6. SCRIPTING THE USUAL TERROR
A short story and/or play.
THE CAST.
THE WRITER
THE DIRECTOR
THE READER
THE TERROR (The Terror has no lines but is in every scene)
SCENE 1.
An early morning in early summer. Dawn glowing pale on the horizon, the colour of nothing. Two people awake ahead of the world. THE WRITER sits at the table before the window, trying in vain to write. THE DIRECTOR, in the kitchen, has just put on the kettle—he is not here yet, or not anymore. There is a film playing at all times in his mind; he slips in and out of it at will. THE WRITER looks over and imagines she can see it through the back of his head.
Enter THE READER, late (as always) to the scene, who will depart as soon as the action stops.
THE WRITER stares at the page. Night’s shadows have not yet left her. The kettle boils.
THE DIRECTOR, taking a box down from the shelf: I’ve only got the standard stuff.
THE WRITER: Okay.
THE DIRECTOR: I don’t really drink tea. I don’t buy it.
THE WRITER: It’s fine.
THE DIRECTOR pours the water in a mug and sets the mug on the table.
THE DIRECTOR: How’s the writing?
THE WRITER: It’s good.
THE DIRECTOR: Good.
Silence intervenes, cuts a path. THE DIRECTOR opens all the curtains and all the windows. He sets last night’s dishes to wash. He tidies and dresses and runs a comb through his hair. What else? He sets the comb on the table. Attaches the watch to his wrist. What else? In his mind, an outlaw sets off across the desert. THE READER watches through the back of his brain. THE DIRECTOR stares at himself in the mirror while the outlaw battles the sands. Imagine two realities warring with one another. Imagine the mind as portal to somewhere else. Now imagine that there is just a man in front of a mirror. Which of us has a way out of the body?
THE DIRECTOR, returning to the room: I have a meeting soon, then I need to get to the gym.
THE WRITER looks up and opens her mouth to speak. She says nothing.
THE DIRECTOR: What is it?
THE WRITER: Nothing.
THE DIRECTOR: I noticed you went somewhere last night.
THE WRITER: I was downstairs. I couldn’t sleep.
THE DIRECTOR: Something on your mind?
THE WRITER: No, nothing.
THE DIRECTOR sets his laptop down on the kitchen bench. He starts going through emails.
THE WRITER [aside]: How to explain to a person that every night you wake to darkness and your mind tunnels down into that place we’re not meant to go, that void at the heart of all thinking, and the realisation crashes over you—barrels into your body, breaks through your chest—that one day you will cease to exist, and you shoot up, crazed and desperate, needing to run, to connect, to crash into that person who means most to you, to break down in tears, shake their arms, crying, We have so little time, we have so little time—how to explain to someone in the light of day, flies buzzing and cars on the road, that our differences don’t matter, that inconvenience doesn’t matter, that all our petty grievances and stupid arguments are irrelevant, that the only important thing is the human connection, soul to soul, heart to heart, between any and every person in the world, with whoever we find around us, through fate or chance, take your pick, because all of us are on the same damned path, the future shooting out before us like a dead-end road going dark?
THE WRITER: Can we do something together later?
THE DIRECTOR: Like what?
THE WRITER: I don’t know. Go for lunch or dinner. Maybe the beach. A walk.
THE DIRECTOR: I’m not sure. I don’t have much time.
THE WRITER [aside]: None of us have any time.
The language of trees blows in through the windows. Sunlight glimpses the table. Outside the city is learning about the day, this new tide of hours which has swept in from the fathoms above. THE READER wonders what it all means. On her laptop, THE WRITER writes: Where does time come from? THE DIRECTOR thinks to himself: Every day is a desert.
THE WRITER: What’s this meeting about anyway?
THE DIRECTOR: I’m seeking more funding.
THE WRITER: More?
THE DIRECTOR: It takes a lot to make a film.
THE WRITER imagines they go for a walk by the shore and somewhere amidst the sea-spray and the sun-heat her heart opens and pours forth like a bottle of wine, sloshing red into the world. Her lips find the words to describe the tunnel inside her brain and THE DIRECTOR listens closely, nods, and upon her final word says, Me too. Me too. This, she feels, is the deepest possible connection between two beings.
THE DIRECTOR: The things that brought me joy as a child are now a source of terror. [THE READER notes that he doesn’t actually say this.]
