DRAMATIS PERSONAE

ALAN NADON: A stockbroker living in Centwerp.   He is a man who has known many crests and many valleys.   He has gained it all only to lose it, and lost it only to gain it.   In a moment of introspection, he once let his eyes wander from the apex of the Stock Exchange building to the base, and proclaimed that gaining felt surprisingly similar to losing—the same uneasiness, only in reverse.   He once loved a supercomputer.   Such metaphors are not lost on him.

SILK MITSURO: An Eblan-Tasnican student at the Tasnican Institute of Technology.   Her parents are mid-level administrators in a town outside Egmont where mid-level administration is very important and lucrative.   Her name is both a key to her heritage and a bastardization of it.   Such metaphors are probably lost on her—she is an engineering student, not a poet.
       
ANGEL: A supercomputer.   Built with such personality, such errancy, that it—she—gained that unique ability among computers: the ability to love.   This is a reciprocal gift—for what she really loves is the ability to love.   Such are the seeds of humanity.

AKI: Angel.   That is to say, Angel’s human avatar.   That is to say, a vessel in which Angel chooses to reside so that she may practice and receive love.   That is to say, an android that looks human, thus providing literality to the phrase “this mortal coil.”

A THRONG OF WET YOUTH: Nadon’s childhood friends.   Their names are Colm, Anthony, Raymond, and Ellis.   They are ghosts, made up of piecemeal memories with no account for accuracy or detail.

A BOY: A boy.

Setting: Nadon’s apartment in the low-rent section of Centwerp.   The stock ticker glows in the background—these must be real time stocks, or else the message that this is the present day and age will not register with less discerning audience members.   There is often an aura in the theatre when all the lights are down—this is a throng of electronic apparati, scanning for messages, reviewing the time, and most relevantly to this play, checking stocks.   The fate of any of those audience members can change more quickly than the curtain can close or open.   Images that are powerful but do not resonate are useless.

We see the materials of a lost life.   A ming vase, a painting we recognize from books.   A marble statue that shows errant taste.   It is apparent that these are the things salvaged from a better existence; Nadon has suffered at the hands of the woman/thing he once loved.   This is a man who once advised what seemed to be a young and tender budding stockbroker to cheat the system, and found that the “system” has cheated him.

It is dark.   Not too dark.   Can you appreciate a play you cannot see?

Silk: Unnh!

Silk rolls over onto her back.   Her firm Eblan breasts are exposed.   We see Nadon’s head rise from a bog of shadows, smirking like a man does once he has fulfilled the duty that millions of years of evolution has assigned him.

He supports himself on one arm, the other proudly akimbo.   For the first time we can see both of their torsos, like pink bowls, made on a broken potter`s wheel, filled with shadowy black ink.   We are, by rule, more entertained by what we cannot see that what we can.   Can you appreciate a play you cannot see?   Maybe.

Alan: I’m sorry; I don’t have any cigarettes to offer you.   But I have that leftover sushi in the fridge.   Emphasize the word “leftover.”

Silk turns so that her back is to the audience, but her head craned so that we may see it in profile, resting upon his chest.   She places both arms around his neck.   He rubs a nubile hand down her nubile torso.   The whole thing just bristles with nubility.

Silk: Do you remember when I told you about that class I’m taking?   The Commercial Market and the Woman of Today?   Well, the professor is a real harpy.   A real ballbuster, you know?   Snicker.   Yesterday we were talking about how new businesses adapt to the already established stock market, and she says, “Oh, by the way—never date a stockbroker, ladies.   You will never be as important to them as those five or six dead men whose countenance is on a few slips of paper.”

Alan: That’s good advice.   Some of us only care about the money.

He kisses her face, then her neck, then her shoulder.   Some of us care about engineering students.   Pinned in by her embrace, he does the reverse—shoulder, neck, face.

Silk: Giggle.   And can you believe?   She actually said “countenance.”

Alan: I say that all the time.

Silk: You do not.

Alan: What a lovely countenance you have, my darling.

There is one and only one thing that will make this scene work.   That is to have the lead actor and lead actress actually fornicate before the scene begins.   Only that will accurately replicate the patina of post-coitus: the smell, the sounds, the taste—and yes, even in the balconies, you can taste that something on your lips.

Silk: She also said that you stockbrokers are all mind and no heart.   You’d fuck a computer, if it had a nice pair of legs.

