This was only a few years back, snow fell and fell and blinding winds heaped huge drifts around my old house and at night it seemed some furious kingdom of darkness had descended on us, our sedate world overtaken and altered permanently.

The problem is that our old-timer team has a hockey game, a game miles away in a country arena.  Do we go out on a night like this?  The few vehicles visible are spaced out in hesitant convoys, roads looking terrible and blurry and the ditch beckons.

Coach phones with the word, the game is on and he will pick me up at the usual time.  We may be the only old timer team with a coach.

We drive back-roads and loopy hills and hollows where sawmills once buzzed beside rivers and now the mills are gone.  Coach is a good driver and we make it to the old sheet-metal arena that smells of chicken fries and our goalie’s Tiger Balm and, a bonus, we win the game and, another bonus, Darcy invites us afterward to his garage, to his iron stove and beer and deer sausage sizzling.  He played pro for Montreal and Ottawa and has some good stories.  He played pro, but we are bringing him down to our level.  We stay up late and devour all of his victuals as the storm rages.

Coach drops me at the end of my driveway; he treats me far better than I deserve.  All night the blizzard argues outside my house, old wooden windows leaking air and thumping in their frames, but I pile on blankets in my cold room and during the night I dream a warm grocery cashier puts her lips to mine.

In the morning the snow and wind stop.  I go to the back door and pull it to me, but wind and snow have formed a second door, an exact imprint of my backdoor, every detail pressed in the snow, the rectangular panels, the screen, the handle, an exact white copy of my door filling the frame.

It seems a shame to alter such a creation, but I leap through this new door, destroy this doppelganger door.  Outside the sky is blue, my yard calm and sunny, the wind’s fury gone, our world back, restored to order.

I shovel around my doors.  Out front the sidewalk snow-ploughs have pushed through and cut high perfect walls in the drifts, beautiful white hallways that travel miles across the city like some complicated art installation, like trenches from the Great War, but the war is over and it is bright and cheery and clean, no rats, no mud, no snipers in this stunning new world.

Cars pass by, but the snow is heaped so high I can’t see them and all sounds are muffled.  White walls, but open ceilings, like passageways in an albino Pompeii, roofless and bright, infinite and surreal, and I can follow these weird perfect hallways all the way across town saying good morning, how are you.

The new walls glow in the sun and I want to hang a thrift store painting where the perfect white hallway passes my house; I expect to see light switches and doors and offices with photocopy machines humming inside the huge snow-banks, offices printing out more white, the light everywhere so bright it’s a form of distilled noise.

Italy, Cuba, Mexico, California.  They all boast admirable climates and painterly light, they have limos and palaces and glitzy pop stars with thread count concerns, but they don’t have this, this strange and beautiful winter world.  They have no idea what I’m talking about.

—Mark Anthony Jarman

Mark Anthony Jarman is a short story writer without peer, heir to a skein of pyrotechnic rhetoric that comes from Joyce and Faulkner and fuels the writing, today, of people like Cormac McCarthy and the late Barry Hannah. He edits fiction for a venerable Canadian magazine called The Fiddlehead which, in the 1970s, published some of my first short stories (and another story is coming out in the summer, 2011, issue). Mark has written a book of poetry, Killing the Swan, a hockey novel, Salvage King Ya!, four story collections, Dancing Nightly in the Tavern, New Orleans is Sinking, 19 Knives, and My White Planet, and nonfiction book about Ireland called Ireland’s Eye. He teaches at the University of New Brunswick and lives in a very large house fronting the Saint John River. His story “The December Astronauts (or Moonbase Horse Code)” appears in Numéro Cinq’s Best of Vol. 1. See also his interview with NC Contributor Mary Stein here. “Hallway Snowstorn” was originally published in a special Christmas fiction issue of the Salon section of the Saint John Telegraph-Journal.

The title first drew me to Alicia Duffy’s “The Most Beautiful Man in the World.” It reminded me of the title to one of Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s short stories, “The Handsomest Drowned Man in the World.” Obviously I have a predilection for superlatives, but that’s where the similarities in the stories end.

What draws me back to this short film time and again is its simplicity. Duffy’s short film is breath-catchingly unnerving. The film follows a young girl through one of those disturbingly familiar, oppressively boring, days of summer. The TV’s desperate pleas for attention, the mother’s phone chatter in the background, even the dog’s endless panting, all draw attention to this young girl’s isolation and loneliness. But she remains unattended and ignored.

It’s a simple film, almost entirely visually told, with only one overt line of dialogue: “That’s my dog.” Nothing significant happens. No confrontations, no abuse. But it ripples and thrums with threat. And, as wrong as it is, it contains the possibility that the tedium and boredom of this day might end, that someone might pay attention to her.

It’s a small plot, the film turning full circle back to the living room floor, the dog, the blare of the inattentive television. It might seem like nothing has changed, except for one thing: it’s a tiny shot, the flash back to the field with the man standing shirtless in the tall grass, but it’s all we need to know that however inappropriate, the attention she received in the field has cut through the boredom, the malaise of the endless summer day.

Duffy went on to make a feature film in 2010, All Good Children:

“After the death of their mother, Irish youngsters Dara and Eoin are moved to France to stay with their aunt. There, the boys befriend a local English family and the impressionable Dara falls under the spell of their young daughter Bella. But when she begins to pull away, Dara’s feelings for her start to get out of hand.” –imdb

Click here to view the embedded video.

– R. W. Gray

Adam Regn Arvidson has completed his epic (nearly a year) exploration of nature writing in America, including essays on Edward Abbey, Wendell Berry, Rachel Carson, Edward Hoagland, Joseph Wood Krutch and Loren Eiseley plus a special craft essay/digression on imagery and invective (in the work of Edward Hoagland). Adam also explores the profound political and cultural effect this particular kind of nonfiction prose has had—these nature writers have altered the way with think about the land we live in (we are talking about the invention of Green). In the last year, Adam also had a new son and completed a nonfiction book on landscaping and the environment that will be published by W. W. Norton this fall. —dg

Contents

Introduction

Loren Eiseley’s Two Cultures

Edward Abbey’s Access to Wildness

The Enigmatic Edward Hoagland

Criticism Through Imagery

The Power of Rachel Carson

Joseph Wood Krutch’s Natural Personality

The Place of Wendell Berry

Adam Regn Arvidson is a landscape architect and writer in Minneapolis. He has published numerous articles on design, planning, and landscape in a variety of magazines, including Landscape Architecture, Minnesota Conservation Volunteer, Planning, and Metropolis. He is founder of Treeline, a design/writing consultancy that assists public and private clients in telling the story of their land through landscape architecture and writing deeply rooted in place. In 2009 Adam won the Bradford Williams Medal, the nation’s highest award for landscape architectural writing, and he has a book forthcoming on environmental practices in the nursery and landscaping industry (W.W. Norton, 2012). This fall, Adam will be inducted as a Fellow of the American Society of Landscape Architects. He is currently pursuing a Master of Fine Arts in Creative Nonfiction at the Vermont College of Fine Arts.

Adeena Karasick is a one-woman semantic explosion. She writes in the spirit of verbal play and experiment and RIOT out of Gertrude Stein and bpNichol, among others (spoken word, rap, Black Mountain). And how can you NOT like a poem that admits its own “unraveling” and bills itself as an “asterisk taker” and contains lines like “oh, just lick its/ ideological infrastructure” and dances between contemporary cultural filigree and theoretical/philosophical references (“ontic gap”)? See below, a video of Adeena reading from the beginning of the poem. The images scattered through the poem were made in collaboration with Blaine Speigel. The whole poem, called “This Poem,” will be published as a book this fall by the great and storied Vancouver publisher Talonbooks.

Adeena Karasick  is an internationally acclaimed and award winning poet, media-artist and author of seven books of poetry and poetic theory: Amuse Bouche: Tasty Treats for the Mouth (Talonbooks 2009), The House That Hijack Built (Talonbooks, 2004), The Arugula Fugues (Zasterle Press, 2001), Dyssemia Sleaze (Talonbooks, Spring 2000), Genrecide (Talonbooks, 1996), Mêmewars (Talonbooks, 1994), and The Empress Has No Closure (Talonbooks, 1992), as well as 4 videopoems regularly showcased at International Film Festivals. All her work is marked with an urban, Jewish, feminist aesthetic that continually challenges linguistic habits and normative modes of meaning production. Engaged with the art of combination and turbulence of thought, it is a testament to the creative and regenerative power of language and its infinite possibilities for pushing meaning to the limits of its semantic boundaries.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Her writing has been described as “electricity in language” (Nicole Brossard), “plural, cascading, exuberant in its cross-fertilization of punning and knowing, theatre and theory” (Charles Bernstein) “a tour de force of linguistic doublespeak” (Globe and Mail) and “opens up the possibilities of reading” (Vancouver Courier).  She is Professor of Global Literature at St. John’s University in New York.

Composed in the style of Facebook updates or extended tweets, This Poem is an ironic investigation of contemporary culture and the technomediatic saturated world we’re enmeshed in. Mashing up the lexicons of Gertrude Stein, Loius Zukofsky, Shakespeare, Walt Whitman, the contemporary financial meltdown, semiotic theory, Lady Gaga, Jacques Derrida and Flickr streams, “This Poem” a self-reflexive romp through the shards, fragments of post-consumerist culture. Both celebrating and poking fun at contradictory trends, threads, webbed networks of information and desire, and the language of the ‘ordinary”, it opens itself with rawness and immediacy to the otherness of daily carnage.

A deeply satiric archive of fragments, updates, analysis, aggregates, treatise, advice, precepts, echoes, questions, erupting in a voluminous luminous text of concomitance. divergence, dis/integration and desire.

A serial poem that textually proceeds in the tradition of such poets as George Oppen, bpNichol,  Robert Duncan, Jack Spicer committed to the shape of a life lived with the lyric irony of textuality; taking on the search for definition punctuated with strong incursions of eros, pleasure, terror and social networking. —AK

dg
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This Poem

By Adeena Karasick

Part II

And in the rapturous apertures
of perspicacity (purse capacity),

of its bootstrap boobietrap of ear-tickling
hyper-inflated speculative frenzy

This Poem just wants a “happy ending”

like a ring-a-ding swinger
foursquare tech ticker, fecund licker

elbowing its way through a persnickety
kwik-pic sticky dictic,

and wants to lick you immeasurably,
your vesicles and crevasses, lick the lips of your
pixilated proxy, paroxysms of purring tragedy

wants you to smack it
up against its inky-vexed lexis,
mixological excess, slide down
its rumpy pumpy amped-up optates,
jacked clad cock of the walk ecto-flecked vectors

.

and says, stroke me

like a homiletic honeydoll
a homonymic ho-ey hoo hah vocable soaked
in technosexual credit-crunch-studded
sarcasm,
suspension-drenched interstices, pursed indeces
smouldering with
ouise locutia

This poem has been overexposed

And wants to rip the skin
off your tongue, la langue,
and leave you gasping in the unstable scourging
like a bedecked blanquette of
phoneme-philia flirty fragments

Oh yes! it IS an agent provocateur
and has space to rent.

.

.
§
.

.

It is massaging its ellipsis, its encrypted
scripture va va voom titty boom
thrusting by the seat of its
panting scansion
screaming like a lexilicious kettlebell

oh, just lick its
ideological infrastructure,
its foreign born moorings
magnetic memetics

‘cause, this poem is going down
pointillistic, pantiless and pedigreed
like a naughty vixen
of clipped consonants, imperious avowals
all plumpy pumped ’n predatory
scrubbed raw

.

.
§
.
.

in the exile of
its kiss-and-tell toxic quixotics
exotic kick in the sassy ass-
onance of its
neo-psychedelic, post-apocalyptic
blogzilla buzz of its backlash
.

………………….(flashy hashtag)

.

And says, no, no no, it aint no
provocative repository
in the knotted residue of
warped torpor;
no dispossessed edifice of
smuggled irruption

but is all hot ‘n lingual

.

.

like a  pin-up panoply
of prissy pomp palimpsests

and feels that it is perpetually misunderstood

.

like a vajayjay cupcake
kumquat popsicle
bellhop hopstop tinkywinky honeybun homegirl

.

.
§
.
.

and is so re-evaluating its options

trying to re-form —

‘cause for all its saucy posturing,

all it really wants
is to be violently invaded
with resurgent divergence
illicit twists, trysts, a(r)ching dialogism

wants you to get behind it

break into
its low-income-sensitive-sliding-scale-rent-controlled
phantasms, fantasies, phonemes

gangsta flanked
fidgets, widgets, closeted contexts
seeping caesurae

oh this poem is unraveling

like a scrolling corollary.

It is sculpting the subjunctive
scratching its i’s out
outsourcing its tsurris

“re-organized”
out of its position
.
.

But is still larger than life

.

.
§
.
.

But, like a grafted hymnody
bar-brawlin’ brillo-fill ghetto-glam flimflam,
comically morbid liberal mystic lurking like a suspicious package

it is sticky with contingency
like a dripping canopus
pulsing pussy pussile puff,

a petite pouty plotting potty myth
panoptically partying like a
nymph-fête flarffy parfait

or heady confetti

is just SO full of itself —

and its promises, presumptions,
sumptuous crumping, apertures, impratures, rapturous
samples,

in the shifting opacity
of foistered festers,
twisted fisters smoldering
like a taunting hot mot tramp stamp

who will not leave its language unattended.

And, in the pulsing labyrinth of smuggled irruption
it is screaming silently

and wants you

.

.

to open it
toward you

like a paeonopoesis of mimesis
or a titty-tassled teapartying transman
all ekphrastically elastic

‘cause oh Good Gravy!

this poem is such an asterisk taker

polychromatically chronicling
like a microtwtiched ’pata-cake
ache ‘n shake yeaseaer

§

a jitterbug bunny-huggin’ buxom baby-doll saucepot
scattin’ its raspy ripstop strappy sling back snack wrapped
semes of its own
creamy dyssemia

its ironized twee-ittered witty timbitten titty fit
flustered rebooted fembot flambé

its flirty flexicon
of fixity mixes, in a nexus of synnexes,
annexes, diexis
of lexically-sugared circuits

Oh this poem is taking the line’s share

Its wellsprings are spreading
like floodgates
like an ontic gap

and with all its fermished emissions,

it is bursting its bank
plumping its slips

ellipsing its syrupy stirrup slurpee surplus
in the ipseity of the unsayable

all bespoke ‘n spoken for

—Adeena Karasick

In the fall of 1993, I went to Daniel Boone National Forest in Kentucky on a college class trip. We barely knew each other: young design students immersing ourselves in the nuance of the landscape for a week or so. This was the first of what would be four years of design studios together; the first overnights of a fall tradition that continues to this day. Yes, we still reconvene, now with families in tow, every year in the fall, to reminisce about college and time since, to talk about our careers, some of which have remained firmly anchored in design, some of which have transformed over the years.

