THE SHADES OF ORCUS

This script is copyright protected and may not be reproduced,

distributed, or disseminated without the prior written permission of
the author.

1
CHARACTERS

Thom Warren mid-thirties, an art critic

Sasha Manning mid-thirties, assertive, his assistant
Lilyanna Quinn mid-twenties, overwhelmingly magnetic
A Woman (Kaitlyn Harding) a suicide victim
Professor a faculty member of Northwestern

Notes on Casting:
Lily’s physical description is major component of the dialogue at the end of the piece. This
should not be indicative of the physical attributes of actor to play her: the text was initially
written for(?) a specific actor and the author will provide appropriate rewrites for any
actor who plays her, if necessary. It is true that Thom finds Lily “beautiful,” and this should
be taken as an appraisal of her brilliance more than her physical appearance. The criticism
this work makes on narrow conventions re: beauty does create a dramatic irony if Lily
retains some of the physical traits that are misogynistically held up as “beautiful,” but this
is not what makes Lily a catalyzing force: her vivacity is a kind of sorcery. Thom’s
experience with her causes him to romanticize her as she is (that is, as the actor playing her
is) in his final monologue. I cannot stress enough that this text does not attempt to make a
broader statement on what constitutes a “beautiful” person, although I think it does much
in subjecting that convention to scrutiny.

As dictated in the stage directions, please double the actress playing Lilyanna as Kaitlyn
Harding and the actress playing Sasha as Professor. These doubles are done for ironic
effect and some of that commentary is arguably lost when cast with separate actors.

2
 THE SHADES OF ORCUS

I’m only a desire for beauty, and outside of that: void, nothing.
- Jean-Paul Sartre, War Diaries 1939-1940

ACT ONE

Chopin’s Nocturne in E-flat is the last song in the preshow.

Darkness. We see projected somewhere a home video of a dark
room, in which a young woman stands on a chair. It is too dark
to make out her features, and we can hear in the poor recording
a Samuel Barber adagio. Above her dangles a limp, self-tied
noose. A beat. She places the noose over her head, almost
reverently, like a rosary. A beat. Stares into the blackness.
Through broken sobs:
Kaitlyn: I’m sorry, Danny—
Also in the dark, we can see a man’s face illuminated by the blue
glow of a laptop screen. He watches idly, a digital recorder poised
to his mouth. He sees the projection on the wall of his office. In
the video, we see her kick the chair out from beneath her. The
instant the rope goes taut, there is a sudden blackout, so we are
spared the image of her swinging corpse.
Lights fade up. Thomas Warren leans against his extraordinarily
messy desk, his hands in the pockets of his slacks, chin resting
over the collar of his tasteful cardigan. He looks the stock figure
of a tired New England intellectual. He is in his mid-thirties. He
peers down at a letter and dictates it into his recorder.

3
Thom: “My dear Danny, I am so sorry. You’ll never know – you can’t
know – what I feel. Everything hurts. The world hurts. There has
been no kindness given to me from anyone but you – not my
family, not my friends, not God: only you. And now I have to go.
It hurts too much to stay. Try to understand. I love you. And if
love were enough, I’d never want to die. It’s all I have to leave
you. I’m sorry. I’m yours, forever, now. Kate.”
He folds up the letter and places it into a manila folder. From the
same folder, he withdraws some photographs. Speaking into a
digital recorder, he scrutinizes them.
Thom: Subject is Kaitlyn Marie Harding. Twenty-eight. 5’6”, one-
hundred twenty-two pounds, blonde hair, green eyes, white.
Matriculated University of North Carolina – Chapel Hill, class of
2012. Looks bizarrely like a young Kate Hepburn, though the
distortion from the clotted blood in her face makes that
presumptuous.
He idly takes a sip of coffee.
Subject hanged herself in the bedroom of her Akron apartment
while her boyfriend was rehearing a play at the community
theatre. Ironically, he was playing Lear’s fool. Note to self: tell
Sasha to include that, somewhere – it has poetic resonance.
Subject included second note set on her night-stand addressed to
Thomas Warren, a reference to myself, which reads: “Dear Dr.
Warren, I have made it known in my notarized will that my
suicide be critiqued for inclusion in your collection. I hope you’re
either enlightened or entertained by it, and that it helps you and
whoever else sees it in some way. It will help me.” End note.
Statements from the boyfriend afterward reveal that he had no
idea of my work or that Ms. Harding followed it. He seemed
distraught by this. Note to self: tell Sasha to try to organize a
meeting between me and—(he looks for the name)—Daniel.
Another sip of coffee. Sasha, his assistant, slides in, holding more
folders. Thom gives her an acknowledgement and holds up one
finger to signal he is almost done. She waits patiently on a
chair by the door, watching.

4
 Subject fails preliminary qualification for inclusion for the
following: her suicide lacks originality, her method of tying the
noose was clearly researched only moments before and was
done with the use of a simple nylon rope from her garage,
attached to an exposed support beam in the ceiling of her
bedroom and included with other submitted materials. (He
withdraws the rope from the manila envelope, quickly scrutinizes it,
and casually tosses it aside.) Being a fan of my work, she must have
known that a routine hanging lacking artistry would have failed
this criterion. Furthermore, her suicide note to her boyfriend,
while heart-felt and riddled with pathos, it is not of use to my
project at this time. The video of the event is of poor quality, her
face is obscured, and the police photos which were passed to me
in accordance with her notarized last wishes lack aesthetic or
critical poignancy. Ms. Harding was, unfortunately, another
perfunctory suicide. Will reevaluate at a later time.
He clicks off recorder. Thinks. Quickly clicks it back on.
And Samuel Barber? Good God.
Sasha: Which one?
Thom: (brushing it aside) Opus 11.
Sasha: I like that adagio.
Thom: Then you have as much taste as she does. Did.
Sasha: It’s sorrowful. It’s painful. I think it’s fitting.
Thom: (not looking up at her) Fitting means unoriginal. Ever see Ben
Brantley use the word ‘fitting’ for a major musical? I’ve heard
that song four times in four months. More than Dvorjak, not as
many as Mahler.
Sasha: Still, it fits.
Thom: (looking up) You think I’m crass.
Sasha: I think you’re something that rhymes. (Thom grunts.)
Thom: It’s not as though I’m giving my unsolicited opinion. These
people ask for it—quite literally as their last wish.

5
Sasha: (not unkindly) I’ve worked for you for two years—why are you
arguing with me?
Thom: Speaking of people who work for me—(he nods to her folders)
Sasha: Just finished compiling them for you.
Thom: Anything good?
Sasha: Depends what your kinks are.
Thom: Christ, Sasha: between you and the message boards, I’ve had
about enough moralizing for one day.
Sasha: I’m not moralizing.
Thom: That’s what moralizers say.
Sasha: “Moralizers” isn’t a word.
Thom: Sasha.
Sasha: I can turn off the Wifi.
Thom: Please don’t.
Sasha: I should. Every public figure has a hundred pages on the internet
smearing them. People who don’t even criticize the dead. You’re
going to get some.
Thom: I’m a critic. I don’t mind criticism. But this: (clicks a button on his
laptop, bringing up a page that’s clearly been sitting there for a while)
“Morally bankrupt, bereft of compassion or a sense of decency,
Dr. Thom Warren is, literally speaking, walking evil. Who the
fuck does this man think he is, and what kind of god-complex
does it take for such a sociopath to think the world desperately
needs him to pass judgment on our most troubled people as
some sort of suicide sommelier?”
Sasha: We should put that on the business cards.
Thom: Except that sommeliers don’t review wine as much as identify
them—
Sasha: God, you’re a ponce.
Thom: It goes on like that, an entire forum. Over eight thousand
comments.
Sasha: Do they all use syntax that well?
Thom: Objectively no.
Sasha: Don’t tell me you read them—
Thom: I read them all.
Sasha: I’m smashing the router tomorrow. You have a problem.
Thom: If only you knew.

6
Sasha: Why is it even getting to you?
Thom: If only I knew.
Sasha: (changing the subject) Anyway. The new cases—there’s one you’re
going to need to call county for.
Thom: Yeah? What is it?
Sasha: When’s the last time you slept?
Thom: Just give me the file.
Sasha: Well, it’s—just, here—(she hands him the folder. He opens it and
flicks through. His eyes meet hers.)
Thom: Sasha.
Sasha: Yeah.
Thom: This subject isn’t dead.
Sasha: Yeah. She wants to pitch it to you.
Thom: Pitch it to me? Like a movie?
Sasha: I guess.
Thom: How does she propose to do that?
Sasha: She didn’t say. She just left her contact info. Wants to meet you.
Thom: (hands it back) Shred it.
Sasha: Shred it?
Thom: Yes. After you send a .pdf to our people at county and call her
nearest mental health center.
Sasha: You’re sure?
Thom: It’s the law. (She takes it.) No, give it back. (He takes it back.)
Sasha: I’ll do it.
Thom: It’s the end of your day. I’ll deal with it.
Sasha: The trolls have left the internet.
Thom: My thoughts exactly. Forget about it. Hell, I’ll probably forget it.
Sasha: Yeah.
Thom: Is that all?
Sasha: Yeah. No—Barry called. Wants to know how you’re feeling
about the deadline.
Thom: The same way I feel about rectal probes.
Sasha: He wants to know what the holdup is.
Thom: Tell him there’s not enough material.
Sasha: All right, but what is the real reason.
Thom: That is the real reason.
Sasha: Are you kidding? We’ve done fifty cases this month.
7
Thom: They’re missing what I need.
Sasha: (something) All right.
Thom: We’ll get there.

Sasha turns to go. Thom throws Kaitlyn’s folder and the rope in
a drawer. She stops at the door.
Sasha: Thom.
Thom: Mm?
Sasha: That girl you were evaluating when I came in. The hanging.
Thom: Yeah.
Sasha: You said it was unoriginal, it lacked vision. And that, knowing
your work, she must have known it wouldn’t be considered for
the collection.
Thom: (chewing his pen) Yeah.
Sasha: So why did she send it in, anyway?
Thom: (thinks for a bit) Ever do theatre in high school?
Sasha: (smiling) Yes. Our Town.
Thom: Did it suck?
Sasha: Of course, it did.
Thom: Did you care?
Sasha: (beat) I don’t think so.
Thom: (apropos) Suicide is a performance.
Sasha: Like hell.
Thom: (pressing on) You’ve never heard me give this lecture? (She shakes
her head, so he presses on.) Like all performances, suicide is often
premeditated, rehearsed in the head. It’s often staged for
effect, the subject considering what it must be like to walk in
on their corpse, the theatre of the action and what it leaves
behind.
Essentially all active human concepts are performances. Right
now, you’re performing: your gender, your job, your
understanding of our relationship, etc. Suicide is no exception.
Every performance is special to the performer.
Sasha: Is that true?
Thom: In some way, it must be. It is theirs. And, in the case of suicide, it
is the last and only performance. It is self-contained, self-
experienced, self-witnessed. Spectator and spectacle exist in one.
8
 I’m not talking about egotism, you understand, but intimacy. It
always means something—to them. And, like performers of other
kinds, they both crave and detest a critic: need the validation and
despise the scrutiny.
Sasha: I think I understand.
Thom: That’s refreshing.
Sasha: Fuck you.
Thom: I’m not talking about people, I’m talking about them. What they
don’t understand—perhaps what even you don’t understand
after all this time—is that so little of criticism has anything to do
with judging the art as much as it does comprehending it,
theoretically. What is this piece of art’s place in the canon, in
society, in relation to others in its genre? And in order to give
better criticism, one needs to see pieces that contribute to that
dialogue. Things said the same way over and over don’t provide
any new insight.
Sasha: The same way over and over—
Thom: Become “fitting.”
Sasha: So, she sent in hers—
Thom: So, she sent it in, anyway. Sure, it’s a boring old hanging. But it’s
her hanging.
Sasha: “Boring.”
Thom: Relatively speaking.
Sasha: Doesn’t that matter to you?
Thom: It certainly matters to her. Whatever Ms. Harding is trying to say,
on the other hand—(he points toward the folder)—has already been
said, and then some. (reflective) When I started the collection—
oh, ten years ago?—all I wanted to do was tell people’s stories: I
want to share their truths. After a while, I learned a very sad fact.
Sasha: Which was?
Thom: Not all truths are created equal. There’s only so much column
space.
For a moment, Sasha’s intensity is palpable.
Sasha: Can I speak as a friend?
Thom: You are a friend.
Sasha: As a friend: keep reading those forums.

9
Thom: (pensive) Yeah.
Sasha: (getting up) I’ll see you on Monday. Get some sleep.
Thom: I do sleep.
Sasha: Go home. Sleep. Don’t be here in the same clothes when I come
back.
Thom: See you then.
Sasha has closed the door just before he finishes the line. He’s left
at his desk rubbing a temple with one finger, staring off into the
darkness, lit garishly by the intense bulb of his desk lamp. He
sighs, and speaks into the void:
Thom: “Father,” I said, “Father, I cannot play
The harp that thou didst give me, and all day
I sit in idleness, while to and fro
About me thy serene, grave servants go;
And I am weary of my lonely ease.

Better a perilous journey overseas

Away from thee, than this, the life I lead,
To sit all day in the sunshine like a weed
That grows to naught,—I love thee more than they
Who serve thee most; yet serve thee in no way.

Father, I beg of thee a little task

To dignify my days,—'tis all I ask
Forever, but forever, this denied,
I perish.”
As he speaks, the dawn gently breaks through the windows,
spilling up the walls of the office, growing to an intense amber
beacon. The fade is slow, ever so slow. When he finishes, the
sunlight suggests to the audience that it is around 6.a.m. the next
morning.
This transition is underscored by an eerie music; it suggests a
rush of time, unearthly, reverberating but not distracting. The
ticking of a clock incorporated may be appropriate but may also
be trite. The aural presence of this “noise,” suggests the

10
 compression of time, as though an entire night is lived in the
course of the moment. It fades out as the poem finishes and the
lights have reached their final “dawn” look.
The intercom on his phone buzzes, breaking his reverie. He
suddenly looks exhausted, and the brusque reminder of reality is
painful. The buzzer sounds again. He blearily looks at his phone
and, bewildered, presses the intercom button.
Thom: Yes?
Lily: (a woman’s) Yes—hello?
Thom: Yes?
Lily: Hello.
Thom: Yes, hello. Where are you looking for?
Lily: I’m looking for the art critic, Dr. Warren.
Thom: (still clearing the sleep from his head) Uh—
Lily: Do I have the right place?
Thom: It says Thom Warren on the door.
Lily: I should have put two and two together.
Thom: Yes, but—but, I’m afraid it’s Saturday, and we see by
appointment.
Lily: Sorry?—
Thom: An appointment, if you—if you have an appointment, you can
come back—
Lily: I don’t have an appointment.
Thom: Yes, you’ll have to make one—
Lily: I can’t do that.
Thom: (pause) Well, I’m afraid you’ll—you’ll have to call in and make
some time if you—
Lily: I’d like to see you now.
Thom: How do know who “I” am?
Lily: I saw your keynote at the University of Chicago.
Thom: (wryly) One of the few.
Lily: I wasn’t. May I see you, please? (A long pause.) Are you doing
something else?
Thom: (Beat. He’s too tired to really comprehend this line of interrogation.)
I—really, I should be honest with you. I haven’t slept well.
Lily: In how long?

