Archive of Our Own

[Image description: A page formatted as a Magnus Institute statement in a handwritten font. At the top in each field is written "Name: Daniel Stoker," "Date: 29 May 2013," and "Subject: Discoveries at the site of the first Covent Garden Theatre." These captions are slightly obscured by a post-it-note which reads "ESTRANGEMENT EFFECT" in cursive. There is an inline illustration of Danny Stoker sitting, troubled and trying to write at a desk, and the more translucent image of Gertrude Robinson watching him through a window from the other room.]

They say you'll take anything here, as long as it's truly told. Something about "the realms of apparent reality"--right? But I guess it makes sense, doesn't it? You run a repository for people's first-person accounts of the impossible: you're already amassing the world's greatest archive of unlikely stories. Stories are what you've got here. You may as well make sure that they're true.

Well, that much I can provide. I have that. I don't have a lot now. But I have a story for you, Ms Robinson.

Let me explain.

I've lived a charmed life. I know that much. Some people--men especially, I guess, guys my age--need to pin their hollowness to an outside scapegoat. But I know better than that. I've always been healthy. My parents were middle-class, and kind and supportive. They even waited until my brother and I were out of the house to divorce, amicably. The worst misfortune I suffered as a kid was tonsillitis. I've been dealt a good hand. My troubles are my own.

The second-worst misfortune I suffered as a kid was an exceptional brother. I'm joking, half. I want it on record that I adore my brother. Anyone would, in fact, and anyone should. But all the same, I think he factors in.

My brother is about three-and-a-half years older than me. Actually, he's thirteen hundred days my senior--he figured it out once, in his head. He's good with maths; it's because he forges onward and applies himself to a question, unafraid of getting it wrong. I mean, he probably won't get it wrong. He's never met an academic discipline he didn't like. But I just mean that common self-consciousness about failure, about foundering stupidly in the shallows of a problem: well, I'm sure Tim feels it too, but it doesn't stop him. He's too interested in the answer. He's too intent on getting where he's going.

[Image description: Another page of the same Magnus Institute statement, with story text continued. Each page header reads "The Magnus Institute * Statement of Personal Experience."]

So that's a difference between him and me. When I've tried to tell myself, well, nobody really has a purpose, nobody really has a calling, that's just pretentious--all I need to do is look at my brother, right? And then I know I'm making excuses, because I don't.

I like the word vocation, because it literally means calling. Originally it had a religious connotation, like God called you to do whatever it was you were doing. Teaching. Smithing. Preaching. Yes, obviously Tim told me about this. This is not the sort of thing I'd look up on my own. Vocation--what a nice word.

Anyway, I never did have one.

Tim works in publishing. It's editing he does, but I'm sure he'll get around to a magnum opus. When my mum or dad get asked about Tim, they can always tell you about all these things he's doing--you know he did a year at FU Berlin? You know he's got an editing credit on that recent Gilgamesh translation--but when they're asked about me, they can't quite answer. It's not disapproval. They just aren't sure.

It's all right. They wouldn't be wrong not to know--I've spent my whole life looking for my vocation. For the thing that I am and do the way that my brother is and does.

Here's a fun fact about me: I just spent a year getting certified as a sailing instructor. For a while I was really, really into the idea of being really, really into the ocean. There's a certain peace, a certain self-reliance--oh, I'll spare you. You know, I don't know where I got the idea this time: I flatter myself that it wasn't Patrick O'Brian. Or worse, Russell Crowe. But the point is, I was in sort of a hobby hangover early this year--resigning myself consciously that I just didn't like boats that much--sort of morose, not really admitting to myself that I was looking for a rebound.

Looking back, I believe that urbex would've just been that: a rebound. It sort of followed the same logic, which was probably why I chose it. To save face over the last one, following some invented love of freedom. All things like this are invented.

And anyway, my brother's name was coming out in a WW Norton edition of Gilgamesh. I had to do something.

Urbex is a fancy word for photography and/or trespassing, I should note. I took it up in February, in the cold with the help of some internet guides, and anything's interesting at the beginning, of course. I hadn't intended to do much of the trespassing bit. As I explained to Tim, we live in a city with a fascinating and layered history, and some of that history is layered on top of itself--he was nodding, I assume being a good sport about things he already understood--if you knew where to look.

"Try not to get tetanus," I remember him saying. He was smiling, but I could tell he meant it. The other terrible thing about loving older siblings, is they fret.

[Image description: Another page of the same Magnus Institute statement, with story text continued. In the bottom right corner is a sketchy illustration of a circus clown's head in profile, as though drawn onto the page.]