The trip included a single overnight expedition (that’s perhaps too grand a term for it) down into one of the deep river-cut valleys that lace that part of Kentucky. We set off in the morning mist on a flat trail, which soon began to descend beneath the plateau. It got cooler as we dropped into the valley and soon we could hear the limpid trickle of the fall-docile creek.

You know what this essay is about, since you’ve presumably read the title, and if you know anything about Wendell Berry, you know where this is going. These wooded cuts are his place.

Finally from the crease of the ravine I am following there begins to come the trickling and splashing of water.  There is a great restfulness in the sounds these small streams make; they are going down as fast as they can, but their sounds seem leisurely and idle, as if produced like gemstones with the greatest patience and care.

That’s from “Entrance to the Woods,” a 1971 essay that chronicles a weekend hike. Berry published his first book of nonfiction two years earlier (The Long-Legged House) and has had perhaps the most prolific and consistent career of any of the writers profiled in this series. Some book of Wendell Berry nonfiction has come out almost every two years over the past 40. In recognition of that, he was awarded the National Humanities Medal in 2011.

His topics: agriculture, war, coal mining, nuclear power. His stance (simplified here, of course): love the land, be of the land, love each other. Berry, to me, feels like a conglomeration of his peers. He has Carson’s mastery of fact and research, Krutch’s fascination with the evocative moments nature provides, Hoagland’s gentle and non-judgemental observations, and, yes, wrapped in the same bundle, Abbey’s radical streak. Just a year ago, in February, 2011, at age 76, Berry participated in a sit-in to protest mountaintop removal coal mining in his native Kentucky.

Native Kentucky. Native to Kentucky. Above all else, Berry writes of becoming native to a place, of knowing it well, so well that doing harm to that place would be like doing harm to a loved one.

A man might own a whole country and be a stranger in it.  If I belonged in this place it was because I belonged to it. And I began to understand that so long as I did not know the place fully, or even adequately, I belonged to it only partially. That summer I began to see, however dimly, that one of my ambitions, perhaps my governing ambition, was to belong fully to this place, to belong as the thrushes and the herons and the muskrats belonged, to be altogether at home here….

The title essay in The Long-Legged House, from which that excerpt comes, is an introduction of Berry himself, in the context of a small cabin (“the camp”) close by a Kentucky river. He goes on:

But now I have come to see that [belonging] proposes an enormous labor. It is a spiritual ambition, like goodness. The wild creatures belong to the place by nature, but as a man I can belong to it only by understanding and by virtue.

When I walked down into that Kentucky ravine so many years ago with my friends, I was not of that place. I was from the Chicago suburbs—a vast non-place—and attending college in east central Indiana. My family were Scandinavians and Irish who settled in the farm country of northern and central Illinois. After graduating college, I worked in western Pennsylvania (coal country), returned to Chicago, then resettled in Minnesota, where I have now lived for more than a dozen years. I do not have the deep (“long-legged”) tenure on the land Berry has accomplished.

To write, as I do now, of being “of a place” is hardly new ground. Many authors and critics have considered the topic, and many have made it the central tenet of their writing (Scott Russell Sanders and Terry Tempest Williams jump to mind, but there are others). My modest addition to the dialog is this: in that Kentucky ravine, I was learning to learn about place—to examine landscape closely, to discern its ways, to capture its essence, in order that I might create new (or restore former) landscapes.

Landscape architecture is often misunderstood, so let me describe it simply. Architects design buildings; landscape architects design everything else: cities, parks, preserves, roads, trails, and (now that I think about it) buildings—where they sit on the land, how they interact with the land, how people move from outdoors to indoors and back again.

“The Long-Legged House” (one of my all-time favorite essays) describes a careful process of landscape architecture, affected by and affecting each of Berry’s life moments up to the writing of the piece. Family history is there, etched on the land, and childhood exploration, and adolescent escapes, and work and marriage and worldly travel and coming home again. To suggest this is a design process, executed over a hundred years (or thousands, since the river and ravine themselves have been transforming over geological time), isn’t a stretch for me, nor, apparently, for Berry. The early sections of the essay deal with a relative’s construction of “the camp”:

As soon as he marked out the dimensions of his house on the ground the place would have begun to look different to him, would have begun to have an intimacy for him that it could never have had before. Earlier, any place he stood was more or less equal to any other place he stood; he would move on to another place. But once those boundaries were marked on the ground, there would have begun to be a permanent allegiance. Here was the tree that would stand by the door. This limb would reach across the porch.  Looking out here would give a fine view of the water. Here was where the steppingstones must come down the slope.

Let me fast forward from that ravine in Kentucky. I’ll skip the design studios, the detailed site analysis graphics, my undergraduate thesis, my work in Pennsylvania remediating the environmental damage of acid coal mine drainage, and my relocation to the foreign “place” of Minnesota. Let me fast forward to early 2005, when I was asked to do something horrible.

At the time, I was working for a landscape architecture firm that designed suburban housing subdivisions. It was in the years of the housing boom and we had more work than we could handle. Things were moving very fast and the subdivision layout work, normally the bailiwick of a pair of designers in the office, began to spill over into my department. One day my boss came to me, dropped a roll of drawings on my desk and told me about a new 200-or-so-acre development. I knew my task: draw the roads, lots, and parks so the land could be transformed into a “neighborhood.” He told me there was no budget for a site visit—that I would design this land without ever setting eyes or foot upon it.

I hadn’t read much Wendell Berry at the time, but had I, these words (also from “The Long-Legged House”) might come to mind:

…perhaps the most important lesson that nature had to teach me: that I could not learn about her in a hurry. The most important learning, that of experience, can be neither summoned nor sought out…. The thing is to be attentively present. To sit and wait is as important as to move. Patience is as valuable as industry. What is to be known is always there. When it reveals itself to you, or when you come upon it, it is by chance. The only condition is your being there and being watchful.

That sentiment lies very close to my heart, and I realize now it is what motivated me to, over the following six months, plot an escape from that firm. At the time, I was pissed off. Memories of learning the landscapes of Kentucky ravines and southwestern deserts and Midwestern ag-lands flooded in. No wonder, I thought, all the suburbs look the same: they are not drawn on the land, but in offices.

These days, now on my own, I spend time on every site, usually a 24-hour period. Yes, I have camped out on residential lots, mountain-biked across a thousand acres of future vacation property, and snowshoed with an ecologist over Mississippi River valley parkland. Not a bad job, you say? I agree, and why not? Landscape architecture, should, at the very least, be based on intimate knowledge of the land.

Berry would say, I suspect, that 24 hours, a few hikes, and an overnight stay does not constitute intimate knowledge. And I agree, but it’s usually the best I can do, for now. I have land, though. A city lot in Minneapolis where we have, over the years, transformed the hard-packed urban soil into a fruitful garden. Two acres of northwoods within a neighborhood I designed, which we have not touched, yet, but will, once we understand how to. Illinois farmland (and here I sneak into Berry’s agrarian passions), always conventionally cropped, but soon farmer-less, a cousin retiring. Over time, I am beginning to belong, guided always by Wendell Berry’s simple statement:

The world is full of places. Why is it that I am here?

Return to the Nature Writing in America Table of Contents page.

— Adam Regn Arvidson

————————————————————————–

Adam Regn Arvidson is a landscape architect and writer in Minneapolis. He has published numerous articles on design, planning, and landscape in a variety of magazines, including Landscape Architecture, Minnesota Conservation Volunteer, Planning, and Metropolis. He is founder of Treeline, a design/writing consultancy that assists public and private clients in telling the story of their land through landscape architecture and writing deeply rooted in place. In 2009 Adam won the Bradford Williams Medal, the nation’s highest award for landscape architectural writing, and he has a book forthcoming on environmental practices in the nursery and landscaping industry (W.W. Norton, 2012). This fall, Adam will be inducted as a Fellow of the American Society of Landscape Architects. He is currently pursuing a Master of Fine Arts in Creative Nonfiction at the Vermont College of Fine Arts. This essay is the last in a series of explorations of nature writing. The whole “book” can be viewed here: Nature Writing in American.

Okay—I think if you cross Aristophanes with Samuel Beckett or Eugene Ionesco, you might end up with something like Lynn Coady’s irreverent fringe play Mark. Or, if you cross tag-team wrestling with the Battle of the Sexes—the play actually has a club called the “slap-stick” and a very large phallus. Mark is a delight and a lovely addition to Numéro Cinq‘s growing collection of plays and screenplays, a section of the magazine that is unique as far as I can tell.

Lynn Coady‘s is an amazing novelist, also deservedly popular. Her fiction has been garnering acclaim since her first novel, Strange Heaven, was published and was nominated for the Governor-General’s Award for Fiction when she was 28. Strange Heaven was followed up by a best-selling short story collection, Play the Monster Blind (2000) as well as the award-winning novels Saints of Big Harbour (2002) and Mean Boy 2006). Lynn Coady grew up on Cape Breton Island in Nova Scotia and now lives in Edmonton. Her most recent novel is The Antagonist, which was short-listed for this year’s Giller Prize. Mark will be published with another of Lynn’s one-act plays called Skydiving by Scirocco Drama later this year. Mark ran at the Edmonton International Fringe Theatre Festival in the summer of 2009 in a production directed by Rob Appleford. The photographs herein are rehearsal photos from that production.

dg

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Mark

By Lynn Coady

.

Characters:

Two WOMEN, CANDACE and BELINDA

Two MEN, ALISTAIR AND DEXTER

One Male ATTENDANT

One JUDGE, hooded

A DRUMMER

Actors: Bradley Bishop & Tom Blazejewicz

.
PREAMBLE:

Stage:

Two large plinth-boxes, DSL and DSR, two stools DSR, one stool UCS with two GONGS on either side, with a single MALLET and a SLAP-STICK on either side of the stool.

The DRUMMER enters with DRUM: louche, Upper East Side, too cool to be in this play. He ambles to a DSR stools and sets up

WOMEN’S FANFARE.

Enter Two WOMEN from SR, one bearing BASKET: they are dressed in canvas shifts tied at the waist with a rope. High Energy! Rite-of-Springy pirouettes! Rose petals! Prom dance excitement! They settle at the DSL plinth-box.

A BEAT. Then the MEN’S FANFARE.

Enter Two MEN, from SL, one bearing BASKET: they are dressed in canvas jockstraps tied to a rope around their waists, with canvas sweatbands around their heads. Macho strut! WWF Smackdown! Calisthenics! Dynamic Tension Stretches! High Fives! They set up at the DSR plinth-box.

A BEAT. Then the JUDGE’S FANFARE.

Enter JUDGE, hobbling on the supporting arm of the ATTENDANT. The JUDGE is slowly led to the UCS stool. The ATTENDANT puts the MALLET in the JUDGE’S palsied hand and picks up the SLAP-STICK.  The ATTENDANT wears a silver WHISTLE around his neck.

The JUDGE bangs the DSL GONG (henceforth known as the WOMEN’S GONG) ONCE.

The WOMEN pull out a GARLAND from their BASKET which is placed on the head of BELINDA.

Much girlish excitement.

The JUDGE bangs the DSR GONG (henceforth known as the MEN’S GONG) ONCE.

The MEN pull out a large PHALLUS with a hook on the base from their BASKET.  DEXTER  hooks the PHALLUS on his belt. Much macho celebration and admiration of length/width/tumescence.

The ATTENDANT cuts the frivolity short with a loud THWACK of the SLAP-STICK on his open palm.

Both teams get ready to rumble. BATTLE FARFARE from the DRUMMER..

Another THWACK! FANFARE stops.

BELINDA and DEXTER approach each other CS and begin to circle each other menacingly in a clockwise direction, looking for an opening.

Actors: Kathy Ingram & Tom Blazejewicz

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SCENE 1: WHAT IS WHAT?
.

The opponents circle, ready to grapple. Wrestler stances, beady stare-downs.

BELINDA: Oh.

DEXTER: Hm?

BELINDA: What’s that?

DEXTER stops his circling and drops his wrestler’s stance.

DEXTER: What?

CONSTERNATION from ALISTAIR and CELEBRATON from CANDACE on the sidelines.

BELINDA: I said, “What’s that?”

DEXTER: I know, I’m asking you, what? What’s what?

BELINDA: (gestures vaguely at him) That.

DEXTER: (looks down at himself) What?

BELINDA: That. That. That thing.

DEXTER: (glances vaguely, then away from himself) Oh, yeah. I don’t know.

BELINDA: No but, look at it.

DEXTER: Yeah, I know, I noticed it this morning.

BELINDA: What did you do to yourself?

DEXTER: I don’t know, I guess I bumped into something.

BELINDA: But it’s huge!

DEXTER: It’s not huge.

BELINDA: It’s got this weird shape to it.

DEXTER: I’m pretty sure I got it at work.

BELINDA: Yeah but doing what? I mean it’s huge!

DEXTER: It’s not that huge.

BELINDA: Yeah. (beat) No, it’s huge.

DEXTER: (sighs pointedly)

BELINDA: Does it hurt?

DEXTER: No, I can’t even feel it.

BELINDA: How can you not feel it?

DEXTER: I told you, I don’t even remember getting it.

BELINDA: But like—how is that possible?

DEXTER grunts an impatient “I don’t know” kind of grunt.

BELINDA: And, it’s all. . .it looks like. . .

DEXTER: Oh my god! I have a mark, so what?

The ATTENDANT sounds a WARNING WHISTLE.

BELINDA: I’m just asking what happened.

DEXTER: Jesus, I’m a guy, you know? Guys get marked up sometimes, doing whatever, christ.

The JUDGE bangs the MEN’S GONG loudly. Appropriate reactions from WOMEN A/B and MEN A/B.

BELINDA transfers GARLAND to CANDACE, who changes places with her. DEXTER gives PHALLUS to ALISTAIR, who changes places with him.

