The Ledge

THE LEDGE

Part 1

EXT. CHRISTMAS MARKET

A man stands alone in a noisy crowd, his head raised slightly above those around him. He stares flatly ahead, his mouth closed and straight. The wide crowd around him are babbling but he cannot discern any conversation as they cut across each other in a web of noise.

The crowd falls out of focus. The ocean of noise gradually becomes muted and his own voice comes forward in clarity.

MAN

It has been this way for years. I cannot solve my biggest problem.

The world doesn't react to my touch. It is as if I am behind the glass. I don't touch anyone and nobody touches me. What happens to me doesn't depend on me. I'm at the mercy of the hand. It is only by its whim that I come into the world to touch something, until just as suddenly it pulls me back, even in the middle of a breath. In my world there may be silence for twenty years and a waterfall for five minutes. In that five minutes a life screams, being born. But then – silence again. Whatever step I was about to take – irrelevant.

In the waterfall everything carries great meaning. Behind the glass it becomes noise. Where I am there is endless noise and very little signal. I am always primed to hear signal, but where I am it is very quiet.

In times past – lives past – I went out in search of signal, but I've grown disillusioned with searching over the years. A man must only do what he must or else he'll miss what is meant for him.

A large hand, owner unseen, comes down from above and pushes the man forward. Without a change in his expression he begins walking.

EXT. DARK STREET

He walks alone down a dark, empty street.

MAN

It is enough to make you wonder whether you aren't living at all but standing still and watching the world pass over like a screen. I don't think it's apparent from the outside that anything is wrong. I live, I move. My life proceeds quite uneventfully. Many even enjoy my company and my conversation, telling me later on that I put them at ease. I don't remember who they are. They drift onward like Chinese lanterns over a dark sea toward a mythical gathering spot while I remain bobbing in the dark like a hazardous iceberg they had feared crashing into. In the end they met only a shadow, while the whole time I have remained untouched. Nothing happens to me at all.

INT. NEIGHBORHOOD DIVE BAR

He sits by himself at a small table in a dim dive bar that, despite its scuffed state, thanks to being built out of warm wood and lit by incandescent lights that conceal more than glare, bears the potential through its soft materials to reverberate with the auras of its frequenters. The wood, being a soft material, absorbs pheromone-like traces of the people inside it and, since all trees are in communication with each other and all wood thus in communication with itself, reflects back the brew as an ambiance, while keeping trace particles stored for itself forever like an organic copy-paste.

At present the bar feels dreary; weariness and a void of pretension are mixed with a smidgen of underfoot grime. There's a file of men, mostly older, mostly white, and some black, who sit watching sports. He sits at a corner table by himself watching them.

MAN

I think the problem is that I have nothing to say to anyone. It's my own fault; I have taken the time to have grounded perspective. If I hadn't stood aside while the world fell, I might not be alone.... By now the gulf between us is an impasse. I chose to be on another wavelength and the world has not stood still meanwhile, favoring simplicity and the bliss of abstraction over painstaking care and interminable nuance, forgetting the reasons to pursue such aims – specificity, both of close vision and overview, as well as the secret droplet from the equally painstaking formula of sensibility that turns blurred vision into sharp caricature vision – relentlessly. The reason, of course, is because that is how you build. That is the foundation of foundation.

It's not their fault. Most people have been cut off from access to the real and now dwell in an untethered realm with no way back. While I have gone up on the lift, the world trend became to go down, burn it all, start over. The idiot's path requires real commitment to abandon, and is an effective form of resistance if one is truly fearless about retardation. But most people are not fearless; they are lazy in addition to being very scared, and only capable, without proper guidance, of a botched operation. Their actual result is thus weakening their lives by putting themselves in a far lower middle than the middle they would have been in had they fought for complexity.

No... the bitter truth is that I'm the last of my kind: an archivist in a world that wants to move on. It already has. People remember nothing from yesterday, and if they do, they have not sorted it. I remember it all, and how it changed, and have etched it in stone, without interpretation. I have avoided perspective as much as possible, satisfied with the one I was given, and stuck to memory instead. I have also avoided turning the light on myself, examining my own arm beneath the microscope. Therein is the crux of my friction with the current time: the trend is for them to alter themselves, reinterpret themselves, see their own words and decisions in ever changing flavors of light. It's become like a drug. All to avoid the painful process of recording and storing. The research. The honesty. The discernment. That's the word. If you want to drive a stake through a young person today, send him screaming back into the shadows, say discernment. Order them to discern. Of course they believe they are. Their attention has been fixed upon their ever-changing image, which, surprisingly, has made them most unfree beside their predecessors. For under constant attention no true emblems can come, no cultural symbols congeal. Plants need their time in darkness; the flower loves the night, in which her attention falls to her stem down to her roots which never see the light. But people are unable to articulate the vague sense of trouble that troubles them because all they have ever had is the self, and they treat it like play-doh while the world is simply scenery somebody propped up behind them.

A group of college students enters and immediately makes a cacophony scraping tables across the floor into a cluster. They carry on vibrant conversations, quickly change the music on the electronic jukebox, and the man remains in his thoughts, observing them while the notes of something contemporarily mystique fill the bar.

Their presence has overpowered the hanging air, bringing with it a new one that is sultry and retro and a little bit gothic. They have usurped the light by virtue of how it loves their features; it is consumed inside their young skin, their shining dark hair and faces, big smiles, shoulders in thrifted wool coats and gloomy brown turtlenecks with long black sleeves. Their motion is like a lazy dance; they've brought their escape with their troupe tripped backwards into a pocket of time seeking refuge in this hole in the wall to be, drink, and laugh in their scavenged outfits away from the world outside.

It is like an unseen film he flirts with the possibility is just for him. A screen interrupts an off-season game for a commercial about condoms you put in your mouth, but the students pay the screens no mind and talk about celibacy and school, among other things.

MAN

Do people change so quickly? They look half-hazy, as if they're halfway between reality and a screen, so that we are the first screens and the screens in the room are images of screens. We have placed among ourselves second-layer screens and, with them, a flattening of our world, in some ways widening the boundaries of this one, but at the cost of simplifying others. It is applied compression to feeling. Imagine going backwards - from the first screen to the world behind it, the world of no screen, where no feeling is flattened. Therein must be true life and source.

Their minds will gradually awake to the horror, layer by layer: screens selling condoms to a generation that isn't having sex and that doesn't know love. Loud brash blacks all around in a once-majority-white neighborhood bar where it's impolite to react to the obvious differences in recreational rhythms that brutishly rip up the atmosphere, which the black table, bluntly aware of racial reality, defies as a part of the drama of their outing, while the white people succumb to having been taught to meekly untrain their eye, except, mostly for the old men watching sports together, which is why the screens selling condoms and playing basketball stay on and the coffee shops all sell ipads. A true artist sits in the corner and internalizes these problems, finding their source in himself and abstracting them to derive symbolic meaning. It allows him to float through life, a post-war cope still applied to a post-war shock that is still ringing. The subconscious quietly teaching itself to love shibari, so quietly the conscious mind cannot hear its whispers and can freely speak against it aloud without ever truly succeeding and being driven mad by clever glimpses into sinusoidal marketing methods.

...Maybe it is dumber not to descend with your friends into mob rule – not the rule of the mob but rulership by the operative principles of crime syndicates, i.e. short-term strategic maneuvering and '5D chess' for petty short-term purposes, labors, over the reconstruction of Tartaria. Cheerful nihilism for the masses, syndication for the elites, and the unmitigated march of entropy for all, clearest seen in the cheapening of consumer goods.

EXT. NIGHT - STREET

Walking, he continues his thoughts.

MAN

This is all conjecture. No conjecture is allowed. Any interpretation is a waste of time. The hand comes down at will and ends my predicament. It already has, only I have not accepted it....

EXT. MORNING – OUTSIDE A CAFE, BY THE WATER

The man stands by the water at a cafe at the innocuous edge of a harbor. Sunlight comes in at a low angle from a clear sky and he walks in to get coffee.

INT. MORNING – INSIDE THE CAFE

It's too early for music. The light from outside falls through the windows rippling over wall-piled chairs.

MAN

I used to think this place would look better with checkered linoleum floors rather than wood, for some reason, but under this morning light it's all the same. Its patterns have become louder than the objects they fall on; the objects beneath have receded, flattened into a single plane of skin, concrete, wood, eyes. I behold our world from behind the first screen. It is light's world; we are incidental.

People walk in silently while the light casts its stripes over them and the walls behind them, moving through it while it ripples in place over walls, over floors, over arms, human heads, human torsos, human hands, over bricks.

EXT. A QUIET PARK WITH A FOUNTAIN

There is a park at the edge of town that he walks to, a large, peaceful park that looks abandoned and unwanted. There is nobody else here.

On two sides are long thin trees with a canopy in full bloom, forming a vertical striped wall. It is shockingly green all the way up, thick with fern swirls and vine columns that makes it feel like the place of ancients. The ground is laid with long, curving white paths that all lead to a large marble fountain in the central court that is chalk white and chalk dry, chipped in parts and covered in stains of unuse.

MAN

The world is empty. There is only light and the basin where sound falls. I savor the quietude when the crowd and the noise are pushed back far enough to make space, and in that space to remember something I haven't remembered in a long time: I have always been in the desolate plain. I am not leaving the world of people for some far remote field; I have been there the entire time. It's only that for long moments the bustle and noise of movement is pulled over my eyes.

In truth, I am not faced with the difficult choice of accepting the call back to isolation. It is answered regardless of what I think and do. The hand of God has me in its grip and moves me across the world at its will. But there is a period of struggle, a theater of conflict, and maybe that is necessary. Am I struggling to choose? No. Only to realize and accept. I am playing it out as if I have a choice in order to adjust to the change.

In truth, there is only one difficult choice in this life, and that is: do you want to be the artist or do you want to be the muse? It's a choice that many a muse who has played her part well has had to make, who stood close enough to the artist to look over his shoulder and peer at the mechanics of his world and realize that all of her forays into artistry had only been dilly-dally toe-dipping into the fantasy orchestrated by the artist himself.

A muse has a charmed life of performance in constant conversation with Creation's best elements and the bestowal of a magnetic attractor-crown for serendipity and charm. But she must give all that up to become an artist, because to be an artist is to be set aside, to step out of the magical world into the emptiness from which is comes, and there day and night to work. The life of the artist is a lonely and technical process of isolation in the tower, pulling the levers of the charm factory according to its meticulous timetables. He works for no reward, heeds no one but himself, as admirers and detesters come and go with their valid claims, for otherwise his work would be ruined, and he has nothing else in this world. He does not even react if God comes to the door with his beloved dream in a bow. He is not defiant – he is alone. And he, alone, like God, knows emptiness. He must reject the whole world and encourage it to reject him, or else all was for naught. His fruit is not spontaneous and effervescent like it appears to others, but mechanical, planned, prepared - wound up every day by his hand. If he doesn't wind it up then he has nothing – and likewise has nothing else to do, so he is ever between a rock and a hard place – for he exists in a bare room and knows that the whole world is just a series of bare rooms lit briefly by a candle until abandoned.

