EDGAR
Yes, do let us hear. But you may disagree with me as vehemently as you wish. Disagree, argue, object—nothing, I assure you, will enrage me as much as a patronizing, officious remark of my wife’s.
MICHAEL
What do you mean by not defeating the occasion? How do we go about ensuring that? The final form of the occasion is not yet realized. Is that what you mean? That the guest of honor is still to arrive?
EDGAR
We’ve been talking of matters of consequence and this is what has evolved. So my little arms deal wasn’t a separate event. Surely that is clear. It was not a separate inexplicable event. It was the beginning of something. I can tell you I have never owned a gun before and it generates in me a kind of nervous pleasure. It interests me to be holding this gun and I find myself interested in my ideas as I hold it. I am not bored holding it. And peculiarly enough, I look at you all and wonder why you don’t have guns, why we are not all holding guns. Isn’t that weird—it seems to me so much more natural a picture if we were all holding guns. This apartment should be filled with them. They should be stuffed in drawers and falling out of the medicine cabinets in the bathrooms, they should be in the children’s toy chests. If that is the feeling I have, perhaps we are meant to share what it is that is to happen from this gun. Only this evening did I feel moved to take it out of my pocket, so perhaps we are meant to share the occasion in some way. But if you isolate me because I am holding this gun, if you decide I am on the brink of madness, for example, or over the brink, that could be ruinous.
CLAUDETTE
But what else can we think? What else are
we to think as you brandish that thing and insist that the children and the staff be brought in here, and you wave that thing around until they are!
EDGAR
That is your construction of what I did. I waved nothing. Your housekeeper came, I suppose, to consult with you and she has been too paralyzed to move since. Your children wanted to join us again. They are in the house and already implicated in whatever happens here. Shouldn’t they have some say in the matter?
CLAUDETTE
Very well, will you permit them to leave? If they have a say, I have a say, and if I want them to leave and their father wants them to leave, if I should take them in hand and leave this apartment, will you stop us?
(
Pause
)
EDGAR
I have not heard them say they want to leave. But if that is your instinct, you should follow it, if it feels correct, and I will see then what is correct for me.
(
CLAUDETTE
struggles with the idea of attempting to leave with the children. She cannot do it
)
EDGAR
Oh, what a shame. After all, Claudette, you invited me to dinner, you thought I was acceptable in your house, perhaps you thought I was amusing, perhaps you even had some affection for me. And now you have judged me to be not recognizably human. We must be careful. It is Joan’s nature to interpret her husband to the world in the worst possible light. Do you really see this as something hostile or mentally unstable? Does everyone else agree? Do you, Andrea? Michael, you could not agree with that.
MICHAEL
Well, without question you’re committing a hostile act. But since you’re generally sensitive to the state of our culture and the way we live, I might make an argument for an ironically hostile act, one in which you are less personally involved than you appear to be, with some off-hand, distant, almost political cruelty about it. You appear to have hijacked a living room.
EDGAR
Well, that’s better! After all, what would my destiny be, what could any of us hope for if it turned out that I had only gone crazy.
JOAN
I cannot believe you would have come to this. But quite clearly, you have. Therefore there is something wrong with me. I am to blame. I thought there were limits to his dissatisfaction. I thought there were limits to his capacity for unhappiness. There are no limits.
EDGAR
So what have I commandeered here? I think I might have chosen a room less trendy. White upholstered modules, lots of chrome and Lucite. A spot of color on the walls, a modest Léger, a dubious Mondrian. A view of the park. All very standard. All what they’re doing this year.
GRACE
I feel I must speak. It’s bad enough to walk into a fine Fifth Avenue building with excellent security only to meet a gunman in the very apartment of my dear friends Joel and Claudette. But that he also feels free to malign their taste is inexcusable.
CLAUDETTE
Grace dear—
EDGAR
No, no, it’s all right. Grace feels that a gunman should know his place. But I live in an apartment like this. We all have apartments with beautiful things and we all have summer homes at the seashore. We all have cars like each other’s cars, we all have safe deposit boxes and we all have lives indistinguishable from each other’s lives. So what shall we do? We none of us know our place.
CLAUDETTE
Then what is it you want from us? If we are so hopeless, what do you expect from us? If we are so lost, why do you stay among us? Why do you come here and terrorize us?
(
One of the children comforts
CLAUDETTE. JOEL
,
in turn, calms her
)
JOEL
Edgar, you claim to want us cooperatively to decide what is happening here. But the opinions of the person
who holds the gun have, somehow, more amplification than the opinions of the rest of us. What shall we do about that? I would not want to call you a hypocrite. I would not want to suggest that it is an act of fraud for you to encourage us to determine altogether what is to happen.
CLAUDETTE
Yes, you didn’t ask our permission to bring a gun here. We didn’t share that decision. We didn’t know you had it and we didn’t agree that you should have it or agree that you should bring it into this house. Yet you came here with it. And you knew you were going to pull it.
EDGAR
No, I had no idea! In fact, I had almost forgotten I was carrying it until Joel perceived I was inconsolable. I am grateful to him for that. Perhaps it is wrong to expect you to share the feeling of inconsolability. Perhaps it exists because it cannot be shared!
