He waves, as if recognizing an old friend, loud slurping sounds echoing across the cavernous lobby. His faux big dick energy boosts Penny’s shock and awe at seeing him again, and so soon.

“They took everything but your kitty,” she scoffs, tossing the befuddled cat to Jonnie, who grabs him with his free hand. Penny shakes her head, struts across the lobby, waves buh-bye.

“When are you free this week?” asks Jonnie, turning and doing a 3-point shot, his plastic coffee cup hitting the side of a garbage can, ice and backwash cascading across the frilly lobby carpet.

“Never,” replies Penny, having had enough Fazoolie for this month’s edition. She does a mock lay-up, takes her own mid- court shot with her notepad, making it dead-on with a swish.

“Nice shot!” salutes Jonnie, kissing away coverage in Fauxbes and hope of an amazing romp in the sack with Penny Pitz. “Do you always tell the truth?” he asks, really wanting to know.

“Only when I’m not lying,” she taunts, playing his Land of Bullshit game one last time to get away. She blows him a kiss with her middle finger, and exits through a revolving door.

Jonnie watches concave windows distort Penny’s gorgeous figure into grotesque yet enticing shapes as she is flung around 180 degrees, hurled into the busy street, and out of his life.

He’s blown the interview, has zero chance of getting a date with her, and been evicted. If Jonnie’s lucky, the sheriffs are still distracted upstairs. Time for him to follow her lead, and leave.

“Heads I win,” declares Jonnie, flipping a scintillating coin, watching it twirl in the air, feeling as though his cat is all that he’s got left in this world, and all others. “Tails you lose…”

“Meow,” says BS, still the odds-on favorite.

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She scans this mega million dollar dump, and in his absence shoots more pics. Trash strewn across real estate valued at seven grand per sq ft epitomizes her current work and dating life.

The high-end hovel looks like a combination of Pee-wee’s Playhouse, a high school production of Mamet’s American Buffalo, and a Soho sex shop ransacked by crazed bonobos.

Unmatched furniture of uneven quality is distributed at random throughout the place, interspersed with a broken foosball table, a 1:5 scale replica of Michelangelo’s David, and piles of junk.

Maps of East Timor, Azerbaijan, and Tasmania are stuck on a wall next to Farah Fawcett’s iconic poster, and an M.C. Escher print of tessellating angels and demons, hung upside down.

On an adjacent wall hangs a set of geometric wooden shelves consisting of dozens of interlocking isosceles triangles in varying sizes, their vertex angles alternating top and bottom.

Sprawled across a shelf alongside mason jars full of various bugs—including bees, wasps, and big furry spiders that send chills down her spine—is a miniature dinosaur toy collection.

Penny smiles and spontaneously tucks a Troodon formosus dino into her clutch bag. The species was only ~6 feet long, a large brain for its size, and equipped with partially opposable thumbs.

Evolutionary biologists speculate that had the Chicxulub impactor not made them and their brethren extinct, T. formosus could have become today’s apex predator, taking over the world.

Homo sapiens instead rules our planetary roost, the consequence of a series of unlikely events whose counterfactuals are just as unlikely, if not more. We owe our dominion to that space rock.

Fast forward, about a hundred billion chickens are slaughtered each year for human consumption, about the same number of humans who have ever lived. The revolution will be on TikTok.

“You’re welcome,” she says to herself, having no clue about such a what-if scenario plan of life on planet Earth, instead reminding herself of her childhood sticky fingers escapades.

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Laszlo “Larry” Spitz, my father, was a Hungarian WWII refugee who survived the Holocaust, emigrated to South America after the war, then finally made it to America, the land of his dreams, sixteen years later.

The firsthand victim of systemic racism, antisemitism, and racial cleansing, he learned absolutely nothing from his personal traumas, and instead embraced his enemies to become a raging bigot of his own.

A man of silence or screams, he often shouted “If I wouldn’t be a Jew, I’d be the world’s biggest Nazi!” That sounds like hyperbole, a Jewish Dirty Harry, but my family will vouch for that being the tip of the Laszlo rage volcano.

He loved dogs and hated people, his anger and contempt in direct proportion to the melanin content of their skin. The darker they were, the more he despised them. Latins were bad, African Americans the pits.

Larry was enthusiastically misogynist, too, with plenty left for gay people. His wrath was consistent, had its own logic: White masculine men were at the top, epitomized by German fascists and Scandinavian designers.

Given his worldview, I was a disappointment to him from birth. My crushing weakness was self-evident from an early age, when I displayed ineptitude in his basement workshop that rivaled a hardware store.

His contempt for me increased exponentially after I started to display my own talents, which shockingly included critical thinking and a love for science and mathematics. These were unacceptable in his household.

Discouraged and threatened, Laszlo’s wrath expressed itself as a concerted if ham-fisted effort to destroy my personality. When I asked for a book in a store, he’d flip through it, find words and equations, tell me it was too hard.

He walked into my pre-teen bedroom, packed with rows and rows of used books that I bought for pennies on the dollar, and voraciously read. “What a waste of money!” he yelled. “These dusty turds will do nothing for you.”

A masterful manipulator and hateful narcissist, all the energy that went into negatively reinforcing my strengths flipped into positively reinforcing my weaknesses. As such, every failure of mine was cause for his celebration.

Whenever I was happy and excited, he’d manufacture a deficiency to highlight and hurl insults; and whenever I was sad and depressed, he’d dial up the charm to ensure that his loser of an only child never bounced back.

I grew up within this toxic ecosystem, one that took me at least as many years to at long last get over. Due to nature or anti-nurture, I’ve done my best to be a fun, doting father to my own kids, for better and for worse.

That might be why my younger son, Nick, then a senior in high school, was astonished to hear how my Dad almost ran over several Black kids. I’ve told him about Laszlo before, but he’s had trouble believing in these stories.

I remember the incident like yesterday. We lived in a small three-bedroom house in Skokie, Illinois, in a lower middle class and sketchy part of this otherwise safe and sedate North Chicago suburban neighborhood.

Our crime rate was probably 10x of the surrounding blocks because right across the street loomed a row of liquor stores. At the time the adjacent city of Evanston was dry, so they zoned-in all the vice that they could fit in there.

Always on edge, I had trouble sleeping because of the police sirens and drag racing on our street. I was afraid of Monsters underneath my bed and in the ‘hood outside, when the real terror ground his teeth in the other bedroom.

I attended Skiles Middle School at this time, a highly volatile mix of rough and tumble Black kids from Evanston, and relatively milquetoast Jewish kids from Skokie. Nearsighted and out of shape, I did my best to hang on.

On a typical day after school, several of my friends from the neighborhood and I were playing tackle football on the front lawn of my house. Flush with the grass was an asphalt driveway that led from the street to our garage.

About an hour into the game, we suddenly noticed that several Evanston kids had ridden in on their bicycles, were gathering near us. One of them grabbed our loose football and started tossing it to his own friends.

Additional kids from the other side of the liquor stores were assembling, the initial several now up to more than ten. David, the coolest white kid among us, was the first to lose his cool. “Call the cops, Mookie. Go! Do it!”

Dave freaking out was what freaked me out, too, since of all people I figured he’d be the one to recognize an actual rumble brewing. As he frantically gestured for me to go inside and call, still more Black kids appeared.

Unbeknownst to me, the clock none of us carried, indicating the time we were never precisely aware of, struck five. My father always got home like a machine then, demanding dinner on the table the second he walked in.

Only this fateful afternoon about a dozen Black kids from Evanston had the audacity to be hanging out on his driveway: filthy dark impediments between Laszlo Spitz and his Hungarian goulash or chicken paprikas.

Worse still, the sight of “negritos” physically on his property triggered a reflex action of foot on accelerator. As my white friends and I watched in terror and relief, Laszlo peeled in, roaring from the street, burning rubber.

The Black kids literally leaped for their lives, many within millimeters of impact. Some jumped on their bikes and others ran fast as they could. After parking in his garage, my father strolled along his driveway, triumphant.

My friends cheered. My father, sucking on a toothpick — another quirk — reached into his mouth, threw the damp twig onto the asphalt, and then hacked a wad of spit. He had restaked his claim. All was right with his world.

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Astonished, Penny leans over the side, knocking the cat off her lap. She shoots quick smartphone shots of Fazoolie’s fall, then grabs his telescope, pivots it, and tracks his spiraling descent.

Within five seconds, Jonnie is plummeting at over 40 mph, as the ram-air inlets at the front of his arms and legs scoop airflow into his wingsuit, inflating the once loose nylon into an airfoil shape.

After five seconds, Jonnie is hauling ass at nearly 100 mph, his suit converting vertical fall speed into horizontal glide, at a ratio of about four feet forward for every single foot down, weeeeee!

“Meow,” says BS the cat, not wanting any part of this madness, instead burrowing into a soiled pizza box. He finds a tasty morsel, devours it with gusto. All is again right with the world.

Penny watches Jonnie ride the winds in graceful downward arcs as if he were one with the city, sky, and planet. Although a half-blind freak, Our Hero demonstrates masterful cruise control.

Pitch angle, descent rate, and speed are controlled by arching and tucking his arms, legs, and core in micro-movements. Turns are banked by rolling shoulders, and yaw adjusted by leg separation.

The second derivative of Fazoolie’s position vector describes his centripetal acceleration in a radial direction over a fixed interval of rotation, taken through the angle of his starting point, so there.

In other words, Jonnie is batshit crazy for attempting such a risky stunt around his building, and between skyscrapers on every side. “Oh, shit…” he mumbles into his mic, muted by the winds.

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Penny doesn’t make it more than a few steps away until Jonnie, always hovering near a singularity, dives into another black hole. Seasoned pro at being evasive, he’s also adept at evasive action.

Not so fast gestures Fazool, tilting his head and raising his blond caterpillar eyebrows. She’s too buttoned up and serious, and he’s too sloppy and horny, for him to give up without more go-go.

“Let’s play a game,” he suggests, trying to spice things back up.

“I don’t play games,” she scoffs, sliding open the balcony door.

“Ack!” barfs BS the cat, hurling a gnarly hairball right into Jonnie’s big blond bouffant. The trichobezoar is like a wet snowball slamming into a muddy mountain, causing a landslide.

“Hee hee, hee hee hee,” chuckles Penny, hand to mouth.

“Fuck,” sighs Jonnie.

Jonnie hair-tosses the hairball off the balcony, and pushes the cat off his shoulder as Penny continues to giggle at his expense. The puss scampers by, rubs her leg, and leaps onto her chair, waiting.

The sudden shift in the center of gravity disorients Jonnie, who’s already disoriented by the smell of her perfume and the swishing sound of her pantyhose when her long legs cross and uncross.

“Everything you say is either true, or false,” he continues his game undaunted, talking with his hands. “I win if I can trick you into giving me information that’s true—even if you’re lying.”

“I have no idea what you just said,” says Penny, closing the patio door, and sitting back down. The cat nuzzles into her lap as she takes out her notepad again, scribbling to appear engaged.

“Try me,” grins Jonnie.

“OK,” she says, acquiescing against her better instincts. Penny has no idea why she has enabled this excruciating exchange to continue. The cat licks himself, watching. “How do I win?”

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Trying to schmooze onto Penny’s “Thrillionaires Under Thirty” list, he pitches his tantalizing life story like he spins everything else—to the point Jonnie doesn’t believe his own bullshit, either.

“What kind of a name is Fazoolie?” interrupts Penny, five minutes of sonic onslaught later, finally managing to get a word in, her question as devoid of context as his whole harangue.

“Family name.”

“Can you be more specific?”

“I was born in the house that my father built,” states Jonnie in a stentorian tone, as if reading aloud from someone else’s austere biography. “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times—”

“You shouldn’t use the passive voice.”

“What are you talking about? I exercise every day.”

“Or plagiarize.”

“I only use what other people throw away,” he insists, flicking a joint roach into a tall pedestal ashtray, like those found in Greyhound stations, “and throw away what other people use.”

“Does that explain your apartment?” says Penny, pivoting her long neck. Her upturned nose blasts him with contempt, snootiness, and entitlement, making Jonnie delirious with desire.

“Want a drink?” he asks, both now chillaxing on his balcony twelve hundred feet above the eclectic Chicago skyline, flush with the sprawling lakefront looming a few blocks to the east.

“I don’t drink while I work,” she insists, taking detailed notes despite the torrent of Jonnie’s bloviating nonsense, and her own powerful impulses to leave as soon as she can find an out.

“You’re working?”

“You’re drinking?”

“Every damn day,” he toasts, augmented with another joint. Jonnie’s cat stares at her, as if he’s checking her out, too.

Penny’s square-shouldered jacket, matching skirt, victory roll hairdo, pearl earrings, and heels give her a classic comic book look that reminds Jonnie of Lois Lane—making him Superman.

The self-characterization is unconvincing to everyone he meets, and he couldn’t care less. His brash delusion increases in direct proportion to his desperation, loneliness as chronic as his libido.

Penny’s professionalism and aloofness do nothing to shield Jonnie from her stunning looks and understated sex appeal, exacerbating his condition. He twitches, itches, and sneezes.

His unabashed lust turns her off, along with his apparent cat allergies. Yet Jonnie’s obnoxious exuberance piques Penny’s curiosity to the point where, despite her doubts, she stays put.

Having interviewed the ultra-wealthy the world over, she’s catwalked roads to riches paved with eccentric personalities and dubious prowess. She nominates Jonnie here in both categories.

Talented, socially awkward people creating global empires is de rigueur. In stark contrast, this fake entrepreneur squeezes each drop out of his questionable charm, his competence irrelevant.

A spoiler on her offbeat list, Fazoolie is ranked not by talent nor net worth, but sheer bravado. His superpower is annoying the hell out of people doing the real work, yet still getting shit done.

“Want to smoke a joint?” asks Jonnie. “You asked me that already.” “Thought you’d change your mind.” “No thank you,” repeats Penny. “Mind if I do?” exhales Jonnie.

“You already are,” she observes.

“Right on,” he nods, watching the weed smoke waft across his impaired field of vision. He stares at her cleavage—she notices, and he continues to stare, undaunted, lost in Fazoolie World.

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His chiseled, angular face, broad forehead, deep set eyes, Roman nose, high cheekbones, jutting chin, and new wave explosion of blond hair atop his lanky body are rugged, vulgar, and enticing.

An Armani single-breasted lavender suede jacket over a Brunello Cucinelli Oxford sport shirt drapes his tall and thin frame, Brioni Sea Island sapphire pants shimmering below, all custom tailored.

But after a moment’s scrutiny his luxurious, high-end outfit appears mismatched, his shirt and pants are wrinkled, expensive jacket is stained, and he’s greeting her at the door barefoot.

Full lips, upturned as he speaks, make him look like he’s his own ventriloquist dummy, the unseen puppet master fisting him deep to everyone’s satisfaction, except those forced to hear him speak.

“Sorry I’m late,” he lies, always tardy, and often not aware. “I’m the one visiting you,” she smirks, confusing even herself.

“That’s astonishing!” he shouts, loud enough to make her wince. “Jonnie Fazoolie?”

“Last I heard.”

“I’m—” extending a hand to shake.

“Sandy!” shaking it, beaming. “Sandy Titz! From Bloomberg!” “Pitz,” she corrects him. “Penny Pitz. From Fauxbes.”

“Same thing,” insists Jonnie. “No, they are not.”

“Then why didn’t you say so?” “I did say so.”

“Right on!” grins Jonnie, still standing there. Well, this is starting well.

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The aircraft accelerates down the runway, hurls itself into the sky, giving Jonnie a mild g-force rush equivalent to doing a thin line of coke in a Vegas hotel room with an OnlyFans creator.

He peers out the oval-shaped window and gasps in terror, gripping his armrests for dear life. Nothing between his feet, the plane, and the relentless ground a thousand feet below, vertigo!

The irony of an extreme sports and social media stunt guy freaking out on a commercial air flight doesn’t elude him. Pavlovian startle potentiation has made his system whack.

Modern air travel was accelerated decades by Curtis LeMay, after all, who developed long range aircraft to fire bomb hundreds of thousands of Japanese men, women, and children.

No wonder Jonnie’s freaking out, flying coach having nothing to do with it. He frantically hits the service button above, gets a condescending stare from the passenger next to him, idiota.

Jonnie calms down and thinks about Leonardo Da Vinci, Renaissance man and homosexual, a transcendent genius obsessed by flight, who’d be utterly amazed by this experience.

How strange to be sitting in this hunk of metal, soon accelerating to several hundred miles per hour, at the altitude of Mount Everest. Maybe jumping Universes isn’t that hard, after all?

BS purring beneath his seat, out the window Jonnie sees the pastel-colored hotel strip and aquamarine Nichupté Lagoon, giving way to the azure Caribbean, and white sand beaches.

The planet is so enormous and beautiful, yet never enough for the greed and hedonism of the humans who have conquered it. He’s offering not only the whole Universe, but—the Infiniverse!

The scam is his best and worst yet, exactly like the awesome and awful situation he finds himself in right now. Never has his life been this dire, yet never has he felt this creative and excited.

Everything is riding on this project, and nothing. Whether he succeeds and gets on his feet, pays off his debts, gets everyone off his back, flourishes even, or fails, is suspenseful only to him.

Last minute of every day, bottom line of every spreadsheet, nobody cares either way. That truth excites and appalls him, reminds him he’s on his own, yet judged every step of the way.

Decades in the arduous making, inspired with a naughty blink, Jonnie senses this idea will be his ticket to ride. He’s been wrong so many times in his life, he might as well be right for once.

He vows to go Full Fazoolie on this Infiniverse traversing project, sell it in, then slither away like never before. The Universe—this Universe—gives “go” code, and he’s going for it.

As the plane attains cruising speed and altitude, he leans his chair back, tries to get his tall and lanky frame comfortable. His blond head sticks up over the padded rest, and he soon nods out.

Fazoolie dreams he’s seated within a luxurious and impressive captain’s chair, surrounded by a futuristic bridge that’s a mashup of Star Trek, Star Wars, and all of his favorite sci-fi movies.

On the main screen, wrapped in 270 degrees of super high-res arced grandeur, is a stunning view from low Earth orbit. Superimposed graphics display an interstellar flight trajectory.

Suffused with energy and optimism, Jonnie senses within his dream that he’s celebrating the sheer thrill of leading a new project, and knowing he’s onto something special here.

Beneath his swiveling Cap’n Kirk chair snoozes his cat, BS, as next to him swishes a breathtaking cat-like creature, striped and wearing a form-fitting uniform, prehensile tail behind her.

The security officer’s long, lean limbs mirror Jonnie’s, but are toned and muscular, with a flexible spine and digitigrade legs giving her steps an agile bounce. She approaches, purring.

“Quantum lattice priming, initiated,” the Alcubierre starship’s AGI states, announcing launch sequencing. “Zero-point gradient harmonization, and event horizon shield tuning, check-check!”

Jonnie feels a warm soft paw seductively rub his shoulder, then a razor-sharp claw tease him with searing pain. Aroused and agonized, he looks into the most beautiful face he’s ever seen.

Her narrow jawline at the base of an oval skull frames wide-set, crescent-shaped eyes with slit-like pupils, irises bursting like metallic supernovae. Below her muzzle swell thick, supple lips.

