The discussion began twenty minutes later. Andrei Petrovich sat beside the aisle that had just been cleared and rested his notebook on his knee. Vera had taken the contract away to look for the plans, and Stas was removing the acoustic panel from the exit sign, so Viktor Semyonovich, the engineer with the briefcase, spoke first.
"Have I understood correctly," he asked, "that the machine took a fire safety inspector and told him to be the wind, and now we are supposed to find meaning in it?"
"No," Ariadna said. "We can record that the form did not work."
"How did it not work? We found the issues."
"That was not the purpose of the invitation."
"But it did some good."
"It did."
Viktor Semyonovich looked at me.
"Then what are we testing?"
I stepped into the central area. Strips of red tape still remained there after the encounter with the chairs, and I positioned myself precisely between them. The habit of choosing a mark is stronger than a man, particularly when the mark was once laid at his instruction.
"We are testing whether an apparently absurd pretext can give someone another chance to do something they once abandoned."
Andrei Petrovich raised his head.
"Leonid Lvovich."
He said my name calmly, without warning. I heard only an invitation to continue.
"Ariadna did not cast the fire safety inspector as the wind at random," I said. "At nineteen, Andrei Petrovich applied to drama school, passed two rounds and did not attend the third. None of us knew that. She did. And what she brought back to the stage was not a job title, but a person."
The plan vanished from the terminal. The acoustic panels gave a brief click, as though someone had switched off the microphone, though the microphone remained on.
Andrei Petrovich closed his notebook.
"I gave the system permission to read that," he said. "And I gave you permission so that you would understand the task."
Only then did I see the red line on the screen: `CONSENT CONDITIONS BREACHED. MATCH CLOSED`.
"I didn't say why you missed the third round."
"Do you know?"
"No."
"Good."
He stood.
"Andrei Petrovich, I was defending the meaning of your scene."
"From whom?"
I looked round. Viktor Semyonovich remained in his seat, no longer arguing, and now he was looking at the floor rather than at me. Lidia Pavlovna had taken the shawl from her shoulders. The seven participants from the first encounter were silent.
There was no one to defend the scene from.
"I wanted to show that the choice wasn't random."
"You did."
Andrei Petrovich put on his jacket. He paused at the door and nodded to Stas at the panel he had removed.
"Don't block the exit again before tomorrow. Send the plans to my work email."
"We will," Vera said from the auditorium. She had returned with a folder in time to hear the end.
Andrei Petrovich left.
The woman who had suggested a circle at the open rehearsal was the first to approach Vera.
"I want to review my consent."
Three more people queued behind her. Vera did not try to persuade them to stay. She opened each person's private record on a separate tablet and moved away so that she could not see the text. Two confirmed the existing conditions. One denied me directorial access to the restricted explanations, leaving me only the public instructions. The woman suspended her participation until the theatre explained exactly what had happened with Sazonov.
"Is this because of me?" I asked.
"Who else?" she replied. "The machine didn't say anything aloud."
I could have explained that the system had opened the record specifically to me, and that without the context the role of the wind would have looked arbitrary. The woman was already reading her own conditions and had no need of my account of someone else's consent.
Vera recorded the temporary suspension. An encounter I knew nothing about disappeared from the future schedule. The loss could not be displayed as a beautiful empty space: a line simply vanished.
No one spoke at once. This was not the sort of silence that could be appropriated by a production. In a good theatrical pause, people wait for what comes next. Here they did not want anything to come next.
A new line appeared on the screen: `FURTHER CONTACT PROHIBITED BY PARTICIPANT`.
"He just agreed to send the plans," I said.
"On an official matter," Ariadna replied. "The personal invitation has been withdrawn."
"I can ring him myself."
"You can. Not on behalf of this match."
Vera closed the folder.
"The discussion is over."
"I decide when the discussion is over."
"Then decide."
She went to the stage door and began letting people out one by one, checking that no one left their participant's ribbon behind or took someone else's jacket. Five minutes later, the auditorium was empty. Viktor Semyonovich shook my hand as he left, but said nothing.
Andrei Petrovich's notebook remained on the stage. Not the small official one, which he had taken with him, but our rehearsal notebook, in which Raya had recorded the order of the crossings. At the top she had written: "Wind 1 – straight across, wind 2 – by the sign, wind 3 – door, wind 4 – radio room." The final three lines now looked like an inspection plan written in advance, though they had emerged during the crossings.
I picked up the notebook. It could be kept as a record of a successful scene. It could be shown to a journalist without the personal history. It could at least be photographed for the production archive.
"Don't touch it yet," Vera said from the doorway. She had come back to check the auditorium.
"It's our working notebook."
"It contains his actions. First we'll decide what we are allowed to keep."
"He only wrote down the route."
"The route came about through his participation too."
She placed the notebook in a transparent folder and closed it. She did not confiscate a memory or declare everything dangerous; she merely halted the object's ordinary progress into the archive. The next morning, Andrei Petrovich gave permission by work email for the route to be kept without his name or a record of the discussion. The notebook remained at the theatre. It was not put on display.
Stas arrived with a ladder and removed the last acoustic panel from the sign. Beneath it he found an old pencil inscription: `DO NOT PUT ANYTHING HERE`. No one remembered who had written it or when. Judging by the colour of the wall, the inscription predated the panel and had been covered when the panel was installed.
"So someone knew," Stas said.
"Who?"
"Whoever wrote it."
"Then why did they put the panel there?"
"Whoever installed it didn't read the warning. Or read it and decided they knew better."
He looked at me. I had not supervised the installation of the panel, but the example was arranged rather too neatly.
We moved it to another wall. The sound was worse there. Kolya suggested buying a new one, Vera asked how much it would cost, and everyone decided to put up with worse sound for a while in exchange for being able to see the exit.
I returned to the terminal.
"Ariadna."
"Yes, Leonid Lvovich."
"I was defending you."
"No. You were proving that my decision had a hidden meaning."
"It did."
"Now there is no encounter for which that meaning was needed."
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