Noon tastes like bad coffee and stage dust. I wait in the aisle with my pass turned backward so it doesn’t flash my name to the bored usher scanning badges. The auditorium is cold enough to store fish; the AC runs with that aquarium hum that sometimes lives in my studio, reminding me that whole rooms can be filters. The panel banner reads Future of Performance & Community, and someone has placed a bowl of mints between the microphones like a peace offering.
I clock the exits, the camera positions, and the thin door to the right labeled SERVICE that’s been propped with a crate of programs. Elena is three rows back, dressed like an apology in neutral colors, hair pinned; she’s flanked by two plainclothes who look like they eat procedural manuals for breakfast. Her jaw isn’t set yet, which means she can still believe in a clean question.
The moderator runs the intros and calls him Lyle Corcoran, consultant, in a tone that pretends the word consultant isn’t a costume. He strolls out with a trimmed beard and a dark suit that knows how to keep its own secrets. The stage wash glazes his eyes, turning them into coins. He takes his seat and taps his ring on the table once: a bright, percussive click that ricochets up the rafters like our private metronome.
Micro-hook: The tap lands in the same pocket of the room where the confetti cannons hiccuped last night. My hand tightens around my pen until the clip bites. He wants the echo. He wants the rhyme.
The panel warms up with safe questions: community engagement, transparency, the ethics of immersive formats. He speaks in clean sentences that sound balmed, like he moisturizes his words. “We owe the public care,” he says, “and we owe participants autonomy.” His ring ticks quietly against his water glass while he nods at a playwright describing post-show debrief circles. He looks like a man who helps, who gathers, who opens new doors—always in public, always on tape.
The Q&A starts. The volunteer with the mic chooses hands that rise politely. A dramaturg asks about donor transparency. A grad student wants to know how to document consent. He compliments them by name, a trick designed to feel like respect. He says “thank you for your bravery” to a student who admits a harmful show she loved.
When the mic reaches me, I stand. “Mara Keene,” I say, because hiding here is another mask. The room swivels. A few people whisper; a Night Choir pin flashes near the aisle, a tiny cherub grinning. I keep my shoulders down, my tone flat.
“Transparency question,” I say. “When a donor uses an alias—say, LC Arts—and funds ‘repairs’ that unlock private access, would you consider that transparent philanthropy, or a stage door key paid in advance?”
He smiles in the direction of the question. “Transparency is contextual,” he says. The ring taps twice: tick, tick. “Aliases can protect privacy in a landscape hungry for outrage.”
“Privacy for whom?” I ask. “For a man who wants cameras on his best angles or for the people he scripts into empathy?”
“I don’t script anyone,” he says. He doesn’t look directly at me; he addresses the room, letting the camera operators frame him in benevolence. “I create conditions for testimony. I discourage spectacle.”
“Then whose confetti hit my hair?” I ask. The air shifts, a hush that smells like burnt sugar riding the air vents, our factory’s signature sneaking into this white-walled theater. “Whose cannons were programmed with HERO SHOT?”
He places his hand over the ring like a man at a swearing-in. “Language is theater’s instrument,” he says. “Context is everything. If confetti fell, perhaps a prankster wanted to mock rescue tropes.”
“Then perhaps you can address a trope,” I say, glancing at Elena just long enough for him to clock her. “You’ve said before—somewhere—that third-act rescues are—”
“—for cowards,” he says, graciously completing my line and smiling into the house as three cameras catch his profile. He lets the words sit as if he’s placing a rose on a piano. The ring taps once more: tick. “Because true rescue happens in act one, in prevention, not in public choreography.”
The line is a fingerprint, a voiceprint, a patent you can’t file. My breath stays shallow but steady; I do not break the microphone silence. Somewhere behind me, a phone pings and is shushed into a coat.
The moderator fidgets. “Let’s keep questions concise,” she says, but she doesn’t stop me. The room needs the train to finish arriving.
“You avoid cameras during your supportive debriefs?” I ask. “Because we found a wall of cherubs hiding an array.”
