POLYPTYCH FOR THE BEGINNING OF THE END OF THE WORLD, OR THREE BEGINNINGS FOR THE END OF THE WORLD AND A PLAY
CABBAGES
You take a risk and you are rewarded: You live through a swelter summer—the humidity of it; the flying vectors of disease of it; the itchy, sleepless, worry-filled nights of it—and still you have a baby, deliberately, and it works out great. Congrats. You end up with a baby with a normal head, normal feet, normal lungs, and bask in the normalcy of the earthly reward. You pray, eat the placenta, swaddle, inoculate. You return home at night to keep the neighbors in the dark. You do not call the man to tell him. His heart, being a man’s. You bundle and feed. You do not answer doors.
You research convents and covenants, somewhere to be not alone, promises. A small Armenian eunuch drives you into the hills one night. He is incapable of feeling the urge for legacy, the silly feeling the moon gives the sea, he explains. You don’t get this analogy. He makes love, he says, but no plans. In this way, he is like just about every man you’ve ever met. “But if your employer put these stipulations in your contract,” you say, “get a lawyer, bud.” In the hills, the women welcome you, soothe and assure. They give you and the eunuch separate rooms. The baby sleeps beside you, semi-suctioned into a rubber bassinet that clips to your bedframe and promises nearly moralizing posture. You look at the newborn reflecting starlight like a glass of water. Half-asleep, yourself, you believe you hear the screaming of the castrati, the crying of angels. In the morning, the eunuch is gone.
The group is called the Mothering. Their last baby left four years prior, grown, prepared. It is the longest they have gone without a good birth, twenty-two years. Coming to gather your clean clothes to wash the items themselves, they are pleased to see how good you are with the baby, that your T-shirts and bralettes are crusted with the peanut-colored stains of your breast milk. If you had turned out to be the kind of mother who’d force her baby to face a corner while you smoked and took pills and painted your toenails over and over in a poorly ventilated room as a prelude to the many years you were destined to spend filling the child’s head with doubts, it’d have been a blessing just the same. But they are happy you are the mother you are, the kind who travels with dirty laundry, a woman prepared to make the most of anything.
The eldest amongst the Mothering, who is so glad to have you, and is also huge, invites you on a tour of the grounds.
“May I bring my baby?” you ask.
And the mother answers, “You may, yes, if you choose to. You may choose to hold it close always, like a stone made of solid silver discovered in a pile of coal and that you keep hidden from the men and women you pass in the street.”
Hot, flax-yellow clouds of dust hover a foot over your head. This place is dry and high up, good for wild rose and grapevine orchards. It’s quite early and already it’s very hot. Women in gray habits crawl in and out of the orchards. Your baby is too young to wave back. Your guide’s flat shoes look painted on and remind you of the black shellac bands of the bowling pins you used to try to knock over ten at a time in the bowling alley of your hometown. You wonder if any of the women here can juggle. If they put on talent shows to keep themselves entertained. If they drink the wine, too. If inside the woman’s tight shoes are a pair of purple feet, or hooves, or something you’ve never seen in your life. The enormous old woman is beginning to tell you a story.
In those first years following the outbreak, she had worked at an orphanage. They took the children no one else would. The bad births. One morning the Superior went mad and ran around with a paring knife puncturing the tiny malformed bodies in their cribs. The eldest reports having seen the Superior in the golden light of the morning and not understanding what she was seeing at first, confusing this horrendous vision with an old memory of her grandmother from the years before the outbreak, of the woman out on the first day of the harvest, rooting cabbages from their beds, rolling them into her skirts, drunk on the joy of purpose.
LOVELY ROOFS
Our house outside Atlanta was covered in wisteria vines. The wisteria swung from the eaves of the house in big, gushing lilac loaves that cast shadows inside the house. The shadowing would start small each spring, the shadows appearing in the shapes of pets: a small dog napping on my bed, a dead bird dangling from the frame of my closet door. And each day, the shadow creatures would continue to grow in size and features until, before I knew it, summer arrived, and the whole house fell under a dark purple light. The old lady across the street used to say the wisteria had been there since before our house was even built, since before the Civil War, that the bushels had been free floating in space for more than a hundred years or something when builders came and decided to wedge some pieces of wood underneath them. For a whole summer the builders would part the wisteria like a curtain in the morning and disappear inside until sundown. All kinds of noise and music would sound off from within the wisteria, and at night the builders would take its beautiful smells home to their wives. When the house was finished, the wisteria looked puffed up, like a wig settled on a head. The old lady said she remembered that. I don’t know, sounds crazy, but she seemed like the kind of woman who knew what she was talking about.
