The play that Leonard Flake had been asked to direct for the university’s spring season was Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia. The idea was that most of the audience would be composed of middle-aged academics who might remember it fondly from their own college days, the time in their lives when they had gone to the theatre most often and which they were frantically trying to regain by going now. Back then, Arcadia would have been fresh and new, which had been half the appeal of it, but try telling that to the middle-aged academics. They would totally miss the point, thinking that they wanted to see something they still thought of as modern when really what they wanted was something that had been young when they were young.

“After all, there’s only so many underappreciated Shakespearean comedies we can do,” said Maureen Hausman, the head of the theatre department. “And please, Leonard, do not say Hamlet.”

Maureen was middle-aged herself, but she made up for it by pretending to be older rather than younger than she was. Her once-brown hair was streaked with natural grey, and Leonard half-suspected that her glasses were not prescription. She lowered them now to look at him across her desk, a look that was as much a bid for sympathy as it was a warning. Leonard had been lobbying to direct Hamlet for nearly three years. His big idea was to have all of the cast switch which characters they were playing throughout the play, so every actor had a turn at Hamlet and the audience would realise how universal the character truly was. Maureen thought that would be confusing beyond practicality. Besides, ever since Leonard’s most recent hospitalization, he suspected they were wary of giving him anything with too much emotional depth.

Leonard did not want to direct Arcadia. He did not want to preach about youth and time and genius and love to an audience of people who he suspected possessed none of those qualities. Most of all, he did not want to be perceived as being somehow in union with his patrons. The job of the director, he told Maureen, was not to give the audience what they wanted but to give them exactly what they didn’t want and make them face it head on. His job, he did not say, was to prove to them that he—Leonard Flake who had come from nothing, from an alcoholic mother and an absent father and a hospitalization already under his belt by the time he was sixteen—was better than them. That he knew something that they didn’t.

Maureen sighed, a short, irritating sound. “I’m not sure if you’ve noticed, but funding isn’t particularly high right now for theatre. So yes, I would like to just give them what they want. It won’t kill you.”

He wondered if she felt embarrassed after she said that. If she did, she was far too professional to show it. A lot of things, it turned out, would not kill Leonard. Up to and including himself.

———

The one thing he did like about Arcadia, he admitted to himself weeks later, when production was well under way, was the set. That center table around which all the action revolved, laden with the props required for two different time periods. The way the 1800s actors and the present day ones (which was, he reminded himself, no longer actually the present day) shared books and apples and a tortoise, and any anachronistic props, like the coffee mug, would be there in the 1800s scenes, simply treated as invisible by the players. It was like the play was saying that all of the ingredients of a life are laid out right there at a start, and only as you move through time you begin to see them. But Leonard doubted that any of his audience would understand that message, that the tools you have had since the beginning only become visible when you come to need them.

“‘The time is out of joint,’” Leonard muttered to himself.

“I’m sorry, that’s not the line, is it?” asked Anna Witford, who was playing Chloë Coverly. She was a pretty undergraduate, and frankly a better actress than her meager part required. But there was something in the way she held herself that suggested the ease that only comes from aristocracy. Besides, she had a remarkable ability to make her eyes go all dewy and pink with tears that would really come in useful in the second half of the play.

“No, it’s not the line,” Leonard said. “It’s not a note either, just ignore me. Take it from ‘He said he knew you.’”

It was his own inability to cry on command, Leonard reflected, that had really and truly scuppered his career as an actor. He had a great memory, good voice control, but he couldn’t, no matter how hard he tried, squeeze out a tear. If he thought about it properly—which many a therapist had tried to force him to do—he hadn’t really cried since he was sixteen. Before that, he had cried all the time, although rarely in front of anyone else. Leonard remembered with some satisfaction the series of rules his young self had established around crying. In the shower, usually, so the steam flushed his cheeks and the water washed away the salt and if his eyes looked red, afterwards, he could say he got shampoo in them. If, by chance, he lost control, collapsed in sobs during the day, he had routines to cover it up. Flake men didn’t wear makeup; even his mother owned very little, but he would steal her skin cream from her bathroom, the one with sunscreen in it, and rub it in so that it paled the skin and disguised the swelling. Leonard had never been caught crying, at least until that day in the hospital when one of the nurses walked in on him and there was nothing he could do. He remembered her hard look when she said, stop crying, it’s not doing anybody any good, and how it had suddenly occurred to him that she was right, it wasn’t. He hadn’t shed a tear since.