He tilts his head. “I enjoy allegory,” he says. “Cherubs are public domain.”
The laugh that ripples through the house is brittle. He rides it. “Ms. Keene,” he adds, finally using my name, “I admire your reach. But reach without restraint is a megaphone without a choir.”
“The Night Choir sings with consent,” I say. “They’ve learned—took time, took harm—to modulate.”
“They trade enamel pins like indulgences at pop-ups,” he replies, and the crowd splits: some grin, some harden. He spreads his hands in a priestly half-shrug that says I forgive even as I tease. “Communities need rituals.”
Elena stands. The motion is small and clean, but I see the lossy wave ripple through her plainclothes. She nods to the side aisle team, then to the stage manager hovering by the wings. The plan is quiet: a conversation offstage, a request to remain for a few clarifying questions, a corridor door where cameras are fewer.
“One more,” I say, because he thrives on one more. “Did your philanthropy buy you backstage keys at the Orpheum before it closed?”
He finally looks at me. The eye contact slices; the room blurs down to a line between us. He moves the mic aside with solemn fingers. The ring ticks the stem: tick.
“The Orpheum,” he says, letting reverence sand the word, “is a nave where our city keeps its failed prayers.” He lets that gravitas swell. Then he smiles, soft as gauze. “I gave them money for lights. It was tax-deductible.”
Micro-hook: A press camera clicks near my shoulder, and in the sensor’s flicker I hear a hallway door unlatch. Stage left, the service door has lost its program crate. A hand I know—an usher, bribed by a myth—slides it aside. The backstage corridor yawns like a throat.
Elena moves. She isn’t sprinting; sprinting tells a story you can’t edit. She steps into the aisle, badge low, voice lower. “Mr. Corcoran,” she calls in a tone that could calm dogs. “Could we speak in the greenroom?”
He stands slowly, giving the cameras a full-length of consideration. “Always,” he says. “I believe in dialogue.” He clasps the mic as if to pass it to the next panelist, but he keeps it a beat too long. “I also believe in ventilation,” he adds, eyes twinkling. “Rooms get stuffy.”
He waves two fingers at the audience in a gesture so minor it looks like humility. Then he steps off the stage—not toward Elena—but toward the service door, moving at the speed of confidence. Two volunteers hesitate, flanked by the moral weight of an event; he smiles at them like a donor and they part.
Elena’s plainclothes angle to intercept. One reaches the door as it closes; he shoulders it open into a concrete corridor smelling like hot dust and spilled paint. I follow because my worst habit is chasing narrative, and because my best habit is refusing to let someone else write it for me.
The corridor is a strip of unglamorous truth: caged bulbs, taped signage, pallets with inked labels, a map of FIRE EGRESS where someone has doodled a cherub in Sharpie. Footsteps slap ahead—not running, not quite, a stage walk that wastes no energy. The ring ticks against metal—tap on a handrail, tap on a plate—until the sound becomes direction.
“Left,” a plainclothes says into his cuff. “He took left.”
“Negative,” another answers. “I have him on the right stairwell.”
Lyle’s voice floats back, buttered. “Lieutenant Park,” he calls, careful not to use Elena’s first name, careful to make the formality public record, “I’ll be just a minute.”
Elena doesn’t accelerate. “Keep your hands visible,” she says, and her cadence entangles with the ring’s rhythm in a duet I hate.
We hit a fork that shouldn’t exist according to the map and does anyway—a steel door with a sign that reads AUTHORIZED TECH ONLY, and a loading dock painted dead-end until your eyes learn the seam. He slides through the seam and leaves the tiniest cherub sticker on the frame, the way some hikers tie ribbons to trees. Cameras catch me catching it. I pull it off with two fingers, bag it, and hand it to Elena without a word.
“Stop,” Elena calls, and for a breath he does. He stands at the far edge of a wedge of daylight where the dock opens on a narrow alley. The air that blows through carries river chill and the burnt sugar of the factory, weirdly tender.