Actors: Tanner d’Esterre & Kathy Ingram

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SCENE 2: THE CYCLE OF LIFE
.

CANDACE and ALISTAIR circle each other in a counter-clockwise direction, looking for an opening.

CANDACE: (turning away) Sorry.

ALISTAIR is thrown off-guard.

ALISTAIR: That’s okay, just—. (beat) Listen, you never told me how your week went.

CANDACE: Oh, it was fine.

ALISTAIR: What about that manager you were telling me about, the one you said spits all over your computer screen?

CANDACE: Sweetie, it’s Sunday, I don’t want to think about work.

ALISTAIR: No, come on, I wanna–

CANDACE: It’s fine.

ALISTAIR stares at CANDACE.

CANDACE: What?

ALISTAIR: (pouting, sulky) “It’s fine.”

CANDACE: Well what do you want?

ALISTAIR: I want to talk.

CANDACE: That’s what I was trying to do, a second ago. And then I got shut down.

 The JUDGE bangs the WOMEN’S GONG. Appropriate reactions.

ALISTAIR: I didn’t shut you down, I just wanted to change the subject.

CANDACE: I noticed that.

ALISTAIR: Because it’s weird. It’s pointless. There’s nothing to talk about. I’ve got this big ugly mark, who cares? It’ll fade in a week or so, okay?

CANDACE: It is. It is weird.

ALISTAIR: Okay. Why is it weird?

CANDACE: Because it’s huge, and you say you don’t know where you got it, and I just don’t see how that’s possible.

ALISTAIR: Haven’t you ever bumped yourself by accident?

CANDACE: Yeah.

ALISTAIR: And?

CANDACE: It left a bruise.

ALISTAIR: Uh-huh! The wonders of the human body! You bump, you bruise, and then you heal. It’s the cycle of life.

THWACK!: The ATTENDANT strikes ALISTAIR across the back with the SLAP-STICK. ALISTAIR jerks with pain. As he walks it off, CANDACE pursues him.

CANDACE: Okay, one, I don’t like it when you talk to me like that, okay? It’s condescending. And two, yes, you bump, you bruise. But I’ve never had a mark like that that I didn’t remember getting. And you know what else? I’ve never just, like, bumped myself and ended up with something that looked the way that thing does. So I’d appreciate it if you’d quit talking to me like I’m the one who’s being irrational.

ALISTAIR finally turns and confronts CANDACE.

ALISTAIR: I just. . .I don’t know, I guess I bumped it at work.

The ATTENDANT blows the WHISTLE as a warning. ALISTAIR starts.

CANDACE: How? How could you have gotten it at work? It’s not like you’re a longshoreman or something, you fit people with eyeglasses. What could you possibly have been doing to give yourself a mark like that?

ALISTAIR: I don’t know! (beat.) Oh. I know. You know what, I got it on the beach the other day.

CANDACE: Doing what?

ALISTAIR: Oh—christ, baby, I don’t know! We were running around playing football, rough-housing. . .it could have been anything.

CANDACE: I don’t remember you bumping yourself.

ALISTAIR: Yeah but when I was playing with the guys, you weren’t there. I probably did it when I was fooling around with the guys. Guys get themselves scuffed up all the time. . .

Another THWACK across the back for ALISTAIR. From the sidelines, DEXTER waves desperately to ALISTAIR to be tagged into the game. ALISTAIR breathes through the pain but refuses the tag. Frustration from DEXTER.

CANDACE bears down on the suffering ALISTAIR.

CANDACE: I think I’d remember if you hurt yourself.

ALISTAIR: I didn’t hurt myself. Isn’t this the whole point? If I don’t know how I got it, it couldn’t have hurt much.

CANDACE: That’s what doesn’t make any sense.

ALISTAIR: It does make sense. You’re fooling around with the guys, getting aggressive, you trip, bash into a tree or whatever, but you’re just so into what you’re doing you don’t notice, your adrenalin’s pumping, you just get up and keep playing. Don’t you remember that from when you were a kid, coming home all covered with scrapes and bruises, and you could never tell your mom where they came from?

The JUDGE bangs the MEN’S GONG. Incredulity from the WOMEN. ALISTAIR ripples with self-satisfaction as DEXTER makes it clear that he expects his turn.  But ALISTAIR is too pleased with himself to give the PHALLUS over just yet and waves off DEXTER.

CANDACE: Yes.

ALISTAIR: Okay!

Clearly, from ALISTAIR’s demeanor, there is no more to be said.

CANDACE: But.

AN ANNOYED BEAT.

CANDACE: Not. That. Kind of. Mark.

ALISTAIR: Okay, this is fucking idiocy!

A THWACK across the back for ALISTAIR. He YELPS in surprise, then glares outrage at the ATTENDANT. The wind taken from his sails ALISTAIR finally hands off the PHALLUS to DEXTER. DEXTER takes it with an air of reluctance after what he’s just witnessed. Steps into play with a wary eye on the ATTENDANT.

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SCENE 3: HEADS STILL ON OUR SHOULDERS
.

CANDACE: Excuse me?

DEXTER has an inspiration. Clears his throat.

DEXTER: This is idiocy and I’ll tell you why. I have a mark. People get marked up. It’s a busy, dangerous world out there—remember the time we were walking along the sidewalk and you slipped off the curb just as a bus was pulling up, and I had to yank you back up before it hit you?

CANDACE: You pushed me off the curb.

DEXTER: I didn’t push you off the curb!

CANDACE: You did. You crowded me off the sidewalk, so I fell off the curb.

DEXTER: That’s not the same as pushing you. Anyway, that’s not my point. My point is, there are dangers around every corner. Half the time we’re lucky we make it home with our heads still on our shoulders. The mark isn’t the issue here. What I want to know is why you’re fixating on this.

CANDACE: I’m not fixating.

DEXTER: You are fixating. What would you call it? We’ve been standing here for the past ten minutes arguing about a stupid mark on my body that I could’ve gotten anywhere, doing any number of things. I’m telling you I don’t remember how it happened, and for some strange reason, you’re not letting it go. Now what exactly is going on here?

CANDACE: That’s what I want to know.

CANDACE, counting her chickens, steps out of play and waits for her point. DEXTER braces for the WOMEN’S point.

The JUDGE raises the MALLET once …. Shakily …. and lets it drop …. Twice …… it falls again ….. then a quick decisive bang on the MEN’s GONG.

CANDACE is horrified. DEXTER gives a relieved exhale. ALISTAIR scratches his head, perplexed at the decision. BELINDA is almost seizuring in her desire to be tagged into the game.

DEXTER: (fired up, hitting his stride) Okay so now we’re getting down to it, yeah? Well, good, because I’m kind of tired of having my time wasted with all these vague insinuations. How about you try just saying what you mean for a change?

The JUDGE bangs the MEN’s GONG again. Panicky CANDACE tosses the GARLAND to BELINDA, who enters the game. ALISTAIR gestures to be tagged in. DEXTER ignores him, confidence renewed.

BELINDA: I just want you to be straight with me.

DEXTER: Okay, I thought we were done with the vague insinuations. What you’re doing is calling me a liar.

BELINDA: That’s not what I said.

DEXTER: I know, because you’re being passive aggressive.

BELINDA looks to the ATTENDANT expectantly to thwack her opponent. The ATTENDANT doesn’t move. Furious, she rounds on DEXTER.

BELINDA: That’s not fair.

DEXTER: You said, “I just want you to be straight with me.” Thereby implying I am not being straight with you. Meaning I am behaving, in some respect, crookedly. That is, lying. If you think I’m a liar, just call me a liar.

BELINDA: All I’m saying is. . .it’s weird.

DEXTER: It is weird. It’s weird, first of all, that of all the things we could be doing or talking about now, on the weekend, you decide to harangue me about some mark on my body. It’s weird that, rather than having the courage to just say something like, “Hey, you know what? I don’t trust you. I don’t believe a goddamn word coming out of your mouth,” you decide to make me feel this bizarre, indirect guilt for. . .for having hurt myself! For having an owie!

The JUDGE bangs the MEN’s GONG. Jubilation from MEN, consternation from WOMEN. DEXTER hands off the PHALLUS to ALISTAIR with a touch of ‘nobilesse oblige’. ALISTAIR enters the game, determined to put DEXTER in his place.

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SCENE 4: THIS IS THE THING
.

BELINDA: It’s not that I don’t trust you.

ALISTAIR: Well, that’s how you’re making me feel, and I think it’s kind of shitty to be honest.

WARNING WHISTLE from ATTENDANT.

BELINDA: I didn’t want to start a fight. I just wanted to know where you got the mark.

ALISTAIR: And I told you—

BELINDA: No you didn’t! -

ALISTAIR: (simultaneously) I don’t know!

DOUBLE WARNING WHISTLE  from ATTENDANT.

BELINDA: And that’s not possible. That’s what’s crazy. It’s like you come home one day with an axe in your head, Oh, where’d you get that? Hm, this? Oh I have no idea. Didn’t even notice it was there.

The JUDGE bangs the WOMEN’s GONG. Anger from MEN, flying belly bump from WOMEN.

ALISTAIR, fuming, hands off the phallus to DEXTER.

DEXTER: Okay, tell me what’s really wrong.

BELINDA: (Thrown) What?

DEXTER: What’s really wrong? Clearly it’s something pretty serious if you’re making so much out of this thing.

BELINDA: No, there’s nothing else. This is the thing. This is the thing, right here. I just want a straight answer.

DEXTER: Which you’ve already said. Which means, you think I’m lying to you. Which means, you don’t trust me. Which means you and I have got a really big problem, because I didn’t realize I was such a fundamentally untrustworthy guy.

BELINDA: Sweetie, you’re not! That’s not what I’m saying. . .

DEXTER: Well, to be honest, I know I’m not. I know I haven’t done anything wrong. So that can only mean the problem is with you.

The JUDGE bangs the MEN’s GONG. DEXTER gives a muscle-ripple and an ‘oh, yeah, that’s right’ nod to ALISTAIR. BELINDA tosses the GARLAND carelessly to CANDACE as she stalks off. Sarcastic ‘oh, thank you so much!’ gestures from CANDACE as she adjusts the GARLAND on her head and enters the game.

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SCENE 5: THE SAUCE ON LOW
.

CANDACE: You know, ever since you took that psychology of whatever course you’ve been insufferable.

DEXTER: It wasn’t ‘psychology of whatever’ it was Key Texts in Psychoanalytic Literature. Nice way to change the subject!

CANDACE: I’m not changing the subject, I’m talking about what you just did. What you’re always doing. You read into every thing I do and say, and then you try to turn it around on me. Sometimes I just say what I mean, you know? Even Freud said that. “Sometimes when I say cigar, I mean cigar.”

DEXTER: He didn’t say ‘when I say cigar’, he said a cigar was just a cigar.

CANDACE: You know what I mean.

DEXTER: Almost never.

A THWACK across the back for DEXTER from the ATTENDANT.

CANDACE: I say something like, Oh my god, you have a horrible mark on your body, where’d you get it? And you come back with: You’re fixating! You’re calling me a liar! You’re insecure and passive aggressive!

DEXTER: I’d like to point out I used neither of those two terms.

CANDACE: You did.

DEXTER steps out of play and looks the JUDGE for confirmation. The ATTENDANT bends down to hear the JUDGE’s verdict. The ATTENDANT straightens up and shrugs non-committally. DEXTER then stomps over the DRUMMER for backup. The DRUMMER quickly checks the messages on his CELL-PHONE and avoids his eyes. Frustration and betrayal for DEXTER.

CANDACE: You did and you know it.  And I’m saying not everything I say has to do with some kind of unconscious motivation.

DEXTER: Says the person who just called herself insecure and passive aggressive.

CANDACE: What the hell does that mean?

DEXTER: It means you’re being insecure and passive aggressive. And you know it! You just told me that that’s what you’re being without being conscious of it. Because I never said it, Honey, you did. And then in the next breath you claim not everything has an unconscious motivation!

CANDACE: (doing a slow burn) That’s not even the point.

DEXTER: So what is your point?

CANDACE: My point is fuck off! You’re the guy who “accidentally” pushed me in front of a bus, how’s that for unconscious motivation?

The ATTENDANT delivers a THWACK across CANDACE’s back. She is more shocked than pained at this. DEXTER shoots her a ‘how do you like them apples?’ smirk. CANDACE, fighting tears, hands the GARLAND to BELINDA.

DEXTER: Ok, I don’t even know what we’re fighting about anymore.

BELINDA: You know what, I’m really not feeling well. I think I’m going to go lie down.

DEXTER  is taken aback by the change in tactic.

DEXTER: Oh, no no no no no, you’re the one who started this. You think we’re going to leave it here? With me feeling like a piece of shit and not knowing why? That’s not exactly fair.

BELINDA: Yeah, well, fair or not, that’s how I feel. So, listen, put the sauce on low at around 5 o’clock, okay?

With a flourish, BELINDA  hauls out a LARGE WOODEN SPOON she had tucked into the back of her rope belt and hands it to DEXTER with an evil grin. BELINDA ooooohs with admiration from the sidelines. DEXTER  looks at the SPOON in his hand, then at BELINDA, appalled.

DEXTER: No way, no way are we leaving it like this. This is brilliant, five minutes ago you were like a dog with a bone, the mark, the mark, tell me all about the mark. And the minute I turn things around, you wanna go hide under the covers.

BELINDA: I don’t want to hide, I just don’t want to fight anymore. It’s making me sick.

Panicking, DEXTER  hands the SPOON over to ALISTAIR. ALISTAIR  enters, grabs the PHALLUS off DEXTER rather brusquely and hooks it on. Before responding to BELINDA, ALISTAIR stops to think, tapping his PHALLUS absently with the end of the SPOON. Finally …

ALISTAIR: It’s not making you sick, it’s just that you know I’m winning.

The JUDGE bangs the MEN’s GONG. ALISTAIR  mimes tasting a sauce with the SPOON and his face registers an exaggerated paroxysm of ‘oh that’s sooooo tasty!’.

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SCENE 6: CRAZY
.

BELINDA: That’s really sad. That you talk about it like that, in terms of winning and losing.

ALISTAIR: Let me put it another way then. You know I’m right.

BELINDA: Right, wrong, winning, losing. That’s the important thing. That’s what really matters, right?

ALISTAIR: Well—no.

BELINDA: Whatever. (making to leave) I’m tired.

