Stage Directions

Lars embarks into the room. Paul is on the couch with his computer. Lars speaks to his cell phone. He doesn’t know what he’s doing for the game. He just woke up. He puts the phone down and down he goes on the couch.

Paul to the kitchen making coffee. He leaps in the air then leans intensely on the fridge.

“Wait that’s fucking crazy!”

Paul brings Lars a cup of coffee and sits by his computer. “That’s fucking crazy. That’s what that dream was; I dreamt this when I was sixteen.”

“What did you dream?”

“I had a dream with Lars and there was something about football. And I was doing just what I’m doing now.”

“What living here?”

“No working on a web site like I am here or something with trees and branches just like on this screen. And then Lars and the Super Bowl or something football.”

Lars is laughing.

Paul says: “Do you want pancakes.”

Lars waits. “I mean I would eat pancakes if you made them but I don’t really care if I have pancakes.”

“Okay well I’m going to make pancakes.” He begins to mix pancakes.

Lars lies on the couch. He is in sweatpants and loose sweatshirt. Paul moves in the kitchen in slippers. He goes to the sink.

“I came home from that party last night and crushed like 15 cockroaches here. I pounded them here. One after the other. I think I woke Ken. It’s fucking nasty.”

“Bump Bump,” Lars says. “Had to murder ‘em. Ken was here?”

“He was sleeping. Here since you’re going to have some pancakes do you mind doing the dishes while I cook?”

“See that’s why I’m not that invested in the pancakes. I would enjoy them but I don’t want to have to move all that much now.”

“I just remember having a big breakfast with many roommates and everyone working together on the meal.”

“I know I would like that too but it’s that for now I can’t get so involved. I have to sit here for a bit. I don’t even care if I eat for a few hours this early. Here I’ll wash just the things, the pans for you to grill on.”

Lars goes to the sink.

“You had that dream last night?”

“When I was sixteen.”

“I was in your dream when you were sixteen?”

Lars is laughing. They eat.

“Ken seems better right?”

“Maybe I don’t know.”

“But he’s like in a better mood it seems. He’s not as angry or listless. He joked with Lucas about Richard’s work on the golf course. And we all talked about the environment at MoMA.”

“He stills seems like a bit of a guest here.”

“He’s done with the chemo now though. Isn’t he? Now he can do things. I expect everything will be cool soon.”

“What makes you think he’s in a better mood?”

”Just when I saw him the other day, the first time after he got back, when you were recording. He seemed more engaged. More interested in what happens now. I was going to say something but I haven’t had a chance to speak with you yet.”

“I’ve been going to Tommy’s to play music more often. I don’t want to disturb Ken too much. You can hear everything through that wall between our rooms.”

They quit the food. Light a joint.

“Yeah I bet. I was going to move my typewriter from right by that wall. I figure if I’m going to use it it’s going to include late at night. And the head of his bed is right there.”

“There’s something unsettling about Ken. I feel odd wearing his slippers.”

“After he moved in before, before he left, he started showing Richard and I these paintings he was making on packaging plastic and he was saying how much he thought they sucked and it was just a piece of shit for now but he’s just trying it out and so on.”

“When I told him about the work I’m doing for the web site he was like you mean you accepted a job you weren’t qualified for?”

“Really? But I thought he didn’t seem as grouchy this time.”

“I thought it was strange. At the gallery even yesterday and then he just came back and watched videos, didn’t want to come see the party at all.”

“What was the party like?”

”It was only okay. Not that many girls. And April’s friend didn’t come. I just got really stoned.”

Here comes Ken through the door. The boys offer the joint. Ken won’t have it.

“What girl?”

“This tall beautiful girl Lebanese or something. We were talking two nights ago, April’s friend.”

Ken stands at the approach to the room. He wears a small hat over his skull and narrow jeans.

“By the time I came back there wasn’t anybody anywhere,” says Lars.

“Yeah your phone message was really funny. Especially the part about the latest edition of us at 3. Here listen to this:”

Paul holds his phone. It says:

YO PAUL WHAT’S UP WHAT’S UP I’M JUST CALLING
TO SEE IF YOU’RE STILL OUT AND ABOUT OR MAYBE
YOU’RE TRYING TO GET A GOOD NIGHTS SLEEP LIKE
MOST AMERICANS IN ANTICIPATION OF THE SUPER BOWL.
IT’S LIKE 6 IN THE MORNING AND I’M WALKING
AWAY FROM WORK. MAYBE YOU’RE STILL PARTYING TOO HARD
TO HEAR THE PHONE RING AND IF SO CALL BACK.
BUT I’M NEARLY IN THE TRAIN STATION. THE MAIN
THING THAT HAPPENED TONIGHT WAS
I ACCIDENTALLY GAVE YOUR PHONE NUMBER TO
THIS FAT BLACK GIRL AT THE BAR. I MEAN
I GAVE IT TO HER ON PURPOSE BUT I WAS TRYING
TO GIVE HER A FAKE NUMBER AND I ACCIDENTALLY
GAVE HER YOURS. SHE WAS CRAZY. BOMBAYED
SHE SAID CAUSE SHE WAS DRINKING BOMBAY SAPPHIRE
AND SHE WANTS TO WATCH THE SUPER BOWL
WITH ME TOMORROW. SHE LIKES THE EAGLES.
SO SHE MIGHT CALL YOU. I THOUGHT I’D WARN YOU
BECAUSE IF SHE DOES DON’T TELL HER
YOU’RE MY ROOMMATE OR SHE WONT STOP CALLING.
ANYWAY SORRY ABOUT THAT. I UH UH WELL
WHAT’S UP WITH YOUR NIGHT? DID YOU MAKE OUT WITH GIRLS?
DID DEVIOUS SEMANTICS PLAY? DID YOU EVEN GO
TO THAT PARTY? I’M GOING TO CALL YOU AGAIN IN CASE
THE MUSIC IS TOO LOUD OTHERWISE I SUPPOSE ALL THAT
AND MORE ON THE NEXT EPISODE OF LARS AND PAUL
WAKE UP AT 3 IN THE AFTERNOON. PEACE OUT

Lars is smiling. Ken smiles and stands in the approach.