He tore himself away from his reminiscences and focused on the actors on the stage. They were doing the second scene, the first look at the modern setting. Already, the actors were mostly off-book, and it was clear that they were having fun with it—most of them undergraduates, still a little thrilled by the dirty language and explicit sexuality of Stoppard’s writing. Most of them were in t-shirts and jeans but Marissa Garcia, who played Hannah, seemed to be method dressing: she was wearing a dark blazer and wool trousers, despite the heat in the dark theatre. She looked about right, a little older and harder than the others, but something in the acting wasn’t quite right. She was supposed to be commanding this scene, but his eyes kept turning away from her and towards Anna.

He wondered, sometimes, about his tendency to take notice of his female students. He was simply more compelled by them, and wondered if they could tell, and if so, what they made of it. Did they take him for a lech, or just a sad old man? Leonard wasn’t sure which would be worse.

His thoughts were interrupted by a flash of movement in the corner of his eye. There, in the dark back of the theatre, was that a man? Was it them? For a moment, the shadows coalesced into a human-sized shape, something lurking, something sinister. Then he blinked and the figure was gone. The tips of his fingers had gone numb. He pulled a bottle out of his rucksack and dry-swallowed two of the little blue pills his doctor had described. They scraped his throat on the way down, making him cough.

“Mr. Flake?” It was Anna. The action on stage had stopped, the young actors gathering up their scripts and chatting amongst themselves. It was the end of rehearsal. “Mr. Flake, I was wondering if I could ask you a few questions about my part.”

“Please, call me Leonard,” Leonard said, and regretted it immediately. He had never quite managed that delicate balance of friendship and professionalism required for his role as a director, which was of course not quite the same as being a teacher. He had authority, but it was a creative authority. He wasn’t grading anyone, but he did, in his castings and in his direction, have an ability to impact the actors’ lives. It made him uncomfortable, that level of power. The way that Anna was looking at him, as if he had all the answers, made him uncomfortable. Did she know about it, what had happened last May? Did they all know, and were they talking about it, about him?

“It’s Chloë,” Anna said. “I don’t quite get her. Or, I mean, I get her, but not her role in the play. I mean, she’s sort of a bit part, isn’t she? A sex symbol more than anything. She’s kind of the dumb one, really, in a play about geniuses.”

“She is, a bit,” Leonard told her. “But she’s also what keeps the play moving. Sex is what keeps the play moving. The heat, remember?”

“I guess that’s just not how I see myself,” Anna said, somewhat bashfully. She undid her long blonde hair from its bun in what seemed to be a genuinely unconscious movement. “Like, as an idiot among geniuses, I mean.”

“That’s not how I see you either,” Leonard said quickly. He might not know much about working with students, but he had a vague feeling he wasn’t supposed to undercut their confidence. “That’s not why I cast you. Think of Chloë as the one tethering the whole thing to reality. The concrete, not the hypothetical or the academic guesswork. You know,” he said, warming to his theme, “You might think a bit of Ophelia. At the beginning of the play, when everyone around her is slightly mad and irrational and she just wants to get married to her boyfriend. Chloë’s like that. She’s the one who cares about the things that really matter. Sex, not math. Living people, not the dead.”

Anna’s eyes lit up. “I would love to play Ophelia, you know. It’s kinda my dream role.”

Leonard felt a sudden warmth towards her, so strong that for a brief, crazy moment he imagined himself taking her small face in his hands and kissing her on the mouth. He shook off the impulse. “I’m going to do Hamlet, some day. As soon as the higher-ups will let me,” he said.

It wasn’t a joke, but Anna laughed and looked pleased. “Well, think of me when you do.”

As Leonard left the theatre, blinking in the sudden light and coldness of the air, he tried and failed to prevent himself from looking around for the figure he hadn’t seen in the darkness. But the street was empty save for a few straggling students and the occasional moving car. Nobody was lingering, nobody was watching. It isn’t starting again, he told himself. Everything is better now.

Last May, in the weeks leading up to Leonard’s hospitalization—his second ever, and the first in his adult life—he had become convinced that the university was trying to fire him. He had some idea (possibly the most irrational part of the whole theory) that Maureen Hausman was too embarrassed to tell him to his face. He thought that instead, the mysterious forces that ran the university and that he referred to in his head only as them were trying to drive him insane, making him ill enough to quit on his own. He stopped eating, stopped sleeping. Coming to work one day he saw a white van in front of the theatre and the next day, when it was still there, he realised that it must be a part of the conspiracy, that someone was spying on him, trying to catch him out in some way. He had begun to see figures everywhere, the outlines of men in mafia-don suits who disappeared as soon as he looked at them outright. He knew with a clarity he had not known since he was sixteen with a bottle of sleeping pills halfway down his throat that these men wanted something from him, that they were trying to drive him insane. This was Gaslight, this was The Truman Show. He was the one real person in a world of actors, and they were scripting an ending with which he refused to comply. So one day he stormed into Maureen Hausman’s office in the middle of a meeting, and in front of a litany of men in suits he decried her shady practices, her backhanded methods to get him to quit his job. He told her she could send all the men and vans she wanted, he wasn’t going anywhere. That same day he went to the Hillstead House Hospital. It took a month for him to make it back to work.

