What to do with such a sorrow? It was like an enormous black cloud boiling up over the horizon…He had to transform it, or at the very least enclose it.
Miranda would become the daughter who had not been lost; who’d been a protecting cherub, cheering her exiled father…What he couldn’t have in life he might still catch sight of through his art: just a glimpse, from the corner of his eye.
By choosing this shack and the privations that would come with it, he would of course be sulking. He’d be hair-shirting himself, playing the flagellant, the hermit. Watch me suffer. He recognized his own act, an act with no audience but himself.
Watching the many faces watching their own faces as they pretended to be someone else—Felix found that strangely moving. For once in their lives, they loved themselves.
It’s necessary to look like the version of himself that’s become familiar up at Fletcher: the genial but authoritative retired teacher and theater wonk, a little eccentric and naïve but an okay guy who’s generously donating his time because he believes in the possibility of betterment.
If she’d lived, she would have been at the awkward teenager stage: making dismissive comments, rolling her eyes at him, dying her hair, tattooing her arms…
But none of this has happened. She remains simple, she remains innocent. She’s such a comfort.
His magic garment is hanging in there too, shoved to the back. The cloak of his defeat, dead husk of his drowned self.
No, not dead, but changed. In the gloom, in the gloaming, it’s been transforming itself, slowly coming alive.
This is the extent of it, Felix muses. My island domain. My place of exile. My penance.
My theater.
Your profanity, thinks Felix, has often been your whoreson hag-born progenitor of literacy. Along with your whoreson cigarettes, may the red plague rid them.
“Colonialism,” says 8Handz, who spent a lot of time on the Internet in his former life as a hacker. “Prospero thinks he’s so awesome and superior, he can put down what other people think.”
Fool, he tells himself. She’s not here. She was never here. It was imagination and wishful thinking, nothing but that. Resign yourself.
He can’t resign himself.
…the island is a theater. Prospero is a director. He’s putting on a play within which there’s another play. If his magic holds and his play is successful, he’ll get his heart’s desire. But if he fails…
But my other name’s Hag-Seed, or that’s what he call me
He call me a lotta names, he play me a lotta games
He call me poison, a filth, a slave,
He prison me up to make me behave,
But I’m Hag-Seed!
Idiot, he tells himself. How long will you keep yourself on this intravenous drip? Just enough illusion to keep you alive. Pull the plug, why don’t you? Give up your tinsel stickers, your paper cutouts, your colored crayons. Face the plain, unvarnished grime of real life.
Prisons are for incarceration and punishment, not for spurious attempts to educate those who cannot, by their very natures, be educated. What’s the quote? Nature versus nurture, something like that. Is it from a play?
“That’s not bad,” says Anne-Marie. “Maybe with more feeling. Pretend you’re falling in love with me.”
“But,” says Freddie. “Maybe I am falling in love with you. O you wonder!”
“We could put them on show,” says TimEEz. “Gibbering lunatics. Street people. Addicts. Dregs of society. Always good for a laugh.”
You called me dirty, you called me a scum,
You called me a criminal, a no-good bum,
But you’re a white-collar crook, you been cookin’ the books,
Rakin’ taxpayer money, we know what you took,
So who’s more monstrous…than you?
…it’s Ariel who changes Prospero’s mind, from revenge to forgiveness, because despite the crap they did, he feels sorry for the bad guys and what they’re being put through…so we take it that’s okay—to change our own minds.
Ain’t gonna any more lick your feet
Or walk behind you on the street,
Ain’t gonna get on the back of the bus,
And you can give our land right back to us!
Prospero says to the audience, in effect, Unless you help me sail away, I’ll have to stay on the island – that is, he’ll be under an enchantment. He’ll be forced to re-enact his feelings of revenge, over and over. It would be like hell.
But at least he’s given them a start. His life has had this one good result, however ephemeral that result may prove to be.
But everything is ephemeral, he reminds himself. All gorgeous palaces, all cloud-capped towers. Who should know that better than he?
…That was his idea, if not of hell exactly, then at least of limbo. A state of suspension, somewhere on the road to death. But on second thought, what did he have to lose? The Road to death is after all the road he’s on, so why not eat well during the journey?
What has he been thinking—keeping her tethered to him all this time? Forcing her to do his bidding? How selfish he has been! Yes, he loves her: his dear one, his only child. But he knows what she truly wants, and what he owes her.