If he doesn't work and sacrifice, then he has nothing to offer his muse, or anyone. The muse will continue being the muse. But she, too, needs the artist, for without his eye she means nothing. She shines, but her rays do not project; she emanates, but into the darkness, singing her song to deaf eras. And then what was she for? Then people look around and petulantly complain nothing happened. There's a smooth gray spot on the wall where something should be and the world constricts to fill it... the vacuum is not endlessly deep pitch blackness, but flat bland gray. Depth belies comparison, which belies a framework. Gray emerges when the framework collapses without a replacement. A code gray is far more serious than a code black, which yet contains its own opposite. Gray contains everything and nothing. All is one. All is the same. A lack of variety and separation causes space to contract as the unit of measure diminishes to adjust.

That is why the uniform of the tech crew is gray and not black. They are the ones who do not need stories, who stand outside the performance and have weaned themselves off of light. They receive impressions of a very different kind. There's an irony: the gray that threatens to engulf the world during its transitions removes the name off of everyone and reduces them like a flood to sameness. The tech crew walk against the world in order to remove their names and reach the unstoried place. They are not at all the same.

EXT. LATE AFTERNOON - A GRASS FIELD WITH HOUSES

The man walks down a thin dirt trail in an open field, far beyond the park now. There are few signs of civilization – a sparse house on a plot of land, stone walls. Perhaps some sheep.

MAN

What would compel a muse to become an artist? When she has played the muse so well that she steps into the artist's place and her eye becomes his in their mystical union, there a window appears. Then there is no path of return. She cannot go back to being a muse without forgetting, and she cannot fully forget. She is left in a middle ground, the dark, diminishing night before devotion. She is not yet an artist just because she has seen through the window. In truth there is no choice here, either, but only the delaying of duty. Because one cannot go back and to move forward is a struggle; many perish in the flames of the middle and that's all their struggle comes to. But as a kind of compensation for the high chance of failure her thrashings in this place can be her brightest moments, bright precisely because they reach toward the future promise. To become the artist, she must desist being the muse. She must give up the charmed life and take on the intentional one, the life that only happens if one winds it up constantly and resists all the noise, and summons the strength to call her beloved noise. I can only delay and delay, until death.

The man continues his lonely trek toward a horizon of diminishing light. There is no end before him; the plain stretches flat in all directions and there are no more houses.

MAN

Up, up the narrow staircase. Up the narrow way. Few will withstand the terrible silence of the narrow path - a silence only broken up by the wind or the disappearance of time. Here a hundred days can pass like an hour. But I know that the middle can bear no thought. You keep your head down through the crossing until you look up and hit the wall of your home.

I would rather it were not so. I would rather belong to the world of people. But if God has made my home in isolation, who am I to protest?

The howling wind strengthens as he treks on, occasionally propping himself up on a boulder. He is the only man on the plain. On the bluish horizon a small wooden cabin comes into view, blending out from the dusk.

EXT. EVENING – OUTSIDE THE CABIN

The man stands at the cabin door thinking nothing. The wood is somewhat gray; his surroundings are quiet. He flips up the latch and goes in.

INT. EVENING - THE CABIN

It is very quiet. Still the man thinks nothing. Beyond the single east facing window the sky is now dark. Inside the wind continues to howl through the walls and the windowpane as if coming over the face of a cliff.

Inside lingers the stale air of a place that has been long abandoned and left still, a life one finally returns to after an unknown stretch of time. He is relaxed, though alone. He putters around, testing and turning on lights. The first light is a candle - shadows on the walls dance from wind through the cracks; but they have followed him from the world. He draws a curtain, worn and thick and red or brown, over the window to block out the wind.

Now he commences on a long list of housekeeping chores. The first order of business is the fireplace and a fire, and to clear out the soot, which he spreads over the grass outside his door.

While the fire is still small he looks over his appliances, putting away things lying scattered on the floor.

MAN

I have to always tend it, or else the wind would put it out.

INT. - ROARING FIRE

Soon a fire burns steadily against the darkness past the curtain and illuminates the little room, quivering when strong gusts blow in from off the ledge; it and his breathing bring the wood of the cabin walls back to life.

A look around his effects. In the middle of the cabin sits a large rectangular wooden table, both his work station and dining room. Rough shelves filled with the books, his companions and conversation partners in the world of light and sound, whom he knows better than anyone he has ever met.

An old piano with sheet music against another wall, a guitar, and other odd instruments in the corner. A faded-to-pink red couch pushed against a wall, and a projector beside it; on the wall across a screen has surprisingly remained tacked on. Cast iron piled in the corner by a black stove. Out of sight - a bathroom, a bed, a sink.

INT. - BY THE WINDOW

Music plays from a record player. The whole cabin is bathed in light and there are no shadows anymore. He enjoys his solace and the music over the soft sound of crashing waves. The wind has died down throughout the night.

MAN

I do not fear living by the cliff. On the contrary, it's a relief to find the comfort of my home at the edge of the world. It is the greatest gift God could have given me – to draw a border on the alone world. That is true mercy, far more than I deserve. What would have been intolerable would have been to be placed in the middle, to find my home in the middle of a field without end in sight. All of reality is mere boundaries.

Beyond the ledge begins a country I will never know; on the waves its airs I can never name roll in everyone morning, and at night its foreign music lulls me sleep, like a screen forever playing a film that stays on and remains impossible to step into. It is so great a gift I feel ashamed to know I must be weak to have merited a limit to my suffering.

INT. CABIN – BY THE WINDOW

He sits, relaxed, by his window, looking out at the dark shore, a drink in his hand and needing nothing while the music continues.

MAN

I can only truly love those who also find their comfort out here at the ledge by the sea, who have their home along the cliffs and live as another pale light on the dark horizon.

INT. - OUT THE WINDOW

Through the window – there is the ledge, albeit poorly visible. It is a long cliff, and a long distance away there seems to be another faint light flickering. Whether a star or the window of another home is hard to tell, but he watches this distant glimmer and contemplates a neighbor sitting waiting by her window. He knows she is not young, that she is bereft, alone in her own isolation and woes, like he set aside to wait and to listen, and maybe it is all for nothing, but there is no choice in it, regardless. He gazes through the distance as upon a friend and neighbor, intercepting lines of her story like a radio play blown in on the sea breeze to him, faintly overheard like all conversations in the privacy of the thin realm of devotion.

MAN

It is this thin link of obeyance that joins distant windows. God's is the unbreakable bond. God God God. What is God? God is where I hear music. The law of scale dictates that the laws governing any level cease to work on the level above or below, so that a whole can never be reduced or subsumed. A whole is subject to the laws of its level, defined by them. A crowd does not behave like a collection of individuals, an individual does not behave like a collection of cells or molecules. The lowest man is more than the sum of all his neurotransmitters, which are operant under another set of rules and on which plane they do not add up to a man. What is that missing space between them which makes “man”? It is the level. Thus to put forth that there is no essential difference between one thing and another as all is matter is a specious load of slop fed to undergrads.... A powerful individual is to his nation akin to what a serotonin receptor is to a man. But God is above even the highest level and below the smallest subatomic one. The alpha and the omega. One could call the “God-particle” what one could call the “God-man”. Except that at every level, more was required of the whole which dwelt on it than of the one at the level below. And yet, humanity as a whole is a more balanced thing, while an individual is uniquely unbalanced.

INT. - WOMAN'S WINDOW

A vision of her window overlain atop his, rendering the sky between these two panes of glass a lighter shade of purple-blue, at times lilac where it is heavily dusted with stars.

MAN

Choicelessness is our common thread, and when I sit by my window and look from my home into the window of a woman waiting for another's return, I feel her company though she is on her own particular stream. We're each a light in the dark for the other. When I come here and look out and do not see the flickering light I do not think she isn't real, but of how she is moving out in the world right then.

The play tells of a golden bond remaining untarnished with time. She walks in the world like I; when another approaches her and attempts to take her hand she reacts like wood; she can do nothing for him. The Lord just as soon blows him away, while the ghost of him who's gone reemerges from the background reeled in on that thread of gold, reminding her he has never gone, and that he, whom she thought she'd forgotten, has diminished in her not a whit but is still living with her loneliness. In that moment she knows – and by proxy I understand – that true love does not wane - it is made of something undegradable, is not the flame but the seed, touched once by the living waters and blossomed, a God-given gift that proves itself, and as God keeps me removed from the world alone with just the light and the wind so does he keep her at the window by a candle, nourishing, without choice or forced will, the bond he himself has put there, underneath all the world of noise, and there is no choice in any of it.

Who is this ghost, this perfect phantom who has traveled the length from a distorted fantasy to a human man to a perfect projection? I am able to know this stranger through her. I know that nothing from the world, since, has touched her.

I am conscious of a subtle distinction between these thin transmissions and the thoughts born of my own will. Here there is no difference between imagination and reality. It is because this distance is ideal - for propping up a vast fine world – that I receive them. And I am content to believe that my presence has a stabilizing and comforting effect on her, of assuaging her loneliness by glowing in her periphery, so that she can sense me there without altering the beautiful world she swims in. That I might be so critically needed by a stranger lends a great sense of purpose to me... and is a support in this loneliness, that yet requires continued loneliness.

One day I will walk over and knock on her door. It's just that I'm always called back down before I can muster the time. One day I will fight hard to stay here long enough to find out...

But he hesitates. He is aware that the possibility of her presence bears more than its share of his stability. To prove or disprove it definitively... is to place the survival of a fragile arrangement that encompasses much of the inner life of the cabin in great jeopardy....

EXT. MORNING – CABIN SITTING ON THE LEDGE

Morning light reveals the cabin sitting very near to a ledge. Beyond the ledge is the glittering, calm morning sea, and the sun rising over it. A moment of profound peace.

EXT. MORNING – THE CONCAVE LEDGE

The man feels overwhelming relief when he walks out and looks at the sea. He has finally arrived. The brisk wind does not disturb him but soothes him. He basks in God's gift to him:  an end to the known world. And what could come in on the sea, from beyond... mystery stayed with him, dancing in his backyard.

EXT. MORNING – CLIFF GOING DOWN TO THE SEA

It is a long way to the sand and the rocks.