“Causality envelope initialization, and singularity avoidance protocols proceeding,” continues the ship’s AGI. “All systems primed, we are ready for warp threshold ignition, by your mark.”

The cat-being’s pointy, triangular ears at the top of her head swivel independently to capture sounds on the bridge, her whisker and nose pads expressively twitching in sync.

The sultry cat-creature winks, a super hot alien sliding into Jonnie’s lap. Twisting to face him, her arms wrap around his shoulders, her head tilted to one side, eyebrows raised, grinning.

“By your command,” interrupts the AGI, “negative energy pulse initiation will commence, become amplified, with throttling and release for optimal superluminal stretch, on my watch. Ready?”

She looks Jonnie in the eyes, reflecting back his hypnotized, desperate face, overwhelmed by desire. “I love you, Jonnie,” she purrs, sandy tongue lashing and licking. “You know that, right?”

Jonnie thinks she sounds like Rosie Perez, which given these circumstances is absurd, but makes him want her even more. Weird and wild, he’s never been this batshit crazy entranced.

On the bridge’s main screen the big blue Earth looms below, its curve traced by the atmosphere, with the Moon rising and stars twinkling. “Initiate!” commands Jonnie, looking in her eyes.

The cat-creature leans in, her whiskers bristling against Jonnie’s five o’clock, razor burn shadow, tickling him at first, then erupting bursts of static electricity that almost induce a seizure.

Jonnie is electrified and shakes, but the warpship is steady, exhibiting no discernible change in motion. They seem suspended, weightless, nothing happening, yet around them—

The Earth and stars distort inward, as if being pulled toward a point just ahead of the bow, then elongate into blue lines not due to motion, but space-time being squeezed and drawn inside.

Stars behind the warpship red-shift and dim, as if plummeting into a deep hole within the fabric of the Universe itself. On either side a lensing effect is like looking through a shiny soap bubble.

The Earth wraps around and within the wobbly bubble, giving a complete view even though most of the planet is beyond the line of sight. The Moon spreads into a narrow ring surrounding them.

A rapid series of images explode inside Jonnie’s mind, all of them starring this sultry, anthropomorphized feline achieving mind-bending physical positions, fucking Fazoolie’s brains out.

He gets the sense they are clandestine, Universe-trotting, agency-evading lovers, backdrops to their bangs locations as exotic and variegated as their sexual creativity and boldness.

Fueling their passion and licentiousness is the drama of pursuit, an existential threat posed by unseen powers with the overt goal of catching them, dismantling their romance, and their lives.

The underpinning is betrayal. Commander Kitty is not only Captain Fazoolie’s lover, but also the mistress of a powerful bureaucrat obsessed with absolute dominion—and her.

Reality under attack, the ubiquitous conflict has turned personal. Operating within the shadows of multidimensional war, the jealous cuck vows vengeance, yet must ultimately defeat the foe.

Stars ahead begin to converge to a point, then vanish. Stars behind fall away, becoming a stretched smear of red void. Cherenkov light envelopes the ship as it begins the jump to—

A mesmerizing melody, akin to a child’s lullaby pitch-shifted with deep delay and quivering tremolo, reverberates throughout the warpcraft, an eerie siren’s song awaiting a defiant reply.

Alarms sound, throwing the ship and crew, including Jonnie and his new lover, to port. “Inertial matrix reset!” shouts the AGI. “Artificial gravity, and internal reference frames, disrupted!”

Explosions ring out, the hull of the advanced starship buckles, then breaks. Depressurization is rapid, but not before Jonnie’s feline friend transforms into the child riddler of Fulcrum’s demo.

Imagine shaking a big glass jar of colored M&Ms, the pieces rearranging into random yet inevitable patterns. Imagine the jar shaken countless times until Kittynaut turns into Carroll’s Alice.

That’s what the transformation looks like to Fazoolie, who feels like he’s tripping. One instant he’s insanely in love, then— shake-shake-shake—next instant he’s being scolded by a child.

“I simmer without a stove, I scream without a voice,” the young girl whines, very disappointed in him. “When I’m spent, regret will glow, but in my wake, wise minds may grow. What am I?”

“You are Anger!” says Jonnie, as he awakens to rough turbulence on a plane that’s just left the Cancún airport in sunny Mexico. Passengers gasp as the aircraft pitches fore and aft, quite a ride.

Jonnie grabs the armrests, his head spinning, but spirit winning. He feels aloof, significant loads lightened, the strangeness of the Universe catching up to his own eccentricities, exceeding them.

“I love you, Jonnie,” echoes the hypnotic space kitty, “you know that, right?” Basine teases “—infinitesimally small, but non- zero—” And Penny taunts “How’s that working out for you?”

“Fasten your seatbelts,” a flight attendant admonishes him. Jonnie feels aroused and terrified as he buckles back up, swearing if he doesn’t die now, he’ll live to tell this infinitale.

Either that, or at least pay down some of his debt, prove to himself and anyone else who cares that he can save himself, and the Universe. After all, what’s the point of doing a deal—?

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As Penny enters the elevator of the luxurious Chicago high rise, she hears in her imagination the cheesy movie preview voice over: “Within a world of deceit, only a liar can be honest…”

Teenage Penny felt that timbre sounded hot. Liquid vowels and weighted consonants, masculine but not boorish, active without being aggressive, a generic US accent turning her on in the dark.

Penny also believed slackers were losers, until she got saturated by opulence, big winners now sus. The population’s smallest sliver devouring the largest slice, she now despises everyone.

Lingering resentment, compounded by lack of interest, draws her to charismatic jerkoffs exemplified by this Fazoolie guy—and she knows it. Rather than resist the trend, she follows him on X.

Hype and hyperbole aside, she appreciates a born bullshitter like Jonnie for wearing weaknesses on his sleeves, hurling gratuitous bombast so over-the-top his abject failures become transparent.

Accelerating upward, the floor presses against her Rothy’s eco-friendly heels, an intoxicating virtue signaling akin to eating an entire pint of Chubby Hubby just to save the rainforests.

Blood rushes to her feet. She feels a somatic dissonance that to Einstein suggested space-time is curved, gravity bends light— to Penny a reminder that she hasn’t had a penis in six months.

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Last on her list and certainly least: Jonnie Fazoolie, an epic piece of work. Her team’s background research reveals a brazen exhibitionist with disdain for convention—and proven results.

Bottom line aside, Fazoolie has percolated to the bottom thanks to extreme stunts and sloppy YouTube videos. His schtick is selling himself as a quirky inventor, his startups never starting.

Along the way, this Jonnie person somehow skirts the boundary between bonafide credibility, and abject failure. Seems the bigger and harder he falls, the more lives are bequeathed to him.

Coming to Penny’s mind is Hugh, a vacuous classmate from elementary school who had zero discernible charm or skills, except for everyone wanting to be his friend. Jonnie is not him.

Fazoolie is instead an unnerving freak everyone tries to avoid, yet for unknown reasons keeps running into. He’s annoying until becoming a habit—and with enough repetition, an addiction.

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Changing Beats

Days flow into weeks, weeks into months. Although she wants security, stability, and a soulmate, her chronically single self is out each night on bad dates, at good shows. She still loves NYC.

Late one random night on the 5 train headed back home to the UES, the subway car packed despite the ungodly hour, Penny watches an amateur acrobatic troupe perform on the handrails.

As bodies twirl inside the noisome and claustrophic car, a remix of Andy Moor & Orkidea’s EDM classic “Year Zero,” featuring Carrie Skipper’s modulated voice, blasts from a portable speaker.

The amateur performers groove on the Adam Ellis Breaks Mix, which melds trance roots with a heavy breakbeat drive that infuses the distorted, ephemeral vocals with hypnotic intensity.

Penny hates techno, but her head nods and feet tap to the beat. She thinks the song is an apropos soundtrack to the mood in the tight and vibrant space, and a fitting capper to her evening out.

A mesmerizing melody, akin to a child’s lullaby pitch-shifted with deep delay and quivering tremolo, reverberates throughout the moving car, an eerie siren’s song awaiting a defiant reply.

“Aha!” she gasps out loud, a delightfully silly and enticing idea for tweaking an iconic Fauxbes list spontaneously popping into her mind. She can’t wait to get home, write a pitch to sell it in.

Unable to ignite her love life, changing up her work life will do for now. Bored with blowhard billionaires, eager to meet more eligible ineligible bachelors, she’s going to shake things up!

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What Dreams Are Made Of

“Oh — My — GOD!” Alexa blurted, a drama queen who exaggerated a hiccup now making the paint peel with blistering shock & awe. “Shhhhhhhhhh!” I waved and grimaced, equally excited yet scared of stirring the neighbors. Standing behind her my line of sight was poor, further obfuscated by Alexa’s enormous Housewives of Lincoln Park perm that had a mind of its own.

I sidestepped as she opened the bag slowly, imagining the crescendoing drum roll… My initial prediction proved predictably right: countless plastic baggies packed with crystallized methamphetamine, and at least two dozen bovine-embossed vials of liquid ketamine. For bonus jail time Greg included bottles of gamma-hydroxybutyrate, and a shrink’s cabinet worth of psychoactive Rx.

“We could have a helluvah time in Vegas with this stuff!” Alexa echoed Slim Pickens from Dr. Strangelove, rubbing her hands over the drugs as if casting a spell or exorcising demons. “We can party like it’s 1999!” Her rites didn’t resurrect Aleister Crowley or summon Prince, but did snap me out of fearing Greg’s bag. Metaphors mixed, analogies short circuiting, I wanted to dive in.

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Shifting from ultra high profile PR to business journalism seemed natural enough, if a precipitous downgrade from her global responsibilities and grotesquely lavish offshore lifestyle.

Sheesh, thought Penny, relieved and grateful for the opportunity to get back into the working world, yet feeling manipulated by her ostensibly well-meaning, and forever manipulative, sisters.

So with a loaded résumé and Jenny’s conditional referral, Penny hustled her privilege with aplomb to switch career gears into a reporter role at the acclaimed publisher and event organizer.

Given her unique background, albeit checkered, Penny was assigned to the team of over fifty worldwide experts compiling the Zillionaires List, hot since its launch in the late 1980s.

With their goal of accurately estimating net worth, the experts send surveys, examine financial documents—and conduct interviews, for which Penny Pitz was optimally suited and eager.

Putting her on the zillionairebro beat was expeditious. She was already something of a business celebrity, if a sketchy one, and by any stretch a triple threat: smart, attractive, and personable.

Another unfair advantage was her legacy XTX network, which still linked her to many of the world’s top movers and shakers, able to be leveraged for coveted 1:1 interviews, insider scoop.

Settling in, her new “office” in Jersey City is a shitty little cubicle within an open floor layout. She can hear and smell the gasps and farts of dorky marketing techs all around her, grossss.

“What’s your name?” asks a UX specialist, eating Whizzlers.

“Reese Charleston,” she says, hurling a fake smile that hurts.

“I see what you did there,” he replies, dissed but impressed.

“I’m so glad,” leers Penny.

“No, you’re not.” “Yes.”

“Do you mean ‘yes, I’m so glad’ or ‘yes, I’m not’?”

“When did you graduate high school?”

“You assume I had to graduate to get a gig here?”

“Hard to flourish on charisma alone.”

“Sometimes I amaze even myself.”

“What do you do the rest of the time?”

A freak magnet wherever she goes, Penny stares at him, reaches over, pulls a Whizzlers out of the family-size bag he’s holding, pops it into her mouth, and slowly chews in front of him.

“You’re welcome,” he says after watching her masticate.

“Thank you,” she gawks, handing him back the wrapper.

Sure, the office is professional penance worse than Guantanamo, but thankfully she’s hardly ever there—instead on the road with choice access to 0.000034367129% of the world’s population.

Within months she’s interviewed so many plutocrats, top to bottom, Elon to Bubba, SpaceAx to Chick-Fikin-A, that they’ve morphed into a mega mashup, a human meatball made of money.

Most are straight old white men, and many hit on her. Pleasing to Olympus’ trolls, she’s galloped her editorial Trojan horse from dive bars to five stars—tempted, but never giving herself away.

“Have you ever been interviewed by Fauxbes?” asks Penny Pitz.

“Have you ever been fucked by an oligarch?” asks an oligarch.

“Never had to,” she grins, “the entire country beat me to it.”

“You’re too prim and pretty for your job,” he tries yet again.

“So are you,” zings Penny, making him want her even more.

“Go ahead,” he insists. “Ask me anything…”

Despite the harassment, Penny counts her perks, and admits her post-MBA gig doesn’t suck. At least her biological and sorority sisters, ex-BFs, and extended family approve, or say they do.

“When are you going to introduce me to your Zillionaire List?” asks Benny, fresh from her nasty divorce, and latest round of cosmetic surgery. “I’m the one who got you that job, right?”

“Actually,” corrects Jenny while putting her finishing touches on this Friday’s meal, Jerusalem artichoke velouté with truffle oil, and a crispy quinoa chaser. “I’m the one who got it for you.”

“I had a three-way last night with Larry and Sergei at the Rosewood Sand Hill in Palo Alto,” giggles Penny, knowing how to shut them both down. “Never had so much fun oogling!”

Her colleagues are jelly, tho, and claim she actually excels at spreading sheets with micro-softs. Penny’s instead irritated by their callous disregard of her mad biz skills, on full display, yo.

The stretch limos, private jets, and poolside rave parties remind her of the good ole crypto daze, keep her interested long enough to indulge, but not short enough to lose interest from sheer ennui.

Brushes with billionaires are also fodder for cocktail dates with the world’s most ineligible bachelors, but do less for her own bottom line. Want to get rich? Work, steal, inherit—or marry it.

Surrounded by wealth again, but not her own, she’s getting jaded. A stark contrast to her first gig excusing and glamorizing crypto—where her decisions mattered, and people listened.

XTX was such a small company, with so much power—some in her own young hands—that despite everything that happened and why, she was never made to feel like a bun in a sausagefest.

Penny’s back in the testosterzone again, but instead of producer, director, and co-star, she’s just a prop. Late nights in swank tiki bars still suck when she’s poorly scripted as filthy rich dork bait.

Accustomed to being under-estimated her whole life, the cost of entry was mastering how to fly under the radar. But enduring exploitation by chauvinists who set her ceiling low really sucks.

Her feminized generation has indeed come a long way, baby, yet the manbro world, especially given today’s political whiplash, abides. Seems Penny and her gender again share the same limbo.

Meanwhile word has gotten out that crypto’s Princess of PR is back in the biz—even if under-employed, and not getting the industry attention she secretly craves, and obviously deserves.

In parallel the crypto tide has turned: Sam sitting in the slam, feeling vindicated as he watches his reflection unshatter in the looking glass of corruption he helped create, and then crack.

The reluctant doll of Silicon Valley, Penny is invited to the inauguration. A gaggle of her recent interviewees stand beside The Donald, a veritable dudebro renaissance of deregulation.

She marvels at how times have changed. Not only has Penny flipped from pariah to prima donna, but the blockchain has become shackled to the G, thickening the wallet of the Trumps.

Crypto redeemed, she gets offers, of course, most notably from World Liberty Financial, and from none other than DT Junior himself—but she turns them all down, severe griftcoin PTSD.

Her politics centrist to libertarianesque, Penny is still astonished by the president-elect issuing a billion of his own meme coin, his family’s stablecoin soon to flood the world and its underbelly.

The tsunami of tariffs—reckless, sloppy, and vengeful as the Musk DOGE purge of the government—confirms her feeling the best years are long gone, even though she mostly faked them.

Inured to cronyism by this point, she’d be the last to naively unsee funny money graft, and the first to admit that villains and heroes are interchangeable, depending on who wins an election.

Maybe she fears another crash, Sisyphus the best metaphor for her airport-circling career aspirations, and relationship status. She still flies first class, accrues miles, stubbornly won’t let it go.

Penny pinches herself, hard, making her shout, resulting in a bruise that looks like a hickey if it weren’t on her arm. Why isn’t she living it up? Why isn’t this another golden age for her?

Constraints beget creativity: no risk, no reward—no pain, no gain. Penny understands that Icarus burning, plummeting, and crashing got blinded by more than just the blazing bright Sun.

Too hot to handle, she’s cooled down, reaching a state of thermal equilibrium during an administration gone ballistic Day One. Penny the Phoenix, more like it, risen from decentralized ashes.

Powering her allure is a bad girl lurking beneath the polished surface, a tantalizing tease tempting brutish straight guys to grunt, and classy gay men to adore, befriend, and emulate her.

She senses her biggest challenge, and most stubborn obstacle, is being unable to fully let loose. The Universe has perversely blessed her with privilege and power she uses as camouflage.

During her most intimate moments, Penny allows herself the luxury of dirty talk. “Do you want to fuck me?” she asks, later demanding “Come on my face…” for a spectacular result.

But she does it for her lovers, not for herself. Taking pleasure in pleasing others is of course a pleasure, but Penny feels as though she is going through the motions of her own repressed emotions.

A long, long time ago, lurking within a memory buried far, far away, Penny endured devastating childhood trauma. The old man behind the curtain is guilty, but she’s scared to look inside again.

His diabolical ghost lurks in the shadows of her fears, and contorts the unreasonableness of her expectations. She closes her eyes, taps her heels three times, but has forgotten what to ask for.

Dorothy having surrendered, Penny remains a work in progress. Alternating between pinpoint intentionality and random uncertainty, she’s Schrodinger’s Pet: victim and victimizer.

“I saw you on TV,” snarks Benny, talking with her mouth closed, her nose upturned, reaching for another glass of sauvignon blanc. “Billionaire techy dorks only date Asians, so you’re out of luck.”

“I can’t believe you accepted the inaugural invitation,” grimaces Jenny, as the Feds attack her law practice, denying access to government buildings—while her partners make concessions.

“I trysted with Bernard Arnault at a P-Diddy Freak Off during an active eruption on Tanna Island,” says Penny, helping herself to another helping of salmon gefilte fish, with horseradish espuma.

The following week, she’s not invited to Friday night dinner. If nothing else, alienating her sisters has blessed Penny with a renewed sense of purpose, gleeful spirit of defiant independence.

Such familial intransigence would have been unimaginable even during her XTX days.

“How you doing?” asks Whizzlers back at the office, Penny wearing her vulnerability to the point he grows a pair, and initiates a conversation in the staff kitchen.

“Want some?”

“Sure,” she says, accepting his offer, taking the bounty back to her cube. Penny eats gazing at a Chippendales wall calendar, tacked to the fiberglass padding. She def needs to get laid.

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Never Mind the Bullocks

Mystery ended, my existential angst began. Sight is the brain processing light that’s impacted the eyes, hearing is sound vibrating one’s eardrums, and touch is physical stimulation of the nerves in the skin—but taste and smell are triggered by physical stimuli that enter the body. When you smell something, you’re taking in the mo…

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Special Delivery

Spring 1997: Eddie Murphy got busted with a transgender prostitute, Gary Kasparov was defeated by an IBM computer, Donald Trump split with Marla Maples, and Greg, our unFriendly Neighborhood Drug Dealer, bounded up three flights to the door of my Chicago pad. Bang, bang, bang—“Open up, let me in!” — Bang, bang, bang—I ran over and peeped…

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Not too long ago, Penny Pitz cared. A double major in poli sci and econ at Brown, class of ‘17, she couldn’t wait to save the planet: Sexism, racism, poverty, and war—she was over it.

