Tree

Mom dropped me behind the stage, and I felt the first cramp right as I got out of the car. That may explain a little of Autumn’s behavior today. Synchronization may be a very stupid good idea.

I was ten minutes late, and would have missed the meeting. Gwen needed mom’s signature on some stuff. My ears felt sore, and heavy. That was because there were little tyrannosaurs biting them of course. Goddamn it.

The door to the stage was propped open, and I told mom I could get a ride back. Agenda: Talk to Autumn. Talk to Big Davey. Build awesome sets. Don’t freak out on anyone. Bleed.

I brushed my earlobe with my fingers, squared my shoulders, and went through the door and up the stairs to the stage. The stage that was every bit as wonderful as before, letting me know that I was still here to build things. That I could build anything.

As I came in there were two big things happening. The big big thing happening was that the platforms and flats that would make up the house and hay loft were being assembled. At this time it was three platforms and three flats on the ground, while people put wheels on the platforms, built the braces to hang the flats on them, and got ready to raise the hay loft platform.

The smaller big thing was that a beam of light was shining in from the house and illuminating a piece of luaun. Autumn knelt in front of it drawing something. Gotta start somewhere.

I went over to see what she was doing, observing silently. The beam of light was coming from one of the incredibly expensive moving heads (of which we had two). The luaun had been hung on a fly bar so that the image the light projected onto it could be traced. Which is what Autumn was doing. With a carpenter’s pencil she was digging in the outline of a tree. This seemed like a very safe way for someone who could not draw a tree to make good trees.

I didn’t say so.

The tree also didn’t look much like a tree, so much as a big bunch of sticks.

I didn’t say that either.

Instead I went to the shop to find my own carpenter’s pencil, slice the tip sharp with a few strokes from a knife, and started outlining the tree next to her.

Over the next five minutes Autumn and I had a dozen conversations. Each was creatively drafted, full of emotion and deep meaning. Around half of them ended in a disastrous screaming match, three ended with us together on the floor, there was one each for both of our murders, and one in which we ran away together to Nicaragua, got caught up with the contras, robbed a bank to pay them back, found out the bank was run by the Swedish Mafia and fled again. She shot me in the back as I was getting on the helicopter in Ibiza. It was raining of course.

I probably should have shared a few of these conversations with the person I was supposed to be having them with. But Autumn wasn’t talking out loud, and I hadn’t come up with a way to open my mouth.

Then we finished the tree outline and Autumn said, without turning to face me, “Bring the bar down so we can hang the next one, and I’ll put holes in it.”

If there was any time for honesty, these was probably something like it. “I don’t have the slightest idea how to do that.” She groaned and her eye roll started at the base of her neck, when I threw out the peace offering, “Would you please show me?”

Autumn put her pencil in her pocket, and took me over to the rigging lines. Showed me how to unlock them, called, “Fly bar one coming in down stage!” and tugged on the rope until the bar was down at my chest height.

She did all of this with a maximum of bitch.

While she went off to put mounting holes in a piece of luaun, I went to the tree we had just drawn. It had been suspended from the bar on two lines around a foot long. Each line looped into a carabiner, and I very carefully unscrewed each and unclipped them. The luaun flopped to the floor and I surprised myself by catching it in my hand and swinging it behind me.

Autumn stepped up with a new piece, she’d slammed a drill through two corners. As we put it on the caribiners she stopped for a second and looked at me. I had just enough time to make eye contact and wonder what expression my face should have, when she ducked her head. “Think you can manage to raise the rod?” The words were a challenge but the tone was softer. Not chastened, not contrite. Almost…mortified.

Her body language had changed too. Really embarrassed. I still don’t know what is going on, and until I do, all of this is completely normal. I’m acting how a normal person acts and I’m pretending that she is too.

I put my hand on the fly bar, “This is bar one, right?”

She nodded and had the weird feeling that I was only ever going to speak to the side of her face for the rest of time.

“Fly bar one coming up, downstage!” I called, as I pulled on the rope. I locked it into place and went back to draw trees. I will pretend this is normal until I make it normal again.

It didn’t get normal again. After an hour we had four trees done, I had put in a tampon, and there was a small break.

Regular Dave checked his phone, “No games today?”

As a collective, us women shook our heads.

He sighed. “Okay, well Susan will be out for another forty five minutes, so let’s take a smoke break and get back with it.”

Outside in the smog Autumn still wasn’t looking or talking to me. Bree and Sarah both said something about my new earrings, which made me feel nice. I’m pretty sure that made Autumn feel awful because she drew in on herself and sucked down half a cigarette.

Big Davey touched my ear, which made me flinch, and then I had to consciously relax as he finger the little T-rexes. He could look without touching right?

Apparently not. Wee David fingered them too. Autumn was never going to talk to me again.

Or not. “Do you know how to switch the gobo on a moving head?” She asked. We were back inside at the bar. We had just pulled the fourth tree off.

I shook my head.

She smiled at something over my shoulder and said, “Okay, come with me. This will be fun.”

We went down the stairs and into the house, and up the aisle to the ladder at the back. Autumn let me climb first, telling me I didn’t have to call out. Patrons get upset when you’re yelling in their ear during a show. I tapped the ladder any way. Two taps, and eye contact with a smile from Autumn.

Then an oof and a gasp, sometime around when my knee was at her head height going up.

I turned, “Did I kick you?!”

“No, I think I just got some of your hair in my face.”

I reached for my head, and said for the second time that day, “My hair isn’t that long.”

“Well then I guess it was your tail. Try to keep it out of my face.” She laughed. I laughed. Very funny joke. Did nothing for the tension between us.

I got up the ladder to see the inside of the booth, where every available surface was covered in graffiti. There were two office chairs, who knows how they had gotten them up the ladder, but everything else was cheep wood, painted black. A single desk ran the length of the booth and on it were five different boards, each covered in 200 dials, knobs, switches, buttons, and sliders, for a total of approximately 1,000,000,000,000 things that could go wrong at any one time. There was also an ancient computer showing the Windows 98 screen saver. It’s keyboard was tucked on its side and who knows where its mouse was.

Autumn batted my tail out of her face as she came up through the trap door, “That thing is a menace.”

“What is?” I looked behind me and couldn’t see what she was talking about.

“Your—never mind.” She pulled the keyboard toward her and hit the space bar. “Aisling, meet Horizon. Horizon sucks.” On the screen were around 20 different boxes all showing 0% and a bunch of blank number spaces. Autumn scrolled down until she found one box that read 100%. It was #57, for all the good that information will do you. With that light (it must have been a light) selected she slapped a bunch of keys so fast I couldn’t see, until one of the not blank slots read: Value: 2

We both looked to the stage where the light on the piece of luaun was now an entirely different tree.

There was a tense moment where neither of us said anything and then we both spoke at once, stopped, gestured for the other to go first and spoke again. Autumn held up a hand then and said, “Let me. I’m sorry I acted like I did.”

Which is where I decided that, if she wasn’t going to hate me for the end of time, I could stand to stick up for myself. “It’s really not cool to try and force me into some body mod, and then get angry when I don’t do it.”

She bit her lips. Clearly I was supposed say I was sorry too. “Then why did you do it.”

“Not because of you. I just…” I felt the prickles behind my eyes, “I just wanted the earrings. And if you had shown them to me and asked…”

Now Autumn was crying too, and we were hugging and both of us were blubbering.

We calmed down enough to get back onto the stage and keep making trees. Things weren’t normal again, and might not ever be. But we were both okay with that.