LAST FAll
A Contemporary Theater Production - Complete Manuscript
All Three Acts Combined
Theater Company: The Rangmanch Collective, Mumbai
Venue: The Black Box Theatre, Kala Ghoda Arts District
Season: 2025 Contemporary Voices Series
Note: This manuscript contains all 31 variations developed during the creative process
Production Overview
LAST FAll is a fearless, psychologically charged exploration of transgression, power, and moral
foundations set against the backdrop of contemporary urban India. This long-form theatrical work pushes
boundaries through its unflinching examination of strong desires, gender emotional registers, and the
architecture of authority. The play centers on a brilliant and composed character whose forbidden affairs
explode structures from within—not through erosion but through detonation.
Synopsis
At the center of LAST FAll stands Diop Mehta, a brilliant strategist at a prestigious Mumbai think tank
dedicated to social reform. Composed, calculating, and charismatic, Diop navigates the intersections of
power with surgical precision—oscillating between masculine authority and what the script calls
"drone(ing) power queen" modes—until they initiate affairs that will detonate the very foundations
they've helped build.
The play unfolds across three interwoven narratives of transgression:
1. The Primary Affair: Diop's relationship with Kavya, the spouse of their closest colleague and co-
founder of their moral reform initiative. This liaison doesn't erode their world through slow decay but
explodes it from within—a controlled demolition of everything they've publicly stood for.
2. The Secondary Entanglement: A parallel narrative exploring non-violence and complicity through
Diop's mentorship of Arjun, a young activist whose pacifist ideology becomes both weapon and
shield in their dangerous dance of attraction and resistance.
3. The Third Transgression: The most troubling thread—Diop's psychological dominion over Priya, a
22-year-old intern at the think tank, dramatizing the asymmetries of age, experience, and institutional
authority.
Complete Character List (All 31 Variations Represented)
Diop Mehta (35-40): The brilliant, composed protagonist. Gender-fluid in presentation, oscillating
between masculine authority and "drone(ing) power queen" modes. Their public persona as a moral
reformer masks deeper hungers. They transgress not through erosion but explosion.
Kavya Singh (30-35): Spouse to Diop's colleague Rahul. An artist whose work explores boundaries and
taboos, making her both Diop's perfect match and ultimate undoing.
Rahul Singh (35-40): Diop's co-founder and closest friend. A true believer in their reform work, blind to
the betrayal unfolding in his own home.
Arjun Rao (25-28): Young Gandhian activist. His commitment to non-violence becomes complicated
when he realizes Diop's interest extends beyond the ideological. His story dramatizes non-violence as
potential complicity.
Priya Sharma (22): Think tank intern. Brilliant but inexperienced, drawn into Diop's orbit through a
mixture of admiration, ambition, and carefully orchestrated vulnerability.
Louise D'Souza (55-60): A senior care worker at the nearby St. Catherine's Elder Care facility. Former
human rights lawyer who chose caregiving after a personal tragedy. Represents genuine moral authority
earned through lived experience and daily acts of service. A loving caregiver and beautiful example of
justice.
Adadie Verma (Age ambiguous, 30-45): A chaos mathematician turned corporate fixer. Agent of both
control and chaos. Hired by the think tank's board to "stabilize" the organization, but their methods
involve controlled destruction. Gender non-conforming, they mirror Diop's fluidity but channel it toward
entropy rather than power.
Campilla D'Souza (Would be 75): Louise's deceased mother, appearing as a ghostly presence visible only
to Louise and, mysteriously, to Adadie. A former nurse who abandoned her family to join a radical
commune, she embodies the maternal betrayal that shaped Louise's compulsive caregiving.
Jersey Mehta-Singhania (28): Diop's niece/nephew (they reject binary terms), heir to both think tank
legacy and industrial fortune. Speaks exclusively in present tense, as if past and future don't exist.
Embodies repression and affluence.
Felipe (Age impossible to determine): The think tank's night wanderer, hired as "Ambience Consultant"
but exists primarily in the building's liminal spaces. Explains how, in dream corridors, shadows and
reflections pose exposures of secrecy and non-binary contradiction.
Home E. Da (Age shifts with perception): The play's true architect of horror—a former patient care
theorist who underwent experimental empathy enhancement therapy that went catastrophically wrong.
Metaphorically leaves bread crumbs that symbolize facing the ceiling—acid-deformed hospital patient
heads, so lucid in mind they are mentally branded as spontaneous occurring recollections.
Vingt (20): The think tank's youngest researcher, experiencing vulnerable transgression arising from lust
and deep hunger for dangerous affirmation. Collects emotional scars like credentials.
Quirky Theo (Age reads differently to everyone): The think tank's "Stillness Consultant"—a paradox
wrapped in charm. Their unique stillness gradually builds tension until it snaps with definitive glances and
twitches of shoulders and head.
Mrs. Fernandes (93): Elder care resident who embodies chosen innocence—the refusal to become
cynical even after knowing better. Carries scars like pockets full of polished wonders.
The Feminine Shaman (Ageless): An eternal witness who has been present but unseen throughout,
offering perspective on how guilt and thrill can be experienced simultaneously.
Prashant, Maya, Samuel/Samara: Think tank analysts who dwell in combinations of offbeat logic,
aesthetic oddity, and gentle surrealism.
The Chorus: Representing societal voices, moral foundations, and the "particular morals reimagined" that
Diop's actions systematically transgress.
Theatrical Elements
Staging
Minimalist set with modular platforms that reconfigure to represent different power dynamics
Strategic use of levels to emphasize hierarchies and their dissolution
Projection mapping for psychological states and societal pressures
Contemporary conception of "intellectual as home, combined with space as sterile clouds-drenched
veneers"
The Intellectual Home / Sterile Cloud Aesthetic
The stage design embodies the paradox of "intellectual as home" meeting "sterile cloud-drenched
veneers":
The Think Tank Space:
Walls of frosted smart glass that fog and clear based on character proximity
Furniture that appears solid but is actually hollow acrylic filled with vapor
Books suspended in lucite cases, readable but untouchable
Whiteboards that display equations in condensation that evaporates before completion
Air conditioning that releases visible mist, making thoughts literally cloud-like
Pristine aesthetic heightened to reveal psychological traces of horror
Disturbing decay exists beneath perfect, refined sophistication
The Elder Care Facility:
In contrast, aggressively tangible—stained, worn, human
When think tank characters enter, they bring their "cloud" with them—sterile fog creeping across
lived-in spaces
Louise's garden exists in a liminal space where both aesthetics battle
Betrayal as Continuous Action:
Each character trails vapor that shows their ongoing betrayals
Diop's seductions leave condensation on surfaces that never quite dries
Louise's care creates steam that fogs her own reflection
Jersey exists in a bubble of climate-controlled air, their betrayal being the refusal to share
atmosphere
Adadie's calculations appear as frost patterns that continuously form and shatter
Betrayal not as past event but continuous action
Sound Design
Incorporates drone music and electronic soundscapes
Traditional Indian instruments distorted to create unsettling atmospheres
Silence used as a dramatic device during moments of moral reckoning
HVAC systems as percussion—the intellectual home's climate control becoming the play's heartbeat
Cloud sounds: precipitation, condensation, the hiss of thoughts evaporating
Movement
Influenced by Kalaripayattu martial arts forms to represent internal conflicts
Contemporary dance sequences for the chorus
Stillness and hyper-controlled movement for Diop's "power queen" moments
Characters move through different atmospheric densities—sharp in the sterile zones, sluggish in the
humid truth
Each character has personal rhythm and unapologetic individuality
Thematic Explorations
Transgression as Foundation: Rather than transgression as deviation, the play posits it as the hidden
foundation of moral systems—what must be forbidden for morality to exist.