ALISTAIR: No, wait. What do you mean by that?

BELINDA: I mean—never mind.

ALISTAIR: Stop it!

The frustrated ALISTAIR, without thinking, raises the SPOON with a threatening gesture. A WARNING –WHISTLE from the ATTENDANT.

ALISTAIR: (carefully) Stop making me feel like a walking piece of shit. What, I’m trying to understand this, just tell me what you mean.

BELINDA: (beat, as if gathering strength) I was trying to talk to you. That’s all. I just wanted to talk to you and before we could even get underway, you had to shut me down, you had to make sure I understood that everything I said was wrong, everything I thought was crazy, and everything you think is right and sane and you’re the only one in the room who sees things clearly. It just—this always happens. And it really wears me out after a while.

The JUDGE bangs the WOMEN’s GONG. ALISTAIR throws down the SPOON in frustration. He slinks to the DSL plinth box and hands the PHALLUS to DEXTER.

DEXTER: I’m sorry. Okay? I got defensive.

BELINDA: Yeah. I’d say you got a little defensive.

DEXTER: Well how am I supposed to feel?

BELINDA holds up her hands.

DEXTER: Okay. I’m sorry. You understand, though, how this makes me feel, right?

BELINDA: I think so. But maybe you should explain it.

His bluff called, DEXTER is lost. He makes a quick ‘time-out’ gesture and runs over to ALISTAIR for a consult. They WHISPER hurriedly, DEXTER nodding, as the ATTENDANT approaches them with the SLAP STICK. BELINDA and CANDACE  take advantage of the diversion to consult.

THWACKS for both MEN. BELINDA hurries back and resumes her place, as if she’s been waiting patiently. DEXTER returns to the field.

DEXTER: It makes me feel under attack. It makes me feel on trial.

BELINDA: I don’t mean to do that.

DEXTER: Well—if I can just—I mean, I’m sorry, but it feels to me as if you do.

BELINDA: I get angry.

BELINDA  and CANDACE exchange a thumbs-up and a wink. ALISTAIR  sees disaster approaching and tries to warn DEXTER with an SOS gesture.

DEXTER: I can tell. I can tell you’re angry. That’s part of the feeling under attack thing.

BELINDA: Because I feel like you are treating me like an idiot, Honey. And I feel like you are trying to drive me crazy. And I feel like you’re trying to convince me that I’m crazy as a way of avoiding being honest with me. And I feel like that’s not fair.

DEXTER: Because you are fucking crazy!

THWACK across the back for DEXTER. The JUDGE bangs the WOMEN’s GONG. ALISTAIR slaps his forehead with his palm in frustration. DEXTER sheepishly hands the PHALLUS to ALISTAIR. BELINDA hands the GARLAND to CANDACE.

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SCENE 7: APESHIT
.

CANDACE: Do you see now what I’m talking about?

ALISTAIR: Listen, what are we going to do about this sauce?

DEXTER gives a ‘what the fuck, dude?’ gesture to ALISTAIR.

CANDACE: And now you want to talk about the sauce. That’s just great. You’re fucking crazy, now what are we going to do about the sauce?

THWACK across CANDACE’S back. She is enraged!

ALISTAIR: No, come on, I want to talk, I do. But we’re both starving, we haven’t eaten anything since this morning. You know what you get like when your blood sugar’s low.

CANDACE: Oh my god! Next you’re going to say I must be on my period.

ALISTAIR: No, because I know that was two weeks ago.

Double-Takes from both BELINDA and DEXTER on the sidelines.

CANDACE: You do?

ALISTAIR: Yeah, don’t worry, I always batten down the hatches when that that particular shitstorm is on the horizon.

CANDACE: Oh, fuck you!

CANDACE SLAPS ALISTAIR across the face. Another THWACK across CANDACE’s  back. ALISTAIR rubs his chin, satisfied.

CANDACE is on the ropes, panting in pain.

BELINDA jumps up and down to be tagged in.

DEXTER is not paying attention to the action at this point and is flirting with a female audience member in the front row as he sits on the DSL plinth-box.

A BEAT.

CANDACE marches over to the seated DEXTER, drops the GARLAND onto his head, and marches back to the DSR plinth-box. GASP of horror from everyone except DEXTER. He turns to see what the deal is, sees everyone starting at him. Slowly, he reaches up and touches the GARLAND on to of his head. He laughs, bemused. No one else laughs with him. Realization dawning, DEXTER shakes his head – ‘no fucking way, dude!’. The ATTENDANT approaches with his SLAP STICK. He THWACKS DEXTER across the back once, twice. On the third wind-up, DEXTER forces himself into the ring.

ALISTAIR and DEXTER stand awkwardly, unsure of how to proceed.

ALISTAIR: Well. That wasn’t a particularly rational thing to do, now was it?

DEXTER: Ah. . .I guess not. No.

ALISTAIR: So maybe now you kind of see my point.

DEXTER: Yeah, maybe. Maybe.

A couple of beats. DEXTER scratches his crotch absently. ALISTAIR whistles tunelessly. This goes on long enough for the ATTENDANT to blow a WARNING WHISTLE to get them going.

ALISTAIR: I know! How about a beer?

DEXTER: (relieved) That sounds great.

DEXTER sits down on the stage. ALISTAIR goes over to the BASKET DSL and hauls out two Big Rock cans. ALISTAIR tosses one to DEXTER and joins him sitting down. They crack the beers giddily and drink long.

ALISTAIR: (swallowing) Ahh.

DEXTER: (swallowing) I feel less irrational already.

The men chuckle.

ALISTAIR: So can we talk about this now?

DEXTER: Sure we can buddy.

ALISTAIR: I’m a guy.

DEXTER: Absolutely you are.

ALISTAIR: You know, I’m messing around in the garage, I’m playing ultimate on weekends. . .

DEXTER: Of course.

ALISTAIR; We’re like big kids in some ways, right? We fall flat on our asses and we jump up, brush ourselves off, and keep going. Could have an open artery, blood spurting everywhere, wouldn’t even notice it.

DEXTER: I know, sure.

ALISTAIR: I ever tell you I broke my toe when I was sixteen, playing football? Didn’t notice.

DEXTER: No shit?

ALISTAIR: Well, you know, I noticed. It hurt like hell at the time. But didn’t even bother to get it checked until a couple of weeks later. Just kept playing like nothing was wrong.

DEXTER: Hm. (sips)

ALISTAIR: So there you go.

DEXTER: Sure, absolutely. (beat) Well—yeah, but. . .

ALISTAIR: What?

DEXTER: See, this is the thing. You did notice it. When it happened. You broke your toe, it hurt like hell—

ALISTAIR: I know, but I’m saying. . .

DEXTER: So I mean at that moment, you knew you hurt your toe, right?

ALISTAIR: Yeah, but you’re totally missing. . .

DEXTER: No, no I’m not actually. You broke you toe, you looked down at your toe, you went, Oh, shit! My toe! Right?

ALISTAIR is horrified at this line of questioning.

ALISTAIR: Yeah, but the point is, I forgot all about it afterward.

DEXTER (oblivious to what he’s doing) But that’s not the point. I mean, maybe it’s the point, but it’s completely beside the point.

ALISTAIR: Honey? You’re starting to sound irrational again.

DEXTER: (standing up, straightening his GARLAND) You know what, don’t talk to me that way.

ALISTAIR stands up. They both hand their beer cans to the DRUMMER, who drain them thankfully.

ALISTAIR: All the point ever was, is: Guys get banged up.

THWACK across the back for ALISTAIR. His look of betrayal makes DEXTER wince.  Slowly and almost unconsciously they begin to circle one another.

DEXTER: Look, sweetie, I know guys get banged up, that’s not in question, okay? You keep coming back to that point like it’s so crucial, but it’s not, it’s irrelevant. I’m not saying it’s not normal to come home with scrapes and bruises, I’m saying it’s not normal to come home with a mark the size of that thing and not remember getting it.

ALISTAIR: We just keep going around and around in circles. Around and around and around and around. You always do this.

DEXTER: I don’t always do this. When do I do this?

ALISTAIR: You get neurotically fixated on one tiny, stupid thing and all of a sudden you’re a dog with a bone.

DEXTER: When? When did I ever get neurotically fixated?

ALISTAIR: Like that time you found a grey pubic hair.

DEXTER: I wasn’t neurotically fixated on that.

ALISTAIR: You went apeshit.

DEXTER: I didn’t go apeshit, Sweetie, I was upset.

ALISTAIR: You went on and on. “Oh my god. My groin is getting old.”

DEXTER: It was just because I never had a grey hair anywhere before, not even on my head.

ALISTAIR: “I have old lady pubes.”

DEXTER: I can’t believe you’re comparing that to this! That was like a couple of minutes in front of the bedroom mirror.

ALISTAIR: Yeah well it seemed a lot longer.

DEXTER: This is really low, what you’re doing right now. Acting like I’m throwing some kind of hissy fit, treating me like I’m nuts just for pointing this out. Like I’m just some dizzy, hysterical bitch trying to pick a fight, when you’re coming home and feeding me this obvious line of bullshit.

The JUDGE bangs the WOMEN’s GONG. The WOMEN gawk at each other.  The men are growing so steamed they barely notice.

ALISTAIR: Oh my god, you’re not gonna let this go.

DEXTER: It’s just really insulting. And, sorry, but it’s really starting to piss me off.

ALISTAIR: Piss you off? You’re insulted? When I’m clearly being accused of something here, and you don’t even have the fucking balls to come out and say what it is!

DEXTER: That’s because I don’t know what it fucking is—(throwing down) shithead!

ALISTAIR: Well if you don’t know I guess we’re pretty stuck, aren’t we—dickbreath?

ALISTAIR unhooks his PHALLUS and lays it on the stage. He strikes a serious wrestler’s pose. DEXTER takes off his GARLAND and lays it on the stage. He strikes a ninja-swan pose.

DRUMMER, pleased, plays some ominous FIGHT RHYTHMS..

The MEN clinch and wrestle each other to the floor. The ATTENDANT, who is standing beside the JUDGE, starts forward to break things up, but the JUDGE holds him back with the MALLET.

The MEN wrestle. Badly.

After a bit of flailing—embarrassing for all concerned—ALISTAIR catches DEXTER in the gonads.

DEXTER: Oh!  Arg!  Ugh!  Jesus!

He pulls away from ALISTAIR and moves toward the ATTENDANT, demanding retribution.  The JUDGE, however, still holds the ATTENDANT with the MALLET, so the ATTENDANT can do nothing.  DEXTER limps back into the fray, keeping his distance from ALISTAIR, trying to walk it off.

ALISTAIR: (smirking) Sorry about that, honey.

DEXTER: That was. . .that was really. . .below the belt.

ALISTAIR: (innocently) All I’m trying to do is defend myself.

DEXTER: Defend yourself!  That’s exactly it.  It’s a fucking battle to the death just trying to get a straight answer out of you.  I ask a simple question and you come out with all guns blazing.

ALISTAIR: Like you haven’t had your claws out from the moment you brought this up.

DEXTER: I can’t believe you’re being such a defensive asshole.

Now it’s ALISTAIR’s turn to entreat the ATTENDANT to THWACK DEXTER. The ATTENDANT refuses. ALISTAIR’s shoulders slump.

ALISTAIR: (slowly, deliberately, his back to DEXTER) And you’re being a passive-aggressive cunt. How’s that for below the belt?

A THWACK across ALISTAIR’s back.

ALISTAIR, incensed, stalks over to CANDACE, who sees him coming and warns him away.

ALISTAIR hands his PHALLUS to CANDACE and limps back to the DSL plinth-box.

CANDACE stares at the PHALLUS in her hand, amazed. She wiggles it, hefts it, and finally hooks it onto the belt around her waist. She does a little strut, taking the PHALLUS for a test drive.

Finally, she enters the field to face DEXTER.

.
.
SCENE 8: A NEW CROP
.

DEXTER:  I can’t believe you called me that.

CANDACE: (in a ridiculously deep voice, fiddling with her PHALLUS) I’m sorry, sweetheart.

The ATTENDANT approaches her with the SLAP STICK. CANDACE waves him off with ‘I’m so sorry, sir! It won’t happen again!’ gestures.

DEXTER: You called me the C-word.

CANDACE:  Honey, I’m sorry.

DEXTER: You dropped the C-bomb!

CANDACE: I’m so, so sorry. I lost my temper, baby.

DEXTER: It’s a bit emasculating, don’t you think?

CANDACE gives DEXTER a look of reminder, gesturing subtly to the PHALLUS that she, not he, is wearing.

DEXTER: (grappling) I mean, uh—you know.  Call me a prick—call me a cocksucker, even. . .

(strutting again as she eases into her role): I’ll call you a cocksucker if you want, baby, but how will you know it’s not a compliment?

DEXTER: I don’t find that funny.

CANDACE: No, I know. It’s not. I’m sorry.

DEXTER: I’m just trying to figure this out, you know? I didn’t want to fight with you.

CANDACE: I don’t want to fight either.

DEXTER: I’m sorry, but I gotta say—this defensiveness. I make a little, innocent remark, I just ask a question and it’s like—whoa! Suddenly you’re scratching my eyes out.

CANDACE: Ok —come on, seriously.

DEXTER: What?

CANDACE: “A little, innocent remark”? Give me a break. You asked where I got the bruise, I said I didn’t know, and you proceeded to jump down my throat is what happened.

DEXTER: I didn’t jump down your throat, baby.

CANDACE: You jumped down my throat.

DEXTER: I’m just worried about you.

CANDACE: Oh my god!

DEXTER: Well I mean what’s going on with you?

CANDACE: What do you mean, what’s going on with me? What are you implying?

DEXTER: I’m not implying anything, I’m saying when a person comes home covered in bruises . . .

CANDACE: Covered in bruises! I’m hardly ‘covered in bruises!’

DEXTER: . . .Walking around with a bruise the size of fucking China, and you expect me to believe. . .

CANDACE: Here we go!

DEXTER: . . .you have no idea where you got it. I mean, ok, let’s go with that. Let’s say you have no idea where you got it. Let’s say I choke that down for a second. Let’s say I swallow that unlikely bit of information and I’m even able to keep it down for a moment or two.

CANDACE: And I really appreciate you not making a big production out of it by the way.

