play since high school. But they screw their courage to the sticking-place, and both end up squeezing a blackly masochistic, white-knuckle fun out of the evening.
“Whoa,” he says, walking her from the hall. “What in the world was that?”
“I’ve always wanted to pretend I could act. I just needed an accomplice.”
“So what do we do for an encore?”
“You pick.”
“How about something a little less nerve-crushing, next time?”
“Ever gone cliff diving?”
HERE’S THE THING: they both get cast. Of course they get cast. They were cast already, before they tried out. That’s how myths work. Macduff, and Lady Macbeth.
Ray calls up Dorothy in a total panic. Like he’s been playing with his father’s shotgun and it just went off. “We don’t actually have to take the parts, right?”
“It’s community theater. I think they’re counting on you.”
She knows already the precise worst button she can press in him, right there in their first week together. Criminally responsible, this man. Pathologically accountable to the hopes and expectations of his kind. And the lady, reckless enough for ten of him. She pretty much tells him: no Macbeth, no more dates. They take the parts.
Dorothy is a natural. But Ray: even the casting director, the night of the first read-through, thinks she may have made a terrible mistake. Dorothy watches the man, awed. He’s the best worst actor she has ever seen. He just speaks his lines, with a lanky gall and astonishing naïveté, as if he’s putting forward the case for his own existence in front of the End of Time Debate Club.
She raids the public library for books on method acting and getting into character. He falls back on stoicism. “I’ll be lucky to memorize all the lines.”
After two weeks, he’s almost competent. After three, something more starts to happen.
“No fair,” she says. “Have you been practicing?”
He has been, in ways he just now discovers. He never realized it before, but the law itself is theater, long before you take anyone to court. Ray has one gift: to play himself with a fearsome intensity. This will make him, over the coming years, a highly successful litigator of and patent. Now that simple gift turns his Macduff weirdly hypnotic. By standing still in deadpan earnestness, he seems to tap into the planetary will.
Dorothy’s main superpower, in place since girlhood, is being able to read every muscle around a person’s mouth and eyes and tell with perfect accuracy whether he’s lying. This does nothing for her stenography or her Lady Macbeth. But it does make her want to test the outer limits of this man’s innocence. Three nights a week of rehearsals for five weeks, and she’s convinced: Ray Brinkman would indeed leave his wife and kids alone and unprotected, out in a castle in the sticks, just to save his godforsaken country.
The staging is very seventies. Very Watergate. Admission is free, and the community gets its money’s worth. For three nights running, Lady Macbeth goes down in spectacular flames. For three nights running, Macduff and his men, kitted out as trees, help the forest migrate from Birnam Wood all the way to Dunsinane. Trees actually journey across the stage. Oak, hearts of oak, armies and navies of oak, post and lintel of the house of history. The men hold great branches, and while unwitting Macbeth declares his prophecy-ensured safety, his attackers dance so slowly across the boards they seem not to move at all. And each night, Ray has almost forever to think: Something is happening to me. Something heavy, huge, and slow, coming from far outside, that I do not understand.
He has no idea. The thing that comes for him is a genus more than six hundred species strong. Familiar, protean, setting up camp from the tropics all the way up through the temperate north: the generalist emblem of all trees. Thick, clotted, craggy, but solid on the earth, and covered in other living things. Three hundred years growing, three hundred years holding, three hundred years dying. Oak.
The oaks swear him in as temporary deputy in their fight against the human monster. Good Macduff hides behind their cut branches (Many living things were harmed in the making of this production), hoping he’ll remember his next lines, praying he’ll defeat the usurper again tonight, and marveling at the strange, irregular, lobed shapes fleshing out his camouflage like the letters of an alphabet from outer space, each glyph shaped by something that looks for all the world like deliberation. He can’t read the text on