Well, I didn't intend to give him much to fret about. All I was going to do was scope out the exterior of the Royal Opera House and compare it to the old public blueprints I'd acquired of Robert Smirke's original design for the Theatre Royal. Do you know of Robert Smirke? I suppose you do. There's no explaining anything to anyone at all these days.

Hardly edgy stuff, anyway. It was hard to imagine anything dangerous happening on-site of an operating theatre. I was fond of theatre, a bit: actually, I'd always wanted to do it as a kid! But I had stage fright back then--I'm over it now, most take me for extroverted in fact. So it was just my brother, charming like the crack of a whip, from As You Like It to Cabaret. I contented myself with the trombone.

The problem with my reconnaissance plans at the Royal Opera House, though--as I realised when I got there--was that it was a nighttime business. This is the sort of obvious plan liability that always happens to me. So wandering about wasn't just a no-go, it would be breaking and entering.

I guess sometimes I have a streak of mischief, though. Or adventure. Or maybe it's that charmed, privileged life I mentioned--knowledge that nothing's ever really going to stick to me. I decided to take the lobby stairs down, down to the basement. In the worst case I could just claim I was lost, right?

The door at the bottom landing was grey--I sort of assumed I was about to walk into a janitorial area. But when I went through it--camera tucked innocently away--I thought I was lost.

If this had been the lift, I'd have assumed it'd gone back up. But it's difficult to go the wrong way on the stairs. Nevertheless, I was in another lobby--empty, velvet-lined, dark and plush.

My first thought was that I definitely wasn't supposed to be here. My second was excited: secret clubs, I was thinking, viral popup theatre--but it was an empty anteroom, lit modestly with Victorian wall-sconces that flickered unreliably every so often, like the flutter of eyelashes. The emptiness unsettled me more than immediate ejection would've. For one, it was difficult to pass off lingering as an innocent mistake. But for another, I could've sworn the air was different. Draftier, unsteadier, cold breeze stirring stale perfume.

All I found, near the theatre doors, was a leaflet on the ground. I picked it up: it looked fresh, though in an antiquated style. It appeared to be a programme for a show called THE QUEEN OF SORROWS.

I'd no desire to be arrested. I left.

I wonder when I decided to go back. It wasn't when I got home. It wasn't after I read the programme, either, sitting on my bed--The Queen of Sorrows, it said, by J Grimaldi. The cast were all names I didn't recognise, playing characters with allegorical-sounding, fairytaleish appellations--the Queen of Sorrows, the Castle Maid, the Foolish Prince.

[Image description: Another page of the same Magnus Institute statement, with story text continued. In the upper left corner is a similar sketchy illustration of a circus clown's head in profile, also as though on the page.]

No, I think I decided when I was weighing my other options. I'd more or less hit the top or bottom of what urbex had to offer me--I knew the rest would be dicey building codes or my own mediocre digital photography.

Was it exhaustion, then, that drove me on? Exhaustion from too many rebounds? I don't think so. Thinking back--though now it feels a while ago--I don't think I was driven. I think I was drawn.

The lift took me down this time, the following night. Funny how that works. I had my programme in hand--though I wasn't dressed for the occasion, and, come to think of it, I think I still brought my camera.

The doors let me out in the same anteroom--which was still, in fact, empty. But this time I could hear the murmur of a crowd from within: an audience waiting for a production to begin. I hesitated, just this once. And then I started to go in.

The Theatre Royal was grand. The rows were near-full of men and women near as grand: the shapes of top hats, the jewelled glimmer of a woman's dress. They didn't look at or notice me, though, and I feared their notice if I stared too long--so I just shuffled between and found a seat, not far from the front row.

Then the lights went down, and I heard the orchestra test their instruments and play their overture--which dwindled, soon, to a single melody. I'd never heard music so real.

The curtain parted--just enough to admit a single figure, a narrator. A role the programme had listed, incongruously, as Ringmaster. A man in a tailcoat of the deepest starry velvet, with the poise of a knife. He turned in the spotlight, and grinned, and I recognised my brother.

Of course he wasn't my brother. He wasn't trying to be, and I wasn't mistaken. But he was, precisely in form and the commanding edge of his smile, my brother: and he looked right at me. Maybe at everyone. But at me.

The Ringmaster who looked like my brother opened his song with an invitation. He had a voice like my brother's, too, which is to say richly and gratingly beautiful: and I do remember him saying or singing, while we wear our masks tonight--and you wear yours; and his cast filtered out, in costume, facing us, in silent invitation. They held out a hand, each. Then the music came to a halt, the lights down, and the show really began.