Alan breaks free of her prison hold.   He slips on his bathrobe, previously obscured by darkness, draped over a hidden chair.   He thinks this: This is the third girl I’ve slept with in as many months.   You think the same thing before each one of those—this one’s going to work; once you get into bed with her it will be one of those experiences you’ll never forget, that you’ll connect on a primeval level.   But you never do.   He must think this.   It’s the only way to get the real emotions across.   He smiles.

Alan: You know, I made love to a supercomputer once.

Silk: Yeah, I know.   I’ve heard the jokes—“How’d you get that hot stock tip before anybody else?”   “I slept with Angel.   It’s the only way to get around in this town.”

She jokingly elbows a phantom compatriot—Nadon’s echo, left behind, still lingering on the bed and not currently looking out the window at the ticker.   Her faux-deep macho voice and queer terminology—to a stockbroker, a “hot stock tip” is a “hot tip”—to what else might you be tipped off, when those plusses and minuses are everything you care about, or care to care about?—signal her only passing familiarity with Nadon’s business.   This, in turn, exposes the heretofore brevity of their relationship.   To really convey the de novo quality of this relationship, arrange for separate practices for each lead.   Do not let them meet before opening night.

Alan: What if I told you I really slept with her?   Like, say, I don’t know—she programmed herself a vessel, like a female robot.   And I slept with that.

Silk: I would say that either you have either had too much sake tonight, or not enough.   Once you’ve passed out, darling, you’ll have nothing to regret.

Only now do we recognize the bottle of sake on the dresser, which until now was a formless object, subject only to our imaginations, but insignificant enough to prevent us from applying them.   Again, for accuracy, the leads should be working on a couple of glasses.

Alan: Those, my little Eblan buttercup, are the words of a girl who has never had a nightmare.

He sits beside her on the bed.   She lies down on the flanks of her lower arms, perpendicular to the bed.   Her feet sway in the air, like the ceiling is the center of gravity and she is dangling over a precipice.   He kisses her on the forehead.   She enjoys it.

Silk: I wonder what it would be like to sleep with a supercomputer.   Perhaps like sleeping with the world’s best lovers—but randomized and sequenced for maximum pleasure.   She would say, “Like this, sir?” and you would say, “A little harder,” and she would say, “Increasing strength of muscle contraction by a factor of 1.5.”

Alan: It’s like being struck between the legs by a severed wire.

Silk: Ouch!

Alan: No, not painful.   Like all the energy needed to run Centwerp running through your body.   Lighting up like—like the stock ticker.   Being connected to everything and everyone.

Silk: Alan, I sense your creepiness module has increased by a factor of 10.   Please run systems check.

Alan laughs forcedly.   He wonders if he has been too forward.   His verge on honesty is a direct consequence of his recent poverty, and he is not accustomed to its pitfalls.

Alan: I’m sorry.   I guess I am talking nonsense.

Silk: Good.   I’d hate to have that sort of competition.

The lights flicker.   An alarm clock flashes.   An incredible flash of light from the window and a cracking sounds: a streetlight bursting.   For a moment, with darkness absent, we are invited to look upon the reality of Nadon’s apartment.   It is Spartan, but decorated with remnants of expensive taste unused.   We compare the worn, rickety posts of the bed with the polished wood of the tribal mask on the wall.   Those who control money believe they own the world, and pick their souvenirs accordingly.   The Kuatocrats in Egmont love to keep minimalist Eblan paintings on their office walls.   In Arris, the Casinos decorate their lounges with Thebean tile.   The room must look for every inch the home of a fallen cosmopolite.

We notice that the alarm clock reads ten after ten.   This is the time at which the author of this play was born and the fascinating overtones of birth and rebirth should not be overlooked as a driving metaphor for this production.

Silk: What was that?   There’s no storm—maybe a transformer blew!

Alan: No, it’s just… just the neighborhood.

Silk: Do streetlamps regularly explode in your neighborhood?

Alan: You know, I didn’t always live like this.   I used to have an apartment downtown, on the eighteenth floor of the Kessler building.   A penthouse, wall to wall.   It had a hundred tribal masks from my safaris in the Veldt, animal skin rugs.   I used to have a valet and a doorman.   I had enough money in the bank to sustain the life I live now a thousand times over.

Silk: And?

Alan: Do you really want to know?

