A play that begins with time travel and ends at the bottom of a very deep hole.
Act One
Scene I
A time and a place, pitched to A24.
It is the year of the Water Tiger, the third of its species to have passed you by. The Earth Tiger meanders to the far-beyond before you had grown cognizant of the peripheral. And now you have come to only regard the superficial. You look ahead, and she begins to dig, but it is not time for that yet.
Exit, She.
It now comes the incidence for the temporal past, demonstrative of a spatialized history, to engage with the temporal present.
The universe trembles from within.
Enter, Sound.
Sound approaches from stage right, having emerged from behind the east-blown wood.
Enter, Eastern wood.
Hold position—
Hold position for the century to come.
You wait patiently, having left the autonomy of otherwise behind. Time walks past.
Enter, Time.
Exit, Time.
Enter, Time.
Exit, Time. Enter, Time. Exit, Time.
Enter, Time.
Now, the wood falls to the ground, having long awaited so, its roots brought from the earth with a selfish velocity. Her foliage, defiantly random or determined as so, lands in opposition to her node of origin.
Enter, Random chance.
Randomness appears as determinism when it is dressed synchronically with time.
Exit, Random determinism in sync with time—
TIME
—or had it been determined by randomness?
Shrugging, the pair uncouple and meander away.
Exit, Randomness. Exit, Determinism.
The hole, a fallacy, assumes the previously collapsed form.
Exit, Westward wood.
YOU
(What is even left on stage?)
End scene.
You weep softly through sound’s dried lips, having been held in the hole. Time gazes on from afar.
SOUND AND THE HOLE
(In near unison, an echo, egocentric in nature)
Worry not, for the sediment is not far now. Though having been banished, it strays near still.
“But even so, space is not indicative,” retorts Time itself.
Exit, Time.
Enter, Sentiment, sedimented (in some time to come).
Act One
Scene II
A place without a time, pitched to A4.
It is the year of the Water Tiger. The tunnel is still being formed, roughhewn and single- minded still. Soon, it will come to bridge a temporal past, demonstrative of a spatial history, into the joint space-time present, but the construct of time has fallen under scrutiny and could not join us today.
Exits further, Time.
Enter, Sound.
Sound approaches from stage left, having emerged from behind the east-blown wood. Behind it, the mechanical poacher lingers as the shadows recede. The universe trembles from within.
Enter, Poacher.
The wood falls to the ground, its roots brought from the earth with a selfish velocity. Her foliage embraces the space away from the cartesian grid.
SOUND
(A fallen tree)
A fallen tree.
The mechanical poacher, running still, records the figure of sound as sound itself parries away.
Exit, Sound.
The poacher and its bounty surrender themselves to stillness and wait for an instantiation of time to rejoin this sullen place. Space holds itself for time.
Enter, Time. Enter, man.
Exit, The fallen tree.
Act Two
Scene I
A diner inside the tunnel, displaced but rendered in time, atonal.
She, her, and you sit at the corner booth inside the diner, she and her on one end, and you at the other. Outside the window is dirt. The city’s silhouette grins from the rendered space above, but you do not see it from within the hole.
YOU
I thought it was a tunnel.
HER
It will come to be a tunnel in time.
(She lies; actually, it will come to be a well.)
She and her have the gift of foresight, as beings left behind. Time waves on from the audience with a smile, faint and fleeting.
SHE
You think that you are digging a tunnel, but really it is a hole.
HER
The sediment is there; you will find it. Soon you will come to realize that you must fill the hole and dig another elsewhere. You will dig many holes before arriving at the wholeness that she had sought.
SHE
I did not know that then. I believed that I was starved for acceptance. The hunger was blinding. A blind and hungry man will eat almost anything given to her without much inquiry.
HER
I have eaten many things you cannot dare to fathom.
YOU
When I picture my youth, it is derivative not of memory, but from imagination. I see myself in the third person.
SHE
You were taught to forget and chastised for failing to remember. You can scrub your mind free from sorrow, but it is actually memories that you have exiled.
HER
It is brainwashing. But remember, emotions are causal if you wish to remain seen as sane.
SHE
Is there anything left that you retain?
YOU
The birdsong of my ancestors. It skips a generation. My mother is tone deaf, but she loves to sing. Strayed sounds bring her much joy. I wish to adopt them one day, if not on her behalf.
SHE
It is unkind to antagonize another for the mistakes of your own. Looking for is not akin to listening to.
YOU
But perhaps they were not brothers but rivals.
HER
Brothers fight sometimes.
SHE
It is brothers that build great cities. Rome fell and will fall again, just as you have died and will continue dying in this life. You will go through many deaths yet remain living still. I know of this to be true, for it was a ceramist that told us so not long ago—it is from death that lends her the materials she molds.
HER
Unlike the sculptor, who works with corpses—you glue dust together in desperation for a form.
YOU
I am not the necromancer you speak of, but that much else is true, I suppose.
HER
Do you also suppose that the felled tree wishes to die?
SHE
Were the felled trees ever to be made aware that they were planted to be cut? For we do not tell the cows of their fate, but we can hear it in their calls.
