by Craig Lucas
MARIANNE: And we’re supposed to forget that he threw broken appliances at mirrors and stabbed the kiddie pool with a knife when some neighbor kid had peed in it and he was “sick of it goddamn it, what’s the point of fighting all the time working I’m sick of / life!”
BILLY: Okay, enough.
TAD: God.
MARIANNE: Why do you think we never had anyone over?
TAD: You always had those little flecks in your eyes, yellow and orange, like a cat. I bet you lick like a cat.
KAREN: Tad?
TAD: Uh-huh? I’m fine for now, thanks.
(Karen walks away.)
MARIANNE: You look exactly the same.
TAD: I do?
MARIANNE: Doesn’t he?
TAD: You look better.
MARIANNE: Oh, I don’t think you noticed me back then.
TAD: Are you kidding me?
MARIANNE: No.
TAD: I asked you to the prom.
MARIANNE: No, you didn’t.
TAD: I did.
BILLY: He did.
MARIANNE: You did?
AUSTIN: I think he did.
MARIANNE: You all remember that? . . . No, you didn’t!
TAD: Okay.
MARIANNE: You did?
TAD: You went with Gerard.
MARIANNE: I married Gerard.
TAD: Oh.
BILLY: You divorced Gerard.
MARIANNE: I divorced Gerard.
TAD: Good. He was kind of an—
MARIANNE: No, we’re friends.
TAD: Oh.
MARIANNE: He’s okay.
TAD: Yeah, I liked him, okay.
(Pause.)
AUSTIN: They have a kid.
TAD: Oh.
BILLY: Don’t spoil it.
MARIANNE: NOOO!
BILLY: It’s finally working out, can’t you see all of what we went through, it’s finally straightening out and they’re going to be happy and Tad and I and all of us can be friends, we can be a family, and if I for any reason I don’t come back she’ll have someone to replace everything she’s lost already and protect her from you too don’t you see that?
AUSTIN: He’s in a home.
MARIANNE: You wanna just speak for me?
AUSTIN: Well, he was wondering, I’m sure.
MARIANNE: Were you?
AUSTIN: Yes he was. I’m sorry I’m a lunk a lughead, things just come marching out of my mouth, I can’t stop them. —Autistic.
TAD: Yeah?
(Short pause.)
BILLY: He’s very beautiful.
MARIANNE: He’s very beautiful.
TAD: What’s his name?
AUSTIN: Anthony. Tony.
MARIANNE: Tony.
BILLY: He’s six.
TAD: What exactly is autism?
MARIANNE: Well, funny you should ask, because no one really knows, they think it might be, well, all kinds of things . . .
AUSTIN: My fault.
MARIANNE: . . . but it could be congenital—
(Karen returns with drinks and snacks.)
AUSTIN: That’s where I come in, my mental illness.
MARIANNE: He doesn’t really respond to love or touch, he’s in his own world he can’t function in class.
AUSTIN: It runs in my family.
MARIANNE: Go to school.
AUSTIN: I’m bipolar.
TAD: Ah.
KAREN: You’re not mentally ill.
AUSTIN: That’s why I drank. To take the edge off. (To Karen, without stopping) What do you think it is if not a mental illness?
MARIANNE: They think it
KAREN: It’s a condition—an
could also be caused by
allergy.
something as simple as
inoculations, / something
AUSTIN: No, alcoholism is an
they use—
allergy. (To Tad) That’s what
I say if—That’s what I say
when somebody, whenever
TAD: I’ve heard that.
anybody offers me a drink.
(To Austin) Uh- / huh.
MARIANNE: Uh- / huh—
AUSTIN: “I’m allergic,” I can’t. If I drink, I break out in handcuffs.
(Everybody laughs.)
They’ve all heard that—
MARIANNE: I haven’t.
AUSTIN: But— No? I tell people I’ve used up all the drinks a guy gets allotted for one lifetime, we all get a certain amount . . .
TAD: Uh-huh.
AUSTIN: . . . and I’ll tell you, though, this disease doesn’t just want to slow me down . . .
TAD: Uh-huh.