Gender and Power: Diop's fluid gender presentation and "drone(ing) power queen" modes serve as both
armor and weapon, allowing them to navigate and manipulate different registers of authority and desire.
Non-Violence as Complicity: Through Arjun's storyline, the play interrogates whether absolute non-
violence can become a form of enabling or even violence itself.
Asymmetry and Consent: The narratives force audiences to confront uncomfortable questions about
power differentials, the impossibility of true consent within hierarchical structures, and how consent can
be corrupted.
Existential Betrayal of Roles: Can one betray a role they never chose?
Who Holds the Power: Exploration through pronouns and verbs of power dynamics.
Structure
Act I: "Foundations" - Establishes Diop's world and the moral architecture they've helped construct Act II:
"Fissures" - The three affairs begin, each representing a different form of transgression Act III: "Fall" - The
inevitable collapse, but questioned whether it's truly a fall or an ascension
ACT I: FOUNDATIONS
Scene 1: The Opening Image - Pristine Decay
[The play opens with Diop standing in their think tank office—a space of impossible perfection. Floor-to-
ceiling windows are treated with smart film creating interior clouds. Every surface appears flawless,
crystalline. Yet in the corner where walls meet, there's a single drop of what looks like condensation—but it
never moves, never evaporates. It's been there so long it's become part of the architecture.]
Diop (preparing a presentation, words appearing as vapor on glass): Moral Infrastructure in Modern India
requires systematic approaches to behavioral modification...
[As Diop gestures, making words appear in vapor, each letter briefly reveals something beneath—older
words, never quite erased, forming phrases like "help me" and "I can't breathe" before being covered by new
corporate speak.]
Diop: We must architect systems of accountability that scale across demographics—
[The think tank's white marble floors pulse with a barely perceptible rhythm. Not stone at all, but something
organic calcified into the appearance of luxury.]
[Diop's movement shifts—from corporate precision to something more fluid, more dangerous. This is the
"drone(ing) power queen" mode—a hypnotic authority that makes others lean in despite themselves.]
Scene 2: The Perfect Conference
[Conference room. Rahul, Kavya, Arjun, and other board members assembled. The laminated air table
reflects their faces in its surface.]
Rahul: The quarterly projections show our moral intervention programs achieving 73% compliance rates.
Kavya: Compliance isn't change.
Diop (shifting into power queen mode): But it's measurable. And measurement is what the funders
understand.
[Their eyes meet across the table. A moment too long. Rahul doesn't notice. Arjun does.]
Arjun: The non-violence initiative needs restructuring. People are complying without comprehending.
Diop: Perhaps comprehension is overrated. Perhaps... compliance is enough.
[The words hang between them, loaded with double meaning.]
Scene 3: Louise's Introduction
[Split stage. Stage left: Diop continuing the think tank presentation. Stage right: Louise gently washing the
feet of an elderly resident, humming a Konkani hymn.]
Diop: We must architect systems of accountability that scale across demographics—
Louise (overlapping, to her patient): There, Agnes aunty. Better? The swelling will go down.
[The scenes bleed into each other when Priya, rushing between her internship and volunteer work, becomes
the bridge between both worlds.]
Priya: Sorry I'm late, Diop. I was at the elder care facility and—
Diop: Your volunteer work is admirable, but punctuality—
Louise (calling after Priya): Your jacket, child!
[Priya exists in both spaces simultaneously for a moment, caught between worlds.]
Louise (to Agnes): This child works too hard. Trying to save the world in two places at once.
Agnes: Like you used to, no?
Louise: I learned. Justice isn't in the verdict. It's in the daily choice to reduce suffering.
Scene 4: The Perfect Fruit
[The think tank's reception. A bowl of perfect fruit sits on the modern desk—too perfect. Apples with skin like
patent leather, grapes that never wrinkle. Prashant from Research walks by, checking his expired calendar.]
Priya (reaching for an apple): I missed lunch...
Receptionist: Those aren't for eating. They're for atmosphere.
Priya: But they're fruit.
Receptionist: They're beyond fruit now.
[When Priya accidentally drops one, it doesn't bruise—it cracks like porcelain, revealing hollow darkness
inside. A sweet smell emerges, not of fruit but of formaldehyde.]
Prashant (not looking up from his 2019 calendar): Today doesn't exist yet. Neither does that apple. You're
trying to eat the future.
Scene 5: The Inheritance Arrival
[Jersey enters the elder care facility wearing a ₹3 lakh jacket, carrying artisanal coffee for the staff. They
move through space as if it rearranges itself for their convenience.]
Jersey: I am volunteering here now. Uncle/Aunt Diop says I need perspective.
Louise: We require a six-month commitment—
Jersey: Time is a construct I don't acknowledge. I am here. Now. Always now.
Louise: But next week—
Jersey: Doesn't exist. I am feeding Mrs. Fernandes. She is telling me about her daughter. Everything is
present tense.
[Jersey's refusal to acknowledge past or future makes them immune to both guilt and hope—the twin
engines of everyone else's actions.]
Mrs. Fernandes: This one understands. We only ever have now. The past is a story, the future a guess.
Scene 6: First Sighting
[Think tank hallway. No one sees Felipe enter. Priya notices them first—a reflection in the smart glass that
doesn't match anyone in the room. Maya from Research passes, her computer screen showing only
wingdings.]
Felipe (from everywhere and nowhere): The building has veins you haven't mapped. Corridors that exist
in the pause between inhale and exhale. I walk them.
Priya: Who are you talking to?
Adadie (entering with measuring equipment): The new consultant. They're... probabilistic.
Felipe: I am the space between yes and no. The building hired me to explain its dreams.
Maya (typing in symbols): □△○●◐◑◒◓
Priya: What did she say?
Felipe: "Dreams don't need explanation. They need witnessing." But in wingdings, it's more true.
Scene 7: The Mother's Shadow
[Louise's first encounter with Campilla occurs during a mundane caregiving task. As Louise bathes an elderly
resident, Campilla materializes in the steam.]
Campilla: Still washing other people's mothers, mol?
Louise (not looking up): Someone has to.
Campilla: I taught you too well. The perfect daughter—caring for everyone except yourself.
