Deranged but Oddly Moving

Chapter One: The Artisanal Telegram

Gilbert Pringle had been retired for fourteen months, and he could prove it, because he had marked the day on the calendar stuck to his refrigerator with a magnet shaped like a crab.

The calendar was two years out of date. He kept it anyway. It had a photograph of a lighthouse on it, and the lighthouse looked the way Gilbert felt: functional, unvisited, slowly being eaten by salt.

His mornings had a shape. He got up at six because his body no longer permitted alternatives. He fed the sourdough starters. There were three of them, lined up on the windowsill in jars, and he had named them Pamela, Bubbles, and The Understudy. Pamela was aggressive, sour, and refused to rise no matter how she was handled, which Gilbert felt was fair, given the source of the name. Bubbles was reliable and boring. The Understudy sat in the back and waited for one of the others to die.

At six-fifteen he had his argument with the cat.

"You're in my light," said Gilbert.

Banquo, eighteen pounds of orange indignation with one and a half ears, did not move off the counter.

"You're always in my light. You've been in my light for nine years. I have given you notes."

Banquo blinked slowly, which in cat is either love or contempt, and Gilbert had never once been sure which.

At six-thirty he checked the bucket.

The bucket lived on the floor beside his bed, positioned under the place where the roof had decided, sometime during the previous winter, to become a feature rather than a barrier. When it rained hard, water traveled along a rafter, gathered itself at a nail, and dripped with real commitment onto Gilbert's pillow. He had moved the bed. The water had followed. He had come to believe the house was making a point.

His house sat at the end of Skinner Ridge Road, three miles outside Pelican Bluff, Oregon, a town whose two claims to fame were saltwater taffy and an annual kite festival that nobody attended. The taffy was genuinely good. The kite festival was held in September, when the wind on that stretch of coast blew in a manner best described as personally hostile, and every year the Chamber of Commerce printed four hundred flyers and every year the flyers ended up in the ocean, which locals had begun to accept as the festival's actual content.

The rest of Gilbert's day, on a typical day, went like this: coffee, a walk on the beach in a coat that no longer had a working zipper, forty minutes of reading a play he had already directed, a nap he would deny under oath, the crossword, dinner standing at the counter, and then the part he didn't put on any list — the hour or so around eight-thirty at night when he sat in a chair by the window with the lamp off and felt, with great clarity and no self-pity, that he would never again do anything that mattered.

He had directed regional theater for thirty-four years. Eighty-one productions. He had gotten actors through opening nights with duct tape, ibuprofen, and outright lies. He had once staged a Scottish play in a converted grange hall using nothing but fourteen chairs and a fog machine borrowed from a wedding DJ, and a woman in the third row had wept so hard she had to be walked outside.

And then there had been Lear.

Gilbert did not think about Lear on purpose. Lear arrived unannounced, usually while he was doing something harmless, like buttering toast.

The production had been at the Coast Rep in the town of Fenmore Landing, and it had been, for two and a half weeks of previews, the best work of his life. Then a donor had funded a hydraulic storm machine. Gilbert had said no. The board had said the donor was very enthusiastic. Gilbert had said no again, more quietly, which in board meetings is the same as yes.

On opening night, at the exact moment the old king turned to face the weather, the machine had discharged one hundred and ten gallons of water in three seconds directly into the front three rows. A retired postal inspector named Marv Sisk had been lifted out of his seat by the force of it. Two lawsuits followed. So did a review in the Pelican Bluff Beacon by Pamela Durning, who covered theater, obituaries, and the tide tables for that newspaper and brought the same energy to all three.

The headline had been: LEAR DROWNS, AUDIENCE WISHES IT HAD.

Gilbert had resigned eleven days later, told everyone he was ready for a change, and gone home to make bread.

So: fourteen months. Sourdough, cat, bucket, chair by the window.

And then, on a Tuesday in April, a teenager on an electric bike came up Skinner Ridge Road with a piece of paper.