The odds had shifted in her gender’s—if not her generation’s— favor. Educational performance, maturity, EQ, and institutional support drove growth for the girls, and backslide for the boys.

Manosphere backlash helped hurl both trad political parties into reactionist orbits with their distrust of authority, hatred of culture wars, and calls for revolution, all driven by digital radicalization.

The seething misogyny bursting on the scene angered Penny, and implored her to work even harder to prove her self-worth, and that of all womanhood. Rights, not roses. Power, not permission.

Despite her many personal advantages—and America’s historic bonanza of food, health, wealth, technology, and safety—the social media-accelerated griping turned Penny into a victim, too.

Opposed to institutions while reaping their benefits, obsessed by the disadvantaged yet doing nothing to support them, Penny knew exactly what she wanted, without having the slightest clue.

Graduating with big plans, microaggressions turned major when she inevitably realized nobody cared. Over-educated and under- experienced, she joined the long line of Ivy leaguers hung to dry.

Discovering the Gen Z myths were all true, including those that weren’t, she collapsed into the null set of zero career, marriage, house, or certainty, and retreated home to Mom and Dad.

They were supportive and gracious, as always—while her older sisters reveled in the chance to rub it in, say we told you so. The final straw: sleeping in her childhood bedroom in her jammies.

Insomniac, vaping, and gazing up at the glow-in-the-dark stars stuck up there two decades ago, the constellation Cannabis Major formed the word LOSER—yeeting her out of there.

A go-getter, from the get-go nothing was going to stop Penny from getting going! A list maker, list making was at the top of her lists, so if all else failed, she had a list at the top of her list.

Item #1: Explore effective altruism, the surest path to getting rich fast, without feeling guilty. Make a mountain of money, then give it all away. Maybe not all of it, right? Hmm, how to begin?

After escaping the OC, moving to San Francisco, and being hired then fired from a SaaS startup in five minutes, a sorority sister’s lover’s sister sent her to a rundown relic near Berkeley City Hall.

On the 4th floor of that iconic Ghostbusters dump on Telegraph Avenue, she met former Jane Street traders bullshitting on bean bag chairs, smoking joints, making big plans, oozing chutzpah.

Cryptocurrency as the convergence of entrepreneurship, finance, and tech was exactly what Penny wasn’t looking for—so of course she sat down, lit up, and joined her new blockchain tribe.

Despite her youth and inexperience, Penny was only a few years younger than most of Alhambra Research’s twenty-somethings staff of less than twenty people, and she felt comfy and vibey.

Wearing many hats, as they all did, she gofer’d coffee, wrote ad copy, troubleshot glitchy software, and became a core member of a bold, raw team trailblazing decentralized banking and crypto.

Distributed fintech was more than a tool, and heralded crypto as a banking revolution—freeing up control, bringing transparency, and democratizing global wealth through the immutable ledger.

The time zone difference in bitcoin value between New York and Tokyo spawned quick millions, igniting XTX, a “multinational crypto arbitrage brokerage” soon destined for fame and infamy.

In 2019 the power and risk of crypto was felt by retail and even institutional investors, eager for a new exchange that could handle futures, options, tokenized stocks, and margin trading.

Transaction fees from high-volume, high-frequency buying and derivatives—along with revenue from issuance of their own sketchy tokens—accelerated their already exponential growth.

By wrapping a deceptively lucrative business model around reckless risk-taking for a purportedly worthy end, they confused everyone, especially themselves—and got filthy rich, ridic fast.

Big money poured in, obfuscating the questionable talent, twisted ethics, and bogus philanthropy. The more money they made, the smarter they felt, the entire world their naive enablers.

The staff, still tiny in comparison to their billion dollar QB balance sheet, grew in early-2021 with Nathaniel Blackless as the Head of Marketing, soon Natalie Tiananmen leading PR.

They recognized Penny’s talent, teamed up. Within a wild couple years, she took for granted and rocked the blank-check energy of a limitless budget. XTX moved fast, buying things and people.

Throwing around tens of millions, they blasted prime time ad spend, ignited deals with celebrity athletes, spawned stadium rebrands, and courted corrupt politicians from both parties.

Stephen Curry “wasn’t an expert”—and didn’t need to be! Tom & Gisele—were in! Mr. Wonderful called it—the safest place to buy crypto! Larry David “didn’t get it”—and was missing out!

Celebrities her friends only saw on the popping new streaming services became her party pals, as she flew around the world and back again, clinching major deals, and selling-in new ones.

To think that a blink-of-an-eye ago she was smoldering in her Hello Kittys, gawking at scintillating sticky stars—and now she was a Maven of the Universe, helping to deflower male heroism!

To be fair, she had no reference points, no baseline to assess her astonishing situation. Their entire startup experience felt surreal like the BS currency they traded: playtime with play money.

Sam Bankman-Gried was a weird CEO, and a strange first boss to have, etching a model in Penny’s mind of young, eccentric, and hungry founders embracing high risk—and #winning

Wearing t-shirts and khaki shorts, playing video games during meetings, SBG epitomized the manchild with balls who swung wildly and hit home runs, big wins over solid batting averages.

Penny giggled at his Jewfro, felt a crush, was quickly squashed by geekier Harlin Ellison, giving her the evil eye. Don’t shit where you eat, or fuck where you shuck, lessons learned fast.

Whether Sam was a genius or a moron didn’t matter as long as crypto was hot, and the market rose—but the instant investors spooked and his worthless tokens vaporized, their shit got real.

Foul balls were one thing, doping his ostensibly independent investment company with customer funds another. Bank run, bankruptcy, bail violation: three strikes, and SBG was out.

With his fall the crypto bubble burst, pricked by these bean bag chair geeks at the cusp of DeFi transformation. The regulators pounced, precipitating backlash, yet not in time to save them.

The fall of XTX was an instantaneous, quantum wave function collapse. Wealth and success were entangled, binary states. When ZC, the CEO of Bynance, saw trouble, they flipped to 0.

Nothing dashes hope faster than confirmed fear, the dusk of 2022 heralding ChatGPT’s dawn, and the crash of crypto. Everyone got hot for bots and Sam went to the slam, a new era launched.

His exponential ascent and inexorable fall ruined Penny’s dream gig, leaving another zoomer in the lurch. Who could blame her? Hitting the jackpot on the first pull, she got used to The Life.

The momentum boosted Penny to dizzying heights, until the predictable end bloodied her hands and résumé with the blunt trauma of DOJ subpoenas, forfeiture of a swank Bahamas condo.

Nathaniel and Natalie felt bamboozled by SBG, took the fall hard. Penny partnered well with both, especially Natalie, yet everyone scattered from the wreck, licking their wounds.

Markets crashing, at least for five minutes, forced her out of decentralized banking and into a traditional career pathway. Too bad the AI revolution was still weeks away, a cyber lifetime.

Less-blessed besties welcomed Penny back to their real world woes of unemployment, crushing college debt, tech and housing bubbles, and interminable kvetching. They invited her to brunch.

A fallen star, she was showered with condolences and cattiness. The gals wanted to know if she’d banged Sam—grosss—and the guys wanted to know how much she had stashed in Switzerland.

She had nothing to hide on either front, the rapid boom and riveting bust exhausting her. Still catching her breath, Penny craved a tinge of normalcy, until they bored her in five seconds.

Penny’s ex-BFs didn’t know what to do with her, either. Impress her with a Hamptons invite? Go grunge in the Village? After partying with Post Malone, the Weeknd, and Katy Perry? Zzzz.

Still fresh was live press coverage of Sam’s trial, and her two days of sworn testimony—with speculation still swirling around a plea deal—hanging low was def her best PR option. Tick, tock.

Killing time, she checked a list, her bucket one, and began her new life at the end of the one she’d lost: cruise the Arctic, hike the Longji Terraces, descend into the Thrihnukagigur volcano…

Borrrrrrrring. The world was interesting enough, yet she no longer was, making amazement impossible amid her personal ennui and disappointment. Penny knew she had to dive back in.

Feeling the lingering inertia of a shattered reputation with every new career explored, changing things up was hard. Economics? Bzzzt. Consulting? Bzzzt. Tech? Bzzzt. Investments? Hellll, no.

“Ask yourself what you like to do, are good at,” suggested her middle sister Jenny, on the deck of their family lake house in Connecticut. “Then find a new job where you can do that.”

“Easy for you to say,” smirked Penny, the youngest of her three sisters: the doctor, the lawyer—and her. Their age gap spanned a decade, her role relegated into their wake, and out of harm’s way.

“I don’t know if I like my job or not,” said Benny, the oldest, “but at this point it doesn’t matter. Look what happened to you!” her faux zing making Penny jittery. “Anything can happen.”

She was used to these sisterly complisults and insultiments, building her up, tearing her down, designed to keep her in her place as Baby Sister, the family most comfortable that way.

Including Penny, to be fair. She felt adored and fawned over, the stress of competing with her competitive older sibs supplanted by their nurturing, albeit asphyxiating, guidance and protection.

In awkward, transitional moments like this, she wondered if her congenital position in the Pitz’s pecking order stifled her professional development, atrophied her emotional growth.

Her sisters married right out of college and had their own families. That added parental pressure on Aunt Penny to do the same, ball thrown into her court if she ever wanted to grow up.

So far, not. Friday evenings were their ritual of single gal Penny as the unaccompanied weekly dinner guest at Jenny’s, as if the youngest sister somehow morphed into the new oldest daughter.

Creepy, but comfortable, like Penny’s dating history. Her long line of suitors dismissed as a litany of losers, these ineligible bachelors reinforced an already spinsterly status quid pro quo.

Was Penny stuck? Too soon to know, as Jenny was too busy with her happy marriage to care, and Benny was too busy with her unhappy one to pay any attention, either. Then XTX happened.

Her spectacular success disrupted the core family dynamic— Baby Sis unleashed! Soon having crashed and burned, thank gawd, the family equilibrium has returned, everyone relieved.

“You had a way with words,” continued Jenny, sparring with Benny for their collective attention. “Remember you chose journalism as your minor, I think, before switching to poli sci?”

“You advised against it,” recalled Penny, hating and loving when her sisters gave her advice and life lessons, feeling like they were caressing and correcting her. “You said there’s no money in it.”

“There isn’t,” cut in Benny, rubbing it in again. “But now that you’ve conquered the world, maybe you can do what you like to do, instead of what you think you need to do to get ahead?”

The hurtful hypocrisy coming from a Northwestern University Feinberg Medical School graduate was so obvious and extreme that Penny succumbed to the snarkiness, and took it personally.

“Good idea!” piled on Jenny, who only agreed with oldest sister Benny when the fleeting and reluctant concession disadvantaged youngest sister Penny. “Fauxbes is a client. I’ll make a call...”

See? Everything was always all about Penny, even if Penny was never taken seriously, treated like daddy’s girl: an entitled little brat unable to make it on her own, inevitably returning home.

“Thank you,” she sighed, in the same tone used with her lovers after they finished—Penny feeling dirty, eager to clean up. She cried in the bathroom, unsure whether from desire or despair.

Flushing the toilet, turning to the vanity mirror, a wiser face peered curiously back at her. As a little girl, she sometimes wondered about the Penny on the other side. What did she think?

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Act 2

FADE IN.

Five years later.

Kaufman’s Jewish Book Shop. Spring.

Early Sunday morning.

A transformed place: The shop is repaired and cleaned, shelves are all fully stocked. Bright, blue spring morning light shines generously through storefront and into the refurbished store.

ISAAC sits behind the counter, an old school mechanical adding machine placed before him. He is dressed immaculately in an ostentatious black double-breasted suit, designer white shirt. He is hatless, his hair blow-dried, wearing thin-rimmed round bankers’ glasses.

ISAAC is busy working the machine, punching buttons and pulling levers, while talking on his smartphone.

ISAAC
Venture Capital, the big VC money, Bro, you know what I’m saying? That’s what I’m talking about, not some, some, some goddamned bookshop on Devon Avenue, capisce?… Right… I know… Sure, sure, sure I know all about it… Don’t talk to me about the Old Man, forty years blah-blah-blah in the business, makes seven hundred large a year pre-bonus can’t tie his own goddamned shoes… You know what he’s been doing most of those forty years? He spends ninety percent his time fixing fuck ups … That’s right, absolutely right… He’s basically the garbage man of One Financial Center, Izz… When he’s not quoted ten bucks a square foot only to have the company pay fifteen, he’s busting balls in the research department, trying to resuscitate the beast… Damn straight, he’s looking for a quality hooker in a hillbilly shack, know what I mean? I mean, whatever happened to the guy? The good old days, hustling for a buck, hot leads from cold calling, an ace in every hand, the demon of Maxwell Street… CEO my ass. You need the right guy for the right job, simple as that. I always told the old fool, the Sales Manager is, next to the Prez, the top dog in every firm… You want a company to turn a good profit, then you go out there and sell, hands-on hands-off, risk-taking and ass-kicking is the name of this game, generate some cashflow, you hear me?… Our firm’s no different. We’re the bully on our block, the apex predator in the savage jungle, and we should use our power… What do I mean? This is what I mean: Fuck the investment banks, fuck the government bureaucrats, fuck the assholes we hire to fill the companies we create, and most of all, fuck the customer… What? You called the meeting? Today? A day early, right? Unexpected, but whatever, Sunday is funday, no problem, no problem at all, if you’re not willing to be on it 24/7/365 then you’re just one of the chickenshits we routinely destroy during normal business hours… Good, good, good, listen now, listen to me: I want you — shut the fuck up for a second — I want you to go straight in there, get right in the Board’s face, go ahead and activate the plan, you know, the shit we’ve been talking about… Yeah, I’m sure, sure I’m sure… Don’t worry about it, I’ll be there soon, soon as I can… No it’s not too late, and yes we still got time, plenty of time… While you do that, I got a couple things to wrap up in this shithole, then gimme another twenty minutes to roll downtown… Yeah, be like Nike and “Just Do It”… Yeah, yeah, yeah, whatever… Fuck you too, bye.

ISAAC sets his phone down, smiles intently, continues working the adding machine several moments. In one sweeping motion he stops, examines then pulls off a long strand of adding machine tape, and stuffs it into a pocket, and stands.

ISAAC picks up his smartphone and keys from the counter, and briskly heads for the door.

TAD KIEL, in his early sixties, dressed in an exquisite all-white suit, with white pants and white shirt, black and white wingtips with a black fedora
with white ribbon and white feather sticking out the top, rings and bling glittering on many fingers, enters gracefully through the front door, bell tinkling behind him as he approaches exiting ISAAC.

ISAAC continues heading out the door, not looking at the apparent customer, and runs right into TADDY.

ISAAC keeps moving, pushing Taddy back toward front door, both almost stumbling over.

ISAAC
Sorry, shop’s closed. Gotta go.

TADDY
But today is Sunday?

ISAAC
Funeral, death in the family. No fun at all. Shop’s closed, very sad. Come on now, out-out-out, hurry-hurry-hurry, I said I gotta go.

TADDY
The funeral is already over.

ISAAC suddenly recognizes the familiar voice, physique, and outfit, and stops pushing.

ISAAC
I think there”s this old Yiddish proverb, something to the effect that people don’t stumble because they are weak, but because they think themselves strong.

TADDY
Didn’t I tell you that one?

ISAAC
Then you must have stolen it from someone else.

TADDY
Yi-tzie!

ISAAC
Ta-ddy!

ISAAC and TADDY extend arms and hug, pat each other on the back, then release.

ISAAC
What brings you here, Bossman?

TADDY
Same question for you. Everyone missed you at the funeral.

ISAAC
I’ve been busy.

TADDY
Too busy for your own Father’s —

ISAAC
— Business, Taddy. Been taking care of business.

Following exchange double time:

TADDY
Making money? —

ISAAC
— Immense buttloads, honey.

TADDY
Kissing babies? —

ISAAC
— Robbing old ladies.

TADDY
Paying taxes? —

ISAAC
— Never! But I fucked a girl in Dallas.

TADDY
Well, hellllllooooo, Bayyyyy-beee!

ISAAC mock-courtseys.

ISAAC
Uh thank yoooouuu!

ISAAC and TADDY put their arms around each other’s shoulders, face the audience, and dance across stage as they sing with enthusiasm.

ISAAC and TADDY sing “I’m a Yankee Doodle” by George M. Cohan:

Well — (Sing it now boyz!)

We’re two Yankee Doodle Dan-dies
We’re two Yankee Doodle Do-or-dies
A couple real live nephews of our Uncle Sam’s
Born on the Fourth of July!

We’ve got a Yankee Doodle sweetheart
She’s our Yankee Doodle joy

Yankee Doodles came to Chi-cago
Just to play the po-nies

We’re two Yankee Doodle boys!

ISAAC and TADDY separate, then give each other a “high five”.

Pause.

TADDY
We missed you there.

ISAAC
Meeting? I thought it was scheduled for Monday?

TADDY
What meeting?

ISAAC
Funeral, yes, of course, I know, right? Sorry. Too bad about the old guy, am I right?

TADDY
Too bad.

ISAAC
Miss him?

TADDY
Miss him.

ISAAC
Your card playing partner?

TADDY
Your Father.

ISAAC
Your fellow refugee?

TADDY
Your Father.

ISAAC
Your friend?

TADDY
Your Father.

Long pause.

ISAAC
I heard Izzie wasn’t at the funeral, either.

TADDY
Indeed. Damn shame that neither one of Abraham’s sons could make it to his funeral… How’d you know Ishmael wasn’t there, either?

ISAAC
We talked about it.

TADDY
I can understand you not going, but Izzie?

ISAAC
Maybe he was angry that Abba left me the store, after all.

TADDY
Why would he care, money he makes.

ISAAC pulls adding machine tape out of his pocket, dangles it in front of TADDY.

ISAAC
And why should I care? Come on, I have to be honest with you. I know Abraham was my Father, your buddy, whatever. But I haven’t even seen the guy in five years, since this place got wrecked and he threw me out after I offered to help him fix it. Things change. I was there, then, and, thank God, I’m where I am, now. Same goes for him, I hate to say.

TADDY
For who? Izzie, you, or your Father?

ISAAC
“All of the above.”

TADDY
You still care about money?

ISAAC
Oh yeah.

TADDY
This shop, this bookstore, is it worth money?

ISAAC holds up the adding machine tape.

ISAAC
Shit.

TADDY
Your professional opinion?

ISAAC
Yo, Taddy, dawg. Look around. Place is a dump.

TADDY
There’s knowledge here.

ISAAC
Of what? Of how to run a bookstore into the ground? How to destroy a family? And what? The books, these books? What good did they ever do him, did they ever do anything for our family? And what good can they possibly do me?

TADDY
Try reading them.

ISAAC
Read what? For what? For who? Scholarly tomes about forgotten ancient traditions, Talmudic arguments about angels on pins, histories of shtetl outhouse habits? Esoteric mysticism, Archangel Metatron and the Ten Spheres of Power, Willy Wanka and the Chocolate Factory give me a fucking break. Have you read any of them? Bad writing and bad thinking. When Jewish writers aren’t boasting in one breath how we’re better than everyone else, while in the next breath whining how everyone hates us, then they’re pontificating about obtuse bullshit no one gives a shit about anyway. What’s the practical value, the worth, the fucking point of all this churning intellectualism and waste of paper, when the world keeps spinning in spite of us, our suffering, even and especially our success?

