Jan Baracz: twilight mechanics

  “twilight mechanics” *

Act II.
Scene I.

SAM ‑ pale, gaunt, ragged, hawklike-featured old man.
FEROX ‑ young, slinky, sylphlike human-animal hybrid.
ALEXA – an electronic device.
WORD** ‑ an invisible and notably absent (perhaps lost?) metonym for language.

Room at night, Sam is lying on a disheveled bed in a semi-dark room. A passing train rattles the room. Drones or helicopters vibrate in the distance. Explosions are heard in the background (Is it bombs or fireworks?).

SAM

What kind of night is it? Lights flashing everywhere? What makes night night if not darkness? Word, what happened to your containing act? Have you severed yourself from my days? What is this empty, dry, tongue-shaped shell. In fact, where are you?

Ambulance sirens and car horns join the “orchestra”.

ALEXA (blue halo pulsing around its top)

Can you repeat your question?

Enter FEROX

The language has come to betray us.

ALEXA (blue halo blinking)

Can you try to re-phrase it?

SAM

I dreamt that we got out. And past the damned radius I saw the other shore.

FEROX

All around, the rim flares up untrodden. The soil is aflame, not a rat can escape.

ALEXA (blue halo blinking)

Would you like me to play music? Wagner or Schoenberg?

SAM

(to Ferox) Unplug her.

FEROX

And dreams have left us to march along the troops, across the raging waters.

SAM

On, do you remember on? What was on? I can’t recall it. How can one go without on? Is on still even on?
 

The room is darkening. The cacophony outside is gradually subsiding with hiccups and whimpers.

ALEXA (blue halo blinking)

There seems to be an outage. Please restart your Echo device and try again.

FEROX

The night is here. Let charcoal and graphite blindly render her velvety hollow.

SAM

And Word? Can Word trace its way back?

* In December 1914, after the onset of World War I, the publisher John Lane had asked Ford Madox Ford to change the title of his then upcoming novel The Saddest Story. In the response letter to Lane, Ford suggested (sarcastically) The Good Soldier.  To the author's horror the novel soon appeared in print under the that title.

** Not to be mistaken for the Biblical God.