All that is left is everything that came before you, before all that you knew and all that they knew. All that is left is the rock and the fire and the loamy decay, the powder of stone and the powder of knowledge. All that is left is the space between there and the there you will never reach. All that is left is the space owned by the invisible.
Now, at the end of your week in the world you have nothing left but the invisible to love you. You have nothing left but the sigh of the empty and this unknown world’s forgotten gaze. You have nothing left but the desperation under the tongue and the eagerness in the palm. You have nothing left but what you have no voice for, however wide you open your mouth and work the exhausted muscles of your throat.
For at last you have arrived at nothing, understand that nothing binds these threads of flesh together, that nothing holds nerve to bone or gives direction to your vanishing blood. Yours is a religion and a politics of nothing, and you find you have nothing left to say.
APHASIC WORLD SYNDROME
The cats had climbed onto the outside of the house again. Alex stopped to count them—he didn’t understand how he could know this, but he believed their numbers were a more precise indication of his condition than any of the multitude of tests his doctors had performed. He stopped at 127, too depressed to continue. They made an exact accounting difficult anyway—they were in constant movement, digging their claws into the weathered planks with each step, sending slivers and chunks of house raining down onto the lawn below. When they howled—usually singly or in pairs, but occasionally gathering together for a chorus of group complaint—they irritated his own fragile ductwork, so that he was forced to conduct his daily chores in tears.
He made his way down the runway to mail the prayers he had gathered into his arms: sad, orphaned prayers he had sung during spare moments, now ready to sail into other households where they would torture the sleeping inhabitants with paper cuts. Sadness turned to anger quickly in this day and age, so who was he to tell his prayers their indiscriminate violence was wrong? At least he would soon have them safely out of the house.
At the end of the runway waited the eager birdhouse. He rolled up each prayer tightly and stuffed it into the tiny round hole, increasingly excited as the displaced birds flew out and peeked into his ears. There the yellow candles burned, filling his head with smoke.
Once all his prayers were safely inside the bird house, Alex raised the small white flag of surrender so that the mail carrier would know he had been thoroughly defeated, and his prayers were ready to be picked up and sent on to their eventual assassinations.
All the cats had come down from the house and now gathered at the base of the birdhouse, waiting to capitalize on any avian mistakes. The howling winds on their grand bicycles regaled him with tails of mice and men.
It suddenly occurred to him that in all his doctors’ speeches not once had aphasia been mentioned as a possible symptom of his favorite, sweet disease. But he was on a diet in any case and had no time for demise.
Besides, he had never been good with words. Chopping each one down had been such hard work he’d finally switched his giant screaming baby to coal.
But what if the problem wasn’t his? Perhaps it was the world itself that had captured illness, and instead of constantly speaking the wrong word (for the world is largely mute, no matter how much you flatter it), the glory of its aphasia was that it kept bringing forth out of its nervous womb the wrong object, the incorrect animal, the mistaken human being desperate with amnesia.
But Alex was certainly no mathematician or rogue milkman of the dreamlands. He was hovel born, his mother a cello falling down a forgotten staircase, his father an unemployed cigarette embalmer.
He was no vacuum cleaner to refinish the world—he could hardly polish his own toes.
But something had to be done. The cats had stretched out his tongue and were now playing it with their tiny bows, making a music so apologetic he might cry himself awake.
DECEMBER
The snow accumulated slowly over several weeks. No more than an inch fell in any one evening, but the best efforts of those in charge were ineffective at removing the snow the following day. The best efforts of a brilliant and uncompromising December sun were equally useless. Each night while the city slept the snow drifted down, almost imperceptibly, like a slow fall of white dust, the powder of a dream shoved against the saw blade of consciousness. And it was so cold, despite that bright sun, that the powder stayed, collected, and grew to a phenomenal depth of numbing whiteness.
Once they realized what was happening to their city, the people became alarmed, of course. Those who remained in charge were chastised for faulty preparation. Plans and strategies were devised and adopted. Promises were made. Programs were implemented. And still the slow snow accumulated. With no end in sight.
As those who pretended still to be in charge talked and studied, shouted and divided, the people of that city—singly, then collectively—eventually accepted both the cold and the depth of this December snow. Businesses closed as employees stopped showing up for work. Downed power and phone lines went unrepaired. Families gathered around and smashed their TVs. People whispered to each other in the dark at their dinner tables. Parents made up new and startling tales to reveal to their children at bedtime.
It was during this time that those who used to be in charge—out wandering the empty streets with shovels in their hands—began discovering the bodies.
The bodies were cold and well preserved. Further investigation demonstrated that they had been dead for a very long time. The bodies were those of men and women, parents and grandparents, but outnumbering all of these by a vast quantity were the bodies of the children. Thousands of children, faces immobilized, thoughts frozen in mid-formulation. Stuck behind trees, cradled in frosted bushes, stacked along the streets like earth-filled sacks damming a flood. No attempt had been made to hide their bodies. Their small still forms lay scattered like indecision.
Those who hoped one day to be in charge again searched their records carefully: none of the families of these parents and grandparents, none of the mothers and fathers of these countless sweet-faced dead children had reported them missing.
All out of procedures, those who were again in charge (if only of a few thousand unreported dead) refrigerated the bodies until the issue could be studied further.
During the next month the temperature rose almost imperceptibly, a degree or so each day. The snow melted. The people of the city gradually grew less inclined to sleep and dream.
In the high offices of those again comfortably in charge, the officials waited for the phone calls of alarmed citizens seeking their loved ones. No phone calls ever came.
Life in the city returned to normal. Businesses reopened. Voices rose above a whisper.
And all over the city they were again being murdered: the dozens, the hundreds, the thousands. Those in charge never found any bodies, and, even if they had, they would have discovered no wounds.
THE MASK CHILD
The Puppets: Tall, thin, stylized: think Japanese Noh, think Greek tragedy. The tallest of these figures is THE MASK CHILD. Either use two versions for child and adult or construct a puppet that grows. Through the progress of the play the Mask Child wears a bewildering succession of masks over the puppet head. The masks he wears as a child are much larger than the ones he wears as an adult, with the exception of the Baby Mask which is small-featured, delicate. A few of these masks are described in the text—have fun with the rest. His drapery (clothing) suggests that the body hidden beneath is “different.” It consists of uneven stripes with odd corners, lines that do not meet, clashing colors. The PARENTS behave as one unit, a chorus. In fact, one puppet will do: two heads and two torsos, draped in complementary clothing, joined at the hip. The NARRATOR has a long face and beard. He wears a robe similar to that which a judge might wear. The BOYS is a chorus of adolescent boys—see their introduction into the play for more description. The GIRLS is a similar chorus of adolescent girls. The TUTOR has long hair, dark robes, and a wizard’s pointed cap.