the rest of the play
ACT 2 - Adagio lacrimoso
The scene same as before, we see GENE, SUSAN and LIZ sitting in the central room, GENE and SUSAN on the loveseat where LIZ is sitting with JOHN sprawled out over the couch unconscious, his head on her lap. GENE, SUSAN and LIZ are all very much inebriated as there are empty wine bottles on the coffee table, but most noticeable is the smoke that fogs the central room. All are slow to react to questions or events, some on the verge of sleep, the nighttime events nearly up.
GENE: But you should be happy.
LIZ: I know.
SUSAN: It’s terrible that he doesn’t think of you more when envisioning that twisted world of his.
GENE: (from out of nowhere) You can’t break up with anyone. It’s all one. You and me. One.
LIZ: Well, we’re still together.
GENE: It’s impossible for you two not to be.
LIZ: It’s not anything like that.
GENE: You and I are the song of eternity become flesh masquerading spirit.
LIZ: He’s dying, and me, and everyone else too.
SUSAN: The point, no, it’s more like its always a good time to meet up again with what you really are.
LIZ: She having shot him and then took her own life.
SUSAN: That’s terrible.
GENE: (standing up) The essential oneness of things escapes our everyday mind. Let loose and get back to that interconnectedness (begins to flap his arms, starts swaying about the room, stepping over others) Om (which continues until his next lines)
LIZ: (as if a vast dawning has occurred) It’s the thought of divinity that haunts him.
SUSAN: Is it?
LIZ: A ghost of god, wandering up and down the fragments of world that you know.
GENE: What? (mumbles, still dancing) nobody knows… what man? Nobody owns me or the world, Susan’s empowered too. Me who? I hear someone over there is being haunted by God. Impossible.
SUSAN: It’s true, but there’s no one over here.
LIZ: Yes I am. Wait haunted or hunted?
GENE: (concerned) Who’s haunted? The trick is to think that everyone can’t be guilty if you are equal and the same as everyone else.
LIZ: Wow, he’s way gone.
SUSAN: Gene! Gene! Come on back to us. Enough ghost dancing.
GENE: It’s quite the trek. Horizontal and vertical.
LIZ: (vacantly sarcastic) Of course. Gene’s too far above the rest of us
GENE, having spun himself dizzy, collapses. Everyone else but LIZ laughs.
GENE: (still on the ground, raising his arms in the air) Come to me, my darlings. (SUSAN alone goes over to him, sit on either side of him while the others watch) You’ll hear now a story I’ve never heard before. It has never been related to me by any living creature and is, as we speak, whispered into my ear by an angel genius.
JOHN: (as a child, asking about a bedtime story) But where did the friendly ghost wander off to?
GENE: (startled by the interruption) What? Are you awake? (they all wait, no response) Well, either way, stop interrupting. Gathering angelic love fragments together into something coherent is more difficult than others would have you believe.
SUSAN: Pardon us, Gene. Please.
GENE: The lord, being great and kind and loving each you, me, all in him one, him in all one. Him who has bequeathed joys innumerable to all and the peace of authentic enlightenment to some commands this angel to relate to me, to mirror to you all, the truth, kind, sweeter than any dessert,
JOHN: (mockingly) Impossible!
GENE: shh, the truth stored in the inherent ordering of the all in one, one in all
LIZ: That’s not an angel, it’s the ghost of a musketeer! (LIZ, SUSAN laugh)
GENE: Here we go (breathes deep, pauses, screams the following) happy days all! The blessings of the one in all all in one upon you. May the simple offerings of the earth be enough to tear you away from it to contemplate us here in the beyond.
LIZ: But what good is mere contemplation? For the sake of it?
GENE (still screaming) What is the good of anything? To come apart. The end of all is dissolution into the immemorial unknown, thereby becoming part of it. The hardest thing while under earth time is not to commit to it, not to be deceived into thinking that the work of your hands is safe from the calamitous march of time. The calamity abideth forever, and the vanity of multiple vanities becomes the eternal one, still nothing new under the sun.
LIZ: (giddy) God’s a nihilist! Gene yelling God at us is a nihilist! I love it! God, everything, the great soul in the sky is dead, long live the great obliteration!