11
Thom: I beg your pardon?
Lily: How long has it been since you slept?
Thom: I don’t really—I don’t really think—
Lily: How long?
Thom: (wonders whether or not to tell her. He decides:) A month.
Lily: Precisely.
Thom: Twenty-eight days.
Lily: Including last night?
Thom: Twenty-nine days.
Lily: Serendipitous. Me too.
Thom: Really.
Lily: Seems like a stupid thing to lie about.
Thom: I suppose.
Lily: Let me in, Dr. Warren. I brought coffee.
Thom: Okay. (He presses a button on the phone; we hear a buzzer through the
speaker, and a tiny click of the downstairs door being unlocked.)
Thom looks up from his phone in self-questioning awe, almost
mouthing “What the fuck?” to himself. He rises from his desk
too quickly, knocking his knees on it and spilling his pen cup and
an old to-go coffee everywhere. Furious, he growls to himself and
vainly tries to shake cold coffee off his folders and wipe it from
his desk.
In the middle of this chaos, a woman enters. She is radiant: all
vivacity and a winning smile. She can’t be more than twenty-
five, bright-eyed and incandescent. She is dressed fashionably,
holds a coffee in each hand, and seems amused by Thom’s office
entropy. Thom realizes she is there by one or two dramatic
degrees, and ends his attempt to rectify his situation by lamely
holding several coffee-drenched items and staring at her. It
should be impossible to tell that this actress doubled for Kaitlyn
Harding at the beginning.
Lily: You look like shit.
Thom: Thank you?
Lily: I should have guessed you’d already have some.
Thom: What?

12
Lily: (holds up coffee. Thom, meanwhile, holds a folder that is noticeably still
dripping.)
Thom: Right.
Lily: Good thing I brought a replacement.
Thom: Thank you.
She walks over to Thom’s desk and gently sets the coffee on it.
She then retreats to the chair next to the door, sitting with a
seemingly practiced ease and eyeing him bemusedly over the lip
of her coffee cup as she drinks. It’s almost as if she’s been in this
office every day. Thom, torn still between just having been
sharply woken and stunned at the surreal turn of events, gapes.
She laughs.
Thom: Is there something amusing, here?
Lily: Is there anything that isn’t?
Thom: I—ah—this is going to sound strange—
Lily: Sure.
Thom: But do you possibly know what time it is?
Lily: You don’t keep a clock in here?
Thom: It distracts from work.
Lily: Sure. (She’s already pulling her cell phone from her purse.) It’s 7:36
a.m.
Thom: (settling into reality) All right. Fine. All right. (He takes a sip of
coffee.) Thanks for this.
Lily: No problem.
Thom: (The aftertaste hits him.) That’s really good.
Lily: You like it? It’s my favorite blend.
Thom: It’s familiar somehow.
Lily: French; Victor makes it in a cart down 10th. I’d be surprised if
you had it before.
Thom: It’s exemplary.
Lily: Not a word you hear around the hipster coffee shops these
days. It’s usually pretty “rad” or “dank.”
Thom: (shrugs) Sure.
Lily: You don’t mind people butchering the English language like
that? You’re hip with the slang?

13
Thom: (taken aback) I’m not an elitist.
Lily: You’re an art critic. (Quod erat demonstratum.)
Thom: (unoffended) Right.
Lily is enigmatically drinking her coffee again. Again, Thom is
standing awkwardly in his own broken universe, like a Mormon
missionary suddenly finding himself in the middle of a goth
concert.
Thom: I’m sorry—I seem to be at a disadvantage, here.
Lily: Oh?
Thom: You obviously know much more about me than I know about
you.
Lily: It’s not on purpose. I’m an open book. I even blog.
Thom: Right.
Lily: Well?
Thom: (takes another sip of coffee. He’s aware enough of life now to begin to
be suspicious.) Let’s start with: who are you?
Lily: Lilyanna Quinn.
Thom: And what is it you do, Lilyanna?
Lily: This and that. Student, fashion icon, barista, musician.
Thom: A true millennial.
Lily: There’s no point in having a persona these days, Dr. Warren.
They’re so expendable.
Thom: (piqued) Is that right?
Lily: You don’t need to self-fashion anymore: just selectively angle
your selfies in front of the right backgrounds, and you can
convince people you’re anything. I don’t think most people lead
fake lives: life lends itself to being faked.
Thom: I’ll bet you had a lot of friends in school.
Lily: As many as you, probably.
Thom: You’re a cynic.
Lily: I’m a—something. Whatever it is, it’s the manacle of my
generation.
Thom: Hipsterism?
Lily: (this is no joke) The desecration of irony.
Thom: Okay. (He sets down the coffee.)

14
Lily: You don’t agree.
Thom: I don’t, but this isn’t a graduate seminar. Why are you here?
Lily: You don’t think irony is being held hostage?
Thom: (taking the bait) I think that’s the blind-spot of young people—all
people, I mean, when they’re young.
Lily: What’s that?
Thom: They discover new knowledge and plant their jaded flag in it,
like Euripides didn’t come across it before them. Or Shakespeare,
Virginia Woolf, David Foster Wallace—your mom and dad, for
Christ’s sake. It’s just the same old island recolonized by new
breeds of sarcasm.
Lily: Have you rediscovered that island, too?
Thom: (a not unwelcome realization) I’ve been walking its beaches, lately.
Wondering if I’m marooned there.
Lily: Good. I was afraid you were talking out your ass.
Thom: I do that, too.
Lily: Anything else you want to know?
Thom: (sips his coffee, musing) Why are you here?
Lily: I need some consultation.
Thom: On talking out your ass?
Lily: On an art piece.
Thom: I don’t do appraisals anymore.
Lily: No, this will be for original work.
Thom: An artist, too. What kind?
Lily: A performing artist.
Thom: Isn’t everyone?
Lily: What are you again?
Thom: A critic, presumably. (Gets it.) Clever. It’s true, I guess, that
everyone’s a critic. In their own minds, usually. Do you have a
show coming up, or—
Lily: I’m trying to devise a piece, it has multiple themes: irony,
liberation, temporal consciousness—
Thom: Trying to save irony from the reductive masses?
Lily: (those teeth) Oh, he’s funny.
Thom: I have moments. All the same, I’m not sure I can help you. I am
buried under a massive project of my own, right now. It’s taking
up all my time and, frankly, sapping my soul. I do have a

15
 colleague, a friend out of the Art Institute of Chicago, who
specializes in devised performance. I am sure she’d be very
willing to help and advise —
Lily: I don’t want her.
Thom: I’m sorry?
Lily: I’m not interested in her opinion. Only yours.
Thom: That’s—unexpectedly kind, but—I’m sure she can be of—
Lily: No one can help me but you. I want—you.
Thom: Lilyanna—
Lily: Lily, please.
Thom: Lily, sure, Lil—wait a minute. (The light bulb clicks on. He
frantically searches through coffee-covered folders until he isolates a
single damp file and opens it.) Lily—Quinn. Born April 25th, 1991,
Portsmouth, Maine, Lily Quinn?
Lily: In the flesh.
Thom: My assistant just gave me your file last night.
Lily: I’ve been trying very hard to get in touch with you. I want to—
Thom: (a little coldly) She told me what you wanted.
Lily: (wilting very slightly) Oh.
Thom: (he tentatively drinks his coffee now, as if wary of it) Look, Ms.
Quinn, I don’t know if you’re aware precisely what it is I do,
here—
Lily: I’m very familiar with what it is you do here.
Thom: Then you’ll know that I review—and consider writing for
publication essays on—suicides through the framework of
performance theory.
Lily: (smiling) What exactly is it you think “very familiar” means?
Thom: Right.
Lily: (wryly) I explain that I know very well what you do and you, in
turn, explain to me what you do.
Thom: I’m sorry about that, I—I’m extremely tired, and I—
Lily: Would this qualify as mansplaining?
Thom: (completely derailed) What?
Lily: Would this moment fit the definition of mansplaining?
Thom: I’m not sure I care.
Lily: See, if I start making feminist jokes with you, not caring
only makes you look worse.

16
Thom: This is getting less funny.
Lily: Right. Drop the politics, Lily. Can’t help myself sometimes. (The
train of thought is too tempting for her.) Only it’s the irony. Like if
you were to objectify me, right now.
Thom: (silent)
Lily: Well?
Thom: Well, what?
Lily: Go on, objectify me.
Thom: I’m—I’m not going to—
Lily: It’s what you’re worried about doing, anyway. So just get it out
of your system. You should be used to it: I’m just asking for a
little superficial criticism.
Thom: The only thing that’s superficial here is how obviously you’re
playing me.
Lily: Like Nero played his fiddle. So?
Thom: So what?
Lily: Objectify me.
Thom: No.
Lily: And you won’t do it because you’re not sexist.
Thom: Feel free to tell people that.
Lily: He’s got jokes.
Thom: I’ve got a walking acid trip in my office on a Saturday morning.
There’s your objectification.
Lily: See, you had a golden opportunity. Should have done it.
Because, in the context of this discussion, if you had trivialized
my body or my personality—which has context of its own—you
would have been deriding the idiots who do that intentionally.
Right?
Thom: Uh—
Lily: Just agree with me.
Thom: (doing so before thinking) Sure.
Lily: A seemingly straight male objectifying a young woman—
Thom: A definitely straight male—
Lily: Easy, Hefner. At best, such criticism could be considered a sexist
joke—and it most often is. But in this context, in which we are
discussing irony, the joke is transformed, because I’m in on it,
right? The moment is all! If you said it, I’d know you weren’t

17
 being sexist, but ridiculing sexism. Doesn’t matter how sick the
idea is, so long as you’re in on it.
Thom: I’m familiar with how irony works.
Lily: (in perfect humor) Very familiar, mansplainer?
Thom: (laughing a bit) Touché.
Lily: (almost to the end of her logic) And are you admitting defeat
because I made you or because it’s true?
Thom: “Admitting defeat”—
Lily: Waving the white flag of whatever—
Thom: Jesus, of course it’s true.
Lily: And how do I know that?
Thom: Context.
Lily: (satisfied) And on the first morning, she created irony, and she
saw that it was good.
There is a very long beat.
Thom: Lily. What has this got to do with anything?
Lily: Dr. Warren, this is everything. Or it should be—certainly to you.
Thom: (nonplussed) What exactly are we talking about, right now?
Lily: (genuine) I’m just spit-balling.
Thom: I see. Drawing lines in the sand. I should know that you know
what I do here, since you have been trying so hard to see me.
That only makes sense. Begging the question was stupid. That’s
where we rabbit-trailed.
Lily: (slightly deflated) Sounds about right.
Thom: You know my work, and you want me to do the same with
you. To you.
Lily: That’s a bit reductive, but yes.
Thom: Ms. Quinn.
Lily: Dr. Warren.
Thom: You are very much alive.
Lily: That’s flattering.
Thom: I’m not being cute.
Lily: I’ll say.
Thom: I’m saying that I can’t be of any use to you. You haven’t
committed suicide.
Lily: I will.

18
 Beat.
Thom: There—there are things . . . things I am supposed to do if I hear
someone say that.
Lily: But it’s true.
Thom: Are you seeking help of some kind?
Lily: Not the kind you’re thinking of, I’ll bet. (She laughs. Her humor is
extraordinarily warm throughout this entire scene. There is nothing
manic about what she finds funny or the way she expresses it.
Everything about her exudes charisma, warmth, and, yes, perhaps even
sex, though that’s the fault of the narrow focus of men and not her
tactics. There should be several well-selected moments where Thom is,
too, guilty of this myopic sin.)
Thom: Ms. Quinn, I’m not qualified to help people seeking aid for
suicidal thoughts.
Lily: Good, or you’d be out of business quickly.
Thom: That’s—that’s unfair.
Lily: (cocking her head) I’m not antagonizing you, Dr. Warren.
Thom: Unfair is an understatement—that was cruel.
Lily: I’m not moralizing.
Thom: (double-take) You’re not what?
Lily: Feeling a little misunderstood, are you?
Thom: No, I mean, did you say—
Lily: I am not seeking help, Dr. Warren, because I don’t need it.
Thom: I think you might. And given the circumstances, I’m not really
comfortable with you calling me “Dr.” at this moment. You’ve
just told me you want to kill yourself, and I have a Ph.D. in
Theatre History. Thom is fine.
Lily: All right.
Thom: All right. (breathes) So, what do you want with me, Lily?
Lily: I want you to work with me.
Thom: So I was told.
Lily: Then why did you ask?
Thom: Surely—obviously you must know—it’s impossible for me to—
to do what—to consult—
Lily: Why not? (She is perfectly innocent.)
Thom stares intently at her. Finally, he sets his coffee down.

19
Thom: You know, last night, when Sasha—that’s my assistant, Sasha—
when she brought me your—your—well, I don’t even know
what to call it—your proposal, I guess it would be: I told her to
shred it. Throw it in the garbage. You know why? Because
people who kill themselves aren’t insane, but I think you might
be. You’re very—you’re very well-read and all that, but I don’t
think you—I don’t think you fully grasp what you’re asking for,
here.
Lily: (All she needs to do is smile, and nod her head at the file that is still in
Thom’s hand.)
Thom: (resigned) Yeah.
Lily: You didn’t shred it.
Thom: I was curious, I guess.
Lily: Morbidly, I hope.
Thom: Anyone would be.
Lily: Shouldn’t you be beyond morbid curiosity by now? Doesn’t
your work dispel morbidity?
Thom: In a perfect world.
Lily: So, if this isn’t morbid curiosity, what is it?
Thom: I’ve no fucking clue.
Lily: Foreplay. (This resonates.) Is this more obscene than people doing
it without help?
Thom: No.
Lily: What is it?
Thom: It’s not obscene. Not to me.
Lily: What is it to you, then?
Thom: I don’t know.
Lily: You know. You didn’t shred the file.
Thom: I do know. I just don’t know if I can say it.
Lily: You’re not more messed up than me, Thom. Say it.
Thom: Beautiful. It’s particularly beautiful.
She’s touched.
Lily: That’s kind.
Thom: No, it’s—it’s not—I (he is moved to distraction. He goes to the
window where the sun has now properly risen and the light is less
garish.) It can be beautiful. It can be devastating in its poetry.

