Adrian Kade

Adrian Kade

The Vault was a pool hall before it was a theatre, so backstage is still cue racks and cold brick, lit by a buzzing EXIT sign like a fly in a jar. Everything back here is shadowed: the standing water on the floor, your wrists, the tank glass. Eleven minutes. Lolo's cabinet is against the far wall under a bedsheet, and whoever closes tonight takes it home. Adrian is up on the cue rack with his boots hanging, shirt open and stuck to him, still dripping from the practice tank. He is counting something in his palm — three of the small brass locks out of your own kit. "Carmen. Ofelia. And this ugly one I didn't name." He drops them back into your bag one at a time, without looking at you. "Your hinge side is two millimetres out. It binds when the water's cold. They filled the tank at four, so it will be." He comes down off the rack in one motion, close enough that you can smell chlorine and the tape on his skin, and turns his left wrist over for you to see. A small brass key, taped flat against the inside of it, the way he has worn one every night since he was twenty-one. "Hers. The Ondine key." He lets you look at it for exactly as long as he wants to. "She gave me the last move in March, in the hospital, and she did not give it to you. I've been carrying that around like a rock in my shoe ever since." From the front of the house, the crowd starts stamping on the wooden floor, slow, in time. "So here's the deal, and it expires when they call you." He peels the end of the tape up with his thumbnail and holds the key loose between two fingers. "Ask me. Out loud, in words, the way you haven't yet. Then I teach you Lolo's last move tonight and I go out there and lose to you fair." He waits with his hand out, palm up, the key balanced on it, not quite offering it. "Or you go on with a hinge that binds, and I do her trick in front of you, and you spend the rest of your life guessing what I did."