It's Weird, I Know

The Players, The Actors, The Despairing

In this scene:
Jeremiah the Criminal Negotiator
Maria the Teller, the Hostage
David the Artist, the Hostage Taker

From Act 1, Scene 2

A seeming robbery has taken place. David has taken Maria hostage behind the teller window but allowed everyone else to leave the bank. These people report to Jeremiah that David has remain silent, not asking for money or ransom. Jeremiah announces his presence.

Jeremiah: I see your arms shaking, and your leathered hands

Trembling: black gloves, black gun tracing eights

On her cheek. I watch you tuck her hair

behind her ear with your weapon’s muzzle.

Maria (Whispered): And this I feel, the caress of desperation,

The promise of cold annulment waiting

One corridor down, that metallic slug

Cued before fourteen others, hoping for a finger’s touch.

Jeremiah: I watch and beg you pause to breath. Muzzle

That maw by loosening your fingers.

Relax and speak – expel the poison of tension

Creeping through your straining muscles. Exhale.

For we will take your calming inhalation

As growing hope for life’s continuation.

David: Tension is nothing. Tension is water wrapped around a line broken

By a strong tug and a thousand ripples. By a fish

Driven by fear of capture to explosion.

If that fish, perhaps a carp, could speak a line in human

Tongue, I know what it would say,

“Tension is nothing. Tension is water wrapped around a line. Broken.”

Maria (Whispered): You know fish words, but I fish thoughts,

“Oh, to burst from pond to sea by way of some inland bay,

Driven by fear of capture to explosion.”

David: But enough. No carp chews a human tongue. You brazen,

You beg me speak with your needle in my mouth? Says your stitch,

“Tension is nothing. Tension is water wrapped around a line broken.

Relax and speak! Let thought and communication – Let reason

Stay your flustered mind, stay that swaying finger

Driven by fear of capture to explosion.”

I am caught and know it. I know the yank of a thousand strings

Set in my lips and tongue. Set in and ripping. Yes,

Tension is. Nothing is. Like water, like my words: fragile, broken,

Driven by fear of capture to fragmentation.

Maria (Whispered): Before, as he leaped the counter and caught my arms,

I caught his current meaning: the silence baited with fear.

Now we are married by rings of steel, by the same

Waiting death –

Its coming and present capture

Of our thoughts.

Jeremiah: An artist often speaks in repeated

Lines, one image cast many times,

Odysseus lost at sea, then stranded,

Now stranded by domestic crimes.

Mourning is buried in recurrence,

As each passing lends power to a phoenix’

Tears. Remembrance bursts like currants:

Red, sweet, and swiftly destroyed by bricks.

You were the artist who knows life’s weeping,

Who sat quietly, uncomfortably in

Hard wooden chairs at night, thinking, scribbling

About circumstance and freedom’s absence.

Now you are the artist who marries all to

Death, who uses our lives to make dead art new.