Read by Tony Bell
Schmiedeleut wrote a play, and I read it, and I copied it out for myself twelve times in a total of twenty-seven of my notebooks. Then I saw it performed on stage, and in the final act I jumped over the brass rail and I cracked my skull and my ribs when I hit and that’s why I’ve been plastered down here, I suppose.
The attendants, admittedly, are pleasant enough. The nurses bring me cake, which I can’t eat, and tea, which I never drank anyway. When their crests of smiling and chatter have rolled on, they clear the way for the doctors’ own rituals. These tend to involve a cold tube, my shaven nostrils, and a heavy liquid that may or may not contain the same recycled remnants of the surplus cake and tea. It smells the same, certainly, but then everything always does. The principal difficulty regarding the doctors and nurses is that they change in their faces every time they come, and, what’s more, that they all appear in essentially identical uniform. This brings a fresh ordeal each newly risen morning: that of calculating whether the bright-clad figure approaching is after my lips or my nose. (I can no longer count on waking in time to benefit from the rule that the nurses precede the doctors, unfortunately.)
Schmiedeleut – the mighty Schmiedeleut! – wrote just one play, but what a play it was. He wrote it in a week, I discovered, and so, the moment I acquired by certain inspirations the original manuscript copy (green clothbound, 400 pages, of which 314 filled), I held it like a legendary lost dagger in my two hands, and I vowed to read it in exactly one week myself. And more: I relayed each and every word into a notebook of my own (black leatherbound, 200 pages), and then another (taupe leatherbound, 200 pages, of which 184 filled), such that I might experience that mastercraft as it was first created. I paused only (and always) wherever I sensed that Schmiedeleut had paused, seeking stimulation where Schmiedeleut, too, must have stalked it: in the curves of dark rivers, in creeping rain, in the emptiest recesses of stairwells and lanes. I read, and I wrote, and I felt Schmiedeleut’s play within my limbs and my movement. Schmiedeleut’s play was more than a play. It was a castle, a throng of rising towers, and I was clambering inside it to the last, tallest turret.
They have fed me already today. They have come and gone with the cake and the liquids. They bring no medicines, for I am not ill; I am merely withering, borne equally now by my injuries and my futility.
By the time of my second undertaking to copy out and submerge my being within the play, I had secured the information that it had taken him precisely seven days, four hours, and twenty-three minutes to complete, from what became the ninetieth line (as the prologue was added later, after the fifth day) right through to the final, richest words. I adjusted my own schedule accordingly. For the third attempt, I managed to locate a far more satisfactory pair of notebooks (green clothbound, each 200 pages, of which 200 and 158 pages filled respectively). And by the seventh venture, I had achieved the feat of using exactly 314 pages, as I then realised was an obvious requisite all along.
They will not come again today, until nightfall.
My ninth and tenth copies were necessarily abysmal, for a single and singular reason. Between my eighth reading and the ninth, it had in the relevant circles been suggested and soon confirmed that Schmiedeleut, determined as he was to commit his play to its paper existence by way of his left hand, had, some months before that revered occasion, personally severed three fingers (two and a half, in fact) from his formerly preferred right hand. Thus was he obliged by his own genius turn of discipline to rely on the remaining five fingers of his left hand.
Naturally, I took the very same course. Hence the somewhat alarming condition of, in particular, the ninth set of notebooks: five green clothbound, 200 pages each, of which 926 filled (914 stained or tinged in some way; 43 more ripped or soiled irremediably).
Here, in this gated icicle, I can read back through none of my notebooks, nor, alas, that original sacred volume of Schmiedeleut’s play. This pains me insurmountably, far more so than any of the punctures in my lungs, skull and digits, which all continue to rasp and throb daily. I am forbidden from reading Schmiedeleut’s play here, just as I am forbidden from having it read aloud to me, and from speaking of what is, if mention is unavoidable, known as my “accident”, and quite plainly was no accident. In any case, I am physically incapable of reading in my present and foreseeably enduring state. My eyes refuse to focus on one letter or word before jumping simultaneously to that which follows and that which precedes, only to repeat the same process at each subsequent destination, causing exponential nausea, grief, searing ache and utter nonsense in place of the lines I long to hold again.