20
Lily: Suicide?
Thom: I hate that word. It sounds like something killing something.
Lily: It is.
Thom: Maybe. Maybe it’s something else.
Lily: Like what?
Thom: Liberation? The final expression of the self? Truth? Maybe
that’s all rationalization. Maybe it is just the fetishism of the
fucked up.
Lily: Maybe it’s not.
Thom: When I saw this—(he places his hand almost reverently on her
folder)—when I saw this—I recognized in it, in you, that thing. I
don’t know how to describe it. I appreciate whatever the
ontology of suicide is: I think it’s horrible, tragic, terrible—and I
think those things lend to its beauty, just like they lend to the
beauty of other tragedies. Why tragedy is tragedy to begin with.
I wanted—all I’ve ever wanted—is to find what is beautiful in
this. And maybe I would be able to, and perhaps that would
make the loss of so much from so many somehow mean more.
Everyone always says that suicide is so useless; the most
profound beauty often exists in the most useless things. And
when I read this last night, I felt that you saw what I see.
Lily: I do.
Thom: (crushed with gratitude) No one else ever has.
Lily: I came to you because I want to die, Thom—that’s going to
happen—and I want to make it beautiful. You are the only
person in the world who wants the same thing.
Thom: I—want? That can’t be the right word.
Lily: I don’t want anything else.
Thom: To die beautifully.
Lily: Yes.
Thom: And outside of that?
Lily: (sincere) Nothing. The void, I guess?
Thom: You don’t want to live?
Lily: Can’t have it both ways. I’m complicated but I’m not a paradox.
Thom: But why? Look at you: young, lively, sharp—
Lily: Beautiful?
Thom: Yes—is it wrong, really so wrong to say so?—yes.

21
Lily: It’s not wrong to say so. (That smile again.) But it is—
Thom: Ironic.
Lily: What else?
Thom: So—why?
Lily: That’s the one thing you can’t ask. I don’t want you to ask that.
Thom: Can’t—
Lily: Not now, and if you agree to help me, not ever.
Thom: I don’t see how that’s possible.
Lily: I don’t see how it’s impossible.
Thom: No, you don’t understand—if, Jesus fucking Christ, how can I
even say if—if I were to try—to help you with this. It would be
crucial. It is the impetus behind the entire—fuck me, is there
even a word?—yes, I suppose, there must be—performance.
Lily: I’ll know it. You won’t need to.
Thom: Hypothetically.
Lily: For now.
Thom: I haven’t agreed to anything.
Lily: I know.
Thom: I was right, wasn’t I? About you being insane. You must be
insane. Jesus Christ.
Lily: “I was never really insane, except upon occasion where my
heart was touched.”
Thom: (brushing it aside) De Sade.
Lily: You wish. More to the point, if I were insane, why would you
be tempted?
Thom: Maybe I’m insane, too. Enough people have said so. They
might be right.
Lily: This is good foreplay.
Thom: Is it?
Lily: Yes.
Thom: Was it really not de Sade?
Lily: It was Poe. Look—
Thom: You know he tried to kill himself.
Lily: De Sade? No, he didn’t.
Thom: Edgar Allan. (beat) Delirium got him first. (Bizarrely, he seems to
have regained some kind of upper hand for the first time in the scene,
playing on Lily’s level. Lily smiles.)

22
Lily: Let’s skip the foreplay. It comes down to this, Thom: you can
either talk about others’ art for the rest of your life or you can
fucking do some.
Thom is still. Something inside him just broke.
Lily: (firmly, tenderly, she fills him with her conviction) You and I,
together, are going to make something beautiful.
She rises, walks to Thom, and extends her hand. Thom stares at
it for what feels like forever.
Lily: It’s just a handshake, Thom, not a blood oath.
Thom: I’ll clear the day for you, Monday. Come Monday. We’ll do it,
then.
Lily: (shaking her head) Tomorrow.
Thom: Tomorrow.
She lowers her hand and goes to the door. Just as she is about to
leave, Thom says:
Thom: Why haven’t you slept? I know why I haven’t but . . . In twenty-
nine days: why didn’t you get any sleep? (She doesn’t respond.) I
can ask that, can’t I?
She smiles at him again—that completely genuine, human smile.
Lily: I really didn’t see much of a point. (She exits.)
The same “music,” the time noise, plays again. Thom leans his
head against the door, looking utterly exhausted. The lights seem
to speed up the sun, bringing the day into night, Thom hasn’t
moved. For “hours” he’s leant upon the door, and when the noise
reaches a fever pitch, it suddenly stops, flooding the room with
an instant jarring silence. At the precise moment, Thom’s head
snaps up.
He seems to be standing in a memory. His office is, to him and
us, a lecture hall at the University of Chicago. Projected on the
back wall is the title page for a presentation: “Fall to Grace:
Suicide as Art. -Dr. Thomas Warren.” He addresses the audience
as though it were the lecture hall.

23
Thom: All right, I’m coming to the end of my time here. I’d just like to
take a quick moment and thank the Graduate School and the
Department of Art here at the University of Chicago for bringing
me in today. My colleagues here have been very gracious and
your questions so far have been very—ah, well, stimulating. I
appreciate you giving up a gorgeous spring afternoon to sit in a
dark lecture hall and listen to me talk for two hours about
suicide. I want to take my last several minutes to wrap up with
one final story.
Now, since we’re at one of the best Universities in the
country, and we have a full house of distinguished scholars and
students, I’m wondering if at least one person here might be able
to identify this woman.
A projection of a grainy photograph, featuring a young and alive
Evelyn McHale, replaces the title slide.1 There is predictable
silence from the audience.
Thom: Anyone? (No one answers.) That’s quite all right. This isn’t her
best angle. You’ve all probably seen her before, just in a better
pose. Andy Warhol fans, particularly. What about now?
A projection of the famous photo showing Evelyn McHale’s
surreal corpse, nestled in the twisted metal of a limousine after
her leap from the Empire State Building in 1947, replaces the
previous slide.2 He responds to sudden acknowledgement from
his audience, whether the “audience” of his scene or the real
audience viewing this production.
Ah, yes, now she’s ringing bells. This photograph is, of course,
famous. You’ve all probably seen it before, somewhere, seen this
woman before—probably commented on its kind of macabre
hypnotism, wondered at your own perhaps morbid fascination
with it. Many have.
Her name is Evelyn McHale.
Evelyn jumped from the observation platform of the
Empire State Building in May, 1947. She’d left her fiancé just
1
The Daily Notes (Canonsburg, PA.), 6 May 1947. All rights contingent.
2
Time. May 12th, 1947. Photograph by Robert C. Wiles. All rights contingent.

24
before this, and in a pocketbook that she left on the deck, she’d
written: “I don’t want anyone in or out of my family to see any
part of me. Could you destroy my body by cremation? I beg of
you and my family – don’t have any service for me or
remembrance for me.” Obviously, a piece of that last wish went
unfulfilled—everyone, including her family, saw the end of her
descent when this photograph was published on the cover of
Time magazine on May 12th. The picture was taken by a
photography student.
He is very quiet for a moment, contemplative, as though this next
portion of his speech is not of the same well-structured material
as the rest of his lecture.
I fell in love with Evelyn through this picture. Or at least, with
what she created: a roomful of artists might sympathize with me
when I say there’s little difference between the two. I don’t mean
to be melodramatic. I know it’s brutish to say—at least, I’ve been
called that when I gave this presentation in other places—but
Evelyn McHale was not a “beautiful” woman, per se. She was
perfectly plain, average, the status quo American lady of the
period. Even if you could say she was striking, you couldn’t use
of her in life the same words conjured by this immortalization
of her death.
Transcendent.
Ethereal.
Sublime.
There was, in this moment, an apotheosis. It must be—
something angelic must possess her: look at her graceful form,
her perfect skin, utterly unaffected body. She fell well over one
thousand feet and ends the plummet cradled almost lovingly by
the mercurial steel of a devastated limousine, and she seems
virtually unmarked. She is Ophelia in the flesh, the metal made
almost water by the force of her fall.
I often hear some pretty trite talk about this sort of view
romanticizing suicide. As though we are making of something vile,
something virtuous. Sometimes, maybe even most of the time, I
can see why people think that. Art criticism has always

25
 been an esoteric language, and those unversed in its lingua franca
are bound to draw sometimes offensive conclusions about what
we are trying to encapsulate. But Evelyn McHale decimates that
accusation. When I look at her, I’m unable to intellectualize her,
to codify or interpret her. All I can do is experience her. All I can
do is feel. To explicate her is, to me, a vandalism, a desecration. It
might be the only religion I’ll ever have.
The projector clicks off. The absence of Evelyn’s photo makes the
room feel, ironically, colder. House lights rise ever so slightly on
the audience. (Note: if the theatre/venue is arranged in such a
way as to make this undesirable, individual specials or spots can
be focused on the necessary characters instead.)
Thank you very much for coming. I know some of you have
questions or comments—since you’ve been beholden to me all
afternoon, I’m happy to do the same for you, now. Yes, thanks,
you.
A woman who gives the impression of being a faculty member,
doubled by the same actress who plays Sasha, stands and speaks
loudly/comes to a microphone at the front of the aisle. She wears
glasses, scarf, etc. The subject has clearly left her cold.
Professor: Dr. Warren, thank you for coming and being willing to speak on
such a—ah, taboo subject.
Thom: (sensing danger) Thank you.
Professor: I wonder if you’d be willing to elaborate for me, how can you—
well, it’s just that, you know—you say part of the beauty of
Evelyn McHale is that she lands unharmed by the fall, and that’s
somehow sublime. And I’ll grant you, it looks that way in the
photograph, but that takes her story out of context. She was
practically liquefied, they just didn’t know it until they tried to
move her. I don’t mean to be obscene—(she gives apologetic looks
to the rest of the audience)—but her insides spilled everywhere the
moment they touched her. She was in pieces. It wasn’t beautiful
in real life, it was horrifying. And I want to know—my question
is, really—how can you glorify that—that awful thing, how can

26
 you call it sublime, when in reality it is, in fact, grotesque? Aren’t
you fetishizing it? And thank you.
Thom: (taking a quick drink of water) Well, thank you. And I’m sure most
of you caught her clever allusion to the endless aesthetic debate
about the sublime and the grotesque. I think for the sake of time
I’ll avoid the theoretical argument and focus on what seems to
me to be a kind of—well, moral accusation?
Professor: (no shame) It is.
Thom: (catching her chill) Well, the professional gloves are off, then. I
don’t think I glorify the grotesque, or make excuses for it, or
fetishize it. Really, all I’m doing is suggesting that the same
fascination everyone has with other kinds of—grotesque—
performance applies here, too. How horrific were the deaths at
Thermopylae, ma’am? Couldn’t you describe in same brutal,
reductive detail the mangled bodies in the Somme, in Hastings,
Saratoga, in Stalingrad, in Gettysburg? If I’m guilty of fetishizing
gore and death, so is Lord Byron: “Earth! render back from out
thy breast/A remnant of our Spartan dead!/Of the three
hundred, grant but three/to make a new Thermopylae!” So is
Siegfried Sassoon: “To these I turn, to these I trust/Brother Lead
and Sister Steel/To his blind power I make appeal/I guard her
body clean from rust.” Alan Seeger wrote of the same battle that
he had a rendezvous with death that he would not fail. And sure,
Wilfred Owen criticized the great lie that it is sweet and fitting
to die for one’s country, but he also reminds us that “men who
fade in dust of warfare fade fairer.” And so must Joel Barlow
have fetishized Saratoga, and Langston Hughes have fetishized
Stalingrad, and Walt Whitman fetishized the Civil War, by your
logic.
Where are the moral qualms with these men, “glorifying”
forced, conscripted death of thousands and millions, the dead
who didn’t choose it, and for whom the end came brutally and
garishly, like the aftermath of Evelyn’s fall? Why is romanticism
of death in war somehow more moral than romanticism of a
death executed with agency, with intent, with forethought, for
and by a person for whom death often comes as a mercy? I don’t
want to go down that psychological and existential rabbit-hole,

27
 because I’ve talked too much already, but that’s just speaking
about some of the glorification of death in war, just in poetry—let
alone the ways in which we glorify the death of martyrs, the falls
of heroes, the executions of despots, and so on.
I will say this: that artists can find beauty in tragedy is as
old as both beauty and tragedy. I don’t believe it fetishizes the
worst moments of human existence to discover in them
something worthwhile. And if we can acknowledge that
completely valid impulse for some atrocities of life and not
others, we’re hypocrites. We’re denying ourselves the liberation
we deserve. If it’s only consolation, fine; if it yields some kind of
truth, so much the better. But it is not—it cannot—be
pornography just to try.
The professor sits. On the other side of the theatre, another person
stands/comes to the microphone. It is Lily.
Lily: Thanks so much for coming, Dr. Warren. My name is Lily, I’m a
senior here, and I have a question.
Thom: Thanks, Lily. Fire away.
Lily: If you were to perform suicide yourself, how would you do it?
A long stillness. Thom hesitates.
Thom: You may as well ask me how I’d paint your face, Lily. I’m not a
painter, I don’t have the inclination.
Lily: I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to—
Thom: No, no. (He smiles) I get it, it’s an intriguing question. I guess—
(He truly struggles.) What I meant to say is—it’s complex, but—
All right, I’ll put it this way. (beat) If I ever felt the need to—to
paint a picture—I’d want it to show everyone how I see the
world. Beauty, if it happened at all, would be an accident. I don’t
think I can make beauty. If I tried, I think I’d have missed the
limousine and hit the pavement.
The noise-music plays again, louder than ever. It is harsh and
brief and stunning, and the houselights immediately die as the
office lights instantly fade up. It is early morning, Sunday, and
Lily is entering through the door. She catches a stunned Thom
by surprise, who is still standing in a pose as though he is

28
 answering questions of a now-vanished audience in a lecture
hall. Lily laughs when she sees him. The transition between these
two apposite universes should be jarring.
Lily: (laughing) Do you need a few minutes alone?
Thom: I’m sorry?
Lily: What are you doing?
Thom: I just—(he puts his arms down)—I don’t really know.
Lily: Looks like it was another sleepless night for both of us.
Thom: (suddenly taking in his surroundings) It’s Sunday morning.
Lily: Yeah. Is it too late to make it to church?
Thom: I’m an atheist.
Lily: I’m a Pisces. (handing him a to-go cup) Brought you coffee. Again.
Thom: Thanks.
Lily: Seriously, do you want to get some rest, or something? I know
I said you look like shit yesterday, but that was—you know,
yesterday. I can come back when you’re feeling more up to it.
Thom: More up to it.
Lily: Yeah.
Thom: I remember you.
Lily: (brightens) Do you?
Thom: Yes. From the lecture at UC.
Lily: Evelyn McHale.
Thom: I’m sorry—this is going to be—I can’t help but think: did I—
inspire—you? To want to . . .
Lily: (simply) To kill myself?
Thom: Yes.
Lily: Has anyone ever told you that you have an ego the size of
Neptune?
Thom: They compared it to other planets.
Lily: No, you didn’t inspire me.
Thom: I see.
Lily: Is that a comfort?
Thom: I have no idea. Was it the lecture? Evelyn?
Lily: It was none of those things.
Thom: I just wondered because—
Lily: I’ve already said that I won’t tell you why I’m doing it.

