All my life, I realized, I’d wanted to do the Queen Mab speech, and now I did, babbling on about the tiny fairies’ midwife, her wagon’s spokes made of spinners’ legs, the cover, the wings of grasshoppers, her whip of cricket bone… faster and faster, madder and madder, a tortured young man with eloquence rivaling Shakespeare’s but none of the solid, business side of the Bard; Mercutio, a man in love with his own words and willing to follow words where they led even as they led him to madness…

‘“Peace, peace, Mercutio, peace! Thou talk’st of nothing,’” I interrupted myself in my Romeo voice, alarmed now at my much more brilliant friend’s frenzy, shifting my body in space through three dimensions as if shaking the space where I’d stood as Mercutio an instant before.

And so the play slid forward in that timeless spaceless space.

I realized almost at once that Aglaé was better at improvising the summaries than I—and she could remember most of the other players’ lines and the Chorus’s long speeches word for word when she wanted to retrieve any of them—so I let her take the lead, only stepping in as Romeo or Mercutio or Tybalt for key lines, and then only a few. It was as if we were skipping across the surface of a pond, saving ourselves from falling in only through our speed and unwillingness to fall and drown.

Then it was our first encounter, our first scene together as our real characters, all thoughts of Rosaline out of my teenaged mind now, my heart and soul and stirring prick focused forever more on the transcendent image of my Juliet—

“O she doth teach the torches to burn bright!”

We asked the unmoving Abraxas to imagine the party, Tybalt’s anger, Capulet’s restraint of the young firebrand, the singing, the dancing, the men and women in bright colors and masks, and all the while young Romeo following, almost stalking, young Juliet. Our banter had the urgency of youth and love and lust and of the reality—shared by so few in all of time! — of truly having found the one person in the cosmos meant for you.

“‘Good pilgrim, you do wrong your hand too much,’” whispered Juliet/Aglaé. “‘Which mannerly devotion shows in this…’”

A second later I leaned close to her.”‘Have not saints lips, and holy palmers, too?’”

“‘Ay, pilgrim, lips that they must use in prayer.’”

“‘O then, dear saint, let lips do what hands do. They…pray.’” And I sent my palm against hers and we both pressed hard. “‘Grant thou, lest faith turn to despair.’”

When we did kiss a few seconds later, it was—for both of us, I could feel— unlike any kiss or physical experience either of us had ever known. It lasted a very long time. I touched her thoughts as well as her lips. Her trust—never fully given before, I understood at that instant, chased by so many men, stolen by a few, betrayed by all others—opened warmly around me.

She floated above me during the balcony scene. It was the first time I’d ever understood the depth and youthful shallowness and hope in those lines I’d heard too many times before.

I was Mercutio and Benvolio and Romeo in coming scenes, even while Aglaé delivered selected lines from the Nurse and from Peter.

She summarized Friar Lawrence’s part except for certain responses to her Juliet.

Suddenly I found myself acting out Mercutio’s verbal taunts with Tybalt, Benvolio’s failed attempts to intervene, Romeo’s joyful interruption, the mock fight between Tybalt and Mercutio that led to Mercutio being slain under Romeo’s arm.

To an observer—and in a real sense Abraxas was the only observer, since the dragoman’s eyes and ears were presumably just conduits to Him—it must have looked as if I were having an epileptic fit in freefall, babbling at myself, twisting, floating, lunging with invisible epees, moaning, dying. “They have made worms’ meat of me,” cries Mercutio.

“O!” cries Romeo. “I am fortune’s fool.”

In act 3, scene 5, Aglaé and I made love. We actually made love.

We had not intended to do it, even as our thoughts flew between us like messenger doves during the intimacy of our almost perfect improv. I had not thought of doing it.

But as the scene opens but before Juliet says “Wilt thou be gone? It is not yet near day,” our stage directions say only that we are both aloft, with a ladder of cords, but Kemp had often staged it with Romeo and Juliet half-dressed on a couch standing in for their marriage bed. Offstage, of course, between scenes, had been Romeo and Juliet’s one night of bliss as man and wife—a very few hours of realized love before the lark pierced the fearful hollow of their ears and never, as fate would have it, to be followed by another night or moment of intimacy.

But before Aglaé spoke that first line—she hesitated, her eyes on mine, the God and dragoman forgotten by both of us—I began to undress her. She rushed to undress me.

But the lovemaking was not rushed. I have no need to describe it here and you have no need to hear details, but trust me that there was nothing rushed, nothing self-conscious, no sense of doom or finality, no awareness of other eyes on us—neither divine nor dragomanic—and we made love as joyously and slowly and then as impetuously and wildly as Romeo and Juliet would have at their age and in their depths of first-love rapture.

I did love her. Juliet. Aglaé. My love. My life.

We half-dressed afterward, she delivered her “Wilt thou be gone?” line, we laughed and debated whether it was the lark or the nightingale—the former meant death to me from Juliet’s family, but I laughed out, “‘Let me be ta’en, let me be put to death. I am content, so thou wilt have it so.’”

That wakens her to the morn and danger. She all but shoves me out with protests and final kisses and more final hugs and kisses.

I’d forgotten Abraxas. Forgotten the floating dragoman with the unblinking eyes. I’d forgotten everything but my performance and the truth beneath it—which was my body still vibrating like a struck bell because of my lovemaking with Aglaé and the knowledge that should the human race or universe itself end tomorrow, it was all worth it for these moments.

It was in our final tomb scene together that I realized that we were probably going to die then and there.

Our lovemaking had been spontaneous but real.

Our love was new but real.

The lines we were delivering had never been delivered like this by living actors in all the history of time or theater. Our energies were absolute. Our emotions all real.

I was sure that when I pantomimed drinking the poison in Juliet’s tomb, I would feel the cold spread of the true apothecary’s poison actually move through my veins like death-ice. And then, a moment later, when Aglaé pantomimed my dagger entering her breast, real blood would flow into the Pleroma and she would die.

“‘Here’s to my love,’” I whispered anyway, holding up the imaginary bottle and drinking it all down. “‘O true apothecary. Thy drugs are quick. Thus with a kiss I die.’”

The kiss was brief. I was dying after all. I fell, floating slowly away from where she floated horizontally in the golden glow.

I did not die. Nor did Aglaé’s make-believe dagger pierce an all-too-real and beating heart. The show went on. I summarized Friar Lawrence’s lines, the Page’s, the Watchmen’s, then Aglaé reported Capulet’s wife’s and Montague’s sorrow in snippets of dialogue, and then I delivered Balthasar’s and the Prince’s important lines.

Aglaé floated dead again while I boomed out in a prince’s royal voice.

A glooming peace this morning with it brings,

The sun for sorrow will not show his head.

Go hence to have more talk of these sad things;

Some shall be pardoned, and some punished:

For never was a story of more woe