Part 2

EXT. PARK ENTRANCE

At the richly green park's entrance, a younger man walks through the iron gate. His each buoyant step exudes a wellspring of energy, and it's clear that he is in the summer of a full earthly life. The youthfulness that has bit by bit built up in him has reached a tipping point; and the spillover has led him askance of his everyday path into a novel place. His eyes open wide.

MAN 2

I thought I knew everything. Everything about this city. How have I never been here?

The lushness of the forest makes a deep impression upon him, as does the tallness and straightness of the birches growing close together, and the thick maneish canopy that quarters this place off from the city like a wall. He spots a large marble fountain in the distance and walks toward it.

MAN 2

I feel like I've escaped and this must be a portal. It feels neither like the city nor the forest, but a different place altogether. An ancient place full of new life, or a new place full of ancient life, abandoned like the inside of an old church the forest took back....

The fountain looks dry and unused, with many cracks, yet still stately like it once was when built. The entire park feels abandoned. He is the only person there... until from the other direction he sees a man coming, and moreover that if they both keep apace they will cross at the fountain.

They study each other as they approach. The stranger is older, and at first glance looks homeless, but as they get closer his gestalt is separated into dishevelment mixed with surliness. Now he appears more like a lost professor from another time who never lost a striking sense of independence and haughtiness, or the foundation of his authority. He looks, for one, at him with unfiltered scrutiny, but shows no obligation to break the silence and is obviously content to just stare as they pass.

EXT. PARK, BY THE FOUNTAIN

They both slow down. The older man seems to take a familiar trek and he gathers that he has been here before. This prompts the younger man to seize on the second they slow down to almost a stop.

MAN 2

Where's the way out of here?

MAN 1

Hm? Through.

The younger man laughs.

MAN 1, ANNOYED

What's funny?

The younger man shakes his head.

MAN 2

You know... 

MAN 1

No, I don't.

The younger man looks at the older again, disproportionately disoriented from a minute skipped beat. The stranger becomes newly outlined in his antique clothes, transmogrified into a djinn or eccentric – either way, abstracted from the human world. He wants to ask him if he's from here, and five other questions he cannot formulate. But all he says is:

MAN 2

It's not important.

MAN 1 SHRUGS

It's not? Well, you know what they say: there are two kinds of people.

MAN 2

What are they?

But the older man laughs, which breaks whatever spell has kept them there, and continues on his way in the direction of the younger man. The young man calls after him as he passes.

MAN 2

Those who find the park and those who don't? 

But the walks toward the gate, redoubling his laughter receding into the scenery as if passing through an invisible wall after which he becomes a mere projection, unreachable.

The young man stands frozen at the fountain, suddenly aware in his body of a rapid series of undefined sensations that proceed one after another through his being. A reflexive jerk from his navel toward the gate, as if to hold the stranger and stop his transition from flesh to glass. Then a burst of dread the moment he becomes an unreachable hologram. And before he can begin to parse the interaction, a jolt like a car coming to an abrupt stop: a subaltern understanding that he is now the old man, that there is something he must do, courses through him before it is swallowed like lighting slipping silently into the darkness of cellular memory, where, it's supposed, it does its work beyond conscious reach so that he may not interfere with procedure. And, at last, nothing. Him as he blinked a second ago.

He is about to turn back and head home, but instead he walks on past the fountain in the direction the old man had come from. He looks at his watch, remembering that his fiancee is waiting for him at home. 

MAN 2

Is it not within my rights as a human being to stray from the path? She knows I'm out. She knows I wander. 

He can feel it getting late in the day beyond the park. A twinge of guilt passes through him.

MAN 2

And who made the paths I take? I did. But if not for her I would have made them another way, wouldn't I?... I do it so because she is my tether. If not for her I might have wandered and never stopped. We wander to stop, don't we? That is, we hope we stop sometime.

With nobody here, he hears his thoughts and sensations most clearly, and he is conscious of a resistance. Part of him wants to turn around, but a greater force keeps moving him forward like an inertia that has not yet been discovered into law, toward the other end of the park he knows must be there, if someone came from there....

I'm a free man. If I've become so fearful I can't wander away for one evening and see what's on the other side it's because I've let myself become this way. No... this fear is baseless. It's not an instinct any less than the instinct of curiosity and compulsion. She won't even question.

EXT. DEEPER INTO THE PARK, TWILIGHT COMING ON

For the first time in a long time he is completely alone. Disorientation lingers in a dull and bearable form. The park seems never to end, with still no exit gate in sight, but he knows it is his anticipation that makes it so vast. The trees grow closer together on the other side and allow less light, trapping a stable dimness of twilight in the gaps. When he peers into their dark pockets they reflect many vague suggestions of forms back to him, which makes the whole scene becomes soft and blurred; all of the ambient light around him comes from an occasional lamp that has come on.

MAN 2

Is it so bad to be tethered? What are we made for, if not for that... for other people.... Is there less love where people are not? Maybe that's what I need to know. The behemoth of human life is among others, among love, even if some do not realize this. Humanity avoids the fringes and clusters together. If the fringes were so important to us wouldn't we be more spread out, more of us living there.... But they are important, for their boundaries. To know them, that is. Do people dance on the fringes? Thinking of the fringes all of a sudden, when I've taken two steps out....

At last he comes upon the other gate, standing wide open, exactly like the one he entered through but leading out onto a field of grass. He looks guiltily at his watch, having lost track of time getting lost in his thoughts. But it's fully dark now, too late to avoid walking back in the dark and thus no reason to turn around. 

EXT. EMPTY PLAIN – NIGHT

What he walks for he does not know, but he marches on - hesitantly. Ahead is a treeless and sparse yet surely suburban landscape stretching in all directions. He has not expected to find this kind of settlement so close to home yet a world away, simply waiting behind a hedge like the secret garden. 

There are evenly but very sparsely spaced houses sitting stately on large plots of land in the plain, but no inhabitants are out. Between the homes the intervals of light form a regular pattern, around which are long shadows that almost touch each other, forming their own layer of communication in this scenery. Looking at it he senses different adventures, different cognitive, physical pathways... different people and different women....

He looks back, as if to look at his old life, and beholds it all framed beneath the awning of the last cerulean light. The path forward thins, he finds and loses it but continues through the dark, feeling his freedom and with it his fear. 

MAN 2

What am I afraid of? All this is only human nature. Am I agoraphobic? Maybe I can't stand to be alone? I feel deeply isolated, yet it's only been an hour or two....  Maybe it would comfort her - and me - if I were to turn back now... but it would be the wrong thing to do. I'm in a scene now whether I like it or not, and it can only complete if I play my part, and I know how to play my part. It's instinct. It's like my body is reading an instructional manual for its continued direction. Even if I don't find the end, I'm already past a certain point. I can only keep going until.... 

She would do the same.... She would do just the same. No... that's a lie, and I know it. It would never occur to her to walk on for nothing and she would never end up in a new place in the dark.  Maybe that's the problem: I wish she would. Do I wish she were here with me right now? Mm... I want to be alone... and I am....

So cannily is everything spaced out in this strange neighborhood as if to be from another civilization, with unfamiliar proportions that yet register to him as a cohesive, even better, arrangement, an arrangement that begins working to reconfigure his patterns to itself. 

MAN 2

I'd be a different person if I lived here. I would be unrecognizable to myself simply due to the placement of the elements of daily life.

The darkness and the golden light of the distant homes generate new patterns that shuffle his inner landscape as they collide and meld with the existing imprints in his mind. When the automatic background processing of the day's impressions begins drying of usual inputs, it turns to the great buried reserve of yearning, and he experiences the depth of the reservoir and thus emptiness and hunger, which, unaccustomed as he is to silence, he warps into fear. In the silence left behind by digested, sorted, discarded noise his life pares down to a few distinct elements that need less constant input, and each sits in darkness with a wide space around it. 

All the elements and their matrix turn over in his mind between millstones, living creatures which become memories and then break down into moments, phrases, and at last contextless details looping out of inertia until they've looped so many times they're ground down to dust which blows out of working memory in the wind of his inner aether. He examines those few solitary elements like marbles in his hand, for he has stepped away from them by putting distance between himself and his life. 

Simultaneously a dark projection or negative of each digested moment falls into deeper memory beneath his hand, and he watches them fall for as long as he can until they disappear into God-knows-where below awareness like reverse balloons. He remains standing aside, knowing that before he can access truly new thoughts all of the old forms must be less than dust. He has aloneness, but not emptiness.

MAN 2

Fear - it is an unreal emotion. There is no such thing as it. What I see when I dissect its black screaming is something like a dark floor in a dark room with many mismatched rugs thrown on it over each other partially: a collection of emotions in my psyche triggered simultaneously but that are at odds with each other and cannot interact. This happens instantaneously fast. They overlap like venn diagrams comprised solely of south poles. You can't pinpoint the fear. It is the space between them which is fear! So much of modern fear is simply fuzzy observation. Laziness. Our reaction of overwhelm.

The man wonders how he can so easily break from his life. He considers which side to be on. Is fear good? Without fear he finds it much easier to keep walking, away from his life, and less burdened by guilt which he can almost laugh at. The disappearance of the fear he carries is like bringing day upon night. Everything changes. Where there was constriction there is expansion. Where there was quicksand there is solid green ground. Coldness becomes pleasant warmth. 

MAN 2

There is only one rope leading back to the world of people. Her name will be the last word I will hear before language becomes obsolete. I never realized how alone I am in this world aside from her. That is not to disparage aloneness, but to note that in the default aloneness most come to as they mature, I have attached her, and she, me and for this reason we count as one. We could. Many either resist or pretend that they have allowed it to happen when the opposite of either case is the truth. To create a greater whole is to sacrifice the managed self. To combine and form a new whole one must break its barriers and lose itself, or some of its thoughts of itself – I do not know the difference. Later if the whole-of-two comes undone, the individuals that formed it are less than they were before, gaping to the environment without boundaries from it. But they close up automatically and become less than one as they reform. The only way to avoid such lessening is transcendence, and the only way to transcend is to accept that you have chained your real and only body to real defeat. Life and time move forward irreversibly. Our intuition doesn't accept time's linearity these days as we've opened our eyes too wide to its circularity without being able to grasp both, and now prefer to move nowhere, to hang onto a cherished notion of self that yet we make malleable in other ways to substitute for how we would have sacrificed it!

It unnerves him, the distance with which he thinks of "her". But the disturbance goes away. He is left with only the cold light of strangers' homes that provides no warmth. Without knowing it, he follows the same narrow path of the man, but it is unfamiliar, disturbing. He only knows that something has taken hold of him and part of the going is to find out what that something is, at the end of the journey.

Wholly foreign shapes appear in the darkness now that he has crossed the bridge. The bridge was his fear. The hardness of rocks registers for the first time, the field is now almost bare; there are only a couple of houses left to cross.