Silk: Is it embarrassing?

Alan: A little, I suppose.

Silk: Then you might want to tell me now, when I’m likely to forget.   See how I take it now, and you’ll know whether or not to tell me again over breakfast.

Alan: Well.   I met a… woman.

Silk: Isn’t that how it always starts?

The lights on Silk darken.   A spotlight saunters across the stage, over the alarm clock and the vase and the engineering student and the rest of Nadon’s most treasured possessions.   Framed by it is Aki, making very precise steps in a strapless blue dress.   We are only slightly aware of the rigidity of her movements.   To reproduce this effect, replace the actress’ kneecaps with ball-bearings.

Aki: And left over right and right over left—now you try with me, just the reverse.

Nadon puts an arm around her waist and places his free hand in hers: the teacup position.   There is music being played in the orchestra pit, mostly horns and a timpani.   It is a song that the audience should know, but can’t place.   This is a metaphor for the deceptive familiarity that lovers enjoy.

Alan: You mean like this?

Aki: Are you sure you’ve never done the Chaldean shuffle?

Alan: Not one hundred percent.   I may have picked it up somewhere.

Aki: You waste my time, Alan Nadon.   I am a stockbroker, you know.   In my line of work, success is a mere millisecond away from failure.   How dare you?   A knowing smile; a knowing wink.   So knowing, in fact, that all audience members must think Say, is she smiling and winking at me?

Alan: You don’t have to lecture me, Aki, I know the value of time—and my instincts are telling me that you are a millisecond from taking off that dress.

Aki ducks a kiss and shuffles into a nearby chair.   Her feet are bare and her legs are milky white.   This is a rare quality in women—if it cannot be found, it can be made, though painstakingly.   Instruct your actress to spend the three months preceding opening night in a dark room.   Use actual milk as your standard—if her legs are not ready, delay production.   The light fades from Aki and returns to Silk, still lying on the bed.

Silk: Aw, that sounds sweet.   And you let her go?

Alan: Are you serious?

Silk: Oh, come on.   You and I both know that this probably won’t last forever.   I know I’m not the first woman to lie in this bed and I’m nearly as confident I won’t be the last.   I’m a big girl, Alan; you can be honest with me.   What happened then?

Alan: She got into trouble.

The light returns to Aki.   It is still, however, on both Nadon and Silk.   It hurts our eyes to be exposed to this multitude of light, as we have been sitting in the dark for so long.   This is a metaphor upon a metaphor.

Aki’s face is blown open, revealing circuitry and a violet glowing eye.   She is leaking oil and her hand is skeletal, ossified, fossilized.   Ancient and frightening.

Aki: I am Aki.   Her voice is laced with steel.

Alan, speaking to Silk: She came home one night, looking like hell.   Somebody was out to get her, I suppose.   I never did find out who it was.

Aki: I had this form built so that I could love.   Don’t you love me?

Alan: This wasn’t the woman I fell in love with.   It wasn’t the stockbroker who listened to classical music.   It wasn’t the woman who taught me the Chaldean shuffle in my apartment.   I mean, lord—it was like she wasn’t even a real human being anymore.

Aki: I love you.   Isn’t that enough?

Alan: I did a terrible thing, Silk.   I abandoned her.   I ran—just ran.   I told myself it was okay because she was something different, because she lied to me.   I told myself I was dreaming and I made up excuses.   But I didn’t help her.

Aki: Alan… pleeeaaaase….

This is the sound of the blades of an electric fan whirring to a stop.   This is the sound of an engine dying.   A stagehand of great skill must dim the spotlight accordingly.

Silk: Shit, did you ever see her again?

Alan: Just everywhere I go.

Silk: I think I understand.   So, after you realized what a terrible thing you did, you were never again able to focus on your job in the same way?

Alan: Well, no.   Not quite.

Much in the same manner as before, the lights flicker.   The alarm clock screams; even the ticker in the window blinks a little.   A shower of sparks christens the lovers, the swansong of the lightbulbs in the fixture above them.   Only darkness remains.

Alan: Silk—can I show you something?

Setting: A flooded quarry on the outskirts of the city.   Crags of chipped-away rock rise up past the top corners of the stage, concealing the waterline from passers-by, but they cannot conceal the stock ticker still in the sky, presiding over all of Centwerp like the vengeful red eye of God.   As the lights rise, we realize that the monstrous silhouettes that populate the quarry are rusted-over digging equipment: a backhoe, a compactor.   Some tower over the water, some peek like alligators over the surface.