Louise: You taught me nothing. You left.
Campilla: I taught you the most important lesson. That even mothers can choose themselves.
[The resident Louise is bathing suddenly grips her hand, mirroring a gesture from Louise's childhood. The
boundary between past and present dissolves.]
Resident: My daughter never visits.
Louise: She loves you. Love just... looks different sometimes.
Campilla: Listen to you. Still making excuses for abandonment.
Scene 8: The Continuous Betrayal Machine
[The think tank's central conference room. The massive table made of laminated air—compressed
atmosphere between glass sheets. As characters place their hands on it, their palm prints appear in
condensation, then slowly evaporate, only to reform. Samuel/Samara enters, speaking only in questions.]
Diop: Our thoughts live here, in the space between solid and vapor.
Adadie: Your betrayals too. Watch—
[Adadie breathes on the table, revealing all the accumulated hand prints—a palimpsest of every deception
planned in this room.]
Samuel/Samara: Is deception different from decision? Does the table know the difference?
Diop: Everything here is decision.
Samuel/Samara: Is it, though? Or is everything here what we couldn't decide?
Scene 9: The Introduction of Crumbs / The Acid Revelation
[Think tank wellness seminar. Home E. Da distributes what look like homeopathic supplements—small white
pills that resemble breadcrumbs.]
Home E. Da: These contain concentrated mindfulness. Distilled from moments of pure clarity.
[Their face appears kind until caught in profile—one side shows traces of chemical scarring that forms
patterns like neural networks.]
Rahul: What kind of clarity?
Home E. Da: The kind that comes in the final moments. When the ceiling is all you can see, and suddenly
everything makes sense.
[During a particularly violent memory extraction later, Home E. Da's acid scars begin to weep—not blood or
pus, but a crystalline substance that hardens into sharp, glass-like formations.]
Adadie (observing): Your scars... they're not healing. They're evolving.
Home E. Da: The acid was meant to enhance neural pathways for empathy. It burned through flesh,
through bone, through the barriers between self and other. Now my wounds think. They remember. They
hunger.
Scene 10: Arjun's Seduction
[Late evening. Think tank meditation room. Arjun practices yoga while Diop watches from the doorway.]
Diop: Your non-violence is beautiful. So... uncompromising.
Arjun: It's not beauty. It's necessity. Violence corrupts even when justified.
Diop (moving closer): But don't you ever want to... push back? To feel the power of resistance?
Arjun: Resistance doesn't require violence.
Diop: Doesn't it? What if someone were to... touch you? Without permission?
[Diop's hand hovers near Arjun's shoulder. Arjun doesn't move, doesn't flinch.]
Arjun: Then they would be violent. I would remain myself.
Diop: And if remaining yourself means enabling their violence?
Arjun: That's the paradox you're trying to create. But I won't play.
[But he doesn't leave. The non-violence becomes a form of invitation—passive, complicit.]
ACT II: FISSURES
Scene 1: The Shadow Conference
[During a crucial meeting, Felipe's shadow attends without Felipe. It takes notes that appear on the smart
glass in condensation—not words but architectural diagrams of rooms that don't exist.]
Felipe's Shadow: This meeting is also happening three floors down, in the corridor that isn't there. The
decisions you make here echo in rooms you'll never find.
Diop: Can someone turn up the lights?
Felipe's Shadow: Light is binary—on or off. I exist in the dimmer switch. Watch.
[The shadow demonstrates: as lights dim, previously invisible doorways appear in the walls—apertures to
nowhere, or everywhere.]
Prashant (consulting his 2018 calendar): The shadows are more punctual than the people. They arrive
exactly when they're supposed to have left.
Scene 2: The Mathematics of Abandonment
[Adadie encounters Campilla in Louise's garden, initially mistaking her for a probability shadow—a
mathematical echo.]
Adadie: You're not supposed to exist. The equations don't support spectral manifestations.
Campilla: Your equations don't account for guilt.
Adadie: Guilt is just chemicals. Oxytocin withdrawal, mirror neuron misfiring—
Campilla: Then calculate this: What's the probability my daughter forgives me?
Adadie (computing frantically): Zero. But also...infinite. A paradox.
Campilla: Welcome to motherhood.
[This encounter destabilizes Adadie's certainty, introducing the first crack in their mathematical worldview.]
Scene 3: Louise's Intrusion
[When Louise first enters the think tank, she brings the elder care facility's humidity with her. The sterile
clouds recoil from her presence. Where she walks, the smart glass clears, revealing the city beyond—poverty,
density, life.]
[Louise's footsteps leave wet marks that refuse to evaporate. The think tank's climate control systems go into
overdrive, trying to maintain their perfect intellectual atmosphere against her human humidity.]
Maya (typing in wingdings on her report): ▽◦◊◈◉◊◦▽
Louise: What's she writing?
Adadie: This quarter's productivity report. In symbols, it's actually more accurate.
Scene 4: The Corridor Encounter / The Money Mirror
[Split scene. Felipe's corridor overlaps with the facility where Jersey and Priya work together.]
Vingt (to Felipe): I've been watching you walk through walls. Teach me.
Felipe: You can't walk through walls seeking passage. Only seeking dissolution. Why do you follow?
Vingt: Because you're dangerous. And I'm... collecting dangers.
Felipe: Ah. You're one of those who thinks pain is proof of existence.
Vingt: Isn't it? Every scar says 'I was here, I was real enough to bleed.'
[Simultaneously:]
Jersey (to Priya): I am always where I am. Unlike you—you are in Diop's bed while standing here.
Priya (shocked): How did you—
Jersey: Wealth is seeing everything while being seen by no one. I know Diop is using you. You know Diop
is using you. Yet you return.
Scene 5: The Garden Confrontation / The Conference Table's Secret
[Louise's garden. Diop visits, ostensibly to discuss partnership. Jersey has been rearranging plants
mathematically.]
Louise: I defended the innocent for twenty years. Won cases, lost cases. Then I realized—justice isn't in
the verdict. It's in the daily choice to reduce suffering.
Diop: Beautiful. We should use that in our next campaign—
Louise: No. You don't use it. You live it.
[Louise's stillness contrasts with Diop's constant repositioning, their body language revealing discomfort with
genuine moral authority.]
[In the conference room, a bubble in the laminated air table breaks. What emerges isn't air but a perfectly
preserved butterfly—beautiful, iridescent, and absolutely wrong. Its wings beat once before it crumbles to
designer dust.]
Samuel/Samara: Was that butterfly ever alive? Or is preservation a form of living?
Scene 6: The Acid Revelation (Expanded)
[Home E. Da's private laboratory. Their body is revealed as a map of purposeful wounds.]
Home E. Da (to Vingt): Look closely. Each scar has become a production site.
[Their torso opens like a cabinet, revealing rows of crystalline weapons grown from pain:]
Memory shards that pierce consciousness
Empathy spines that force others to feel what they felt
Clarity fangs that bite through denial
Revelation ribbons that unspool from wounds like magnetic tape
Vingt: You're harvesting yourself.