TADDY smiles at ISAAC, who looks at his fancy watch.

ISAAC
I really have to get going…

TADDY approaches, puts arm around Isaac, leads ISAAC away from the door and to a stool. They both sit facing each other.

TADDY
I’ll be honest with you — I’m not much into that kind of thing, either. I was always a lousy student. But after all that’s happened in my life and the life of my community, I figure I’ve come to know people. You can’t please them all, that’s for sure. Some like this, some that. But we all need a little love. Love’s like a good deal — when you least expect it, expect it.

ISAAC
Are you getting soft on me, Taddy?

TADDY
As we get older, you said it yourself, things change.

ISAAC
Whatever happened to the good old days?

TADDY
What good old days?

ISAAC
Fast deals, greased wheels, free meals?

TADDY
You don’t like your job anymore, you don’t like what I taught you?

ISAAC
Who? Us? Two Live Jews? Kaufman &Kiel?

ISAAC pantomimes grabbing a microphone, gets up to dance and sing like a rapper.

ISAAC
We’re Two Live Jews Wid Attitute! We got da biz by da ballz, only place we can go, ya know, is up, up, up!

TADDY applauds. ISAAC sits back down.

ISAAC
I can see what you’re trying to do.

TADDY
What?

ISAAC
You’re trying to get me to forgive the father I’m trying so hard to hate.

TADDY
Forgiveness has nothing to do with this, not even acceptance. It’s got nothing to do with him.

ISAAC
What then? Forgive myself? Accept myself?

TADDY
Do you know what success is?

ISAAC
You would always tell me your three basic rules, which I followed to the T from the very start, not knowing what the fuck you were talking about: a) work hard; b) know your own limitations; c) mind your own goddamned business.

TADDY
That is correct.

ISAAC
Have I followed those rules?

TADDY
You’re the best Sales Manager the firm’s ever had.

ISAAC
Well then — All I’m saying is that we should let the past rest, we should go on with our lives. Sentimentality is for losers, and you know it. What good is it? We have what we need, and we know what we want. The difference between the two motivates us to get up each morning and kick ass, take names. What else is there?

TADDY
When you get older, a little wiser, when all your hard work and sacrifices start to pay off, when you can sit back and watch the wheels you’ve oiled turn by themselves, well, then maybe the time comes when you look for different things. You stop, you think, you look to more than just the deals.

ISAAC
“Just” deals? All we do is deal. Oh, Taddy, you’re a whole lot older than me,
and a whole lot richer, so I know where you”re corning from. You have your own life, I have mine. My life, right here, right now, is where I want it to be — no more mysteries, no more petty psychological intrigues.

TADDY
You used to ask questions.

ISAAC stands, walks about as he speaks.

ISAAC
Effective people cut right to the chase, few surprises in this life. Ignorance is usually a matter of being too afraid to face up to what you’ve known to be true all along. Most people have all the answers they need, only they don’t have the guts to follow through with the logical conclusions… I finally came to realize the extent to which my life was lived as a life of denial. I’m the type of person who not only wants many things, but who has the drive to get those things. If justice means that a person fully realizes their potential, then justice for me is to be rich, is to have power not only over others, but over my own destiny. How many wasted years did I have to endure until I could admit to myself that only by symbolically killing that old fool could I at long last liberate myself?

TADDY
He loved you.

ISAAC
I loved him, too. So what? Our last confrontation changed everything. For the first time, I expressed exactly how I felt, and whether he liked it or not, he was forced to listen. By finally letting it all out, letting him have it, my heaviness was lifted, and I no longer had to hide from or feel burdened from a childhood of pain. It seemed that only by appeasing that child, taking revenge for him, could I at long last become a man.

TADDY
Someone once said that people take revenge, while only God punishes.

ISAAC
Yeah, but God doesn’t seem to have these kinds of problems… Anyway, you’re right. What I did I did solely for myself. Forgiveness, acceptance, who really gave a shit, either way? You know, there’s so much suffering in this world, so much noise and nonsense. Who can say who is right, who is wrong, or if the truth makes any difference at all? Money is real, Taddy, and enticingly finite. Tears you can cry forever, while a deal’s a deal. Forgetfulness liberates. Done deal.

TADDY
You used to be so inquisitive as a child.

ISAAC
I used to be an epic loser. You understand what I did to my Father, and even with your loyalty to him, as a friend, as a fellow survivor, you still respected me for doing it. You played a part, you can”t deny that — You first hired me because I was beginning to think this new self-confident and assertive way. You promoted me when, after finally breaking with him, I learned how to apply these techniques to the business world. And now, after Abraham’s physically dead, life goes on, no doubt with less difficulty, not more.

TADDY
The past isn’t that easy to just let go.

ISAAC
What am I going to do? Sit and stew over it? Wonder if it could have been different, should have been different? What a waste of time. He didn’t even really love me, how could he have?

TADDY
That’s where you’re wrong.

TADDY also stands.

TADDY
He loved you, as only a father can love a son. Some day, you might understand this, appreciate it. You see, when we want only the best for
someone we love, then over-protection is all too easy, we become afraid because our vulnerability to the world is no longer personal, since we suddenly have more to lose than our own skins. Our fear often makes us do the opposite of what we intend, we get confused, and we share our
confusion with those we both love and persecute, those we sometimes persecute with our very love.

ISAAC sits back down, listening.

TADDY
For refugees, survivors of great traumas, perhaps the burden is even greater. When you witness first-hand the fragility not only of the human psyche, but the vulnerability of civilization itself, setting comfortable boundaries becomes difficult. For some, it’s impossible.

ISAAC
I don’t know.

TADDY
He did his best, Isaac. As we all do.

ISAAC
OK, but you and my Father were just so different. You looked high, he plummeted low. You saw opportunity in calamity, while he made a mess out of birthdays, lunches, and Sunday mornings in front of the TV. I know, I know, the war, atrocities, genocide. I suppose a Holocaust can change a person.

TADDY
Believe it or not, yes and no. Your Father and I were always different. He was as taciturn and morose before the war as after. We liked each other then in the old country for the same reasons we liked each other here in the States. For all my recklessness he was rock solid, while perhaps he could let himself live a little through my indulgences. We kept an eye out for each other, kept each other from making foolish mistakes.

ISAAC
Nature? Nurture? Both?

TADDY
Your Father and I are from a different world, Isaac. You might know this, but you can never truly understand it. While you had your Little Richard and Richard Nixon, we had our Franz Joseph and Joseph Stalin. You had your hoola hoops and RC, we had our Katyusha rockets and Zyklon-B. We ate horse meat, and smeared our bread with donkey fat. In grammar school gym class, we practiced marching and gun twirling, told stories about the Hussars, the Great War, the thousands who were sent East and never came back. We were hunted by all sides in every conflict. Our parents raised us to be afraid, while our teachers prepared us to fight the new war, the war against Bolshevism… And we both somehow survived, each in our own way.

ISAAC
He never told me much about the war, or before.

TADDY
Some memories are too painful, others too joyful. Besides, there’s a fine line between compromise and complacency, cooperation and collaboration. But the older I got, the more I experienced and the less I understood about these boundaries. I discovered that the only way I could keep my sanity and my life was to live in the moment, not pay too much attention to the culture that had taught us to accept our own victimization. I asked myself what it might take to really succeed in such a world. To me, the worst aspect of failure was the feeling that I was missing something. Just like you, I wanted it all, even then. My lesson was figuring out how to keep myself alive.

TADDY sits back down next to ISAAC, and leans close to him.

TADDY
Morality implies decision, and an act of will involves making a concrete choice. For a Jew to walk into the gas held few moral paradoxes. They pointed, you went. To the last, most felt they might be saved the very last second, as if an angel would hold back the hand of their oppressor just before the moment of greatest sacrifice. But I’ve always looked at it from the other end: I felt that simply waiting, not making a decision was actually the path ripe with ethical difficulty. As a result, I felt that any active choice, no matter how difficult or contradictory, was superior to merely allowing life to follow its otherwise inevitable course.

ISAAC
Last I checked, the Nazis tried to kill us, right?

TADDY
Don’t get me wrong — Most who died were as helpless as your Father, who by chance happened to survive. But I’ve lived under the guise that if you don’t like something, then you have to change it. Your Father could never understand this. If someone of superior power told him to do something, he did it, even if it meant sacrificing that which was most sacred to him, that which he most loved… Anyway, I saw how much you were suffering, and took you in. I praised you when you had known only rebuke, I encouraged you, when you had known only disdain. I gave you all the tools necessary to become a success, and, not surprisingly, that’s exactly what you have become. Mazel Tov! My hat goes off to you, Issac. You’ve done very well for yourself, well enough to make your older brother quite jealous.

ISAAC
Ishmael works for me — he works with me now. We’ve settled our differences, and the time has come for us to do what we each do best. And with Father gone, no one can hold us back.

TADDY
Excellent! I need cooperation among my employees. But it hurts me whenever I see your family scattered. It pains me to think what kind of tradition will be handed down when both of you still hold such animosity toward your Father.

ISAAC
You know, when things were at their worst, I was willing to endure whatever atrocity, whatever personal exodus, simply to break free. I felt a falseness among my own, so I went astray. For so many lost years, I found myself in strange associations, mingling with those who could not, would
not understand me. But I learned things otherwise never learned, saw things that would have remained forever unseen. You once told me that you’d rather be a tourist than a refugee, that if you couldn’t ever go back home, at least you could find worthwhile experiences on the road.

TADDY
Indeed I did.

ISAAC
Like you, I’m such a tourist- But essentially, aren’t all Americans? This
country is a hodge-podge, misch-masch of culture and value. “Who are we?” Who cares — so long as we win.

TADDY
But people need a guide, they need someone they can look up to, respect.

ISAAC
People need a crutch, a Master, only to remain comfortable in their role of Slave.

TADDY scrutinizes Isaac. Isaac distractedly looks at his fancy watch again, smiles, shrugs nervously. Following exchange one-half time:

TADDY
I am older than you, Isaac. More experienced.

ISAAC
That is why I respect you so.

TADDY
I have a reputation, and I have deserved this reputation.

ISAAC
I admire you for it.

TADDY
I have saved you.

ISAAC
I am forever grateful.

TADDY
Remember, though — you can, essentially, save only yourself. God punishes those who do not respect His world and its rules. The only antidote for pride is the acknowledgment and worship of a Higher Power.

ISAAC
I know what I know, hey-hey-hey, I am what I am. I will bow down to no one, since I can rely only on myself.

Smartphone on the counter starts to ring.

ISAAC gestures, stands, walks over to the counter. He picks his phone up and turns away from TADDY, cups hand over the receiver.

ISAAC
Hello?… Yeah? Yeah, sure, hold yer horses, I’m almost out the door… No-no-no, I’ll be there, you understand? I know I’m late, shit happens, just give me a couple more minutes… Yeah, everything according to plan — What? — Okay, I get it. Fuck it. Just go ahead. Yeah. You do it. I mean it. The Nike thing, yeah. Start the close, set the stage. I’ll be there in a few… That’s right.

ISAAC hangs up, puts his phone back onto the counter, shrugs “sorry tor interruption” to TADDY, then distractedly walks over to a shelf.

ISAAC looks at and then takes a baseball from the shelf, spins it in his hand, then revs up tor a pitch. As his arm swings forward, TADDY grabs the back of his hand.

TADDY
Bad idea.

ISAAC
Warren Buffet likes baseball.

TADDY
He also likes bridge.

ISAAC
I was never much of a card player.

TADDY
Yeah? Neither was your father.

ISAAC tosses baseball to TADDY, who catches it.

ISAAC
My Father wasn’t much of a businessman, either.

TADDY
He had his world, you have yours.

ISAAC
And you have yours?

TADDY
You’re saying?

ISAAC
Just thinking.

TADDY
Salesmen shouldn’t think.

ISAAC
I’m not selling.

TADDY
I can tell that something’s on your mind.

TADDY tosses the baseball back to Isaac. ISAAC starts bouncing baseball up and down in his hand.

Pause.

ISAAC
I don’t like where our Company is going.

TADDY
Our company?

ISAAC
The Company.

TADDY
Go on.

ISAAC
People are talking.

TADDY
People are always talking.

ISAAC
Have you heard what they’re saying?

TADDY
I hear them, but I follow my own instincts.

ISAAC
People are saying that we’re losing our touch.

TADDY
We don’t touch, we deal.

ISAAC
People are saying that we’re being held back.

TADDY
Held back from what?

ISAAC
People are saying that you are holding us back.

TADDY
From what?

ISAAC
People are saying that the time has finally come to act, to strike the fatal blow, and that you’re holding us back.

TADDY
I have my own orders.

ISAAC
From who?

TADDY
Instinct tells me what to do. I listen, and only then do I act.

ISAAC
What if you are wrong? What if the voices you hear, the signs you see are the wrong ones?

TADDY
You hear, you see, better?

ISAAC
I think that our Company should act, act now, act decisively.

TADDY
At what cost? At what sacrifice?

ISAAC
You can’t think that way. That’s part of the problem. When you feel you have been summoned, you have to make your move, regardless of consequences. If you have the faith, then everything else is secondary to following through with your promise.

TADDY
What if your promise is success? What if you have faith in happiness?

ISAAC
Life’s more complicated than that. You have to ask yourself: Do I live to deal? Do I have what it takes to rub elbows with the guy in the Big Chair, knock on the door of the schmuck in the Corner Office? When the time is right, you have to strike.

ISAAC
Be specific. Who are you holding the knife to?

ISAAC
I’m talking generalities.

TADDY
You think the Company, our Company, can do better?

ISAAC
Yes.

TADDY
You think that by being more aggressive we can do better?

ISAAC
Aggressive, maybe. Decisive, definitely. You’re like a father to me, Taddy. I say that maybe now’s finally the time’s to let the son take over the show…

TADDY
You will follow through?

ISAAC
I will follow through.

TADDY
You have the faith?

ISAAC
I have unbending faith and stalwart determination.

TADDY
Regardless of consequence?

ISAAC
Total sacrifice.

TADDY places a hand on ISAAC’s shoulder.

TADDY
It pleases me to hear you say these things, Yitzhak. So much the more so, knowing how it will please you to hear that I have sent an official letter to the Board of Directors, specifying my nominee for successor to the post of Chairman of the Board and Chief Executive Officer.

ISAAC
Your successor?

TADDY
Yes. My retirement is long overdue. And since what I say the Board does, I wanted to see you this morning, and congratulate you a little in advance. God bless you, little Isaac, you’ve come a long way, baby. You’ve passed every test — and tomorrow, it’ll be official, the whole world will know.

ISAAC
I, I- I, I mean, I — You mean, you mean that I, I am to succeed you at the Company?

TADDY
Our Company, yes.

ISAAC
I, I- I mean, that, I, I should —

TADDY
— Go ahead, Isaac. Speak up.

ISAAC
I, I, I —

ISAAC breaks free, hurriedly put the baseball back on the shelf, and heads rapidly for counter.

ISAAC
I have to make a quick call.

TADDY runs and grabs ISAAC, drags him back to the stool, sets him down again, then sits next to him.

TADDY
No-no-no. Come. Come sit.

ISAAC
You know, I don’t really deserve this, I mean, I’m still kind of young, and, I,
well, you know…

TADDY
Don’t be afraid, little Isaac. You’ll do just fine! I have faith in you.

ISAAC, visibly tense, glances at his fancy watch.

TADDY, completely relaxed, talks to ISAAC slowly and methodically.

TADDY
People deny the Holocaust these days in order to legitimize fascism. Oppressors have long known that real political power rests in the hands of the middle class. Genocide and gentility mix only after the fact. You have to market hatred properly first, sanitize it, make it an acceptable reaction to extreme circumstance that only authoritarism can combat. So you package it as “order,” “liberation,” the right to realize a certain cultural destiny to win over the bourgeosie, blah-blah-blah. Neo-Nazis deny history just so they can repeat it, you know.

ISAAC winces, taps his fancy watch.

ISAAC
Taddy…

TADDY
We are indeed “The Chosen People,” as we certainly have chosen ourselves. But I have to ask myself. At what sacrifice? And chosen for what benefit? We have suffered so much to sustain our separation, but what has been brought upon us, and what have we brought upon ourselves? Has there been an alternative strategy? Is assimilation a sin, or a long-term survival tactic? In business, the temptation to “sell out” is not even a temptation, it’s a sound marketing strategy. You adjust yourself to circumstance, you do what must be done to maximize your own interests. Have we wisely done this, as a people? As a race? As a religion?

ISAAC
Taddy… I really need to make another call…

ISAAC tries to stand, TADDY pulls him back down.

TADDY
But I’m not talking assimilation, I’m talking cooperation. Prejudice works both ways. I tell myself that there’s two things I should always keep an eye on: My weight, and my racism. People are complicated. The Holocaust, being such a human tragedy, was also a rather complicated affair. Simplifying it, labeling every German a killer and every Jew a victim, is to rob both German and Jew of a complex historical reality, is to take away as much heroism as add to the disgraceful cowardice. Life is clearly unfair, but there’s a paradox to Genocide: it is founded on the belief, the bare knuckle reality, as it were, of human equality. One does not feel too powerful killing a stupid beast, but to kill an equal, to destroy a superior, even, that, my friend, is power.

ISAAC
Taddy! I have to tell you something!

TADDY
When I was your age —

ISAAC leaps to his feet.

Pause.

ISAAC
Tad Kiel!

TADDY
What?

ISAAC
I have to talk to you…

TADDY
Then talk, little Isaac. You know you can trust me.

ISAAC sits, fidgets, stands, starts to pace.

Pause.

ISAAC
What is experience? What does it mean to be experienced? I don’t know. I guess I’m too young. But can I venture to make a guess? You watch out for mistakes, you jump at opportunities. That’s business, am I right?

TADDY
Speak to me now. Say what you must.

ISAAC
The toughest part of having an opportunity is knowing when to use it. The hardest thing to learn in negotiating is sensing when to act, and when not to —

TADDY
— Now is the time to speak, now is the time to act.

Long pause.

ISAAC
I tried to take the Company away from you this morning. Right as we speak, someone loyal to me is grabbing the reigns in your absence, to put them into my hands.

TADDY removes cigar from his suit, pops it into his mouth.

Long pause.

TADDY
Yes. I know.

ISAAC stands.

ISAAC
Say again?

TADDY
I’ve known the whole time. Planning a Board Meeting without me… Rallying the major stock holders… “The old fellow’s washed up. Company’s on the skids. Where have all the good times gone? Takes a young stud at the helm to fuck with the best of ’em, ha-ha-ha”… And etcetera, etcetera, etcetera.

ISAAC
How did you find out?

TADDY lights and puffs on his cigar. He stands.

TADDY
Izzie told me. He told me about your idea from the very beginning.

ISAAC
My own brother Ishmael did this to me?

TADDY
Very smart, knows where to keep his loyalties.

ISAAC
That uncivilized bastard.

TADDY
I of course would have found out anyway.