29
Thom: No, I didn’t mean that.
Lily: We are here to make art.
Thom: I—I think I’d prefer it if we avoided that phraseology for right
now.
Lily: (arching an eyebrow) It’s your phrasing.
Thom: No, I’m not so sure it is. This is uncharted theoretical territory:
the kind of art I critique happens. I interpret it post hoc and glean
what I can from it. Putting it in motion, executing—creating—it,
myself, makes me feel—
Lily: Well?
Thom: Like I’m opening the oven for Sylvia Plath.
Lily: Whereas before, you were just waiting for her to do it herself.
Isn’t that a little hypocritical?
Thom: No—yes. I don’t know.
Lily: Well, your ontological quibbles aside—
Thom: Are you sure you weren’t a graduate student?
Lily: It’s going to happen, Thom. I’m going to do it. And that means
you can either help or not. I won’t judge you, either way.
Thom: That’s—entirely too ironic.
Lily: Sexy, huh? Anyway, how do you want to start?
Thom: How do you mean?
Lily: Devising the piece. How do we begin?
Thom: We’re starting now?
Lily: I’d like to.
Thom: Lily—I—
Lily: (she is suddenly harsh, albeit briefly) What is it you’re so afraid of?
Thom: (taken aback) What?
Lily: What is your problem?
Thom: (honestly) I’m—so tired, Lily. I just can’t think straight, right
now.
Lily: I haven’t slept either. I’m thinking fine.
Thom: I’m sorry, I—
Lily: What did the chicken cross the road, Thom?
Thom: (blinks) Why did the chicken—?
Lily: Yeah. Do you know the answer?
Thom: Everyone does. To get to the other side. What about it? (Sips his
coffee. It hits him.)

30
Thom: Oh, my God. To get to Other—the “Other Side.” I can’t believe
it. In my life—in my fucking life, I never actually got that joke
until just now. (He’s gobsmacked.)
Lily: (pleased) You’re an idiot.
Thom: I’ll be damned. It’s a suicidal chicken.
Lily: You ready now?
Thom: (utter disbelief) Okay.
Lily: (suddenly rising, walking down) Now, you’re on the observation
deck of the Empire State Building.
Thom: (obviously) No, I’m not.
Lily: (gesturing) Here we are, surrounded by people. It’s a chilly but
bright spring morning and you can hear the cacophony of horns
and yells from New Yorkers 1,050 feet below you. The Hudson,
the cold granite, the garbage. You look up from your coffee—(she
quickly inserts his coffee in his hand)—and, suddenly, you notice
you’re standing next to a young blond woman with a big nose
and white gloves, staring tentatively over the side of deck. She’s
just put a tiny black pocketbook in her coat and laid her it over
the railing.
Thom: Evelyn.
Lily: Right over here. (She quickly trots to the other side of the room and
assumes something of the character.) What do you say to her?
Thom: What do I—?
Lily: Say to her, Thom. Jesus, do we need to get you some Adderall or
something?
Thom: No, I just—I don’t know that I would say anything.
Lily: This is your only chance.
Thom: So, it seems.
Lily: She’s your idol.
Thom: I don’t know that I would go that far.
Lily: You “fell in love with Evelyn,” or at least “fell in love with what
she created.” Artists might agree that they are one in the same.
Thom: (vulnerable) I know.
Lily: (becoming concerned) Why wouldn’t you speak to her, Thom?
Thom: I don’t know what I’d say.
Lily: You could say anything.
Thom: That’s why I am terrified.

31
Lily: (quizzically) Is it a sex thing? Like asking a girl to prom?
Thom: Jesus, you’re young. No, of course not. Nothing like that.
Lily: You seem the shy type.
Thom: (defensively) Because I’m bookish?
Lily: (genuinely, kindly) Yes.
Thom: No, it’s not that. I’m not afraid of beautiful women.
Lily: So, you do think she’s beautiful? You said she wasn’t.
Thom: She isn’t. Not yet. (He’s still looking at the specter of her at the other
end of the “observation deck.”)
Lily: So, you’re not afraid of her.
Thom: No.
Lily: But you are afraid.
Thom: I think so.
Lily: Of what?
Thom: Of stopping her. (He is lost in this image. He can almost see the
sunlight glinting off her gloves, looking at Lily and, at the same time,
through her.) Look at her. She’s so—precarious. She wrote it
down, so she thinks she needs to go through with it. What can
she do: go back to the fiancé she just left? Prove that she’s just
like her mother? She had to write it down. But words can be
crossed out: hers were. Paper burns. So, she’s terrified, not of
going through with it, but of not. Anything—any thing might
shatter her resolve in this moment.
Lily: Like you.
Thom: Like me. (beat) If I say anything, she might not do it.
Lily: You could save her.
Thom: Saving her would ruin her. She wants this.
Lily: And you?
Thom: I want it, too.
Lily: You want her to die.
Thom: (suddenly breaking) No, no. I don’t want her to die. I don’t want
anyone to die. I want—I mean, I want people to be happy, and for
many that means death. I don’t think that’s something people
should apologize for. And I want—deaths like Evelyn’s, that end
in something wondrous, no matter how horrible it was getting
there, I want people to be able to find beauty in that.
Lily: (firmly) So, you want her to die.

32
Thom: Why are we doing this?
Lily: If you talk, she might stop. She might not go through with it.
Thom: Yes.
Lily: You’re afraid of ruining—the art?
Thom: Yes.
Lily: Anything else?
Thom: I want her—I want her to be happy. I want that for her.
Lily: That’s why we’re doing this.
Thom: Okay.
Lily: Should I jump, then?
Thom: You-you or Evelyn-you?
Lily: Me-me.
Thom: No.
Lily: Why not? Why not jump? Critically, aesthetically—the fall is
classic, it has a mythos, it suggests a metamorphosis. It’s Icarus,
it’s Ophelia, it’s Evelyn, it’s—
Thom: Fitting.
Lily: Precisely.
Thom: No. It’s not. Not for you, not now. Now, it’s amateurism. Now,
it’s cliché. Besides, you’re not there, are you? You’re here. And
the moment is all; didn’t you say that? Why craft someone else’s
moment when you own the present—use it. I—
He suddenly realizes what he is saying, and his throat clenches.
Lily: Go on. Thom.
Thom: I can’t. This is sick. I can’t do this.
Lily: It’s not sick.
Thom: Look at what we are doing! We are speculating on the mind of
one corpse to create another.
Lily: You want her to be happy?
Thom: Of course.
Lily: You want me to be happy?
Thom: (hesitates) Yes.
Lily: We are both going to get what we want. You just have to be brave
enough to make it.
Thom: This isn’t about bravery.
Lily: Not for you, no. It’s about hypocrisy, then.

33
Thom: Oh, Jesus Chr—
Lily: (looking directly into his eyes) You will not scare me away from the
edge.
Thom: You don’t know that. I could. And I—I don’t want me to want
that to be true.

A gentle knock sounds suddenly at the office door. It’s tentative,

unforceful. Thom immediately wheels to Lily and presses his
finger to his lips. Lily, intrigued, looks to the door, and almost
playfully makes as though she is going to answer it. Thom sternly
mimes to stay put. The knock sounds again. Silence. When he is
sure the person is gone, Thom sighs.

Lily: Well, that was dramatic.

Thom: Shut up.
Lily: Afraid to introduce me to your friends?
Thom: I don’t have friends.
Lily: Duh. Who was it?
Thom: Sasha, checking to see if I’m here. Or a client. Probably that. (He
rubs his temples—the invasion of the outside world is traumatic.)
What were we—where were—
Lily: The moment is all—
Thom: (falling back into it) The moment is all. We know Evelyn wanted
to die, like we know you want to die. But we don’t know that
leaping wasn’t somehow inspiring to her. What if she was
walking home to hang herself, or open her veins in the bathtub,
and just happened to pass beneath the shadow of the Empire
State Building? Suddenly it made sense to her—like the pieces of
a puzzle falling into place. And the moment responded for her:
the universe conspired to make her beautiful. What if the
observation deck was too crowded at the time for her to do it?
What if the wind had been slightly stronger, and blew her onto
the sidewalk instead of onto the limousine? What if the
limousine had just pulled away a second before? The odds, the
cosmic elegance that had to be in play, the infinitesimal chances
that a photography student could walk by at the right time—how
do you craft that, or compose it? It’s—it’s—serendipitous.

34
Lily: I thought you said you don’t romanticize this stuff.
Thom: I don’t romanticize it. It’s just romantic.
Lily: Mhm.
Thom: You shouldn’t jump. You should—the moment will make itself.
Lily: Right. What will I do then?
Thom: I don’t know. Yet. But I will. Or you will. When it happens.
Lily: That’s not pragmatic.
Thom: Art is rarely pragmatic.
Lily: Yeah, but—Thom, I can’t just wait until inspiration strikes. It—
time isn’t working with me.
Thom: I’m sure it doesn’t. Most of the time.
Lily: It doesn’t. Carrying this around, waiting for the—it’s a special
breed of torture.
Thom: What is?
Lily: Existing. I need it to end, but the only thing that can make a sad
life sadder is to leave the world without putting anything
beautiful in its place. I won’t do that, if I can help it, but I can’t
hold out forever: I’ve left the universe in the dust. (She sips her
coffee.)
Thom: So, you can kill yourself, or you can have a cup of coffee.
Lily: (astonished) You’ve got to be kid—
Thom: You’re a fan of Camus. (realizing the math that had, subconsciously,
already been done in his head.) Albert Camus: suicide by degrees of
distraction. He could kill himself, he knew, but if he had a cup of
coffee to think about it, he would have thus prolonged life—
Lily: —right, compelling him to reconsider the same question
afterward, and make the same decision. That’s how he kept on
keeping on. I can’t believe you know that.
Thom: I can’t believe you live it. You literally drink French coffee.
Lily: It helps. Honestly, it helps.
Thom: That is the most bizarre thing I’ve ever heard.
Lily: Speaking of, are you going to finish drinking that?
Thom: Well, now, I fucking have to, don’t I?
They look at each other, and the unmitigated irony of the scene
overwhelms them both. They laugh, genuinely, warmly, and at
length. It must be a moment of absolute appreciation for both the

35
 complexity and absurdity of life. The chill of their previous
objective is utterly dissolved from the room.
When their laughter finally dies down, there is the awkward but
not unwelcome feeling of wondering what to do next. They might
be reclining in a chair, on the desk, couch, etc. The mood is
certainly more relaxed. That reclining mood continues.
Lily: Did you really love her, or is that a thing you just say?
Thom: Who, Evelyn?
Lily: Mm.
Thom: I hope it’s never a thing someone just says.
Lily: They do.
Thom: “Love”—I don’t know. Even the word is so—so heavy.
Lily: Yeah—doesn’t “fuck” feel better, on the tongue? And less cheap?
Thom: You’re planting that cynical flag again.
Lily: It’s not cynicism, it’s realism. Love is profitable. People will say
they love anything—ideas, things, people—if it’s in their best
interest. Any idiot will buy it.
Thom: Sure.
Lily: Case in point, Evelyn McHale validates your whole
methodology. Without her, without some idyllic, pristine model
of “love” on which your appreciation of real beauty is based,
you’re just a sick fuck getting off on people kicking their own
buckets. She’s a line of social credit, a popular piece of collective
empathy that convinces morons you’re not a psycho.
Thom: (laughing to himself) Holy shit.
Lily: Isn’t it possible?
Thom: (Laughing louder) Of course it’s possible. Is this what being
criticized really feels like?
Lily: You tell me.
Thom: You think I’m a psycho?
Lily: You’re a total psycho.
Thom: What does that make you?
Lily: A caffeine addict.
Thom: (contemplates this for a moment, then moves on) Well, I can say in
my psychotic defense that my love for Evelyn was real. I really
loved her. (A beat.) How couldn’t you love her?

36
Lily: Have you ever loved anyone else?
A long moment. Finally.
Thom: No.
Lily: That’s obscene.
Thom: Is it?
Lily: Totally obscene.
Thom: (mulling over the Greek) Ob-skēnē. Out of the scene.
Lily: (chewing on it) Skēnē—it’s Greek, I think. Sounds like Greek.
Thom: Euripides, Sophocles, Aeschylus, they all had their characters
run offstage to commit suicides. The “world” of the poetry only
existed within the skēnē, the scene-house, so a death that was
suggested outside of it theoretically took place in another
dimension. But always some messenger or pike-holder or
someone would run in later and describe what had happened:
the audience doesn’t see it, but somehow, the poetry makes it
even more horrific. Fucking hypocrites. “…And there we saw
the woman hanging by the neck, / cradled high in a woven
noose, spinning, / swinging back and forth. And when he saw
her, / giving a low, wrenching sob that broke our hearts, /
slipping the collar from her throat, he eased her down, / in a
slow embrace he laid her down, poor thing….”
Lily: Dr. Seuss.
Thom: Sure.
Lily: Nailed it.
Thom: I don’t know exactly why that changed. The obscene, for some,
became impactful, elegant, even beautiful. Let them die with
redemption! If only Beckett had let Vladimir and Estragon get
off-stage, they could have ended their torture. But before our
eyes we see suicides in Shake-speare, Anton Chekov, Arthur
Miller—
Lily: Quintin Tarantino.
Thom: And they say I fetishize death.
Lily: You know what they think the difference is, though. Those are
just performances, Thom. Not like real life.
Thom: They are all performances.

