ACT ONE

(Thick red curtains are closed across the stage. The room is dark. Ushers in red uniforms, pamphlets in hand, line the isles. There is an orchestra and choir below the stage. The Narrator speaks from every corner of the room.)

Narrator: This is an obituary, year 2020. This obituary is for two lovers who had never touched. A story not possible till this very moment in time. A smashing of old fashion gallantry and high-tech sex, the impossible fuck, the plague infected love story of The Q, told on every forum of communication except the forum of flesh.

In 2020 the world became masked. Robbers, villains, and kink operatives roamed the markets, the clinics, the political discourse. A veil pulled back to reveal weak immunity, herds brought to their knees, beasts wailing against bars. Time bent, hospitals collapsed. A hazmat suit for a grave digger. Barren streets, birds took flight. Boats docked, not a shooter shot. Whales sang, factories revolted, the hum of aspirators hung in the hallway of a last day.

But, what was below, was above. The mycelium of the underworld had replicated tenfold in the space between breath and light, creating interconnected world brought to you by the bright white highways of frequency. A billion voices caught in the wind, moving through locked doors, whispering slanted through shuttered windows. Lips touching blue screens. Children dancing alone to cameras. We expose, we expose, we expose. Your hypa ragged. A forest built in atmosphere. A precinct burned, we were all meant to die. But not like this.

Choir:

Interconnected, planetary.

Enter left: MAN

(Wind blasting, painted hill for background, rusted forms of women made of car parts line the stage)

Narrator: Self-described louche bastard, pretending to pretend. Hair in face, known as a builder of pretty things. Destroyer of pretty things. Working under the oaks he built his seminal work, Champ des Monstres.

(Below stage, the orchestra plays and the choir sings)

The critics cried out: He is staggering!

They sang: The cultural juxtaposition of animal urge and industrial mechanics! 

They rumbled: He will leave them to die, that is art! 

(The man sits under an oak tree building monsters. The orchestra plays softly Bruno Coulais’s In Memoraium)

Wheel spindles for arms, bell housing for hips, he drapes their brake bracket rib cages with linen. Sews together gaskets for hearts, artery by artery. Placing within their empty eye sockets quartz clocks. Winding, winding, what is time? The Monstres were lined in rows, electrified with spark plugs and circuits. Arms spinning, eyes blinking half past two, he walked among them as they lifted their metal hoop skirts, their mechanical legs opening and closing for him. He wrote them letters, pinning pages to their hair, letting his words blow in the breeze. As the rains came in, he would leave them, unsheltered, rust blossoming across their bodies, breaking them down just feet from where he slept.

The choir sings:

Aloneness is a state of being.

ACT TWO

Enter right: WOMAN

(The stage is dark, just a shadow of her form against the light. Ushers pass out pamphlets titled The Path of the Bull.)

Woman: I lay dreaming, lusting through dark antiquarian reveries as soft white ash and blackened leaves gentle their way to my rooftop. East of the watershed is burning, but I am in a puppeteer’s shop, dragging my fingertips across marionettes, miniature hands carved in gesture, painted lips. One large polycephalic stick puppet, with a smoothly sanded face of Jesus, a saint, and three men pulled from pews and altars, sits propped against a wall, taking me in. The darkest of wood, cherry rouged cheeks. Long lashes of sad men. Twelve dollars. The puppeteer says, “This puppet is for holding over your face as you are chased by bulls, and God will watch you as the horns brush your ass and the sound of hooves drown out the sound of your heart.” Twelve dollars. My pockets empty. I said aloud, “I want this.”

I wake up in want, thinking, I am not religious, I do not know what this dream means. Outside, a blood orange sun rises, the ground dusted with the remains of dead flora and fauna. Considering, I do know what it is to be chased by bulls. Figuratively, surely, literally, once. We ran as fast as we could, the cattle behind us, pushing us through the field, to the oak tree on the rock. He was in tears, believing God sent this stampede to punish him for his work as Butcher. The way he cut a swine’s body, hung it in the freezer, twirling on hook. I thought, this man thinks God is watching him. Maybe that made him appealing, the way he cried while being chased by bulls, while I scrambled up the rock, thinking we will probably sleep together tonight. Because, like I said before, I am not religious, I do not know what any of this means. We didn’t know then that the field would burn twenty years later, that flames would chase the bulls, all of us running for twelve dollars, wondering why God was watching.

(Woman exits stage. The curtains close. A hologram of a girl-child is projected on to the stage, in front of the curtains. She stands staring at the audience, mouthing hello, her hand held against glass unseen.)

The choir sings:

My heart is filthy.