(
Silence
)
ANDREA
I have a confession. I did not tell in my story of the poet selling his poems in the street that I bought several of them. That is because they were mostly very bad poems. Only one was good and that was a plagiarism of Walt Whitman. I think it is important to clear that up. That is part of the story too. It is important that we all know all of the story that any of us tells. I edited my story for the sake of romance. I wanted Edgar to find someone from the crowd who distinguished himself in his enterprise. But of course the truth is that in our country, where the practice of poetry pays so little, there are enormous numbers of poets. In our country, where the practice of poetry is thought to be impractical and eccentric, there are astronomical numbers of poets! And they are all standing on street corners selling their poems or standing in country roads and writing their poems. They are all standing looking at the ground under their feet or at the sky over their head and making up poems
about what is on the ground and what is in the sky. We may be unaware of their great numbers because they are forced to live among us as we live among ourselves, as workers and people without work, as patients in hospitals, as betrayed lovers and born and dying persons, but not as poets. And that’s the way they live too. There may be almost as many poets in our country as there are cars. They are manufactured somewhere, perhaps in the English departments of universities. And so they are everywhere. Every town in the United States has its poet, just as you always find a Chinese restaurant wherever you happen to be. I think if every Chinese restaurant in the country had a poet inside, you would see how many poets there are. In fact, most of the restaurants would have to have several poets inside. Some of the poets would have to cook and some of them would have to dine. Some of them would stand behind the glass case containing the lichee nuts. And as time went on, there would be more poets than the Chinese restaurants would know what to do with, and poets would be waiting on lines outside the doors and down the streets.
(
In the last few moments of this speech
ANDREA
begins to laugh. But it is the kind of laughter that turns almost immediately to tears
)
EDGAR
But why are you crying?
ANDREA
Because it is enough to make me cry but not enough to make me hold a gun.
EDGAR
Oh, Andrea, don’t ask me to put down this gun. I find my hand wants to hold it. Is it possible the body makes the decision and the mind only understands it subsequently? That’s how reflexes work, after all. The body does something and the mind recognizes what it has done. Perhaps the mind is only the body announcing what it has already done. When it’s born it cries to announce it was born. When it’s older it kills and announces it was angry. Do you think, do any of you think
I would hurt you, that I wouldn’t destroy myself a thousand times before bringing harm to you or the children? But something has begun that has to be allowed to happen. So Andrea, if you must cry, I must hold the gun. I’ll hold it for all of us.
(
Pause
)
MICHAEL
I remember years ago a man running on the beach, a middle-aged man running alone at low tide. He was the first one I ever noticed. The runners those days ran alone. They ran on the beaches, or they ran on the tracks behind the universities. Today there are so many runners that they go in packs. And they are dressed to run. They’re dressed in shoes that have been manufactured for them and sweatsuits and shorts and headbands manufactured for them. They run in the city along the river and they run in the streets of the suburbs. They run along the edges of highways past the gas stations and fast-food places. They run along the highways to enlarge their lungs and breathing capacities, to make their hearts strong and muscles firm, but I don’t know why, because the cars get the air first, they can’t run past the cars, and what is making their lungs large and hearts strong is pure lead and carbon monoxide. Still, they run and there are more of them than ever. Not only white middle-aged men, but boys and girls and older people and black people and most of all women. A lot of the runners are women. They do not appear as women, they appear as runners. Even when they’re attractive, they’re attractive as runners rather than as women But as I say, they are all running. And I wonder, What is it their bodies have decided that their minds have yet to announce? Perhaps it is their secret acceptance of the need to train for what is going to happen. Perhaps the runners training along all the roads of the country, training on the trails of our national parks and down the main streets of small towns and in parks in our cities and in traffic packs on the highways
are the unconscious training of the nation for the terrible thing to come. When this terrible thing comes, our runners hope to outrun it. I see no other reason to run along the highways and breathe car exhaust. They are learning not only to have strong hearts and limbs and large lungs, they are learning the directions in which to run, they are learning the routes, it is very interesting. But of course, if you talk to runners, they all tell you how much better they feel since they began to run. They’ll not admit to be training for the time that will come when it is time to get away from whatever it is that is coming. They will not admit it, perhaps because their minds do not yet know it. And each day their number increases because more and more people want to be ready for the time when there is nothing left but to run, when nothing else will avail but to run, and they do not want to be among those who cannot run or who falter and stumble and collapse from the attempt to run. They do not want that. They intend to be able to run. Their bodies are in training but their minds haven’t made the announcement. When will they make the announcement? I have no idea why they haven’t already made the announcement.
(
The sound of the doorbell
)
JOEL
There is our guest of honor.
(
The little
GIRL
cries out
.
EDGAR
drops down on his knees before her
)
EDGAR
What? What is the matter? What do you think is going to happen?
GIRL
The end of the world!
Curtain
Act Two
(
A few minutes later. Everyone onstage, as in Act One. But the guest of honor
,
ALAN
,
sits tied to a straight-back chair
.
EDGAR
holds the gun
.)
EDGAR
Speaking for all of us, Mr. Secretary, I can’t tell you how thrilled we are to meet you, to have you here among us, in this very room, and to have experienced the almost mystical moment of your arrival just as the idea came over us that the world is coming to an end. You can imagine how we look forward to the views on this subject of our greatest statesman.