DEXTER: So we put aside that question—we squelch it, we beat it down. Even though it’s a perfectly harmless, innocent questions with every right to be asked. But fuck it, it’s dead. We kick that question to the curb.

CANDACE: You’re making it sound like the question is a baby seal or something. . .

DEXTER: We bash the question’s brains in with a club and we stand there together on the, on the bloodied ice floe—we stand there with the question lying dead and mangled between us.

CANDACE: For Christ’s sake!

DEXTER: But what’s that? On the horizon! Wriggling toward us? Oh my god!

CANDACE: Wriggling toward us?

DEXTER: It’s an entire herd of questions! A whole new crop!

CANDACE: Why are they wriggling?

DEXTER: Because they’re baby fucking seals. You chose the metaphor, not me. And it’s apt. They’re young and fresh and innocent and they’re frantically wriggling to the side of their murdered brother. And they’re saying, Hey. Wait a minute.

CANDACE: The seals are saying that?

DEXTER: Ok, they’re saying in all their innocence, sure. Maybe you don’t know where you got the bruise. That hideous fucking mark. Maybe our fuzzy white brother deserved to get clubbed over the head for asking a simple, obvious questions.

CANDACE: I thought the seal was a metaphor for the question itself.

DEXTER: It was, sorry, it was. So now all these other seals gather around, gazing up at you with their big, sad eyes.

CANDACE: Their innocent eyes. Don’t forget to emphasize how innocent they all are. Pure as the driven snow right?

DEXTER: They are. Because listen to what they’re saying. They’re saying: We care about you. We don’t understand. Ok, you don’t remember where you got the mark. So what, then, does that mean? You go out, you get marked up. You don’t know how it happened. And here they come. Here comes the rush of new questions. Have you been having some kind of psychological episodes? Are you losing time? Do you have epilepsy?

CANDACE shoots DEXTER a wary look.

DEXTER:  Are you hurting yourself unconsciously maybe? In your sleep? Or maybe you’re having black outs.

CANDACE:  Don’t.

DEXTER:  Are you drinking? Are you using?

CANDACE:  Don’t!

DEXTER:  Are you using again?

CANDACE stomps over to the ATTENDANT and demands a penalty THWACK for DEXTER.  The ATTENDANT is implacable.  CANDACE flails in frustration. 

CANDACE: That is—that’s really offside.

DEXTER: No. I think, under the circumstances, it’s fair.

CANDACE: You know the answer.

DEXTER: Ok, let’s say I do. Let’s club that one to death too. POW!

DEXTER mimes a violent seal-clubbing, startling CANDACE. 

DEXTER: But, oh look, yet another fuzzy white head pops up, another pair of big sad eyes, another question.

CANDACE: And what’s this one want to know?

DEXTER: This one wants to know if you’re fucking someone.

A BEAT.

CANDACE: I’m amazed it took you this long.

DEXTER: I mean, what kind of idiot do you think I am?

CANDACE: A huge idiot! I think you are a huge fucking idiot!

A THWACK across the back for CANDACE. She takes it with grim satisfaction.

DEXTER (thrown): I don’t know what I’m supposed to say to that.  I really don’t.

DEXTER turns away.  CANDACE rushes over to the bored-looking ATTENDANT and snatches the SLAP-STICK from his hand and bears down on DEXTER.  The JUDGE holds the ATTENDANT back with the MALLET.

CANDACE: (brandishing SLAP-STICK) That’s good, because I have something important to say to you. You need to get your jealousy under control. It makes you manipulative and mean, and it all comes down to your own pathetic insecurity, and if you want to know the truth, it’s a huge turnoff. This whole stupid, unending conversation is representative of a much bigger problem, and it’s a problem that has nothing to do with me.

DEXTER: That’s nice. That’s nice. You’re saying you’re not attracted to me? You’re saying it’s a turnoff every time I ask you for a simple explanation? So if I ever want to get laid again, I have to look the other way? Ask no questions, tell no lies? That works out well for you, doesn’t it?

CANDACE winds up the SLAP-STICK to THWACK DEXTER, then hurls the SLAP-STICK to the ground in frustration.

CANDACE: I’m saying this problem we’re having right now—it’s your problem, baby. You don’t have any faith in me, because you don’t have any faith in yourself.

DEXTER  wears an incredulous, amused look, as if he is about to declare the previous statement the stupidest thing he has ever heard –

The JUDGE bangs the MEN’S GONG.  DEXTER  is appalled and disgusted.  He hands off the garland to BELINDA like he wants nothing more to do with the damn thing.   CANDACE  picks up the SLAP-STICK and hands it to the ATTENDANT, unrepentant. No reaction from the ATTENDANT. CANDACE turns to BELINDA, braced for more battle.  BELINDA is a momentary deer-in-headlights.

.
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SCENE 9: RIGHT
.

BELINDA: You’re right.

CANDACE:  (thrown) I’m right?

BELINDA: You’re right.

BELINDA abruptly puts her face in her hands. CANDACE rushes to her.

CANDACE:  Oh my god, baby. Don’t cry.

On the sidelines, the MEN roll their eyes/throw up their hands, are generally disgusted. 

CANDACE puts her arms around BELINDA, who weeps.

CANDACE: Sweetie, sweetie I’m sorry. I’m sorry, okay? Please don’t.

BELINDA: I don’t know what’s wrong with me.

CANDACE: Nothing’s wrong with you. Nothing’s wrong, baby. I’m sorry, I didn’t mean it.

BELINDA:  No, you’re right. You’re right, I’m insecure. I’m pathetic!

CANDACE: You’re not pathetic.

BELINDA:  I just get so scared.

CANDACE:  (letting her go) I know, but why? You’ve got nothing to be scared of. I’m with you. We’ve been together six years. I’m not going anywhere. I’m right here, baby.

The JUDGE bangs the MEN’s GONG.

BELINDA: You’re always so busy at the optical. You’ve got so many friends—those guys you play football with. . .

CANDACE: Honey, they’re just guys.

BELINDA:  I hardly ever see you.

CANDACE: You know that’s not true. We went to the beach. . .

BELINDA: We went to the beach, and you played football. With ‘the guys’.

CANDACE: I’m sporty! You know that. I don’t like lying around in the sun! I need to be up and moving around. How do you think I got this thing in the first place?

BELINDA: Well, that’s the question, isn’t it?

The JUDGE bangs the WOMEN’S GONG.  CANDACE winces. She takes a deep breath.

CANDACE: Honey? Let’s not go back there, I beg you. Look, we’re both starving. Our blood sugar’s low, and, you know what, check the calendar: we’re—I mean you’re due to menstruate any day now.

BELINDA: I am?

CANDACE: Yes, it’s no wonder we’re both freaking out. You know how we get.  You get.  How you get.  When you’re having, um. . . your special woman time.  (growing desperate, realizing how bad she is at this)  Which, uh, which I find disgusting, by the way.

BELINDA:  What?

CANDACE:    (excessive masculine posturing here)  Well you know, it’s gross.  Ew!  I don’t wanna know about that shit.

BELINDA stares at CANDACE, open-mouthed..

CANDACE: Hey!  I’ve got a great idea. You go on upstairs, put something in the DVD player—whatever you like. One of those whacked out Japanese horror movies you like—anything. I’ll heat up the sauce. . .

BELINDA: The sauce is burnt.

CANDACE: Oh—right. I’ll order us up some Thai, how about that? Where’s my –

CANDACE pats herself down, looking for her cell-phone.  She unhooks the PHALLUS from her belt and holds it up her head like a telephone receiver.

CANDACE: So, what do you feel like? Sky’s the limit.

BELINDA: I’m not hungry.

CANDACE: Sweetie, you haven’t eaten all day, it’s no wonder you’re a mess. You rather have sushi? Or that spicy tofu you like so much?

BELINDA:  I’m not a mess. You’re treating me like an invalid.

The JUDGE bangs the WOMEN’S GONG. CANDACE begins to panic.

CANDACE: Uhhh, Indian. How about Indian, you feel like some tandoori?

BELINDA pulls the PHALLUS out of CANDACE’S hand and drops it on the floor.  CANDACE scoops up the PHALLUS and stomps over to the ATTENDANT to complain waggling the PHALLUS in his face. The ATTENDANT leans down to confer with the JUDGE. He straightens up and shakes his head. CANDACE confronts BELINDA with the PHALLUS.   

CANDACE: What did you do that for?

BELINDA: Because you’re not listening to me. You’re treating me like a child, trying to lull me to sleep with TV and tandoori. You’ll do anything to avoid the issue at hand, won’t you?

The JUDGE bangs the WOMEN’S GONG.  

CANDACE: I thought we were past this. I thought we agreed, there is no issue. The only issue here is your insecurity, remember? I said, “You’re jealous.” And you said—what’s that? Do you recall? Your honour?  “You’re right.” That’s what you said, only a moment ago. I heard you. The whole courtroom heard you.

The JUDGE bangs the MEN’S GONG.

BELINDA: You keep treating this like a game, like it’s some kind of competition.

CANDACE: Well—what is it then? I don’t know what it is. I don’t understand what it is you’re trying to achieve with all this, other than making us both miserable.

Abruptly, BELINDA buries her face in her hands again. The rest of the company looks faintly disgusted with this tactic. THWACK across the back for BELINDA. CANDACE looks pained at this.

CANDACE: You know, sweetie, I’ve got questions too. I’ve got my own herd of baby seals over here. I mean, why can’t we just move on from this? Why can’t we just go back to how it was? Why can’t we just be happy together, like we used to be? What’s going on here? I mean what’s changed? Why is everything so hard between us all of a sudden?

BELINDA tosses the GARLAND to DEXTER, who storms on in a holy rage.

.
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SCENE 9: MIRROR
.

DEXTER: THIS IS BULLSHIT!

Terrified, CANDACE plucks off the PHALLUS and slips it down her cleavage. Her face registers a little ‘o’ of titillation, quickly suppressed.

CANDACE: What do you mean?

The ATTENDANT blows WARNING WHISTLE and CANDACE, rattled, hastily pulls the PHALLUS from her cleavage and rehooks it on her belt.

DEXTER: I mean I’ve had it. I’m sick of this line of crap you’ve been feeding me all afternoon.

DEXTER stomps over to the DSL plinth-box, drags ALISTAIR over DSC and pulls up his shoulders so that he is standing at attention. (There is a bit of conflict involved in this process—ALISTAIR miming ‘Quit shoving, dude,’ as DEXTER mimes something along the lines of ‘Just bear with me for a minute, OK?’)

 DEXTER pushes CANDACE so that she faces ALISTAIR. CANDACE and ALISTAIR face each other, not moving.

DEXTER: (shaking CANDACE’s shoulders roughly) Look! Look at that thing! Look at the size of that fucking thing and tell me I’m crazy. Tell me I’m fucking insecure. Tell me you don’t know where you got a bruise the size of somebody’s fucking hand. Go ahead! I dare you! Look at that, and look at me—look me straight in the eye—and I dare you, I fucking dare you to tell me how pathetic and insecure I am. I’m begging you, do it, I’d love for you to do it, go ahead, tell me right now. Do it. Tell me I’m insecure. Tell me.

CANDACE stares at ALISTAIR.  Neither of them move.

CANDACE: (Struggling) Let me go.

DEXTER holds CANDACE in place. She continues to struggle, getting frightened.  The ATTENDANT moves in to deliver a THWACK to DEXTER. He ignores it and keeps holding the struggling CANDACE.  Finally, he releases her.

CANDACE glares at DEXTER before an idea strikes her.  She removes the PHALLUS and hands it to ALISTAIR.  They simply trade places.

But just before the scene can start up again, CANDACE helpfully reaches over and places DEXTER’s hands on ALISTAIR’s shoulders, so they are in the same holding position as previously.

Suddenly DEXTER doesn’t seem as cocky.

CANDACE resumes her position as ALISTAIR’s reflection.

ALISTAIR (violently shaking off DEXTER): Get your fucking hands off me!

DEXTER: I’m sorry. I’m sorry, babe.

ALISTAIR: Who the fuck do you think you are?

DEXTER: I’m sorry.

ALISTAIR:  You’re lucky I don’t punch you in the fucking head.

DEXTER: I know. I’m sorry, I was upset all right? I’m sorry. I’m just—I’m really hungry. My blood sugar must be really low—you know how I get when I haven’t eaten.

ALISTAIR takes a menacing step toward DEXTER

DEXTER (quickly): I’m also having my period.

ALISTAIR: You don’t put your hands on me.

DEXTER: No, I know.

ALISTAIR: You never. Fucking. Do that.

DEXTER: I know. I’m sorry.

Satisfied, ALISTAIR removes the PHALLUS with a flourish and hands it back to CANDACE before heading back to the sidelines. She re-affixes it and faces DEXTER with a renewed confidence.

.
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SCENE 10: STILL
.

DEXTER: Still.

CANDACE: What. What now?

DEXTER: I think I had a point.

CANDACE: (exhausted) Oh my God. This is never going to end.

Done, CANDACE flings the phallus  to BELINDA, who is looking worn out herself.  She puts it on and comes to face DEXTER with her head down, hands on her hips; girded.

DEXTER: Back there. In front of the mirror. I think I made a point. I think my point was undeniable.

BELINDA: Fine. Let’s get on the merry go round one more time.  Bring it on.

DEXTER: Okay. There’s fantasy, and then there’s reality. No—sorry. Let me start again. There’s reality, and there’s perception—right?

BELINDA: What the hell are you talking about?

DEXTER: I’m saying—what I’m trying to say is—you can tell me I’m insecure until the cows come home, Sweetie. It’s a really easy thing to do. You can tell me I’m lazy, I’m vain, I’m a coward—whatever. The point is, you can say anything you want—but that doesn’t make it true. These are just accusations. They’re the weapons you’re using to keep me at bay. But you just saying that stuff doesn’t make it the case. Now let’s look at what I’m saying.

BELINDA: What are you saying.

DEXTER: I’m saying, Sweetie, you have a very large, very nasty bruise on your body. Every time I look at it, it makes me wince. It hurts me just to look at it, do you understand? And I’m not just saying that because I’m tired, or hungry, or because I want you to shut up, or because we’ve been together a really long time and maybe I’ve kind of forgotten why we started this up in the first place, or because sometimes it seems like, considering how much I’ve given to you over the years I don’t seem to be getting much back, or because you used to find me really sexy and now we pencil sex in every other weekend like its buying groceries or cleaning the bathroom. I’m saying you have a large, ugly bruise on your body—because you have a large, ugly bruise on your body. This is the fact. This is the single fact we have in play. This is the fact that, no matter how many deflections you might come up with, you can’t deny.