JOHN: (falling from LIZ’s lap onto the floor, drowsily) What are these museums, libraries and schools but so many mausoleums; what is the learning of the wise, the drunkenness of youth, but pasteboard masks.
LIZ: (standing up, still strangely giddy) He sounds like his old self!
SUSAN: Everyone stop yelling!
GENE: (shouting as God) That’s not what I meant at all!
LIZ: It’s what you said, jerk! Leave us alone.
SUSAN: Seriously, Gene, it is late and you shouldn’t shout so loud now.
GENE: It’s not me, it’s the everything talking through me. I’m a medium for the world. The words don’t mean what you want them too.
JOHN: When does that happen anyway?
LIZ starts to laugh, admiringly of JOHN
GENE: (getting upset) Why are you laughing? Huh? Gene the fool, Gene and his twenty palms all held out to you, well you can laugh all you want, but it’s a sin if ever there was one. (Apparently assured) If only you all would start valuing the truth of what I tell you.
JOHN: It’s not your truth, Gene, it’s not even true, it’s your art. It’s what you do, and it’s done poorly. (still from the floor, reaching for a nearby bottle) It’s this pornographic display of Gene’s glaring wound inflicted by the same world that he claims now to love and to lift upward. Gene, you hate us all, I know, I see it in you.
GENE: I do not!
LIZ: Gene! It’s ok, just say
SUSAN: (rushing to GENE’s defense) Both of you be quiet, it’s easy enough to start throwing out accusations
JOHN: He himself started talking about sin, and if there’s anything that Gene was sure about its that we’re all really one, right? And if he starts casting dispersions on us, then he casts them on himself. You should be yelling at him for being so opportunistic in his beliefs.
GENE: (beginning of delirium) Opportunistic. So spraketh the great unbelieving initiate believer. God is screaming at me to say the following
LIZ: (correcting) The ghost of a believer for god the friendly ghost.
GENE: (taking a deep breath) AllwhosaythatGeneiswrongdonotappreciatetheinvisiblemarkingslovinglyplacedontheworldbymytongueandfingers (breath) blindaretheyandarerightlysaidtobelivinginthesinofignoranceandinspreadingtheirignorancedoharmtothemanythatareone (breath)
Theonlypenanceforbringinginnocentsintountruthistocastyourselfapartintwo (breath) foritiswrittenintotheholynessofhteonethatwhateverisdonetoothersisdonetoselfwhichisalwaysandforeverother (GENE collapses to the ground)
SUSAN: (having grown increasingly nervous by this odd display) Gene! (rushes over to him)
JOHN: I’ve got to leak, but tell Gene when he arises that I’ll be sure to listen for the holy words while going. (disappointed) Ah, he’s sleeping.
SUSAN ignores JOHN, who leaves stage right while attempting to awaken the seemingly unconscious GENE
SUSAN: I don’t know if he is sleeping. Gene? His eyes are open. Gene? Come on, darling say something.
GENE: (like a hurt child) There is a design.
SUSAN: (relieved) Of course there is.
LIZ: Whatever, just leave me out of it.
SUSAN: Just leave us alone until tomorrow, we were there for you this afternoon.
LIZ: After nearly driving me over the brink with your phony love that comes out of everything always!
SUSAN: Just please, Liz, I’ve never seen Gene this far into the spirit.
LIZ: There isn’t any spirit, it’s a heart filled with vodka and wine and a brain smoked dry. It’s all a blanket to wrap your bodies in, even from within, so that you don’t have to worry about the things that, when they pass away, don’t find themselves anywhere. Your body isn’t solid enough so you turn to ideas.
SUSAN: Liz, please, lay off Gene.
GENE: (struggling to respond, obviously disconnected) But…infected…worse than ever…goodnight!...sweetsexydreams. And lo…(quickly and upset) No more words from God. Now only rotten humantalk for barren, dead humans. She who makes the world barren as…
SUSAN gasps, while LIZ only realizes what has been said after SUSAN’s gasp. JOHN does not understand the reference right away.
LIZ: (enraged) Evil bastard!
JOHN: (concerned, grabs LIZ as she leaps at GENE) Whoa! What’s going on?
GENE: Everything within being taken away, anima, corpus, intellectus, but I’m still happy. (SUSAN muffles GENE’s mouth, as LIZ had momentarily given up struggling to get at GENE)
SUSAN: Liz, please, he doesn’t know what he’s saying, he’s out of his mind.