AUSTIN: . . . it doesn’t want my house, my family, my credit cards, total my car, this disease wants me dead.
TAD: Uh-huh.
AUSTIN: Underground.
TAD: Right.
AUSTIN: It wants me stone-cold done.
TAD: Uh-huh.
AUSTIN: Rotting meat.
TAD: Yeah.
MARIANNE: We get it.
AUSTIN: That’s how insidious it is. I’m filled with gratitude. That’s what being sober has done for me. I’m blessed with a son, a beautiful kid— And God will protect him, I know. A marvelous daughter, both of them individuals in their own right—
MARIANNE: Thank you.
AUSTIN: —a daughter who puts me to shame with her strength and clarity, don’t pooh-pooh me, a loving, endlessly giving wife, they have all given me more than I could possibly ever deserve—
KAREN: Sh.
AUSTIN: I’ve put them through hell, I have. You can’t shut me up. I do, I thank God every day, I hit my knees first and last thing, for this second chance. I didn’t deserve it, but . . .
(Short pause.)
MARIANNE: We did.
AUSTIN: I don’t ever want to go back.
Scene 5
Dolores alone.
DOLORES: Well, my mom had another stroke. She felt it coming on and kept ringing, I feel awful. Worse still, I called 911 and got that ridiculous recording, “Your call is important to us, please stay on the line.” I bundled her up in the car and took her to the emergency room, she’s in overnight, at the most two days, it was another tiny one, her vision blacks-out, but she’s still awake. Charles wants to put her in a full-time “facility.” For Christ’s sake, she reads, watches TV; she can cook if I put the cutting board across her wheelchair, she loves to try new things. Last night we were cooking Mexican. Without the chilies. We walk the driveway, she wheels herself . . . And there is no more beautiful time of year than this—the leaves pouring down like feathers from huge unseen flying birds migrating across the sun, so many burnt umbers and oranges and blood, blood reds. Plum colored. The oaks hold on to their leaves the longest, I remember that, even in the shivering bleak cold. That’s mother and me, our last holding on. Yes, she can be the world’s most gigantic pill, as Charles says, but . . . she’s come all this way, through decades, not to mention my dad. I’m the only one now. My sister is way upstate in her—not ashram, silent order: Nuns, Buddhist nuns in Albany, New York, that’s like having, I don’t know, Kurdish rebels in—Cleveland. But it’s just as well she’s silent. But mother is quite comfortable. And this is the house I grew up in. Listen:
(Silence.)
That’s all you ever hear. A creak when the heat comes up, a corresponding creak when it goes off. I love this house. There is such a sense of . . . fit. You’d think I’d find it oppressive, but . . . I’m less lonely here than I—would be, was, back there, will be again, all too soon. Charles really can’t leave the city and I can’t see how we can be together if I don’t live with him, and I love him— Well, people have many worse problems than this one. But for now I’m getting a little respite, and, oh, for god’s sake, we’ve been sleeping together for seven years. (Pause) It isn’t that Charles is— The sun doesn’t rise and set in his eyes, let’s put it that way, he’s a human being. He didn’t, doesn’t quite . . . hang the moon. But he’s very responsible and works ha
rd and he’s not an a-hole, which in the city, listen, that’s more than you might think. To find someone who—especially if you’re not nineteen and a micro-neurosurgeon. I started as one of his secretaries at the hospital, he used to be chief of the department. We went out, anyway . . . he’s good people.
Scene 6
Billy, Tad and Marianne are together in the backyard, lighting up, smoking a joint.
TAD: What’s with the elephants?
BILLY: A lotta people came.
MARIANNE: D’ja think they wouldn’t?
BILLY: You know he doesn’t talk like that, that’s all memorized from documentaries; his father couldn’t read. He perseverates.
MARIANNE: Tony . . . does the same thing, but with movies.
TAD: Uh-huh. Perseverate.
MARIANNE: Uh-huh.
BILLY: With Dad it’s either elephants or the Yankees.
MARIANNE: Oh, yeah, don’t even say that word.
TAD: Okay. “Yankees”?
