The Rehearsal (16 page)

He pointed at a chalked rectangle drawn on the gymnasium floor, and said, “All right. Everyone get inside the line, please.”

The students moved forward in a crush to get inside the rectangle. The area was small and they had to cluster tightly, shuffling
together and clutching at each other to keep their balance and stay inside the line. The girls drew their shoulders together
and became ever so slightly concave, carefully bringing their
upper arms forward and together from an instinct to protect
their breasts. The boys snickered and shoved each other with their shoulders and the backs of their wrists. Stanley found
himself in the middle of the crush, uncomfortably pinned between a pair of girls both facing inward. The girl in front breathed
into his collarbone and carefully shifted her feet so they were tucked inside his own. The rough edge of her foot touched
his, and she quickly shifted her weight to twitch away.

“Before we begin fighting I want to start with a few exercises that will get us comfortable with touching each other,” the
Head of Movement said. “This exercise is called The Raft of the Medusa. The aim of the exercise is to be the last person standing
inside this rectangle. When I say you may begin, you must all start pushing each other. If any part of your body touches the
floor outside the rectangle, you must leave the raft immediately. The last person to remain inside wins. Does everybody understand?”

There was a flurry of nodding from inside the cramped rectangle.

“Pushing only,” the Head of Movement said. “No punching. No kicking. Not yet.”

Everybody tensed their elbows and braced their legs, ready to fight. The students on the outer edge realized too late their
disadvantage, and all at once they tried to angle themselves better to worm their way into the center.

“All right,” the Head of Movement said. “Go.”

The rectangular crowd immediately began to boil. A few of the students were shoved out of the rectangle within seconds; they
skipped backward and retreated with a kind of rueful disappointment to watch. Stanley found himself surrounded by girls, and
at first he shoved at them gingerly, careful with his hands lest he touch their breasts by accident, using mostly his shoulders
and his hips. The girls were less polite. Little palms were shoving at the small of his back all of a sudden, pushing and
pushing, and he found his feet slipping on the floor. He
grabbed a fistful of somebody’s sweater in an effort to resist. The
whole crowd lurched suddenly sideways; everybody’s bare feet arched and skidding over the floorboards, and half the class
tumbled over the western chalked perimeter and off the raft. The disqualified students hopped neatly out of the way and left
the rest of the group to fight.

With a large part of the class gone, the winning students could move more freely. The game became more tactical and more deliberately
hostile. Stanley had one of the smaller girls in a clumsy underarm headlock and was trying to force her over the line when
another student fell sideways on to him and sent all three of them staggering off the raft. The Head of Movement was standing
calmly to the side. He checked his watch.

When the raft had been emptied of most of the students, the remainder formed a ring around the final fighters and began to
chant and cheer. The winning three were locked in a sweaty embrace in the chalky center of the raft, skidding sideways and
occasionally dropping painfully on to a knee or a hip and tugging the others down as they fell. Their legs were braced and
bowed as they grappled with each other, two boys and a girl—a wiry muscular girl with the shapely and decided figure of a
dancer.

Somebody on the perimeter set up a stamping rhythm, and soon all the students were stamping and stamping, their bare feet
sending up tiny clouds of white dust, the steady beat filling the massive space, rising up to the lofty stippled ceiling where
the hooded bulbs hung from their bluish rack unlit. The Head of Movement did not join in the stamping, but his long fingers
tapped in time against his forearm and his eyes moved carefully from the ring of cheering watchers to the fighting three,
and back again. Every time one of the winning fighters was shoved hard or forced closer to the chalk perimeter there was a
whoop of appreciation from the crowd and an explosion of clapping and laughter. The beat got faster and faster. The Head of
Movement nodded his head and sometimes smiled a tiny smile.

In a sudden fluent movement the dynamic of the struggling three abruptly changed, the boys turning upon the girl and moving
to work in tandem for the first time. The tacit flare of cooperation made the Head of Movement inhale gravely and stroke the
corners of his mouth with his finger and his thumb. The girl was finally ousted, hauled over the line by the boys shoving
at her in a parallel surge. The boys then turned to face each other, skipping quickly away from the perimeter and back into
the safety of the middle of the raft. The girl added her voice to the cheering and the stamping, and the boys were once again
locked in a skidding headlock, a weary inching dance that finally ended when the two of them fell across the southern line
in a tangled heap.