DEXTER looks to the JUDGE.  The JUDGE’s head is bowed. He may be asleep. Or dead.

BELINDA: (really exhausted now) I haven’t denied it. Not once. You’ve made that point already—over and over again. Yes, I’m marked. Yes, I have a mark. No one’s denying the mark. So what now?  What now, honey?  Where do we go from here?

DEXTER still waits for his point.  No response from the JUDGE. DEXTER stands at a loss. After a moment or two, the ATTENDANT moves toward DEXTER, who still can’t come up with anything—the well is dry.  He removes the GARLAND before the ATTENDANT can descend. For a moment, DEXTER  doesn’t seem to know who to give it to.  Finally he settles on ALISTAIR, who takes it grimly—like he can’t stand the sight of it  anymore.

Everyone’s a little shocked by DEXTER’S  anticlimactic defeat.

ALISTAIR: Okay.  You haven’t denied it. But you haven’t explained it either.

BELINDA: What is there to explain?

ALISTAIR:  How did you get it?

BELINDA: I don’t know.

ALISTAIR: (losing his temper)  I DON’T WANNA HEAR THAT!

(a WARNING WHISTLE, which ALISTAIR ignores)

ALISTAIR: How did you get it?

The ATTENDANT moves in with a THWACK for ALISTAIR.

BELINDA: (cowering) I don’t know!

The ATTENDANT thwacks BELINDA, who surprises everyone by falling to her knees.  ALISTAIR watches as she struggles painfully to her feet. He’s got an idea.  He waits until BELINDA is fully upright and facing him.

ALISTAIR: (deliberately) How.  Did.  You.  Get.  It?

A THWACK from the ATTENDANT for ALISTAIR, who was already braced.

BELINDA: (horrified)  Don’t do this.

ALISTAIR:  I’ll ask you again.

BELINDA:  No!

ALISTAIR:  How.  Did.

BELINDA: Stop it!

ALISTAIR:  You.

BELINDA: I don’t know!

: (simultaneously) Get.  It?

The ATTENDANT, starting to find this tedious, delivers a THWACK to both contestants.

BELINDA is done.  She moves to DEXTER  and gives him the phallus.

em>But DEXTER gave up long ago.  He takes the stage but doesn’t even bother to affix the PHALLUS to his belt.

DEXTER: Come on, man.

ALISTAIR: I can do this all day.

DEXTER:  But why?

ALISTAIR:  How.

DEXTER: Is it really that important to you?

ALISTAIR: Did.

DEXTER:  Dude!  It’s not worth it.  Let’s just go get a drink.

ALISTAIR: You.

DEXTER: I don’t wanna do this anymore.

ALISTAIR: Get. . .

DEXTER: I’m not doing this.

DEXTER hands off the PHALLUS to CANDACE, who takes and affixes it with much reluctance.

She takes the field and faces ALISTAIR.

A couple of BEATS of silence.

ALISTAIR: (smiling savagely)  . . .It?

The ATTENDANT gives ALISTAIR a particularly loud THWACK.  ALISTAIR falls to his knees.  He looks up at CANDACE and CANDACE looks down at him.

ALISTAIR:  How.

On the sidelines, DEXTER and BELINDA moan.

ALISTAIR: (struggling to his feet)  Did.  You.

CANDACE abruptly removes the phallus and holds it out to ALISTAIR.  ALISTAIR takes it, amazed, as CANDACE walks offstage.  ALISTAIR affixes the PHALLUS to his belt.  BELINDA, not knowing what else to do, follows CANDACE offstage.  DEXTER watches ALISTAIR for a moment, then walks offstage.

ALISTAIR stands there wearing the GARLAND and the PHALLUS.

Suddenly, the  JUDGE is struggling to his feet as the ATTENDANT assists him.  The JUDGE picks up his basket, waving away the ATTENDANT’S help.

With aching slowness, the JUDGE and ATTENDANT head DCS to approach ALISTAIR, who awaits them.

The JUDGE places the BASKET in front of ALISTAIR and waits.

ALISTAIR  removes the GARLAND and drops it into the basket.  Then he removes the PHALLUS and drops that into the basket.

The JUDGE simply picks up the BASKET and hobbles offstage.

ALISTAIR stands facing the ATTENDANT, who still wields the SLAPSTICK.

ATTENDANT:  Congratulations.

 —Lynn Coady

Here’s a brand new “What it’s like living here” essay from Liam Volke in Victoria, British Columbia. (He’s Gabrielle Volke’s brother—staunch readers will remember her lovely interview with dg, published in October, 2010, at NC.) Liam is freshly graduated from the University of Victoria’s Theatre program with a BFA in Acting. He lives and acts and writes poetry in Victoria. His poetry has been published in the CBC Poetry Anthology, 2007. He blogs at The Tower of Babble.

dg

 
.

What It’s Like Living Here

from Liam Volke in Victoria, British Columbia

University of Victoria

In Victoria, among the aged flower children and retired English folk, a river of young blood surges through its heart and pools around a green ring.

In your first year as a student, life was wrapped within and around the Ring Road of the university campus. You saw maple leaves for the first time. You tasted independence: in Rez, with other under-aged drinkers. You lost your first love. Here is where you thought you’d reinvent yourself.

The classes for your Acting major are all in the Fine Arts section of the campus, a modest trio of white, brown and grey brick buildings facing a paved circular courtyard with a single evergreen in the centre. This section seems quarantined from the rest, placed outside the Ring (inside is the stronghold of Sciences and Humanities). “Theatre? We have a theatre?!” they say. We’re a big deal abroad, you tell yourself.

Most of the trees here keep their leaves, so at first you suspected you were in paradise. The rain was a welcome change from the snow that browns and greys with the dust and gravel of hometown Calgary. You told yourself you would always love the rain. You told yourself a lot of things.

 

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Oak Bay/Saanich

This place is lumpy. Streets rise and fall through the rolling neighbourhoods. The houses are fearless, splashed with bright yellows, greens, reds, purples even; the monochromatic craze of suburbia never quite made it here. Prayer flags hang from porches, and front lawns are lined with roses, irises, tulips, rhododendrons, and daffodils.

Some of the streets are lined with cherry trees, which you always forget about until late March, when they all erupt in bouquets of pink and white. Arbutuses lean over the rocky beaches. Their brown bark peels like paper, revealing smooth, sandy-orange trunks. Gary Oaks twist and writhe straight out of a German fairy tale and onto the hillsides. They droop overhead, and even dip menacingly in front of you. But their climbable branches remind you of your tree-dwelling ancestors.

Amid this fecundity, there are cracked streets with no sidewalks at all. And you can find free junk along the curb: a desk, a box of books, a small trampoline, a dresser, a keyboard, a couch, a set of broken computers, closet doors, the shell of a kitchen sink counter—you could furnish your home without paying a dime. It’s not recommended, though.

.

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Downtown

The beauty and strangeness of this place is amplified by the double decker buses. The first time you rode on one, you looked down through the window, sneering at the little people far below on the sidewalk.

Traveling downtown is like probing the rings of a tree: each block closer to the waterfront takes you further into the past. The buildings don’t lord it over you with the cold majesty of the steel and glass giants of your own hometown. In fact, the buildings here are quite stumpy. But what they lack in height they make up for in age, and character. For downtown Victoria, “modern” means Art Deco from the 1920’s.

Here, just about everyone has a yoga mat. The only thing more common than yoga mats are local coffee shops. In Victoria, the citizens are quite fond of their joe and their sun salutations.

On the corner of View Street, a man sits cross-legged, holding a cardboard sign with “Spare Change For Weed” painted on it. At the corner of Fort Street, another man stands–no, bounces slightly, at the knees–holding out his ball cap, a forlorn, beggarly dance to amuse the misers that pass by. Outside the 7-Eleven, at the corner of Johnson and Douglas, there’s another man, squatting, leaning against the streetlight, making a G-shape with his body, as he gives a great gap-toothed yawn. His face is as wrinkled as the island’s bedrock, and the hair on his balding head is matted. You nod. He nods. You suspect that some people have lived on Victoria’s streets for years, hitchhikers and vagrants who’ve fled the gnawing freeze of prairie winters for Victoria’s temperate climate. Some of them are kids younger than you, with dreadlocks and studded jean jackets, who camp out in alcoves between stores. The only group more ephemeral than you are the tourists who claim the city during summertime.

In Victoria, the busker-to-passersby ratio here is absurdly high: sax players, cellists, guitarists. One artist makes a flawless facsimile of a Vermeer out of chalk. The bronze statue of a cowgirl on the waterfront winks at an unsuspecting girl who gawks a moment too long. The girl jumps, then checks to see if anybody else noticed. This human statue is covered from head to toe in bronze paint, with pigtails turned up like Pippi Longstocking. Only her winking green eyes betray her status as a sentient being.

Walking down Government Street, it’s easy to feel optimistic. There is something genteel and polished about this street that harkens back to the Age of Progress. Gorgeous granite buildings house The Irish Times and the Bard & Banker pubs, Munro’s Books, a cigar shop, The Soda Shoppe, countless boutiques, including a hat store, a military antique store, and a store dedicated entirely, all-year round, to Christmas. The street opens up to the harbour front where you can’t help but relate to those 19^th century builders and entrepreneurs, guided by the unwavering belief in the triumphant march of Modernity and the undying glory of Empire, with their World Fairs, pearly street-lamps lit by newly harnessed electricity, hot-air balloons and Belles-Époques. There are parts of this city that never stopped believing in such things.

At the foot of Government Street lounges the Empress Hotel, its red-brick face bearded in ivy, a hub of colonial luxury and a counterpart to the earnest granite walls and oxidized, pistachio-green copper domes of the Parliament Building just across the street, the splendid heart of our now post-colonial government. Both buildings meet at the corner and face the traffic of the inner harbour, where cruise ships lumber in and announce themselves like a boorish guest. The smell of fried food wafts up from vendors on the piers, where private boats huddle beneath a city of masts, cables and multi-coloured flags. Across the water a huge Delta hotel rises like a fortress on the shores of Esquimalt, a modern answer to the Empress. Captain George Vancouver, as golden as a pharaoh, perches on top of the Parliament Building and watches over it all: the harbour on his left, the rows of squat office buildings and apartments on his right; the lush neighbourhoods beyond them; the green mountains beyond those, up island. And while Vancouver keeps vigil up where you imagine must be the best view in town, his former captain, the more well-known James Cook, stands along the walkway above the inner harbour. Cook is a humbler black bronze, with a white streak of dried bird shit running down his face. And instead of welcoming the boats into the harbour, Cook’s gaze is fixed on the Empress across the street, making sure it doesn’t go anywhere. So far, it hasn’t.

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The End

Past the Parliament Building, at the end of Dallas Road, you come to Ogden Point. After that, there is no more. You have reached the edge, where dead kelp dries in the sun, and waves slurp and gurgle against the stone face of the breakwater.  Beyond the steely Juan de Fuca Strait, the Olympic Mountains float above silver clouds, as if the upper air was crystallized into rock. You imagine they can never be reached.

When you first see Victoria, it gives the distinct impression that the city planner was a four-year-old, doodling the roads. With a crayon. On a napkin. With his foot. Such is the tangle you found yourself in when first trying to navigate the roads; roads that bend and morph into other roads without warning. Even the university campus doesn’t believe in straight lines. People settled here first, and civilization trundled along after. But there is something organic about the city’s pattern. It’s the kind of place that makes itself up as it goes along, like any imperfectly human settlement should. Not unlike you, in fact.

—Liam Volke

The Parkinson’s Diaries

By Steven Axelrod

Leaving the Breakers: Escape from Assisted Living

My mother had been diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease ten years ago. Still ambulatory in her late eighties, she was now living in a retirement community in Long Beach, California, on the fifth floor of a beautifully restored hotel from the golden era of Hollywood called The Breakers. The ceiling of the lobby floated twenty feet above the marble floor, with intricately worked plaster panels that put the tin ceilings of Greenwich Village cafes to shame. The peaked red tile of its roofs and turrets lent it a Mission revival feeling, and the top floor restaurant, the Sky Room, earned its name with a spectacular panorama of the harbor, while retaining  a heady whisper of old time movie glamour. The staff was charming and helpful, the suites themselves were spacious and sunny, sparked with period detail in the moldings and baseboards, with high ceilings and water views. The dining room was spacious and congenial, the other residents friendly and patient. You couldn’t ask for a more pleasant and professional assisted living arrangement.

And I hated it, with every fiber of my being.

I hated the way the impeccably courteous, and hard-working staff treated my mother and the other residents as a separate, feeble race, inferior but privileged like hemophiliac dwarf royalty, simultaneously catered to and patronized, deferred to and dismissed. I hated the smell in the hallways, some tragic perfume of disinfectant and decay – the sense, so much like the sense you get in a hospital, of a world where human volition and dignity have been sacrificed to the mechanisms of medical technology and routine.

I also hated the dining hall food, tasteless and generic as if the management actually calibrated how many of the residents had no working taste-buds left and arranged the meal preparations accordingly. I hated the weak coffee and the fuzzy sausages, and the cardboard pancakes, the sense that the particular texture of life, the look and feel and taste of things, didn’t really matter any more.

Most of all I hated the resignation of the people there, their palpable sense of loneliness and abandonment, the heartbreaking schedule of activities posted in the elevator (Exercise classes at noon, crafts at three, casino night on Thursdays), and the veil of stigma that seemed to hang over the lives shuffling across the frayed carpets of the upstairs corridors like the smog on the harbor: to be there was to be forgotten, warehoused, left behind and abandoned. Behind each stoical face there was the piercing awareness of a family prosperous enough to install an older relative in such a luxurious setting, and yet unwilling to include them in the daily life of the family.

It felt claustrophobic and unnatural, as perhaps an orphanage might feel at the other end of both life and affluence. For millions of years, in every country on earth, from the Stone Age to the Middle Ages to probably just before the Industrial Revolution, the older members of a family lived with the other generations, offering guidance and receiving help, passing on oral history and family secrets and recipes and folk medicine and being eased out of life among their children and their children’s children. This lovely place was most of all unnatural, inhumane in its segregation of the aged.

