1001 Nights Cast

The biggest problem facing her is her obsession. Stella is cleaning again. Stella is clean. Everything around Stella is clean. She has washed her hair with each of the three different shampoos that she has lined up in the bath. Somehow the hair is not coming clean. Now she has begun to trim it.

A small elfin man shared an otherwise empty train compartment with a 19-year-old American girl who shivered in the top bunk through the dark of the overnight journey opening her eyes only at stations where dogs sniffed around the carriages and East German border guards in long coats paced the platforms. She saw Quonset huts glowing in the dark. She didn’t dwell on the mystery of life nor did she try to decipher it.

This journey appears in full resolution after 26 years as a result of some kind of cerebral cross-reference with the situation in front of her. The two performers on stage will soon jump to cleaning up the mess they have created and, though they are veteran performers, on this night they have no one to clean up for them. Their friends in the audience pitch in. She is stuck washing and rewashing the floor for hours and no one seems to understand why she should be trying to get it clean. Then comes the moment that triggers the memory of the train journey and the elfin man and now all of this in front of her pales in comparison to the pictures in her mind: the Quonset huts and the border guards and the sign that read IT IS DANGEROUS TO THROW THINGS OUT OF THE WINDOW.

Stella keeps returning to the mirror where she finds even more hair to cut from her head. She is trying to finish a haircut she started a week and a half ago. She isn’t counting how many days since she started but it’s 11. She plays not only the radio but a music CD and the television simultaneously. She can hold each sound in a different part of her head while she cleans. It helps trace the lines of thought that tangle around the mile markers of her recollections.

She remembers the performance in which two performers poured mud onto a rug and ran in place, pushing it into the rug and kicking it up behind them and spreading this mud around the room on the soles of their shoes. She found it hard to look at.

Douglas had done himself in with pills. And while it certainly wasn’t her fault, she felt strangely implicated in the death of his spouse who succumbed with him of her own overdose. When Maggie had asked her whether or not Douglas might be a good catch Stella said simply, ‘I don’t think he would do anything to hurt you.’ They were found dead together on the floor of their home.

It wasn’t one thing that gave Stella’s life so much weight just now. It was the accumulation. The sum total was almost more than she could bear. Maybe it was more. Maybe she wasn’t bearing it.

The bed was very dusty. It had to be turned and beaten with the broom stick and turned again and vacuum cleaned and aired out and all around the bed frame had to be thoroughly cleaned. There was a fine whitish dust that clung to itself in clumps and mixed with other scraps of substance so small they couldn’t be identified.

It wasn’t only promises that were fragile, the road also bent and the bridge sighed and all of the shadows were wrong. It wasn’t a woman in the far corner, just her reflection in the glass. Another lesson in the aberration of light. When Stella passed the large sculpture of a shoe, the one in the plaza downtown, the echo of the children running around inside it caused the hairs on her arms to stand straight out as if pulled by the static electricity from a balloon. The thought of the quiet sound of the hair being pulled to the taut rubber of the balloon excited her inner ear.

Another friend, addicted to noise, walked the city for comfort after a long day’s work. Stella imagined her following each noise that attracted her and eventually losing sight and touch and becoming a single-sensed being simply following sound. But that was a silly thought. Not unclean, but silly.

Clouds appeared everywhere: in her tea, in the rearview mirror, on the television, and the back of her mind. She was working on dissipation, shining a sun so bright that everything dried up. But her vision turned this into a trauma in which everything dried so fast that her eyes stuck to the left corners and she had to turn her head in order to see forward. At this point she decided to accept the clouds.

Michael needed comforting last Monday after being attacked by a man with Down’s syndrome who wanted the label off his shirt. The man succeeded in getting the label off and in ripping Michael’s shirt and causing him to get off the train and come home to relax before getting back on the train to finally make the journey to work for the day. Later when Stella told the story to some of her co-workers one of them, preferring poetry to compassion, commented: ‘I say, give the man the label.’ As if wanting something so bad is license enough to have it no matter the cost to someone else.

In the performance a man measured the length and width of the space and in darkness between measurements rolled up the measuring tape and, because the music had been loud and because now it was not playing, it became possible to hear the quiet sound of the tape moving back into the housing. This was very satisfying.

Everything was next to everything else in such a haphazard way. She straightened the rug. Even her home landscape had turned strange.