The Juliet Spell (22 page)

He didn’t let us down. Standing on an upturned planter, he threw out his arms.

“I thank all of ye for your loyalty to this play. We are in excellent condition. We miss many friends tonight, but some will be coming back when they see we are serious, and hear what we have done already. Others we may replace with ac.tors who were not cast the first time. And I promise you, we have enough to do this play with those who are here right now. We do need a good rehearsal space. Drew and I are working on that and I may have good news for you in a night or two. In any case, the show will go on. If I can, I mean to perform the best Romeo and Juliet ever, and I mean for us to leave a light in people’s souls that will shine for the rest of their lives.”

A few of us laughed and clapped.

“Beginning tonight, I want to start doing this show the way I’ve known it done in England,” Edmund went on. “I have seen it work there, and it will work this time. From now on, if someone has a thought about how to make a scene better, speak up. You’ll be amazed at what can happen.”

Bill London put up his hand. “Edmund, I like the sound of what you’re saying. But we’re not professionals the way you are. We don’t live this stuff. We need someone to tell us what to do.”

Edmund nodded. “I take your point. But what I say is, let’s do this play as I’ve known it done in England, where everyone can contribute what they think.”

“But who decides?” Maria said. “Someone must decide.”

“Come on, Ed,” Bobby shouted. “If it weren’t for you we’d all be sitting around feeling sorry for ourselves. Take

some responsibility, damn it. Be the director.”

A lot of people shouted that Bobby was right.

“Okay, okay,” Edmund said. “You all make sense. But I say we English know best how to mount a play, and this is the best way. When you have your new scripts in your hands you’ll begin to see how this can work.”

“New scripts?” I said. I had the script in my hip pocket. Unless Edmund’s brother had done a total rewrite and sent it forward from 1597, I didn’t need a new script.

“New scripts,” Edmund said. “English-style scripts. We call them sides. And when you have your sides, you’ll find this is a different play from what you’ve known so far.”

Edmund began to hand out the contents of the boxes. Some of the scripts were only a few pages. Others were nearly the whole play. Each one had an actor’s name at the top, together with their parts. And each script had nothing but that actor’s cue lines and speeches. The rest of the play was gone.

“What’s up with this?” Phil Hormel asked, looking up from his handful of sheets.

“It’s how we did it in London the last time I was in this show,” Edmund said. “I thought it might be interesting to try it. If it doesn’t work out, we can always go back to the old way. But let’s do act two this way and see what we get.”

So we did.

And what we got was a whole new show.

I know, it was a new show anyway. But all of us had been in plays before, and none of us had done anything like this. It was a little like improv if you’ve ever done that, except that in improv you’re making things up as you go along. Here, we were improvising to discover what was already there. But what was there changed as we did it.

At first, we were clumsy and slow. We missed cues, dropped lines. But then, like in improv where you have to concentrate on the other actors or you won’t know what to do yourself, we learned to focus on everything the others were doing, and we started to fly.

Nobody was hanging around waiting for a cue. We didn’t dare. We didn’t want to. We knew we’d miss something. So we were not only a cast, we were an audience. And as the night went on, we got more and more into it and everything became more and more intense.

We still didn’t finish that night. How could we when we kept coming up with questions and ideas and interrupting ourselves? But when ten o’clock came and it was time to pack it in, we kept on for another hour, and didn’t want to stop then.

But we did, and then we applauded ourselves. We hugged. We jumped. We slapped each other’s butts.

Bobby was so happy he couldn’t even talk. He just punched the air over his head and squeaked.

Phil Hormel hugged himself.

Maria smiled like she really meant it.

And Vivian had a grim, but satisfied look on her face.

As for me, I was sure I could feel Edmund’s iron resolve not to kiss Miranda ever again rusting away in my arms each time Romeo and Juliet clinched. This guy was mine, even if we’d only kissed once. Juliet just had to be patient.