MARIANNE: He can tell you who played the woman in the toll-booth—
BILLY: Tony.
MARIANNE: Tony, in a chase scene where a car goes crashing through—
BILLY: She doesn’t even have to have a close-up.
MARIANNE: He knows her name, what other movies she was in . . .
TAD: Mm-hm.
MARIANNE: . . . if she’s still alive.
BILLY (Sees): Fireflies.
TAD: I’d like to meet Tony.
BILLY: You should.
MARIANNE: Okay.
BILLY (Getting up): Anybody want?
(Head shakes. Billy moves toward the house. Tad lies back, staring up at the sky.)
MARIANNE: Are you cold?
(Tad shakes his head no.)
TAD: Are you?
(Marianne shakes her head no.)
TAD: Good f[ood]—
MARIANNE: Billy—
MARIANNE: Oh, sorry.
TAD: No.
MARIANNE: Billy joined the reserves, Dad goes: “Great, throw your life away for nothing, oil.”
TAD: Uh-huh.
MARIANNE: Billy says something like, “Tell me you don’t feel something for kids fighting for you getting killed over in—” and Dad’s like, “You don’t know anybody over there.”
TAD: Uh-huh.
MARIANNE: What were you gonna say?
TAD: Oh, I don’t . . . Oh doesn’t it seem strange . . . that of all the times it could be, from the beginning of the universe, let’s say time isn’t infinite, let’s say that it’s only a couple of hundred trillion years it’s all here, then nothing . . . That’s still a lot of time. If it could be any little slice of time—
MARIANNE: Yes.
TAD: —any eighty-year slice in all that time—what are the odds—
MARIANNE: Right.
TAD: —that it would be this slice—
MARIANNE: Yes yes.
TAD: —of time that we happen to be alive in . . .
MARIANNE: Uh-huh.
TAD: You’ve thought this?
MARIANNE: Oh, sure.
TAD: I’ve tried to explain this to so many people and they never know what I’m getting at.
MARIANNE: No?
TAD: Doesn’t it just seem pretty amazing . . .
MARIANNE: Uh-huh.
TAD: . . . that it just happens to be right now—
MARIANNE: Yes.
TAD: —and not during the dinosaurs—
MARIANNE: Absolutely.
TAD: —or a billion years from now when neither of us would be here, it’s now, it’s right now, in all that vast expanse of time, this is the moment in time it actually is.
MARIANNE: I still can’t go to the prom with you.
(Pause.)
TAD: We’ll find something to do.
Scene 7
Dolores alone.
DOLORES: Coming back from the hospital, I stopped at the G&K deli, it’s been there forever, the same couple running it—
(At the same time, Karen begins to get ready for bed, she washes her face, flosses, etc.)
I’ve never known their first names, the point is that the wife, Mrs. Noone, always smiles and says hello, recognizing me, which is what’s missing in the city. Even if you see the same people over dozens of years, they still act as if you are a threat to their well-being. And is that any place to raise kids? It’s fun to drive here, the lakes and the endless woods, serene—
(The sounds of a nature program on public television. Austin kneels by the bed. He prays. But his attention is drawn to the program, the subject of which is naked mole rats.)
Our property even butts up against state park, the Appalachian trail is a thousand feet from the house! But Charles’s practice is down there, shrinking heads, unearthing unconscious desires, he makes a pile and he loves what he does, whereas I can do what I do anywhere on Earth. Which is nothing. I mean, I have held down half a dozen jobs over the last fifteen years, but they all seem to be exercises in existential futility: Companies that provide some obscure service, returning profits to unseen people in expensive homes one never gets invited to. I’ve learned every single word-processing system, computer programming, technological whatever, I can work any phone system with my toes while juggling memos and smiling through the worst nastiness, but why should I have to? Why shouldn’t I live like regular people?
KAREN (To Austin): Are you going to stay up?