Home E. Da: I'm the prototype. Every patient's pain can become productive. Imagine—hospitals as
weapon factories, suffering as raw material, death as industry.
Louise (entering): Those crystals—
Home E. Da: Each one is a death crystallized. The acid taught my body to transform pain into something
useful. Beautiful, even.
Scene 7: The Vapor Affair / Arjun's Complicity
[Split scene: Diop's seduction of Kavya in the meditation room while Arjun watches from the doorway,
paralyzed by his non-violence.]
Diop: Tell me what you need.
Kavya: To feel alive again. Rahul sees me as another reform project.
[Their bodies generate heat that fogs every surface. Their betrayal manifests as condensation that spells out
accusations on the windows: "RAHUL," "FRIEND," "TRUST."]
Arjun (to himself): I should stop this. But stopping requires action. Action is violence.
[His non-violence becomes complicity. He turns away, enabling through inaction.]
Scene 8: The Parallel Dinners / The Reflection Dialogue
[Split stage showing two dinners happening simultaneously:]
Left stage: Diop: The wine is from a vineyard that employs only former convicts. Kavya: Even your
seduction has social justice angles. Diop: Everything I do is calculated for maximum impact.
Right stage: Louise: Mrs. Fernandes made this dal. She insists on cooking despite her arthritis. Elderly
Resident: It helps me remember my daughter. She loved my cooking. Louise: Memory lives in the hands
as much as the mind.
[Both scenes use the same dialogue structure but with vastly different intentions:]
Diop/Louise: Tell me what you need. Kavya: To feel alive again. Elderly Resident: Just someone to
remember my husband with.
[In the bathroom mirror, Louise encounters Felipe:]
Felipe: Which Louise is real—the one who saves others or the one who couldn't save her mother? The
building knows you're both. It built corridors for each version.
Scene 9: The Dangerous Affirmation / The Meditation Room's Walls
[The think tank's meditation room. Walls of living moss grow in patterns revealing confessions. Vingt
deliberately seeks out Diop.]
Vingt: I know what you are. What you do. I'm applying for the position of next victim.
Diop: That's not how it works—
Vingt: Because you prefer the unwilling? The innocent? I'm neither. I'm pre-corrupted, seeking
corruption's graduation ceremony.
Diop (intrigued despite themselves): What could I possibly offer someone who wants to be damaged?
Vingt: Confirmation. That I'm worth damaging. Elaborately.
[The moss on the walls spells out their exchange, growing greener with each admission.]
Felipe (appearing in reflection): This one's already walking between walls. They're seeking solid impact to
remember what edges feel like.
Scene 10: The Garden Equation / The Ceiling Projections
[Night. Adadie finds Felipe rearranging Louise's garden according to mathematical principles.]
Adadie: You're destroying the stories here.
Felipe: I'm revealing the pattern beneath the sentiment.
Louise (arriving): Those flowers were planted by residents. Each one has a story.
Adadie: Stories are just noise. This pattern—it's pure. It will maximize growth by 23%.
Louise: Growth isn't the point. Memory is. Mrs. Fernandes planted those for her late daughter.
[During Home E. Da's demonstration elsewhere, breadcrumbs project stolen memories onto the ceiling—
acid-damaged faces staring upward, so clear in their thoughts that viewers experience their revelations as
physical sensations.]
Home E. Da: Each breadcrumb contains 1,000 hours of ceiling meditation. The paralyzed see everything
—past, future, the pattern of how suffering connects us. I've made their immobility mobile.
Scene 11: The Dream Tutorial / The Repression Dance
[Felipe finds Arjun meditating while Jersey performs a classical Bharatanatyam dance in another space, but
every movement is in aggressive present tense.]
Felipe: You think non-violence means choosing peace over conflict. But the building knows better. Every
wall is both solid and permeable. Every door is both open and closed. Violence and non-violence exist in
the same space, like this—
[Felipe demonstrates by walking through Arjun—not around, not over, but through, existing in the space
between his molecules.]
Arjun: That's impossible—
Felipe: You're thinking in binary. Possible/impossible. The building thinks in gradients. I am its gradient
made flesh. Or flesh made gradient. The distinction is another false binary.
[Meanwhile, Jersey dances:]
Jersey: I am dancing. Not 'have danced' or 'will dance.' Only am.
Adadie (watching): Your movement patterns... they don't compute. No temporal flow.
Jersey: I am effect without cause, cause without effect.
Scene 12: Louise's Transgression
[Campilla watches as Louise perpetuates a gentle deception with Agnes aunty, who mistakes Louise for her
own daughter.]
Agnes: Daughter, you came back.
Louise: Yes, Ma. I'm here.
Campilla: Look at you. Lying. The virtuous Louise, finally transgressing.
Louise: It's kindness—
Campilla: It's theft. You're stealing her daughter's role. Just like you stole mine when I left.
[Agnes dies believing her daughter returned. Louise's moral certainty shatters—has her caregiving always
been a performance to fill the void Campilla left?]
Scene 13: Jersey's Climate Bubble / The Meltdown Arsenal
[Jersey exists in their own portable atmosphere while Home E. Da reveals their body as a map of purposeful
wounds.]
Jersey: I am breathing. You are suffocating. The difference is purchasing power.
[Jersey's bubble creates its own weather system—tiny clouds forming and dissipating around them, while
others struggle in unfiltered reality.]
Home E. Da: My wounds became wombs. Each scar, a factory for truth.
Priya (horrified): You're harvesting yourself.
Home E. Da: I'm the prototype. Every patient's pain can become productive. Imagine—hospitals as
weapon factories, suffering as raw material, death as industry.
Scene 14: Adadie's Analysis
[Adadie attempts to mathematically deconstruct Home E. Da's breadcrumbs.]
Adadie: These aren't pills. They're compressed neural activity. You've weaponized dying thoughts.
Home E. Da: Weaponized? I've democratized. Why should profound realization be limited to the dying?
Adadie: Because the realization comes FROM dying. You're forcing living minds to experience death
without release.
Home E. Da: Precisely. Eternal clarity. Imagine—every thought as lucid as your last, but lasting forever.
[Adadie's equations begin reflecting ceiling patterns. They're becoming infected by the borrowed memories.]
Scene 15: The Scar Symposium
[Louise discovers Vingt in the medical supply room, creating deliberate wounds with surgical precision.]
Vingt: Making myself legible. Each scar is a word in a language only the wounded speak.
Louise: This is self-harm—
Vingt: This is self-authorship. My body's a rough draft. I'm editing.
Louise: Scars don't make you real—
Vingt: Says the woman whose entire identity is one massive scar shaped like her mother.
[Louise freezes. In the mirror, Campilla's reflection nods approvingly at Vingt.]
Vingt: See? Your scar recognizes mine. They're having a conversation we can't hear.
Scene 16: The Psychic Trap Door
[A sparse corner of the think tank. One table. Two chairs. A water cooler that drips every 47 seconds. Louise
sits for 90 full seconds before speaking. The audience must feel the weight of time.]