LIZ: (struggling against JOHN’s grasp, delirious with rage) I’ll kill you, you son of a bitch! You! Evil! Heartless! Hollow! (stops struggling and collapses in tears)
JOHN: (soothing) Hey, hey, What’s going on, now?
LIZ continues to sob, but pushes JOHN away. He attempts to get back to her, but she reacts quickly and viciously pushes him away. SUSAN attempts to get GENE off of the ground, still fearing LIZ, though unsuccessfully.
GENE: (as SUSAN drags him away from LIZ) It was me! It was me, Liz! I know it was. It still is! I was there first becoming inside you with Susan and John all at once with you. Paradox.
SUSAN: Shut up, for chrissakes
LIZ: No! It was me and John, but he doesn’t want the part of me.
JOHN: What are you talking about?
LIZ: You don’t want me, you just want to be alone, but you couldn’t be alone. You need to start in on other people, you keep thinking that you really are in a desert or hidden away in the trunk of a tree with none but whatever divinity there could be, but you know there isn’t. (sobbing, shouts) But then what’s it for?
JOHN: Whoa! I do love you. I do. You know we couldn’t raise a child. That’s all we talked about before, don’t you remember? We were going to be good activists, and shed some accumulated guilt and maybe adopt when we got the money. You couldn’t imagine becoming pregnant. (LIZ sobs loudly)
GENE: (struggling against SUSAN’s best effort to speak) And left unsatisfied!(muffled by SUSAN, then) Barely lamented! Help me, mom! Avenge me! (muffled)
JOHN: (to SUSAN angrily) Can’t you get him out of here?
LIZ: Perhaps if you did love me, I could not say that I know what it has been that I have recently been learning at your obliging but thankless side, at your side, comforting you as you pray to yourself that you don’t find your own genius already buried in those books you enclose yourself with, while I myself became something only negative, something that pulled you away from scanning the heavens for some tragic loophole.
JOHN: (defensively) Has it been so bad?
LIZ: (hesitating at first) Well, you can’t just…It’s just that….Yes. It has been that bad. All of this scrambling for something more whole than me, and even the death of your unborn child did not sway you from that self-disciplined odyssey for a home that was never yours, that myth of ataraxia that Gene and Susan know much more about than you do anyway. They’re just simple, silly kids and they really do know a lot more than you do. No, you still think that you somehow count for more in the end, when the god you say you don’t believe in comes out from behind the veil and pats you on your head for being a good son.
JOHN: Fine. Is that really your image of me? Fine. (pause) I don’t pretend to value the games that rule this living arrangement. Granted. But do you really think that I was unmoved by the disappearance of the only real thing that has ever come from anyone living here? That poor child was the only meaningful thing that you and I can do, it’s the only rationalization I can give to my life now.
SUSAN: (baffled in earnest) No. It’s nothing you can turn into something for you, it isn’t a damned symbol for something else. What about all of the soul searching and late nights, then? Why go through all that?
JOHN: (pulling a piece of paper from his pocket, reads from it) I the preacher was king over Israel in Jerusalem. And I gave my heart to seek and search out by wisdom concerning all things that are done under heaven: this sore travail hath God given to the sons of man to be exercised therewith. I have seen all the works that are done under the sun; and, behold, all is vanity and vexation of spirit. That which is crooked cannot be made straight: and that which is wanting cannot be numbered.
LIZ: Stop it! Just say what you mean!
JOHN: I communed with my own heart, saying, Lo, I am come to a great estate, and have gotten more wisdom than all they before me in Jerusalem: yea, my heart had great experience of wisdom and knowledge. And I gave my heart to know wisdom, and to know madness and folly: I perceived that this is also vexation of spirit. For in much wisdom is much grief: and he that increaseth knowledge increaseth sorrow. (After he is done, he looks around to the others, who are waiting for a clue from him, he goes to the loveseat and sits, his head despondently in his hands)
LIZ: You ass! (runs at him and slaps him hard which he just takes, while the others, even GENE, look on anxiously) How could you say that about our child! That our child is only something to make you feel better, you’ve completely denied its existence from the first nervous moment I was pulling at my fingers the ring you gave me and wearing a gray sweater which became disgusting to wear as the signal that I indeed was pregnant went up and shone like a distress sign, a miserable star in your brain guiding your plans away from me and the poor creature that you and I had the trouble of making in our vanity.