Her shadow appears on them, illuminated by yard lamps, moving along the walls where it skulks, like a spider, reaching and clawing for new crevices to keep up with his walking. He leans away as her stranglehold reaches for him. But she misses every time - until it occurs to him - she does not reach for him. She does not even see him. She reaches past him as if he's not there – and he's not a member of this world – of which she, somehow, is. He has seen her, but not her, but unmistakably part of her, the same her cast under the light and spatial dimensions that exist on the fringes like the kaleidoscope turns and reveals what their urban civilities hide. The realization of her reaching past him ignites a living rage. One minute he wants her, the next he wants to leave her, and so on forever. Just as he wanted to see here. 

MAN 2

What does one know if one doesn't reach the extremes? In the middle one is soft, undefined, cowering in fear under bordered convictions, denying the state of his existence with irony and whatever other poisons are employed. Irony itself is just a barrier against being deeply affected. An ironic person will never be convinced to budge. He has the noxious mixture of comfort and fear. To seek the fringes is to strive against comfort.... But I never strove, I never sought them out. They sought me. It is not my own striving that led me. I had nothing to do with it, no urge to come to the brink of humanity. When my ways unravel and the impressions finish processing, there is nothing left beneath them. I am a processor of inputs, and should the inputs change so will my beliefs. My power lies not even in choosing the inputs but in moving to where the inputs may find me, to new civilizations, new places hidden in this world where egos operate other than I know, so that I can get out of myself, somewhere.  

Should a butterfly flutter across the wall the sky will turn from foreboding to mysterious. Where the houses have ended the world becomes flattened, and thinking the words creates instant beauty, his own personal church, the new house that's everywhere; its walls are the indigo sky, its light is the light from his eyes, but whether it originates in him or is a secondhand light he does not know. He does not even know who even is speaking now. It is his voice in his head, but somebody else's words pouring into his consciousness like a ribbon. He can sense its distinct quality and sound from his own thoughts. Light seems thicker and slower here, elongated and stretched, forming church frescoes on the horizon, the stars, and a chorus of distant material sounds. Now he understands what was calling him: isolation, that has dropped like a ladder out of the sky.

EXT. THE PLAIN, AMONG ROCKS AND BOULDERS - DARK NIGHT

The terrain becomes harsher, boulders replace homes, the wind becomes louder, but he does not notice, so well have the outer darkness and the inner light imprinted on his mind. He looks back as if expecting to see his old life back there like a distant planet, but all he sees is pitch darkness, and all that passed through him has disappeared into that darkness.  

Only the shadows have followed him out to the rocks, cast long by the last remaining light. Her form reappears, dancing beside another, taller, shadow, a strange man who is not him, or maybe it is him. No – is it a man he cannot be – the man he saw before, whose place he has taken. If he is here, where is that man now?  She moves in waves like an uncoordinated ripple, illuminated by the strange light of imagination, the brain's own electricity distorting her image, but it is unmistakably her soul, which is initiating him into something that has been hidden under his nose for years, hidden by her and revealed by her. Dread fills him.

MAN 2

I carry her with me, in fact she follows me, no, I followed her, and now will finally catch up to her. How can I be angry?... What would I have heard? I had to leave and follow the path out to find who she is alone. Why else would he have caught my eye? Why would I ever have come to the park? It all connects from the end. The end is the whole reason it happens! Of this alone am I sure.

He tastes the end in glimpses that flicker, every time it flickers out plunging more deeply back into the darkness of failure. He feels close to something like a veil he cannot pass his hand through, for the world has flattened to a sheet and all sound resolved to a single pitch.

MAN 2

How easily the thread to humanity is lost. But I don't find it bothers me. Only being unbothered bothers me. When you go out far enough there is only forward you can go, and what is truer is what pulls you onward, waiting to embrace you and tell you that it wasn't all in vain. The only danger is that - well, that it was. That in the crossing you may stumble on the idea that the world is a flat blank sheet and then the frail paper boat carrying you will dissolve, and you will simply unravel and become one with the darkness around you.

The way is a thin chain through darkness, on and on. Only by passing through the previous door can you open the next one. As I pass through each doorway it falls away behind me so that I cannot pass back that way; I can only go on to the next room. It is a precarious procession through night. These disappearing rooms mark a trail that cannot be followed. Only those who walk it shall know. One must spend time in a room without trying to leave, and eventually, the revelation it bestows falls away, provides a hits but then leaves one still searching, and even becomes as if it never was. Some will say this searching is the yearning of an expansive, devouring soul but I say it is the outside knock on your door of a totality that can't be ignored, and our reaction a flaw of our nature: excitement at a bit of refueling. Room revelations are why knowing can never be final, why truth is unsayable but by God alone. Revelations are like snacks, but isolation, always expanding ahead and behind, is like a three-course meal, and, farther on, unfolds like a banquet for the Maharaja.

Isolation makes what you focus on real. It is the changing chamber for eyes. The more alone one is, the more real what one sees becomes.... One finds things he can otherwise not when he simply waits still; then, feeling mistakenly unobserved, they begin to inch out of the walls, and one waiting can gain clarity that is forbidden to his kind, clarity whose doorway vanished upon his earlier garish knocks at the revelation of itself being observed.

A vision appears out of the darkness, clear, of a distant land. On the other side stands a new man - himself who awaits himself, arms outstretched over the void, framed in front of a golden archway, the gold being his living room light. He waits calmly yet is a stranger, saying nothing; an impossible man, and though he cannot see the man's – his own - face, he feels his face watching his, just as he senses that she has rejoined him from the shadows somewhere deeper within the yellow light of their room. 

But between here and there, there is the unraveling, there is the void, and not everyone makes it across. Language is his only friend: the words “golden thread”, “reunification” - thinking these weightless symbols is his sole means of keeping the narrative thread from unraveling as the night pulls the pins out. In the crossing he is no one - not the man on either shore, but an eye between them.

MAN 2

Everyone has their place on the other shore. The only question is, do they of their own selves there? I only know because I have made the crossing. I only made the crossing because I was called to my home that isn't my home. The other shore is the same shore and when I cross I will blink and be back on the right shore -

The dark forms around him are reminiscent of his neighborhood and he wonders, if he'd been paying attention, would he have realized he has just ended up back at home by a new way?  Years of forgotten life have been compressed into seconds while feet stretch out into endless miles of black water that keeps moving the shore further back with a soft roar.

His old self swims up from under somewhere poking him like a jagged shard beneath the veil. He is like a hospital patient waking up from sedation while being operated upon. It stirs up memories that douse him in the cold of his own blood as it turns inside him from the collision of shores; the psyche rearranges with the flick of a black butterfly wing passing across the black sky; one wing is the horror before him and the other is the horror behind him, and they meet like two fronts colliding into square waves and causing disorder to the delicate ocean. What is beneath the ocean he now fears to see, now that he is certain he could pierce that thin screen and that it is by the grace of God alone he does not, for no reason, that he does not simply walk through it and demolish the dream.

He feels panic coursing through him, heavy impending doom that comes like a wind. He acknowledges calmly that hallmark of unraveling: instant manifestation. There is no difference between madness and truth on the screen. What truth is there to hold onto in the realm where all dots connect? Scientific, physical truths, emotional, cultural truths, the vast trove – all have their anchors in this flat but infinitely broad sheet of trillions of neighbors that reach into the three-dimensional world, and madness is merely those connections that break apart, hurtling, against the door into light. 

MAN 2

White is the holy emanation, black is its absence. I will never wear black again. Shadows are something's absence – a thing itself like their presence - of the living source; what of them could crawl in and settle and then speak to me? I no longer know if I am myself come from my old life to the distant shore or if I am looking back from the distant shore at my crossing... I see him – me – struggling.... Is who you are in the unknown is more real than the known? To the unknown the known is unknown.

Somebody flicks off the lights. He and all within and without him come to an abrupt halt as the inner and outer life rips down the middle. He gasps, his face pressed to a pitch black well stretching forever in all directions. All he can hear is white noise and the beat of his racing heart. He cannot speak, cannot scream, and does not know who it is that still looks. He perceives only the naked hollow tube underneath every layer of structure, going on forever. It is as if a thumb has come down upon his amygdala, and pressed. He is before naked fear. Pull off the fifty mattresses and down feather covers and find the discomfiting pea of the self, a tiny marble about to roll away down the hollow tube forever and ever.

A scuffle like moving gravel fades gradually into silence at his feet. He walks slowly backwards in shock, like a rubber band stretched to its apsis slowly slackening back. 

There is no moon. No stars come through the clouds. There is no light by which to see the unlit cabin sitting a short distance away as he turns around.

EXT. NIGHT - MAN IS WALKING DOWN A STREET

The man walks purposefully on a well-lit neighborhood street of brick row-homes. There is nobody else and only the quiet hum of an undisturbed night. He stops at one of the doors and turns a key.

INT. NIGHT - MAN INSIDE HIS APARTMENT

He opens the door to a scene of his fiancee curled up on the couch in the living room, barely lit by the weak fire in the fireplace but illuminated much more instead by the blue-white pixelated light emanating from the television playing a show; it coolly bathes the room, her profile, their furniture, in light and noise. She turns her bluelit face to him and smiles gently, then turns back and continues watching.

The audio floats like particles in the air. Everything looks and feels blue, as if the electric light is seeping through the cracks of the reality-screen. He is barely aware of having walked home. Time seems to have stretched across a great span and bounded a range of traversal previously beyond his reach.

He sits down across from her on the love seat without saying a word or removing his shoes. He looks at the reflective Christmas ornaments on their tree behind the couch, at the wall clock that shows almost midnight, at various framed pictures and appliances. None of it belongs to him. He has walked into a stranger's life. The woman sitting across from him is unfamiliar and unremarkable, her smell unusual. 

His gaze falls onto the fire which also seems blue. The world is stable, but he is not. Underneath the calm crackle and static there is a rip within – if there is still such a thing as within – binding his reassembled parts like a thin vein of nothing. He is not able to speak. Luckily she does not say anything.

MAN 2

Am I him or am I me? Is she her or is she she? Did I blink and cross the ocean after all? I do not know which side I fell out on, or which shore is the other shore looking back.

In the pixelated false twilight of the living room the observable screen-life flickers between reality and nonreality. The faint light of embers cuts through with its analog warmth and continuity. The vision is plastered onto the screen of his mind: of himself on the other shore in the yellow-backed room in the glittering world that glows brighter going deeper in, looking out and waving to him in his conjured crossing-boat. Underneath, behind his skin, the eye that witnessed is still crossing, eternally reaching for a shore but unable to reach one or another.

Focusing intensely on any such thought for more than three seconds sends his heart racing so fast he becomes aware of the hand resting upon the master switch. Then, he must will himself into distraction and simply wait for his nerves to descend from the peak pitch where he's aware that at any moment the switch could flip and leave him simply not-here.

