excerpts from
American Dreamer
from
The Best American Short Plays 1995–1996
MARILYN People are always so curious about what it’s like to be dead. It’s surprising considering how easy it is to imagine. What’s it like to be Nikita or Fidel or Doc, that’s the real mystery. But to be dead . . . I only close my eyes and “picture” things and places around me.
[She closes her eyes.]
I picture . . . the bed as nothing. The closet door . . . is nothing. The air-conditioner . . . is nothing. They’re all nothing to me, as real as the light picking up their rays. I’ve fallen into enough darkness to know my mortal limits.
[She stands and goes to the map and sweeps away the pins on the map with her arm.]
I can even imagine the world dead.
[Beat.]
Cut a notch in the windpipe of United States . . . to relax the muscles binding the organ sack.
[She slashes at the United States with her shoe heel and bits of paper fly.]
Slide my index and forefingers under the hide of Moscow, letting out the carnal stink of grass and sage.
[She slashes at Moscow with her shoe and bits of paper from the map fall away.]
Saw down the belly of China, Africa, South America—toward the genitals of Europe.
[She slashes at China, Africa, South America, and Europe and bits of paper fall from the map.]
I part the cavity and expose the bloodless gray-green organs of the sea.
• • • •
MARILYN Most of his childhood was spent in the infirmary of boarding schools. He showed me the pictures. Those infirmaries looked like my orphanage. He slept on musty mattresses. Ate bad food. His parents never came to visit him. Only the books came . . . Tolstoy . . . Dickens . . . Flaubert . . . Mann. He said he could grasp the head-bars of his sick bed and feel the presence of all the people who had ever slept in his bed before him . . . telling the short from the tall, the dark from the fair. He could perceive the murmuring of their hearts, the pulse from their weak wrist, the flutter of their breath struggling for air, the movement of listless legs. He could encounter the very character of all those who were sick before him. He could endure their moods: anger, joy, sadness. He knew their hesitancy, their deliberateness. He was experiencing the sensation of the Western Indians who could smell campfires that they were unable to see. That’s how he got to sleep at night putting his arms over his head and holding on to the metal bed-bars and feeling those invisible suffering souls before him. He could always tell who believed in God and who did not. He knew what part of the country they were from. There were as many cities and towns as philosophies. He knew what food they liked, what flowers they loved, whether they were fond of horses. He said holding on to those bars day after day made him understand human pain and human hope.