ISAAC
Fuck.

TADDY
You must realize, little Isaac, that if I have acquired any skill over all these years, then that talent is a sensitivity to the raw instinct for survival. And if anyone should ask me what holiness is, what sanctity is all about, then I would tell them with no hesitation that God respects our willingness to survive in the world that He has thus created — and not only survive, but flourish. I will let nothing and nobody interfere with that. I am a Jew in that I continue to persist, and to thrive.

ISAAC
I think I stopped being a Jew when I stopped loving my Father.

TADDY
You are a Jew, and you love your father. Those are the two things that you can never deny. And if you choose, foolishly, to deny them, then you will fail, because that is who you are, and forever will be: A son to your father, and a child of the race.

ISAAC
I just want to be saved. All my life, I’ve waited for that one instant everything makes perfect sense. And then when it finally comes, I can feel it, I know it to be true — and then just as suddenly I realize that my sudden enlightenment has caused all the rules to change, and I’m no better off than I was before.

TADDY
You think that because you’re a star, you shine any brighter than the millions of others? You think that I owe you something? That thousands of years of history count for nothing? And what of the years I put into you, the money I gave you, how I helped you?

ISAAC
I work for you. I work with you. You aren’t doing me any favors. I’m your best sales manager, you said it yourself. Okay, okay, so, you might have opened a few doors for me. But you’ve gotta admit that I’ve helped make the Company — your Company, our Company — what it is today. I’d even go so far as saying that without me —

TADDY
— Yes, that’s right, without you. My Company is now without you. You can pack all your shit up in the morning.

ISAAC
No, Taddy! You can’t do this to me. Give me a chance! You saved me once, save me again.

TADDY
You know no trust. You know no loyalty. You know nothing about respect, tradition, or civility.

ISAAC
We’re running a business, Taddy. What do those things have to do with business?

TADDY
You betrayed me.

ISAAC
I worked hard for you.

TADDY
You tried to run me out my own goddamned Company.

ISAAC
I have the numbers.

TADDY
Numbers? Fuck the numbers.

ISAAC
Don’t Jew me down. I generated millions in revenue.

TADDY
So why? So you could stab me in the back?

ISAAC
You lack the vision.

TADDY
I can see just fine. And right this second, there’s an asshole standing in front of me.

ISAAC
I have my allies.

TADDY
You can stand in line with them.

ISAAC
What are you saying?

TADDY
You’re fired. And tomorrow, we make a clean sweep.

ISAAC
You can’t fire me.

TADDY
Just did.

ISAAC
I’m out?

TADDY
You’re out.

ISAAC
I’m out. I can’t believe I’m out…

Pause.

TADDY walks up to Isaac.

TADDY
When the protecting angel decides to strike, who then can stave his hand?

TADDY slaps ISAAC from the right, his glasses flying off.

TADDY
Kadosh!

TADDY slaps ISAAC from the left.

TADDY
Kadosh!

TADDY slaps ISAAC from the right again.

TADDY
Kadosh!

TADDY then slaps ISAAC from the left, the right, then the left again in quick succession, the force of the last slap knocking ISAAC to the floor.

TADDY
Holy! Holy!! Holy!!!

TADDY puffs on his cigar, and blows smoke into ISAAC’s face.

TADDY
To fight tradition, that I can understand. For what is a cultural heritage, if nothing lies in opposition to it? To be Holy is to be Separate. We have been tormented for three thousand years, and we can be guaranteed survival for another three thousand if only our enemies continue their fight against us. But look at you, born and raised in middle class America, white suburban Jewish trash, desperate for an identity, any identity, even if it should happen to be a Jewish one. But we know, you tried that. To become a Jew meant following your Father, and that you could never allow.

Pause.

ISAAC slowly crawls on floor, looking for his glasses. ISAAC finds them, picks them up.

ISAAC gets off the floor, stands up awkwardly, visibly disoriented.

ISAAC
I have to confess that when I experience a particularly successful orgasm, I see repeating images of swastikas emblazoned across a stormy horizon, as if projected onto my mind’s eye.

TADDY
No shit. So do I.

ISAAC squints, puts glasses on.

ISAAC
Woah.

TADDY
But the difference between my orgasmic swastikas and yours is that mine are drawn from actual memories: the wings of Messerschrnidts built in the slave factories at Dauchau, S.S. armbands marching in unison up the Karlstrasse, and of course the draped flags of the Reich, from the Charnps-Elysee to Warsaw to Rome.

Pause.

TADDY reaches into his pocket and gives Isaac a cigar.

ISAAC nods.

TADDY
You have to understand, Isaac, that there’s a qualitative difference between being a fake, and being a phoney.

ISAAC
Why are you doing this to me?

TADDY lights Isaac’s stogie.

TADDY
I am trying to help you.

ISAAC
I don’t need your help.

TADDY
Now you”re starting to sound like Abraham.

ISAAC
My Father said that God often spoke to him.

TADDY
Yeah, God spoke to Abraham. The only problem was that none of the shit he said was any good… And you? Who do you sound like?

ISAAC takes a heavy drag, exhales a plume of smoke.

ISAAC
Like an American.

ISAAC and Taddy put arms on each other’s shoulders again, face the audience, dance a little as they again sing:

ISAAC and TADDY together:

We love to listen to the Dixie strain!
We love to see the girl we left be-hind us

And that ain’t a josh
She’s a Yankee, by gosh!

Oh-oh say can you see-ee —
Anything about a Yankee that’s a pho-ney?
Anything about our pedigree that’s a pho-ney?

‘Cause —
We’re two Yankee Doodle Dan-dees
We’re two Yankee Doodle Do-or-dies

ISAAC’s phone rings.

TADDY and ISAAC separate.

TADDY walks to the counter, takes the phone, hands it to ISAAC.

TADDY
For you.

ISAAC takes his phone.

TADDY
Shalom aleichem!

ISAAC
Aleichem shalom.

TADDY gracefully exits store, bell tinkles behind him.

ISAAC waits for Taddy to walk out, then sweeps the phone to his ear.

ISAAC
Hello?… What! What!? What are you saying to me?… What is this Mickey Mouse shit? Slow, slow down — What? — I’m out? What do you mean I’m out? Out? Out. I’m really out… Oh, shit… How could this be? How could this have happened? How could you have done this to me?… Hello? Hello! Hello?!

ISAAC slams his phone onto the counter. He tears at hair, paces several moments, then sits down on a stool behind the counter.

ISAAC picks up the adding machine tape, examines it, tosses it onto the floor.

ISAAC puts his head in his hands, shakes himself, mumbles, looks up, surveys the store, smirks.

ISAAC leans back. He sits still for a moment. Then he idly takes a random book from a shelf, flips through it.

ISAAC gazes at ABRAHAM’S hat on hook, removes the hat, puts it on.

ISAAC flips more through the book. He leans back in his chair, puts his feet on the counter.

Front door opens, bell tinkles.

Orthodox Jewish FAMILY enter, holding hands.

FATHER, all-black clothes and hat, long beard and tzitzi with appropriately dressed MOTHER and two small CHILDREN, a girl and a boy.

The BOY wears a baseball cap.

ISAAC looks up at them, takes his feet off the counter, and stands.

The BOY notices the baseball on a shelf, takes the baseball, then starts to toss it up and down.

Pause.

ISAAC clears his throat.

ISAAC
May I help you?

SLOW FADEOUT…

FIN

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Background

I was twenty-five and living in LA when my mother committed suicide, a sadly predictable culmination of her chronic postpartum depression, lonely second emigration, and terrible second marriage. The week before, I phoned my father insisting on an emergency intervention. He chastised me for over-reacting and disturbing him at work, and quickly hung up.

Traumas take time to process, especially life-changing ones, so I felt changing my life was necessary, no matter how long it would take. Following her funeral, the cumulative outrage toward my father reached a fever pitch, yet instead of confronting him, I moved back to my home town of Chicago to get as far away as I could. We became estranged for years.

Avoidance is an effective survival technique, one that I had mastered in childhood. The repressed emotions require a catharsis, with oneself and others. Five years after my mother died, I was beginning to process my feelings about her death and our toxic family’s life together — and realized that my father still held the keys to being released from my burdens.

As the smoke further cleared, I began to understand that my father expected fealty. Born a Jew in Budapest a century ago, surviving the Holocaust, he bore the hallmarks of an Eastern European ethnic minority at the bottom end of the Austro-Hungarian hierachy. In other words, he’d gotten his ass kicked his entire life, and expected his son to kiss his.

The biblical story of God commanding Abraham to sacrifice Isaac always bothered me, deception being a major reason. Figuratively pulling the wool over Isaac’s eyes, Abraham promised that God would provide the lamb, his son not realizing his dire fate until a moment before the Angel stayed his father’s hand. I always wondered how it would have played had he known.

Well, in my metaphorical case I did know — and I didn’t like being sacrificed on the altar of our dysfunctional family one bit. So as an expression of my much-needed and long-overdue catharsis, and in lieu of having the balls to finally let my father have it, I decided to retell the Old Testament tale from the vantage point of a sacrificial lamb refusing to lie down and die.

Around this time back in mid-nineties Chicago, headlines blazed with the story about a famous Jewish bookstore on Devon Avenue being vandalized. I don’t remember if any arsonist was ever caught, but I do recall allowing my festering anger toward my father to suggest the possibility of an inside job. That sparked the drama of Moriah, which I wrote into this two act play.

Rereading and sharing this play after three decades, I’m reminded of writing’s power for self-realization. I usurped the styles of Pinter and Mamet to do on a virtual stage what I knew I shouldn’t do on the other side of the proscenium arch — wreak my revenge. Smart enough to understand the consequences, I still wasn’t brave enough to simply talk to my father.

A few years later, perhaps bolstered by writing this play, I reconciled with him. By then Parkinson’s disease had made an irascible, taciturn man even more inscrutable, but none of that mattered. On his deathbed I spoke to him calmly and kindly, told him everything was OK. I had finally learned my biggest life lesson, that of letting everyone go — especially him.

Here goes…

Moriah

A biblical allegory in two acts

Cast

ABRAHAM Kaufman, bookstore owner, early sixties.
ISAAC Kaufman, his younger son, early twenties.
Tad “TADDY” Kiel, family friend, man in his early sixties.
An Orthodox FAMILY: father, mother, young boy and girl.

Settings

Act One, at night in the winter in the vandalized bookshop, takes place five
years previously.

Act Two, during the day in the spring in the restored bookshop, takes place
presently.

Dedication

For Ira Pilchen, a childhood friend with whom I discussed many of the challenges processed through the writing of this play.

Act 1

Late Friday evening. Winter.

Kaufman’s Jewish Bookstore on Devon Avenue in Chicago.

The store is vandalized.

Boarded front door and storefront down stage. Antisemitic graffiti spray-painted on walls and fixtures, including slogans, swastikas, various antisemitic grafitti. Shelves are toppled, in disarray, with many books scattered across the floor. Pieces of broken glass, splintered wood, torn papers and photographs, various Jewish artifacts and paraphernalia are strewn about.

A lit menorah placed on a counter is the only apparent light source, flickering yellow flames, casting eerie shadows. Occasional lights from passing cars on the street outside might also enhance this mood.

ABRAHAM wears black pants, vest, hat, starchy white shirt, and dangling tzitzit. He is by himself in the store, faces the audience, sweeping the debris on the floor. His back is to a boarded front door.

ABRAHAM
War against the Jews. Wherever we are, wherever we may go, everyone hates us. Our persecution continues. No escape…

Front door opens, bell tinkles.

ISAAC enters, wary, dressed much like ABRAHAM, though noticeably disheveled, carrying a bottle of wine. He stops just inside the shop and stares at ABRAHAM, whose back is turned to him.

ISAAC clears his throat. ABRAHAM doesn’t respond.

ISAAC
Shalom?

ABRAHAM
We’re closed. It’s the beginning of the Sabbath. Go.

ISAAC
The door was unlocked.

ABRAHAM stops sweeping, stares straight ahead, back still to the door.

Pause.

ABRAHAM
They broke the lock. They destroyed everything.

ISAAC
I’ve heard that civilization ends when people cease being courteous to one
another. I’ve come to help you.

ABRAHAM turns, squints at Isaac.

ABRAHAM
No. Civilization ends when people cease believing in the divine. Who are you? Another detective? Insurance company? Or one of them, back to finish the job?

ISAAC
Do you remember when I broke your front window? We were just kids then, playing baseball in the street. Do you remember? I’ll never forget.

ABRAHAM slowly turns back around, resumes his sweeping.

ISAAC removes his hat.

ISAAC
I insisted at the time that my little German neighbor friend threw that ball,
but you didn’t believe me. You knew me too well, you could instantly tell when I was lying to you.

Pause.

ABRAHAM continues sweeping, more rapidly now, back still turned to Isaac.

ISAAC
When you finally got me to admit that I was the one who broke your window, I begged for your forgiveness, saying that it was, of course, an accident. After all, we were only children. Such things happen — accidents
happen.

Pause.

Sweeping continues, more urgently.

ISAAC
But you slapped me. You told me that accidents don’t happen. You told me that everything has a reason, and that being your favorite son, I was always
accountable for my actions, and that nothing I ever did was any good. You hit me again, and made me confess: you made me tell you not only that I was the one who smashed your storefront window, but that I had meant to smash it.

Sweeping stops suddenly. ABRAHAM stares ahead.

ISAAC
You then said that my punishment would be the confession itself, would be the knowledge not only that I had done wrong, but that you knew all along what I had done, and why I had done it.

ABRAHAM slowly turns to face Isaac.

ISAAC
And of course, I promised never to do it again.

Pause.

ABRAHAM
Why have you come back?

ISAAC
I read about this mess in the papers today. You’ve become rather talked about, in spite of yourself. And I figured that when this whole city knows more about Abraham Kaufman’s bad luck than his own son does, well, maybe the time had finally come for Isaac to pay his dear old Dad a little visit.

ABRAHAM
Five years. Five years. And if this tragedy never would have happened to me?

ISAAC
Then some other tragedy eventually would have, huh? Tragedies have been a part of our family since we were a family. Without something terrible to hold us together, we never would have made it. I guess it’s fitting that tragedy has brought us together again here tonight. our own little reunion?

ISAAC places the bottle of wine on counter.

ISAAC
Shall we celebrate?

ABRAHAM
Yeah, shabbat shalom. Look, look at what they have done. I told you that it would eventually happen to us here in America. Everyone thought I was crazy to think they hate the Jews here, too, that they would take action against us even here. But this. This. Just like back in the old country! Do you see what they have finally done to us?

ISAAC
Not to us, father, but to you. I have nothing to do with this place. This shop, all that’s in it, all that’s left of it, is yours — all, yours.

ABRAHAM
This shop, my work in it, put you and your brother through school. This shop put clothes on your back, and food in your mouth!

ISAAC
Of course. I know. I just told you.

ISAAC extends his arms.

ISAAC
I’ve come back to help you.

ABRAHAM turns his back, resumes his sweeping.

ABRAHAM
In five years, not a phone call, not a letter.

ISAAC
You could have called me. You could have written.

ABRAHAM
I didn’t know where you were. One day, schluss, gone.

ISAAC
Mr. Kiel knew: Tad Kiel, your dear old family friend from after the war, before the war, even. And you knew that he knew.

ABRAHAM
Ach! Don’t talk to me about him.

ISAAC
Does he still want to buy your store?

ABRAHAM
We are still friends.

ISAAC
Business, or pleasure?

ABRAHAM
He offered to help, I told him I didn’t need any.

ISAAC
Looks like you could use all the help you can get…

ABRAHAM
I had times, times here in this shop, I could have used your help.

ISAAC
Wasn’t the impression I got. When I could have worked here, you didn’t seem to want me around.

ABRAHAM
A son is one thing, an employee is another.

ISAAC
And you were “The Boss,” either way.

ISAAC clicks his heels together, salutes.

ISAAC
Yes sir, no sir. What did you always tell me? “Discipline builds character.” I am forever indebted, thank you, father!

ISAAC bows, and tips his hat.

ABRAHAM throws down the broom, faces ISAAC, pointing.

ABRAHAM
You don’t know anything. When I was your age I brought out my whole family, supported them in a country where we didn’t even speak the language. For me, nothing but worry and work for the past forty years. And you? My spoiled American dreamboy? What do you have? What have you worked for? I am “The Boss”? Does that bother you? You think I was hard on you? Look at yourself now: I should have been harder. Maybe then you would have come to something. You want to “help me”? Help me by getting the hell out my store.

ABRAHAM picks up the broom again, turns away.

Pause.

ISAAC
Then what? Wait another five years for some other disaster?

Abraham
You are the only disaster.

ISAAC
I am what I know. I am what I have been taught. What you taught me.

Abraham
Five years!

ISAAC
And so little has changed… Playing the same old tunes, singing the same old songs… Hard to get away from others. Even harder to get away from ourselves, right? Something always brings us back. You’re right, you’re right. Five years…

Long pause.

ABRAHAM stares ahead, away from ISAAC.

ABRAHAM
You are so thin and pale.

ISAAC
At least I’m not old and decrepit.

ABRAHAM turns.

ABRAHAM
Do I look so bad?

ISAAC
No, not so bad.

ABRAHAM scrutinizes ISAAC.

ABRAHAM
You look terrible. Dirty. You have a cut finger?

ABRAHAM grabs his finger, ISAAC pulls it away.

ISAAC
An accident. Just tired. Been busy, you know.

ABRAHAM
Yes. Very busy. Now with this mess more busy than ever before.

Pause.

Father and son stare at each other.

ABRAHAM then leans his broom against a case, removes a rag from his pocket, picks a book off the floor, dusts it, and places it on a tall shelf.

ISAAC watches him. ABRAHAM repeats the procedure.

Several moments later, ISAAC sighs, removes handkerchief from his own jacket, begins to assist his father. They work together in silence.

ABRAHAM
What’s the matter with you? You’re going to mess up that jacket. Take off the jacket.

ABRAHAM helps ISAAC take off his jacket.

ABRAHAM
This is dirty. Your shirt, is wrinkled. Where did you get this? Ach! You have a job? Look at you. You want to get a job, you have to look nice. Who would hire you, looking like this?

ABRAHAM brushes ISSAC’s shirt, straightens his collar.

ABRAHAM
Are you hungry? Something to eat? We clean a little bit, we go get a little something. Good restaurants up the street, remember?

ABRAHAM hangs the jacket on back of a chair. He picks up another book, cleans it, hands it to ISAAC, who places it on a shelf.

Pause.

ABRAHAM speaks as he picks up books, cleans them, and hands them to ISAAC to place back on a shelf.

ABRAHAM
To survive the camps, we dreamed about our freedom. We would have willed anything for liberation, any possibility. If God had to destroy everything we once knew and considered sacred, then so be it, so long as we could one day leave those terrible places.

ISAAC
You never wanted to talk about the war, even when I asked you.

ABRAHAM
The Americans finally came, I returned to my city and found a wasteland. Rubble everywhere, broken glass and broken bodies. Destruction and the tools of destruction surrounded us, as if God truly mocked us, as if for our freedom we really had to sacrifice everything we once knew and loved. All I could think about then was running away. You can’t imagine the conflict. Every street held a memory, every building was like a part of
my own body and my soul. But most everyone I knew, either dead or never to return. I was free, but I no longer had a home.