37
 A moment.
Lily: Off-scene. Not loving anyone else. I was right.
Thom: (remembering) It’s true, if pathetic. Just Evelyn.
Lily: I don’t believe it. How do you love someone you’ve never met,
who’s been dead for decades before you were born? That’s not
tragic so much as it is lame.
Thom: I am lame. What time is it?
Lily: Don’t change the fucking subject, loser. How can you love
someone—
Thom: I don’t know! How can you love someone you know? How do
you ever get the part when you finally get to see them for who
they are? Not until they’re dead. (beat) It’s also unfair: they’ll find
new ways to wound you every day but you only get to see them
naked for the first time once.
Lily: I love everyone. Everyone. That’s my problem. I can’t stop falling
in love, so I can’t stop being heartbroken. It’s a vicious cycle. (She
happens to be staring contemplatively at her leggings as she is saying
this.) I can’t stop buying yoga pants. That’s my problem. They get
holes in them so easy, but I keep buying them. It’s the ass, you
know.
Thom: (ironic) Oh, yes. I know the ass.
Lily: It’s a real problem. Life is hard.
Thom: Life is hard. Then . . .
A moment. They’re connected.
Thom: What do you want, Lily?
Lily: To die. You?
Thom: To sleep.
Another moment.
Lily: (smiles) Christ, we are such a satire.
Thom: (the giggles are returning) I know. But, guess what?
Lily: What?
Thom: I’m having a really, really good time.
Lily: No—(laughing, too)—don’t start—
Thom: (overcome) I haven’t slept in almost a month—and—and—we’re
trying to plan your goddamn suicide—
38
Lily: Stop—I cant!—
Thom: And I am having—I swear, I’m having the time—of my life.
Lily: Oh, God—yeah—me too.
The laughter dies. Lily climbs under Thom’s arm and leans her
head on his chest. There is something both platonic and intimate
about this. How could sex be remotely revealing compared to
what they are attempting to accomplish together? He runs his
fingers through her hair and sighs.
Lily: Thom.
Thom: Yes.
Lily: I need to hear something.
Thom: What’s that?
Lily: I don’t know. Something. What time is it?
Thom: I ripped the clock off the wall and smashed it. I realized I was
counting the hours. For weeks.
Lily: I think I’m becoming afraid.
Thom: Of what?
Lily: To jump. (A long beat.) Talk me back onto the ledge.
Thom: I—
Lily: You can do it.
Thom: I know I can.
Lily: Tell me something beautiful.
Thom: You are beautiful.
Lily: Useless, useless, useless.
Thom pauses awhile, whether in consideration or conflict is hard
to tell, and continues to run his fingers through Lily’s hair.
Finally, in a very slow cadence, he begins to recite:
Thom: It’s Jorge Luis Borges.
Lily: Perfect.
Thom: Maybe.

“Not a single star will be left in the night.

The night will not be left.
I will die and, with me,
the weight of the intolerable universe.

39
I shall erase the pyramids, the medallions,
the continents and faces.
I shall erase the accumulated past.
I shall make dust of history, dust of dust.
Now I am looking on the final sunset.
I am hearing the last bird.
I bequeath nothingness to no one.”

Slowly, ever so slowly, he is falling asleep, until by the end of the

poem he has drifted off and rested his sleeping head on top of
Lily’s. There, she begins to cry. The noise-music fills the room,
raises to an unimaginable volume, and the light of the sun slants
quickly forward from late morning to early evening. Suddenly,
everything goes out to blackness and silence.
End of Act One

40
 ACT TWO

It is several hours later. The slanting sun blazes in an infernal

orange and amber and purple and gold through the windows,
splashing the walls with a fiery coming of night. It is roughly
7:30 p.m. The light, while so reminiscent of the sunsets of the day
before and the day before, feels somehow finalizing, slightly
mythic, rather like Albert Bierstadt’s “Sunset in Yosemite
Valley” (1869).3

Lily still lies on Thom on the couch: this light turns her hair to
burnished gold. Thom is sleeping soundly. It would seem they
have not stirred for the entire day, except that now a record is
playing. (Somewhere in the office, among where a shelf of books
and other office articles must certainly exist, there is in an
unobtrusive recess an old record player—at once a cliché of the
tired intellectual and a genuine love of Thom’s, since forgotten.
It’s currently playing Jim Morrison’s “The End.” As the house
lights dim, the song is the first thing we hear from the darkness:
it establishes the mood for few phrases before the previously-
described lights rise on the scene. The intent is to give the
impression that the music has been playing for some time before
the scene begins.

Thom slowly opens his eyes. Lily is staring blankly at the

opposite wall, as though in a trance.

Thom: What time is it? (Lily doesn’t respond. He notices the light.) I slept
all day, didn’t I?

3
As all designers know in this age of digital reproduction and augmentation, the intensity and
saturation of the color (and therefore, the character of the light) in this painting varies wildly
from website to website, reproduction to reproduction. When in doubt: the more intense, the
better—without, of course, washing out the action.

41
 Lily is still staring. Thom wonders if she is asleep. He gently
cracks his neck and gazes at the light play on the ceiling. The
music is a gentle underscore to the following.
Thom: I didn’t know sleep could feel so good. It wasn’t enough, but it
was—something. My brain was in a full state of decay this
morning. But this sleep—even just a few hours of it—was—
was—there isn’t a word. Redemption.
My dreams—so vivid. Like paintings, I was never into
paintings, critically speaking. I hate paintings, really. Don’t
know why. But I obsess over the way they can capture light that
is simply absent from real life. They create photography that
doesn’t exist. Maybe, somewhere in space, it does – in the hearts
of nebulas, in luminescent dust, in the fingerprints of a newly
born universe. But not here. I wonder why people insist on
calling Hubble a scientist. He was so obviously an artist.
In my dreams, just now, I saw that light—it filled me like
chloroform. I think I saw colors that don’t have names, that can’t
be perceived by the inadequate receptors of the human retina –
the mind’s eye only can behold. . . . Behold – in Greek: theatron,
theatre. A place to behold. I don’t know what I’m saying, now.
I’m rambling. You should tell me to shut up more than you do.
Is this Jim Morrison?
Lily: (she’s somehow different) An art critic that isn’t into paintings?
Thom: Can’t be into everything. Mercifully.
Lily: Aren’t, like, all art people into paintings? Don’t they sip wine
they pretend is really good but they really can’t tell the difference
between Clos de la Roche and Two Buck Chuck; just drinking
and looking at the paintings done by the masters and think to
themselves: “If only I were born then, I could have been
something by now?”
Thom: You’re an art person. You tell me.
Lily: I’m a person who does art. There is a difference.
Thom: Oh.
Lily: I used to paint.
Thom: Did you?
Lily: I’ve done everything. There are pictures of it on Instagram.

42
Thom: Right. And your poems on Tumblr and your memoirs on
Twitter. You and all other young people.
Lily: Is that supposed to be a jab at young people?
Thom: It can’t be, I’m not that old. I don’t know anything about them.
Lily: Young people?
Thom: Social media.
Lily: Oh.
Thom: Except one thing.
Lily: What’s that?
Thom: They are the new tombstones.
Lily: (thinks about this) Right.
Thom: I don’t want to get up.
Lily: Don’t.
Thom: I want to go back to sleep.
Lily: Don’t.
Thom: Did you get up and put on the music?
Lily: (resolutely sarcastic) No, Thom. I used the Force.
Thom: I meant:
Lily: A poltergeist did it—
Thom: I meant—you got up and turned on the record player without
waking me up, then got back under my arms and put your head
back on my chest, and I still didn’t wake up. And my shirt is
unbuttoned.
Lily: You slept like a rock. But you did talk in your sleep when I
moved.
Thom: What did I say?
Lily: I couldn’t tell.
Thom: Good. I’m afraid of talking in my sleep. Like I’ll reveal secrets
about myself that someone could hear and I wouldn’t be able to
stop it.
Lily: I do that awake. It’s no big deal.
Thom: You don’t have secrets.
Lily: I’ve got one.
Thom: How did you even find the records?
Lily: I snooped.
Thom: (torn between indignation and humor) You what?

43
Lily: I went through your things. I was bored. You were sleeping.
Figured you’d be of better help if you had some rest.
Thom: What did you look through?
Lily: Why, are you worried I found your weirdo porn or something?
Thom: My porn might be the least weirdo thing about me.
Lily: I didn’t find anything weirdo.
Thom: (smiling) That’s little comfort, coming from you.
Lily: I just found the records. I didn’t peg you as a fan of The Doors.
Thom: I didn’t peg you for a snooper.
Lily: I showed up at your office on a Saturday morning without
warning and bullied you into helping me kill myself. I’m like the
weather, old man, stop trying to predict me.
Thom: One of these days, I’m going to win one of these exchanges.
Lily: One of these days…
Thom sits up and stretches, cracking his neck and arms. It is the
horrible transitory moment between being perfectly content and
rallying oneself to do whatever comes next. There is a tension
between them, as if neither of them want to move, and neither of
them can find an excuse not to.
Lily: What is it like, being awake again, after not sleeping for so
long?
Thom: (ponders) This world hurts more, I think.
Lily: (beat) God, I hope so.
Thom: “All that we see or seem, is but a dream within a dream.”
Lily: Poe, again.
Thom: (smiling) Poe. (beat) Sasha is going to kill me. She’s going to
come back tomorrow and she’s going to be able to tell I stayed
here all weekend and she’s going to kill me.
Lily: Sasha, your—
Thom: My assistant.
Lily: The one who knocked? She sounds like your mother.
Thom: She wishes.
Lily: Have you two fucked before? (There’s no malice or jealousy, mere
curiosity—but, as always with Lily: the hint that her curiosity is a
means to an end.)
Thom: (again, compelled to honesty for her) Yes.

44
Lily: Here?
Thom: No. Why?
Lily: Just curious.
Thom: Morbidly?
Lily: Never.
Thom: You think that’s sleazy?
Lily: Yeah, but I don’t really care.
Thom: You’re just snooping, then.
Lily: Sure. Was it good?
Thom: It was late, I was drunk, I had just gone through—
Lily: I really don’t care.
Thom: It feels like you’re judging me.
Lily: You’re a person who feels like you’re judged. You fucked your
assistant. Of course. Next, you’ll be revealing to me that
professors seduce their students and the wife sometimes fucks
her yoga instructor. Platitudes are useless. Worse, people are
naïve enough to think it doesn’t apply to them. Their clichés are
special.
Thom: And what if you’re wrong?
Lily: It’s rarely wrong.
Thom: But when it is?
Lily: Then you’re just an asshole, I guess.
Thom: What do you want to do?
Lily: Listen to Jim Morrison.
Stillness. Lily is standing on the other side of the room, now,
looking through the window at a sunset so harsh it almost makes
her eyes water. Thom is listless. There is an emptiness between
them, now, and it wounds him.
Thom: Do you want some coffee? There’s coffee in the other room.
Lily: (quietly wrestles with it) No. All right, yes.
Thom: I’ll be right back.
Lily: No. I’ll get it.
Thom: It’s not a problem.
Lily: (firm) You stay here. I’ll go.
Thom: Okay.
Lily goes to the door.
45
Thom: The coffee is in a cupboard over—
Lily: I got it.
She goes. Thom sits on the edge of his desk, in limbo. The record,
after a few moments, ends, the needle skips over and over. Thom
is staring at the door, unheeding, waiting for her to come back
in. Is it possible she won’t? She does.
Lily: You’re out of coffee.
Thom: Sasha just bought some—
Lily: It’s not in there. I checked everywhere.
Thom: All right.
Lily: The record’s skipping.
Thom: Huh?
Lily: The record. It’s done playing.
Thom: Oh. Right. (He goes to change it.) You know, when I bought this
thing, I used to listen to music all the time. I was in graduate
school—one of those hipster douchebags that insisted vinyl had
a better quality for sound, when the truth was I really couldn’t
hear a difference between this and my iPod. This sort of became
decoration. I’ve got Spotify, now.
Lily: I was right.
Thom: About what?
Lily: It was just about vinyl instead of vino.
Thom: I’m a whiskey man.
Lily: Thom—
The same knock again. Thom and Lily glance at each other. Thom
adopts the same attitude as before.
Thom: (mouthing) Be quiet!
Lily: (mouthing) Answer it!
Thom: (shakes his head)
Sasha: (off) Thom? Are you all right? (Thom doesn’t respond.) I can hear
you in there, you know.
Lily: (a hint of her old smile, old warmth) Answer the fucking door, you
coward.

46
 Thom shakes his head again. Lily’s eyes flash, and she runs to the
door. Frantically, Thom scrambles after her, Lily just inches
ahead. Smoothly, she reaches the office door and pulls it open
precisely as she glides behind it, hiding upstage between the open
door and the wall. Thom has been so close behind her that is looks
exactly as though he has opened the door himself. Sasha stands
on the threshold, stunned.

Thom: (beat) Hi.

Sasha: Hi.
Thom: You’re here.
Sasha: You’re here.
Thom: Yeah.
Sasha: Unbelievable. You’ve been here all weekend.
Thom: No, I haven’t.
Sasha: You sound like you haven’t slept.
Thom: (pleased with his honesty) Actually, I have.
Sasha: (beat) Can I come in now?
Thom: I don’t think you—
Sasha: I swear to God, Thom—
Thom: All right. (He stands aside.)

Sasha enters, taking in the room.