Lars begins setting a chessboard.

“Is a big black woman going to call me?”

“Maybe. I gave her your number.”

“I’m going to give the phone to you.”

“Ken do you play chess?”

“I know the rules. Are you any good?”

“Yes. I usually beat Paul. I haven’t played Richard yet.”

“I don’t like games where if you figure out a certain technique you can just win it.”

“Chess isn’t really like that. Someone who knows some strategy has an advantage but there’s no key to winning like tic tac toe. It’s more like football.”

“I think the field is too small and the motions too restrained. It’s formulaic.”

“It’s not though; the basic principles are central control and covering angles. But the best results come from unpredictable play.”

“I don’t like it.”

Paul says: “Where are you coming back from Ken?”

“Oh I left early and decided to go outside for a while longer. I was having a hard time sleeping. I feel fatigued but I have a kind of itchy nervous reservoir of energy I can’t relax. And I could hear the music from down the hall all night. I was miserable. I was having a tough time and I finally slept.

“Then Paul’s phone started beating.

“It bumped for a while. I couldn’t sleep. I left my bed and tried to eat a sandwich I had from yesterday but I had no appetite. I walked outside. It was light already and warm but I had misery in my eyes and it was on the walls of the neighborhood.

“The dirty mounds of snow between the sidewalk and the street were melting and flooding toward the intersection. Humped on the edge of the curb they were flat in the light, greyish brown and falling into dark puddles, or channels really, heading down the street. The water was like in caves, almost loud as an echo, but everything else grew light and opened up. Everything else caught the new sunlight and relayed it.

“Kids were up early, tossing a football across the street by the driveway. Splashing errantly in the wet delta of the driveway. They wore bundles like snails but it wasn’t cold. I passed those kids. Like I say the walls of the street were bright but miserable, like a misery of desertification, a slow emigration of rooted life and with it tendrils keeping the landscape from disintegrating.

“I crossed Brooklyn and as the day grew I saw more and more people in the streets. Families went to church. I saw Puerto Rican grandmothers herding children. Black men and women lined Graham Avenue to enter a chapel there. Everywhere was warm and snow disappeared with the people heading to church. But it was so early I seldom saw a car. Everywhere was quiet even with the people. Over by Havermeyer gangs of Hassids, children in uniforms and curls, walked broadly by. I followed the rapid melting streams to the river.

“There is a kind of feeling I get sometimes and I don’t think its something I’ve had just you know in the recent time, where if I’m walking its as if trees or bushes keep striking me in the face and across the chest, and winding up my legs. I don’t really feel the pain like that, like a whip or scrape in the face, but it’s like the annoyance, the disturbance of branches reaching across and wrapping me up, a kind of auric bramble. And if I have always felt that I’ve been made aware of it by this thing, I think. And it’s not just when I’m moving but that interfering reaching at me, getting in my way, even when I sit down or stand in the kitchen. But here I was walking between all these old storage yards, warehouses, shiphouses, sheds. Sticklike trees punching out of corners in fences and where the walls met the cement. The street was wet with the flowing snow but the walk and the trees, branches, the corners of walls, the buildings were dry with the winter. Drowned and dried out. These trees were scrappy, weedlike, reaching from cracks. Rooted in cracks, a cracked shell of a city. And I was reminded, even as I felt it still in my mind, of the feeling of those branches halting me.

“The trickles of water disappeared as the roadway disappeared into the fragments of stones and bricks at the edge where the water reappeared as the dark deep river. The branches were upon me as I pushed my way past a wire fence but there were no more real trees here, just yellow grass out of the mud leaning at the river.

“I hopped along the wet broken beach, the glass and block beach.

“I stood on some damp pile, leapt onto old dock planks. Fighting the branches. My sneakers sunk lightly into the soil-soaked woodwork. Snows had left their deposits and rejoined the river. I was a fiber of ice, a crystal of water, held in place by a wrecked bough from the earth. The landscape will be carried off, bright and miserable. I touched my hat on my head.

“The ecology of dry land, surveying the place because the place is a niche to fill, is an ecology of defragmentation. The land is swept from above and excavated below by man or crooked water, undermined, brought back into the water. Like computer files. Whole grain to grain alcohol. Everything consumable, the carboniferous world broadcasts like digital music, amplified by its reducibility. Those godlike tentacles don’t reach to the water as I’d thought; they are from the water pulling into the deep. Cast out like Super Bowl advertising. Exploding like a tumor and then wrung out like a narcotized mind. The soaked detritus drains to the deep. The deep atomic core.

“I wept.

“I dove in, splashing water to the shore. Everything fills above me.”