The teenager's name was Tad Kroon. He worked at the taffy shop and, apparently, for a company called The Telegrammatic Concierge, which Gilbert would later learn was a service based in San Francisco that charged four hundred dollars to deliver a message by hand on cream-colored stock in all capital letters, for clients who wished to seem eccentric on purpose.

"Are you Gilbert Pringle," said Tad, reading off his phone.

"I'm afraid so."

"Cool. I have a telegram for you."

"Telegrams stopped in 2006."

"Yeah," said Tad, "but somebody paid a lot of money to make one anyway, and I get twelve dollars, so."

Gilbert took it. He read it standing in the doorway with Banquo pressing against his ankle like a landlord.

MR. PRINGLE. STOP. I HAVE PURCHASED THE OLD NORTHRUP CANNERY AND CONVERTED IT INTO A FOUR HUNDRED SEAT THRUST STAGE. STOP. I AM FOUNDING THE PELICAN BLUFF SHAKESPEARE FESTIVAL AND I WOULD LIKE YOU TO DIRECT IT. STOP. I SAW YOUR TWELFTH NIGHT IN THE PARKING GARAGE IN 2009 WHEN I WAS SEVENTEEN AND IT REARRANGED MY INTERIOR. STOP. TERMS ENCLOSED. STOP. PLEASE SAY YES. STOP. RUPERT KANG.

There was a second sheet. On the second sheet was a number.

Gilbert looked at the number for a while. Then he went inside, sat down at the kitchen table, and looked at it some more.

The number was large enough to fix the roof. It was large enough to fix the roof, replace the water heater that made a sound like a man being startled, and still have something left over, which in Gilbert's professional experience had never once been true of anything involving Shakespeare.

He knew who Rupert Kang was in the vague way that everyone knew. Some app. Water. Reminding people to drink water. Sold for an amount of money that had made the national news and caused Gilbert, at the time, to say the word "water" out loud in an empty kitchen, in a tone.

He should refuse.

He listed the reasons on the back of an envelope, because he was a man who made lists when frightened.

1. I am sixty-two.
2. I am not good at this anymore.
3. Fish smell.
4. Pamela Durning lives four blocks from that cannery.
5. Hydraulics.

He looked at the list. It was, he had to admit, not a strong list. Item one was arithmetic. Item three was weather. Item five was a machine he had never asked for in the first place.

It was item two that had teeth.

Banquo jumped onto the table and sat directly on the envelope, which Gilbert chose to interpret as a note.

"You don't have opinions about my career," he said.

Banquo began to wash.

"You have opinions about the noise the can makes."

Outside, it began to rain — not weather, exactly, more of a persistent gray idea. Gilbert listened to it work its way along the roof, gather at the nail, and begin, with that awful patient rhythm, to drip into the bucket beside his bed.

He thought about the parking garage. He had forgotten that anyone had seen it. It had run for nine performances on level three of a municipal structure in the winter of 2009, with a cast of eleven and a sound design consisting entirely of engine echo, and it had been reviewed in the alternative weekly by a man who called it "deranged but oddly moving," a phrase Gilbert had hated for a week and then loved for fifteen years.

He went and got the phone. There was a number on the second sheet under the money, and he dialed it before he could construct a reason not to.

It rang once.

"Rupert Kang."

"This is Gilbert Pringle."

There was a sound on the other end that Gilbert eventually identified as a young man standing up very fast.

"Mr. Pringle. Oh. Oh, wow. Okay. I have a whole thing prepared, do you want the whole thing—"

"I'd like to know what the play is."

"A Midsummer Night's Dream," said Rupert. "Because it's about people making something terrible in the woods, and loving it."

Gilbert closed his eyes. That was, irritatingly, a real answer.

"When do we start?"

"Monday," said Rupert. "Mr. Pringle, this is going to be beautiful."

Somewhere in the bedroom, the bucket received another drop.

"Yes," said Gilbert. "Well."