There is a village.
It sits in the middle of a wide, un-witnessed plain, and the plain stretches in every direction without end, and at the edge of the plain there is nothing. The village does not know this. The village has never looked that far.
Every evening the villagers emerge from their homes and walk to the village square. They do not ask why. The square is where one goes in the evening. This is known. This has always been known.
They build the stage together. The men carry the heavy planks, the women drive the nails, the children run the ropes through the pulleys and haul the curtain up until it hangs red and trembling in the air like something that believes in itself. They test the lights. They sweep the boards. They arrange the chairs of the audience in long, careful rows, the angles considered, the spacing precise, each seat its own small throne. They fluff cushions no body will press. They set programmes on armrests no arm will rest on.
When everything is arranged to satisfaction, a bell is rung.
The villagers stand at the entrance of the square and they welcome the audience in. They smile and bow and gesture warmly toward the seats, and they say this way, please, and mind your step, and so glad you could come. They look into the eyes of the audience as the audience files past. They feel the warmth of the crowd. They hear the low murmur of anticipation, the rustle of garments, the small coughs and shuffling that precede any great occasion.
But there is no audience.
There is no audience.
The seats fill. The villagers take their places backstage. The head villager, who wears a coat slightly finer than the rest and has worn it so long he has forgotten it was given to him, peers through the gap in the curtain at the full house and feels, each evening, a deep and genuine gratitude. How fortunate we are, he thinks, to matter so much to so many.
The curtain rises.
Each villager plays a role. The roles were not chosen; they were inherited, handed down with the same wordless certainty as the evening walk to the square. Some play heroes. Some play villains, and these ones carry their villainy with a kind of professional pride, for a play without a villain is no play at all, and they know this, and they believe their contribution to the whole is just as essential as the hero's. Some play the silent background figures who cross the stage with purpose and never speak, and these ones wonder, sometimes, whether they matter, and then they hear the audience and they know: yes, they matter. Everyone matters. The audience has come to see all of it.
The play has no fixed script, only fixed roles. Within the role there is improvisation, passion, invention. Some villagers deliver their lines and the square erupts. Some villagers die in Act Three and they die beautifully, artfully, in ways designed for maximum effect from the back row. When they rise for their curtain call they are unashamed, because the dying was the performance, not the death.
The play runs long. It always runs long. By the final act the youngest villagers are old enough to carry the narrative and the oldest ones have moved into the background, shuffling, forgetting their lines, improvising badly, and the audience loves them still, the audience always loves them still.
The curtain falls.
The applause is tremendous.
The villagers pour out from either side of the stage and they stand in a long line, hand in hand, and they bow. They wave. Some weep, overcome by the reception, by the proof that what they made was worthy of such response. The head villager steps forward, his fine coat catching the light, and he holds out his arms toward the full and roaring house, his face open and radiant.
THANK YOU ALL FOR COMING, he screams. IT IS ALWAYS A PLEASURE TO ENTERTAIN.
The applause rises. It shakes the boards beneath their feet. The villagers feel it in their chests, in their bones. Several bow again, unable to stop. The youngest ones, performing for the first time, will remember this moment for the rest of their lives. This, they will tell their children, is why we do what we do. You will understand when you feel it.
But there is no audience.
There is no audience.
The square empties the way water empties from cupped hands: gradually, then completely. The villagers dismantle the stage. They stack the chairs. They fold the curtain and wrap it in cloth and store it in the dark. They do not speak much during this part. There is a particular silence that belongs to the end of things, and they respect it. They walk home through the plain's cold dark and they sleep soundly, the sleep of people who have given everything they had.
The next evening, they return.
And the next.
And the next.
Seasons turn without comment. Children are born into the village not knowing a world without the square, without the stage, without the evening ritual, and so they do not think to question it. Before they are old enough to have a role, they watch from the wings, and they see the joy on the faces of the performers, and they hear the roar of the audience, and they want it. They want it more than anything. The elders give them their first small role and they perform it with their whole hearts, and when the curtain falls and the house roars, something in them is sealed shut. The question that might have been is never asked.
There is one, occasionally. There is always one.
A child who stands at the gap in the curtain before the show and looks out at the chairs, and notices something, some quality of the light, some texture of the silence, that does not sit right. Who turns to the elder beside them and asks: where is the audience?
The elder smiles. The elder has a kind face worn smooth by years of certainty. The elder says: They are coming. They always come. Look how full the seats are.
The child looks. The seats are full. The child is sure of this. The child returns to their place backstage and says nothing more.
By the time they are old enough to know what they saw, they have performed too many times to bear what the knowing would cost. And so they smile, as the elder smiled. And they answer the question, as the elder answered. And the stage is never short of hands to build it, never short of voices to fill it, never short of eyes to search the dark beyond the lights for proof of the thing they cannot stop believing.
The villagers age and die. They die in costume. They are buried beneath the plain and the plain receives them without ceremony, without notation. New villagers arrive, already walking toward the square, already reaching for the hammer and the plank.
And every evening, the stage.
And every evening, the curtain.
And every evening, the head villager, whoever he is now, whoever he has become in this generation, steps forward in his fine inherited coat and opens his arms to the dark.
Because to stop would be to face the plain.
And the plain has no seats. And the plain holds no programmes. And the plain does not care, not even slightly, whether the play was any good.