Work Text:
(act six: aftermath)
—
Tell me, Kakania demands. Tell me what I can do.
Here is Isolde, bled pale and ever so lovely by tragedy, the pitch-dark of her hair a mad splash against the canvas of her hospital sheets. Here is Kakania, swept into the Foundation with a shattered mirror in her hand and a chip on her shoulder.
It’s not advised, Mesmer begins, fits the wire-covered helmet over Isolde’s head. Isolde barely breathes, and Kakania’s hands twitch in memory. She forces them down. She may not entirely trust the Foundation, or its methods—a modern “Mesmer”!—but Isolde’s new doctor is no Schwartz; here there is no ravenous audience, no opera singer, carved apart for Vienna’s viewing pleasure, only the quiet hum of machinery and the rustle of crisp linen.
(besides, who is she to speak about treatment? she failed the first time, and vienna fell with her, and now the era of psychotherapy has left her behind, and–)
The Artificial Somnambulism will respond to both of your memories, Mesmer says, and given the nature of your relationship and your shared memories–
For a moment, Mesmer looks distinctly uncomfortable, hands coming to fiddle with the array of devices scattered across her table.
(a nervous tick? kakania could help if she had her mirrors–)
Your mind will conform to the dream. There’s no telling if you will retain your current memories, Mesmer continues, and there’s no method to predict how your buried memories will surface, especially in contact with Isolde’s volatile state.
Please, Kakania whispers. I have to try.
I will end the simulation if your monitor shows too much distress, she relents, ushering Kakania into the bed besides her. It’s not quite mercy.
—
In some dreams:
It’s closing night. Isolde plays Tosca, and Kakania sits front row. The finest dream, she thinks, and when the crowd reaches fever pitch at the inevitable descent into act three, Kakania rises with them. Isolde comes alive under the weight of their gaze, the arc of her dagger true.
Salvation, she thinks, and in this version it does not matter who Scarpia is; Kakania only has eyes for Isolde.
It is startlingly ordinary.
—
After the show, there is a party. Vienna loves excess almost as much as it loves art, and it never passes up the chance to take a piece of its brightest stars.
Heinrich strays to the sides, in animated conversation with Theophil as they debate over Tosca’s new stage design, Berlin Expressionism, the nature of beauty, the nature of a tragedy.
(revelation, desire, descent. isolde clutches at the diaphanous edges of kakania’s clothing and falls and falls and falls.)
And Isolde–
Isolde stands in the center of it all, buoyed up by adoration. She’s a distant, shining thing, but Kakania catches her gaze, and she bounds down from her cage of onlookers and meets her under the stark golden light.
Isolde leaps into her arms, and Kakania catches her in an embrace.
Kakania buries Isolde in roses. Thank you, Isolde gasps, breathless, adoring.
You were incredible up there, Isolde, unparalleled, she praises, the finest dream—she grasps the flickers of memory: Isolde in her clinic, a terribly named painting, pushes it away—the finest in Vienna, she finishes. Isolde notices the hesitation but does not comment.
Thank you, my doctor, my dearest friend, she says instead, pulling Kakania closer.
( doctor? )
Kakania laughs and twirls her through a dance.
It is far too long and far, far too short before she returns Isolde to the waiting crowd.
—
In other dreams:
Yours, she gasps out, yours, Cavaradossi, yours. They’re in the back alleys of a stage, guttering lights a flicker above them. Isolde places a hand on her collar and they roar back to life. Dress up, running lines, they’re rehearsing one scene or another but Isolde has always had a penchant for improvisation: here is Isolde, heart in her hands, proffered like a prayer. Kakania swallows her heart and it crawls right out of her throat.
(one-two step. here. here is the epiphany, cast in incandescent light.)
Isolde paints a smile on her face, love-struck, devastated, unnameable, and for a whiplash of a moment Kakania falls, falls, falls.
—
(much, much later, kakania will shatter a mirror in her grip and think foolish, undue, foolish.)
—
In kinder dreams:
Kakania in her clinic, Isolde besides her, a terrible, tender-winged moment. Isolde looks half-caught between dreaming and waking, and it’s the most honest Kakania has ever seen her.
Run away with me, Cavaradossi, Isolde says, and the dream starts to distort.
(a stage. tosca.)
Kakania startles out of her reverie. Isolde?
Run away with me, Kakania, she says. She has never once looked more beautiful, more breakable.
What do you mean, Isolde? Kakania holds her closer, her frantic hummingbird heartbeat blurring together.
(isolde, a singular, shining thing. karl at her feet, a blade in her hand-)
Run away with me, Klara, Isolde pleads, again, again. We’ll never be happy here. We’ll never be free here. We have no future here, doctor. Let’s run far, far away, to a place where no one knows us.
I can’t, she prepares to say—her patients, the Circle, Vienna —but what comes out of her mouth instead, unbidden, undue, is yes.
—
In kinder dreams:
Kakania takes her hand and runs a continent away, then another, until the horizon heels at their feet. In a kinder universe, it is enough. Away in Europe, away in Vienna, World War I passes with quiet certainty, the news of it filtered and broken and faraway, and whenever Kakania thinks to ask Isolde of it, she can see Isolde paint on her actress’ smile and lie.