He touches his fingers to his neck to feel his pulse. The movement catches her attention.

FIANCEE

You look like you're in another world.

Her words  have a strange echo. He says nothing.

Up until this morning they have had a very ordinary life. Now continuity is broken by a barrier. He envisions yesterday's life going on beside him, himself walking into their living room, brushing off the days events, flopping beside her on the couch where they watch TV and discuss their weekend plans. Now he lags behind out of sync, stuck in the past's events and watching the life that should be move along in a parallel realm. He spans two active states in the same location... unless, of course, the location is multi-layered. Then the shadow her, the other him, are hanging around somewhere as well. He looks at her and hoarsely speaks.

MAN 2

I'm bounded by my limits and cannot go further.

She is concerned. He continues to stare at her.

FIANCEE

What's wrong?

MAN 2

I just told you what's wrong.

The clocks ticks slowly. Loudly.

MAN 2

It's almost midnight.

She stares blankly.

MAN 2

You weren't worried?

FIANCEE

(Innocently) You said you wanted space.

He vaguely remembers a conversation from a few months ago about the topic.

MAN 2

You didn't think something might've happened?

FIANCEE

I was trying to do what you asked! Jeez, you try to listen and it's still not what they want!

He peers at her as if through a doorhole, trying to peel back the cracks.

FIANCEE

I didn't mean that.... Please say something. You're freaking me out.

The longer he paddles to the other shore the greater the distance between him and it grows so that the ocean reveals itself infinite, and the story he has been replaying, of stepping into its waiting life, must be a hallucination of the black sea itself; only it is all that is true, and that whole infinite ocean lives inside inside the unclosing rip form the split.

MAN 2

Something did happen.

FIANCEE

What?

MAN 2

I don't know. I reached nothing... I reached nothing... but the word is too much.... I don't know if I'm here or back there, if it's me or if it's him, or if I'm nobody, nowhere.

FIANCEE

I don't understand. You or who?

MAN 2

Me. Another self. But it ended. Everything ended as soon as I glimpsed.... And then I stood before naked fear. I stood before nothing. There is nothing left of humanity there. Nothing. Just the end of perception, the end of ways. 

His fiancee stares at him very concerned. He does not ever talk like this.

FIANCEE

Do you feel alright? Did you take something? Do you want to go to the hospital?

MAN 2

I'm trying to tell you - ! I don't know what happened to me. It's like I was taken out of the world, rearranged, and then placed back in, but the world doesn't fit together anymore because I saw too much. I feel strange. Very, very strange. That's the only word to describe it. That coldness, that blankness, is inhuman. Like bare metal. I think it's settled into me forever.

She leans in to look inside him as he did to her, but the motion is not characteristic of her. She only mimics it. She looks right past the black gap and sees nothing. It is too dark for her to perceive. 

MAN 2

(Perhaps the shadow is attached to her without her awareness, and so free to move on its own: still her, but she never has to know.... How lucky. Come to think of it that is more interesting.... I can speak directly to her shadow and she will be none the wiser. Yes... this is the only way to carry on....)

FIANCEE

You don't sound like yourself.

The man laughs.

MAN 2

I don't feel like myself.

FIANCEE

Please don't laugh like that. Where were you? Where did this happen? Where were you go all night? Who were you with?

The question has a lag time like a delayed physiological response, as if she is finally catching up to his scenario. He decides to keep syncopation.

MAN 2

I didn't see anyone but an old man at a park. But I don't remember how I got there... I never even knew it was there. After we talked just kept walking. Something compelled me.... I'm not even sure I would've if I hadn't met him. It's the park that goes all the way out to a field and out of the city, you know it?

FIANCEE

I don't know it.

MAN 2

No? Well, I saw you there. You were with me. I thought you were following me from a distance. It seemed like you knew all about it, and about the field. You knew everything.

FIANCEE

I've been home all day! I don't know anything you're talking about or any park!

She begins to cry.

FIANCEE

Do you not believe me?

MAN 2

(Quietly) I don't know. I don't know anything right now.

FIANCEE

Who was this man? Did he give you something?

MAN 2

He was just in the park, just walking the other way. We barely said anything. He represented nothing.... In him all things are represented.

FIANCEE

What does that mean?

MAN 2

I don't know. Do you think I've lost it?

She comes over and sits beside him, strokes his arm.

FIANCEE

No.... I think you have a lovely imagination. But sometimes it makes things more complicated than they are. I think if you see that man again you ought to say something to him.

MAN 2

You think that's a good idea? What would I even say? We spoke barely a minute.

FIANCEE

I don't know if it is. Maybe it could be a bad idea.... And I don't know what you would say. I don't know. I'm just trying to help.

He perceives kindness of her eyes and a kind of solidity begins to gel under him, as if the flickering of the world-screen finally decides on a stable signal and the material world follows shortly.

FIANCEE

We could go there this weekend.

His heart races just thinking about it.

MAN 2

I don't want to go back there.

FIANCEE

(Softly) Then just forget about it.

MAN 2

I can't. I feel like I've lost something I'll never get back. I shouldn't have gone to the fringes. There's nothing for people there. I was foolhardy.

FIANCEE

I don't think you've lost anything. I think you're just having a panic attack.

He tries to envision the sparkling room of the other shore again, but no longer can. The rip has been papered over. He can no longer reach in. He feels, irrevocably, that he has failed. How much that wanted to but could not be said in the moment, and now that he cannot reach his impressions how much more easily words come. 

FIANCEE

You know they say it's the fate of all great minds to be alone.

MAN 2

No need to flatter me.

FIANCEE

I love you!

Her utterance reverberates as if coming from multiple sources, the last signal sent out from the rip before it closes and he forgets what it all means. Every passing moment staring at the fire calms him, chaining the incandescent world of their yesterday life to the reality-screen and abetting its victory against the nonreal. He is once again contiguous with his yesterday self, and can now look back with bewilderment on the dreamlike scenario of today. He remembers that he likes craft beers and what he was hoping to do this weekend. 

A deep sadness comes with the return to humanity. One way or another he has lost, and he has lost because he cannot hold, and because he cannot hold he has forgotten. And yet something remains lodged inside him like a shard of black glass so that he cannot fully accept it for a dream. 

FIANCEE

...You know how easily you can spiral if you just have caffeine all day. Especially with us being on our phones all the time and everything going on....

MAN 2

You're right. You're always right.

INT. DAY – IN A HOUSE

The older man is again as we met him – staring blankly ahead in the midst of chatter, only this time instead of a crowd the source of the chatter is a vivacious, shorter woman who encircles him like a bee. They are in a naturally lit foyer. All of her chatter is about trivial affairs. Her voice sounds like a running brook, of which he cannot make out anything. He met her in the world; she feels very comfortable here, optimistic about their future. She hands him his hat and a set of keys.

He does not even know the ballpark of what she is saying. If it is about an appointment he decides he is not going.

She reaches up to peck him on the cheek; he doesn't react. She takes this as normal. She spins around the foyer in a waltz with a large tote bag slung over her shoulder and the confident, dreamy expectation of continued continuity. Everything happens.

All the while she chatters. The man picks up a bag on the floor next to him and walks alone out the door. When it closes behind him he feels instant relief, leaves the bag at the door, and begins walking forward.

Part 3

INT. WOMEN'S BATHROOM

A tall, thin model regards herself in a long mirror, admiring the way the clothes she wears hang on her body.

WOMAN

Truly only the very thin can wear clothes. Even on an average body the art is instantly lost, the temple crumples into the curves and lumpens of mediocrity and at once disappears, swallowed by the gaping maw of their King Appetite. They know not what they miss. Its only saving grace is that the vision becomes invisible rather than corrupted, hiding in itself upon an unworthy bearer and reemerging perfectly in its full display on the worthy. This is the high art and resistance of fae silks. And who are the worthy? The very design has their names written in it! 

There must always be the worthy, or else all was for naught. I will never convince myself that whole designed realities going unheard by deaf ears is any kind of blessing. It is a great tragedy for something to be created and go and unused. But that is a great daily tragedy whose magnitude goes also unseen, swallowed like a whale by this disorganized swarm of life and its so-called venerated laws of motion. The war between body and spirit shall never cease and neither shall I. I recede to make room for the vision, so that what wants to be seen can come into the world through me.

She admires how the fabric drapes over her bony shoulders; the slightest added sharpness to the angle sets it in place to run down the guiderails of her thin arms and hang from her neck so that each tiny carmine flower lays flat against the barely rolling landscape of her torso, gently pressed on the subtlest mounds of a moving artwork of gradient shadows from collar to hip in neat uninterrupted lines.

Not before this winter could even I do its intricacies justice. But now I have the eyes to see its intention for the world. My eyes are ever re-seeing on this journey that never lacks for deeper truths. Before it would come through in glimmers, when I skirted around the line, keeping the vision a slave to chance, blinking in at favorable alignments between posture and light, blinking out with the swish of my arm. Mere suggestion is its own magic, of course, but it is beginner's magic, the spell of the nymph who gives a mortal his first taste of the wood. It is the magic of those insecure in themselves. Easy magic. Great fun to dally in... and a difficult flirtation to renounce, for it was all so I could merely enjoy myself, and that was needed for a time. But any flirtation is not true....

She hangs her head, overcome with sudden remorse.

WOMAN

Is this why he has kept me at bay? For indulging too long in nymphatic idleness? Now in the depths of this winter I have received his message. I understand what he wanted to tell me, what he couldn't say any other way than by silence. He is the master of silence. There are many truths that live there, that one cannot tell or show. 

I decrease so that he can increase. I step into a new place where the vision is permanent and truth shines regardless of the conditions of light. I don't mind any pain. Pain is the gateway to another world whose hallways are my home. It is sustained pain that sustains the eyes that can see the dream. But it feels good to waste away, good like an acquired taste that forms into a pillar of a new world based on new standards. It must be real pain that bear with it all the risk of reality. No simulation, but your body, your self. A high entry price. Your soul must already be transfigured, already denied the order of the daylight world, to come in. Sense – respond. That is the order of the day. Denying yourself must be how men feel when they dig holes – that sensation of pushing into the earth. It's very satisfying to push into anything that resists your efforts. I push into myself, pushing with absence into the loose earth of untensioned satisfaction until it tenses into discomfort and resistance. With every denial the space in which resistance battles urge builds up stronger while the limbs grow weaker.

They cannot understand from outside. I'm lucky it found me and rescued me from this doctrine of decay and reforged me in a new one. Deny the body nothing. One has to start denying themselves first, and only then find their god along the way in the long hall which appears and through which all such seekers, initiates, desperadoes, and other bearers of great sympathetic feeling who've found no corner in this world are funneled, the gateway all such souls pass into, hallways where early on the journey, cheerful worldly passerby unwittingly encourage what they didn't know they're seeing with vapid exclamations like: “You look great!”.