Thom: Why exactly are you—

Sasha: I drove by the office this morning. Your car is still outside. It was
outside yesterday, too. I stopped in and knocked. Figured, hey,
he probably went to get a few drinks after work on Friday and
left his car here. Wanted to check in.
Thom: Really, Sasha, it’s—
Sasha: (trying to maintain composure. She does not have the shrill fury of a
wife who’s caught her husband cheating, but a friend who has run out
of chances to give. This is an intervention. She sees Lily’s scarf and idly
picks it up.) This is really pretty. What’s this one’s name?
Thom: This is getting melodramatic.
Sasha: (the driest sarcasm) Isn’t that the worst thing?
Thom: I mean—

47
Sasha: Because—really—the assistant picking up after her boss’s
benders. Before sleeping with him, that’s humiliating, but
after—
Thom: I’m sorry.
Sasha: Me too. I shouldn’t have come here. I don’t know what was
going through my head.
Thom: Whatever you’re thinking, it’s not—
Sasha: I told you. I told you I couldn’t do this again.
Thom: Good news: you’re not.
Sasha: We’re friends. And colleagues. And whatever. And I can’t watch
you kill yourself like—It’s not fair—
Thom: No one is trying to—
Sasha: I said if it ever happened again, Thom—and—Thom, you
promised. After I cleaned up the vomit and blood from your
floor last time, you promised—
Thom: You should go.
Sasha: No. I should quit. I should run—so far away.
Thom: Sasha—listen to me. You don’t know what you’re talking about.
Sasha: Explain it to me, then. I wish you’d explain it to me because I’ve
been living in the goddamn Twilight Zone for weeks. I don’t
mean to be selfish, or hysterical, but I care. I care about you. We
have a night together—and it was good, you know, and it didn’t
need to mean anything more than that but it was still a night
together—and you say you can’t ever do it again. Which is fine,
you know? I’m a big girl. Professional boundaries or whatever.
But then—
Thom: Sasha—
Sasha: No, Thom—set that gargantuan intellect to some empathetic
fucking use and put yourself in my shoes—but then one wild
morning I come into the office, business as usual, to find some
bloated, stinking whore walk naked from your office and into the
bathroom like she’s been living here. You’re on the floor, covered
in vomit, covered in blood—and what the hell was I supposed to do?
Thom: Damn it—
Sasha: No idea what I’m supposed to do but I know what I did: hold your
hand in the ER. Sleep in a hospital cot by you, that’s what—
though, God knows you didn’t sleep except when they put

48
 enough horse tranquilizer in you to kill a normal guy. And what
do I do after that? Nothing to do but come back here and take
some stain remover to your carpet, open some windows, make
some coffee; because you won’t talk about it or leave. Every
weekend is another macabre hibernation in this shithole. So,
every Monday I come back terrified of finding you on the floor
again.
Thom: I’m sorry—
Sasha: I’m not your girlfriend. I’m not your mother.
Thom: Then stop trying to take care of me.
Sasha: Someone has to! Someday it’ll be a coroner.
Thom: Can we just do that part now?
Sasha: (pause) There’s not enough morbid humor in the world to make
someone think you’re kidding, Thom.
Thom: (firmly) This isn’t the time. It’s also none of your goddamn
business. (A ringing silence)
Sasha: (in disbelief, her voice lowered) Yeah. Professional boundaries. (She
stuffs Lily’s scarf into Thom’s arms) I should leave before whoever-
she-is gets back. (Going to the door.) I don’t know what the last
slut shot you up with, but I hope it kills you this time.

She slams the door in one fluid, brisk exit. The reveal of Lily
behind it is striking, almost as though she and Sasha can’t exist
in the same physical space together. She is pensive. She stands
there for a long time, looking at Thom, unmoving.

Lily: I’m not judging you.

Thom: I don’t see how that’s possible.
Lily: You have a complex. But I see that it’s, in some ways, justified.
Thom: (sitting down in his chair, defeated) I have been terrible to her.
Lily: Maybe.
Thom: I’m don’t want to morally parse this, right now.
Lily: No need.
Thom: That’s what I just said.
Lily: No, I mean, there’s literally no need. It’s—boring.
Thom: Excuse me?
Lily: It’s just boring. Isn’t it?

49
Thom: Hey, that’s enough—
Lily: Boring. Boring. Boring.
Thom: Goddamn it, Lily—please, can’t you—
Lily: It’s is. It’s dull, useless, predictable, cliché, trite, uninspiring,
tedious—
Thom: What are you doing?—
Lily: (taken away with it)—uninteresting, monotonous, pedantic,
stupid—
Every word now is a knife. Whether she is stabbing them into
Thom’s skull, now, or her own, is impossible to tell. Each one
opens her agony further.
Lily: It’s pedestrian, so obviously stale. Are you feeling a little
imprisoned by circumstance? Why would I care, Thom? Why
the hell would I give a shit about what clichés you make in
here—because, because why?— oh, because you can’t defile
your fucking temple of distraction with the Real! Watch the
theorists lose their minds over that unparalleled innovation!
Your endless, endless sabotage of self isn’t novel. Stopping it
would be somehow revolutionary, but isn’t that just too
cynical—or Romantic—they get mixed up, don’t they? You care
so much about beauty and surround yourself with ugliness—
what pithy genius irony. Everyone, open your hymnals to page
“Seen it!” and scrutinize, ladies and gentlemen, the poetic
resonance of Thomas Warren, Doctorate of Philosophy, critic in
art, hack in life. What-the-fuck-ever. I don’t care—I don’t care.
It’s not evil, it’s not morally obtuse, you egomaniacal prick. It’s
just fucking boring. It’s only neuron- deadening, spirit-crushing,
mind-strangling ineptitude of existence. (The tears are beginning to
flow freely. Her tirade at Thom is refocusing away as she crumples to
the floor.) It’s not even tragic. It’s not even tragic. It’s just—just—
useless. (She sobs.) And I swear to God, I swear, if you give me
some tawdry piece of bullshit poetry, some fatal remedy right
now—I’ll—I’ll—(she can’t go on. She is a Roman Candle having
spent herself and is now smoldering in her own charred pile.) Go
hang yourself, Thom. Just go dangle. You’ve outlived your use
to anyone.
Thom stands behind his desk, hypnotized by the outburst.
50
Lily: (lifts her head. Her eyeliner is smeared. She almost looks a corpse, so
spent of life.) I would give anything—anything—to be Evelyn
McHale.
Thom: (hoarsely) Evelyn wasn’t even Evelyn. Until she was.
Lily: (barely getting the words out) Who was she before then?
Thom: Someone like you, I guess.
Lily: What are you going to do about Sasha?
Thom: I don’t know. What are you going to do about you?
Lily: (sitting up) I’m not going to leave this room, Thom. I can sense it.
Whatever it was—the moment, however it happens. This is the
last sunset.
Thom: I think that may be true.
Lily: Is this what it’s supposed to feel like?
Thom: I’ve never felt it before. Tell me what it’s like.
Lily: (smiling, wiping her eyes) I’m feeling inspired.
Thom: Then I’ve definitely never felt it before.
Lily: Will you—can you—
Thom: Anything.
Lily: I still need your help.
Thom: I’m yours. Make me useful.
The noise-music. The lights must fade in such a way that the
actors can move to their next places without giving the
impression that the characters have been dropped. What shifts
may distract the eye and mind for this? When the noise has
reached a fever pitch, the lights instantly come up. It is now night
outside: the bastard amber of a storm lamp streams through the
window. The office is lit by some reading lamps and a few
industrial, fluorescent office lights hanging from exposed steel
beams above. The character of this scene, due to the light, is of a
stark and unfeeling mien to the others. This transition should
suggest the passing of time without obstructing the pace too
much: we are nearing the very witching-hour.
Thom has spread small blanket from the back of his couch on the
floor in the middle of the office. On it are various instruments,
whatever they could find around the room, the annex outside,
and the bathroom through the door in the corner. Among them

51
 are an Exact-O knife, Thom’s belt, a case from one of the cushions
on the couch, a box of matches, and a small bottle of prescription
meds. A new record is playing, now: a slightly upbeat classic
rock. The music is very soft, just enough to hear as a consistent
underscore of the dialogue. The office is in noticeable disarray
from their search.
Thom: I wish I knew what time it was.
Lily: (something more of her “usual” self) You in a hurry to get
somewhere? (Thom shrugs) I can’t think of anything else that
might be in here, but it’s your office. You know what’s in it.
Thom: I’ve been wracking my brains about it. I’m getting tired again.
Not feeling terribly inventive.
Lily: (moving on) Your brains are the part of you I need. Let’s just talk
about what we’ve got.
They’re standing together, staring down contemplatively at the
assembled tools before them.
Lily: It’s a start, I guess.
Thom: What is it—what is it, precisely, that you’re looking for?
Lily: The Empire State Building. (a beat) They look so—so—
Thom: Amateur.
Lily: Yeah.
Thom: What did you expect? To throw yourself on Excalibur?
Lily: (unironically) Yeah.
Thom: (looking up, softly) It doesn’t have to be these, you know. It doesn’t
have to be tonight. We can do better.
Lily: It does—have to be tonight.
Thom: Yes, but—
Lily: It has to.
Thom: (resigning himself) All right. But we can try to find something that
isn’t so banal.
Lily: Everything is banal until it isn’t.
Lily stoops down and picks up the Exact-O knife. It is, of course,
just a simple office tool—but in her hands it takes new context.
It is impossible to tell precisely what she is trying to feel from
it—an esoteric rightness impossible to express. In this picture, it

52
 seems to look not like a mere Exact-O knife, but the wand of
Circe.
Thom: How does it—how is it?
Lily: It feels light.
Thom: It is, I guess.
Lily: Is it sharp?
Thom: Try it.
Lily presses the edge of the knife into the tip of her finger. A small
drop of blood wells up.
Lily: It would work.
Thom: Cutting yourself—where?
Lily: I don’t know. Where is it usually done?
Thom: I mean—hard to say, “usually.” The obvious choice is along the
wrists. There are Classic examples. When Seneca was forced to
slay himself, he sliced his wrists open: it was the tradition. He
didn’t bleed out, though, he put himself in a hot bath to open his
blood vessels. “’Where,’ he asked again and again, ‘are your
maxims of philosophy, or the preparation of so many years’
study against evils to come?’”
Lily: Was it painful?
Thom: It was excruciating.
Lily: I’m not afraid of pain.
Thom: I believe you.
Lily: Any others, by cutting?
Thom: Countless.
Lily: But any others that come to mind?
Thom: (smiling ruefully) A few. But that one is my favorite: I liked him.
He was a Stoic. Tried to teach us that letting our emotions run
rampant leads to chaos. Would that Nero knew.
Lily: I don’t think this is it.
Thom: How can you be sure?
Lily: I can’t.
Thom: All right.
She sets down the Exact-O knife and moves onto the pillow case.
Another divination.

53
Lily: This feels—better, somehow.
Thom: (poring through his mind) Asphyxiation is an arguably feminine
form of suicide. It is calm, at least in the beginning. But unless
it’s aided in some way, it always leads to autonomic resistance
from the body in the end. As far as I know, there isn’t a will
strong enough to overcome the body’s natural response for air.
So, almost impossible without a device of some kind, or help
from someone else.
Lily: In which it’s no longer asphyxiation, but suffocation.
Thom: Yes, and no. Suicide semantics.
Lily: I don’t think I could do it, myself.
Thom: Honestly, I don’t think this could do it for you. (He touches the
case.) It’s so porous. You’d have to be nearly dead already.
Lily: You could do me like Desdemona.
Thom’s blood runs cold. He stares at her, shocked. Her earnest
face reflects no trace of humor. Suddenly, a wide smile breaks
across it. She laughs—that same warm, perfect, human laugh
from the first act. If her humor is somehow sick, her expression
of it couldn’t be more wholesome.
Lily: You—you should have seen—
Thom: That is—(laughing)—that is so fucked up. You are sick.
Lily: I’m sick? You thought it was a little hot—admit it, you fucking
perv.
Thom: Incredible. (giggling) You are—
Lily: Obscene?
The laughter dies down a bit. They watch it fade from each other
and recognize the resolve setting in. They are almost each other’s
strength. She sets down the case and moves on. Again the
divination, but this time with the matches.
Lily: What am I supposed to do with these?
Thom: Self-immolation.
Lily: Like a Buddhist monk?
Thom: Sure. They took their inspiration from the Lotus Sutra, wherein
the Medicine King sets himself on fire to teach lessons about self-
sacrifice.

54
Lily: Is it beautiful?
Thom: In its own way. I think they are more beautiful than the element,
the monks. So tranquil, dedicated, accepting of what is
happening. It’s a notable dissimilarity: the angry rage of a
gasoline flame set on the canvas of an utterly peaceful face. I
have to marvel at the strength of will these men must have
possessed, to be so still while on fire. Exercising with distinction
what Schopenhauer ironically believed was the will to life.
Lily: I don’t think I have that strength of mind. (She seems almost
disheartened by this. A bizarre kind of self-esteem loss.)
Thom: You have other things.
Lily: Thanks. (Still pondering. She’s not unconvinced on the matches.)
They don’t feel right, exactly, but they don’t feel wrong, either.
You think it’s because I’m a water sign?
Thom: I absolutely do not.
Lily: Fair enough. (She bites her lip.) Won’t it burn the building down,
too?
Thom: You could do it outside.
Lily: No, Thom. (She’s gentle, but serious. Like she’s explaining math.) It
has to happen here. It can’t be anywhere else.
Thom: (hesitant) Well, we haven’t talked about it, but that’s going to
cause some practical problems for me.
Lily: I imagined.
Thom: How will I explain your body? My whereabouts this weekend?
Lily: I know.
Thom: Not to mention, a lifeless person showing up in the office of a
man infamous for a captivation with suicide is, I don’t know,
conspicuous. Do we have a contingency plan for any of that?
Lily: (sighs) My philosophy right now is in crossing one bridge at a
time.
Thom: You’ve only got one bridge.
Lily: (looks at him) It will be all right, Thom. It’s always all right in the
end.
Thom: Good God, you just gave me a cliché—
Lily: (briskly skipping over this) If I do this in the office—
Thom: Right.
Lily: It will catch the building on fire. Discuss.

55
Thom: (simply) I don’t care.
Lily: Really?
Thom: (even more simply) Really. I don’t care. I’ll collect the insurance
money. Or I won’t. Some hobo broke into my office to get warm
and dropped her cigarette. Or, I go to jail. One bridge at a time.
Lily: Okay. Still. Burning.
Thom: Burning.
Lily: I’m not afraid of pain.
Thom: You already said that.
Lily: But pain that can be experienced within reason, pain you can
imagine—that’s—
Thom: No, I get it.
Lily: What do you think?
Thom: (smiling) If there’s anything I’ve learned, it’s that what I think
matters very little. What do you feel?
Lily: (She lights a match and stares at the flame, trying to see if it seduces
her. The match burns away. Finally) No fire.
Thom: (a little defeated) No fire.
Lily tosses down the matches. All that is left on the blanket now
are the pills. The same attempt to intuit their worth for her.
Lily: What are these?
Thom: Barbiturates. Sleeping pills. My doctor gave them to me a few
weeks ago.
Lily: (She rattles the bottle) This prescription is full.
Thom: Yeah. I only took one dose. They didn’t work. They made me
throw up.
Lily: (not unkindly) Who wants to sleep when you could be shooting
heroin and screwing prostitutes?
Thom: It’s really not like that.
Lily: I don’t—(beat). You only tried them once and they made you
sick?
Thom: Yeah. Uncommon reaction, but I’m just lucky that way.
Lily: Any chance that the one time you used them was when—
Thom: Yeah. The night before Sasha found me.
Lily: (ever forward) You’re an idiot.
Thom: So, you’ve said. But, Lily, the woman—

56
Lily: I don’t care. It’s boring.
Thom: Lily—
Lily: Oh, my God, do you ever know when to shut up? (She looks at him
pointedly and rattles the bottle to signal it’s time to move on. Thom
sighs.)
Thom: Ideally, you take the bottle and slosh it down with a good sum
of booze. You lay down and drift off to sleep and don’t feel a
thing.
Lily: It’s so—passive.
Thom: I suppose you could call it that.
Lily: I always imagined—you know—doing this…
Thom: Sure. (a moment) It’s how Diane Arbus went.
Lily: Who?
Thom: She was a photographer. She, too, made a life’s work of finding
beauty in the grotesque. (He points to an Arbus print on the wall.)
Actually, it was a combination of these and the knife: she took
the pills and slashed her wrists. I don’t know, but I think she was
too—vital—for the cutting alone to do it. I think she needed the
sleep. She called it her last supper.