DOLORES: Charles won’t even consider Brooklyn, that’s how Manhattan-centric he is. He has his office in the ground-floor space, he has half a brownstone. I’ve always kept my own eeeny little walkup, and now, with the wedding, we’re moving in, oh blah blah blah. Oh, I should get back before visiting hours end, though that’s another thing, they don’t really care. They don’t have all their rules crammed up their asses like—
(Austin and Karen have both gotten into bed. Karen kisses Austin and turns off her light, rolls away from him. The TV light plays on Austin’s face.)
One day, New York City has alternate side of the street parking, right? This was back when Charles had the car, so I’m in charge of parking—nice to have a full-time servant, isn’t it? I’m waiting for the street cleaner, finally he comes, goes by, and that’s another thing: they arrive with this enormous worthless piece of junk that spews dirty water all over everyone and everything, stinking up the atmosphere and leaving the street just as filthy, but now all the shit is wet—that’s cleaning the streets in Manhattan—so I re-park the car, get out, and this cop on a mini-toy joke bike, which represents his genitals, I suppose, gives me a ticket! I say, “The street has already been cleaned.” He says, “Read the sign.” “Oh, come on, that’s so they can clean the street, and they have.” He says, “I don’t make the laws.” I wanted to say, “You don’t make sense either, and I pay your fucking salary so you can give me tickets for things that aren’t hurting anybody, what the fuck is your job anyway, asshole, you think a uniform is a substitute for brains or integrity?” But who needs to get arrested, have you ever seen a holding pen in New York City? They put you in with murderers, no toilets, lock the doors, and go out to lunch on YOUR nickel. I’ll take the suburbs. Give me banality before brutality. Any day.
AUSTIN (Still staring at the TV): They lose all their hair and their eyesight; their whole life is lived underground. Look how cute.
Scene 8
Tad speaks with Billy by phone; half of Billy’s head is covered with a bandage.
TAD: We miss you, man. Your dad’s got me praying and I don’t even believe in God!
BILLY: Is anybody on the line?
TAD: What do you mean?
BILLY: Is anybody listening?
TAD: No. Why?
BILLY: I saw him.
TAD: Who?
BILLY: God. I saw God and I saw Satan and I saw past time and this universe, can I tell you, will you just listen?
TAD: What do you mean you saw / God?
BILLY: Okay. Okay, so . . . don’t tell anybody, okay?
TAD: Okay.
/>
BILLY: You know I never believed in any of that shit. But okay. Something happened . . . I’ll tell you in a letter—
TAD: What?
BILLY: —that’s not the important part—the important part is I lost consciousness—
TAD: What happened?
BILLY: I’m okay. I was hit. I got shrapnel in my eye, they got it out.
TAD: Jesus.
BILLY: I’m gonna be a hundred percent.
TAD: Come home, tell ’em you can’t see, lie, come on. Nobody thinks you’re a coward if you lie, nobody thinks you’re not brave or not masculine nobody thinks any of that shit.
BILLY: I could hear and see things, but they were like, I could see through them. I saw that white light everybody talks about and I went into it and past it. I died—and the first thing I realized was, I mean I could see it, this is what God is: There are an infinite number of universes—and time, which we’re programmed to perceive—is no more real than anything else— Are you there?
TAD: Yeah yeah.
BILLY: I’m telling you something, it’s true, this is all real—
TAD: I’m listening.
(Marianne enters.)
MARIANNE: Let me say hi.
BILLY: But things, things that happen here: We’re creating them more than we know, okay, listen, please God—
TAD: What?
BILLY: Every fraction of a second the universe splits off into infinite possibilities—ones where I don’t drop out, or you and I can grow up to be married to each other, I’m not saying—
TAD: I’m listening, hey.
(Marianne tries to listen in, but Tad moves her away: “Hang on.”)
BILLY: It’s all choice, okay, and I was even starting to decompose, stuffing my hands into the soil, and I tried to stand and I realized that there is nothing substantial about the body, I threw myself on a bush with strong branches and I passed through it, first the branches stung like hell and then I just let go, I let my body go—
TAD: Uh-huh.
BILLY: Right through it. You know how we have consciousness? We’re always moving a little bit forward and a little bit back, we conceive of everything in terms of then and now, and that’s an illusion! A seizure is just rapid moving between then and now, then and now—