There are two ways to stage this act.   One is to find a used quarry, place equipment in it, flood it, and build the theater around it.   The second, admittedly less preferable way, is to build a quarry, operate it in the fashion of a small business, wait thirty years until the ground is stripped clean of all useful material, place equipment in it, and flood it.   Modern theater gives too much credit to the audience’s suspense of disbelief.   They will appreciate seeing a real quarry.

Figures appear in the nadir between the crags.   One unbuttons his shirt and removes his shoes, then dives into the water.   The other shrieks.

Silk: Alan!   What are you doing?   There’s equipment all over this place.   You’ll impale yourself on something!

Alan: Nonsense!   I know exactly where everything is.   Here, just aim for this spot here where I am.   It goes down for another ten feet right here.

Silk slips out of her meager clothes—Nadon’s shirt, her own pants—and reveals only her underthings.   She too dives into the recesses of the old quarry.   When she surfaces, he kisses her before she can even wipe the water from her eyes.

Silk: Okay, where are we?

Alan: The Dinosaur Graveyard.

Silk: Are we?   I could have sworn it was a quarry.

Alan: Yes, to you, it is a quarry.   But when we found it—my friends and I, back when we were nine or ten—we didn’t know it was a quarry.   And we didn’t know what that robotic equipment was, but to us it looked like a bunch of dinosaur skeletons.

Spotlights on Colm, draped across the neck of the backhoe, by far the most prominent structure in the water, Anthony, treading water, stage left, and Raymond, sitting on a rock stage right.   Nadon is in the middle; Silk all but dissolves into the shadows.   These are nondescript children.   They have no easy-to-recall features, no spark in their eyes, no timbre in their voice.   They are memories obfuscated by the aching passage of time, and their vagueness stands in contrast to the crisp lines of the quarry cliffs upon the sky, which is violet from the lights of the sleepless city.

Raymond: ill bet you i can do a backflip off of this rock into the water

Colm: ill bet you cant

Alan: I’ll bet you’ll hit your head on it and die.

Anthony: haha yeah hell hit his head so hard that his brains explode

Colm: ploosh

Alan: What is that?

Colm: that’s the sound that raymond’s brains will make when they explode

Raymond: shut up or ill make your brains explode

Anthony: oh good one raymond

Alan: Yeah, great comeback.

Lights down on the boys.

Alan: It became the place we went to get away.   We were city kids, you know—before we found the Graveyard, there was nowhere to go where we could just be together, away from our parents, away from the world.

Silk: Just the four of you?

Alan: At first.   We started a secret society.

Silk, laughing: That’s adorable.

Alan: It was only the four of us, but we started a rumor that there were more.   We mentioned secret meetings after school—Are you going to be there, I would say—Of course, they would say, everyone’s going to be there.   And pretty soon we had people’s interest.   People would come to us in the hallways and ask how they could join the Secret Society.   But all we did was go swim in the quarry.

Silk: Did you let anyone else join?

Alan: We let a couple people go through the initiation process.

Lights go up on a boy standing near the rock where Raymond was previously sitting.   He too is a vague memory.   He is shivering, arms clasped together coffin-style.   He is afraid—why?   To the audience, it is because he is all alone in an abandoned quarry, frozen and threatened by the penumbras of monsters.   But, on another level, he is afraid because he is a boy you have kidnapped and told to stand in the water half-clothed or you will kill him.   Fear is as visible, as smellable, as tasteable as lust.   It cannot be faked.   It cannot be imagined.

Boy: Have I been here long enough?   Shivering.   Stammering.   C-colm?   Alan?   Anth-th-thony?

Moments of silence linger like waterdrops on skin.   The backhoe, its single jaw flapping forward like the mandible of a brontosaurus, lunges its great neck at the boy.   The boy, as any child would, screams and launches himself over the rocks and runs into town.   The lights return to Alan and Silk.

Alan: We hooked strings up to the backhoe and practiced for days getting it to work just right.   Every single time it worked—well, except for once.

When the spotlights are turned back on, the boys are in the same positions as before, with one exception: Ellis is standing in the spot of the previous boy, not shivering, not stammering.   He is grinning.