Oh, did I mention that Edmund was brilliant? He was totally in charge and totally not throwing his weight around. He was Oberon the fairy king and we were his loyal sprites, and we were loving every minute of it. It was glorious, we were glorious and nobody wanted this night to end.

But end it did. People started to leave, and they were happy and excited, more than they’d been since the first

night of rehearsals. I had a feeling that when word got around a lot of missing faces were going to be coming back.

I leaned back against a tree and watched the yard empty out.

“Helen of Troy thinks you did great tonight,” I told Ed.mund.

“Ah. Yes. Well, ye see it does work...”

He was nervous. It was sweet.

Bobby was wandering around the yard, muttering lines and waving his arms, trying different things, in a world of his own. He didn’t want to let go of this night any more than I did.

Drew came around the side of the house. Someone was with him, but I couldn’t tell who it was.

“Dude. You’re late,” Bobby said.

“Where the hell have you been?” I asked.

Drew ignored us. “Excuse me, Edmund,” he said. “This probably isn’t the best time, but it’s important. I mean, I didn’t intend for this to happen, but we need—you need— to know about it right now.”

I had never seen Drew like this. He was totally rattled.

“Drew, whatever it is, ’tis all well,” Edmund assured him. “For the play will be well. And what beyond that can be wrong?”

“I’m not sure,” Drew said.

“What is it, then?” Edmund asked.

Drew sighed. “There’s someone with me I think you need to meet.”

A tall man stepped into the patch of light coming from one of the back windows. I recognized him even though I’d never met him before.

That face. That bad portrait that Edmund had laughed at, was known all over the world. And now the living man

Douglas Rees

was standing in my backyard next to Drew Jenkins, taking in everything he saw with the most beautiful eyes I’d ever seen.

“Give ye good evening, brother,” said William Shake.speare.

Chapter Twenty.

Seven

The Shakespeare boys did not seem all that glad to see each other. No hugs, no smiles. They stood apart. Edmund was tense as a taut guitar string. His big brother glowed with his sense of his own superiority.

“Give ye good evening, Will,” Edmund said, making an elaborate bow, and looking at his brother like he was a pile of unwashed dishes. “How come ye here?”

“Marry, Doctor Dee did send me,” William Shakespeare said. Then he bowed, not to Edmund, but to me. “Have I the honor of addressing the Lady Miranda?”

“I’m Miranda Hoberman.”

“O, fairest of Juliets, of ye has Doctor Jenkins also spoken. I am honored to meet ye.”

“And this is my friend Bobby Ruspoli,” Drew said to Shakespeare.

“Give ye good evening, fair youth.”

“Dude. This is major,” Bobby said. “You brought da Man.” I’d never seen Bobby look so amazed, not even when

he found out who Edmund really was. Then he bowed to Shakespeare.

Our new guest smiled, but Edmund didn’t. His whole body was rigid with anger.

“Drew, my friend,” he said. “What does this mean?”

“I–I was working on an idea I had...” Drew stuttered.

“Aye, indeed,” Shakespeare interrupted. “Three messages has John Dee had of Doctor Jenkins. Three shining gems of intellect which he has shared with me. He treasures every word as if ’twere Holy Writ.”

“But Drew, why told ye me nothing of this?” Edmund said.

“I wasn’t expecting this to happen,” Drew said. “I had an idea I was working on, and I was going to tell you as soon as I knew I had everything right—I mean, it could be danger.ous. I didn’t want anybody risking their life or disappearing besides me. And if it didn’t work, I didn’t want to disappoint you. But this—I didn’t plan on it”

“Disappoint me? How?” Edmund said.

“My ultimate goal was to give you a way to go home. If you wanted to,” Drew said.

“Ah,” Edmund said slowly.

I thought back to that night when Drew had asked me what he could do for me, and I’d said, “Find a way to send an English lout back to his own time.” Or something like that. And now Shakespeare was here. The Shakespeare. Not in London, not in the Renaissance where he belonged. In my backyard. I couldn’t think. My brain was numb.