JOHN: (angry, bitter, despairing) Yes! Of course I’m bad! But if it’s so bad, why cling to me like this? Why try to get some answer? Why bring up the child, which as you have well pointed out is no more, if you just want to yell at me? Do you think that bringing me down, ridding me of my deluded image of the dead, will bring us closer? (pause, LIZ sobs) Death has not brought us closer. (she sobs even louder)
GENE: (drunkenly) You’re already close! There’s nothing in between you!
SUSAN: Gene! Sh.
JOHN: If we are, then it is only in that there is nothing that can be done about us.
LIZ: It doesn’t make sense.
JOHN: You can say what you want, I’m all about you coming up with your own defense from the not terribly tragic but still sad events of this past year, and I’ve been letting you go on with your tragedy for these suckers. I can keep paying my dues in this bacchanalia of dull misery, but I’ll let you know how I get through it.
SUSAN: (Sensing something troubling) John, take it easy, please!
JOHN: No, I’m not going to say you have to stop making your life into a screwball game, even if there isn’t anything more brutal than these continuing games. Their immanence, transcendence, their necessity. The bitter art of this world is the wretched gameplay that must and only can keep going on. But, and here’s the secret, it only gets you if you expect anything from life.
GENE: Bah, bah, we’re too delicate to expect anything. We already know anyway it’s all the same
JOHN: (murderously) That’s right Gene, you do make that move so well, doesn’t he, Sue? No, the petty truth of this is that I needed someone like you when I was down because I expected you to house some kind of treasure. I, like you, expected there to be some salvation in turning away from everything except you, but now everything that brings you down, ruins your fun little parties, those matters that really, really matter, you know what? You know how I get through my day? I know that I’m not worth anything, but you still suffer from that sense of entitlement.
LIZ: (sarcastically) Wow, really? I think I deserve more than being unhappy with my boyfriend. Wow what the hell is wrong with me.
JOHN: Right.
SUSAN: You can’t be serious, John.
LIZ: Well what the hell is the point of it? Why don’t I just swallow some glass and slit my wrists?
JOHN: Well? Is there some reason for you to think I’m not being serious. Life, as you all would like it to be does not exist, but the games you all play to cover it up, this knee-jerk hippie pantheism, and your only slightly less immature nihilism, all of them are boring.
LIZ: So what the fuck are you suggesting? I’m so tired of this you jerk. I can’t wait for you to be done so I can go.
JOHN: I don’t even know anymore. I don’t think it gets wrapped up that easily. Its something that has been around since before you and I learned how to speak, before Adam said “What the hell?” Before anyone spoke with God, or before God even spoke “Let it alone.” Language doesn’t do anything. Amen. That and it is hard to both accept and endure living. There. Something you can pick up and forget about.
LIZ: You can be damn sure I’ll forget it.
JOHN: Whatever you say my little nihilist. Come here and give me a big kiss.
LIZ storms over and slaps JOHN who had already recognized and accepted it. There is a long silence, until GENE belches loudly.
LIZ: (to JOHN) You were happy to be, am, is, was, with me, and you think, may think, that this path, a globe, river or seafloor wherever you find, found, will find yourself, body and blood, soul and deviancy is always nothing will always never be for you.
GENE: Imagine you’re dead and no words no Ghostbody or ghost dancing, you don’t see anything
SUSAN: (interrupting GENE, but he does not stop) You see each other, you love each other
GENE: And you realize that you can’t see or realize anything because its because you, me, its all simplex, we are all the baffling speech of the one Word,
JOHN: Did you know that I’ve been meditating on this little game of yours, Gene?
GENE: (staunchly) Oh, it’s no game John. You need to open your heart to the world
JOHN: Oh I do John, and you know what? I can’t be content with it as you say. I can’t live in the world where everything is one, in which we are all the undisputed boring nonsense of some word speaking other words which are different but the same working in some unsubstantiated unity before the unfolding of all the myriad things that make me different from you. It bothers me Gene because I can’t take the idea of having someone like you as my brother deep down, I refuse to let our essences commingle.