He turns so the light makes a halo where a halo has no business. “Detective,” he says, “I’m not fleeing. I’m de-escalating.”
“You’re avoiding lawful questioning,” she says. “Please step back inside.”
He sighs as if we’re all children and he’s the only adult left in the room. “Your cameras are within the building,” he says, and with a tiny, smug flick of his chin he indicates the press lenses trained on the stage door behind us. “This is better for everyone.”
“No,” Elena says simply.
He taps the ring once on the dock railing. “Third-act rescues are for cowards,” he repeats conversationally, almost bored now that he’s landed the quote where he wants it—on multiple recordings, under good light, with me in frame. “We’re not there yet.”
Two plainclothes move to box him. He smiles apologetically at one, mouths sorry, and then steps sideways into an intake of shadow where a secondary gate rolls and a motion sensor blinks. The gate jerks up with a rattle like applause. He slips through—to a staircase that shouldn’t be open—and the gate drops between us. The plainclothes hit the latch; it sticks, then yields, then opens onto nothing but echo. He has vanished into the back passages laced through this building the way cues lace a show.
Elena’s radio hisses with a painful chorus: “Negative visual.” “Camera two lost him by freight.” “Exterior unit tied up with a delivery truck.” “Stairwell C connects to B-level catwalks we didn’t know existed.”
I stand in the dock’s daylight stripe and taste the river, the sugar, and my own stupid want for confrontation. Around us, a few attendees have found the alley with their phones up, chewing content. A Night Choir kid with a pin the size of a quarter looks at me with eyes like mirrors. I put my hand up, palm down: lower your camera. She drops it, cheeks flushed. Performance protects him; my refusal to perform costs me.
Elena slides the cherub sticker bag into her pocket like she’s tucking in a child’s hair. For one second her eyes close, a micro-grief for the clean sequence we didn’t get. Then they open and are knives again.
“He wants the chase on tape,” I say, not trusting my throat to do nuance. “He wants the world to see us almost.”
“Almost is oxygen to him,” she answers. “But every almost makes a map.” She points to the service map we passed, then to the real seam, then to the gate sensor. “He didn’t float. He planned.”
“He planned for your cameras to be inside,” I say. “He planned for mine to be off.”
“Keep them off,” she says, and I hear the trust and the test braided into the instruction. “This doesn’t go out as a clip.”
The alley yawns, the city chews its own noise, and somewhere a delivery truck bleats its horn like a goat. I feel adrenalized and absurdly awake, every finger tingling from gripping questions too hard. The conference PR rep arrives, flustered and fragrant, asking whether we intend to disturb any more sessions today. Elena handles her with the dark art of polite refusal.
Back in the auditorium, the moderator is trying to reassemble a conversation from the crumbs. On stage, Lyle’s empty chair looks posed, his water glass a prop that understands its role. The bowl of mints gleams under the lights like a joke for anyone with a mouth dry enough to choke.
Micro-hook: My phone buzzes once—an email from a burner I’ve seen in a dozen bad dreams. Subject line: Community Poll Tonight? The body: Audience chooses the pacing. Courage means consent. There’s a link I don’t touch.
I look at Elena, who is already watching me watch my phone. “He wants me to turn it over to them,” I say. “Make the Choir decide risk.”
“Then make them own it,” she says. “But first, eat.”
I smile without humor. “Dumplings?”
“Always off email,” she says, and the ritual holds. We walk out past the merch tables—pins, programs, T-shirts printed with cherubs—and back into a city that smells like sugar and rain. The tidal creek will flood the sidewalks again tonight; the reflections will make doubles of all of us, and I will have to choose which face points toward a microphone.
Elena’s team fans into new positions, not rattled, not done. I pocket my pass and feel the weight of the ring tap in my bones like a hostile lullaby. He wants me onstage choosing pace with a poll and a smile. I owe the dead something else.
I text one line to my teamless team: Tonight—professionals only. The audience votes on method, not spectacle. I don’t hit send yet. I let the cursor blink like a cue light about to turn, and I leave the sentence open long enough to hurt.