ABRAHAM stops picking up and dusting the books, then turns and faces ISAAC.

ABRAHAM
Running away, I thought I left my suffering behind. But it has followed me. These wounds never heal, because the guilty never cease their torment. You see? Forever a Jew, forever will I be hated and hunted down. If I have for a second forgotten, then the world will remind me.

They look at each other for a moment.

ABRAHAM suddenly hugs ISAAC.

ISAAC
You’re alive. You seem OK.

Abraham
The burden of the living is having to remember.

ISAAC
We”re as strong or as weak as we make ourselves to be.

ABRAHAM
You’re alive.

ISAAC
Who knew?

They separate. ABRAHAM throws his arms up.

Abraham
But my shop? Everything wrecked!

ISAAC
Let’s fix it.

ABRAHAM
You know, the living have the burden of responsibility, too: work. What is a man without his business?

ISAAC
Is that all you are?

ABRAHAM
And who are you?

ISAAC
I’m your son, last I checked.

ABRAHAM
Who will help me survive now? You?

ISAAC
I told you. I’m your son. I’ve come back to help you start all over again.

ABRAHAM
Ach! When have you worked? When have you supported yourself?

ISAAC
I work.

ABRAHAM
I heard that Taddy helps you.

ISAAC
I do what I can to survive. That you refuse to help me is another matter.

Abraham
Help you? Why should I help you? How can I help you when I haven’t even seen you? When you abandoned me?

ISAAC
I didn’t know what else to do.

Abraham
You left me.

ISAAC
I was disappointed. I felt so alone. You can’t even imagine.

ABRAHAM
I was always here for you. I wanted to help you.

ISAAC
I tried so hard to make you proud of me. I just didn’t know what to do, what was really expected of me. I didn’t understand.

Abraham
I wanted to teach you.

ISAAC
All I learned from you was how to hate myself. I felt so utterly dependent on you. Not only did I have to endure constant failure, but the shame of your watchful eyes.

ABRAHAM
I wanted to protect you.

ISAAC
Protect me? From who? From you?

ABRAHAM
I didn”t want to lose you like I had lost everyone else.

ISAAC
You push people away. You pushed me away.

ABRAHAM
People were taken away from me. My whole life, everything taken away.

ISAAC
I was afraid of you.

Abraham
I didn’t want to dominate you, or tell you what to do. I just didn’t want you to leave me.

ISAAC
Well, I left.

Abraham
I know.

ISAAC
I hurt.

Abraham
I know.

ISAAC
I came back…

Abraham
Hmmm.

Long pause.

ISAAC
I’m sorry.

Pause.

ISAAC lowers his head, extends his arms, walks toward his father as if wanting to embrace him, glancing up. ABRAHAM turns away, rubs his chin as if speculating. ISAAC retreats, arms fallen, head again lowered.

ABRAHAM
Few weeks ago little Yehudi my helper went to Israel, you know, study in some yeshiva there. Near the Wall, they say it’s very nice.

ISAAC
He’s Orthodox?

ABRAHAM
No, but who likes to stay in Chicago?

ISAAC
Could have moved to Florida.

ABRAHAM
This big clean up job, Yehudi now gone, you know, not that he deserved half his goddamned pay anyway, the bum. Meanwhile I’m getting older, I have the varicose veins, can’t chase the kids away, these winters, the night so cold, very dark, ach. Hard for an old man to run such a shop all by himself these days.

ISAAC
You’re telling me! And in this economy, too. I tell ya, the professionals even have a problem finding a decent job. Pay the rent. The cost of modern love. We’re all getting buried.

ABRAHAM
Taxes. Licenses. Insurance? Shoplifting, too. They browse, then they steal what they can, the gonefs.

ISAAC
These days you need a job to get a job.

Abraham
Know someone?

ISAAC
Shit, Dad, it’s too true. Nobody cares about nothing anymore. A damn shame.

ABRAHAM turns, walks slowly toward Isaac.

ABRAHAM
You have a place now?

ISAAC
In Chicago?

ABRAHAM
In Chicago.

ISAAC
A place, in Chicago. Small place. Not much sun.

ABRAHAM walks closer.

ABRAHAM
You have a girlfriend?

ISAAC
You know, they come, they go.

ABRAHAM stops.

Abraham
Shikses? Black girls? I catch you schtumping a schwartze and I —

ISAAC
— Jewish girls, Pop. They like to be treated nice.

ABRAHAM
You don’t treat them nice?

ISAAC
Takes some money to treat them nice.

ABRAHAM
How much money to treat them nice?

ISAAC
A little money, a little sunshine…

ABRAHAM turns around, faces away from Isaac.

Following exchange happens in double time:

ABRAHAM
Shop is closed on the Sabbath —

ISAAC
— Hate to work Saturday night.

ABRAHAM
Open early Sunday morning —

ISAAC
— I hate to sleep in.

ABRAHAM
Overtime —

ISAAC
— I can use the extra money.

ABRAHAM
Shovel the snow —

ISAAC
— Good exercise.

ABRAHAM
Run the register? —

ISAAC
— ”A” in Calculus.

ABRAHAM turns around, faces ISAAC.

Back to regular time.

ABRAHAM
In what?

ISAAC picks a random book off the ground, brushes it off.

ISAAC
No respect.

ABRAHAM
No respect at all.

ISAAC
“Cultural diversity.”

ABRAHAM
Diversity, schmiversity.

ISAAC
Who do you think did this to us?

ABRAHAM
Oh, I don’t know. The Patels, the Arafats, the Schwartzes. They all hate us.

ISAAC
And you hate them right back?

ABRAHAM
Hate is the best defense. Hatred alerts you to the dangers surrounding you.

ISAAC
Shouldn’t life be more than that?

ABRAHAM
We must survive. That’s what life is, survival. Have you seen what has happened to this neighborhood?

ISAAC
“Same as it ever was.”

ABRAHAM
Are you blind? Here in Chicago the last month, in one night they burned five synagogues and schools. Something happens in the Holy Land, next day we don”t just read about it in the newspapers, we see it right in front of our faces. Trained terrorists attack Europe: our fellow Americans torment us here. Things are getting worse, not better. What can we do?

ISAAC
Work?

Abraham
Work.

ABRAHAM gestures, father and son bend to lift a tall, fallen bookshelf off the floor, heave it up to stand where it belongs, straighten it, dust it.

They start to stock it with cleaned books, various knick-knacks from the floor again. Roles reversed: this time ISAAC cleans and ABRAHAM stacks.

ABRAHAM
Destruction is so easy. A rabbi once told me that God tirelessly created the world in six days, just so people could fuck it up in six thousand years.

ISAAC
Did that rabbi also try to sell you real estate?

ABRAHAM
This shop is my life. When they came in here late last night, they attacked me, my own heart, my own soul. This shop is my temple, and now I’m again a refugee who has to experience another diaspora.

ISAAC
An Exodus can bring together as much as it can take apart.

ABRAHAM
We have been running for more than two thousand years, Isaac. When are we going to stop? When can we call the world our home, when can we call it our own?

ISAAC
We carry our heritage with us. In our culture, in our ideas.

ABRAHAM
Yes, and look what they do to our ideas…

ISAAC cleans another book, hands it to ABRAHAM.

ABRAHAM takes book, squints at it.

ABRAHAM
What kind of a job is this? Look at this!

ISAAC
It’s dark in here, Father, I can’t really see that well.

ABRAHAM
What is the matter with you?

ISAAC
What’s wrong, Abba?

ABRAHAM starts pulling books that ISAAC has cleaned from the bookshelf, shaking them then tossing them back to the ground.

ABRAHAM
Look at this. And look at this one, just as bad. I said what”s the matter with you? I slap you across the face, you hear me? You can’t do anything right? I sent you to the college? So you learned how to be so stupid. You are worthless, do you know that? You do such a job? Shame! You stupid donkey.

ISAAC stares icilly at ABRAHAM.

Pause.

ISAAC
What did you say?

ABRAHAM
What?

ISAAC
What did you just say?

ABRAHAM
We have much work left to do. My shop here? You remember? You see? Come on.

ISAAC
Tell me again what you said. I’m not a child anymore. Let me hear what you just said.

Long pause.

ABRAHAM
I don’t have to prove myself, you hear me? I’m in this store from seven in the morning past eight at night, six days a week for twenty years. Dirty customers and dirty neighbors, nobody cares. And here you are, my wonderful American son, I work my hands to the bone for you, my sweat, my blood, what thanks do I get? Nothing, from nobody nothing. You come here from nowhere, you — you —

Isaac
— Say it.

Abraham
We get a little something to eat. Too dusty in here. Not enough light. Are you tired?

Pause.

ISAAC
Say it.

Abraham
Patel Brothers have a very good curry. You don’t know what you eat, but you like it. How about the deli? The pastrami, very good —

ISAAC
— Say it!

Long pause.

Abraham
Worthless.

ISAAC reaches up, grabs top of the bookshelf, and heaves it forward.

ABRAHAM and ISAAC dart out of the way as the half-filled bookshelf crashes back onto the floor, dozen of books along with various items spilling out and down.

Extra long pause.

ISAAC
Maybe working together’s not such a good idea, after all.

Abraham
Get out. Get the fuck out of my store.

ISAAC
Your store?

Abraham
My store. Get out.

ISAAC
Your problem.

ISAAC kicks a book across the floor.

ISAAC
Insurance?

ABRAHAM
Get out!

Pause.

ISAAC
Tell me: You covered?

ISAAC kicks another book.

ISAAC
Money for repairs?

ABRAHAM
Get out!

Pause.

ISAAC
What’s this?

ISAAC points, kicks another object.

ISAAC
Looks like they left ooooooone.

ABRAHAM
GET OUT!

ISAAC rubs his hands on his pants, and nonchalantly sits on the downed bookshelf, surrounding by debris.

ISAAC
Who’s going to pay for this damage? The glass? The shelves? The paint? Not to mention the junk in here they ruined. Now this?

ABRAHAM
None of your goddamned business.

ISAAC
Business? What do you know about business?

ABRAHAM
I have been in my own businesses, running my own businesses, for longer than you have been alive.

ISAAC
Oh. This business. What about that offer Taddy made? You know, to take the store off your hands?

ABRAHAM
Forget about Taddy already. We play cards, we have a little dinner, we drink a little apricot brandy.

ISAAC
I heard that Taddy made you an offer long before the place even got smashed up.

ABRAHAM
Yeah? And he made me another offer, gave me a little insurance advice after they ruined it, early today. So? So?

ISAAC stands, faces ABRAHAM.

ISAAC
So? So, why don’t you think about it?

ABRAHAM
What difference does it make to you, you gangster. You hoodlum.

Pause.

ISAAC
Taddy, you know that Mr. Kiel. He thinks I’m a Good Man.

ABRAHAM
Then maybe he”s better at rummy than psychology.

ISAAC
Taddy figures that I’d do a fine job running this place. Fine job.

Abraham
You? Run this store? Run my store? You make me laugh.

ABRAHAM sighs heavily, bends, struggles to lift fallen bookshelf. Fails. Tries again. Struggles. Gasps. Fails again.

ISAAC watches, hesitates, then finally helps ABRAHAM lift bookshelf.

ISAAC
I’ve been to college, you know. You once said it yourself, I got brains.

ABRAHAM
With no common sense.

They struggle with the bookshelf.

ISAAC
I’m well traveled, too, been to that Liverpool, England, you know.

ABRAHAM
Yeah? You, the Beatles, and Adolf Hitler.

ISAAC
Hitler visited England?

ABRAHAM
According to his sister-in-law.

ISAAC
Never trust family stories.

ABRAHAM
What about family?

ISAAC
I learn fast.

ABRAHAM
Forget even faster.

The bookshelf is finally up.

ABRAHAM and ISAAC lean against it to rest.

ISAAC
Taddy gave me a the chance to work for him, I turned it down. Why don’t you give me a better one?

ABRAHAM starts to clean and stack books again. ISAAC offers to help.

ABRAHAM skeptically scrutinizes books, grimaces, then accepts them from ISAAC and places them on a shelf as he speaks.

ABRAHAM
Ach! Taddy disappeared when the Germans came. I heard many rumors, various stories that he worked as a kapo in Auschwitz, that he was a runner for the black market in Budapest, that he impersonated a fascist officer in Rome, that after the war he pimped in Paris, and sold contraband in Amersterdam. Me, I don’t know and I don’t care. I don’t talk to him about the war, and I don’t talk to him about business. Maybe that’s why we are still friends.

ISAAC
He’s rich, he has connections, and taking over businesses is his business, his specialty.

ABRAHAM
I don’t care. I work for my money. Things in life you don’t talk about, and people in life you never do deals with, understand?

ISAAC
But aren’t you afraid?

Abraham
Of who? that Hebrew Hooligan?

ISAAC
No, no, not Taddy. He’s a businessman. I mean here. Aren’t you afraid that something like this will happen to you again?

ABRAHAM
A Jew should always be afraid. But he should never live as though he were. That’s why I stay.

ISAAC
Run away.

ABRAHAM
No! You are the one who runs away.

ISAAC
Why stay then?

ABRAHAM
This is my home now.

ISAAC
This bookstore?

ABRAHAM
What else? We dreamed of America as children, watched the American movies. We didn’t want to return to the Promised Land, we wanted to be stars in Hollywood. Here since after the war, I still do not know this country, I do not understand it, and I to this day feel on foreign soil. So to answer your question, yes, I am afraid. Everyone is afraid.

ISAAC
Retire.

ABRAHAM
What would be left for me then?

ISAAC
Come on. Why take all this pressure? Business, can’t be all that great. Now
this mess. I know you like to complain, so maybe, this time, your complaints are legit. The neighborhood really has changed, you know that.

ABRAHAM
I have a responsibility to stay.

ISAAC
To who?

ABRAHAM
To my community, to my family, to the Jewish people.

ISAAC
The Jews wander.

ABRAHAM
No one is forcing me to leave.

ISAAC
Redecorating?

ABRAHAM
We have endured so much. I have endured so much.

ISAAC
Why endure more? What are you trying to prove?

ABRAHAM
I am trying to make a living. Earn a living. Once upon a time, that had meaning to people.

ISAAC
Why here? Why now? Why this way?

ABRAHAM
This is what I know. This is who I am.

ISAAC
So if you don’t sell out to Taddy, then you’re going to let me help you?

ABRAHAM
We talk about it.

ISAAC
I thought we already did.

ABRAHAM
You have to learn.

ISAAC
Learn what? How to say “Hello, Mr. Schwartz… How are you this evening Mrs. Rosenberg?… New candles for the Sabbath Mrs. Stern? Oh, did you hear that old Meyer is screwing Mrs. Pfeigenbaum? Didn’t think the old fuck had it in him… No Rabbi, ‘fraid we don’t have it but perhaps we can order it, a little something extra for you? But of course…”

ABRAHAM
Learn the philosophy, the culture that we continue here. We are an intellectual people, books are like food to us. You must know about our tradition.

ISAAC
What do you know about it? Tell me. What do you even know about these books you sell?

ABRAHAM
I know history. I lived history.

ISAAC
You are a victim of history. You almost died of history.

Abraham
Yes, and that’s exactly why people must remember. The new generation must learn about the Holocaust, so that it will never happen again.

ISAAC
What kind of guarantee is that? I have a friend, yes, a Jew, and he went to an Ivy League college. One day, almost by chance, the Holocaust was discussed. The question was raised as to whether the concentration camps should be destroyed, or if they should be left intact, as living memorials of genocide.

ABRAHAM
And of course he said they should be kept?

ISAAC
He raised his hand, stood up, and announced to the class of future American financiers and engineers that the camps should all be burned to the ground.

ABRAHAM
Eh?

ISAAC
Yes. He insisted. Because he felt that otherwise, they would be used all over again.

ABRAHAM
So! You agree with me.

ISAAC
How so?

ABRAHAM
That persecution continues. That genocide hangs over us like the sword of Ha’Shatan himself?

ISAAC
Jews don’t believe in the Devil, Dad. They don’t need to, since they’ve got their God. But anyway, that’s not the argument. Long as you have Jews, you’ll have antisemitism.

Abraham
Then why do you mock me?

ISAAC
I’m not mocking, I’m not even arguing. You’re absolutely right. I mean look at this act of violence and racism right before our eyes, an active symbol of everything that we fear. All I’m saying is that you should pack it up and go already before it’s too late. Retire. Let me handle it. You’re too old to continue such a fight.

ABRAHAM
But the shop must continue. The tradition must continue.

ISAAC
I’ll take good care of it. I’ll spread the word. Give it to me. As my rightful inheritance.

ABRAHAM
What about your older brother Izzie? The first born son is in line, he should get this store, and not you.

ISAAC
Izzie does very well for himself out in the wilderness of business already. He doesn’t need it like I do. If anything, he’ll start his own… Besides, he knows nothing, he’s no intellectual, like you and me. He doesn’t have my sensitivity, our sensibility. You know that I’m the inevitable candidate, the only candidate, to continue our family and cultural tradition.

ABRAHAM
This shop is meaningful to many people.

ISAAC
I can respect that.

ABRAHAM
You respect nothing and no one. You are lazy, foolish, inexperienced. You care only about yourself.

ISAAC
I am intelligent and assertive, but also practical. My heart goes out to my family, my people.

ABRAHAM
You’re so clever, so assimilated, but not yet American enough to make it on your own? That’s why I had to send you money for years, only to find out that Taddy started to do the same thing?

ISAAC
I’m working for Taddy now.

ABRAHAM
I thought you said you turned him down.

ISAAC
At first, but then I changed my mind.

ABRAHAM
When? Five minutes ago?

ISAAC
While you were busy insulting me — again.

ABRAHAM
Mail room? Secretary? Something mysterious and macho?

ISAAC
You owe me this shop. How can you live with yourself, big house in the suburbs, vacations all over the world, when for years now I have lived in a dump, starving to death, the whole world passing me by? The best years of my life, wasted, while you’ve lived here like a king.

ABRAHAM
I came to this country with nothing — nothing — do you understand? No family, no money, no education, after surviving the greatest tragedy of all our history, and I have built what I have now all on my own. I have given you a home, fed you, sent you to school. What else could I, as your father, possibly do for you?

ISAAC
You have done enough. You have done too much.

ABRAHAM
I don’t know what you’re talking about.

ISAAC
I worshipped you. Do you understand? The only holiness I have ever known was how I felt about you. I looked up at you as if I looked into the eyes of a God. You did everything I ever wanted to do, everything I could have imagined doing, since I imagined those things for the very reason that you were the one doing them.

ABRAHAM
Then why treat me like a fucking peasant?

ISAAC
Because that’s exactly what you are. It took me a long time to realize that. You did not encourage me. You did not guide me. You did not support me. You did not love me.

ABRAHAM
I can show you photographs of the things I bought for you. Ask our friends how I treated you, go ask Taddy.

ISAAC
Sure, all the toys, and the vacations, and the weekend meals in restaurants. But underneath our boring middle class American family life was a scourge, a creeping shadow of guilt, shame, and denial. On the surface, we lived, breathed, and carried on, while every moment was thick with your subliminal abuse, your vicious persecution.