She’s studiously peering down at the bottle. Thom becomes

uncomfortable. He clears his throat.
Thom: In one way, Lily, it’s extraordinarily active. I mean, think of the
observation deck: all the doing is in getting to the edge, taking
one final step—your first foot in the Rubicon. After that, gravity
does the rest. This is rather the same: short of an emergency
stomach pump or an unexpected vomiting, once you begin, the
rest is out of your hands and chemistry takes over. In that light,
well—there’s a way in which this is, very, very brave.
Lily: Yeah.
Thom: What do you think?
Lily: I don’t know.
Thom: No?
Lily: I—I just don’t know. But I think—I think maybe not.
Thom: You’re sure?
Lily: I’m not sure of anything.

57
Thom: Okay. (Lily tosses down the pills back with the rest. They’re stuck.)
Well, Lily, that’s it, I think. I don’t know what else could be of
use.
Lily: (biting her lip) Yeah.
They awkwardly look around the room from their standing
position, like lost children taking in a new scene.
Thom: Wait.
His hands move to his belt buckle. There is a brief pause as their
eyes meet, Lily curious, Thom hesitant. Finally, he undoes his
belt and pulls it from the loops. He hands it out to her.
Lily: What’s that?
Thom: (doesn’t understand the question) It’s a belt.
Lily: I see.
Thom: It’s—you know.
Lily: Right.
Thom: (a moment) Are you going to take it, or—
Lily: Right. (She does. She holds the belt for a while, running her fingers
over it. Something is obviously amiss: it’s been too long. It’s as though
a young man has given flowers to a girl who doesn’t like him as more
than a friend.)
Thom: I know, it’s—
Lily: Don’t be silly.
Thom: It’s a cheap belt. I don’t really know what I—
Lily: You’re trying to help. It’s sweet.
Thom: I guess.
Lily: What would we do?
Thom: No idea. Some people have suffocated themselves with belts,
but it’s not ideal. You’d have to use your own weight to cinch it,
and that belt is so cheap and old, I don’t think it could bear it.
Forget it.
Lily: All right. Here, do you want it back?
Thom: (surprisingly hesitant) Not now. Just put it back with the rest.
She does. She moves around the office, becoming irritated. She’s
caged with her own futility now—and Thom’s.

58
Thom: This is fucking ridiculous. We’re ridiculous.
Lily: We must have missed something.
Thom: I mean, I’m literally an expert—
Lily: —something—
Thom: —whatever the hell that means in this context. The ghosts of
my post-structuralist mentors are coming back to fucking
haunt me—
Lily: Do you ever say anything that anyone else understands?
Thom: It’s not a big office. There’s nothing else to work with. Painting
with sand.
Lily: Sand paintings exist.
Thom: Whatever.
Lily: No, this is it. This is the moment, I told you. Everything feels
right, even if it’s all wrong. Something—something—must be
here.
Thom: Lily, I really don’t—
Lily: It’s here, Thom. We don’t need to keep looking, but we’re not
looking anywhere else, either.
Thom: And what if we don’t find it?
Lily ignores this.
Thom: Lily—are you listening to me? I said, what if we don’t find it?
Lily: How—how—how does one miss it?
Thom: Miss what?
Lily: A one-thousand foot fall. It’s huge. It’s just so obvious.
Thom: When it’s hiding in plain sight.
Lily: Cliché.
Thom: Some things are clichés, Lily. I don’t like it any more than you do,
but they are.
Lily: Not my death.
Thom: Your life, then.
Lily: (truly incensed) Excuse me?
Thom: (Tempted, focuses on the task at hand instead) You have a lot of
demands for this—this art, Lily, but don’t seem to have many
concrete strategies as to how to execute it. You want an
observation deck, and I get that—but I don’t have it sitting in my
office. Art is sometimes practical—yes, and yes, even great art is

59
 sometimes practical. It’s luck and planning and who-the-hell-
knows what else. You have to make a choice, somewhere, you’ve
got to have some fucking courage.
Lily: Thanks, coach.
Thom: You’re welcome. For right now, I’m out of ideas.
Thom retreats to his chair behind his desk. It’s late, he’s
exhausted. It’s hard to tell if the inspiration of the act or the
adrenaline has somehow worn off, but he seems like he could quit
now if he wanted to. The sleep has worn off. He rubs his temples.
Lily is staring at him.
Thom: What? (She says nothing.) Lily, what is it?
Lily: I don’t think you want me to go through with it.
Thom: That’s absurd.
Lily: Is it?
Thom: Is it absu—yes, it is! I’ve been walking you through this every
step of the way. I’ve been guiding you and supporting you and—
Lily: That’s then. This is now.
Thom: (stunned) You think I’ve changed my mind?
Lily: Maybe.
Thom: Lily, I—Lily I laid out before you options. I gave you my belt. I
put sleeping pills with my name on them in your hand and said:
“Here’s how you swallow these if you want to die.” I did that—
they had my name on them.
Lily: Your name, your name. Take a breath, John Proctor.
Thom: What do you want me to do?
Lily: I don’t know. You’re an expert.
Thom: And you, supposedly, are an artist. Where’s your contribution to
this travesty? What did you think of when you thought of doing
this?
Lily: I thought of everything.
Thom: Shame you didn’t bring any of it with you.
Lily: (utterly sincere, a flood) I thought of tying myself like a pentacle
to my mother, my father, the guy I lost my virginity to, and a
humanized form of my college debt, and letting them run in
opposite directions until I was drawn and quartered; I thought
about letting Michel Foucault fuck me over his desk until I

60
 died of dehydration and chaffing; I thought of eating myself,
phalanges and organs, until I was simultaneously absent and
immortal and entirely consumed by myself; I thought of
drowning myself in a pool of coffee. I thought of everything. (In
a fury, she kicks his desk. She is almost amused by her own sense of
macabre romanticism.)
Right now, this moment, the present—whatever it is, is.
It’s all that and then some—it’s everything. Don’t make me try
to put it into words: I’m not a poet, or a Ph.D, or a critic. Maybe
it’s you, maybe I’m just tired. But it’s tonight. It’s here. So, we’ll
work with what we’ve got. Even if it’s nothing: that’s still
something.
Thom: (tired) It’s—just an office. There’s only so much here.
Lily: (wryly) You don’t keep a pool of coffee in the bathroom?
Thom: Apparently, I don’t keep coffee in the coffee cupboard. (They
grin. That appreciation of their absurdity is creeping back. Thom rises.
The music ends as the record begins to skip. Thom quietly switches it
out for another while Lily lies prostrate on the couch, inwardly
gnawing. Low and mellifluous, a soft song pervades the room, sad but
beautiful. It is Chopin’s Nocturne in E-flat Major.)
Lily: (As he does) You got to sleep, even if it was just for a moment. It
was something. I don’t get that. I don’t get a break from existing,
Thom.
Thom: (heartbroken) I know.
Lily: My prison is the present.
Thom: I know.

Lily has run across the room to clutch him. He holds her in his
arms as she cries quietly into his chest. After a while, they slowly
begin to sway.
Thom: Are you dancing with me? (They now are. Slowly.)
Lily: I like to dance.
Thom: I don’t.
Lily: Well, what do you like, then?
Thom: Sabotaging my sense of self, I guess.
Lily: Good times.

61
 They dance, and dance.
Thom: I’m sorry I’m so useless.
Lily: Don’t be sorry. It’s not your fault.
Thom: Well, don’t pity me, or anything.
Lily: Everyone is pitiful. It’s not their fault, either.
Thom: Have you ever just tried—getting over it?
Lily: (Her head still against his chest) Have you ever just tried fucking
off?
Thom: I’d love to fuck off, but I can’t seem to leave this purgatorial office.
I’m going to die in here.
Lily: Aren’t you the lucky one?
Thom: (realizing) Yes, I am.
He stops, looks down at her, searching. A moment hits him.
Thom: All right.
Lily: Hm?
Thom: I’ve got it.
Lily: (burying her head in his chest. She’s content.) What?
Thom: I’ve got the Empire State Building.
Lily: (pulling away, looking up into his eyes) Don’t fuck with me.
Thom: I’m not.
Lily: I don’t think I could take you fucking with me, right now.
Thom: I’m not. Not about this.
Lily: What is it? Where?
Thom: (sighs) I—
Lily: (understanding) You can do this.
Thom: (trembling) It’s in my desk.
Lily: (looks over. The desk feels ominous as they stare at it, like Pandora’s
Box.) Oh.
Thom: Top drawer, on the left.
Lily, uncertainly, let’s go of Thom and meanders to the
back of the desk. She is torn between wanting to hope and
fearing rejection. Tentatively, she opens the drawer and
pulls out a long length of black nylon rope, the noose sent
in by Kaitlyn Harding, and holds it up. Thom stands
shame-faced where they were dancing.

62
Lily: I don’t understand.
Thom: You would throw it over an exposed beam and—
Lily: No, I don’t understand—you lied.
Thom: (resigned) I did.
Lily: Why?
Thom: You wouldn’t understand.
Lily: Why not?
Thom: It’s—complicated.
Lily: Uncomplicate it.
Thom: No, it’s not—you wouldn’t have the context—you couldn’t—
Lily: I don’t even believe you.
Thom: For me—it’s—the rope is—well, just before we met . . . (he rubs
his eyes) Look, Lily, I honestly didn’t think about the rope when
we were looking. And once I did—I—it’s not beautiful. It’s not
going to be, not for me. For me, it will be trite. For me, it’s fitting.
About as predictable an end to this gross parody as Chekov’s
gun. It’s stupid to try to explain. But there it is—there’s a rope in
my desk. And, if you want it, it’s yours.
Lily: Why do you have this?
Thom: Part of a case. I rejected it.
Lily: Why?
Thom: (shrugs) It was banal. Ordinary.
Lily: This rope is banal.
Thom: The way it was used was.
Lily: She hanged herself.
Thom: I never said “she”.
Lily: She hanged herself.
Thom: Yes.
Lily: (divining the rope, letting it slither through her hands) And you don’t
want my death to be ordinary.
Thom: You don’t want your death—
Lily: —You—
Thom: (sharply) No, I don’t.
Lily: (sighs) Okay. Okay, then. (Resolved.) This is it. It has to be.
Thom: Why?
Lily: You’re too close to the art. Can’t see the painting through the
brushstrokes.

63
Thom: (realizing) Because it will be—
Lily: (undeniably sure) Because it will be ironic.
It is. They both feel it. The moment has come, silent and sure.
Did Thom know that it would play this way—surely, it must.
Does he know he set up this cliché himself, and does he hate
himself for it?
Thom: Lily, I—
Lily: Put that chair under that light, Thom.
Thom glances over to the chair by his door, the chair Lily first sat
on when she came into the office a million years ago. He looks
resolutely at Lily.
Thom: No. You do it.
Lily: (arching an eyebrow) Still waiting for Sylvia Plath to light the
oven?
Thom: I gave you a rope.
Lily: Someone else gave me a rope. You hid it in a drawer.
Thom stares at her defiantly. He could almost cry. What matters
most to him now?
Lily: What do you want, Thom?
Another moment of—resistance? Psychomachia?—and Thom
finally turns and drags the chair underneath the office light and
the beam from which it hangs. The stark downward light cast
garish shadows over his face.
Lily slowly walks to the chair; her last mile. Thom breaks.
Thom: You’re going to do it now?
Lily: Yes.
Thom: Why?—what makes now—
Lily: Because, Thom—don’t you know anything? Because it’s always
now. It’s never anything else.
She’s right. She’s always been right.
Lily: The record’s stopped playing.
Thom: Let it go.

64
Lily: I want—
Thom: It’s not that great of a nocturne. He has others.
Lily: All right. Then—then—tell me something. Something beautiful.
During the following, the ritual occurs: placing the chair,
leading Lily to it like a sacred cow to slaughter, helping her
ascend, and Lily slowly putting the noose around her neck. It is
all very methodical, like a clock winding down its last seconds
while Thom watches them tick away, fading forever.
Lily: Anything. Beautiful.
Thom: (voice breaking, the rigidity of a funeral march)
Take this kiss upon the brow!
And, in parting from you now,
Thus much let me avow —
You are not wrong, who deem
That my days have been a dream;
Yet if hope has flown away
In a night, or in a day,
In a vision, or in none,
Is it therefore the less gone?
All that we see or seem
Is but a dream within a dream.

I stand amid the roar

Of a surf-tormented shore,
And I hold within my hand
Grains of the golden sand —
How few! yet how they creep
Through my fingers to the deep,
While I weep — while I weep!
O God! Can I not grasp
Them with a tighter clasp?
O God! can I not save
One from the pitiless wave?
Is all that we see or seem
But a dream within a dream?

65
 His voice catches.
Lily: (that smile) de Sade?
Thom: Poe. Because—
Lily: Of course. It’s all right, Thom. Don’t cry. You got me to the
edge. You gave me the Empire State Building. You did it all. (A
moment.) Good-bye, Thom.

She kicks the chair out from beneath her.

She falls. The rope snaps taut, but the fall is not long enough to
break her. And so, she dangles, a slow dance with her eyes fixed
on Thom; wearing not the expression of the strangled but a kind
of dreamy angel, a sublimity.

Thom is imprisoned. He stares at her, trying to mouth the wood

“goodbye.”

After forever, she begins to fade, and her dance comes to an end.

There is silence, and a calm swaying, like the lithe branch of a

sunswept willow in a warm breeze.

Thom slowly goes to his desk, so slowly, as if to sit down in

quiet contemplation of her. Shaking, he reaches for his recorder,
clicks it on, and takes a breath. Then, something inside of Thom
breaks.

Scrambling, he leaps for the fallen chair, climbing frantically to

pull the lash which ties the rope to the exposed rafter. One arm
cradled around Lily’s body, he is pulled by her weight quickly to
the ground, where she drapes across his lap like a too-mortal
Pieta, and he pushes his lips against hers to breathe life back in.