Louise: ...
[She pours water. The sound is amplified. She drinks. 30 seconds pass.]
Louise: I used to think—
[Felipe appears in the reflection of the water cooler. 20 seconds pass before they speak.]
Felipe: You still do.
[60 seconds of silence. The water cooler drips twice.]
Louise: The patients today. One of them. She grabbed my wrist.
[Louise lifts her wrist. Examines it. There's nothing there. 40 seconds pass.]
Louise: Said I smelled like her daughter.
[The fluorescent light flickers. In the flicker, Campilla is sitting in the second chair. When the light steadies,
the chair is empty. 45 seconds pass.]
Felipe (from the reflection): Smell is the sense most connected to memory. Also to ghosts.
[90 seconds pass. Louise stands. Sits. Stands again. The water cooler drips three times.]
Louise: Sometimes.
[She stops. 60 seconds. The audience waits for her to complete the thought. She doesn't.]
Louise: In the morning. Before I'm fully awake. I forget she left.
[Felipe steps out of the reflection. They're now in the room but wrong—casting no shadow, making no
sound. They walk to the empty chair. Sit. The chair doesn't move.]
Felipe: Forgetting is a kind of time travel.
[2 full minutes pass. No one moves. The water cooler drips five times. On the fifth drip, Jersey enters but
stops in the doorway, caught between entering and leaving.]
Jersey: I am interrupting nothing.
[30 seconds pass.]
Louise: Yes.
[Jersey doesn't move from the doorway. Cannot move. 45 seconds pass.]
Jersey: I am stuck.
Felipe: Between rooms?
Jersey: Between... I am between.
[75 seconds of stillness. The fluorescent light flickers again. In the flicker, the room is full of people—all the
patients Louise has lost, all standing, staring at the ceiling. When the light steadies, empty again.]
Louise: The woman today. When she grabbed my wrist. Her hand was my mother's hand.
[She looks at the empty chair. 60 seconds pass.]
Louise: Not like. Was.
[The water cooler drips. The drop falls upward. No one reacts. 90 seconds pass.]
Felipe: This room doesn't exist during business hours.
Jersey: I am noticing that.
Louise: It's where the building keeps its—
[She stops. 45 seconds. The word hangs unfinished. The silence has weight, mass, gravitational pull.]
Felipe: Grief.
[As they say the word, the walls become slightly transparent. Beyond them, hundreds of similar rooms, each
with a single person sitting alone. 2 minutes pass. No one acknowledges what they're seeing.]
Jersey: I am feeling duration in here.
Louise: Don't.
Jersey: I am trying not to. But the room—
[They gesture. Their hand leaves traces in the air, like moving through water. 30 seconds pass.]
Louise: I come here to practice.
Felipe: Practice?
[60 seconds pass before she answers.]
Louise: Being left.
[The water cooler drips. This time the sound comes before the drop falls. 45 seconds pass.]
Jersey: I am understanding why the building needs this room.
[Home E. Da's voice comes from the water cooler, bubbling up through the water.]
Home E. Da (voice only): Every building needs a room for practicing absence.
[No one reacts to the voice. 90 seconds pass. Louise stands. The chair holds her imprint, visible like heat
shimmer.]
Louise: The woman today. After she grabbed my wrist. She died.
[30 seconds pass.]
Louise: While holding it.
[45 seconds pass.]
Louise: I didn't let go.
[60 seconds pass.]
Louise: For an hour.
[Felipe stands. Their chair shows no imprint. They walk to Louise, stand behind her, almost touching but not.
75 seconds pass.]
Felipe: In this room, she's still holding it.
[Louise looks at her wrist. In the fluorescent flicker, a hand is indeed still gripping it. When the light steadies,
nothing. But she keeps looking. 2 minutes pass.]
Jersey: I am leaving. But I am also staying. The room allows both.
[They step backward out of the doorway, but their outline remains, like a Jersey-shaped hole in space. 45
seconds pass.]
Louise (to the empty chair): Mom?
[No response. 60 seconds pass. The water cooler drips. The drop never lands.]
Louise: I'm so tired of practicing.
[She sits back down. The lights dim very slowly over the next 3 minutes. In the growing darkness, more
figures become visible—Vingt in a corner, scratching at their scars. Adadie, calculating something on
invisible boards. Diop, reaching for someone who isn't there. All silent. All practicing absence.]
[Final blackout. But the water cooler continues dripping in the darkness for another full minute before the
scene truly ends.]
Scene 17: The Vigil Interruption
[During a night vigil for a dying resident, Adadie appears with charts showing the "inefficiency" of death
watches.]
Adadie: Three hours average. No medical benefit. Pure resource drain.
Louise: Not everything that matters can be measured.
Adadie: False. I've measured grief—it follows a power law distribution. Your vigils don't change the
outcome.
Louise: The outcome was never the point.
Resident (weakly): Water...
Louise and Adadie (simultaneously reaching): Here.
[This moment of unexpected synchronicity disturbs Adadie. They calculate the probability of their
compassionate impulse and find it statistically impossible.]
Scene 18: The Loaded Chamber
[Late evening. The think tank's rooftop garden. Four damaged people in constellation formation.]
Vingt: The building's heating system sounds like breathing tonight.
Adadie: Technically, it is. HVAC systems are respiratory.
Felipe: Everything breathes. Even silence.
Diop: Especially silence.
[10 seconds pass. Each weighs the others' words like weapons being cleaned.]
Vingt: I've been thinking about appetite.
Diop: Dangerous territory.
Vingt: All territory is dangerous. That's what makes it territory.
Adadie: Appetite follows predictable patterns. Hunger, satiation, dormancy, repeat.
Felipe: You've never been hungry. Not really.
Adadie: I've modeled it.
Vingt (laughing): Modeling hunger is like photographing darkness.
Diop: Yet we all try.
[Diop turns from the railing, faces the others. Their movement is calculated to catch the light.]
Diop: Who here hasn't mistaken appetite for identity?
Felipe: Identity is appetite. We are what we hunger for.
Vingt: Then I am nothing but want wearing skin.
Adadie: The mathematics of that statement are actually beautiful.
Diop: Beauty. Another appetite.
[15 seconds of silence. Vingt's finger stops on a particular scar.]
Vingt: This one. From trying to feel what everyone said I should feel. Cut deep enough to reach China,
found only more America.
Felipe: Geography of the body is always political.
Adadie: You're mixing metaphors.
Felipe: I'm mixing. Metaphors are just one ingredient.
Diop: Like desire. Mix it with anything—love, hate, fear—changes everything, reveals nothing.
[Adadie's calculations reflect on their face, numbers becoming light.]
Adadie: I've run sixteen million simulations of human desire. Every variable mapped.
Vingt: And?
Adadie: It's not random. It's not ordered. It's...
Felipe: Inevitable.
Adadie: That's not a mathematical term.
