Yeah — how about that? Been going on for weeks. Who knew? Shit happens while you’re busy.
Els scrambles out of his seat and turns up the aisle. Bonner grabs his wrist.
Where you going?
Els doesn’t know. To the nearest television set. To the library. To the office of the artistic director of City Opera to plead innocence.
He lowers himself back into the chair. What do you know about this? He sounds absurd, accusatory.
Only what I read in the papers.
Els stares again at the fulfilled prediction. This can’t be happening.
Bonner’s face lights up. I know, huh? Total gold mine. Somebody’s watching over us.
Els wants to punch the man. Instead, he scrambles back to his feet. Richard doesn’t bother grabbing him again. Els jogs up the aisle and out of the hall, just as the run-through of Act Three begins.
In hours, he knows as much about Waco as anyone. He holes up in his room in Richard’s apartment, camped in front of the TV, surrounded by newspapers. He watches the standoff escalate its nightmare logic: The empire’s war machines. The siege works, cutting off the rebels from the outside. The core of believers huddled around their messiah, living on rainwater and stockpiled rations. He hardly needs to watch; he’s spent three years composing it.
Richard finds him that night watching videotape of the compound taken from an Army helicopter: a few dozen religious zealots bunkered down against the most powerful government on Earth. A voice-over says that the siege is costing the taxpayers a million dollars a week. The camera pans across a nearby caravan of RV vehicles — campers who show up to see how the standoff will play out. They sit along the road in folding chairs, playing cards and barbequing, waiting for the climax of this live theater.
Els speaks in a spectral treble, without turning to look. This isn’t coincidence.
Bonner’s arms are full with pad thai and the day’s rehearsal notes. Peter. Turn it off. Let’s eat.
What does this mean? It has to mean something.
It means we’re a genius, you and me. Absolute psychics.
People will think we. .
There’s no end to what people might accuse them of. Unearned luck. Very bad taste. Opportunism. Some Faustian bargain.
Richard, Els says. We have to stop this.
Right. I’ll get right on the horn to Janet Reno.
Els doesn’t hear. He’s staring at his fisted knuckles. The news segues to a story about the World Health Organization declaring TB a global emergency. Bonner eats; Els watches him. It’s not the siege of Waco Els needs to stop. It’s the siege of Münster.
Two days later, ATF forces overrun the compound. Armored assault vehicles, engineering tanks, tear gas, grenade launchers. Then fire. Els might have told them: everything will burn. Scores of adults and two dozen children, shot, exploded, and immolated, and every detail of the finale beamed around the world on live television.
No need to watch through to the end. Els knows the end; he’s already written it. He stands in Bonner’s apartment in fetid clothes, fingers pressed to his head, waiting to be told what to do. Receiving no commands, he heads out into the blazing day and hops a cab uptown to Lincoln Center.
Richard is in row three, laying into the starving throngs of Münster. I want to hear hope! he shouts. You still believe that God is going to come down and fuck the Prince Bishop and his entire paid mob up the ass!
Els drops into the chair across the aisle. When Bonner sets the onstage planet revolving on its own again, Els tells him the news. The director stares as if Els were a college intern on the lighting crew who has started to give him blocking advice.
Peter, I’m kind of busy. We have previews in six days. Is there something you need?
We can’t do this, Els says.
Bonner blows a raspberry and twists his palms toward heaven. He hoots. His smile is brighter than it has been since Knipperdollinck’s understudy went over the edge of the orchestra pit and smashed his coccyx.
You’re out of your damn mind.
Okay, Els says. We just have to postpone. .
Bonner snickers. There’s no other reasonable response.
We can go next season, Els says. Or later this—
Peter. Get real. We’ve put these people three-quarters of a million dollars in debt. Even a two-night delay would kill them.
Truth is, since the standoff in Texas became a headline, sales for the show have gone from poky to brisk, and opening night now has a reasonable chance of selling out. Marketing has gotten behind the opera with renewed vigor; they’ve started plastering stickers across the existing posters and flyers: Come See the News That the Past Already Knew.
Innocent children, Els says. Burnt to death by American law enforcement agents.
There’s confusion onstage, an altercation over the scene’s blocking. Bonner trots toward the crisis. Els dogs him.
Not our fault, Bonner tells him, without turning.
Els grabs him by the elbow. Listen to me. The minute people see. . We can’t capitalize on this. It’s obscene.
True bafflement crosses the director’s face. The accusation is so bizarre it interests him. This is your story, Maestro. You want to quit, now that it’s real?
THERE’S SOMETHING TO say for a short third act: rapid rising action and a race to the finish. It takes only a recitative and two arias for the Prince Bishop to rally support in the north and tighten the snare of death around the crazed kingdom. The City of God can do nothing but play out its fate in a succession of otherworldly choruses. The siege seals up; food vanishes. A gentle siciliana in the harps and flutes predicts starvation. The believers hold out by eating every dog, cat, and rat within the walls. Then grass, dirt, and moss, shoe leather and old clothes, and finally the flesh of the dead, all to a lilting 12/8 dance.
John, the Messiah, the World’s King, retreats into his beloved amateur theatricals. He turns the final days into a great masque. Revels fill the town square, and the cathedral hosts an obscene Mass. Raunchy figures in the high winds grope and snipe at each other. Chopped-up snatches of sacred chant circle and rise until the entire orchestra turns into a spinning bacchanal.
In a flurry of brass, a group of the tailor King’s starving subjects flee the city. But the Prince’s armies pin them in the shallow meadows between the siege works and city walls. The refugees drag about, foraging the grass like desperate animals until they coat the ground with corpses. The music goes mad; sul ponticello harmonics slither through the strings.
Every player in the orchestra plunges into the surging tutti. The attackers enter a city turned to walking dead. They offer the citizens safe passage for surrender, then slaughter them the moment they lay down their arms.
Knipperdollinck and John, the amateur thespian, are tortured with red-hot irons and hung in cages from the tower of Saint Lamberti. But throughout his ordeal, the fallen savior makes no sound. His final aria — his last public performance — is total silence accompanied by a halo of strings.