Murder Mysteries a Play for Voices (9781466109827) (8 page)

NARRATOR -- LIVE

What?

RAGUEL NOW

(hint of the voice treatment)

Come here.

NARRATOR -- LIVE

Yes.

RAGUEL NOW

(whispers)

Here. A gift for you.

/SFX/ A KISS, SOFTLY.

NARRATOR -- LIVE

(whispers )

You kissed my cheek

RAGUEL NOW

Yes.

NARRATOR -- LIVE

It burns. Ow, it...

RAGUEL NOW

It doesn’t burn for long.

NARRATOR -- LIVE

You took something from me. You...
took...something....

RAGUEL NOW

No. I gave you something. Like the Man said:
forgetfulness is freedom of a sort.

NARRATOR -- LIVE

What did you do to me?

RAGUEL NOW

I never fell. You understand? When the
others fell, I didn’t fall. I’m still doing my job, as I see it.
Doesn’t matter how long it is. I still want to go home. You’ll go
home soon. See ya round, pal.

NARRATOR

The man walked away down the darkened
street, and I sat on the bench and watched him go. I felt like he
had taken something from me, although I could no longer remember
what. And I felt like something had been left in its place --
absolution, perhaps, or innocence, although of what, or from what,
I could no longer say.

(beat)

An image from somewhere: a scribbled
drawing, of two angels in flight above a perfect city; and over the
image a child's perfect handprint, which stains the white paper
blood-red. It came into my head unbidden, and I no longer know what
it meant.

(pause)

I stood up. It was too dark to see the face
of my watch, but I knew I would get no sleep that day.

/SFX/FOOTSTEPS ON SIDEWALK, UNDER...

NARRATOR (CONT’D)

I walked back to the place I was staying, to
the house by the stunted palm tree, to wash myself, and to wait. I
thought about angels, and about Tink; and I wondered whether love
and death always went hand in hand.

/SFX/ TRANSITIONAL, THE NEXT MORNING, ETC,
UNDER...

NARRATOR (CONT’D)

The next day the planes to England were
flying again. I felt strange -- lack of sleep had forced me into
that miserable state in which everything seems flat and of equal
importance; when nothing matters, and in which reality seems
scraped thin and threadbare.

/SFX/ A SUDDEN CRASH OF LOUD TRAFFIC NOISE,
HONKING HORNS ETC.

NARRATOR (CONT’D)

The taxi journey to the airport was a
nightmare. I was hot, and tired, and testy. I wore a T-shirt in the
LA heat; my coat was packed at the bottom of my luggage, where it
had been for the entire stay. The aeroplane was crowded, but I
didn't care.

/SFX/ INTERIOR OF PLANE, ON THE GROUND,
UNDER...

FLIGHT ATTENDANT

Newspaper sir? We’ve got the International
Herald Tribune, USA today and the LA Times.

NARRATOR -- LIVE

LA Times, please.

/SFX/ PLANE TAKES OFF. ENGINES. PASSAGE OF
TIME, PLANE NOISE LOUDER, THEN...

PASSENGER

Must be pretty interesting. You’ve been
reading that same page over and over for an hour, now...

NARRATOR -- LIVE

I have? I’m sorry, would you like the paper?
Truth to tell, I’m so tired that the words go in one eye and out
the other. I can’t remember a single thing I’ve read. Here.

PASSENGER

If you’re sure you’ve finished with it.

NARRATOR -- LIVE

Completely. For ever.

NARRATOR

I had lied: one story I had read stayed with
me. Somewhere in the back of the paper was a report of a triple
murder: two women, and a small child. No names were given, and I do
not know why the report should have registered as it did.

/SFX/SOUNDS AND MUSIC OF NIGHTMARE, MURDER,
AND A TANGLE OF VOICES IN THE DARK, UNDER...

NARRATOR (CONT’D)

Soon I fell asleep. I dreamed about making
love to Tink, while blood ran sluggishly from her closed eyes and
lips. The blood was cold and viscous and clammy, and I awoke
chilled by the plane's air-conditioning, with an unpleasant taste
in my mouth. My tongue and lips were dry.

/SFX/ PLANE NOISES AGAIN

PASSENGER

Bad dream?

NARRATOR -- LIVE

No... just... something I can’t even
remember...

PASSENGER

You’re white as a ghost. Scared of
flying?

NARRATOR -- LIVE

No. I love flying.

NARRATOR (CONT’D)

I looked out of the scratched oval window,
stared down at the clouds, and it occurred to me then (not for the
first time) that the clouds were in actuality another land, where
everyone knew just what they were looking for and how to get back
where they started from.

(beat)

Staring down at the clouds is one of the
things I have always liked best about flying. That, and the
proximity one feels to one's death.

(beat)

I wrapped myself in the thin aircraft
blanket, and slept some more, but if further dreams came then they
made no impression upon me.

/SFX/ THE PLANE LANDS.