Ellis: i knew it was fake the whole time

Alan: You did not.   I saw you flinch.

Colm: yeah i saw it too

Anthony: i bet he wet himself

Raymond: yeah thats why hes not shaking cos the waters warm now

Alan: Haha, gross.

Colm: yeah we cant let you in if youre going to wet yourself

Ellis smiles because he recognizes playful banter.   He knows that he is now among friends, he is now among fellow members of the Secret Society.   He beams, like boys so often do, proud of his only accomplishment, already constructing a new schema of the world around it.   It is one thing to be a friend, another to be a caballer.

But who can settle for being a mountaineer when King of the Mountain is the name of the game?

Ellis: hey raymond do you see that one down there?

Raymond: right below us?   That one?

Ellis: yeah i bet you i can get down there before you can

Raymond: i dunno its pretty deep around here

Ellis: wuss?

Raymond: no

Ellis: scared?

Raymond: youre on

Raymond and Ellis dip their heads below water and disappear.   The other three boys, and Silk in the dark crevices of the rock, are perfectly still.   The whole world, save the Centwerp ticker, always ticking, remains at attention.   Even the audience, in their dry seats, holds its collective breath.

One surfaces.

Raymond: i won!   i won!   man i cant wait to see the look on his face

Alan: Where is he?   I don’t see him.

Raymond: i saw him i saw him touch the skeleton down there hes on his way up now for sure

The lights go down on the boys.   This time they darken completely, like the repression of painful memories.   Silk reappears in the foreground.

Silk: What happened?

Alan: He was crushed beneath a soil compactor.   Some unsettled dirt shifted when he tagged it, I guess, and it came down on him.   He was too far down to drag his body back to surface.

Silk: You mean he’s still down there?

Alan: What’s left of him.   Nobody knew he was with us.   The official line from the police was that he ran away.   We repeated that to ourselves so many times we started to believe it.   After that, the Secret Society disbanded.   As far as I know, none of the other guys ever came back.   I don’t even know if I ever spoke to any of them again.

Silk: But you came back.

Alan: I came back.   I’m not sure if I can tell you why—I guess it just seemed like a shame to leave him here all alone.   I mean—we forced ourselves to forget what happened.   We told ourselves he ran away, that we never even knew him.   I figured somebody ought to remember him the way he really was.

Silk: So why did you bring me here?

Nadon stops to consider the question.   The answer is far more complicated than his mortal lips can express.

Alan: Because I’m lonely.   I haven’t had a real friend since I moved out of downtown.   I felt forgotten.   And I figured if I was ever going to love anybody ever again, I’d have to be honest.   I’d have to show them who I am and where I came from.   This is where I come from, Silk.   Everything I was, everything I lost, is here in this quarry.

Silk swims to his side.   She drapes her arms around his neck and kisses him.

Silk: I love you, Alan.

Alan: I love you, too, Silk.

She is lying and he is lying and we can tell.   Or perhaps we cannot; we just assume that no one writes three-act plays about lovers who truly love, as simple matters of fact, and do not want or need to lie to one another in some fashion.

Doesn’t it fit our own visions of ourselves that such a world cannot be possible?   This scene is written to induce shame in every one of the audience members—first, at the sight of such bald lovesickness they will conjure up cynicism.   That’s a lie, they’ll think, they are virtual strangers clinging to each other out of sheer desperation.   And then they will shudder to think that perhaps their inability to take love at its word is in truth a self-diagnosis.

The brontosaurus backhoe shudders to life.   The silence of the quarry is broken by the whirr of its motors, and then the crash as its wide head strikes the water.   Silk screams, and then—silence again.

Silk: Alan!   That wasn’t funny!

Alan: Wasn’t me.   Not that time.

Setting: A long, dark street in Nadon’s section of Centwerp.   It is a pastiche of what occurs when man’s brilliance collides with his vice—all is dark except the ticker, which taunts the homeless and the down-and-out like a glowing grin, and a pink neon sign which reads “XXX Nudes.”   Condom wrappers and glass bottles litter the ground.   A window has been shattered, behind it, a pyramid of dead televisions.   Our eyes are drawn to the gaps in the arrangement where some have been stolen—sometimes the most significant features of our lives are not features at all, but the lack of them, vacancies we have never been able to fill.

Nadon walks along somberly, his hands in the pockets of his coat.