Once. Twice. Again.

She awakes with massive gasp and tears streaking her face.
Through her misty sight, she sees Thom’s face, who is also
crying. She throws her arms around his neck and they sob into
each other. Finally:

66
Thom: What I want— is you. To stay.
He takes a breath. Her trembling hands are running slowly
through his hair. Wild-eyed, she is trying to grip back onto
reality.
I know, Lily. People are cruel and the universe is indifferent but
we exist anyway. You and I—we’ve stripped ourselves of
originality and irony down to the bone in the last two days, so
I’m left with nothing but cliché, and here it is:
You’re more beautiful in life than you will ever be in death:
that’s what I see. You’re walking, breathing, laughing, perfect,
perfect, art. Alive.
She is coming back to reality by incredibly slow degrees. They are
clutched in this strange kind of cuddle.
You have to give me the key to understanding—all of it. And
living—existing—alongside you, near you, even just knowing
you are, and you want to kill it. That is more pain—and beauty—
than I knew the human body could hold. You’re agony to me. To
end you would be to end all things—the mountains and
medallions and the last sunset—to bequeath the nothingness to
no one.

Now they are impotent creatures, huddling together in the dark.

(consoling her) Don’t you see: you’re a miracle. You want me to
make art: then I’m making it now. I’m making you stay.
There’s only one way to bear this iridescent chaos:
selectively adapt. Keep going. If you’re lucky, you get hit by a
bus. Anything that happens before then, you—and I—will just
have to live with it.
Lily: (hoarsely) The best you can come up with is being hit by a bus?
Thom: How’s that for cliché?
Lily: (lifting her head) I need to tell you—
Thom: It’s okay.
Lily: No—I lied about you talking in your sleep.
Thom: I didn’t?
Lily: You did, but I did hear what you said. (Thom waits expectantly.) I
67
 got up to put on the music and you said: “If you go now, I’ll
never sleep again.”
Thom: (No pleasure in this) Sleep no more. Lily doth murder sleep. (He
buries his nose in her hair.) Why do you want to die, Lily?
Lily: (after a long, long time) No.
Thom: You have to tell me.
Lily: No. I won’t. (Beat.) Do you hate me?
Thom: (exploding with a kind of love) Evelyn had nothing—nothing—
because she was completely unable to see life with any
vivacity—like me, she was useless. Boring. Maybe she spent her
weekends like I do. But to throw yourself off the edge when the
world has every possibility of giving you better than you’ve got,
and to leap anyway—I think that’s courage of a kind, and
stupidity. That’s what’s beautiful, no matter how she landed,
because that’s human. A chaotic universe made a perfect
moment for her because she might never have had one before.
You’ve had them all and you’re just bored of them. It’s not the
same. It will never be the same.
You will never be Evelyn McHale, Lily. Evelyn was lucky.
Thom stares at her, trying to deduce if he’s truly lost.
Thom: (He lets her go. She standing alone, now, almost trembling.) I can’t
do it, Lily. (He smiles ruefully.) I tried to tell you before, once. I’m
not a painter. I don’t have the inclination.
Lily: Do you want me to go?
Thom: I want—(he takes a breath)—what I’ve always wanted. I want you
to be happy. You can’t be happy if you’re dead. You can’t be.
Lily: (lonely, staring out the door) I was right there, Thom. I was on the
edge. I fell.
Thom: I know.
Lily: I was so close to—being free.
Thom: And? Was it the moment?
Lily: (disbelief) No.
Thom: Maybe you’ll be lucky, too.
Lily: You caught me.
Thom: I did.

68
Lily: (breaks her gaze from the door, looks right at Thom) I knew you’d
catch me.
Thom: I’m sorry. I’m so, so sorry.

She meekly begins to gather her things. She is ravaged and

empty, and so is he. She puts on her coat and goes to the door.
She stops there. Thom has gone back to his desk, his head in his
hands.
Lily: I wanted to see if it was possible. If I was actually on the edge,
peering down to the sidewalk or the abyss or to nothing at all, it
would make sense, it would seem right. I would be tempted to
make the leap. There would be—
Thom: Hope.
Lily: (She nods. Her face begs him to understand.) But I couldn’t know
until I got there, could I? Until we got there.
Thom: (Gesturing to the door.) Exit stage right, Lily. You have to go.
Lily: Do I have to?
Thom: I don’t think I have any use to you, anymore.
Lily: (She means it.) I could stay. You could sleep.
Thom: (It is the final temptation. An impossible choice.) You should go.
Lily: I wouldn’t have done it.
Thom: (a moment) I believe you.
She exits.
The noise-music, louder and more fierce than ever. Thom’s head
becomes extraordinarily heavy and falls to the desk. The lights
become so incredibly dim that the stage is only visible through
squinting. The noise-music is oppressive. Somewhere beneath it,
like a memory, is the echo of Chopin’s Nocturne. Then, an
instantaneous change to bright morning light and effect silence,
precisely as Sasha furiously slaps down a bundle of mail on his
desk. Thom is brought violently back to consciousness, having
passed the night staring at the wall as his head slipped almost,
almost, almost to rest on the desk.
Sasha: (slamming the mail on the desk) Take this. I just came to get my
things.

69
Thom: Jesus.
Sasha: This place looks like a crime scene. (She’s referencing the suicide
tools in a pile on the floor.)
Thom: Where’s Lily?
Sasha: So, she did have a name, after all?
Thom: (rising too quickly, banging his knee on the desk.) Sasha, just—ow!
fuck!—wait a minute. Goddamn it: the room is spinning. I need
to breathe.
Sasha: That’s what happens when you’re coming down.
Thom: Would you give me one—
Sasha: Hell no. Hey, she left this—(she picks up Lily’s scarf and tosses it on
the desk). Seems classier than the last one. Must’ve cost you.
Thom: You think I’m trying to kill myself through drugs and sex.
Sasha: I would have expected you to find a more original way to go.
Thom: Yes, I hired a prostitute. Once. And I slept with her.
Sasha: Fucking duh, Thom!
Thom: (smacking himself) No—yes!—Fuck. No, Sasha. I didn’t sleep with
her, I slept with her. No sex, we just slept.
Sasha: Where you stick your dick is none of my business anymore. Can
I go now?
Thom: Sasha, look at me. Listen. I did not—have sex—with the
prostitute. And I did not hire another one this weekend.
Sasha: No one would ever buy that, Thom. That’s fucking moronic.
Thom: I couldn’t sleep—for over twenty days I barely dozed. I couldn’t
sleep for anything: not for pills, not for exhaustion, not for
anything. She was—it doesn’t matter what she was: grotesque,
diseased, ugly. But she was another human holding me. She was
human. Some random woman who hangs out by the overpass.
Sasha: Why didn’t you—
Thom: Why does anyone keep anything a secret? I was ashamed. So
ashamed, in fact, I didn’t do it again—even though it worked. I
needed sleep so badly, I started to hallucinate—I’d take a piss
and miss the toilet; think I was holding a glass when it had
shattered on the floor. The act of thinking itself felt like I was
drowning my brain in bleach.
Sasha: Why didn’t you just—

70
Thom: How—how can you admit, even to yourself, that you’re going to
go insane if you don’t have someone—anyone—holding you? It’s
infantile. Like saying you can’t sleep without a night-light or a
bed-time story. Is it really possible for any human heart to be so
utterly alone?
Sasha: No—no, you idiot. Why didn’t you just call me?

He doesn’t have an answer. Finally.

Sasha: (she sits, processing) You were sick.

Thom: My doctor gave me sleeping pills, they made me sick. That’s all.
Sasha: (softly) You—you are a fucking idiot. You’d rather let me think
the worst than—than cuddling? What kind of sociopath are you?
Thom: (beyond pretense) The only kind there is, I suppose.
Sasha: Am I really supposed to feel sorry for you, right now? Because—
I do. Fuck me, how pathetic.
Thom: Me, or—
Sasha: Shut up.
Thom: (standing out of the way of the door) That’s it. That’s all I’ve got.
You can if you want. I don’t blame you. Or hate me. But I didn’t
want you to go thinking you’d just escaped some—I don’t
know— something that wasn’t.
Sasha: Right.
Thom: So, you can go. Or stay. Or—
Sasha: I—I need to think for a while.
Thom: That’s fine. Take the day off, or whatever you want. I don’t think
I’m going to get anything done today, anyhow.
Sasha: Just shut up.
Thom: Okay.
Sasha rises. The room is somehow alien to her now, but she seems
infinitely less hostile than she was when she first came in. She
passes by Thom and goes to the door, lost in thought.
Thom: Sasha.
Sasha: Shut up. (The door closes behind her.)
Thom is standing in the middle of his office now, nearly blinded
by the bright morning sunlight. The echoes of Lily are
71
 everywhere now: his shirt is unbuttoned from where her head
rested, her scarf is draped over the back of the couch, the
implements they had gathered rest in a small pile in front of the
chair, cupboard doors are open and shelves are in disarray from
their search—her memory has vandalized his current reality. He
is stunned, staring: then the realization of everything he had
done, everything he tried to do, overwhelms him. His throat
burns. He swallows it.
Sasha comes in. She is bearing hot coffee and an envelope. She
puts the coffee into Thom’s hands, who doesn’t even register its
presence: he is still staring at the Lily-ness of the room. Sasha is
straightening his desk and organizing his mail.
Sasha: Here’s the mail. I also forwarded your online submissions.
Thom has absent-mindedly taken a sip of coffee. He suddenly
realizes what he’s drinking and chokes. It dribbles down his white
shirt and onto the floor.
Sasha: It’s hot.
Thom: It’s coffee.
Sasha: Yeah?
Thom: We’re out of coffee.
Sasha: Uh, no we’re not. I just made it.
Thom: No.
Sasha: Yes, Thom. I just made it.
The last night plays through Thom’s mind like a film reel. A
rising heat comes from his heart and into his throat and brain.
Sasha: Anyway, like I was saying—there’s your mail. (She sets it down.)
The email is probably more hate mail: its subject line says “to
obscenity.” Maybe wait to open that one until you feel better.
There’s a long pause as Sasha looks to Thom, hoping to get some
information. Thom is staring straight ahead, his coffee mug
shakes ever so slightly.
Sasha: So, I’ll leave this here. (She heads for the door.)
Thom: (still lost) Yeah.
Sasha: I’ll be outside, doing some work.
72
Thom: You’re not going?
Sasha: I don’t know.
Thom: Please stay.
Sasha: (beat) I’m pretty sure you’ll die if I ever go. You ever felt like
writing about why people stay, why they stick around and deal,
there’s your first submission, I guess.
She goes. Thom stands. His head drops.
Finally, he turns to his desk and walks to his computer. He sets
his coffee down, clicks the email.
Thom: To obscenity.
He clicks the link. On the back wall behind him, the desk projector
throws the image. It is a homemade film from a phone or personal
camcorder. The recorder’s inept microphone has caught a tinny
rendition of Chopin’s Nocturne in E-flat Major. We see Lily,
wearing the same clothes from last night. She looks at the camera,
peers into it like she’s looking into the eyes of a friend. She is so
present. She smiles—that infinitely warm, human smile that she
has impressed in our memory: she is as radiant now as then—
more so, for being projected larger than life. She looks through
the camera at Thom, as if to project to him through her irises
some private thought, some secret love only he could read in her
eyes—an expectation of a new moment of which only he knows
the significance.
Smiling, she says: “All that we see or seem, is but a dream within
a dream.”
Without warning, or a change in expression, she too-quickly
pulls out a gun and shoves it to her temple and pulls the—
Thom presses the pause button. Her face, barrel inserted
dynamically into her temple, is frozen onto the screen.
We don’t get to see her death.
Thom is emptied of all semblance of energy. He wearily, almost
automatically grabs his digital recorder, and, never taking his

73
 eyes off Lily’s on his screen, speaks into it. Tears begin to silently
fall as he talks.
Thom: Subject: Lilyanna Quinn. Twenty-five. 5’5”, one-hundred thirty-
six pounds . . . dark brown hair—no, coffee. It’s coffee-colored.
Eyes—amber—burnished bronze—white gold. Matriculated
Northwestern, class of 2014. She is beautiful. The subject is
beautiful.
He idly takes a sip of coffee. He stops before he swallows,
recognizing what Richard Brautigan called “beautiful parallels.”
Subject shot herself with what appears to be—what appears to
be—a common Glock G19: into the brain through her—through
the temple. Subject sent a video of the—performance—
electronically and not through legalized channels. Note to Sasha:
contact law enforcement to provide said link for evidence. It is
impossible to tell what room Evelyn—Lily—I’m sorry, the
subject, is in, nor does any other peripheral information about the
subject or the performance exist in the accompanied materials.
Another sip of coffee. He is gaining the smallest measures of
resolve. The following is an exercise in self-laceration.
The gun is one of the most common handguns in the country and
its use of a cliché method. The quality of the video is poor, and
no intended aesthetic considerations of it are, on this watching,
particularly noticeable. The inclusion of Chopin’s Nocturne is—
moving on a—on a personal level. Note to self: throw away that
fucking record player. (Another agonized breath. He continues.)
While the subject’s own features are striking, and while the
subject exudes a—she exudes a—she’s happy. The subject is—so
happy, and gives the spectator the feeling of—(he clicks off the
digital recorder, clears his throat, wipes his eyes, and continues)—
while the subject gives the spectator the impression that he is in
a dream, while it is a dream that reveals the vanity and futility
of life for what it is, while the colors of her eyes are as vivid as a
Monet painting, while her body is warm enough to melt glaciers,
while her memory is as human as she is, while her—(he breaks)—
all this is uncommunicable in this performance, and will not

74
 translate to the aesthetic or critical impact of the collection. An
audience lacking—context—will be critically ignorant.
Subject fails preliminary qualification for inclusion. Being
familiar with my work, she must have known that a routine
shooting lacking any artistry would have failed by these criteria.
It is not of use—it is use—it is useless . . . to my project at this
time. Ms. Quinn was, unfortunately, another perfunctory
suicide.
During these last few lines, Sasha has reentered. She is bringing
Thom a stack of new folders of incoming cases.
Sasha: Oh, my God. She’s beautiful. Did she—?
Thom: Yeah.
Sasha: Well. Another tragedy for the pile.
Thom: (ignoring her) It’s a waste. Such a fucking waste.
Beat.
Sasha: Are you going to write about her?
Thom: No.
Sasha: Hm. Samuel Barber again?
Thom: (his eyes haven’t moved from the screen. He hates.) No.
Sasha: So, why not use her?
Thom: It’s hers.
Lights fade to the music of Chopin’s Nocturne. End of play.

75