I grew up in the house covered in wisteria and moved to New York City when I was twenty-three to become an actress and found work as an office janitor. Being from anywhere but New York, the pleasure was all mine. I could hardly think of anything at all to tell anybody about myself, but most people were kind enough to meet me places on my days off to eat and drink and kiss anyway. Back then most people were not afraid of, or very interested in, the end. They only enjoyed productivity and good, pleasurable feelings. People worked very hard and rewarded themselves with the kindness of the world. I was rewarded with the kindness of the world at work. As I cleaned up after the corporate existence of others, every night the great city would come to watch me through the windows of the tower. That far up, except for my delirious vacuum and blabbing coworkers, the city was quiet. From way up, I realized the city was another city on top. I told myself when the Big One hit I was going to live my whole life on the roofs of things and never touch the dirty floor again. I grew up in a house that wore a wig and I’d die on a beautiful roof.
I must admit, the Big One was not what I had expected. It was not just One and none of them were that Big, at least not big enough for any of them to be called the Big One. I like to think of them as a series of very bad days. Like when everything goes wrong, one thing after another. First your power gets shut off because you forgot to the pay the bill and then the food in the fridge goes sour and on top of that you catch a cold and instead of getting lots of sleep, which is what they tell you to do when you’re sick, you’re kept up all night because your neighbors are having this crazy fight—except you lost power because the grid is down and it’s the grocery stores that run out of food and you’re sick because you drank wastewater and your neighbors are actually killing each other for the last drop of it. To be honest, after all that, after everything, I don’t really even remember feeling much when the Earth was shaking. Only a few buildings fell. They say there’s this great big gash in the middle of Times Square, but I never went there when life was normal, so why would I go now, even if there really is this great big gash in the middle of it?
For a few months I barely left my apartment. My brother, who’d been visiting me at the time, was down in the subway the morning of the first earthquake and hadn’t resurfaced. Some people said they were all probably fine down there, that the stations were built to sustain collapses and had all sorts of resources. For a while, some people dug. Not to excavate the trapped but to join them. I wasn’t sure about anything, really. I missed having someone to talk to, to remember with.
The Big One, or the not-so-big-ones, brought memory to the surface of a lot of people’s brains. When people quit bashing each other’s heads in every second, they started going out and touring the ruins, pointing at things and saying, “Remember how that used to be? What we used to do there? What it was all about, supposedly?” Their questions got louder and louder, and, eventually I had no choice but to pop my head out my apartment window and shout, “Hey, buddy, join the club! Get in line!” because people like me had been remembering and missing things our whole lives. It’s what happens when you’re from someplace else. When your life used to be better. Wisteria. I missed wisteria. After the third or fourth group of nostalgists yelled back at me from the street, “Aw, shut up, you miserable fatty, can’t you see we’re trying to heal?” I decided I would find what I was missing in my shook-up city. Wisteria. My brother. A perfect roof. More than possible, I thought, in a place like New York, a place that had everything, maybe even in the afterlife.
MY LAST LIVING MEMORY OF WATER
Tomorrow, all the water left us, Mum used to say. Back then, making fun was easy, seeing that plants were still grown for the smell and kids sang songs in tune with faucets to make sure their teeth were getting clean. If you walked out the front door of our old flat and kept going straight, you’d have prune toes for days. We lived next to a lake we only used for swimming and driving boats around. Imagine that, swimming around in drinking water, stirring it with oil. Like we were blessed, or something. But back then some people even chose to live in deserts, which I think had something to do with trying to live as the poor blessed people in the Bible had, only with TVs, computers, cars, and swimming pools. Yeah, Mum used to joke: Ask a politician if the country’s really running out of water and he’ll say, We already have. Tell him, I didn’t hear about this, when did this happen?, and he’ll say: Tomorrow, don’t worry. We didn’t know it inside the cities, but our countrymen were already dying of thirst all over. So we all used to joke.