I can write, evidently. I can write, provided I extend my left arm as far from my head as is possible, and never, ever glance down at the ink that bends from this pen. I write the same limp words each time. And then, at the end of the airless day, when the nurses return (or rather, the new nurses arrive, or perhaps the doctors, or else the wives) and they fold me away for the coming, hollowed night, my pages are smoothly but firmly pressed out of my grasp. Similarly smoothly, they are torn: into neat strips, and then square-approximate fragments. At this point, I used to howl; later, I only whimpered. Now I am silent.
It is my twelfth copy that I miss reading most of all, along with Schmiedeleut’s original, of course. The beautiful truth is that I could hardly tell the two apart. Schmiedeleut’s play, and my copy, my worship: green clothbound, 314 pages filled (I sourced Schmiedeleut’s trusted supplier of superior 400-page books in the end), no damaged leaves or discomfiting stains, and each script written in an untrained but humbled left hand.
Then came the news of the stage performance. I was tormented, to say the least. Would Schmiedeleut really have approved, as was so adamantly alleged? Would failure to attend render my services thus far useless and despicable? What was to be done?
There could be only one answer. I had made up my mind long before I took that place at the very front of the gallery seating; before I was driven to remonstrate with the slovenly fellow whose ticket, supposedly, entitled him to the centremost position. I knew before I even set foot in that theatre. In honesty, it was never my decision at all, but Schmiedeleut’s, channelled through the incisive message of his play to me.
I waited. I am unable to describe the performance. The acting meant nothing and the stage could have been upside-down or empty for all I was aware. This was because it was, as always, the words in their own unity that bore through. But it was different, indeed, and stunningly so, in that new setting. Schmiedeleut was truly all around me in that cavernous space: inside, outside, in again and out. Schmiedeleut’s play – his play that swept the skies and dusks, was alive, and so very, brutally close.
I jumped. I climbed, I swayed, and I jumped, without end. I had imagined the passage previously as a souping sort of slow motion, but it was not in the event that way - on the contrary, I was a streaking blaze of speed, or speed itself; I was spark, colour, sound and a vacuum suction tunnel that twisted up and sideways, not just down. It was everything else that stretched out and slowed, so that my tunnel was long and immense as I razored on.
I missed. Somehow, after all my calculations and precautions, I missed the stage. Only my head rammed and split on the very edge: the jutting and cruel corner of the stage surface, and I blurred into the floor to the echoes of the closing, saturating lines:
The truth will trail in undertones, if truth will trail at all!
Or something.
Something like that. Or nothing like it, by any measure.
For you see, in this thick, unwieldy fog that breeds in these bandages and between these walls, I have forgotten. I have forgotten the words – all of Schmiedeleut’s words. I have forgotten what Schmiedeleut’s play is, or was, about. There is the fog, or there is nothing, and then there is inedible cake.
The worst remains to be declared once more before they wipe me out for another day. The worst is worse than the sickness from reading, and from not reading, and from forgetting. The worst is this: they tell me, when I drive them to despair with my talk of Schmiedeleut – they tell me that I am he. “You must be!” cry the nurses. “But you must be!” cry the doctors. “Just look at your fingers!” cry all the wives. “Look at your fingers and look at your notebooks and look at the pen in the hand you stab with!”
This is unbearable! Such outrageous, intolerable foolery! For though I treasured Schmiedeleut as a prize and as a flame, though he was my only real bride and blade, I know that I could never have been he. Schmiedeleut was mighty and his play was mightier still – but that play was clearly the work of a lunatic!
(c) Han Stickings Smith, 2018
Han Smith is a writer, reader, translator, sort-of-teacher and definite learner, currently quite interested in hiding places, tides and unbodying. Also published by Litro magazine and selected for the Spread the Word 2017/18 PLATFORM programme for emerging writers. Twitter: @Han_Smiff.
Tony Bell is a semi-retired actor, director and teacher. He spent 16 years touring the world in all-male Shakespeare company Propeller before genderfluid casting made him a dinosaur. He now teaches in drama schools, helping budding actors be better than him. One of his friends directs The Crown – that’s his next job. His favourite hobby is doing the 5:2 diet while watching Netflix documentaries about serial killers
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