Audio Transcript – 'Choice'
[Suffice it to say, I see the universe a little differently than most people, the Luteces notwithstanding. I understand that reality is fractal. Decisions have the effect of cleaving worlds in two, until there are similar patterns recurring at progressively smaller scales in progressively more alternative realities. Every decision... each tiny moment... Andrew Ryan said that we all make choices, but in the end, our choices make us. He was right. But what if you never made a choice. What if the penitent stayed in the baptismal waters forever, caught in a liminal space between action and consequence. Neither sinner nor saint. Would he be a person at all? Would I?]
One iteration of Comstock had lead Elizabeth to New York City in 1925. Before stepping through the Tear, what little she knew of the city had come from Booker, from the meager scraps of detail he'd deigned to share as they tore through Columbia.
It had been raining on the night she stumbled onto the corner of 120th Street in lower Manhattan. The brownstone buildings and the lights of Broadway were reduced to watercolor smears behind the rain. Cars splashed through the streets, cutting across the adjacent silence with horns and screeching tires. The entire city was loud and colorful, filled with people who were equally loud and colorful. Along Broadway, a phantasmagoria of lights flashed against the night, beckoning her towards avenues of clubs and theaters promising every manner of earthly fulfillment. By the time Elizabeth reached Comstock, she was exhausted. She felt so small, alone in the canyons of busy streets, searching for stars hidden behind the glare of streetlights, breathing in car fumes and sewage and cigarette smoke. New York fed off the energy of its people.
As Elizabeth navigated the circular atrium of Fort Frolic, she was reminded of her first visit to New York. Decorated in neon lights, with its torchère columns and checkerboard floors, Fort Frolic was a glamorous place –– Broadway crushed into a singularity within a small, bright corner of Rapture. The district featured everything from the fine arts to vaudeville theater to more salacious distractions: casinos and peep shows and strip clubs. Patrons leered at Elizabeth from open doorways. Women, and some men, led guests into velvet booths circled by heavy red curtains; Elizabeth caught their silhouettes gyrating to the music, pulsing and surging like the lights of Broadway long ago. Fort Frolic was a rhythmic fusion of pleasure and art and music, something so stimulating that it made Elizabeth nauseous. Humanity had abandoned most of Rapture. But in Fort Frolic, there was too much of it.
The Fleet Hall was on the second floor of the main atrium. Whereas most of the boutiques and bars in Fort Frolic were filled with people, the Fleet Hall looked dark and abandoned. Someone had stuck discarded show bills to the doors. The bulletin board advertised a play several months old. Inside, the lights had been turned off.
As Elizabeth stood in the corridor, debating whether to knock or simply return to Point Prometheus, a young man scuttled out of the shadows. He gestured for Elizabeth to approach the door. He wore a mask like Sander Cohen's: a white rabbit rimmed in velvet. As Elizabeth drew nearer, she saw that the young man's face was swollen, his skin shingled and enflamed. His pupils were a fulvous yellow, like sulfur.
... it's all a game... Cohen, Ryan! Two old birds pullin' on each other's milk sticks...
Elizabeth knew the man's name: Silas Cobb. She wasn't sure if he remembered it anymore.
"Sander's expecting you..." he said softly, haggardly. Cobb stepped aside, and allowed Elizabeth into the Fleet Hall.
There was no one in the foyer. The ticket office and the projection booth were empty. The entire venue was very dark. On a billboard adjacent to the main theater, a line of turbo bulbs illuminated a sign: Do not disturb; auditions in progress.
Elizabeth realized that she might have made a big mistake in coming here.
As she stepped into the center aisle of the Fleet Hall, a spotlight blazed to life, illuminating a small circle in the center of the stage. There was a woman haloed in the glare. She was strapped into a harness, dangling at least thirty feet above the stage. Other women lined the left and right aisles, going over pages of sheet music and doing their best to ignore the girl dangling in midair.
There was blood on the stage, and in one corner, a phonograph skipping on a record. Elizabeth swallowed hard.
"FITZPATRICK!" shrieked Sander Cohen, hidden in the shadows. His voice seemed to reverberate from the darkness. "ANOTHER SONG."
Somewhere backstage, a winch began to turn. The woman in the harness rose another few feet. Another figure in a rabbit mask adjusted the record on the phonograph, and when the music began, the woman started to sing...
"This is a changing world, my dear... New songs are sung — new stars appear... though we grow older year by year, our hearts can still be gay..."
As the woman sang, she was steadily lowered towards the stage. Then she wavered on a particularly high note, and Cohen howled:
"NO! No no no no this is all WRONG! FITZPATRICK!"
The woman in the harness let out an anguished sob. "Oh Jesus Christ, Mr. Cohen, please no..."
Someone released the winch. Elizabeth watched in horror as the woman fell, screaming, towards the stage. She hit the ground and Elizabeth heard her body crack, watched fat bruise over broken bones. Blood began to run across the hardwood, and the woman did not move again
Several attendants hurried onto the stage and cleaned up the body. The harness swung limply from the rafters.
