APPEARING HERE

SOFI, forties, lives in Los Angeles, California
EILEEN, seventies, lives in Wichita, Kansas
ELAINE, sixties, lives in Dublin, New Hampshire
GINNIE, sixties, lives in Rio Vista, California
YVETTE, sixties to seventies, lives in Midland, Michigan

SETTING

The courtyard of a medical clinic two hours north of San Francisco.
Two rows of outdoor chaise longues.
May 2019.

A “/” indicates that the next speaker’s dialogue has begun.

SCENE 13

Everyone is onstage lying on their chairs. Elaine is holding a green juice and Ginnie is reading a Thich Nhat Hanh book.

GINNIE
Here’s a provocative question.

YVETTE
Ready.

The Origins of This Great Nation

There wasn’t anything special about us. We were just an average town. Porch swings, wading pools, split rail fences, pump jacks bobbing for oil on the horizon. Meetings at town hall were well attended, sure, but we weren’t some hotbed of insurgents. We didn’t subscribe to any one brand of politics. We couldn’t even be plotted onto your basic left/right binary. Our town had everything: pro-lifers who supported gay marriage, pro-choicers who opposed gay marriage, climate change deniers who owned solar panels, universal health care campaigners who preferred private insurance, creationists with degrees in biology and geology, loyal conservatives, staunch liberals, moderates, radicals, and ornery retirees whose only real issue was guns. And yet that winter we found ourselves united by a common sentiment. We were fed up with our country.

It was very early. Ernest had no business being awake because he had no job and knew no one, was on his way nowhere and had no prospects for the day. Nonetheless, he was hungry and couldn’t sleep.

Thursday, 10 December.

Giles shows us the sample mice and I am, as if for the first time, overcome with joy. Perhaps when I was a child I had feelings like this—but not in many years. I look, for instance, at a small gray mouse, smaller than the others, and it is as if I am seeing (anything) for the first time. He moves among his neighbors so swiftly and yet without error—as if on a track, as if held up by threads from above that prompt him. For reasons I cannot yet fathom, the edge of the enclosure is of great interest to the mice. I suppose there are no such edges in the so-called natural world. No one, not even we, are ready for them (though they are upon us). He sniffs there at the edge and his nose moves with almost impossible articulation.

It was a hard decision. God knows how long it took them to come to it. There were four of them, in a filthy, empty room, starving to death, and they hatched upon a plan. 

Four of them were on one side of a dim room. —I’m going to try it, said the first. The girl watched herself in the mirror as the young man approached. —I wonder, he said. I thought perhaps . . .

EDITOR’S NOTE. From abundant internal evidence it seems clear that the text printed below is the index to the unpublished and perhaps suppressed autobiography of a man who may well have

Stand up, please, place your hand here, state your name clearly. Frederick Charles St. John Vanderveld Montgomery. Do you swear to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth?

A warm may night in Paris, 1903.     A hundred thousand Parisians left their homes in the middle of the night, streaming in crowds toward Saint-Lazare and Montparnasse, the railway stations.

My career began with two strokes of good luck—fate, you might say, because as instances of good fortune none could have bettered them. After the war, towards the end of which I served as a cook in