The first-years performed The Raft of the Medusa six times, repeating the exercise again and again until the students were
flushed and sore and strained. As the morning wore on, their posture gradually began to change, hardening and drawing upward
and becoming more aggressive and finally losing the curving self-conscious protectiveness that in the beginning had handicapped
them all so plainly. The chalked line soon bled out into sticky tracks of gray and white, tearing outward like a dying star.

“Thank you,” the Head of Movement said after almost an hour, when the red-faced victor had sent his opponent lurching over
the line for the sixth and final time. “Now you should all be nicely limbered up and you should have gotten used to touching
each other. I want to start with the very basics of stage fighting and build upward.” He gestured for them to gather round.
He said, “We’ll start with learning how to punch.”

The boy in the mask said, “I need a volunteer.”

The mask was cut away around his mouth like a jowl, curving over his upper lip so his chin and his lower teeth were exposed.
The hard plastic curve around his mouth made him look a little like a marionette, shiny and rigid and hinged. The surface
of the mask was smooth and flesh colored, with almond-shaped eye-holes, and attached to the boy’s face without elastic.

Several of the first-years in the audience raised their hands, grinning in a self-conscious, defensive way, and the masked
boy pointed at one of them. “You,” he said, and beckoned. This was evidently a sound cue: the gymnasium was suddenly filled
with the sound of a classic accordion, jolly and scissoring and gay.

The gymnasium door opened and the secretary darted in, trotting over to the Head of Acting and whispering urgently in his
ear. The Head of Acting nodded, rose, and followed her out. The door closed behind them.

In the audience Stanley shivered with unknowing delight. He watched the volunteer make his way through the audience and mount
the stairs to the stage. By now other masked figures were drifting coolly on to the stage from the wings, pacing about and
looking impassively out at the audience through the fleshy almond holes in their cutaway masks.

“This is an exercise in the Theater of Cruelty,” the masked boy called out above the rising sound of the music. “This exercise
is a challenge.”

He moved behind his volunteer. The boy stood and smiled uncertainly at them all, waiting for his instructions, listening for
sounds of the masked boy’s movement behind him, and rocking back and forth self-consciously on his heels. Then the masked
boy knocked him to the ground. As he fell forward on to his knees, the boy’s head was flung painfully backward, his expression
hurt and bewildered by the split-second impact but still half-smiling his nervous defensive smile. Swiftly the masked boy
darted forward and hit him again, and the boy fell flat on to his stomach, jarring his chin on the floor. In an instant the
masked boy was kneeling on his back, pinning him flat on the ground and twisting the boy’s wrists around behind his back so
he couldn’t move.

Somebody ran forward with a water-trough, a wide, flat basin filled with slopping water, and shoved it roughly down onto the
floor. The attacker grabbed a fistful of his volunteer’s hair, reared up, and plunged him headfirst into the water. He held
his own breath as he struggled to keep the volunteer’s head submerged, looking at his writhing victim down the length of his
stiff veined arms and pinching his lips together in concentration. The victim began to thrash out in desperation and fear,
his legs kicking out on the floorboards, panicked and flopping like a bloody gutted fish dying on the edge of a pier.

From where Stanley sat cross-legged in the audience, the pinioned drowning boy looked headless. Stanley could see only his
damp collar and the last white knob of his spine over the lip of the water-trough as he tried in vain to struggle free. He
watched as the boy slapped the floorboards and writhed and the water slopped and thrashed and the accordion kept playing its
jolly provincial tune. After almost twenty seconds the audience began to shift and mutter, and someone shouted, “Let him go!”
The masked boy looked up with a jerk, as if jolted out of a reverie. He released his victim immediately, jumping up and stepping
backward in a nimble little leap, and the volunteer reared his dripping head, coughing and spitting and taking great savage
lungfuls of air. His eyes were streaming and pink-rimmed and his face was white. He sat for a moment in hurt bewilderment,
quivering and gasping weakly in the middle of the stage.