———

“Leonard?” They were at rehearsal again, and Stephen Billings, who played Septimus, was trying to get his attention. Stephen was a good Septimus—charming, a little roguish—but Leonard had taken an immediate and strong dislike to him. He told himself it was because of his youthful arrogance, his devil-may-care attitude to the script, but in reality it probably had more to do with the fact that Stephen’s father was on the board of directors. He had been one of the suited men in the room that day with Maureen Hausman. Leonard suspected that he had told his son everything about the incident, and that Stephen thought about it every time he looked at him. Besides, he resented the use of his first name. He had told Anna she could call him that, not anyone else.

“Yes, Septimus?” They were at the point in rehearsal where Leonard had taken to calling all of his actors by their character names. It made it just that much easier to look them in the eyes.

“I don’t understand the trajectory of my character,” Stephen said. “I mean, he’s just kinda laid back the whole play, flirting with everyone and being vaguely interested in academia. And then after the play ends, he does this complete one-eighty into insanity?”

“If you want to call it that, yes.”

“But that’s what they call it! ‘A sage of lunacy.’ And for what? Because an underage girl he kissed once who might have actually been a genius died in a fire?”

Leonard sighed. It was going to be a long day if his actors were going to begin quoting the script back at him. Behind Stephen’s back, a few members of the crew were setting up the stage. They were dressed in black and moved like spiders around the corners of his imagination. They made him shiver, and focus on Stephen again, which he almost immediately regretted.

“So, your issue is that you do not believe Septimus was truly in love with Thomasina.”

“He slept with her mother! She was a child!”

Leonard hated it when his actors attempted to bring modern morality into the theatre. The theatre, as he often said, was a place for humanity. Morals had nothing to do with it.

“Stephen,” he said, dropping Septimus for a moment, because the boy in front of him was pompous and closed-minded and nothing at all like Septimus Hodge. “What would it take for you to devote the rest of your life to something? To give up everything you loved, in pursuit of a single, thankless goal? The Septimus we see at the beginning of the play is aimless, bored out of his mind, searching for something. The Septimus we get a hint of at the end has found it. Something to believe in. Do you believe in anything, Stephen?”

“I believe in God,” Stephen said.

“Clearly not enough,” Leonard mumbled, and thought, or you would be off being a monk, not cluttering up my theatre.

“What was that?”

“Nothing, Septimus. Absolutely nothing. Now take it from the top.”

The problem was, Leonard reflected, that none of his students had ever had to fight for something they believed in. They took the world at face value, and dismissed everyone who disagreed with them as easily as they brushed away a fly. They didn’t know what it was like to have a belief so powerful that you needed the rest of the world to see it too. To know something so innately that it didn’t matter if everyone thought you were crazy for it. Something that made it easy to give up everything else, because this thing, this truth, was really all that mattered anyway. They had never gone in guns blazing in defense of what they knew to be a fact. They had never been strapped to a hospital bed, pills tipped down their throats as they tried to explain that they weren’t wrong, they couldn’t be wrong, it was the rest of the world who were lying.

He took out his bottle of pills. It was nearly empty, he could see slivers of the white bottom of the container underneath a pile of blue. He would have to refill the prescription soon.

“Leonard?” It was Anna. She was wearing a high-necked collar that suspended her head like a pale bowling ball, a long silver pendant dangling over the shirt and between her breasts. “I keep thinking about what you said about Ophelia. I think about it all the time when I’m playing Chloë. Do you think it’s made a difference?”

In truth, Leonard hadn’t been paying attention. “Yes,” he said anyway. “Every character in this play believes that they see the world more clearly than the others. Hold onto that. You are the still center in the whirling storm.”

Outside, it was getting dark. Leonard couldn’t see it because the theater had no windows, but he knew it to be true. The set was going up. A constructed world to hide the reality that lurked underneath, like a shark’s fin just about to break the surface.