Thank god for their ignorance. They only say such things because they don't see the mechanism of denial or the gray hall in which the model practices her budding rituals and reaps its early rewards. If committed to the doctrine and able to weather the dark crossing of isolation and confusion, the time of grasping at walls, at anything that might not be there, the wayfaring seeker will eventually come upon an altar, the altar of the god who makes it all real, who shows her that it was all for something by bestowing the one and only vision that has been calling her the whole time. He validates the dull darkness of suffocation, exchanging it for a new darkness, a pitch darkness so bright it creates new eyes in order to witness it. And the miracle is that, so it has been for all who are here; that there at the altar she finds other believers who have walked the same path from the outer world in, through the same isolation, the same truths, who exited the world into the same murky hallway and underwent the same process of acquiring new eyes. Is there no truer way to see the humanity of another on par with one's own than this? No, the greatest miracle is not in finding your god but in finding other believers who have found your god. The most beautiful moment is looking back, seeing all of you moving separately together through the dark toward the altar. In this moment we become siblings, forged in the search. If we all have discovered him then he is real and what he says is true. Our hall rings with resonance. We are home, and we, misfits of the outer world, discover that here we are beautiful - and then, being so transfigured, we miraculously became beautiful to the world that cast us out. And we return to it by our god-given missions, beautiful in the human world but untouchable by it.

It is an incontrovertible conversion to realize that it all was going to something. That there is a god and there are those who see and hear him, who live as I live, and I may even pass them in the streets without knowing. To this day I'm awed in the presence of those who have gone much farther – and feel unceasing awe to realize our entire world is accessible through a secret mentation, namely, a particular self-denial - and a portal opens in the flat gray wall, at whose end there is an already-existing cathedral and a community of believers... all of which, without that simple key, the ordinary daylight world passes entirely by. How did I hook onto the exact right wavelength and find the one act of prostration when so many wayward ideas are cul-de-sacs? What if it was an accident? In my darkest hours he reminds me that he called me by name and that I answered. I was made for it, and made myself for it. And when I went in my god told me that to live in devotion one has to quicken past doubt, looking back not on the pillars of sugar.... And how could I have heard this call prior to acquiring the ears it bestows? But that is the holy paradox.

INT. CAFE MAIN

Having ruminated, she walks out of the bathroom into what appears to be a large cafe, buys nothing, and walks outside toward her purpose.

WOMAN

There is no congruity between the mechanics of our interior world and how they appear to those outside. It might be close to the truth to say that for how each of our actions is perceived by the world the true meaning is an inversion. For instance, they can understand a simple truth such as: they're blind to the halls of a secret church. But the real truth is that it is the eye who is blind to them. They fall not under his light, and thus do not exist. 

The thing about truth is that if you tell someone a truth, if they believe it they will find a way to connect what they already have in themselves to make it true, and will succeed - after all, the bedrock of each word is pure meaning itself. Language is one of a kind this way; its meanings have been crystallized, relative to one another, with calculated margins of ambiguity... past which you are simply wrong. Of course, people no longer care about just being wrong as long as they're having fun and connecting. They are fine with temporary connections, with watching them form and break.... But even if our magic could be entirely codified in letter – which it cannot – they will miss the mark when they try to explain it, for they have not received the bestowal of sight. How could they, without having paid the price?

EXT. WOMAN ON THE STREET

She walks coolly along, tall, thin and swift, disregarding the dirty streets and acknowledging no one. She is an emissary of his eye out here and can only perceive those like herself.

WOMAN

Every day I give gratitude for having found my true family. In our world there are very few places, but they are alive, and everything else is irrelevant. Surreal Urbania, Americana, wherever - it doesn't matter. It all is a kind of gray dream, one scene flowing into another like an endless background for inspiration and profit.

There is one truth their world gets right, the few times they believe it, and it's that life is what's valued. But not all people are alive. My sisters and brothers, our world... they understand me, and I them. We are all we have in this world whose truths are against us....

She only notices one or two people - thin, beautiful - man, woman - it is uncertain, and all the better - recognizing a living piece of art, an acolyte, and nodding approvingly. She thinks to recruit them, bring them into the fold. But not today – she has a busy day.

INT. WOMAN WALKS INTO A STUDIO

She enters a modern building and walks down a long sleek hallway into a studio. The place is glamorous, though to some it would seem severe. At the end of the hall is a black lacquered room – matte black walls and ceiling, white gleaming floor. It plays host to a sense of hushed reverence amid constant activity; between work and leisure there is no difference, their movements are deliberate, coordinated, in a constantly elevated ritual state. From the moment she walks in she takes her place in the dance among her sisters and brothers, waltzing forward and kissing them, accepting distant hugs in return as they waltz away to dress up or do makeup. The world does not see their true inner life, but merely an oasis of fae, glamorous and high-boned, removed from the wider world in a garden of glass, straight-facing celibate kings and queens.

WOMAN

What they miss is devotion, because in their world they consider devotion insanity. I recall when I was a stranger to all of it. Now each of our gestures has depth, rooted firmly in appreciation of each other's sacrifice. What I have taken from the surface world I have poured, and then some, into my one true family, and I can deny no one. Enmity is but another bond, and one of the greatest, for those willing....

She beholds her sister, a bitter rival, a worthy devotee, a great beauty. A strange bond between them, of divine love spring forth divine pain. The medicine is in the pain, it's said, and she dives into the pain whenever she sees her, outlined so much more sharply than any others.

WOMAN

Who in this life is closer to me than my enemy who is just like me? It is a land few dare to explore... but what I have seen by going!... I have no choice but to dive into the movements of my nemesis who reflects life in ways I can physically and spiritually not, yet who sees all I see and knows the same truths. But how she worships! What portion of the truths flow through her!...

If she is clad in blue, then her enemy is green, and their beloved all last season had been swimming in blue, swimming so long he could not any longer without drowning, and now absolutely required the domain of green and its ebullient life, the reflection of light off of chlorophyll to restore him and cast him anew, and what was Miss Blue to do? There was only one of him, one laser focus of his eye. So she remained in the shadows, mourning in indigo while immersing herself in the pain of bearing witness of the truths of green that were locked to her. And how far she had gone to places that were verboten, that may not have even been real!

She stepped awkwardly into her enemy's ways, but she could not mimic them, and there was no way around this inadequacy, for he needed them all... but what he did not know he needed was one wearing green as blue would, in utter misery and villainous spite, for that, too, was a truth, and her nemesis was vibrant, a daytime veranda queen, while she was a swamp creature out of line of his sight... and she thought she had solved it with this new equilibrium, but there was never any such thing, because her enemy – limitlessly talented – spat out emerald knives at the swiftest provocation showing that she, too, had more than a foot in the darkness and the swamp forces at her command, and he delightedly caught them all in their tango, and died in the muck, never minding who sang those bubbling murmurs in his last drifting moments while his queen turned her back and frolicked off with his light. Oh, those things she could never do! Those ways she could never be that her beloved so needed. This was her present time and sometime it would end. She was still in the cathedral, even if she sang the dirge. If she rejected green altogether she would be outside, and she would be nothing – unthinkable – so yes, the medicine was in the pain and who hurt her also helped her.

She watches her sister's performance under the light. How loved she is in her verdant silks made specifically to send her into herself and come out with a new discovery that all can witness. What creation comes of his whims! She catches her breath to receive their lord's vision. How it loves her! How his light shines only for her. She can not help but see through his eye, and see her through his eye. Of course all in the black room are rewarded with his vision in their own way. But whose way can be utterly deepest? Is her context not richest? She alone can witness green's elation and blue's pain woven into inseparable strands... a new understanding. It is exactly as she had suspected, but now – how!? - reflected so painfully back to her in actual life!

She takes off her black overcoat, underneath which is the shirt she admired in the mirror: nauseatingly green, with little red flowers running down in straight lines, unbalanced with shimmering deep blue jewels on top, far gaudier than she would normally wear and something that begs an undersea outfit. 

Her brother beside her looks her up and down, dispassionately studying her body from foot to shoulder.

BROTHER

That almost looks good. Don't know how I feel about the jewels. But you look great!

It is the story she has been quietly living inside for weeks, a story only one other – maybe two – could glimpse - and where is he now? She had sensed him as soon as she walked in. This is not due to a superior connection, she has come to admit, but because his presence is everywhere and his thought permeates the only air she breathes. But his body is nowhere to be found, even though she hears him in her sister's movements, and pauses at every corner that hints at his passing through.

BROTHER

I never saw you wear something like before. Isn't it beyond your palette?

WOMAN

I like to be festive - following their rules while breaking ours.

He leans in closer and speaks into her ear.

BROTHER

You're always putting at least two meanings into everything, it's so brilliant.

Her sister comes down fresh off a performance, tired, patting the sweat off of her face; even out of the light the light still follows her. They perform rituals of admiration, a three-way kiss in the air.

SISTER

Gosh, no, I'm so sweaty.

BROTHER

You're brilliant is what you are.

Another sister calls out lunchtime, heralding several others carrying large laden trays toward a table off to the side of the studio. The whole horde, starving, answer the call and crack open the door on their physical urges. They gather around the table and each other, chatting and casually snacking on the fruit and vegetable pickings without any quick motions. But first there is a sacred leaderless silence. Nobody interferes in another's space, hungry as they are; nobody reaches over and there is no competition, though there isn't enough to go around. Some will have to forego.

She knows she will be one; it's in her character and right for this time. It's an easy task. She stands still while her sister's green arm reaches over and grabs a green apple slice. She has become so accustomed to hunger that it no longer bothers her. This is a new plateau in her development: she does feel hunger, but she is indifferent to it. And with the distance of indifference, she even trains herself to make it a pleasure – if she wants to. But she doesn't care about pleasure. In her perfect equanimity she beholds the veil from which anything can be fashioned. Anything can be anything, as they're fond of saying, but of course they don't live this. They live by the strictest routine, in a world where every color is part of a language that weaves an ongoing tapestry of the myths of their lives, where material fabric speaks a secret code only whose devotees can communicate through because they alone can display the details woven into it in the first place, like mirrors flashing to each other on the sea. Sometimes they go all day without speaking.

A faux-accidental transgression initiates the first dip. Mealtimes are a favorite ritual, and nobody appreciates food like the thin, but, like clothes, they appreciate it correctly. They worship together, all of them, under one belief, tall, thin, and beautiful.