It is cruel and mean-spirited to exile our parents and grandparents to such a place, where they are surrounded only by cheerful servants and other old people and a smattering of younger residents crippled with life shattering diseases like Multiple Sclerosis. It’s a world of decay and extinction. It wears you down, makes you feel half-dead already, padding through an upholstered necropolis infinitely removed from a daughter’s embrace or a home-cooked meal. Our elder relatives need us, they need to feel the continuance of life, the noise of rowdy grandchildren, the conversation of adult kids, the excitement of dogs, the easy welcome of people who love them.

And we need them, that’s what we forget in the busy rush of our over-scheduled lives. We need their shrewd intelligence and their hard-won experience and the connection they create to our own childhoods. We need to be part of the end of their lives just as we needed them to guide us through the beginning of our own. It’s a simple circle, the real circle of life, and it feels like we’ve broken it, ruptured it, for nothing more than convenience. Or perhaps it’s something worse and more insidious – the denial of our own mortality, the cowardly glance away just as we avoid the mirror, pondering the competing claims of botox and the ‘lifestyle lift’.

Three days in Long Beach, wandering the husk of that old hotel, so long past its glory days, as forlorn as its inhabitants, sitting in the empty bar where Clark Gable and Greta Garbo had once eaten caviar and toasted the New Year, inventorying the unused walkers, and the coffee dispensers on the sideboard, made all of this uncompromisingly clear, both to me and to my brother. When my mother said she wanted to get out of there, that she wanted to divide her years between our two families and spend whatever time she had left with people she loved, with people who loved her and missed her and wanted to be with her, we scarcely had to discuss it. We just breathed a sigh of relief, grabbed each other for a group hug, and started planning her escape.

The logistics will be tricky – commuting twice a year between Nantucket and Australia won’t be easy, but none of that matters.

Only one thing matters to any of us right now:

My mother is coming home.

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The Prodigal Mother

Well, I did it.

My mother is back on Nantucket, ensconced in a new bed in our re-arranged dining room, settling in.

I’m happy, but I have to admit that my first response is to feel daunted and a little overwhelmed. Seeing my mother in the assisted living home, and later on in the depressing skilled nursing facility, it was easy to say, “I’m busting her out of this place.” And in fact, it was fairly easy: just a matter of booking plane flights and hotel rooms and moving vans and boat reservations; buying suitcases and boxes and GPS units; and doing one long day worth of manual labor, broken up over four days of beach jaunts, restaurant meals and movies – almost a vacation. It was enjoyable working with my son, and we paced ourselves expertly. True the apocalyptic California sky – harsh cloudless blue tinged with forest fire smoke – made us uneasy, the streets of downtown long beach resembled a some police state utopia in a bad science fiction movie, with cops everywhere (I saw one of them harassing an elderly gentleman waiting for a bus, as if he were a vagrant: “What are you doing here? Where are you heading? What’s your plan?”), and bizarre street signs posting a ten O’clock curfew for anyone under eighteen and forbidding a new crime called ‘cruising’, defined as driving by any spot in the city more than three times in four hours. But we ignored all that. We had a job to do and we did it.

The journey east was relatively easy, also, it turns out that there’s a use for all that politically correct, handicapped-friendly, wheelchair-accessible infrastructure. If you’re actually in a wheel chair, it makes life startlingly easy. A local clothing store had to install a wheel-chair elevator a few years ago after a fire, to meet our draconian building codes. It’s never been used. It always seemed absurd to me, before (especially since the second floor sells work clothes). But I’m starting to get the point. In fact, I may just walk my mother down there in her wheel chair, to give that elevator its maiden voyage.

Our flight was delayed by a tropical storm pushing up the North-East coast, so we wound up spending the night in the Logan Airport Hilton. The comfortable beds and flat-screen television  smoothed over the inconvenience, and brought home to me with some force the very different world that rich people inhabit. The motel we stayed in during our time in Long Beach was a grim and utilitarian place by comparison. Walking down the dark, cement floored, cinder-block walled passageway to our room, I remarked to my son, “This is like Cabrini Green”. “But with no gang graffiti,” he pointed out. We were grateful for small favors. For my mother and me, the Hilton was our last mooring: now we are launched on this unfamiliar sea.

I’m getting my bearings quickly, though. I knew we would need someone in the house during the day to take care of my mother’s relatively minimal) needs – help getting to the bathroom, and reminders about her medication schedule. In case she needed me in the night, I put my cell on her speed dial. She had to go to the bathroom at 11:00, 1:30, 3:45 and 4:30.

To call this grueling sleepless night a ‘wake up call’ seems both too obvious and wholly inadequate (there were four of them, after all). So now I know we need two shifts, if I’m going to be able to work and stay healthy while this adventure proceeds. The whole routine felt strangely familiar, and then thought occurred to me that this situation is in many ways like caring for a baby. You feel the same stress (Am I fucking this up?) the same lack of experience (You know people have done it before but it doesn’t seem that way), the same constriction of your life: any activity that leaves the person in your care alone has to be planned and organized well in advance. Life suddenly requires a lot more thought, as someone else’s needs take precedence over your own. Of course, the ‘baby’ in this case is a brilliant, entertaining and charming woman to whom I own an incalculable debt, which makes the comparison seem petty and petulant. But it maintains traction, anyway.

I’ve spent the morning interviewing potential helpers, making initial doctor’s appointments and trying to get someone to fix our dryer — swamped with details, trying to keep track of first impressions and phone numbers, while my mother chatted with the applicants for the job. She was very frank with them and she said something a few minutes ago that helped put the whole process in perspective:

“I’m happier here than I’ve been in weeks – in months. Years maybe, I don’t know. It’s just so good to be home.”

Well, that’s the point, that’s was why we did it, and that’s makes the whole trip worthwhile.

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Settling In

This is not a story anyone wants to hear. It violates the basic tenets of American optimism. It’s not Norman Rockwell picture; more like an Andrew Wyeth, with occasional torn fragments of Edvard Munch and Francis Bacon pasted over the canvas.

“How is it going?” everyone asks. And of course I say fine.

“Is it tough having your mother living in the house?” And I say no, of course not. Even to her.

Especially to her.

But the facts remain. That’s what facts do. There’s a mindless obstinacy about them. My mother is eighty-eight years old. She has a rapidly advancing case of Parkinson’s disease. She wants to go to the lovely assisted living place nearby, but she can’t really take care of herself, so I don’t see how that could happen. She works hard to improve her physical condition but the odds and the years are against her. Mortality mocks her optimism. Mortality mocks and diminishes everything. Its ruinous taint, the sheer poison of its proximity created every religion and philosophy on the planet. We forget that because we avoid it like the contaminating radioactive isotope that it is.

Shunning death may be the one authentic human instinct beside the ability to suck. We come into life ready to take sustenance from the nipple, hardwired to travel forward ignoring the end of the trip. We build a culture based on youth, we shun the old, we spend a billion dollars on cosmetics and plastic surgery just to keep mortality at bay. I do it. I didn’t know I was doing it until my mother moved in and the awesome, appalling specter of mortality moved in with her.

So how does it feel to change your mother’s Depends undergarment? How does it feel to walk her from the bed to the bathroom, watching her legs tremble as she tries to find her balance? Well, first of all, it’s exhausting. It’s an illness itself, this new awareness of death looming everywhere, a leeching ailment like mononucleosis that saps the life out of your muscles and buries you in your bed. The fatigue is too complex to fight, and only certain parts of it can be solved by sleep. It’s spiritual as well as physical, emotional as well as mental. Part of it is about seeing someone you love so stricken, the penetrating unnaturalness (or so it seems, or so it feels) of your reversed positions, the upended role you have to play in the endgame of a parent’s life. In a way it’s like having a new baby in the house, without the sustaining thrill of a new life to protect. The needs are startlingly similar, but the joy is replaced with sorrow and dread.

Of course I know I’m lucky in many ways. Things could be much worse. We have help during the week. And my mother is as sharp as ever, reading The New York Times and The New Yorker magazine from cover to cover, commenting on the news (“In this country we have Socialism for the rich and free market capitalism for everyone else….”), dismissing her Doctors (“When you’re past a certain age, they just don’t care any more….”). She still loves life and her spirit is ferocious. Watching her do her physical exercises has shamed me into getting back into shape myself. She’s still herself, and she loves being here. She feels like she’s been sprung from prison. She used the term ‘evacuated’ the other day, as if we had plucked her from the midst of some natural disaster when we took her out of the “skilled nursing facility” where she had been living after a urinary tract infection almost killed her.

My wife Annie is a huge help. Of course that has its downside also. My mother said something the other day about being so grateful to me and my brother. I pointed out that some significant portion of that gratitude should be directed toward the one person in this situation who isn’t related to her. It’s an immense unfair burden for Annie, who provided hospice home care, spelled only by her two sisters, for the last six months of her mother’s life. The sight of a walker or a wheelchair, a bath seat or a bedside commode, brings back the most painful memories of her life, and that’s only part of the problem. My son is living with us now also, and he has dubbed the tiny, 200-year old apartment (five rooms and two baths on two floors connected by a  narrow stairway) the NoPrivacyHouse. The name made Annie smile, and she needed a light moment, but it’s another fact and it remains just like all the others: we have no privacy at all any more. Annie feels dislocated and displaced. The small comfortable life we had cobbled together for ourselves is gone. The disruption is temporary, but with no end in sight, some future restoration of our old routines seems far too abstract for comfort.

For now this is our life. It’s constricted, as the lungs constrict during an asthma attack. It’s hard to breathe, impossible to relax. I found myself resting in a customer’s house for half an hour yesterday, just lying down in the quiet room, beyond the reach of obligation, feeling the vibrations of stress shiver out of my nerves like a struck piano string, wobbling to silence.

I needed that, but I couldn’t afford it. I need to work that job and I need to finish it. I can’t afford this new flimsiness, this swooning lack of energy. That’s scary. And my brother, to whom my mother feels such gratitude, is living five thousand miles away in another country, and generously sending an extra $300 a month to help out.  That just about covers a week’s groceries in the most expensive town in America. Thanks for the gumball, Mickey.

So money is tight and living is tight; everything is tight, inside and out. A lot is happening just inside me, weird climate change in my frontal cortex and my limbic system. I feel simultaneously a wild howling sexual desire, the need to throw orgasms at death the way a kid might egg the factory owner’s house on Halloween. And at the same time a scrim of age and decay seems to cover both of us, making the whole idea feel creepy and repellent. The two feelings cancel each other out and nothing happens, which works well for us since sex is the last thing on Annie’s mind right now and we live in NoPrivacyHouse anyway.

So it’s grim and debilitating and the strange dark secret of it all is that I feel absurdly blessed and lucky to have this time with my mother, whatever the cost and however long the ordeal goes on. Because make no mistake, it is an ordeal and I can’t wait for it to be over and I hope it lasts and lasts, until I finally get enough of my mother to really remember her by, because soon enough the remembering will be all I have and I dread that day and I all have is the time until that day to prepare for it.

So we push forward, easing her end, taking the flickers of rest or pleasure when they present themselves, and hold her and hold each other and somehow make the best of it.

Maybe it could be a Norman Rockwell painting, after all.

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Animating the Map

I spent half an hour this morning helping my mother put on her bathrobe.

The goal was to get her bundled up and across the ten feet from her bed to the kitchen table for breakfast. Like some hapless, out-numbered platoon trying to retake some anonymous numbered hill in Korea, ultimately we failed. We managed to get the robe on, with me bracing her trembling legs and holding her up from the back while we searched for the second arm hole – the second arm hole is the killer,  elusive and maddening, always too high and too far back, so it seems as if she will have to dislocate her shoulder to fit her hand in. Suddenly in the closing hours of your life, you have to be a circus contortionist simply to get dressed. Still, we did it. But we couldn’t get to the dining room table because her legs simply couldn’t support her weight this morning. It’s particularly upsetting because she seemed to be making so much progress over the last week. Sometimes the physical therapy and occupational therapy and the exercises seem like nothing more than worry beads,  a soothing distraction, a way to keep body and mind occupied before the next onslaught of the disease. Because when it happens, when the storm surge arrives, all the sand-bagging and levee building amounts to nothing, swept away by the greater force of an illness no one understands, not even the doctors.

We finally got my mother into her ‘Cadillac’ walker – it doubles as an ad hoc wheel chair, and  we  maneuvered her to the dining room table where she ate cereal and drank coffee and talked the situation over. I remain awestruck by the tenacious ability of the human brain to accept an ever-narrowing world and inhabit it, accepting an ever shrinking set of goals and small victories. My mother had hoped to start up her communications consulting business here, and go shopping, and move into the lovely assisted living home on Main Street. Now she takes it as a satisfying and hard won triumph when she can walk on her own to the bathroom late at night. I admire the stoicism with which she adapts to this contraction, but entering the claustrophobic world of her illness, living there with her even as an outside observer, takes a grim toll. It’s exhausting and frightening. At first I thought it was loosening and uprooting the structural supports of my own existence, but I realize now that I was mistaken. Instead, it’s revealing the structural supports of my existence, placing the realities of my life and life itself under the raw and unforgiving fluorescent lighting of mortal truth. It’s my illusions that have been torn up, strewn about the ground: the illusion of immortality, the illusion of the ever-nurturing mother, the illusion of a benevolent universe. I’m going to die as she is dying; I have to nurture her now and the universe, God-controlled or the product of random chance, really doesn’t care at all. The result is I feel old myself, inches not miles from my mother’s precipice, caught up and tangled in the same sticky web of decay and disorder.

It makes you understand how delayed stress disorders happen. During a car crash, or a wartime trauma, things happen too quickly to grasp the nature of the event. But here it’s all occurring in slow motion. You can feel yourself shoving your emotions aside, stamping them down, packing them like boxes into an overstuffed closet. You can feel the effect of looking down and pushing forward with each day, the stress building up like a toxin coating the nerve endings. It will take years to cleanse the blood of this sorrow, and it may never happen. I may not have enough time.