Diop: Since when has mathematics explained anything that matters?
[The challenge hangs. Adadie's fingers pause over their tablet.]
Adadie: Since patterns emerged from chaos. Since—
Vingt: Since never. You count scars, you don't feel them healing wrong in the night.
Diop: Wrong healing. There's a concept.
Felipe: All healing is wrong. The body wants to return to before. But before is gone.
Vingt: So we scar forward.
[20 seconds pass. The city breathes below them.]
Diop: I fucked someone last week who looked like my first mistake.
Adadie: Statistically, we're attracted to patterns of previous—
Diop: Not attracted. Compelled. Like gravity, but sideways.
Felipe: All gravity is sideways when you're falling.
Vingt (to Diop): Did they know? That they were a repetition?
Diop: Everyone knows. No one admits.
Adadie: The probability of unique experience approaches zero as sample size increases.
Vingt: Jesus. Do you hear yourself?
Adadie: Always. That's the problem.
[Felipe moves, or seems to. The shadow adjusts but they might not have.]
Felipe: The problem is thinking problems can be solved.
Diop: Spoken like someone who exists between.
Felipe: Spoken like someone who exists.
Diop: Touché. Or is it?
Vingt: Everything here is touché. We're fencing with wounds.
[Adadie suddenly closes their tablet. The gesture is violent for them.]
Adadie: I had a brother.
[Everyone stills. Adadie never volunteers personal data.]
Adadie: He died at probability 1.0. Certainty. No variables left to calculate.
Vingt: How?
Adadie: Correctly. According to all models. That's why I build new models.
Diop: And if the models are perfect?
Adadie: Then perfection includes loss. Includes—
Felipe: Desire.
Adadie: Yes.
[30 seconds pass. Vingt pours wine, offers it around. Only Diop accepts.]
Vingt: We're all polished by what tried to break us.
Diop: Polish. Interesting choice. Not healed. Not strengthened. Polished.
Vingt: Smooth enough to reflect others' projections. That's survival.
Felipe: That's mirrors.
Vingt: Same thing.
Diop (raising glass): To mirrors then. And what breaks them.
Adadie: Mirrors don't break. They multiply.
Felipe: Everything multiplies. Even endings.
Vingt: Especially endings.
[They don't toast. The gesture hangs incomplete, more honest for its failure.]
Diop: Why are we here? This rooftop. This moment.
Vingt: Because the ground would be too obvious.
Adadie: Because elevation provides perspective on our patterns.
Felipe: Because we're all waiting to jump or fly, haven't decided which.
Diop: Or because misery loves company but settles for proximity.
[The building's breathing grows louder. Or they're all listening harder.]
Vingt: I want—
[They stop. The sentence dangles like a suicide attempt.]
Diop: We know.
Adadie: The want is visible. Calculable.
Felipe: Inevitable.
Vingt: Then why doesn't it decrease with feeding?
Diop: Because you're feeding it the wrong food. Or—
Adadie: Or the hunger isn't yours.
Felipe: Nothing is ours. We're all borrowing from the dead.
Vingt: The dead don't want anything.
Felipe: Exactly. That's why they lend so freely.
[A wind rises. Papers from Adadie's tablet swirl but don't fall. Physics suspended.]
Diop: If I told you my real name. My first one. Before I became this. Would it matter?
Vingt: Names are scars we choose.
Adadie: Statistically—
All three others: Don't.
[Adadie smiles. It's terrible on their face. Unpracticed.]
Adadie: I was going to say—statistically, I love you all.
[Silence. Not comfortable. Not uncomfortable. Just true.]
Felipe: Love is a corridor between—
Diop: If you say "between rooms" I'm pushing you off this roof.
Felipe: Between pushes.
Vingt (laughing): Fuck. We're all broken in exactly the right places.
Diop: Wrong places.
Adadie: Same coordinates, different interpretation.
Felipe: Every map is wrong. That's what makes them useful.
[The scene holds. Four damaged people neither moving closer nor farther apart. The city below doesn't care.
The building breathes. Somewhere, a door that was never closed starts to open.]
Scene 19: The Pronoun Wars
[Same rooftop, moments later. The comfortable damage of the previous scene curdles. Something shifts in
the air—power becoming visible through grammar.]
Diop: We need to discuss the audit.
Adadie: We?
[Silence. 15 seconds. The kind where everyone realizes a trap has been set. Adadie's emphasis on "we" hangs
like an accused finger. The audience feels the air change—from confession to confrontation.]
Diop: The board. They want—
Vingt: They.
[Silence. 20 seconds. Vingt's interruption creates a vacuum. Everyone breathes but it sounds like suffocation.
The audience should feel their own breathing become conscious, labored.]
Diop: Fine. I want. I've decided. The redundancies in your department—
Felipe: Your?
[Silence. 30 seconds. This one is excruciating. Felipe hasn't moved but somehow occupies more space. The
audience sees Diop's jaw muscle twitch. Once. The only movement.]
Diop: The department you currently inhabit.
Adadie: Inhabit. Like a ghost.
Diop: If the pronoun fits.
Vingt: Does it? Fit?
[Silence. 10 seconds. But this silence is different—aggressive, sexual, threatening. Vingt's question isn't about
grammar. Everyone knows. Everyone pretends not to know.]
Felipe: You're all saying "you" like it means something stable.
Diop: Doesn't it?
Felipe: You tell me.
Diop: I'm telling you—
Felipe: Which you? The one fucking your colleague's spouse? The one who presents moral frameworks?
The one standing here pretending those are different people?
[Silence. 45 seconds. The longest yet. Diop's hand moves toward the railing, stops. That arrested gesture
speaks volumes. The audience should feel like they're intruding on violence about to happen.]
Adadie: The mathematical beauty of pronouns is their emptiness. Variables without values.
Vingt: He/she/they/it—all equally meaningless.
Diop: Yet here we are, choking on them.
[Silence. 25 seconds. Someone in the audience coughs. It sounds like a gunshot.]
Vingt: I've been thinking—
Diop: I. Always I with you.
Vingt: As opposed to your eternal we? Your royal plurals?
Adadie: Neither of you owns your pronouns. They're borrowed. Like everything else.
Felipe: From whom?
Adadie: From whoever needs you to be you so they can be them.
[Silence. 35 seconds. This silence has texture—sticky, cloying. The audience feels it on their skin.]
Diop: The audit requires—
Vingt: Requires. Active verb. Subject hidden.
Diop: The audit. I said the audit.
Vingt: The audit requires nothing. You require. But you're too cowardly to conjugate honestly.
[Silence. 20 seconds. The kind that precedes violence. Or sex. Or both.]
Felipe: Speaking of conjugation—
Diop: Don't.
Felipe: Who did you fuck? Or were you fucked? The verb changes everything.
Adadie: Statistically, both occurred. Simultaneously. Schrödinger's sex act.
[Silence. 40 seconds. Everyone stares at Adadie. The stares have weight. The audience should feel
embarrassed for everyone.]