Now, from my bunk, I can hardly sleep for the blasted shores burning so bright on fire. From the desals, way up in the crow’s nest at night, I’ve seen it for days burning, burning so far inland you wouldn’t reach its blue heart by lorry for at least a day. We joke our own jokes now (it’s good to have a laugh): that the drylanders’d put out the flames had they a drop of liquid to spare. They started setting fire to themselves as soon as we were bought out by a corporation in Asia known for hogging all the water for themselves and their rich buyers. Unfair, but the whole world is. What’s a shame (and being shameful is much worse than being unfair), what’s a shame is sometimes the desal’ed water goes to waste. Why? Because sometimes a tanker gets gummed up by pirates or a storm or a trading stalemate, and since we can’t shut off the pumps ourselves, we’ve got to do something with the extra. You look to shore when it happens, but even if it wouldn’t land you in jail, there’s no use quenching the thirst of men and women burnt to crust. And so there are actual days when the desals’ bladders bulge so round we have no choice but to let them piss fresh, sparkling water right into the sea, and I swear even the fish have tears in their eyes every time we do.
And this is what I was doing, letting the piss out of the thing, when I saw it, what at first I thought was a drone with a bomb strapped to it. This was how my cousin got it. But instead it was a ferryman on a skiff, and he was waving at me to come down off the desal to join him on an ocean adventure. I didn’t check with my superiors, I just went, it being my opinion that if the ferryman comes to get you, it’s more than likely that you’re on the other side of something already.
On the skiff, I saw that the ferryman was shoeless. He pushed us away from the desal with a staff that must’ve been several kilometers long. I asked him all sorts of questions, but he had nothing to say to me. His work seemed pleasant and in the present. His life was a straight line from here to there and back again.
We came upon a small island where other men and women were already vacationing, but we did not approach from the populated beach, choosing instead to go around back to where there was a blue crystal cave surrounded by rubbery jungle. We entered the cave as if on a track, disappearing into its maw. The day, the world, whatever came before all of this, turned into a careful, pinprick-sized planet behind us.
In the dark, the ferryman let out a whistle and clicked his tongue. From the ceiling, the glowworms dropped their blue, luminescent threads, which the ferryman gestured to for me to grab. I held the gluey, glowing threads, and they began wrapping themselves around my fists and wrists and lifted me from the skiff, toward the ceiling of the cave. I felt exhilarated and alive and not the least bit worried when the skiff kept moving forward, slipping out from under me and disappearing in the dark. Not concerned at all was I, the one left dangling above the star-streaked waters all by myself. I suppose you could say I trusted in everything in that moment, the dropped ropes of worm shit that were holding me especially.
I’d imagined it happening differently. I’d hoped for something instantaneous, like what had befallen my cousin, honestly. Not like what had happened to my mum. This cousin had been a rugby player before he started sifting water. He’d said that if you got hit in the head just right, you could see god. After the funeral, his brother and I took turns hitting each other in the head. I don’t think either of us got so much as a concussion. Neither of us was quite prepared to hit the other as hard as we needed to. They say hurting people hurt people; however, having known pain, we heard too clearly pain’s announcement, and so we could only play violence, like gentle dogs, like players in a scrum at most. Even the fires, I realized, hanging from the roof of the cave, were the whispered promises of greater violence to come.
I slid my boots off to feel the cave’s respiration on my toes. To feel all at once the light of the germs and the dark of the day. I imagined others coming to do the same. I had no thirst in my throat. I pictured a vacationer motoring in on a jet ski, looking up and seeing. Seeing it just beginning.
CASTING THE GHOST
a play
CHARACTERS
THE GHOST
The set contains a student desk, inside of which, never seen, sleeps a green banana cockroach; and the River of Forgetfulness—intensely neglected, pretty much nonexistent. The stage lights are kept off, so nothing is visible.