As a caretaker, the erosion of your world happens on so many levels at once – that’s what’s hard to grasp from the outside. Your time is shredded, days starting later and ending sooner and trimmed from the middle with new obligations. This means that money becomes an issue and even though the thought of a nursing home draining away a life’s savings feels grim and Dickensian, some fist inside me clenches and says “better her than me” I cannot go bankrupt here. I have to work. That’s not a debate point, it’s a fact. Having no choice simplifies decision-making. But I’m exhausted and that slows work down, also. I have no private time now; Annie and I have no time together except for a stolen cup of coffee or a brief talk in the car, parked in the driveway. I’m writing this as the visiting nurse works with my mother, tapping a few stolen sentences into the computer between consultations and conversations. The emotional wear and tear combines with my mundane practical worries and the inexorable presence of death, the grinning skull suddenly pushing out of the surface of everything, and the sadness and the pity, and the stupid childish anger and the guilt over that anger to create a separate disability that folds over and magnifies the effects of its own symptoms. It reminds me of baking bread, folding over the dough and kneading it, watching it double in bulk under a checked cloth on a warm window sill.

But no one wants to eat this loaf. No one.

My mother was in the hospital for a couple of weeks after a bad fall in the bathroom and we got the house back and dismantled her bed and tried to live normally. But of course life revolved around the hospital and we knew it was just the eye of the hurricane. The next storm wall was coming. I log onto Weather Underground a lot these days – the weather has taken on some mysterious new urgency. I see the blob but I have no idea what it means for me until I click on the ‘animate map’ button. Then I can see which way the weather is moving, caught in a half hour loop. I relax: it’s heading Northeast of us, despite the fact that the official forecast calls for rain. I need to click that same tab in my own life, in my mother’s condition. I see the blob, the angry yellow and orange of a harsh Nor’Easter. But what does it mean? Is this a brief setback, or just another bump in a bumpy road. Does it signify the beginning of the end, or is it the prelude to a miraculous resurgence? I have no way to tell.

But I take comfort in small things.

When I found my mother on the bathroom floor that morning three weeks ago, and helped her to her feet, both of us thought it was all over.

She hugged me and said. “We had fun, didn’t we? Nobody had more fun than us.”

It was true. Some days, some part of each day, it’s still true.

So we hang on and hope for more of them.

There’s nothing else we can do.

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Surreal Life

It looks like my mother is going to have to move in to the nursing home. We just can’t do what needs to be done any more. Every day we are faced with our own ineptitude and clumsiness and ignorance. I can read to her from Tim O’Brien and make her cry, I can tell stupid jokes and make her laugh. But I can’t adjust medications and do physical therapy and take care of her around the clock.

So I spend my days now trying to find cards I don’t recognize with information I don’t know so that people I’ve never seen can fill out forms I know nothing about … all to get my mother into a facility where none of us wants her to be in the first place.

It’s Kafka-esque. Kafka would actually be amused by this situation. He couldn’t read The Hunger Artist to his friends without cracking up. Meanwhile I feel like my entire nervous system is being peeled one layer at a time like an onion and someone seems to have attached lead weights to all my joints. I  can’t even read at night any more: my eyelids secrete glue. The centrifuge of illness and misery sends the separate parts of my life flying in all directions. Some neurologist I’ve never met changes my mother’s medication and sends her into a tail-spin and he acts irritated when I call him up in a panic, after office hours. He’s not the doctor of record. “But you’re the neurologist,” I say, and I’m thinking, they haven’t passed tort reform yet, you miserable prick.

Meanwhile, my mother’s head floats above the dining room table, the spitting image of a younger self, and we discuss the nature of confidence and the rules of grammar and the failures of the president (“I have only one question for him: When are you going to end the war?”) and she instructs me in the best way to dredge the scallops (seasoned bread crumbs and white corn meal after a quick dip in the milk and egg mix). Then she stands up and her legs won’t hold her and all her features pull down in pain and she’s unrecognizable and I can’t adjust.

I’m changing my mother’s diaper and she has no modesty left and takes it in good humor, and she has no idea of the shock wave it sends through my nervous system, like  gunshot wound, the sonic boom pulverizing the soft tissue ahead of the bullet. Why is this so disturbing? It should feel natural, tending to the flesh of a parent, as she tended to mine and I tended to my own children and they will tend to me. And yet every fiber of every nerve screams in protest.

But even that is changing. The most surreal part of the experience is that I’m actually getting used to it. I woke up this morning early (Annie had to catch a 6:30 boat). When I came downstairs my mother was on the floor by the bed. She had slipped down. Her robe and pajamas were wet; so was the bedding. After a split second flinch response and a sort of snap clenching, of the spirit (time to wake all the way up, buddy!), I performed some internal recalibration and saw the scene as a set of logistical problems to be solved: get her off the floor, seated on the walker, into the bathroom; then change the bed, get the laundry in, find new pajamas, get her off the toilet, get her dressed, cheer her up, tuck her in … and make coffee for us. Annie’s alarm was set for five, and she was just getting up when I finished. So I’ve crossed a strange new rubicon now, into a twilight world where finding my my mother on the floor and fixing the nighttime mess just feels like another part of my day, a mundane routine like walking the dog or brushing my teeth: the new normal.

Still, bizarre things keep happening. After days of being unable to stand, my mother woke up in the middle of the night last week, certain she was all alone in the grand foyer of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, in our old neighborhood in Manhattan. She made her way to the top of the grand stairway and then decided she had to get outside to hail a cab. She walked across the whole downstairs of my little house, looking for a way out of the museum – I know this because I left my sneakers near the front door and she was wearing them when I found her: giant Reeboks on her tiny feet. She almost got the basement door open (that actual narrow stairway would have killed her) before she woke up enough to realize that she was at home. How did she do that? The basement door is hard for healthy young people to open. And why aren’t we figuring out some way to harness the over-riding power of that dream in her waking life?

I don’t know. No one knows. She can’t taste food but she loves to eat, she can’t move but she can tour the house in a dream. The people who know how to help her don’t seem overly interested and the people who care the most are helpless. Life is upside down but I’m getting used to walking on the ceiling, skirting the light fixtures and high- stepping the door jambs.

I haven’t been arrested for no reason, as Kafka described in The Trial. I haven’t been turned into an enormous roach and neither has my mother. I’m not spending my days trying to penetrate the faceless bureaucracy of The Castle—though it all sounds a little too familiar. I’m not living in Kafka’s world.

 But I’m starting to understand it.

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The Fire in the Barrens

My mother called me from inside her dream last night.

It wasn’t a psychic experience; she used her cell phone.

My own phone started ringing in the middle of the night. I lurched out of bed, panicked and disoriented. A call in those deep-sleep hours before dawn usually comes from the hospital, the police station or the morgue. This one came from the Pine Barrens in New Jersey, where my mother’s dream was happening.

“I need you to make some calls for me,” she said. She sounded strong and alert. I almost never hear that crisp diction and easy authority in her voice anymore, when she’s awake. It reminded me of my mother twenty years ago – a vibrant seventy-year-old with a busy schedule and a lot on her mind. The ninety-year-old Parkinson’s patient, fading away in the local nursing home?

No sign of her.

“What phone calls, Mom?” I managed. “It’s like two in the morning.”

“Well, I suppose you should call the film office first.”

“The film office?”

“Well, Frank seems to have disappeared and they might know where he’s gone or how to get in touch with him.”

“Frank? Who’s Frank?”

“Oh, sorry. He’s supposed to be handling the extras, keeping track of us, getting the porta-potties here. supplying us with water and snacks, making sure we’re on location when the director needs us. All that kind of thing.”

“Okay, hold on a second. Where are you exactly right now?”

“I’m sure we talked about this. I’m in the Pine Barrens. They’re making the holocaust movie and they had to do a controlled burn for this big sequence they’re shooting. But that’s what I’m worried about. This forest is a tinder box and I think the fire may be going wild. One of the extras is already suffering from smoke inhalation and another one – a very nice man – seems to have fainted. We’re doing our best to take care of them but really it’s Frank’s job and he’s nowhere to be found.”

Now I was fully awake. I was getting interested.

“Tell me about the movie,” I said.

“Well I’m not sure of the story, no one gets to see the script, but there’s obviously an escape involved, since this whole section is set in the woods. And the director is brilliant. Just brilliant. But also a little unstable. He’s always going off on tangents when he talks. He knows everything about film history, and he’s done his research on the period, but I’m not sure he’s on top of things right now. He’s out of control, Stevie, and no one’s really talking to anyone else. Very bad communications. That’s why I thought I should call you. Someone needs to co-ordinate things here.”

I told her to use the old Bob Hope trick of the mini-nap, so she could get some rest in case she had to do something strenuous later.

“Good idea,” she said, and hung up.

She’s been having these amazingly vivid dreams for several years now. Mostly she can’t remember them, but when she can, it’s very difficult for her to distinguish them from reality. We’ve all had that experience: dreaming a car crash and piecing together reality one fragment at a time after you wake up: I can move my legs, I’m my own bed, not a hospital, it was just a dream. Even so the dread can linger into the morning.

So my question is: what’s going on?

If I was a doctor this would be the total focus of my research. Some broken synapse gets circumvented when she’s asleep. Some short circuit gets corrected. She can walk. She can talk without slurring her words or getting lost in a sentence. It’s the same organic machine, the same bundle of nerves and muscles, but it works when she’s unconscious in ways she can only dream of when she’s awake. Doctors and scientists readily admit they have almost no understanding of brain function. The territory has never been explored and remains as mysterious as the bottom of the ocean or the inside of a Black Hole.

The men who created the electronic chip that ‘rewires’ Parkinson patients’ brains and relieves most of the symptoms have no idea how or why it works. They discovered it by accident. Their genius was following the accident and exploring the ramifications of the unexpected. But they remain basically clueless and their awed humility in the face of these mysteries is both impressive and discouraging.

Something extraordinary is going on in the deep recesses of my mother’s mind, some eccentric nightly miracle, and no one has the faintest idea what it is. I know I can’t figure it out. All I can do it send a tiny plea and a rallying call for the men and women doing brain research and trying to find a cure for Parkinson’s.

The cure was in the Pine Barrens last night.

But the director was out of control.

 —Steven Axelrod

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Steven Axelrod holds an MFA in Writing from Vermont College of the Fine Arts and remains a member of the Writers Guild of America (west), despite a long absence from Hollywood. In addition to his frequent contributions to Numéro Cinq, Steven’s work has appeared at Salon.com and The GoodMen Project, and the magazines PulpModern and BigPulp. A father of two, he lives on Nantucket Island.

Tom Tykwer’s “Faubourg Saint-Denis” tells the story of a moment of confusion between two lovers, Francine and Thomas (played by Natalie Portman and Melchior Beslon) where, briefly, the man thinks things are over and the relationship flashes before his eyes. The voice-over addresses the beloved in the second person, a love letter the audience intercepts, and the breathless montage recounts the varied history of these two lovers. It’s a love story of all the small moments, the screams, the tears, the laughs, the repetition of days.

It’s an excessive discourse that recalls other excessive expressions of passion: Elizabeth Smart’s By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept. Marguerite Duras’s The Lover. And yet, in its passion and direct address, its lovely claustrophobia, maybe more accurately Pablo Neruda’s Captain’s Verses.

The film is intimate, excessive, and yet made up of an abundance of small moments that on their own might be insignificant. It’s the repetition of these small moments that makes up the pattern of the couple’s days, the accumulation of memories that shapes the intimacy here. As their history flashes by, the repetitions layer like a palimpsest, the images becoming part of a larger passionate body. “I see you,” says Thomas at the end of the film, as though this were only possible through the crisis and remembering he has just experienced.

Such passionate expression requires a talented hand. It’s difficult to distill so much dramatic history down into a short film without lapsing into melodrama or without drama turning into comedy. Tykwer seems to meta-comment on this here with the film within the film, the cheesy pimp and prostitute story that Francine stars in. When she calls Thomas back to figure out why he hung up, Francine asks him, “How are you supposed to say [it]  . . . without sounding completely melodramatic?”

Their story avoids melodrama through montage and the pure adrenalin of the piece. This is in a sense the polar opposite of the Wong Kar Wai offering a few weeks ago: where Wong lingers and hangs all granite gravity on an image in slow motion, Tykwer races past images like a water slide of vodka.

“Faubourg Saint-Denis” is one of the eighteen short films featured in Paris, je t’aime, an anthology of short films by several significant directors, each set in a different arrondissement of Paris. Other directors in the project include Gus Van Sant, Richard LaGravenese, The Cohen Brothers, Alfonso Cuaron, and Alexander Payne.

Tykwer has masterly told passionate tales before, matching star-struck and tortured romances with a sort of fairy tale sensibility: the questions of fate, free will and running in Run Lola Run; the innocence and violence of The Princess and the Warrior; the dark, damaged passion of Perfume: The Story of a Murderer.

Tykwer, with The Matrix’s Wachowskis,  is adapting and directing David Mitchell’s novel Cloud Atlas for the big screen (it’s listed as currently in post production).

–R. W. Gray

Here are the opening paragraphs of a new story just published at The Literarian, the magazine at the Center for Fiction in New York. The story invented itself late last fall when I happened to stop at a Barnes and Noble in Colonie and discovered huge walls of books categorized as PARANORMAL ROMANCE (see photo above taken by NC Contributor Cheryl Cowdy). This was a completely new literary genre to me—you can tell I don’t get out much. But it seemed very popular. I thought, I can write one of those. So I did.

Read the rest of the story at The Literarian, link below.

Also, if you’re in New York on March 14, come to my craft talk at the Center for Fiction (see the link at the bottom of the story).

dg

Everything Starts at a Bookstore

I was supposed to meet Zoe for lunch at a chic Parisian restaurant she had discovered on the Internet, a crucial rendezvous during which I intended to propose marriage, but I was running late. A fierce, cold rain lashed down suddenly as I bounded up the Metro steps, rain as I had never experienced before. It drove me back into the underground, where dozens of African Parisians discussed the weather in languages other than French. I glanced at my watch and leaped up the stairs again, blinded by the torrents of rain.

Wind whipped the leafless plane trees along the avenue. I spotted a flower shop and ducked in, thinking to buy a bouquet for my love. But I must have slipped through the wrong door, for I found myself in a neat, closet-like secondhand bookstore with dark oak shelves marching back toward an ancient desk fortified with parapets of leather-bound tomes. I hovered, dripping in the doorway, loathe to enter and perhaps spatter some valuable books with water but also reluctant to dive back into the deluge. I wiped rainwater off my watch face, frantic with vexation and indecision. I naturally blamed all my troubles on the Parisians, their precious City of Light, and Zoe’s love of travel, which I did not share.

via The Literarian at The Center for Fiction.