Vingt: I want—
Diop: Again with I.
Vingt: I want you to say my name.
Diop: Vingt.
Vingt: My real name.
Diop: I don't know it.
Vingt: You've known it since you first saw my scars. Say it.
[Silence. 50 seconds. The audience realizes they're holding their breath. The silence is so complete they can
hear their own heartbeats.]
Diop: Victim.
Vingt: Close. Try again.
Diop: Volunteer.
Vingt: Warmer.
Diop: Void.
Vingt: There. Was that so hard?
[Silence. 30 seconds. But this silence vibrates with recognition. Everyone has been named truly.]
Adadie: The audit—
All three others: Fuck the audit.
[They speak in unison. It's horrible. The audience realizes they've been watching power exchange through
grammar, through the violence of naming.]
Felipe: We're all auditing. Constantly. Who owes what to whom.
Diop: Whom. Listen to you. Proper grammar at the world's end.
Felipe: The world ended when we started using pronouns instead of names.
Adadie: Names are just pronouns with delusions of specificity.
[Silence. 60 seconds. A full minute. The audience should feel their discomfort transform into something else
—complicity. They're part of this now.]
Vingt: Who holds the power here?
[No one answers. The question repeats in the silence, growing louder without sound.]
Vingt: Who. Holds. The. Power. Here?
Diop: Whoever asks is already losing it.
Adadie: Power isn't held. It's exchanged. Like pronouns. Like breath.
Felipe: Like disease.
Vingt: Then we're all infected.
Diop: We?
[The pronoun lands like a slap. Everyone flinches.]
Vingt: I meant I. I'm infected.
Diop: Better.
Adadie: Is it, though?
[Silence. 90 seconds. The longest yet. The audience should feel like they're drowning in it. Some will leave.
That's intended.]
Felipe: The building is listening.
Diop: The building doesn't have ears.
Felipe: Doesn't it?
[They all look up. The HVAC system breathes. Or is it their collective breathing? The pronouns have
destabilized everything.]
Vingt: I am—
Diop: Stop.
Vingt: I am going—
Diop: Stop using I like it protects you.
Vingt: From what?
Diop: From us.
Adadie: There is no us. Only temporarily aligned self-interests.
Felipe: The mathematician discovers poetry.
Adadie: Fuck you.
Felipe: You'd like that. The clarity of it. Subject, verb, object.
[Silence. Final silence. 2 full minutes. The audience must sit in their discomfort. Feel how pronouns create
and destroy reality. How power lives in the spaces between words. How we're all complicit in the grammar of
domination.]
All four (simultaneously, not in unison): I—
[They stop. Can't continue. The pronoun too heavy. They disperse without goodbyes. The audience is left
with the echo of that incomplete "I"—the most powerful and powerless word in any language.]
Scene 19.5: The Grammar of Self-Deception
[The four begin to leave but stop at different distances from the rooftop door. They turn back, each moving
to their own rhythm—Diop in waltz time, Vingt in punk percussion, Adadie in algorithmic patterns, Felipe in
no pattern at all.]
Vingt (spinning, addressing the audience): You think you're watching us, but—
Diop (overlapping, also to audience): —we're the ones observing. Your grammar gave you away.
Adadie: The way you breathed when I said "fuck you." Statistically aroused.
Felipe: They don't know if they're "they" or "you" anymore.
[All four now directly address the audience, breaking the fourth wall completely.]
Diop: Let's practice. Say "I am complicit."
[Silence. 20 seconds. The audience doesn't know if they should respond.]
Vingt: They won't. Because "I am" requires ownership.
Diop (to a specific audience member): You. Yes, you. What's your pronoun?
[Whether the audience member responds or not, Diop continues.]
Diop: Wrong. Your pronoun is "audience." Collective. Safe. Hidden.
Vingt (cartwheeling): I lied earlier. About the scars. Half of them are makeup. But which half?
[They pull at their skin. Some scars smear. Others don't. The audience can't tell which are real.]
Adadie (calculating on their tablet): Your discomfort peaks when we use "you" directly. Watch—YOU are
grammatically performing right now.
Felipe: They think staying silent protects them from the pronouns.
Vingt: But silence is just "I" without the courage to vocalize.
[Diop begins conducting the audience's breathing with hand gestures.]
Diop: Inhale on "we." Exhale on "I." Feel the difference? "We" expands. "I" contracts.
Adadie: False. Both expand and contract simultaneously. Like this—
[They project an equation onto the backdrop: I = We ÷ Self-Deception]
Vingt (to another audience member): What would you call me? Use any pronoun. I'll wear it.
[10 second pause]
Vingt: Your silence is a pronoun too. It means "afraid."
Felipe (existing in three places at once via mirrors): Every time you think "they" about us, you create
distance. Every time you think "I" about yourself, you lie.
Diop: Let's make them complicit. Everyone who stays for the next line is agreeing to be renamed.
[30 second pause. Some audience members leave. Diop smiles at those who remain.]
Diop: Congratulations. Your new name is "Witness." Capital W. You've been verbed.
Adadie: The mathematics of witnessing: observer affects observed. You changed us by watching. We
change you by being watched.
Vingt (hanging upside down from something): I'm going to use "we" now, but I mean only myself. We
are feeling violent.
Felipe: Notice how that lands differently than "I am feeling violent"?
Vingt: We are not responsible for what we do next.
Diop: See? "We" disperses accountability like smoke.
[All four suddenly synchronized, turning to the audience.]
All Four: You are using grammar to hide from yourselves.
Adadie: Every "one" when you mean "I."
Felipe: Every "people say" when you mean "I think."
Diop: Every "it's been said" when you mean "I believe."
Vingt: Every "they" when you mean "those unlike me."
[They begin moving in their individual rhythms again—chaotic but somehow harmonious.]
Diop: I'm lying about the affairs. There were twelve, not three. But "three" sounds more believable than
"twelve," doesn't it?
Vingt: We—I—we never wanted scars. Wanted to want them. There's a grammatical difference.
Adadie: My brother isn't dead. I don't have a brother. But "dead brother" creates sympathy-power. You
gave it to me. With your grammar of assumption.
Felipe: I exist in every pronoun simultaneously. It's not mystical. It's survival. You do it too, just
unconsciously.
[Vingt starts distributing something to the audience—small mirrors.]
Vingt: Look at yourself. Now say "I." Now say "me." Notice how your face changes? That's grammar
reshaping reality in real time.
Diop (to audience): Half of you are constructing sentences right now to describe this discomfort. Using
"it" and "this" to avoid "I feel."
Adadie: The other half are grammatically fleeing—future tense: "I will process this later." Past tense: "I've
seen weirder." Never present tense: "I am—"
Felipe: Complicit. The word you can't find is complicit.
[All four begin backing toward the door, but each at their own pace, own rhythm.]
Vingt: We're leaving you with your pronouns now.
Diop: But they're not really yours, are they?
Adadie: You borrowed them. From the culture that needs you to be "you" so it can be "it."