SOUND AND A COW
From the intersection, catty-corner to the diner, simultaneous to the conversation at hand.
Moooo–
(ooo)
((oo))
(((o)))
A reverberation, then silence.
HER
The felled tree speaks in the orientation to which it had collapsed and in the timber’s timbre as it strikes the ground, but to believe that the tree only falls so that you may hear it is egocentric and misplaced.
YOU
But I am immature and unwilling to remember still.
SHE
That, too, will come to change in time.
Time nods in agreement, gazing on from the back of the room, then departs from the audience to rejoin the cast and crew.
End scene.
Act Two
Scene II
The diner inside the hole, replaced in time, microtonal.
She, her, and you sit in the corner booth, all together and all at once. The remainder of the diner is populated by strangers, all of a different tonality than that of yours and theirs—lighter in nature. The strangers cannot see she and her, for they are but a part of you in here. In lieu of the privilege of hearing, the strangers all speak to you.
STRANGER
Imagine your immigration as your propagation.
A GREEK CHORUS
(whispering)
Plant yourself.
Shed your roots.
Replant yourself elsewhere.
Remember who you were.
Remember where you are.
(a threat)
SHE
(To you and to them)
You are but a guest in your own home.
YOU
What is the word for it...?
THEM
insecurity—
(Congruently)
Imagine that the trailing freckles come to join hands at the end of your phrase.
Ellipses exits stage left.
Enter, stage right, the em-dash.
—selflessness and insecurity.
ELLIPSES
(From backstage)
It is much harsher now—
THE EM-DASH
...or perhaps the constellations have connected at last.
YOU
This is reminiscent of the strange fruit in my mother’s tongue.
THE EM-DASH
Grammatical strangeness—
ELLIPSES
The erroneous wandering of grammatical structure is necessary at times to bring stability to a foreign land.
SHE AND HER
(Not at the same time)
Learns to circumvent the squareness of forms.
Rest.
Act Two
Scene II.2
Inside the diner, between strangers.
“Plug your headphones into the aux and see what you hear.”
“But the signal flow is all wrong,” she responds.
“Upload it anyways, if it’s all the same to you.”
Sight, to sound, “But it is not.”
End scene.
Act Two
Scene II
Resumed, from before, inside the diner.
It appears we have travelled back in time?
(End scene)
Act Three
Scene I
Record the sound of a felled tree.
Enter, Sound.
Enter, The mechanical poacher.
Exit, tree.
TIME
Is it the same as you remember?
Sound lingers to caress the body of space, severing its limbs in a wistful earnest.
Time scatters the ashes of sound in the blood of space.
Exit, The mechanical poacher and the figure of sound.
YOU
Is that which is forgotten eidetic to that which is not yet known?
TIME
(Imbued with knowledge)
Wait now for understanding to come. Temperance is but a virtue—fear not it suiting your temperament in present company.
Act Four
Scene I
It was a dark and stormy night.
The weather was cold when placed next to the shade of skin.
I missed the lamentation of christ when I was three years old, and it’s too late to be inoculated for it now.
Even as I am ten minutes early, I am twelve minutes late.
“I’ve never seen that before—it looks Asian.” Said the person on the bus.
PERSON ON THE BUS
It looks Asian.
“Chinese, actually,” I reply. They had meant to address the business beyond the window’s horizon, but I was addressing a whole population.
She reddens more still, yet when I visit my ancestors, I am given their fruit and their faults.
SHE
You shouldn’t take things that are not yours.
YOU
What is mine that is not already yours?
SHE
Nothing is yours that is not mine.
HER
That remains a logical fallacy if you have nothing and she has anything.
YOU
Am I to surrender materiality as to spare my dignity? This seems unbecoming.
SHE
To have and to be mistaken are not mutually exclusive.
THE WOMEN, IN UNISON
For we are not mutually exclusive.
YOU
Am I a woman now?
HER
Yes.
YOU
But she remains a child.
SHE
You cannot eclipse the fragments of your youth. Surely you have come to understand this?
YOU
I see nothing apart from you.
SHE AND HER
Turn around and tend free to the curvature of space. You have been underground for far too long. The sojourn beneath comes to rest ad interim.
HER AND SHE
(From behind)
Orientation is contingent on reciprocity, as in moral relativism. Come child, it is time to move now.
Enter, Time collated with Space.
You go east to travel west.
Exit, Time.
You are west.
You are from the east.
She begins to dig a hole.
SPACE
Carve dust now. Only with time will understanding come.
Fade to darkness, in congruence with the hole’s vertical depth.
Act Four
Scene II
1.62 kilometers below sea level (roughly 63,780 inches).
They flooded her hole in attempts of chasing her away. She treads water, not realizing it had then become ice, but your sire is the sun and as are you.
Tomorrow, the hole will become a well.
Enter, Time.
Enter, Understanding.
Epilogue
Prologue
All together and all at once, underneath the sun.
She bathes.
SHE
I thought it would be longer.
TIME
Begin again, and dig another hole.
Space exposes its bare belly so you may stretch its skin into itself.
Time watches on.
(Sometime later)
Enter, the water rabbit.
(D.C. al fine)