NOTES
The ghost should be played by someone everyone already knows so that when they appear on stage their implied death is meaningful to everyone, including the audience members who aren’t paying any attention. The ghost must be empathized with, easily. The ghost can’t easily give away the ending. It must be willing to wear a costume of a questionable shape. The ghost cannot be a man. It’s okay if the ghost is a man. There must be times at which the audience is confused if Demi Moore is the real ghost. The ghost needn’t know how to operate a pottery wheel, but they must know how to lay ceramic tile to effect the death of the father currently working himself to death re-tiling the downstairs bathroom. The ghost will be very old but die from something they didn’t have to, which really is a shame. The ghost will maintain a careful distance between itself and its subjects so as not to frighten them. The ghost must have a killer jump scare. The ghost cannot be a child; we don’t have the budget to cover that kind of insurance. The ghost can be religious but not spiritual in the least. The ghost cannot be a name, after all—we don’t have the casting budget either. The ghost cannot have a name. It’ll show up on the ramparts more times than I can count. Pain will not rest until the ghost is exorcised; the ghost will be exorcised and the land will be bathed in healing. It might represent serfdom and/or slavery. It will know the story of the actor who lost his memory while performing the role of Old Firs. The ghost will be a reckoning. The ghost will not be denied. If played by a woman of color, she will not be your salvation. The ghost will be well versed in ghosting and haunting. All actors auditioning for the role must be Equity actors. Bring your cards as your devices will not work in the afterlife. Paper exists in the afterlife. When the ghost departs the stage, it will be sorely missed. The ghost must wash before each dressing. The ghost cannot remember its life. The ghost will not believe in ghosts. The ghost will not be so easily convinced. It must be fluent in languages. Payment will be received upon completion of the run in the form of books the ghost has read but cannot remember reading. The audience will not, under any circumstance, reach out and touch the ghost. The ghost cannot be a manifestation of the collective unconscious. It will have been a real person. With a real life. It will refuse to be put to rest. There will be a hint of the plane ride from the island to the mainland and the doubts it collected in the airsickness bag in every line it delivers. Left to its own devices, it will wing it on stage. There will not be enough time for a resurrection. It will bear a bottomless regret. It will speak to your workplace environment and your relationship with your mother. In a voice some will call singsong, it will revise your thinking around what you considered the smallness of life. You will remember it worked as a city bus driver. Noticing that your mother would ride with you and your sister to school each morning only to disembark for another bus headed in the opposite direction for work, it will have assured your mother that it would get her girls to school safely without her. The first morning you rode the bus without your mother, it told you to take the seat directly behind them, which is where you sat, riding the bus, for years. Watching you in their mirror, they asked you and your sister no more than three questions every ride. You never felt uncomfortable or strange. But you also never felt curious enough to ask them anything about themselves. You assumed they rode through the night. You pictured the bus going and going. They were younger than your mother but behind the wheel of that giant bus they were as confident as Hercules. One morning, the city woke up tearing itself apart. The bus driver said they would stop for anyone as long as they respected the bus. Men and women, bleeding from their heads, boarded and respected the bus. At school, half the class didn’t show up. Outside your apartment, the driver waited to see you make it into the building. When you moved away to another city, you forgot about them. Older now, with children, you look to your mother and ask, How did you do all of this on your own? And she will say, I didn’t. I had everyone. Remember that bus driver? You will look upon the ghost on stage and picture it behind the wheel of a great bus, the kind with a windshield shaped like a scuba diving mask. You will wonder how you’d come to feel so alone. The ghost won’t be doing it for laughs. It’s not here to tug at your heartstrings. You’ll think, Are they giving it away for free? You’ll think, Mother? Brother? The girl who died with her whole family on a road trip to Orlando spring break of your junior year of high school? The man you saw lying on the sidewalk and called 911 for but did not stick around to see if he was okay? But something in the performance will tell you it may not be who you think it is. You’ll dedicate the rest of your life to a work of art of your own depicting every person the ghost could’ve been. After Giotto, after Grünewald, after van Eyck (Jan and Hubert), you’ll choose to make a polyptych and paint an altarpiece of many, many panels. Faces and faces, ghost after ghost cast in little gold frames.
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