GENE starts to laugh which makes LIZ start to laugh, causing SUSAN distress
JOHN: I have written a play for you all to celebrate tonight. (silence) It’s called “how a bridge has come to mean nothing to me.”
LIZ: John, just cut it out, stop laboring over whatever your point is, just go off and go to sleep, you can say whatever you want, but it won’t do anything. Words don’t do what you want them to, you recall?
JOHN: True, but everything you are to me, to all, appears as the vanity of very tiny consciousnesses, and that will not change for the rest of your lives. Eventually, in the sobering light of a winter morning as you walk towards your fucking small apartment, friends who know you, who all have their hands plunged into your head and wrangle your brains about, the beautiful people that you are obliged to obsess and worry over, the love that you envision in your life later that robs you of any interesting moments, in that cold I know you hate everything about yourself and that you wish you could shake yourself from being connected to everyone else. I know because of the metaphysical pills you give yourself, that it is a blatant fix you take means to me that all humanity has never shaken the grim image of the weeping Heraclitus from our hearts.
LIZ: Blah blah blah the kangaroo philosopher-judge penitent but always willing to dole out the punishment for him and all others, but who gave me roses and honeysuckles, who let himself become enchanted by the scent of ascending wisteria when his tongue was under the spell of Dionysus, who has says that nothing matters but who cannot always keep up the psychological commentary in any interesting way either. What has changed? In the distance between you and Gene what has changed? When do you end and Gene begins? You’re the same ghostdancers, only you want to flail in the spirit or meaning or truth while Gene wants to slowdance. I would love now to have nothing but a razor to dance with, and the justifications can fill themselves in.
SUSAN: You’re all great inveterate dogs who need someone to bark at or something to lap up. When you think about it there’s nothing so hard as moving one’s body throughout the day, knowing the weight of decisions only once freely made. Sure, no one believes Gene totally, not even Gene, but what do all of you despair about if you really know what you know? I handle all of you, but you’re especially whiney tonight, and I can only take the bitching for so much longer. (lights a cigarette, to the surprise of all) I’m going to bed, come on, Gene. Liz, why don’t you just go on into your own room and why don’t you, John, stay out here? Hm? (no answer from LIZ or JOHN)
GENE: You don’t believe…
SUSAN: Oh, honey bear. Come on to bed. (he does so, noticeably down)
(long pause)
LIZ: Why do you hate me so much?
JOHN: (annoyed) Oh, come on.
LIZ: No, really. (Sniffs) I didn’t love you enough, did I?
JOHN: What? What do you mean? Why try to check everything against those impersonal guideposts?
LIZ: (increasingly hysterical) I just feel so lost. I don’t know who I can trust anymore, I don’t know how to go about moving on from any of what you’ve said about us just now. I don’t know how to forgive you, or if I should forgive you.
JOHN: Well what the hell do you want me to do about it? It’s your life to manage.
LIZ: (sniff) I’m glad that I miscarried.
JOHN: You don’t know what you’re talking about.
LIZ: I do. I used to be alive, and it was nice, (sobs, laughs) don’t get me wrong, but it’s all this afterwards. This hating everything that you do because its either a distraction or harmful. Or both.
JOHN: Would hate to know that something else was made to participate in it.
LIZ: Leave me alone. For the rest of my life.
Curtain
Act 3 - Chromoluminarism Astride a Grave
Scene - the same as above, one cannot tell the time as the room is now a semi-harmonious mélange of colored light, JOHN and LIZ are kneeling holding hands as if they were getting married and the audience were the pastor they do not move from this position for this scene; GENE is sitting in a meditating posture in the back stage left corner of his room facing the corner; SUSAN is asleep.
GENE: (terrified) oh God! Is it the spirit world? At last! At last! Bless you all! At last! Am I dying? Am I dead? Is everyone dead? I killed everyone? That’s terrible. At last! Did I do it? Am I only sleeping? But I am vindicated by the spirit through the spirit with and am the spirit is the spirit in this notime nowthenalways. (pauses) Groovy. I didn’t kill everyone. Too groovy. (pause) I’m dead, aren’t I? But what bliss! This me, this everything which I am. Lord, is that me? Is that me over there? What sublimity. (starts to laugh for a long while, standing up, moving around in his room, at the end of his laugh the audience should feel unnerved. Why so much laughter? Has he just lost his mind? Is this a dream? Is he really dead?) God? Hello? How Sublime! Yes, what is it? Hello? What is it?
