Dreams of John, Who is Dead

Night 1:
I’m behind the sound booth and there are at least twenty microphones we can control from the board. We’ve labeled them all with acronyms for nicknames we’ve given the performers in my least favorite show, Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat. You hate it too, probably in solidarity. Your baritone used to echo off the walls of this theatre: you could have been professional, and we all knew it. Tonight, I can remember all the colors of the coat in order, and my untrained voice still sings along with yours. Except tonight I’m 34 and you’re dead.

“Be careful to cut Michael immediately— we can’t have him on a hot mic.” I’m somehow twenty years older than I was the first time you said that, but I slide him all the way down, sure that you are right he’d say Linda missed the damned cue or something worse. You always tried to hide “worse” from me.

“Why are we here?” I ask. We did so many shows. Why, the night after I met your husband through Facebook, the night after he told me you died and he found a letter I’d written you in a box by your bed, why this show?

“Hand me the candy?” We hid it from everyone else: you always showed me where the candy was. There was a brick-red bag of Boston Baked Beans. I don’t know why we had to hide them. No one else wanted them.

You are sitting on a barstool by the booth while I stand behind it.. You paid me for this show. You taught me to run everyone’s sound cues.

I hand you the bag. “You got my letter,” I say.

Night 2:
“JO-JO-JO-JO-SEPH”— I’m trying to blend and mix the voices so that no one overpowers Seth. We need his voice up front. Wait. Joseph again? I’m eating Boston Baked Beans. We aren’t supposed to talk during the show but the only other people here are onstage and too far away to hear us.

“Why are we here?” I asked.

You smile. Same barstool. You are wearing a maroon polo shirt with khakis, probably because that’s what you were wearing in my favorite picture of you. I tried to find you for fifteen years, John. Fifteen— mute the hot mic— years. The letter was five years old.

“Hand me the candy?”

“Why didn’t you write me back?”

“Watch Ian’s mic. He’s too high in the mix.”

“Your husband told me—“

Night 3:
One of the microphones doesn’t match the control board and I’m scrambling. I can’t remember the name or nickname of the man I can hear whistling while he pees. You are still in the maroon polo and your hair is perfect, was always perfect. I wanted you to date my mom for a while— you knew, didn’t you? Is that why I knew you were gay? I didn’t know a lot of things— you were almost fifteen years older than I thought. You didn’t go to all of the kids’ plays outside of the theatre we worked in together, though you came to all of mine. And an academic award night, I think.

You didn’t know everything, either. You didn’t know that even after I moved to college and you stopped responding to emails that I never went to an audition or a job interview without the note from the flowers you sent backstage the night of my first high school play. “You’ll be great,” you wrote, and if a great man like you believed it— maybe it was true. The last time I brought it to a job interview with me, I was 27 years old, and it was for the tenure track job I have now.

I’d written you the letter before that.

“Why are we here?”

“Hand me the—“

“Why didn’t you write me back?”

“He told you I had a stroke.”

“I had one too, dammit.” I’m crying now. “We could have done it together.”

“My dear (you called me that), not every stroke looks the same.”

I know that. I came back from mine and five years after his— which occurred around the time I sent him the letter telling him I was happy and so much had depended on him, with all my contact information, enough that his husband could find me after he was dead— he died.

“Why—“

Night 4:
Same set-up. Scene before intermission. Must be final dress, because everyone is in their community theatre Joseph costumes. I’m about to press a button to kill all the mics, give the actors a chance to get a drink and touch up their makeup.

“I’ve been asking the wrong question,” I say. You’re already on the barstool. Same outfit, same candy. This time you’re smoking. Why not let you smoke inside, just this once? We all know this isn’t real. “Why did you keep it?”

“You’re right, that’s a better question,” you say. You exhale and smoke billows and for a moment you look as grand and gigantic as your personality always felt. “You’ll never know. You’ll have to come up with something.”

“Did it mean something to you?”

“Probably,” you say.

I’m still crying. “You’re dead, you know.”

You smile with your mouth closed, a smile that always seemed a little sad around the eyes for you. “I know,” you say.

Night 5-247:
Please come back. Please?