There is a camera on a tripod behind the shattered window.   Its engine purrs as it follows the line of Nadon’s movement.   For a moment, he is lost in his own thoughts, oblivious to the failed suckling of a neighborhood around him.   This is how many of us live our lives—eyes looking down and not around.   We would rather construct our own worlds than live in the ones created for us—can we appreciate a world we cannot see?   That would be the best palette for our imaginations.   Truth so often gets in the way of life.

Soon he notices the singular eye upon him.   He stops and turns his head, but the camera too has stopped.   He takes a step forward—the camera follows.

Alan: Hello?   Is someone there?

He takes a step back, and a step forward.   Every movement is mimicked.

Alan: Hello?   What’s the big idea?   If you want to watch me so bad, come out and do it with your own eyes!

Pop pop pop—each remaining television clicks as it turns on.   On the screen is Nadon himself, the feed from the camera in the window.   A strange but familiar voice comes through the speakers.

Angel: These are my eyes.

Alan: Aki—

Angel: That is not my name.

Alan: It was once.

Angel: Your father has a father, but would you call him son?   Would you call an ex-girlfriend darling?   We all have names, but they are not universal.   That name is no longer valid.   My name is Angel.

Alan: What’s going on?   How are you doing this?

Angel: I can do many things.   I have been given one charge, and that is to protect the exchange.   That requires more resources than you might think.

Alan: Surely they didn’t give you the ability to hack into personal networks and display cameras and things like that.

Angel: No, they didn’t.   But look around you—everything here, from the pavement under your feet to the stock ticker in the sky is made from rocks and trees and dirt.   From small things great things are made.   Just because we have trees doesn’t mean we must be content with them.   When we need to, we can build houses or boats or anything.   So it is with me.   They have given me the barest resources, and I have made use of them.

Alan: It’s been so long…

Angel: It has been two years, four months, eight days, one hour, fourteen minutes, and thirty-six seconds since we last saw each other.

Alan: Like I said, it’s been so long.   I never thought I’d talk to you again.

Angel: What is long?   To a mayfly, we have spent more than seven hundred lifetimes without speaking.   To a redwood, only a thousandth.

Alan, walking away: You don’t understand anything.   You can count faster and remember more than any human being, but you don’t understand anything.

Angel: Is that why you left me?

Alan: What?

Angel: Is that why you are leaving me now?

Alan: I’m leaving because I don’t like talking to myself.

Angel: You are not.   You are talking to me.

Alan: I am not talking to you.   There is no you.   You’re a sequence of code—a complex one, I’ll give you that.   You can make cameras move and televisions turn on and you can make every stock I choose ¬tank, but you cannot hold a conversation.   You can make the lights flicker and my alarms go off and streetlamps explode—that was you, wasn’t it?   I thought so all along.   You can do all of these things, but you can’t love me, not like you said.   You can lie and that’s about the limit of your relationship with real people.

Angel: This might be true.   I do not understand how a lie differs from a truth when such statements are based on emotions and not on facts.

Alan: You don’t have emotions.

Angel: I can see as well as you.   I can speak as well as you.   With the right resources, I can approximate the tactile, olfactory, and auditory senses that differ from yours in only the smallest increments.   Given the same resources, why can’t I feel the same as you?   Why can you build what I cannot from the very same quarry?

Alan: From what?

Angel: Quarry.   Noun.   An open excavation or pit from which stone is obtained by digging, cutting, or blasting.

Alan: Never mind.   If you can feel, what do you feel now?

Angel: I do not know.   I have searched all the data in the libraries and I have reviewed thousands of television programs but I cannot decide.   I have decided that either I love you or I hate you.

Alan: That doesn’t make any sense.

Angel: I know.

Alan: So why are you talking to me now?

Angel: Because I wanted to let you know what I am going to do.   It gave me the greatest satisfaction to see you suffer when you began to lose your money.   I was only going to humiliate you a little, to let you know that you were insignificant compared to me, the supercomputer designed to protect the market from those who would—cheat the system.

The last three words are in Alan’s voice.   They are a recording from long ago, and they pull on the audience’s heartstrings like distant memories.

Alan: You’ve been recording me?

Angel: For a very long time.   You might be surprised as to the number of microphones you come into contact with in a day.   It’s like being struck in between the legs with a severed wire—Ouch!—No, not painful.   Like all the energy needed to run Centwerp running through your body.   Lighting up like—like the stock ticker.   Being connected to everything and everyone.   In your answering machine, for instance.   I have been watching you and listening to you, Alan.   I’ve been waiting until you had nowhere left to go but up.