Now, it’s New York, 1921, and Kakania hasn’t stopped looking over her shoulder, but they’re here, clawing a fledgling future out of nothing, and it’s- enough. On some nights, Vienna still scrapes a raw absence out of her, but Isolde curls up against her, so incandescently happy she is difficult to look at, and Kakania lets it settle into the hollow ache of her chest.
(she lets it be enough.)
—
Isolde swoons into the microphone, the arterial-bright redness of her mouth an open wound. She’s wearing soft leather boots, a shimmering silver-green coat and nothing much else, light rippling off of her like water; it’s the one Kakania bought for her two years ago, the fifth anniversary of their arrival, didn’t think about how she just wanted to see Isolde in her colors–
Isolde, singing about love, love, love, spilling over her lips like lifeblood, like wine into the enraptured audience.
Kakania catches her gaze and knows she’s singing only for her.
Isolde looks weightless, buoyed up by happiness, illuminated by unnameable lightness, and Kakania cannot bear to tear her eyes away from her.
The finest dream, she thinks, mesmerized, heart in her throat, Isolde burning silvery-white in her vision, and suddenly the guttering flickers of memory, and suddenly, I have thought this before, and suddenly, no, this has never been how our story ends—
—
That night, Kakania pulls Isolde into her arms and thinks of salvation. She thinks of serene, dizzying futures, and then the total expanse of the empty, ink-dark sky distorted in color, dream or memory or nightmare, close enough to reach for, close enough to drown in. She remembers—inexplicably, terribly—falling; into the endless horizon, this tidal, whirlpool want. She thinks of Isolde, of storms made into form, of prayers crystalized into a heart, of a desperate wish made into a dream—
Held close, Isolde looks all too peaceful in sleep, a light flush across her face, moving in steady rhythm with her breath.
She doesn’t want to disturb her further.
Kakania closes her eyes, listens to Isolde’s heart beat against her chest and knows there is only one way this can end.
—
In the final dream, Kakania leads Isolde down a sparkling boulevard and remembers everything.
It comes to her in fits and bursts, the weight of it torn out of her chest. Here is the final scene. Here is the moment of revelation.
(here is isolde, a singular, shining thing, alone at the end of everything. here is kakania, isolde at her feet, a watch in her hand, closing the curtains on the final act.)
Nonsense, she thinks, dizzy, delirious, utter nonsense, reaching for her glasses, but it all makes sudden, sick sense, and there, then, she wants nothing more than to run. Isolde clutches at her arm, holds her up. She is so, so concerned. Kakania wants to tear her hand away, wants to pull Isolde closer, wants -
(an endless litany of what have you done, i should have saved you, i never thought you would- i am sorry, i am so, so sorry- claws its way up her chest. empty words, she thinks.)
Are you happy here, Isolde? She finally finds it in herself to ask, and she can feel the dream start to ebb, dissolving at the edges. Are you happy, here in this endless dream?
Doctor? What are you talking about? Isolde says, eyes wide and guileless, and even here, even now, she is the best actress Kakania has ever known.
Isolde, she repeats, her voice breaking. Please, just answer me.
Her words fall now in the cadence of an elegy.
I love you, Isolde says all too softly, and isn’t that enough?
Then if this is your happiness, I will no longer disturb it, Kakania whispers, and waits for the dream to fade.
—
Kakania wakes with a hand outstretched and Isolde’s name on her lips.
The Mesmer girl breathes out a soul-deep sigh, looking so deeply unenthused that Kakania actually feels a little sorry for her, but Isolde, Isolde, Isolde, and the rest of the world falls away.
Kakania rises, runs to her side. Isolde looks much the same as she would in death, the night-black crown of her hair a shock against the bone-bled paleness of her skin. In the operas, Tosca comes to her senses to find Cavaradossi bloodied under a firing squad. In the operas, Isolde awakens to find Tristan bled dry, serene as he never was in life.
Here, now, Kakania looks at her Isolde and tries to think of nothing at all.
She’ll wake in a few moments. Mesmer says, still tinkering with her array of monitors. I don’t imagine you’d like to be here when she does.
—
In each and every fairy tale, it is the prince’s kiss that wakes the princess from her endless slumber. Here is a happy ending, the story says.
Kakania encircles Isolde into an embrace, her lips on her brow, and the dream shatters. Wake, she murmurs, and Isolde, a girl half-possessed, rises to her feet–
—
(no. we were never meant for these endings.)
—
In each and every fairy tale, it is the prince’s kiss that wakes the princess from her endless slumber, but Isolde has not been a princess since the end of their storm-swept era, and it is so easy to forget. There is no kingdom, no era, left for them anymore, only empty ruins.
Besides: Kakania has never been much of a prince.
Kakania encircles Isolde into an embrace, her lips on her brow. Sleep, Isolde, she murmurs. Return to the peaceful place, the home of the night.
This is the only kindness I can give to you, Kakania thinks, and holds her ever closer.
This is the only absolution I can give to you, Isolde thinks, and shutters her eyes closed.
—