The audience watched him regain his breath in silence. They met his gaze with a kind of wary suspicion, all of them thinking
that he was probably a plant, a prearranged assistant who any moment now was going to leap up and laugh and cuff them on the
shoulder and say, “I got you good.” They regarded him doubtfully. They were not yet convinced. A few of the students looked
around to measure the approval or affirmation of the tutor, but the Head of Acting had gone and they were alone, a baffled
motley patch of black in the middle of the gymnasium floor.

On stage the masked boy was standing impassively, his legs apart, his hands together behind his back. Then in one fluid motion
he raised his arm, and two other masked boys ran forward, grabbed the gasping volunteer by his arms, and hauled him to his
feet. The first boy ran forward and there was a flurried snipping shoving movement, and then the volunteer boy was shoved
to his knees once more and slapped hard across his face. The two boys who were holding him began to tug at his shirt, and
Stanley realized that the boy’s clothes had been cut off him, sliced from the hem to the collar up the length of his spine.
The masked boys tore away the ragged shirt and jumper, and then darted back, leaving him pale and shirtless and shivering
in the middle of the floor.

The masked boy looked directly at the audience now, as if in challenge. The first-years looked back in bewilderment.

“That sucks, man,” the volunteer boy said suddenly, looking at the torn remains of his jersey and his shirt wadded in a ragged
pile in front of him. His voice was thin. “That’s my favorite shirt.”

The masked boy didn’t flinch. He kept looking at the audience, as if waiting for somebody to speak. Nobody did. He leaped
forward, and the scissors flashed out again, and in a swift careful movement he grabbed a fistful of the volunteer boy’s hair
from the top of his head and cut it off with a thick silver
snip
.

There was a collective intake of breath from the students on the floor. The masked boy stood holding the clump of brown fur
aloft like it was a trophy scalp. Nobody moved. There was a long and horrible pause, and then all of a sudden the volunteer
boy jumped up and bolted. The masked boys tried too late to grab him—they missed. He jumped off the edge of the stage and
ran out of the gymnasium without looking back.

The masked boy watched him leave and drew himself up a little higher.

“This is an exercise in the Theater of Cruelty,” he said. “We
are here to show you what it means to really feel something.”
He gave an odd little bow and then the curtain fell, whistling swiftly down like a blade. The bottom folds hit the stage floor
with a thump and then the first-years were alone in the gymnasium. They could hear the soft apologetic patter of the actors’
feet as on the other side of the curtain they dispersed and then finally disappeared.

“Come with me,” was all the Head of Movement said when Stanley found him, and Stanley followed his sloping barefoot tread
all the way from the courtyard to the office upstairs, both of them silent, Stanley falling back as he tried to swallow and
mask his tears. He was surprised at the violence of his feelings.

“I’ve come to complain,” was all he’d said, standing with his bony knees together and squeezing the blood from his hands.
“I can’t find the Head of Acting. I want to complain.”

Through his distress Stanley found himself a little relieved that he had found the Head of Acting’s office locked and the
staffroom empty. The Head of Movement was infinitely more approachable than the older man, who peered through his glasses
at the students with a kind of impassive chill and wore short sleeves even in winter, as if he were cold-blooded and felt
no difference.

Now, in the still of the office, the Head of Movement placed his palms together in an entreating way. “Stanley,” he said.
“Stanley, what do you think you would do if you paid to go and see a play which included a rape scene, and during this rape
scene the assailant began to really rape his victim?”

“I’d say something,” Stanley said. His voice quavered a little and he reached up to rub his cheek with the heel of his hand.

“You would not,” said the Head of Movement. He laced his
fingers together. “You would shift in your chair and you would think
that this was terribly avant-garde but still it really wasn’t your thing and you would marvel at how realistic everything
was looking and maybe if you were very uncomfortable you would look around you to see what everyone else was making of it.
And then if you really started to feel like something was amiss, maybe if the victim was obviously crying out for help, or
if everybody in the audience was clearly feeling uncomfortable,
then
you might stand up and shout something out. But it would take you a very long time. Most likely by the time you got the courage
to fight back, the scene would be over.”