass, curling badly at one corner, its ink eaten by damp and traced over again in marker by someone with time to kill. FOR LEASE. There was a phone number she read once and filed into [Memorisation].

Peeling at the same corner of the glass was a poster for a production of The Woman in White, which Eppie assumed was by her present world's Sir Andrew and could be either a year or a decade old. She didn't recognise a single name from the cast list among the working productions on the strip, and wondered for a while where they had gone now. The leading lady's photograph was sun-bleached down to a pale oval where a face should have been, and could have been anyone.

Stepping back, she saw that the façade still carried better bones than most. The name was missing. Someone had torn out the gold lettering, and it wasn't the renovators. Eppie suddenly felt adrift as the block went about its Sunday business with neither care nor acknowledgement of her existence. Somewhere north, the matinee crowd was thinning, scattered with elderly women in their Sunday best holding their Playbills like hymnals. South, a tourist carried a girl asleep in a souvenir t-shirt.

East, two stagehands sat on a milk crate by a service door, glancing her way and smiling. Across the street, a pedicab driver slept sitting up. Then she heard the call of the familiar, in the bars of her own song. In the pines, in the pines Where the sun never shines Eppie froze. Someone was singing Pines. Her eyes travelled up West 48th and took in a sight as familiar as the neon billboards. A young, affable man was walking toward her.

A man without clothes, at least at first sight, tanned and free-range, with cowboy boots, a Stetson, a guitar with his name painted down the body, playing to nobody in particular. HOLY SHIT. Eppie put both hands to her mouth. To think that this MAN—this tanned Adonis of a dude—was as load-bearing as the House of Mouse, as Warner, as Universal, as Sony Music in the Great American experiment.

"Hey, little lady." He tipped the hat at her." In the Pines. That was you, right?"

"…Yes." Eppie's heart pounded. Lord. He looked so much taller, and… naked… from the perspective of her five-foot-one [Persona]. She nodded; her ears burned.

"Cheers for the classic, darling," he said in his southern drawl, then went back to his three chords, patrolling the street for tourists blushing for shame at the audacity of American freedom. She had no idea… no idea that the iconic saddle-less cowboy of Times Square could make her so nostalgic. + Karmic Causality She was still smiling when a man in a golf shirt leaned in from the kerb, close enough that she could smell his lunch.

"Hey, sweetheart. Where do you work?"

"… In theatre," she lied without so much as a blink. The middle-aged man laughed like she'd said something clever.

"Sure. How much for a show?" Eppie looked at him. She was sixteen years old, five-foot-one, in a cropped theatre top and cotton shorts, her hair loose in the wind, and she had been acting chummy on the public pavement with a man who was visually undressed from twenty feet. She looked pretty— very pretty— and unemployed. She understood exactly what he was asking. Her Strength of [21] yearned for a flower trough. There were dozens within reach. The city went on making its noise.

She got a cab on Eighth and did not speak to the driver. Sony Tower. Monday morning, Eppie arrived bright and early at work to not work. She sat in Curon's kitchen, drank watered-down coffee, and read the New York Times for clues of the impending crisis. She did a crossword in record time. Then watched her faux-father struggle with his.

"You know… Trent was asking about…" Curon gave up after a minute.

"Too soon." Eppie shook her head, for the recording booth couldn't channel [El Duende]. The skill was for the dead, during live performance.

"Tell Trent I am working on something. I think he'll hate it." Curon slapped his knees, then went back to the crossword. Eppie decided to check her email. Maddy had sent her one this morning. From: Madeleine Filmore < [email protected] > To: Euphemia Fontaine < [email protected] > Cc: Eric Lee < [email protected] >; Frederick Curon < [email protected] >; R. Salcedo < [email protected] > Date: Monday, 30th June 2008, 8: 20 AM Subject: IT STOPPED — the whole campaign 😵.

WEIRD (read below) Eppie 💐 I am sending this first thing because I have been sitting on it since TUESDAY. You were unbelievable on Saturday. That song—I am in tears. 🕯️ Okay, so this smear campaign: WHAT STOPPED Everything. All nine outlets. Both boards. The MySpace queue. Every account.

🛑 THE NUMBERS (comment volume, all channels) — Tue 24 June: 61 — Wed 25 June: 19 — Thu 26 June: 4 — Fri 27 June: 2 — Sat 28 June: 0 (as of 8: 30 PM) 😳 THE ELEVEN ACCOUNTS — All eleven "his little protégée" usernames went quiet the same afternoon. Tuesday 24 June, between roughly 2 and 6 PM Eastern. 🤨 — Not one post since. Not one. Why? THE OUTLETS — 24 June: two of the three originals quietly dropped the story. No correction, no retraction, no follow-up.

— 25 June: the third pulled the airport photo off the article page and left the article up. 🫠 — 26–28 June: zero pickups. Zero. On a story that was getting four a day. WHAT RAY SAYS Ray says it might have something to do with Kiritani-sensei. You were explicitly mentioned in the obituary. The 24th is the day the Times ran his obituary. 📰 I know. I KNOW. People don't read an obituary and grow a conscience. 😐 My manager tells me campaigns do not STOP, Eppie. They fade.

They get bored, they go bully someone else, and you eat a six-week tail of idiots. Why stop smearing? It costs money to get the momentum back up. This is cold. 🥶 WHAT STAYS IN PLACE — Police report: OPEN. Filed 16 June, stays filed. — Salcedo: retained to 31 July regardless. — Comment approval: stays on across everything. — No-comment policy: stays. 46 requests declined this week. 🚫 ACTION ITEMS 1. Read this. 📖 2. REPLY to this, with actual words, so I know you read it 😤 3. Do nothing else. 🤲 4.

I'm so sorry about Mr Kiritani. 🤍 Maddy. X Madeleine Filmore, Media Manager, Artist Services, Sony Music Entertainment T: (310) 244-XXXX | [email protected] Before Eppie could reply, her father's phone rang.

"Really? For Eppie?" He said out loud, then looked at her with both brows raised.

"From a producer? They asked for her by name? Why are you asking me? Am I her manager?" He looked at her some more.

"What, she's not answering her emails? Typical…" Eppie rolled her eyes.

"A film? A feature film?" Curon's voice rose.

"Does she audition?"" Yes—of course she'll audition."

"Alright… I'll tell her." Curon hung up.

"Maddy just called," he looked at her strangely.

"You've been invited to audition for a film. They're sending over the script now to my office."

"What film?" Eppie cocked her head. She was curious too about the contents of her father's exchange.

"How should I know?" Curon shrugged, as if he actually answered emails.

"Check your own damn email!" Sighing, Eppie refreshed her app. Three emails from Maddy, fresh as the summer outside, rose to the fore. She read them.

"Huh…" she said to no one." Looking for someone young who can act old…" Is that praise?! Eppie bit her vain and petal-perfect lips. Or is it an insult?!