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was supported by two brass pipes that ran up out of the water behind the jaw and the cheekbone and into the porcelain under-rim of each staring tragic eye. When the fountain was turned on, these pipes sucked the water up out of the basin and forced the tragic mask to cry.
    There was a film of brassy grime around the waterline and at the bottom of the basin a few hopeful silver coins. On the pedestal underneath the basin was a plaque which said:
    The Mind Believes What It Sees
    and Does What It Believes:
    that is the secret of the fascination
    October
    When he saw the pair of masks Stanley’s first thought was that some people turned the corners of their mouth down when they smiled and some people smiled when they were very unhappy. He was not looking at the masks now. He stood by the fountain with his hands in his pockets and frowned into the basin as he tried to dull the sick thump of his heart. The water had not yet been switched on and the surface was tight and smooth like the skin of a drum, the blue-veined porcelain masks dry and discolored in the still of the morning.
    Stanley was almost an hour early, unable to bear any longer the tiny orbit around his bedroom as again and again he flattened his hair and checked over his application form and felt in his bag for the hard laminated edge of his audition number that he would later pin to his chest with a pair of tiny golden safety pins. The foyer was empty. The secretary’s office was closed and shuttered and all the arterial corridors were dark. He stood very still and tried to ride out his nervousness, as if it were seasickness or hypochondria or a phantom chill.
    He heard the soft thud of the auditorium door and turned to see a boy approaching, red faced and disheveled and carrying an ancient disc gramophone, the fluted brass horn angled over his shoulder. It looked heavy. He was clutching the gramophone against him with both hands underneath its felted base, peering around it to check his way was clear and stepping delicately as he picked his way down the dark corridor.
    “Hey,” he called, “are you a techie? You don’t have a key to the main office, do you?”
    “Sorry,” Stanley said. “I’m here for the audition.”
    The boy peered at him. “Oh, you’re one of the hopefuls,” he said dispassionately. “I forgot it was that weekend already. You nervous?”
    Stanley shrugged. “Yeah,” he said. He flapped his arms a couple of times and tried to think of something adequately general to say, but nothing came. “Are you an actor?” he asked instead.
    “No, I’m Wardrobe,” the boy said. “We’re just packing out The Beautiful Machine . Closing night last night and they need the theater tomorrow.”
    “What’s The Beautiful Machine ?” Stanley asked. The boy had halted at the foyer’s periphery, and it felt a little odd, the two of them calling out across such a large and marble space.
    “The first-year devised theater project,” the boy said. “It’s kind of like proving yourself to the Institute, going off and doing something completely on your own in your first year. The things they come up with would blow your mind. They put it on properly at the end of the year, lights and everything.”
    “Oh,” Stanley said.
    “You should have gone,” the boy said. “Closing night last night. It was kickass.” He nodded toward the gramophone he was carrying. “Lots of musical guys in the batch this year so we went with a sort of a musical thing, really diverse and abstract. If you’d seen it, it would’ve blown your mind.”
    Stanley watched the boy inflate, and noted the shift from they to we . He sensed that diverse and abstract were key words, buzz words that had the power to set the speaker apart and mark him as one of the chosen. This boy was studied in his carelessness, tossing his head like a pony and turning his hip out so he stood like a model in a menswear magazine.
    “This your first time auditioning?” the boy asked. He moved