ABRAHAM
Every night I picked you up at Hebrew school. I got you hair cuts, ice cream, new shoes.

ISAAC
With no love, do you hear me? Worse, you actively sought my self-destruction. Just short of continual physical violence, you attacked with your accusations, claiming that I had done something horribly wrong, that I was guilty of an unnamable, unknowable crime from which I could never vindicate myself, for which you could never forgive me, and I should forever feel ashamed. And since you could do no wrong — for a God could never be in error — every problem was my problem, every mistake, solely my fault. The closer I tried to get to you, the farther you pushed me away, and I could only blame myself for my own alienation and shame. Not only did I suffer from your rejection, but from the feeling that I deserved it, that I was unworthy of even the horrible life you had constructed for me, for our entire family. Of course I failed. How could I have possibly done otherwise?

Pause.

ABRAHAM
You are my favorite son! How could you be saying these things, how could you even believe these things?

ISAAC
Because I now know exactly how you treated me by finally coming to understand how I viewed myself. I have failed because I believed myself to be a failure, because from birth you have fit me with the chains of being the favorite son of a slave.

ABRAHAM
I survived. Do you understand? While so many others died, I survived.

ISAAC
And the burden of that survival you have placed onto the shoulders of your own family. Who else could you punish, who else could be more vulnerable to the collective guilt and horror you brought with you? I was a threat to you, I had everything that you never had, and the deepest part of you could never accept that. I threatened you, and you systematically went about destroying that threat, destroying my soul in the process.

ABRAHAM
I have done everything so that my son could be an American.

ISAAC
“Rock ’n’ roll!” “Yippie-Kike-Eh-Ky-Oh!” An American, born under the red, pasty white, and blue. Land of the Free, Home of the Brave, bursting with success in the land of milk and honey, mortgages and credit cards, ready for the good life. Everything sounds like an endless gingerale afternoon, so peachy keen. Then why have I failed?

ABRAHAM
We spoiled you. Izzie is at least from the old country, too. He knows struggle, he knows what it takes to make it in the jungle that is the world. You never had to push yourself, to work. You always had it easy.

ISAAC
Is misery easy? Is unhappiness easy? Is alienation and isolation and shame easy? I was set up to fail. My totally fucked life is proof that you raised me exactly as you intended. You took away by giving, you could only give by taking away.

ABRAHAM
I never chained you down, I never prevented you from doing whatever you wanted to do.

ISAAC
You ate away at my soul, slowly, methodically, cutting me down in subtle
ways, destroying my personality, perhaps in ways you yourself didn’t even
realize or understand. It took me years to figure out what was happening to me, who was really to blame. You brought me to this pathetic state. It’s your fault. You therefore owe me the chance I need to fix it. You owe me this shop.

ABRAHAM
I’ve already given you everything I can give.

ISAAC
You”ve given me nothing but misery and madness. I feel unclean.

ABRAHAM turns away, looks down.

Long pause.

ABRAHAM
We still have very much to do here.

ISAAC
Closed tomorrow?

Abraham
Open on Sunday.

ISAAC
Think we’ll be done by then?

ABRAHAM
Work all day tomorrow, on the Sabbath no less about because we have to, hopefully the windows will be replaced.

ABRAHAM and ISAAC, with some hesitation, resume the cleaning and stacking. They work silently for several moments.

ISAAC stops, scrutinizes the books, and points to various items and entire shelves as he speaks.

ISAAC
Shouldn’t we put these back in proper order?

ABRAHAM
What order?

ISAAC
Look. Over there you’ve got Hebrew cookbooks amid commentaries on Maimonides. Over here you’ve got travel guides to the Dead Sea next to a biography of Rashi. And right here, this pile, you’re mixing fancy translations of the Talmud with Israeli comic books, political analyses of the Holocaust with dirty Yiddish joke books, mystical Kabbalist codices with radical right wing newspapers.

ABRAHAM
I don’t sort, I sell.

ISAAC
You mean you don’t understand.

ABRAHAM
Understand what? I know where everything is, I know and respect my customers.

ISAAC
This place is no bookstore. This is no more than a cheap gift shop, a tourist kiosk, a Hebraic cultural rip-off.

ABRAHAM
What are you talking about? I cater to my community. My customers, idiots that they are, are always right, and they get exactly what they want, exactly the way they want it. You see, everything has its place, and I know where it all is. You look: The spiced yortzheit candles are over in that part there, designer passover plates next to the Zionist bumper stickers. The floral prints with Esther and Golda were on that wall, readings from the Baal Shem Tov, cassette tape speeches of Moshe Dyan, Woody Allen all on that other rack. You see? Don’t worry, we’ll get to those other things in a little while, fix it all up again. One step at a time, the books, let’s arrange the books for now, then the tchotchkes…

Pause.

ISAAC
You don’t know how to run this store.

ABRAHAM
The store has been running fine until this happened.

ISAAC
You have a responsibility.

ABRAHAM
Hmmn?

ISAAC
You have a responsibility to our tradition.

Abraham
I have the deepest responsibility to my family.

ISAAC
You have betrayed both.

ABRAHAM throws down his cleaning rag, turns and faces ISAAC.

ABRAHAM
I have had enough. Who are you? What has become of you? What kind of a person are you?

ISAAC
Am I? What about the people who did this to you, huh? What kind of people could come in here and try to destroy an old man’s livelihood, huh?Hoodlums, degenerates, not even bothering to take your money, not even stealing anything, just messing things up, doing this just to hurt you. Doing it for no practical reason than to spread more hatred and fear. Scapegoats, that’s all we are: Just like the rabbis and politicians keep telling us.

ISAAC goes back to his work.

Long pause.

ABRAHAM
What did you say?

ISAAC
Nothing. Just shaking my head at all the prejudice and ignorance in this world. Where does this one go?

ABRAHAM
How did you know that nothing was taken?

ISAAC
What?

ABRAHAM
You just said that nothing was taken from here, that the money, then, it must have been left in the register?

Pause.

ISAAC
Yeah. And? So?

ABRAHAM
And they only smashed and painted, they did not take anything from here?

ISAAC
What’s your point?

Abraham
How would you know that?

ISAAC
Know what? About this place? I told you, I read the papers, I got concerned, I wanted to see you.

ABRAHAM
I read them, too. They didn’t say anything about the money. About anything being taken. That’s because I never told them. I never told anyone.

ISAAC
Yeah, right. Great. So the vandals didn’t take anything, right?

ABRAHAM
The papers didn’t say either way.

Long pause.

ISAAC
Ohhhh, ho ho. I get it. Just another cheap-assed scheming Jew. Sure, you probably hit this joint yourself for the insurance money. Naw, you wouldn’t do all this. But what you would do is come back here, see what happened, only to report a drawerfull of cash missing, and report it stolen. Make something out of nothing, take shameless advantage of your own bad luck. Typical.

ABRAHAM stares at ISAAC.

ISAAC
If you could lie about the money in the register, then you could do anything. It all makes sense to me now.

ABRAHAM
Eh?

ISAAC
How much did you report? “Thousands taken” probably. “Pile of money underneath the prayer shawls,” no less. Ha ha ha. Give me a fucking break. What a fraud you are, what a liar and a phoney and a fake.

ABRAHAM
Yitzhak. How, do you know, that I, wasn’t, robbed?

ISAAC
I know you, Father. You probably just made it all up.

ABRAHAM
Made what up?

ISAAC
The money in the register. Not to mention the “various valuable articles” stolen, ha ha ha ha ha. They didn’t take anything, And you, know it.

ABRAHAM
I know it. But how do you know it?

ISAAC
So you actually admit to lying to the insurance people!?

ABRAHAM
Tell me. How do you know what happened here?

ISAAC
Because you’re a cheap, scraggly old man.

Pause.

ABRAHAM
How did you know that nothing was taken from this store?

ISAAC
You must have lied for the insurance. You couldn’t afford to fix the place if you didn’t. You lied. You lied to get more money. I know you lied. You’re a liar. You’ve been lying to me all your life. You could easily lie this time for the money.

ABRAHAM
How do you know that I lied?

Pause.

ISAAC turns away from ABRAHAM.

ISAAC
Leave me alone.

ISAAC reaches onto a shelf, picks up a ceremonial silver knife, examines it intently, recoils and accidentally drops it. Knife falls to floor. ABRAHAM watches ISAAC bend to pick it up, place it delicately on a shelf.

ISAAC
Whoops.

ISAAC rubs a finger, shakes his hand, sucks on finger as if bleeding.

Long, penetrating pause.

ABRAHAM stares at Isaac, approaches, points to him.

ABRAHAM
You.

ISAAC
Me. What?

ABRAHAM
You! You did this.

ISAAC backs away.

ISAAC
What? Did what?

Abraham
You wrecked my store.

ISAAC
You’re a crazy old Jew.

ABRAHAM rushes up to ISAAC.

ABRAHAM
You did this, you came here last night, you wrecked it, you wrote all these things on the walls, so you could come back, and I would be afraid, and I would give the place up to you — You! — You were afraid I would give it to Izzie, you were afraid that I disowned you — You! — You who aren’t even able to make it in the world on your own. You, my favorite son.

ISAAC
You are old.

ABRAHAM
Confess! Tell me. Tell me what you did.

ISAAC retreats, walks to shelves, removes two silver goblets, places them on the counter next to the bottle of wine he brought. He picks up bottle, uncorks it, looks at ABRAHAM, pours wine into both goblets. ISAAC takes the goblets, walks to ABRAHAM, hands him one. Toasts.

ISAAC
L’Chaim. “To life.”

ISAAC drinks. ABRAHAM stares. ISAAC returns to the counter, puts the goblet down. ISAAC turns to face his father.

ISAAC
Will you hit me, Father? Will you slap me across my face? Or better, now that I am a man, will you call the police again? This time, to turn me in? Will you send me up the fucking river, Pops?

ABRAHAM puts the goblet down.

Pause.

ABRAHAM stares ahead, then turns to ISAAC.

Abraham
You are no longer my son.

ISAAC
Fuck you.

ABRAHAM turns away.

Abraham
He is dead to me.

ISAAC
Better late than never.

ABRAHAM
He is dead to the world.

ISAAC
It’s a small world, after all.

ABRAHAM tears at his clothing, starts to chant the Mourners’ Kadish while ISAAC rants at the same time.

ISAAC
Who did this, Father? — You! — You. Tell. Me. You tell me who did this, then. You want to put me away? Do you have the fucking guts to do to me what you always wanted to do? My fate now rests completely in your hands — You! — You want me to go to jail? You want me to have a record, you want to ruin my life? Come on! I know you’re listening to your ghost of a son, your favorite son, always a ghost to you anyway. You are the sole witness. Confess! Put me away! You have that power. You tell me who did this, and then you go and tell your police friends. Tell me, Father. Tell me who did this crime. Tell the whole fucking world.

ABRAHAM completes the Kadish, walks dejectedly to a stool, slumps down on it, stares emptily ahead of him.

Extra long pause.

ABRAHAM
Ach!… Look at this mess… This street has gotten full of Africans, Indians, Pakistans… Dark, deceitful people… They should all go back to where they came from… Dirty, uncivilzed, lazy people… Jealous of The Chosen, taking their anger on the hard working Jews, who make everything happen…

ISAAC
I can’t hear you, Father. What did you say?

ISAAC takes a baseball from a shelf, starts to toss it up and down in air.

ABRAHAM
Italians, Polskies, all happy when any Jew suffers … French, English, they kicked us out of their countries… The Irish wouldn’t even let us in… Of course the Germans, guilty forever… Never to be forgiven for six million dead, their souls crying out for the State of Israel…

ISAAC
I said I can’t heeeeeeeeear you…

ABRAHAM
The Arabs, of course, Palestinians… Palestine is the ancient home of the Jews, our birthright… “Hear oh Israel, the Lord is Our God, the Lord is One”… They must have broken into my store, trying to take back that which has been mine, that which has been ours forever and ever…

ISAAC drops the baseball, which rolls across floor.

ISAAC goes to the counter, and picks up the lit menorah. He holds menorah in the air in front of ABRAHAM.

ABRAHAM rocks himself slowly. He stops, reaches over to shelf, takes the goblet full of wine, recites a prayer.

ABRAHAM
“Blessed are You, God, Ruler of the universe, who creates the fruit of the vine… Boreh p’ri hagafen…”

ISAAC
Do you know what they call the time after the destruction of the Second Temple?

ABRAHAM drinks the wine. He holds the goblet, and stares blankly ahead.

ISAAC
They call it “The Dark Ages”…

ISAAC blows out all the candles.

B L A C K O U T.

End of Act 1

Act 2 is continued here…

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Act 3, Scene 1

FADE IN with EMERGENCY LIGHTS on Ms. Flurry’s reception area, moments later. The sky is still out, but the telephone is ringing: Five, six…

MR. EDWARDS, MR. STEVENS, MS. ROBERTS and MS. FLURRY, their respective brawls having just come to a sudden halt and MR. PETERS, done egging them on, are all transfixed by the ringing telephone.

MR. LAWRENCE enters the reception area (slightly disheveled and holding his suit), also riveted by the ringing telephone.

MS. FLURRY approaches the telephone, hesitates a few moments, and reaches for the receiver. MS. FLURRY clears her throat and answers the telephone in her best professional manner:

MS. FLURRY
(into receiver:)
Thank you for calling Red Swelling, LP, this is Ms. Flurry speaking, how might I assist you?

Pause.

MS. FLURRY
Yes.

Pause.

MS. FLURRY
No.

Pause.

MS. FLURRY
Maybe.

Pause.

MS. FLURRY
That’s certainly possible.

Pause.

MS. FLURRY
I don’t know.

Pause.

MS. FLURRY
Are you sure?

Pause.

MS. FLURRY
Really?

Pause.

MS. FLURRY
Oh, dear.

Pause.

MS. FLURRY
Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha!

Pause.

MS. FLURRY
Please hurry.

Pause.

MS. FLURRY
Thank you.

Pause.

MS. FLURRY
Bye-bye.

MS. FLURRY puts down receiver.

Long pause.

MR. LAWRENCE
Well?

MS. FLURRY
Jack says he’ll be here in a few minutes.

MR. LAWRENCE
“Jack”?

MS. FLURRY
He’ll be right up.

MR. EDWARDS
Who the hell is Jack?

MR. STEVENS
Who does Jack work for?

MR. PETERS
How did he get through?

MS. ROBERTS
Where is Jack? Can he help us?

MR. LAWRENCE
Why didn’t Jack want to talk to me?

MS. FLURRY
He’s coming right up.

MR. PETERS
Right up? From where?

MS. FLURRY
Well you’re just going to have to ask him that when he gets here.

Slight pause.

MR. LAWRENCE
We’re saved!

MR. EDWARDS
Excellent work, sir.

MR. STEVENS
Very good.

MR. PETERS
Nice.

MS. ROBERTS
Anybody notice that the sky’s still out?

MS. FLURRY
Jack’s on his way!

MR. EDWARDS
Who the hell is Jack?

MR. LAWRENCE
Why didn’t Jack call me?

MS. FLURRY
He’s coming right up.

EMERGENCY LIGHTS sputter on and off, and then the stage goes into total BLACK OUT.

Pause.

From the darkness: MS. ROBERTS screams.

MR. LAWRENCE
Shhhhhhh!

Pause.

MR. EDWARDS
Is everybody all right?

MS. FLURRY
I can’t see anything!

MR. PETERS
Don’t worry, neither can anyone else.

Pause.

MS. ROBERTS
Who touched me?

Silence.

MS. ROBERTS
I said, who touched me?

Silence.

MR. EDWARDS
I didn’t.

MR. STEVENS
I didn’t.

MR. PETERS
I didn’t, either.

Pause.

MR. LAWRENCE
I most certainly did not.

Pause.

MS. ROBERTS
Liar.

MR. LAWRENCE
Excuse me?

MS. FLURRY
Shhhhhh!

MR. LAWRENCE
What?

MS. FLURRY
Shhhhhh! Did you hear that?

MR. LAWRENCE
Hear what?

MS. FLURRY
“That”.

MR. LAWRENCE
“What”?

Faint whistling can be heard.

MR. PETERS
That sounds like…

MS. FLURRY
Shhhhhh!

Whistling continues, and now distinctly sounds like the song “Pop Goes The Weasel.” Whistling continues, and on the “Pop” part of the melody:

EMERGENCY LIGHTS flicker back ON, illuminating Ms. Flurry’s reception area.

The whistling continues for another round as MR. LAWRENCE, MR. EDWARDS, MR. STEVENS, MR. ROBERTS, MS. FLURRY and MS. ROBERTS all look at each other in the dim light.

MR. EDWARDS
I think it’s coming from your office, sir.

MR. LAWRENCE
My office? What are you talking about?

MR. EDWARDS
The whistling, sir.

MR. LAWRENCE puts his suit back on, adjusts his tie, and straightens himself up.

MR. LAWRENCE
Wait here.

MR. LAWRENCE enters his office.

FADE OUT on Ms. Flurry’s reception area.

Scene 2

FADE IN on Mr. Lawrence’s office.

JACK sits in Mr. Lawrence’s chair at his desk. MR. LAWRENCE walks in, and stands in front of his desk.

Pause.

MR. LAWRENCE
Mr. Edwards!

Slight pause.

MR. LAWRENCE
Mr. Edwards!

MR. EDWARDS rushes into Mr. Lawrence’s office.

MR. EDWARDS
Yes, sir?

MR. LAWRENCE
What is this man doing in here?

MR. EDWARDS
I don’t know.

MR. LAWRENCE
What is this man doing in my chair?

MR. EDWARDS
I, I —

MR. LAWRENCE
— Find out.

MR. EDWARDS
Yes, sir. Mr. Peters!

Slight pause.

MR. EDWARDS
Mr. Peters!

MR. PETERS walks into Mr. Lawrence’s office.

MR. PETERS
Yeah?

MR. EDWARDS
What’s this guy doing in Mr. Lawrence’s chair?

MR. PETERS
Looks like he’s sitting.

MR. EDWARDS
Don’t be a smart-ass. Who is he, and what’s he doing here?

MR. PETERS
I don’t have the faintest idea. Why don’t you ask him?

MR. EDWARDS
(to MR. LAWRENCE:)
Mr. Peters doesn’t have the faintest idea as to who this man is, or why he’s sitting in your chair, sir.

MR. LAWRENCE
That’s completely unacceptable.

MR. EDWARDS
Sir?

MS. FLURRY and MS. ROBERTS poke their heads in the door and silently enter.

MR. LAWRENCE clears his throat, and turns to face JACK, still sitting behind his desk.

MR. LAWRENCE
I founded this values-driven company from a single office in Redondo Beach, California less than ten years ago, and we now have locations in twenty-five states, the District of Columbia, and maybe an office or two in Florida. Led by our “Five Guiding Principles,” we’re a different kind of company, one where the creativity and individual strengths of each of our coworkers are discovered and then encouraged so that they find their own “Path to Excellence”. Our unique training and employee development system ensures that we provide our clients with astonishing customer service experiences that are truly unique and second to none!

Extra long pause.

JACK
That’s the biggest load of horseshit I’ve ever heard in my entire life.

Slight pause.

MR. LAWRENCE
Who are you? How did you get in here?