Narrator: She came bearing poetry. You can say that two ways told, just tip your tongue and tap the low, and bring the man hand to her face. He thinks he can see through her, to the place where all words spill forth, caught on the tip of his finger, medicine slick in his palm, spit diving through the great rush of Fuck, the tender tendrils of rosebuds laid across her chest. She sleeps with a razor under her tongue.

The choir sings:

Move carefully, he speaks of liquid beasts.

ACT THREE

(As the curtains begin to open, the girl-child fades. The stage is bare except for two desks, facing each other. The woman and the man sit at the desks, computers between them. Behind them, a screen, where their words are displayed as they type.)

Man (typing): I have built a field of monsters.

Woman(typing): Are you scared of them?

Man (typing): No, they keep me company. They pour milk in my cereal when I am too tired to cook.

Woman (typing): Will you ever let them go?

Man (typing): I don’t know if they are mine to let go of.

(The screen is blank, the woman looking away from her computer. The man senses the pause and continues to type.)

Man (typing): I have wanted to kill myself. Even before this.

Woman (typing): Oh… I see. How do you mean?

      Man (typing): Flung from cliffs, cars into poles, that type of thing.

      Woman (typing): What do you mean exactly, that you have thought about it?

      Man (typing): I carry a note in my pocket, to remind me why I shouldn’t.

      Woman (typing): Oh, I see, I think. (She pivots away from the screen briefly, and then returns.)

I do not want to kill myself. I mean, I would. I would if my child died. I would chase her into

the spirit world, wouldn’t even bother with a note. (She traces the scars on her arms.) Thank

you for telling me. (She mistakes confession for intimacy.)

My first boyfriend killed himself. We think, we don’t really know. It was a long time ago. I guess

I have tried… it was induced, from medication. (She rattles the orange bottle on her desk,

watches the light blue pills shaped like breath mints slip from one side to the other.) What does

your note say?

      Man (typing): Just things that make me laugh. (Long pause, screen glowing.) I see your

monsters, too.

Woman (turning back to the screen, typing): I feed them rib meat of prayer. (Shrugging, even though no one can see her.) They are always so hungry, beastly. Ugly.

Man (typing): I think your humanity is trying to kill me. Like it has teeth.

Woman (typing): My therapist says that I walk in three realms. Heaven, hell and earth. I just want to be on earth. Where are you… exactly?

Man (typing): I have to go. It’s a matter of grace. I can’t meet you. I shouldn’t even be here.

Woman (typing): Back to the fields.

Man (typing): Back to the fields.

(The MAN and WOMAN stop typing, the glow of the screen grows brighter. The woman opens the bottle of pills, pours them into her hand. Picks one out, places it in her mouth and swallows. The man turns his computer off, the lights dim on the scene.)

Narrator: The thing about obituaries is that they can only take note of a fractured life rearranged for palpability within the Sunday morning paper. The death they mark is only one death of many within a life. Obit death is death without birth or rebirth, inherently flawed in the nature of its narrative. The writers pluck the beginning, middle and end to create plot where there is only happenstance. They throw in birth-cities, who we were survived by, the way we held capitalism up with both palms. What the obituary can’t speak to is the plot that lies in the time before birth and the many ways that we are reborn within one life. We’ve all died a thousand times in a single decade and yet we went on walking, using elevators, washing dishes and losing socks. Each of us moved ordinary, as if we weren’t in the middle of our own wetted death rattle. I arrive to you with bruised eyes and a tired mouth. You have arrived to me with scaled flesh and dirty feet. No one will call us monsters when we are sprinkled into the same rivers that they swim. We all know we are next. We’ve been fed us soup and laid in bed, as if we are alive, as if our flesh is not stained from the underworld. No funeral home has been called, we have yet to meet a coroner.

As the world bends and burns and the virus shape shifts amongst us, the very nature of the obituary begins to bleed. In the 1700s, obituary meant a register of dead people, taking root from obire, which means to meet death. Hello, how are you? I am very well, thank you. The biography writer takes notice, flips it in ink, makes us notice. And now, if everyone is dying at the same time, who will you write your obituary?

Eventually, it takes the form of a storm, drenching us with the sound of weather. It takes the form of a love letter. It takes the form of a new beginning, the story behind the story. It takes the form of theater, in a small playhouse, down a dark alleyway that requires a stage, lighting, and an audience. Welcome to the Playhouse. Welcome to the end of times.

(Curtains close)

There is applause. Pamphlets tucked in purses. Back stage, the actors pause, touching. She brings her hand to his face, he leans in. “I will feed you meat,” he says with a crooked smile. She nods, hungrily. They leave through the back door, holding hands, wrapped in jackets against the burning night.