But I tried. “What…?” I said.

Drew seemed to understand what I was trying to say, sort of. “It—it isn’t—frankly, I don’t get—everything....” he said.

“Tell what ye can,” Edmund said.

Drew let out a big breath. “Do you remember when you said that the theater was a metaphor for life?”

“Aye, for so it is,” Edmund said.

“And, Miri, do you remember when your mom said maybe Doctor Dee had touched some kind of subatomic synchronicity or something, and you had possibly tapped into it for a second?”

“Yes. Get to the point, Drew. Quickly.”

“Well that got me to thinking about how the Elizabethans used their stage. No fourth wall. No naturalism. The stage was wherever they needed it to be at that moment, especially the big area down front. We call it ‘neutral space.’”

“We do call it ‘the great,’” Shakespeare said. “‘Play this on the great,’ we say.”

“So anyway, I thought that, if the stage is the world, then the world is a stage,” Drew said.

“All the world’s a stage!” Shakespeare said. “All the men and women merely players. I must write that down. Prithee, Doctor Jenkins, help me to recall it when I have a pen about me.”

“I mean,” Drew went on, “if one side of an equation equals something, then the other side equals the first. So the question then became, how do you create neutral space in the world? And if you can do that, is that the same thing as synchronicity? Because if it is, and all time is touching every other instant of time, then isn’t it possible to move around in time and go where you want?”

“Brilliant,” Shakespeare said. “Doctor Dee did dance me about his rooms when he read those words. And he’s far too old for dancing. But tell now the best. Tell them of the par.adox.”

“Well, I didn’t get very far with any of that until I remem.bered Zeno’s First Paradox,” Drew said.

“Zeno’s paradox? ’Tis but a bauble of the mind,” Ed.mund said.

“A jewel of the mind, ye mean, brother,” Shakespeare said. “Listen on.”

“Okay, for the benefit of all those of us who aren’t ge.niuses?” Bobby said.

“Yeah, okay, right, sorry,” Drew said. “Zeno’s First Para.dox is just a mind game, like Edmund said. Say Achilles and a turtle decide to have a race. To make things fairer, Achil.les gives the turtle a head start. Off goes the turtle. Then Achilles starts. But the thing is, before he can catch up to the turtle, he’s got to reach the halfway point to it. And the turtle is still moving. So, Achilles can never reach that half.way point. So he can never catch the turtle.”

“That’s stupid,” Bobby said. “Of course he’ll catch up to it.”

“Right. Except that he can’t, logically,” Drew said. “That’s the point. So anyway, I thought, maybe if I wrote a program that was based on the paradox, I could confuse time and cre.ate neutral space in cyberspace. I mean, cyberspace is neutral space, nearly. Then, maybe I could send an email to John Dee.”

“Uhm, Drew. It’s 1597 where he is,” I said. “No com.puter. No electricity.”

“Of course they had electricity,” Drew said. “Electrici.ty’s been around forever. They just couldn’t use it. I just had to hope Doctor Dee was doing something I could interface with.”

“So how did Doctor Dee get your message?” Edmund asked.

“That was most wond’rous,” Shakespeare said. “Doctor Dee has constructed a device of mercury and sulphur fumes in which bath most delicate copper letters do hang. It was his hope that he might conjure demons invisible to tell him where Edmund had gone. At midnight, in the dark of the moon, he did begin his first experiment. And as he watched, so he told me later, the copper alphabet began to tremble most visibly. Words did come, one after the other. At first he could not credit it. But then he wrote down what he had seen and showed me this the next day.”

Shakespeare pulled out a piece of parchment from his dou.blet and handed it to Edmund. I looked over his shoulder. In the light from the windows, I read.

Doctor John Dee,

My name is Drew Jenkins. I am living in America in the