THE WRITER: I am terrified of nothing, which is to say I am terrified of everything. [THE READER notes that she doesn’t actually say this.]
Neither wants to cause a scene.
NOT-A-SCENE.
THE WRITER [to the page]: I’ve been having the death-panics again. One here and there and then none for years and now I fall nightly into the void from which, as a non-void entity, I can only violently recoil. The journey down is slow then sudden, the journey back tears off all the skin. Body jerk. Blood thunder. Heart running itself into every vein. I split upright, head upside-down. When I find my skin again it is salt-wet. When I tap my phone it is late. I shake back the curtains to search for the sky. In this dark desert the sky is the closest thing to another person. The sky is a portal that never works but still we go on hoping. Tapping the window pane like a phone screen. Connection offline is an oxymoron these days. He said once, if you ever have one of those panics with me, let me know. The problem is that the panics are born of isolation. One cannot sink into the void with company. Alone, I sit there crying, trying to think a thought that doesn’t end in death. As a kid I watched advertisements. As an adult I refuse to own a TV. I want to live deeper. I want to feel my suffering better. Every good idea has an edge. Still I prefer knowledge to bliss—I tell myself this, hands pressed to my chest, throat wide around the ache. I tell myself this nightly death-tunnel is proof that I’m awake. These days, it’s true, I experience every happiness as a kind of pain, wherein the object of my joy is eclipsed by its inevitable loss. Atemporal living, I call it. I am your stereotypical omnipresent god. I am now but I am also always then—hence the sadness. Hence the death-panics. When I watch him sleep I am seeing him on the last day. The look of his back. The back of the door. All things contain their opposite, which is a nice way of saying that all things contain their own demise. My body, factory of life, came with death built-in. Lights out, silence in the house. I tap my phone: it is later. No person in the screen. I think, I will never be ready to not exist.
SCENE 1, CONT.
THE READER watches THE DIRECTOR get into his car. THE WRITER starts off down the hill, along the path, headed for the shore. THE READER is unsure which to follow. Who can say he carries the scene within himself alone? We pass the scene like a baton from life to life.
THE SCENE BEFORE THE SCENE.
At night, he greets her outside his house.
THE WRITER: Hey Stranger.
THE DIRECTOR: I missed you.
They fold into the house (gently). He cooks dinner while she sits on the bench, forking pasta straight out of the pot. With one hand he stirs. The movement of the other up her thigh is question. Or perhaps a direction: one can never know with a man like him. She leans back, opens up. THE DIRECTOR thinks, Now is this answer or instruction? Either way, he abandons the spoon.
After dinner they watch a film about a man who can’t find his car. Twenty minutes in he finds it.
THE WRITER: I don’t understand why it keeps going. He has the car.
THE DIRECTOR: The car was a metaphor. Now, you see, he’s going to realise what’s really lost.
The man spends the next twenty minutes driving. Lots of main roads. Lots of back roads. He is searching for a particular path into a particular wilderness where he once had a home. He finds his home. The film goes on.
THE WRITER: But he found it.
THE DIRECTOR: The home is just a metaphor. Now he’s going to realise what he’s really searching for.
The man rifles through the undergrowth, kicks at stones, pulls earth out of the ground with his bare hands. There he is, crawling about on hands and knees. There he is, digging a hole. Man, arm-deep in the world: will the things he reaches for ever fill his mind? He finds himself.
THE WRITER: It keeps going.
THE DIRECTOR: The self he finds is just a metaphor. Now he’s going to understand what is truly missing.
Realising that this film goes on forever, THE WRITER turns it off.
Later they are in bed, touching. THE WRITER has always struggled to stay in her body during sex. The act makes a singularity of the lovers bodies; it leaves no room for the mind. Naturally she finds it up on the ceiling, watching with a detached, clinical gaze. Your hand, it tells her. Move it there.
Sex is better, she finds, if she lets THE DIRECTOR take control. She can forget the mind and the self and live entirely in and as her skin. This is perhaps the only time she is not afraid.
THE DIRECTOR: Turn over.
Afterwards THE DIRECTOR is back in his brain, shooting a scene.
THE DIRECTOR [to himself]: This desert scene is long and arduous. Will I ever be done with it?