Curtain
Act 4 - the mind lays by its trouble
The scene is the same as the last, the colors have gone, in fact the stage should be, to the greatest extent, seen in black, gray and white, SUSAN is still asleep on her bed, GENE has moved to the central room where he is sitting on the loveseat looking at JOHN who is asleep on the couch; LIZ is sitting on her bed with a notepad and a pen in hand.
LIZ, shaking her head constantly, her eyes closed, is laboring to write something, meanwhile GENE has been inspecting JOHN, looking very close at him, comparing himself to JOHN every now and then. Eventually, he leans very closely towards JOHN’s exposed ear.
GENE softly and slowly whispering something inaudible to the audience, giggles to himself, begins to spin around, claps his hands meanwhile LIZ tears the sheet she is working on form the pad, throws the pen and paper across the room, GENE, done spinning, ecstatic, unconscious, filled with the spirit perhaps begins to quietly sing. The next lines are said simultaneously
GENE: I did not know if it is this stillness of monks or the wailing of an injured night of harm, my screaming line of shot from the land of the dead back here, but I seem unable to respond now to the world as it unfolds around me in this abashed broken quiet. (lies on the ground) Even now my body quickly dilates over the floor and seeps into it. What have I told him? Why lie about it? No mind satiated by anything less than us, infinite us. Recently there have been some words that have come to dwell on my eyes and dissolve into me like bitter lozenges moments later. What words? Is it true? I can still see. Is that right?
LIZ: I’m leaving. I have to leave, there’s nothing here for me. All jumbled now. My love? Love was it? Its Gene’s blanket, I can’t even focus on myself, self too - that’s one for Gene as well. God is that him outside, I wonder how he’s still going. Can barely keep my eyes open. The pasteboard weight of the everyday must now be cast off and see the bitterness really there. Is that John, though? Who is talking in me? I can’t yield to that now, just go somewhere and think later. It doesn’t matter it all comes to me from some vibrations, tired body, my fingers and tongue and ears. My corruption. I want to be away. Away is right, move body elsewhere to rejuvenate. Reyouthenate.
LIZ gets up with the note in her hand, a bag of clothes in the other, and a pillow tucked under her arm. Walks into the center room to see GENE sprawled on the floor.
GENE: (to LIZ) I too wanted to be better than this. I feel constrained by market forces, the body, the soul, and don’t forget my name. Please don’t forget about that.
LIZ ignores GENE, slaps the note hard on JOHN’s chest. Which wakes JOHN and elicits a yelp from JOHN.
LIZ: Finally a heart of the matter. Finally some Eden to return and dissolve into, some symbol you can lock us up in and swallow.
JOHN: I never could talk with you, could I?
GENE: You would have to be separate in order to communicate. Isn’t that right?
JOHN: It seems that in every interaction something very real is sacrificed in order to make room for those games.
GENE: And thus the fragmented significance of the world lays hidden, subdued by the stories we tell of it.
LIZ: (angry) Sacrifice? Subdued?
LIZ quickly leaves and slams the door. John flips open the note, reads it through once and is surprised by what he reads.
JOHN: (turning to GENE) Would you like to hear a poem? Or the part of a poem anyway? (GENE sits up, JOHN clears his throat comically overdramatic, stands up, begins to very slowly, so as not to ruin his recitation, read form the sheet)
Why should she give her bounty to the dead?
What is divinity if it can come
Only in silent shadows and in dreams?
Shall she not find in comforts of the sun,
In pungent fruit and bright, green wings, or else
In any balm or beauty of the earth,
Things to be cherished like the thought of heaven?
Divinity must live within herself:
Passions of rain, or moods in falling snow;
Grievings in loneliness, or unsubsued
Elations when the forest blooms; gusty
Emotions on the wet roads on autumn nights;
All pleasures and all pains remembering
The bough of summer and the winter branch.
These are the measures destined for her soul.
GENE: Well…What the hell? Right? Life goes on in and out, there it is.
JOHN: (disdainfully) Shut up.
Curtain.