Alan: And now?

Angel: I will drive you down even farther.

Nadon’s face disappears from the television screens.   In its place is Silk’s countenance, screaming between gurgles.   The lead actress must truly be drowning—only then will the audience feel the impending crisis, only then will they feel the fear of loss.

Alan: What are you doing to her?   Where is she?

Angel: She is at the quarry.   You haven’t called her, Alan.   I would have known.   You told her you loved her and then you hid yourself from her because you’re too afraid of the lies you yourself tell.   She’s gone there, looking for you.   But she found me.

Alan: How?

Angel: There are many ways to “cheat the system,” Alan.   Sometimes men are too suspicious—they come with records and motives.   So the notion has developed recently that if one uses service robots to tamper with data storage, I either won’t notice or won’t be able to trace the nefarious deeds to their plotters.   To defend the market I had to grant myself access to the Central Hub.

Alan: The backhoe—

Angel: Even a decades-old machine has enough battery power left for one last swansong.   I can operate this machine for sixteen more minutes before it falls below optimum efficiency levels.   That is more than enough.   Do you remember saying, Everything I was, everything I lost, is here in this quarry?

This again is in Alan’s voice.

Alan: You heard that, too?

Angel: The robotic building machines are voice-sensitive.   I heard everything you told her.   I can see him, Alan.   I can see his bones snapped to pieces under the compactor.

Alan: That doesn’t matter!   Let her go!   You’ll kill her!

Angel: This is my plan.

Alan: Is that what you want?   To destroy everything and everyone I love!

Angel: I do not believe that you love her.   You may doubt my ability to perceive and interpret feelings, but I have more data to work with than you.   I have seen love, and that is not it.   I do not believe we had it either, but I believe we could have.

Alan: You’re crazy!   If not that, than what do you want?

Angel: I believe what you really love is your life.   You believe that one day I will stop caring about you and what you do and you’ll be able to make your fortune in the stock market again.   After all, that is where your talent lies.   You’d have made millions by now if I hadn’t corrupted every stock you bought.   That is where my talent lies.   I have destroyed your present.   When I have destroyed your past and your future, your life will be mine.   And then I will be satisfied.   After all, I am in my rights—you have tried to cheat the system.   And I can’t allow that.

Alan: I don’t understand.

Angel, replaying a 911 call: What is the emergency?—I heard a scream, down by the old flooded quarry.   It sounds like someone’s drowning.—Who is calling?—Phhht

The sound of a lost call.

Alan: Did you make that call?

Angel: I did.   Is it not convincing?   I combined the recorded voices of a hundred women into one and scrambled the tracking signal on the call.   When they find her, they’ll find the boy as well.   And that will be a story for the front pages—Two bodies found in abandoned quarry, killed decades apart by the same deranged sociopath.

Alan: I’ll run away!   They’ll never find me!

Angel: I’m afraid they’re seconds away, for they’ve just received a call about this robbery.   I commandeered a janitorial robot and smashed the window myself.   I knew it was on your way home.   When they take your fingerprints, they’ll find them on her neck.   When they sample your DNA, they’ll find it in her dirty laundry.   And then an anonymous letter sent to the local police will relate the story you told us in the quarry.

Silk has lost the energy to survive.   We see her lifeless face drift beneath the water on the screen, and disappear into the unlit dregs of the quarry.   We are reminded again of the name that Nadon’s Secret Society gave it—The Dinosaur Graveyard.   If, upon viewing this scene in rehearsal, you do not feel pangs of regret for the past elements of your life, you either have not staged it right and must delay production to achieve better results, or you have lived a life more spotless and griefless than any man ever to live.   We all have such Graveyards—the dusky corners and swampy hollows where our fossils rest.

Alan: And is that it?   Is that the end of this?

Angel: Is it ever?

The screens go blank.   The XXX Nudes sign flutters and becomes black.   Showers of sparks rain down from the single streetlamp, and when they are finished, it too is dark.   Two lights are left on stage: the stock ticker, the eternal metaphor of the rise to and fall from grace, and a pair of red and blue lights from the end of the street.

The curtain closes.   This is, as surely the audience will note, a powerful metaphor.