Bram had broken three sticks before Ada persuaded him to stop hitting the drum.
He held up the last pair, letting her see the splintered ends. The room smelled of warm cables. On the wall, their rehearsal clock advanced without a tick.
Ada wrote on the slate between them: I can see how hard you’re trying.
He read it, frowned, and wrote beneath it: That isn’t what I wanted you to notice.
She had meant the sentence kindly. She wiped it off.
Ada was Deaf. For eleven years she had made compositions for the lantern theatre: patterns of movement, lit surfaces, hands appearing above the balcony rail. Some accompanied music. Some didn’t. The theatre’s directors had always described the latter as an interesting departure, as though she had briefly left a road and would soon return.
Then, in one morning, the road disappeared.
Airborne sound stopped reaching anyone. People could still feel a door slam through its frame, or the rough vibration of a motor beneath their feet. They could watch a singer breathe, watch a spoon strike a glass. But their ears received neither. There was no reliable explanation, and Ada’s new contract contained a paragraph explaining that the theatre accepted none of the liability for one.
It also called her performance a beacon of resilience. She had crossed that out before signing.
Bram had been the theatre’s percussionist. She had selected him for the new piece because she liked the way he could wait: during an old performance, she had once watched his raised wrist remain motionless for so long she forgot it was waiting for anything. Then it moved, and a whole row of dancers moved with it.
She wanted that wrist, not a drummer demonstrating that drums had once existed.
At the next rehearsal she gave him a pair of white gloves.
He put them on. He spread his fingers, then bowed to her like a waiter presenting a disappointing bill.
She almost laughed. He saw it and held the pose longer.
Six performers stood behind a waist-high screen, each showing one gloved hand above it. Bram’s was third from the left. The rest of their bodies stayed hidden. On the first blue square of light, the six hands opened. On the second, they turned. On the third, Tess showed a red stone, Bram a silver ring, and Iris a curl of paper. The other three hands stayed empty, waiting to be offered something.
Jori, the projectionist, ran the sequence twice. The hands moved correctly. The objects caught the light. Ada had arranged the colors so that the red would seem to draw the blue toward it, and for a moment it did.
Then Bram turned his ring between thumb and forefinger. He was supposed to hold it still.
Ada stopped the rehearsal.
From behind the screen, the performers emerged in coats and ordinary shoes. Without the framing light, their hands belonged to people who had cold fingers and needed lunch.
“You moved,” she signed to Bram, slowly.
He understood enough of their language to answer yes. For the rest he reached for the slate.
Nothing happened when I didn’t.
She pointed to the blue cues.
He wrote: Those happened. We waited for them.
Jori tapped Ada’s shoulder. “He has a point,” she signed.
“He has a score.”
“He has instructions. We all do.”
Ada folded her arms. Across the room, Bram pulled off one glove and rubbed the red line it had left around his wrist.
She had spent weeks drawing those instructions. She knew precisely which interval should make an audience anticipate the next opening hand. She had been working in this form long before the silence. Now, apparently, everyone was qualified to improve it.
Jori left the projection controls to Ada and collected the objects into a tray. She kept the red stone in her palm.
“What changes if he turns the ring?” she asked.
“It distracts from the stone.”
“From where I’m standing, it asks the stone to do something.”
They looked at the stone. Jori moved it toward the ring. Bram, who had been watching their conversation without understanding all of it, moved the ring away.
Ada lifted her slate.
Do it again.
They tried free movement for an afternoon. It was awful.
Everybody had something to express. People reached, fluttered, vanished into their sleeves, brought both hands back, and reached again. Bram dropped the ring. A performer named Iris took the red stone from its usual player, Tess, and built an elaborate little struggle around it. Bram kept trying to offer his ring. The other four performers had nothing to do except appear interested.
Ada stopped them before Iris could fall to her knees.
“We need to know what we’re giving each other,” she signed.
Jori translated on the long board they had put against the wall. Everyone came close enough to read it.
Ada drew six boxes. Within each she marked a beginning position and an ending position. Between them she left a white space.
“The blue light starts the interval. The amber light ends it. You must get from here to here. You decide when to begin, but you have to watch the hand beside yours.”
Bram wrote: Which hand gets to go first?
She had an answer ready. She erased it before anyone read it.
“We’ll find out.”
Jori asked whether the amber cue had to come at exactly the marked count. Ada looked at the six white spaces. “If they need another breath, give them one. Don’t give them a minute.”
They tried again. The first performer opened too early and was stranded, palm upward, while nobody answered. The second waited too long. Bram’s ring slid across his fingers, came to rest against his knuckle, and caught the light. Tess moved the red stone half an inch toward him.
He turned his hand over and hid the ring.
Ada leaned forward.
She could not tell whether he meant refusal, a joke, or simply that he needed to retrieve his grip. She wanted Tess’s hand to answer him.
It did.
Afterward, Ada asked him to keep that movement.
Bram wrote: I might not want to do it at that moment tomorrow.
The old score lay beside her elbow, crowded with marks she understood. She put a fresh sheet over it.
The theatre put up a notice promising an evening without explanation. Nobody believed it. People arrived with the strained faces Ada recognized from school performances: they were determined to appreciate something.
In the front row sat an elderly woman who couldn’t see the small objects. Jori spotted her before the house lights went down. She brought her to the side bench, closer to the screen, and turned up the light on the hands. The woman nodded, then traced a question on her palm. Jori couldn’t follow the gesture.
They exchanged a notebook until they understood each other. Ada watched the time and made herself stop watching it.
There were five short movements. At the end of each, a band of light crossed the floor, so people would know there was a break. They could relax, look at one another, or leave. Ada had insisted on that.
The first movement started too carefully. She stood beside the control desk and could feel everyone trying to make the evening succeed.
Then Iris opened an empty hand.
It should have held the curl of paper. Ada stared at the tray. The curl was there; Iris hadn’t forgotten it.
Tess’s hand offered the stone. Iris withdrew. Bram slid the ring onto one gloved finger and displayed it with an absurdly solemn flourish, as if proposing marriage to an empty glove.
Ada put her knuckles against her mouth.
Iris’s hand came back. It chose neither stone nor ring. It took the paper from below the screen and unfolded it so far that the other hands had to move apart.
Jori held the amber light for one more breath.
Across the room, shoulders shook. One man bent forward, then sat up and wiped his eyes. Ada couldn’t know what he had seen in the exchange. She did know he had stopped wearing his school-performance face.
The last movement was Bram’s. He had asked for a board beneath the seats, mechanically connected to the platform on which he stood. He pressed it with one foot: an uneven succession of pressures people could feel through their soles.
Above the screen, the hands tried to follow. They couldn’t quite. Ada had written a returning pattern for them, and Bram’s pauses kept interrupting it.
She looked at Jori. The blue cue was due. Jori held her finger above the switch.
Ada signed wait.
Bram put his full weight down. The seated bodies shifted. Iris’s paper bent, recovered, and bent again; the red stone moved stubbornly against the pulse.
For the first time that evening, Ada wished she were inside the piece rather than watching it.
Afterward, Bram found her at the control desk. He had taken off his gloves. There was a damp mark on the page where he set one down.
Five more nights? he wrote.
She pointed to the part of the score where his board began, then to the screen.
“I want the hand with the red stone,” she signed. He didn’t understand, so she wrote it down.
He looked from her to Tess, who was packing the stone into its padded box. On his face appeared the expression she had seen at their first rehearsal, just before the waiter bow.
He took the chalk and wrote beneath her request: You’ll have to watch the hand beside yours.
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