Sergio De La Pava - Personae

CLARISSA: No, guilt at how much more vital you feel in his presence.

( Charles’s breathing becomes audibly labored. )

ADAM: Look at him. Maybe he once gave orders that men rushed to comply with. I bet he accumulated titles and positions, wrote his name in sundry registries that business might be conducted more expeditiously but always with an eye towards the full and faithful credit of all his rights thereunder.

CLARISSA: I don’t know, I rather think he toiled diligently at the secret arts. Repaid the niceness of a comely young woman with steadily increasing niceness until they became two halves of a whole with him maybe slightly less than half. From there it was just a long string of staying to the proper course through an incalculable number of imperceptible adjustments, the constant choosing of the right over the wrong.

ADAM: To what profit though? All his sums and takeaways culminate in a bottom line where his personal electricity no longer suffices and he has to plug his heart into an outlet if it’s to keep pumping. What’s he make now? What workproduct and what does it earn him? What does he make of his various liens and levies now that the levee’s burst and there’s nothing left to lean on? A lifetime spent impersonating dignity and putting on airs but at the end nothing’s too undignified provided it supplies the air needed to expend more life. Look at him gasping there. Living, no dying proof, at long last, that life is grand. Don’t let anyone tell you different. Else why the white-knuckle grip on something that otherwise engenders so much bemoaning?

CLARISSA: I see proof all right. Proof that even a series of miseries, some so creative in their pestilence that even the cruelest soothsayer would decline to say them, is nevertheless preferable to what follows.

ADAM: I don’t…

CLARISSA: Besides what we’re saying is inapplicable to Charles. Charles is just going through a rough patch not the end. Nestor and Ludwig will return with news and once so informed we’ll get Charles the treatment he needs. Illness and wellness reside on the same side of the coin it’s just a question of giving that coin the proper flip. I want you to understand this point fully and memorably so I’m going to tell you a story.

ADAM: No thanks, just tell me the point.

CLARISSA: I’m going to, through the use of a story.

ADAM: That’s just it. Don’t want the story, just the point.

CLARISSA: What are you a savage? If I want you to know, really know , my parents were cheap growing up I don’t just flat say they were cheap do I? I say they treated nickels like manhole covers then tell you the story of how we had to bathe in the rain at our country house because they didn’t want to pay extra for water. That’s elemental.

ADAM: That’s not cheap by the way, that’s psychotic.

CLARISSA: So here’s what happened. She was the kind of person who spoke to those closest to her primarily by making sure they overheard her remarks to others. The day we begin she had just returned from…

( Nestor and Ludwig are returning, we cannot hear Clarissa’s story. Nestor addresses Ludwig outside the hearing of the others. )

NESTOR: I sympathize with your human need to share, to enlist allies in a difficult spot, but I’m going to ask you to selflessly not share…

LUDWIG: You mean not selfishly share?

NESTOR: … and keep what we’ve discovered between ourselves.

LUDWIG: What have we discovered?

NESTOR: Yes that, keep it between ourselves.

LUDWIG: I don’t know what we’ve discovered. I wouldn’t even know how to begin to explain, other than to say something like everything we thought was true is somehow neither true nor false and those things we deemed most irrelevant or its converse are not even susceptible to that kind of categorization.

NESTOR: Exactly, can you imagine the reaction?

LUDWIG: But.

NESTOR: You’re our leader.

LUDWIG: Since when?

NESTOR: And leadership requires a certain kind of courage. What a person doesn’t know is always more important than what he does know and not just because it’s orders of magnitude larger. Think of all you would unknow if you could, you know?

LUDWIG: No.

NESTOR: Exactly.

LUDWIG: They have a right to know.

NESTOR: You just said you don’t know what you know. No?

LUDWIG: I know, but I also know they have a right to know what I don’t know.

NESTOR: No.

LUDWIG: No?

NESTOR: No. They’ll be looking to you more for a mood than any particular bit of information. Don’t concern yourself so much with the content of what you say as with how you say it. This upcoming speech of yours will in large part determine…

LUDWIG: I’m giving a speech now?

NESTOR: … how our friends view their predicament.

LUDWIG: Why would I give a speech?

NESTOR: Not why, how. And I’ll tell you. Summon your highest powers because the only thing this crowd respects is rhetorical excess.

LUDWIG: Not how, why?

NESTOR: Why, ( motioning with his chin toward Clarissa and Adam ) would you look at that?

LUDWIG: What?

NESTOR: Nothing. Couldn’t have been more wrong I guess. Meaning when I repeatedly scoffed that love at first sight was as mythical as unicorns or virtuous women.

LUDWIG: What are you talking about?

NESTOR: About those two. I change my mind maybe once a decade but these two have me doing it hourly.

LUDWIG: Change how?

NESTOR: Well surely you saw what passed between them at respective first glance. So palpable that I began to reconsider my position. But then when nothing seemed to germinate from there I remembered how you and Clarissa had shared something similar on your first meeting.

LUDWIG: Not true.

NESTOR: And so concluded that calling these admittedly charged interactions Love was highly presumptuous at best and I was safe in my earlier position. But now see for yourself. What they’re obviously experiencing now was apparently evident from their outset. So there you have it. Against all impediments, love at first sight. A glimpse into the future of a two always meant to be one.

LUDWIG: Good for them I guess.

NESTOR: Of course…

LUDWIG: What?

NESTOR: Well only that if I’m right about what previously passed between you two.

LUDWIG: You’re not.

NESTOR: Then it seems what we’re seeing is more like happy happenstance, happy for them anyway. Ironic too.

LUDWIG: If you say so.

NESTOR: Adam convinces you to risk your life and leave them for the benefit of the group and your absence just happens to open the door to their obvious connection.

LUDWIG: You mean our absence

NESTOR: Obviously if the roles had been reversed or, I would argue, even if they were to reverse now and Adam were to absent himself, that could easily be you in the breathless throes of love.

LUDWIG: I’d rather breathe.

NESTOR: Of course, ( solicitous ) I didn’t mean to suggest otherwise. Just that… this can be a lonely place. Charles has what’s left in his neurons of Linda. Clarissa and Adam now have each other. I guess you could argue that the spare tire’s just as important as the four that spin.

LUDWIG: What does that make you?

NESTOR: I drive, or else I get dizzy.

LUDWIG: I’ll be all right Nestor, but thanks for the concern.

( Clarissa notices them. )

CLARISSA: Guys! You’re back! What news if any?

( Ludwig looks at Nestor who smiles but doesn’t respond. )

CLARISSA: Well?

LUDWIG: Um…

CLARISSA: Nestor?

( He doesn’t respond so Clarissa looks to Ludwig. )

What’s with him?

LUDWIG: Oh, probably that vow of silence you made him take.