/SFX/ A BLIZZARD. THE WAIL OF THE WIND AND
THE SNOW, WHICH FADE INTO

/SFX/ AN INTERIOR ELEVATOR. UNDER THE
FOLLOWING NARRATION, WE HEAR A BUTTON BEING PUSHED, AND ELEVATOR
MOVING, AND THEN A POWER CUT: A HUM, AND NOTHING....

/SFX/ WE HEAR AN A ALARM RINGING FOR A FEW
MOMENTS, THEN IT RUNS DOWN AND STOPS...

NARRATOR (CONT’D)

A blizzard blew up shortly after the plane
landed in England, knocking out the airport's power supply. I was
alone in an airport elevator at the time, and it went dark and
jammed between floors. A dim emergency light flickered on. I
pressed the crimson alarm button until the batteries ran down and
it ceased to sound; then I shivered in my LA T-shirt, in the corner
of my little silver room. I watched my breath steam in the air, and
I hugged myself for warmth.

NARRATOR -- LIVE

(ad libbing, inside the elevator, under the
last moments of the following narration, and continuing beyond it:)
)

Hello? Is there anybody there? Hello? Can
anyone hear me? Can someone let me out of here, please? Hello? I’m
afraid I’m trapped. Hello...

(etc. ad lib, with increasing
desperation)

NARRATOR

There wasn't anything in there except me;
but even so, I felt safe, and secure. Soon someone would come and
force open the doors. Eventually somebody would let me out; and I
knew that I would soon be home.

/SFX/ WE HEAR THE NARRATOR IN HIS BOX
SHOUTING, HOPELESSLY FOR HELP. AND THEN THERE IS SILENCE, AND
MUSIC. THEN ALL SOUNDS AND MUSIC FADE OUT, AND IT IS OVER.

END NOTES BY THE
ARTIST

by George Walker

For the images of this
book I wanted to explore the possibilities of the symbol of the
Angel. Angels are so intrinsic to our myths as a culture, that they
speak to the viewer as symbols of the eternal and of the Divine.
Gaiman presents his Angels as characters with all the flaws of
human nature and brings them down to earth so that we can examine
them more closely as models of the human condition. The challenge
for me was to interpret these descriptions into believable forms
that the reader could identify with. The most difficult concept for
me was the androgynous aspect of the angels. Gaiman uses the
pronoun He in his characters’ dialogue yet Gaiman also suggests
that the angels are androgynes without gender specific roles. We
cannot leap to a conclusion that the relationship between Carasel
and Saraquael was homosexual because that aspect of Eros was (we
can believe) not yet created. I thought about the problem for some
time before concluding that the best course of action was to allow
the characters to evolve themselves and balance the individual
roles with ambiguity and a hint of gender specific appearance. It
is human nature to understand and identify gender roles so that we
can relate these roles to our own experience. That is why the
debate about the Mona Lisa continues; is it a portrait of a young
man or a woman?

Like the radio play and
the hand crafted book, wood engraving is a rarely practised art in
the 21st century. What is wood engraving you might ask? It is the
method of carving images on the end grain of hardwood with the
tools of the silversmith. That is how all the images were made for
this special edition of Murder Mysteries.The technique was
developed and made popular by the the British artist Thomas Bewick
(1753-1828). If you had a basic introduction to Art in High School
you might be familiar with cutting linoleum or wood for relief
printing and that will provide you with a basic idea of how the
images were printed. However, engraving on end grain wood is an
entirely different experience from wood cut or linoleum-cutting
although the printing process is the same (roll ink on relief
surface and impress paper onto surface!). The primary difference is
that the tools are different for wood engraving, in wood and
linoleum cutting we use parting tools and gouges whereas with wood
engraving the tools are descendants of the silversmith tools and
have names like spitsticker, tint tool, lining tool and lozenge
shaped graver or burin. Using the tools of the silversmith on the
end grain of the wood allows the artist the opportunity to create
finer lines and delicate patterns that would splinter or crumble
using other methods and materials. If you examine these engravings
under a magnifying glass you’ll see how crisp the fine dots and
lines print directly from the wood surface.

The hand printed fine
book is becoming more important to our culture as electronic media
begins to dominate our method of mass printed communication. Slowly
we are moving towards an appreciation of the book as art object
balanced with the decline of the book as the primary conveyer of
information and knowledge. The book remains the undisputed time
capsule of knowledge but the internet has become the undisputed
super highway to retrieve it. I do not envision the obsolescence of
books; just their reinvention refined towards an archival storage
vehicle of our most valued knowledge and we have the technology to
do this. It is from this that a new appreciation of fine paper,
type and fine binding will evolve. I hope this book will serve as a
kind of time capsule to communicate through that great unknown
distance of time.

LIST OF ENGRAVINGS

1. smoking

2. death of Carasel

3. Phanuel ~ senior
designer

4. spinning the thread of
being

5. aspects of
assembly

6. silver city ~ Hall of
Being

7. Zephkiel ~ angel
without wings in anquish

8.
soaring

9. His
army

10. Saraquael ~
Carasel’s partner

11. Lucifer ~ captian of
the host

12. FEAR