Felipe: Every pronoun is a uniform. And you're all in dress code.
[As they exit, they speak a final round, overlapping:]
Vingt: I am collectively alone— Diop: We are singularly together— Adadie: You are numerically us—
Felipe: They are specifically everyone—
[They're gone. The mirrors remain in audience members' hands. The house lights come up slightly—enough
for people to see their own reflections. The sound system plays back recorded fragments of audience
breathing, coughing, shifting—all the sounds they made during the scene, now grammatically isolated and
exposed.]
[A projection appears: "Exit is a verb. Staying is a verb. You are a noun pretending to be neutral. This is
present tense complicity."]
[The scene doesn't end. It just stops including the actors. The audience must choose when to leave, making
their grammar visible through action.]
Scene 20: The Aesthetics of Dwelling
[The rooftop again, but now it's pre-dawn. The city below is neither asleep nor awake. Diop sits on the
railing, legs dangling over the void. The others are arranged like a constellation—no pattern, but somehow
inevitable.]
Diop: I've been thinking about the analysts in Research. How they dwell.
Vingt: Dwell. Not live. Not work. Dwell.
Diop: Exactly. Prashant, for instance. He's furnished his cubicle with only expired calendars. Says present
dates are oppressive.
Adadie: That's temporal dysfunction.
Diop: Or offbeat logic. He argues that expired time is the only honest time—it admits its own irrelevance.
[Felipe materializes more fully than usual, intrigued.]
Felipe: Continue.
Diop: Then there's Maya. She's replaced all her computer fonts with wingdings. Submits reports in pure
symbol. Claims language is a crutch we've agreed to limp with.
Vingt: I've seen her presentations. Incomprehensible and somehow... correct?
Diop: Because she dwells in aesthetic oddity. Not as rebellion. As residency. She doesn't visit strangeness
—she's naturalized there.
Adadie: The board must—
Diop: The board prints her reports and hangs them in the bathroom. They think it's art. She thinks it's
data. Everyone's right.
[30 seconds pass. The pre-dawn light makes everything look theoretical.]
Diop: But the one who fascinates me is Samuel. Or they might be Samara. The name shifts.
Felipe: As names should.
Diop: They've trained themselves to speak only in questions. Not rhetorical ones—genuine inquiries. Even
"good morning" becomes "is morning good?"
Vingt: That's exhausting.
Diop: That's gentle surrealism. They're not trying to disrupt—they're trying to understand why we've
agreed that morning can possess moral quality.
Felipe: And their pronouns?
Diop: That's the beautiful part. They use whatever pronoun the listener assumes. Not as submission—as
documentary. They're cataloguing how others grammatically construct them.
[Felipe stands, or perhaps they were always standing. Their shadow falls upward with the rising sun.]
Felipe: These people you describe—they're not dwelling. They're traveling. Through logic, through
aesthetic, through the gentle warping of consensus reality. Dwelling implies stillness. They're in constant
motion, just along axes others can't perceive.
Diop: But they stay in the same cubicles—
Felipe: A cubicle that contains expired calendars contains all of time. An office that speaks in wingdings
speaks in tongues. A person who only questions is the only one having a conversation with existence.
Adadie: You're romanticizing dysfunction.
Felipe: I'm recognizing function. Their offbeat logic beats at exactly the right rhythm—just not to your
metronome.
[Vingt laughs, but it sounds like crying. Or crying that sounds like laughter.]
Vingt: I tried to dwell like that once. In the spaces between expected behavior. But I kept falling through
into wounds.
Felipe: Because you were dwelling in the spaces. They're dwelling AS space. Different preposition,
different proposition.
Diop: How do you know?
Felipe: Because I am them. Was them. Will be them. My pronoun isn't he or she or they—it's when.
[The sun breaks the horizon. Everything becomes more real and less true.]
Diop: So when I describe their aesthetic oddity—
Felipe: You're describing my former addresses. I've lived in expired time—it's spacious. I've spoken only in
symbols—they're more honest than words. I've been every pronoun simultaneously—it's the only way to
be accurately perceived.
Adadie: This is why your data never computes.
Felipe: This is why I don't need to compute. Computation assumes stable values. But if you dwell in
gentle surrealism, two plus two equals whatever continues the conversation with existence.
Diop: The board would fire them if they understood—
Felipe: The board understands perfectly. That's why they keep them. Every organization needs its mystics.
They just call them "analysts" now.
Vingt: What pronouns do mystics use?
Felipe: All of them. None of them. The space between them where grammar admits defeat.
[A bird lands on the railing near Diop. It might be real. In this light, certainty is impolite.]
Diop: I envy them sometimes. The dwellers. Their offbeat logic protects them from—
Felipe: Nothing. It protects them from nothing. They feel everything we feel. They just refuse to organize
it into the usual filing system. Their hearts break in wingdings. Their loneliness uses expired calendars to
mark its duration. Their love asks "is this love?" not because they don't know, but because they do.
Adadie: You're saying they're like us.
Felipe: I'm saying they're the only ones being us honestly. We perform stability while dwelling in chaos.
They perform chaos while dwelling in a stability so deep it doesn't need to announce itself.
[The full sun reveals the city. It looks exactly like expired time, aesthetic oddity, and gentle questions made
architectural.]
Diop: What would happen if we all started dwelling like that?
Felipe: You already are. You just use different pronouns to hide it. They/them/theirs aren't just gender
markers—they're reality markers. Singular/plural/possessive ways of acknowledging that logic was always
offbeat, aesthetics were always odd, and surrealism is the only realism gentle enough to be true.
Vingt: So pronoun choice—
Felipe: Is dwelling choice. I/me/mine builds walls. You/your/yours builds bridges. They/them/theirs
admits the walls are bridges, the bridges are walls, and we're all just dwelling in the collapse between
certainty and mystery.
[Felipe begins to fade with the strengthening light, but their words remain visible in the air, written in
wingdings, dated with expired time, questioning their own existence even as they affirm it.]
Felipe: Tell your dwellers—the board keeps them because somewhere in the spreadsheets and reports
and data streams, they're the only ones telling the truth. That profit is surreal, that loss is aesthetic, that
the whole enterprise runs on offbeat logic pretending to march in time. Their pronouns reveal what yours
conceal—that we're all just making it up as we go along, and the ones who admit it dwell most honestly
in the fiction we've agreed to call reality.
[They're gone, but the question remains: Is morning good? In wingdings, with an expired calendar for
reference, using whatever pronoun makes the answer most true.]
ACT III: FALL
Scene 1: The Triple Mirror
[Louise, exhausted from a double shift, finds Campilla and Adadie in the break room—a surreal scene where
past, present, and probability converge.]
Campilla: My daughter, the saint. Tell them about the money.
Adadie: What money?
Louise: Nothing. She's not real.
Campilla: The life insurance I left. That paid for law school. Your entire career built on my death benefit.
Adadie (to Louise): She's real enough. Quantum superposition—she exists in the