Anna said, “I’ve really loved doing this play, you know. I didn’t think I would, with such a tiny part. But you are one of the best directors I’ve ever worked with.”

She was wearing stage makeup. It made her cheeks too bright and her eyes pop like yolks of eggs in her pale face. She held her hands laced in front of her stomach, and Leonard wanted to cover them with his own. To make them invisible except by feel.

He said, “If you wanted, we could meet for drinks sometime. If you had any more questions about your part, or any possible future parts, I mean.”

There was a brief, stunning silence. Leonard felt the air between them grow heavy with awkwardness, his own face flushed with it. He had misstepped. He’d got it wrong again. Anna shifted on her feet. Her hands moved to her neck, pulling at her collar. “Um, maybe sometime. I’m pretty busy with school work right now.” Then someone called her name, and she darted away across the theatre, silver pendant swinging wildly as she went.

Tick, tick, tick.

When Leonard left the theatre that night, there was a white van parked outside. He reached into his pocket for the bottle of pills, and tossed it into a nearby trash can. Then he began to walk home, the long way.

———

“Remember what we talked about,” Leonard told his cast on opening night. “Thomasina, don’t play it too old. You’re a genius, but you’re still a teenage girl. Bernard, I know you get that paper to read off of in Act II Scene V, but don’t rely upon it too much. You wrote those words, you know them. Actually, that goes for everyone. Forget the script, live the scene.”

Out of the corner of his eye, he could see Stephen scoffing. Behind him, the shadowing figures were closing in. In part to keep them at bay, and in part because he had genuinely had enough of that little prick’s disrespect, he called attention to it: “Stephen, can you take something seriously for once in your fucking life? Are you capable of that, do you think?”

His cast shrank back, but so did the figures. Leonard took a deep breath. He was in control.

“Sorry,” Stephen said. He didn’t look it.

“Just get out there,” Leonard told him. And he did.

The play began.

Leonard tiptoed on stage and lifted up the corner of the curtain. The theatre was filled with the anticipated middle-aged crowd, pulling chocolates wrapped in tinfoil out of their purses and silencing their cell-phones. He spotted Maureen Hausman in the front row, and gave her a little wave. She must have taken it as an invitation he had not intended, because she got up from her seat and, whispering something to her neighbor (was that Stephen Billing’s father? He looked even older and more sour than Leonard had remembered), made her way to the side door.

The play started. Septimus and Thomasina sat at opposite ends of the long table. Between them, Plautus/Lightning the tortoise rested like a paperweight on a stack of books. Leonard had wanted to get a real tortoise, but the prop director had declined. He said nobody would notice the difference.

“‘Septimus, what is carnal embrace?’” asked Mina Sullivan, who played Thomasina. Her voice, Leonard noted, was just a little too high—more like someone who had just inhaled nitrous than an actual child. There was no way she would be able to keep it up for the rest of the play.

Maureen Hausman appeared at his elbow. “It’s going off smoothly, isn’t it?” she said, as the audience laughed. “I knew you would pull through for us, Leonard.”

“Does this mean you’ll let me put on Hamlet, next?” he asked.

She fixed him with a long look through her non-prescription glasses. “I’m sorry,” she said. “But not every play has to be about you.”

Time shifted. The characters waltzed in and out of different decades, different rooms, different beds. Leonard thought about that. He remembered being in the hospital, confined to a single room. Allowed out to use the bathroom or get a bite to eat or meet with a therapist with a face like a walrus, only after asking permission. It occurred to him suddenly that he was no longer there, and that he was free to do and go and be anything he wanted. He was the director. He determined what was real.

Something wet and hot trickled down his cheek. Leonard realised that he was crying. The sensation was strange but familiar. Like riding a bike, he thought, and laughed to himself. A little too loud; the actors were throwing glances at him from on stage. They should know better than that. He smiled at them encouragingly, and the tears rolled down his nose, across the contours of his lips, into his open mouth.

It was the final scene, the dance scene. Maureen Hausman was gone again, back to her seat in the audience. Thomasina and Septimus, Hannah and Gus, moving in squared circles across the room. Leonard walked out onto the middle of the stage, pulled them apart and then towards himself. He began to speak, “‘To be, or not to be,’” and waited for the actors to pick up the lines. They stood there like dead weight, staring at him blankly. He’d always known they were never any good. Whatever, it didn’t matter, he’d do it properly next time. He had all the time in the world to make them see. The curtain was coming down. Somebody somewhere was shouting for an ambulance. Leonard Flake looked out at the audience and found it full of men in black, staring back at him. They were clapping.