WOMAN

How many secret cathedrals are there in this world? How many doors, like the one that led here lead off from the surface if you have a key? Is there, somewhere, a whole other parallel world as big as ours, with its own secret language and halls? How many doors had I passed before stumbling on this one? And if not pain as their entry then what do they use? What do other gods paint with? Does every cathedral contain its own unsayable emotional states? It isn't just pain but, like language, pain attached to thought, meaning with rocket fuel.

And how many in the gray surface-world have dipped into the waters of a juxtaposed realm and touched what seemed like a shipwreck, only to discover that it teemed with a secret life? Maybe their world is far more mysterious than I know. If this world already existed, how many more hidden countries of practice and belief are there that never show a tendril to the light? If our tendrils can't be seen why should others'? Their peculiarity is their protection, for, if innocuous enough, nobody knows they are seeing anything. Reality, if it can be known as anything, is like a wall. A church's peculiarities can get only so far before they become visible – not as what they truly are but as... although... under the light of day, are they not simply what they are?

They sometimes call themselves mermaids as their home is below. And despite her disdain, she loves going back to the surface and observing it from the distance of anonymity, like a marsupial peering quietly from under a rock with its great eyes, gathering shiny objects to take back below. But, as with the Little Mermaid, her brothers and sisters prefer the undersea world, scorning and laughing when she tells them about the curiosities above.

WOMAN

(Speaking) I realized today almost nobody can wear clothes. They're too fat.

BROTHER

Well do you prefer them naked? Personally I prefer the world well-groomed if only so my eyes don't suffer.

WOMAN

Think about how much beauty just disappears on them!

BROTHER

Honey, I don't care. It's bad for the skin.

WOMAN

You're not bothered by the loss of beauty?

Her sister winks.

SISTER

        Trends fade, but style is forever.

BROTHER

Amen.

WOMAN

Do you think what we read makes us thin or fat?

Her brother and sister both laugh, absurdly.

BROTHER

I think you need to eat something.

INT. WOMAN IS CALLED TO MODEL

Lunch concludes and after not eating, it is the woman's turn in the light. She carries the heaviness of the nauseous green, and this is the vision she will channel. Shoots are a sublime ecstasy. It is akin to being on stage. She performs for her god, but is congratulated by his priest. Sometimes she is so overwhelmed she feels nothing, but how she savors his reaction when it comes.

She goes through the motions expertly; she is not aware of what she is doing, but she knows it is perfect. She moves in unbroken motion, so hypnotized that she is utterly empty of self. She is aware of watching herself, of the lucidity of a quite removed mind, and of a disturbing little jolt when she realizes she is having an out of body experience. 

Her brother helps her put on her coat once she comes out from under the light and praises her, offering her water, a cucumber slice, and to take one item from a tray of brightly colored candies. She takes a black wrapped one without knowing what flavor it is.

BROTHER

Like watching water. Now go relax.

WOMAN

I have therapy.

BROTHER

(Winking) Hope you get something good.

She fastens her coat and leaves the building.

EXT. CITY STREETS

She exits the studio in her long coat and sunglasses, her hair pulled back and her mouth stern. Her entire appearance is muted as if to hide, but not so muted that she appears too dark to blend in.

She passes under a large billboard of herself that she doesn't recognize; she only sees it upon looking up following the sound of oncoming female voices belonging to two teenage girls who are passing the other way and remark at how cute the purse she's holding is. One girl says there are good knock-offs not far from an abortion clinic.

Her billboard-self wears a now-unrecognizable expression and a set of fake piercings matching a bright and tattered ensemble as she queens over a skyline under an orange sun in a yellower orange sky; party lights are aglow on the skyscrapers that fall under the dark shadow of her girdled snatch. Her smiling profile looks east toward the rising sun, and she knows in reality there is a casino in that direction. At least there's a connection to the real world.

She has no recollection doing the shoot, other than of receiving payment for it sometime later. She goes thankfully undetected by the teenagers in the tense crossing and rounds the corner while trying to recall the contents of her inner life during that time. It was ages ago, in a much earlier stage of nymphic reverie. She was entranced, full of parties, plans, a playlist of songs, moods, and loves that still scaffold her inner world. She remembers the feeling that they were consciously communally weaving a story, in which she was largely then just a fleeting butterfly. 

She turns a corner and enters another, blander office.

INT. THERAPIST'S OFFICE

The woman arrives early for therapy, startling her therapist, who is a short Asian man of small build with a receding hairline and glasses. He is bent over his desk when she arrives.

She takes her usual seat expectantly, and despite her blatant disregard for the schedule he accommodates her.

SHRINK

Is there anything you'd like to discuss today?

She shrugs and shakes her head.

SHRINK

How was your morning?

WOMAN

I woke up, showered, went for a coffee, had a shoot, and now I'm here.

SHRINK

Did you eat or drink anything other than coffee?

WOMAN

I didn't have any coffee. I go to the coffee shop only as a matter of ritual, like smoking a nicotine-free cigarette.

He writes something down and makes an affirmative noise.

SHRINK

How do you feel now generally?

She thinks about it.

WOMAN

I feel... invisible.

SHRINK

How so?

WOMAN

Well, on my way here I passed by a couple of high school girls under a billboard with my own picture and they didn't recognize me. They were just talking about incels and abortions.

SHRINK

Does it upset you that they didn't recognize you?

WOMAN

No! I love that I can be invisible when I want. My life is at home and I disappear at will on the street, then appear again where and when I want to be. I only want to 'be' where I want to be.

SHRINK

But seeing your own image in the street – that doesn't make you feel visible?

WOMAN

Honestly, I never notice. You could convince me it's not even me. It doesn't look like me.

SHRINK

Does that bother you?

WOMAN SCOFFS

No. It's not my business what happens after the shoot. I don't know what they're going to do with it. It goes on to many other people before it enters the world.

SHRINK

Do you experience depersonalization?

WOMAN

I already said I don't notice.

SHRINK

What about during work? You've spoken before about a kind of euphoria. Did you feel that today? Did you enjoy your work?

WOMAN

I didn't enjoy it, I didn't not enjoy it.

SHRINK

Forgive me for saying, but I think the way you're living is very clearly becoming unsustainable.

WOMAN

Isn't that what drugs are for? To make it sustainable?

SHRINK

No drug will help you to feel a connection with your life and work, nor help you explain why you, who are represented in a way so few are, don't feel visible.

The woman cackles over a twinge of irritation.

WOMAN

Represented!? You live in a fantasy. I don't care about representation! I'm the representation! My concern is for the life that makes it possible. The raw material. That's us. Representation is for your world.

SHRINK

My world?

WOMAN

Yes, and it's disgusting you pretend you don't know what I mean. You're a shrink for what, to help? No, to get as close to our world as you can. The world where I live and work has nothing to do with the world you see it in! We're the feed, you're the pigs, and we both know that will never change. The sad thing is you're not even fuckable.

She stands up and walks out dramatically.

EXT. STREET AGAIN

Flustered, she walks quickly but without direction. She is in imminent need of something, and just as she realizes this she looks up and, as if it calls to her, finds herself across from a large stone church. Overwhelmed at the serendipity, she walks inside.

INT. CHURCH

She looks cautiously around as she has not been in a church in a very long time. She takes a leaflet about confession and reads it, immediately becoming excited.

WOMAN

(Why the hell are there therapists?)

There is a short line by the confessional booth. Without any other motions she walks to it, her boots loud on the floor, and takes her place until it is her turn. She reads the pamphlet and prepares.

INT. CONFESSION BOOTH

WOMAN, READING THE PAMPHLET

In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Amen.

Bless me Father for I have sinned. It has been... God, I don't know how long since my last confession. My sins... I have poisoned love with envy. I am envious of my sister. She is so beautiful, the way she expresses the light, the truths that flow from her being. Next to her I feel like a closed wooden box, invisible, dull, unworthy of his light. I am jealous of how the light loves her. It is torture to be around her, and yet my envy has drawn me closer than ever to another's being. There is no other way; I cannot escape the pain by keeping apart. At least through her I am nearer to the light. Then, at least I graze its shadow again. That is where I live now, in his shadow, but it is the shadow by his light, so it is life. The light shone on me once, too, and for that time I became something so beautiful to myself. Is that the real sin, to see yourself? When the light of our lord illuminates you, it makes you feel as if you're alone in his world. A kind of fulfilled, unified aloneness, with which nothing can compare. It is better than any drug. Now every day I wake up in dread that I may be outside, for if I am not in the light, I am nowhere.

PRIEST

My child, it is not the light which casts shadow. The light of our Lord illuminates all of us, individually and together and more, as members of one great body. None of us is the same, but we are all equally loved in his light.

WOMAN

I don't understand your words, Father. Where I am it is just dark. My sister has permanent faith; meanwhile I who have wavered am made to bear witness to my greatest torture. The light is her and she is him, and I am assigned to record it. It is a gift given to me by our lord: for who else will understand as much of the light that passes between them? I have been called to this most painful task, and through my love I answer. It is because I was not enough alone; my faith is always wavering. No matter how far I go, no matter how I am held, it slips away. I must dress my mind and my heart every morning. Is this just what faith is? Why does my sight keep fading? Why must I knock to enter my home? Why is it so hard to find God, and so easy to take a pill and go to sleep?

PRIEST

My child, it is so clear to me, what your soul cries out for. It is not a pill you are seeking, nor a light, nor a connection, but a single name! A name you can call who will bring you to God at every opportunity, for as many times as you can remember. You are more aware than most of the nature of sin, but we are already redeemed.

You must purify your heart. Commit to laying aside your envy, and instead accept that your sister is as deserving of his love as you are. And accept that you, too, are no less within reach of that same love. You must accept that his love flows to her and to you in equal measure.

WOMAN

But how can I count my envy as sin, Father? Without it I wouldn't know my own wretchedness! I am Nurse Ratched, helping to harm, a leeching voyeur, a bog creature dressed as a friend. I have no pure motivation. Even the urge to confess is but the twisted pleasure of devouring myself. But it has brought me closer to my lord than ever, for I am his observer of rejected places. I go wherever he sends me. It is by envy's dark light that I have revealed what would otherwise never be seen! This is our work! It is valuable work to our lord, and to me!

PRIEST

The Lord works mysteriously, but I cannot believe that he would choose your self-torture.

WOMAN

I know my lord as he makes himself known to me. He is infinitely specific. His eye is like a laser; there is no substitute for its light. Within his narrow light lies an inimitable garden, but you see only a sliver, and you must be able to pass through that sliver to be inside, if he lets you. I follow him into the most unreal of states to get there. My salvation means nothing to me. That is what this green means and why I wear it. He alone knows the fullness of its meaning, for he is the one who has given me this envy as a way back into his garden. It is known only to me and to him, spoken in silences through the thickets of noise. I should be honored that he chose me! I am the messenger and witness to something inimitable, and if I renounce my envy, I will give up the mission and sever our bond!