"Bring me another!" commanded Cohen. "I can't stomach these paltry mountebanks and their caterwauling!"
The other girls shifted. One of them began to cry. But no one looked up from their sheet music, and no one approached the stage.
Elizabeth glanced behind her. The splicer, Cobb, was standing at the entrance to the Fleet Hall. He held a pipe wrench in one hand and a loaded pistol in the other. When he saw her, he grinned. His pillbox teeth gleamed in his raw, red mouth. He ran his tongue over his lips.
Elizabeth braced herself. Then she walked towards the stage.
She understood the mechanisms of Cohen's trial: the singers started their performances at roof height, and were gradually lowered if Cohen approved of the performance. If the show didn't make par, the winch was released, and the singer fell. The better the performance, the lower the fall.
Elizabeth had fallen before. But now Booker wasn't there to catch her. She had seen to that.
"Is there another?" purred Cohen, somewhere in the audience, hidden behind the beam of the spotlight.
Elizabeth climbed the stage. She placed the harness over her shoulders and glared at the empty auditorium.
"Just get it over with, Cohen," she muttered.
Fitzpatrick procured another record. He took a step towards the phonograph. Elizabeth shook her head.
"I don't need that."
Fitzpatrick took a deep bow and retreated behind the curtains. And then he began to turn the winch. Elizabeth's shoulders and back ached as she rose higher into the air. She tried to hold herself upright, fighting against the pressure on her chest. Above the glare, she saw Cohen sitting in one of the theater boxes. Even in the darkness, his mad eyes glittered.
Elizabeth looked past her feet. The stage was very far away. It was a long way to fall. No more Tears. No more Doors.
Elizabeth didn't know if she could die. The Luteces had died, and had come back. Perhaps there was no end for her. Just the long sleep, alone in the dark.
She took a deep breath, and hoped Booker would be there to catch her one last time.
Elizabeth began to sing:
"There are loved ones, in the glory, whose dear forms you often miss; when you close your... earthly story, will you join them in their bliss?
"Will the circle, be unbroken, by and by, by and by? Is a better... home awaiting, in the sky, in the sky?
Elizabeth closed her eyes. She saw Booker's face. She saw Comstock's. They were superimposed over each other, and in each eye there was a new face with new memories, whorling down into recursions of themselves like a Fibonacci spiral. In the space between each stanza, the silence seemed to span an age. The adjacent moments elongated as Elizabeth stared into the recurring patterns of death and resurrection, birth and rebirth. As she sang, she thought of autumns being eclipsed by winters that would never end, where the sun never rose and the world stayed trapped under the shadow. She felt time running out, leaves dying, snow falling, a bitter wind lamenting the darkness... watching the world grow old, leaving a few unlucky ones far behind, consigning them to a history everyone had forgotten about. It brought tears to her eyes, to feel the loneliness of an empty eternity.
The Fleet Hall faded away. The song seemed to slow, until the words froze in glowing fractals. Elizabeth felt the air grow cold. The world telescoped down into a corridor of spherical Fresnel lenses, a collimation of light, the walls a mosaic of lighthouse lamps and broken glass. Each shard was a window, and the windows were cracking. Through the splinters, a spectrum of worlds scintillated against the darkness. Elizabeth thought she recognized the specters of faces, grinning at her from the windows –– people she had once known, but had chosen to forget. People she had never known. People she would love, and strangers who would pass through her life like smoke. And when one of them stepped forward, Elizabeth reached out to touch him. Her fingers ghosted empty air, and his face evanesced into filaments of light and color and sound.
What do I do... where do I go...
Where we always go: forward.
Help me. Please. I can't do this alone.
You're not alone. You ain't ever alone.
I'm so sorry. I shouldn't... I shouldn't have done it. I want my friend back.
You did what you had to. Ain't no shame in it, but there ain't no sense in wishing you could go back and do it all over. You made a decision, and you got to live with the consequences. Comes a time when we got to stop running.
I miss you so much.
Ain't me you miss. The man you miss was drowned in a river in South Dakota. Best you keep him there. Even when you see as much as you do, there are some things you ought a' best leave well enough alone.
This is a bad place. These people... they're insane.
We don't choose the hands we're dealt. We just play our cards best we can. Do what needs to be done. He's here, in the city. You just have to find him.
How?
Trust yourself. Finish the song, Elizabeth. Cohen is waiting for you.
Don't go... please.
Then find me. I'm here, in Rapture. Find me.
Okay. Okay.
"One by one their seats were emptied. One by one they went away. Now the family is parted. Will it be... complete... one day..."
Elizabeth's feet touched the stage. She opened her eyes, and wiped away the tears. Fitzpatrick helped her out of her harness, his hands gentle. Under his mask, he was smiling.
"Well done," he whispered, just loud enough for Elizabeth to hear him.
As she left the Fleet Hall, Elizabeth saw Cohen talking to Silas Cobb. The maestro of Fort Frolic locked eyes with her, and smiled.
"And so our collaboration commences,little songbird."