THE WRITER lies hot and reeling. Her mind, thrust back in her body, doesn’t fit the same as before, as though her body changed shape in its absence. Were she at her laptop, she’d write: If the body is a home, then the mind is a ghost which haunts it.
THE WRITER: Do you think of me when I’m not around?
THE DIRECTOR: Of course, sometimes.
[A long pause.]
THE WRITER: You haven’t asked me back.
THE DIRECTOR: Asked you what?
THE WRITER: Asked if I think about you.
THE DIRECTOR: [Pause.] It didn’t occur to me.
He doesn’t ask the question. THE WRITER wonders how to get her terror out of the description and into the dialogue. THE DIRECTOR is still battling the sands. Eventually, they go to sleep.
POTENTIAL SCENE #1.
THE READER follows the THE WRITER down to the shore. She walks barefoot along the sand. The sun sifts down whitely and the seagulls yearn in the sky and she thinks, Right here. Here, she could tell him the terror of her soul. Already the beach is filling with people who lie flat against the sand. She wonders, Did they, too, follow their hunger out of the darkness? Or did they simply walk out the door? The simplest gesture can hold the most complex thought, or it can hold nothing.
She lies down and allows the light to burn up all her darkness. She will be back again tomorrow.
POTENTIAL SCENE #2.
THE READER follows THE DIRECTOR as he drives to his meeting. He knows where he wants this film to go but he can’t manage to get it there. The desert stretches hot and endless before him. He gets so lost inside it that he takes a wrong turn and ends up on the wrong side of the city. As a kid, he would script and shoot a movie in his head every other month, comfortable in the knowledge that there would always be another. As a director, his hunger for knowledge cannot overcome his fear of the final scene. Each new scene is a new excuse. This road, he thinks, is hard to navigate.
He doesn’t make the meeting.
BOTH SCENES CAN BE EQUALLY REAL SO LONG AS WE NEVER OBSERVE EITHER.
THE READER follows neither THE WRITER nor THE DIRECTOR, but stays in the newly empty room. There might be a clock ticking somewhere, perhaps a curtain flapping in an open window, but THE READER has removed their ears and eyes. The script assumes a superposition. The terror multiplies. SCHRÖDINGER shakes his head. This isn’t what he wanted at all.
SCENE AT MIDNIGHT.
THE WRITER wakes from a dream wherein her lover drained all the blood from her body and put it in a jar. For safe-keeping, he said, while she lay like a wetsuit over the bed. It would have been better, she thinks now, if he’d drunk it. At least then she’d have died knowing she was desired.
THE DIRECTOR is still sleeping. She attempts to tunnel down into her terror but it is futile with him in the room; she slips from the sheets. The only way to be free of fear is to embrace it—she’s sure there’s an axiom to this effect. Silently, in the kitchen, she turns over her terror. She stands on its edge and peers down into its depths. THE READER may find it useful to envision a 2-dimensional black hole, slowly opening at her feet. It chews up the kitchen tiles and half the bench. THE WRITER lifts a foot as though to take a step. THE READER holds their breath.
Her foot lands on the kitchen floor. She is going back to bed.
SCENE 1 (AGAIN).
An early morning in early summer. Dawn glowing pale on the horizon, the colour of nothing. Two people awake ahead of the world. THE WRITER sits at the table before the window, trying in vain to write. THE DIRECTOR has just made himself a protein shake.
THE DIRECTOR: We should be off, then.
[Imagine a large wave of words, slowly swelling. Imagine a lifetime crammed into a sentence that’s never said. Imagine a heart so full with terror that it can barely fit between the ribs. Imagine an infinite desert, with a person standing at every edge.]
[Now imagine nothing.]
THE WRITER: When should I come by next?
THE DIRECTOR: I don’t know. We’ll sort something out, I guess.
SCENE DESIGNED FOR LEAVING.
This drama goes on forever. You can linger here a while, but no one gets to watch the whole thing.
Exit THE READER.
This piece is world-shaking. Never have I been glued to a piece of fiction on this app before. I’ve never before fancied myself the type to enjoy theatrical writing, but this is a totally different beast.
Your style of writing clearly conveys all the psychological and philosophical fiction you consume; I can’t believe how deftly you handled such a complicated storytelling method! If you ever decide to write a book, I’ll be on the pre-order list 🔥
This is really very good, reminds me of Don Delilo’s voice but better!