FATHER

He will find a way to reach you. You do not need to rely on your sin.

The woman involuntary cries.

WOMAN

I cannot give it up!

In a bout of renewed conviction, she stands up and leaves the confessional.

The priest exits after her. They see each other for the first time. He looks into her face and she studies his. He is a moderately built middle aged man with most of his hair, glasses, mild and scholarly looking and calm.

PRIEST

We haven't finished.

WOMAN

I don't go to church. I'm here out of restlessness.

PRIEST

Consider that your restlessness brought you here to give you an answer for it.

WOMAN, AGGRESIVELY

You think I don't know these tricks? You think I can't resist even you trying to get between us? Joke's on you! It's he who used you to reach me again.

PRIEST

I am not in the business of tricking anyone. I am here in the service of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.

WOMAN

He was not envious, and I am. I'm wretched. My path is another.

PRIEST

He went to depths you've scarcely broached. There is nothing to fear.

WOMAN

What I told you today, I've never told even myself. I have nobody to tell - if I did I would lose everything!

PRIEST

I am beholden never to tell.

She embraces him, falling into his chest. Her first full bodily contact in so long that she runs her hands over his torso, feeling its shape and firmness. He gasps and lunges back. He looks at her in shock before recollecting himself.

The woman, overcome with incomprehension, leaves quickly without saying a word.

EXT. STREET, HEADED TOWARD THE PARK

With nowhere to go and disturbed by what transpired, she spins off in an unforeseen direction. In distress she reaches a city park, but instead of going in walks beside it along a tree-lined street, slowing down by a quaint cafe.

INT. CAFE

Inside, nobody rushes. It is decorated for Christmas, with a large fir tree covered in red ribbons with gold trimming, large white snowflakes and multicolored lights. She looks around anxiously, feeling somewhat that her ruffled presence is too brash for this homely atmosphere and its provincial customers, but does not want to resist its undemanding peace. There are couples with young kids dressed like walking Christmas ornaments, some bespeckled loners, old and young, taking up the corners with their coffee and print media; the liveliest spot contains two tables pushed together and filled with youthful gossiping women, and directly opposite them under a window sits a male duo in concentration.

The woman wants to stay and knows it would be inappropriate to do so without buying anything, so she approaches the counter and examines what's on offer, her eyes deriding all the pastries and cookies behind the glass, as well as individually wrapped chocolates and packaged mints on the countertop. A shorter and chubby but amiable barista with an attractive smile takes her order.

BARISTA

How can I help you today?

WOMAN

Can I have a hot water?

BARISTA

Is that all?

WOMAN

Mhm.

BARISTA

Are you sure you wouldn't like a teabag? Maybe a cookie?

Thrown off beat, she spontaneously changes her mind.

WOMAN

Mm... yes, I will take a teabag.

With her tea she returns to a lone red armchair and a small side table situated right up beside the Christmas tree and curls up in it, half hidden behind the branches, cupping her very hot tea and listening to the ambiance of human voices around her. She does not focus on any one conversation but on the various moods, and stops at aberrant unsettlement. Her attention is on the two men by the window, between whom she perceives a mismatch of energy. The older one uncannily resembles the priest still fresh in her mind even though, upon examination, he looks nothing like him beyond being a similar age and of mild bearing – but in his pilled brown Christmaslike sweater he is further colder, stranger, and perfectly self-contained. He looks tired, while the other man is younger and looks confused, even distressed. It is he who is unsettled. His tone is somber, almost urgent; he lurches forward, carrying a great need, while the other leans back only mildly amused. She realizes that she is witnessing the intimate exchange of near strangers, although presently the older man chuckles at his distressed compadre.

OLDER MAN

I don't remember at all. 

YOUNGER MAN

Can't you think about it? I'll buy you a coffee. You can give any bullshit answer and I won't know, only don't say it's that. 

OLDER MAN

(Laughs) Alright. Well, to me it is simply actors and crew. Actors dance and perform, they say the whole world's a stage. There are actors who are aware of who they are and where they are, who know deep in their bones that the world is a stage, and actors who don't know they're on stage at all, who feel eternally real and despise actors. And, completely apart, there are crew, who keep the stage running. And some people think that these populations are nearly fifty-fifty, but I'm not so sure.

YOUNGER MAN

How do you think it skews?

OLDER MAN

Oh, I think there are many more actors. But... not as many as you might think, if you thought the way I do.

YOUNGER MAN

What about the director? Which is he?

OLDER MAN

The director is superfluous. He might wear the uniform of the crew, or else whatever he wants; he talks to the cinematographer and to the actors alike. He's entirely superfluous to the whole production. He's already written the instructions that made it all possible and now he bounces around looking for a place to be and getting in everyone's way. He doesn't want to go back to his room so he runs the show trying to make sure it matches the instructions. Nobody but him is aware of this, so when he's there he's a control freak and when he's not he's hounded by rumors of reclusiveness.

YOUNGER MAN

Are you a director?

OLDER MAN LAUGHS

I'm a nobody.

YOUNGER MAN

A writer?

OLDER MAN

Only in the sense that I live like one. I live alone. Come into town when I need to....

She drinks her hot tea very quickly as she is able to tolerate it, and when she finishes begins to fidget; she doesn't want to leave yet. Anxious, she stands up and goes back to the counter.

WOMAN

Actually, I will take a cookie.

She makes her purchase and returns to her seat, curling up with her feet under her and nibbling on the cookie while furtively listening to the men's conversation, half-hidden in the branches.

YOUNGER MAN

... I envy you.

OLDER MAN

There's nothing to envy. You're lucky to have someone. I only have solace.

YOUNGER MAN

I could use solace.

OLDER MAN

You can have it whenever you want. Solace is solitude.

YOUNGER MAN

But I'm not solitary. You shouldn't be solitary within when you're with someone... if you even can. 

OLDER MAN

Are you going on the world tour? How much solitude do you need, exactly?

YOUNGER MAN

More than I can say without arousing suspicion.... I need time. I touched something and now I want all the time in the world. For what, I don't even know. How do you explain that without making it sound like all the other things it could sound like?

For the first time the older man's attention is truly engaged.

OLDER MAN

You could watch my cabin when I'm gone, if you want. It's peaceful, on the water. That's time....

The men finish their conversation, shake hands and part. Neither has noticed the woman. The younger man walks out and the older resumes reading his magazine without so much as reflecting on this blip in his day. The woman remains curled up in her corner with nowhere she needs to be, sitting and thinking about nothing.

EXT. STREET OUTSIDE CAFE

The older man leaves the cafe and walks through the park back home. The woman watches him leave and then follows him into the park. She has cast off her world without compunction; all of her attention is fixed at this moment and this man and his walking.

EXT. CRAGGY LONELY WAY

The man takes his routine walk and the woman follows curiously, determinedly, keeping her distance but keeping him on her horizon at all times. She doesn't notice the nature and thinks not of when it will end. She followed the whole way without once looking back.

After a long time she sees the cabin in the distance and knows he has already gone inside.

EXT. CABIN SUNSET

She stays behind a large rock, sometimes looking at the cabin from where he does not emerge, and looking around at the plain. No elements bother her numb skin. It is so easy to walk any long path.

It is late afternoon and at last she is calmed, and walks on the grass up to the water. The cabin is far off to the side within sight. The sun is bright, falling, covering the water in gold. She stands at the cliff and looks out in silent awe, happy within her heart.

As the sun falls over the saturated blue, so it makes her arms golden, and a warm wind from nowhere blows over her, against all her skin. For the first time in a long time she feels embodied under the light of the world, part of the living scene, and falls down at the ledge, crying, unable to stop.

EXT. LEDGE, SUNSET

The sun is setting. The woman has been crying a long time. The past feels unreachable and she feels exhausted; as if being embodied has allowed her to fully sense her hunger, she collapses in pain onto the grass and faints by the ledge.

EXT. LEDGE, MORNING

The man walks out of his cabin for his morning tasks and when he looks out at the sunrise sees the figure of the sleeping woman in the distance, feet from rolling over the cliff. He rushes over and picks her up, shivering and blue in the breeze, and carries her into the cabin.

INT. CABIN

Music is softly playing. The woman lies on a dark couch under red checkered blankets inside a warmly lit room. She looks and feels hungover; days of sleep have washed her like a bath. She opens an eye to her new surroundings and sees wood furniture: a large table in the middle and a small table beside her with the book Wind, Sand, and Stars lying bookmarked on it next to a lamp. There are many more shelves of books, a fire roaring, another lamp, all of it deeply lit and almost stiflingly warm.

The radio switches to a sermon.

SERMON

… Nobody is punished for being bad. You lived your life in ignorance, making mistakes. You made friends, you had jobs, adventures... life flowed through you. You weren't bad; you were wrong. Punishments and lulls, that's why they come... not because you're bad but because you're wrong and they're there to correct you....

The cabin is decorated with a tree. A projector is set up. She looks the bookshelves over. It is night outside the window.

The man comes into the living room, visible only from the torso down.

MAN

There's a bathroom over there. There'll be others here for dinner soon.

He walks back to the kitchen. Heavily, she sits up, listens to the music that's come back on the radio, beholds the set dinner table in the middle of the room.

OFF-SCREEN

There is a knock on the cabin door and he opens it.

A mixture of male and female voices exchange hellos, then the couple at the door walks inside and proceeds removing their coats. Only torsos and legs are seen they move around and hear the scuffle of their voices and feet.

FIANCEE

...This view is incredible! We had no idea this was even here!

CABIN OWNER

...It's been my family's for a while...

FIANCEE

...Imagine waking up to this every day...

CABIN OWNER

...You're welcome over anytime....

The model joins them cautiously and takes some silverware for the plates, helping to set the table and introducing herself as another friend. The man of the couple curiously examines the host's effects, including his many notebooks.

YOUNGER MAN

...You are a writer, then....

At this point their conversations are mingled, heard in and out. Only their torsos and below are visible as the owner moves around to set the table and the couple acclimates to the cabin while the model gets her bearings around the entire scene.

MODEL

...Oh, it was a very pleasant walk...

CABIN OWNER

...Sorry for the state of the plates, I don't often have guests...

FIANCEE

...Like we care!...

The table, which is in focus. Only it, the chairs, and moving legs, are seen.

FIANCEE

...You know they're closing it down...

YOUNGER MAN

...That's the best coffee shop in the city. We never would've met again...

CABIN OWNER

...There won't be anywhere left soon...

The owner holds a fifth and final plate in his hands, hesitating to set it down.

FIANCEE

...Are you expecting someone else?...

CABIN OWNER

...Maybe my neighbor....

There is the clanking of silver and glassware, the scraping of chairs, the indistinguishable jumble of four voices which becomes muted and incoherent.