I stayed for all of it, well into the night. When I left I was still thinking. And I came back.

I presume you haven't seen The Queen of Sorrows. It's a musical: I guess you could call it vaudevillian, approximately, but that doesn't do it justice. There's nothing really simulative about it--you go to see something by Cameron Mackintosh, you're paying for the loudest illusion of early nineteenth-century Paris that money can buy. Not so with Grimaldi's company. In Grimaldi's company the players play roles, and the audience watches them do so.

[Image description: Another page of the same Magnus Institute statement, with story text continued. Covering the bottom third of the page is a four-panel quadriptych illustration of allegorical fairytale versions of Gertrude Robinson and Elias Bouchard, standing at a window viewing a different faraway realm in each panel. In each she successively grows older and shows increasing distress, where he remains unchanged and unaffected. The window is also spattered with more and more blood.]

Every night the Ringmaster welcomed and invited us, and every night he caught my eye with a wink. I suppose you're wondering why that didn't deter me, or if it conversely made me return--well, neither. It was charming, brazen--I suppose, still, disturbing. But ultimately just one piece. Just one role. Just one player.

In The Queen of Sorrows, the leading lady is first a serving-maid in the dark palace of the King of Sorrows. You see her, early, attract him with her wit and her sympathy; the King of Sorrows, you see, is a widower. You watch her become his bride and his queen, in a wedding gown in all the colours of the peacock's tail. You see him, unblinking, swear his vows to her, with all the truth in his heart. And he takes her up high, high in his castle up the circular stair to the tower no one else sees, an ascent into his labyrinth.

But their wedding is their last harmonious duet. At first she revels in her power, even as consort--what a voice she has! But he is unfaithful; she laments the ways of kings. In a grand number, he takes her through a tour of his real domain: his tower of many ways and many windows. He takes her to each, behind which the chorus wails--the Great Salt Road, he names them. The far-going boats. The summer palace of the Winter Emperor.

And through them she sees riches, beauty, but: depravity, terror. Show me a country village all in green, her line goes.

And then, frustrated: Show me something good. Show me something good.

And here she learns what their kingdom governs.

[Image description: Another page of the same Magnus Institute statement, with story text continued. There is an inline illustration of Tim Stoker, or something that looks a lot like him - leaning, as though against a wall, in casual dress and a confident posture.]

They have children, who scuttle onstage full-grown players, laughing; I laughed too. There's a rousing act finale and then an entr'acte--well, I've seen it more than once. It's a lovely time, you know. But it doesn't satisfy. So you come back. Or rather--why be shy?--I came back.

Shall I tell you how it ends? The truth is, it gets a bit metatextual from there. Something my brother would be able to interpret better. The Queen of Sorrows rebels, of course, yes; but we realise, we come to realise, that the King is not a widower for no reason--that he is already looking, now and then, at another maid in a white dress. We end with the King stewing on the cusp of a decision. Beneath him, the Queen sings a strange melody, wordless, in harmony with the chorus.

I suppose you've got reason now to wonder if I really came here to tell you--either of you--the story of the Queen of Sorrows. But I don't think you need to hear it.

When I got bored with watching the show--in a way--I lingered; but there was nothing there for me, after the encore, and the audience was gone, all gone. I was going out, and he intercepted me: the Ringmaster, I suppose, but now he was really shaped like my brother Tim. No bells and whistles, just the player who looked like Tim wearing something Tim would wear, leaning on the wall near the lift. He smiled.

"Did you enjoy the show?" he said. "Or was there something else?"

I shook my head, and he stepped aside for me--but as I was going in, as I was going up, he said: "Or do you think you could do better?"

That was last night. I came here today, and now I'm writing this--and once I'm finished, I'll have dinner, not at my favourite restaurant but at the one with the waiters I know best. And then I'll go to see my brother. I think I'm not acting the same; I suppose it's impossible that I am. I think he'll be worried, but I'd like to see him. Just one last time. Him, really, and how he really is.

[Image description: Another page of the same Magnus Institute statement, with story text continued. Only the final lines are written on this page, for emphasis. Above and below them are two illustrations: one of Jon reviewing the Ex Altiora file idly at a messy desk while Tim, Sasha, and Martin hang out around him, everyone chatting; and one of the messy boxes of remaining statements, out of which Danny's statement and one of its clown drawings peeks out undiscovered.]

My mistake was in looking for what I really was, all that time. That's your problem here too, you know. You're so bound. But to play a role--to really play a role--you have to shed what anchors you, don't you? You have to leave it behind.

I leave my brother Tim my love, and this archive the truth. I won't need them where I'm going.