JACK
Name’s “Jack”. You folks seem to be having some problems…

MS. FLURRY
I’ll say.

MR. LAWRENCE
What are you doing in my chair?

JACK puts his feet up on top of Mr. Lawrence’s desk.

JACK
I figure you must have had a pretty nice view, huh? I mean, back when the sky was still there and all.

MR. LAWRENCE
Where’s the sky? What happened to the sky?

JACK
Don’t ask me, pal.

MR. EDWARDS
Answer the man’s question.

Silence.

MR. STEVENS
Who sent you?

Silence.

MR. PETERS
How’d you get in here?

JACK
In? Whoa, for years I’ve been dyin’ to get out.

MR. LAWRENCE
I’ll have you know that we’re all about values here.

JACK
What the fuck does that mean?

MR. LAWRENCE
Our company’s mission, vision, and values are the foundation of how we do business. They’re the DNA of our firm!

JACK
So? Who gives a shit?

MR. LAWRENCE
Without them, we’d be just like everyone else.

JACK
You’re exactly like everyone else. The only thing that might make you a bit different is that you seem to be more full of shit than most.

MR. LAWRENCE
We’ve won awards.

JACK
The sky’s out. Nobody cares.

MR. LAWRENCE
We were Number One.

JACK
Not, anymore.

MR. LAWRENCE
What gives you the right —

JACK takes his feet off the desk, and sits up.

JACK
You want my help out of this mess or not?

Slight pause.

MR. EDWARDS
Yes.

MR. STEVENS
Yes!

MS. FLURRY
Yes!

MS. ROBERTS
Yes, please…

Pause.

MR. LAWRENCE crosses his arms across his chest.

MR. LAWRENCE
Absolutely not.

JACK shrugs, leans back, and puts his feet back on Mr. Lawrence’s desk.

Pause.

MR. LAWRENCE drops his arms and turns to address his EMPLOYEES.

MR. LAWRENCE
If you don’t mind, “Jack” and I would like to have a few words in private.

Slight pause.

MR. LAWRENCE
A few words.

Slight pause.

MR. LAWRENCE
A few words. In private.

Slight pause.

MR. LAWRENCE.
If you don’t mind.

MR. EDWARDS, MR. STEVENS, and MR. PETERS shuffle out.

Slight pause.

MS. FLURRY and MS. ROBERTS also leave.

MR. LAWRENCE goes to the door and closes it.

Scene 3

MR. LAWRENCE turns and approaches the desk, then gestures to a chair.

JACK
Go ahead. Have a seat.

MR. LAWRENCE
Thank you.

MR. LAWRENCE sits.

Pause.

MR. LAWRENCE
Jack. It’s “Jack,” right?

JACK
That’s right.

MR. LAWRENCE
Have we ever met?

JACK
I seriously doubt it. But you never know.

MR. LAWRENCE
It’s just that you somehow seem familiar to me. Familiar, as if we’ve met.

JACK
You tell me.

MR. LAWRENCE pivots and looks toward Ms. Flurry’s reception area.

MR. LAWRENCE turns back to JACK, and then leans closer.

MR. LAWRENCE
If you don’t take your feet off my desk, and get out of my chair, and tell me exactly what’s going on with the sky, then I’m going to have you killed.

Pause.

JACK
How about one-for-three?

MR. LAWRENCE
Come again?

JACK
One-for-three. You’re a star salesman, or at least you were back in the day, so you’re bound to be a numbers guy. One-for-three, which is thirty-three point three-three-three-three-three percent. That’s a terrific return, don’t you think?

MR. LAWRENCE leans back.

JACK
They go on endlessly, you know.

MR. LAWRENCE
What? What goes on endlessly?

JACK
The threes.

MR. LAWRENCE
Which threes?

JACK
All the threes in a third.

MR. LAWRENCE
A third? You’re sure?

JACK
Absolutely sure.

MR. LAWRENCE
I’ll have to think about that.

JACK
A third is actually thirty-three point three-three-three-“three-three-three”-forever. The threes. They go on and on, they never stop.

MR. LAWRENCE
That’s what you mean. Yes, that’s right. They don’t. The threes, they never stop. You must be a numbers guy, too.

Pause.

JACK
So?

MR. LAWRENCE
So.

JACK
So: One-for-three. You in?

MR. LAWRENCE
Which one?

JACK
Which what?

MR. LAWRENCE
Which of the three?

JACK
My feet off your desk, me out of your chair, or I tell you exactly what’s going on. Go ahead and pick one of the three.

MR. LAWRENCE
That’s mighty generous of you.

JACK
Thank you.

Slight pause.

JACK starts to whistle “Pop Goes The Weasel”.

MR. LAWRENCE
What if I asked you to get out of my chair?

JACK stops whistling.

JACK
What about it?

MR. LAWRENCE
In order for you to get out of my chair you’d also have to take your feet off my desk. That combo move would actually make it two-for-three, or sixty-six point six-six-six-forever percent.

JACK takes his feet off Mr. Lawrence’s desk and gestures.

JACK
Ah, ah, ah! Sneaky, sneaky, sneaky! Clearly a man who’s always negotiating. Always dealing and wheeling, and working those figures! Now I know why you’ve made all the big bucks.

JACK puts his feet back on Mr. Lawrence’s desk.

Pause.

MR. LAWRENCE
Tell me what’s going on.

JACK
That’s your decision? That’s your choice? That’s the one of your one-for-three?

MR. LAWRENCE
Tell me exactly what’s going on.

Slight pause.

JACK
You mean, with the sky?

MR. LAWRENCE
With the sky.

JACK
The whole sky?

MR. LAWRENCE
Tell me. Now.

Pause.

JACK takes his feet off the desk. JACK leans close. MR. LAWRENCE leans close.

Slight pause.

JACK
I don’t have the faintest clue.

MR. LAWRENCE stands.

MR. LAWRENCE
You realize, as I’m sure you do, since how can you help but not, that I’m an extremely powerful person.

Slight pause.

JACK leans back. MR. LAWRENCE remains standing.

MR. LAWRENCE
I have resources.

JACK puts his feet back up on the desk.

MR. LAWRENCE
I can make things extremely difficult for you.

JACK examines his fingernails and rubs his nose.

MR. LAWRENCE
One call, that’s all it would take. One call and I could have you taken out.

JACK
“Taken out”?

MR. LAWRENCE
Taken care of, that’s right. For good.

JACK picks up the phone, and hands it to MR. LAWRENCE.

JACK
Go ahead. Make it good.

MR. LAWRENCE puts the telephone receiver to his ear, listens for a moment, then puts the receiver back into its cradle.

MR. LAWRENCE sits back down.

Slight pause.

JACK starts to whistle “Pop Goes The Weasel” again.

MR. LAWRENCE
Please stop that.

JACK continues whistling.

MR. LAWRENCE
Please?

JACK stops whistling.

MR. LAWRENCE
Thank you.

JACK
You’re welcome.

Pause.

JACK
Tell me something I don’t know.

MR. LAWRENCE
Excuse me?

JACK takes his feet off the desk, and leans closer.

JACK
Tell me a story. Make me laugh.

Pause.

MR. LAWRENCE
I was once just like everybody else.

JACK guffaws and sits back.

JACK
I love it! Go on…

MR. LAWRENCE
Back when I was just starting out, I had no idea what I was good at, I had no idea who I was. I just kind of fell into sales, really. At first I wasn’t even any good at it, but I didn’t give up, and eventually realized that I had the knack.

JACK
The “knack”? What do you mean by “the knack”? The knack for what?

MR. LAWRENCE
For selling.

JACK
Yes.

MR. LAWRENCE
For sales. I had the knack, a natural ability, you know, a God-given gift for convincing total strangers to buy products and services from me they usually didn’t want, and often didn’t even need.

JACK
Tell me more… Tell me more…

MR. LAWRENCE
That ability, for sales, for selling, combined with hard work and perseverance, made me good at what I did. I was more than just “good,” in fact, I was great at selling, at sales: I soon found out that I was born to sell.

JACK
“Born to sell,” wow. What did you sell?

MR. LAWRENCE
Selling this, selling that, it didn’t matter. I had the look. I talked the talk. I turned my good looks into great looks by learning how to dress sharp and going to the gym and getting an excellent haircut. And I turned a few choice buzz words into millions and millions in sales when I didn’t even know what the hell I was talking about most of the time. But it didn’t matter, it made no difference at all.

JACK
It didn’t?

MR. LAWRENCE
No, none whatsoever. In fact, it seemed that the less I knew about what I said and what I sold, the more I said and the more I sold. Does that make any sense?

JACK
All the sense in the world.

MR. LAWRENCE
I really was a star. Local sales leader, to regional sales champion, to sales manager, to sales director, to sales VP. When they couldn’t promote me any higher they made me a partner. And when they couldn’t pay me any more commission they gave me shares. And when they couldn’t give me any more shares I sold them and started my own company — This company, in fact, quickly soaring to Number One, and still growing.

JACK applauds.

MR. LAWRENCE
All right. Enough.

JACK stops.

MR. LAWRENCE
What do you want?

JACK
What makes you think I want something?

MR. LAWRENCE
Everybody wants something.

JACK
You’re sure?

MR. LAWRENCE
Absolutely sure.

JACK leans a bit closer.

MR. LAWRENCE
I know people. I sense what they want, and I hold back on what they need, feeding it to them nice and slow. That’s what’s made me so good at giving them what I want them to want, so I get them to give me what I want.

JACK
And what did you want?

MR. LAWRENCE
What everybody wants.

JACK
Everybody?

MR. LAWRENCE
Everybody, no exceptions.

JACK
Zero percent, huh? OK, what is it that everybody wants? What is it that you wanted?

MR. LAWRENCE
I wanted to look good. I wanted to kick ass. I wanted to get laid.

JACK
And did you?

MR. LAWRENCE
“Three-for-three.”

JACK
A hundred percent! My God can you convert a potential buyer! If you’re such a proven mind reader, tell me what I want.

MR. LAWRENCE
You want me to tell you what you want?

JACK
Sure. Try me.

Slight pause.

MR. LAWRENCE
You want to take everything that I’ve earned, everything that I’ve worked so hard to get, away from me.

JACK
Now that’s a bold statement. Why would I want what you have? Why would I want to take everything away from you?

MR. LAWRENCE
Money. Power. Sex.

JACK
Let’s play “one-for-three” again!

MR. LAWRENCE
I’ve had enough. I want answers. I want them now.

Slight pause.

JACK
“Want, want, want.” With all this wanting all about, how am I ever going to discover the real Mr. Lawrence?

MR. LAWRENCE
You said it yourself: Why would you care?

JACK
Why not?

MR. LAWRENCE
I said enough. Talk to me.

Slight pause.

JACK
You’re a mover and a shaker. Big guy like you. We already know all about what you wanted. But what is it that you really need?

MR. LAWRENCE
No more games. Now it’s your turn. You tell me.

Long pause.

JACK pulls a BOTTLE of scotch and two glasses out of Mr. Lawrence’s desk. JACK opens the BOTTLE, and pours liquid into each glass. JACK closes the BOTTLE, and lifts his glass, gesturing for MR. LAWRENCE to the do same. MR. LAWRENCE does.

They toast.

JACK
“To the sky.”

MR. LAWRENCE
“To the sky.”

JACK and MR. LAWRENCE
“Cheers.”

JACK and MR. LAWRENCE clink glasses and drink. JACK refills both glasses, then slides one to MR. LAWRENCE. JACK leans close.

JACK
Back when I was just starting out, I had no idea what I was good at, I had no idea who I was. I just kind of fell…

FADE OUT on Mr. Lawrence’s office.

Scene 4

FADE IN on Ms. Flurry’s reception area.

MS. FLURRY sits at her desk while MS. ROBERTS stands as far away as possible. MR. EDWARDS stands by Ms. Flurry’s desk while MR. STEVENS stands as far away as possible (near MS. ROBERTS).

MR. PETERS just kind of stands there.

Long pause.

MR. STEVENS
What are they doing in there for so long?

MS. FLURRY
Don’t worry. Mr. Lawrence will work things out.

MR. PETERS
Work what out?

MS. FLURRY
The sky. The business. Everything.

MR. PETERS
That guy? You’re smoking crack.

MR. STEVENS
Yes, what makes you so confident?

MS. FLURRY
He built this company up from scratch. I’ve watched it grow —

MS. ROBERTS
— I’m sure you have.

MS. FLURRY and MS. ROBERTS glare at each other hatefully.

MS. FLURRY
I’ve known Mr. Lawrence a long time. He’s gone through a lot, but he’s always come out on top —

MS. ROBERTS
— I’m sure he has.

MR. PETERS
What was that, ladies? I’m not sure I heard you…

MS. FLURRY
Whatever happened, at the end of the day, he was always right. Sure, he’s sometimes a real pain in the ass, and sometimes he can be really mean to people, but he’s always been right about the things that counted.

MR. STEVENS
Always?

MS. FLURRY
He signs the checks. And the checks have never bounced.

MR. PETERS
So? Not a lot of good that does us now.

MS. FLURRY
This business wouldn’t even exist without him.

MS. ROBERTS
But that doesn’t always make him right.

MS. FLURRY
Is that what your attorney said?

MS. ROBERTS
Is that what your husband said?

Slight pause.

MR. STEVENS
What about you, Mr. Edwards? You suddenly a silent partner?

MR. EDWARDS
I don’t always agree with him, or necessarily like how he manages this business, and I often think he’s talking pure nonsense. But I’ve been his business associate a long time, and I have to admit that I respect the man. What about you, Mr. Astonishing?

MR. STEVENS
Let’s just say I think he’s amenable to excellent business recommendations.

MR. EDWARDS
Nobody’s perfect.

MR. PETERS
Well, I hope your Fearless Leader and our boy Jack figure something out, because I’m getting hungry.

MS. ROBERTS
Me too!

MR. PETERS starts to rummage around inside a file cabinet.

Slight pause.

MS. ROBERTS
I miss my parents, my friends, my whole world, and I’m worried about them. What do you think is going on out there?

MR. STEVENS
Maybe we’re right, and the sky’s gone out there, too. Maybe it’s gone out everywhere.

MR. EDWARDS
Don’t leap to conclusions. We’ve been in worse situations and Mr. Lawrence steered us clear.

MS. FLURRY
I have faith.

Slight pause.

MS. ROBERTS
I’m afraid.

Pause.

MR. PETERS finds and pulls out a pack of matches and a box of birthday candles from the file cabinet.

MR. PETERS
Ah ha! Matches and candles!

MS. FLURRY
Oh thank goodness for our employee development initiative.

MS. ROBERTS
You’ve got to be kidding.

MS. FLURRY
We used to have cake and ice cream for the whole crew on every corporate employee’s birthday. But then we cut it down to just cake. And then we cut it down to just cake on only those birthdays celebrated by new employees. And then we just cut it.

MR. STEVENS
Soon things like that will change, trust me on this. Phase II of “Making Things Astonishing” will focus on —

MR. PETERS
— OK, who’s coming with me?

Silence.

MR. PETERS stands next to the closed stairwell door.

MR. PETERS
Not everyone speak up at once.

Silence.

MR. PETERS opens the stairwell door and props it open with his foot.

MR. PETERS
Anybody?

Silence.

MR. PETERS lights a match, and then lights one of the birthday candles.

MR. EDWARDS
What are you doing?

MR. PETERS
“Happy Birthday, to you / Happy Birthday, to you / You look like a useless corporate executive / And you act like one, too” What does it look like I’m doing? I’m outta here.

MR. STEVENS
The stairwell is pitch black.

MR. EDWARDS
We’re more than fifty stories up.

MS. FLURRY
It’s not your birthday, is it?

MR. STEVENS
The candles won’t last.

MR. EDWARDS
You’ll run out of matches.

MS. FLURRY
You’ll get lost down there, dear. Why not wait a few minutes? Mr. Lawrence will —

MR. PETERS
— Wanna make a wish? You people are useless and insane. I chose to be a temp. You know why? So I wouldn’t have to commit to working with crazy people like you. So I wouldn’t find myself in a steady but mind-numbing and soul-destroying job. So I’d still have the balls to make otherwise obvious life-affirming decisions, just like this one.

Silence.

MR. PETERS enters the dark stairwell, and begins to close the door behind him.

MS. ROBERTS
Wait!

MR. PETERS stops closing the door and swings it back open.

MS. ROBERTS
I’ll do it. I’ll go with you.

MS. ROBERTS walks over to the door and takes MR. PETERS hand in hers. MR. PETERS and MS. ROBERTS take one last look at MR. STEVENS, MR. EDWARDS, and MS. FLURRY.

MS. ROBERTS and MR. PETERS turn and head downstairs, the door closing behind them.

Long pause.

MS. FLURRY
Would you gentlemen like some coffee?

MR. STEVENS
How? The power’s out.

MS. FLURRY
I think there’s still some left in the pot…

MR. EDWARDS
Now what are we going to do?

MR. STEVENS
What do you mean?

MR. EDWARDS
The temp is gone.

MR. STEVENS
So?

MR. EDWARDS
He was going to fix the sky.

MS. FLURRY
Well, maybe he can try and fix it from down there.

Scene 5

The door to Mr. Lawrence’s office suddenly swings open, and MR. LAWRENCE comes stumbling out, visibly intoxicated and carrying a half-empty BOTTLE of scotch.

MR. LAWRENCE
No need, there’s no need for that.

MS. FLURRY
Mr. Lawrence!

MR. EDWARDS
Mr. Lawrence?

MR. STEVENS
Where’s Jack?

MR. LAWRENCE
Everything’s going to be, it’s really, don’t worry, it’s, I —

MR. LAWRENCE wobbles wildly on unsteady legs, and starts to fall backwards, until he is caught and lifted back to his feet by JACK, who has entered the room behind him.

MS. FLURRY
Mr. Lawrence, are you alright?

MR. LAWRENCE
I’ve never been, never-ever been, better.

MS. FLURRY
Oh, good.

MR. EDWARDS
Sir, what’s going on?

JACK helps MR. LAWRENCE to Ms. Flurry’s desk, and sits him down on top of it. MR. LAWRENCE puts BOTTLE of scotch onto the desk as JACK straightens him up a bit, adjusting his tie and suit coat.

MR. STEVENS
What have you done with Mr. Lawrence?

JACK
Relax, and have a seat. Mr. Lawrence and I tossed back a few, had a good man-toman, and took care of some business. Right, Mr. Lawrence?

MR. LAWRENCE
Ab-so-loot-ely, Jack.

JACK stands back, and gestures for MR. LAWRENCE to proceed. MR. LAWRENCE makes a visible effort to pull himself together, stands awkwardly, steadies himself, and then addresses the group:

MR. LAWRENCE
I want to let all of you know that, well… I’m sorry.

As MR. LAWRENCE says the word “sorry”:

THE SKY CHANGES: The sky in the window behind them very, very gradually begins to turn back on, almost imperceptibly shifting from darkness to a pale, almost sickly light yellow…

MR. LAWRENCE
Although I’ve known all along that I’ve been treating my employees like pure garbage, it’s only just today, today when the sky went out, that I finally realized just how terrible a manager I’ve been. Not just a terrible manager, but an absolutely h-h-horrible, horrendous human being.

THE SKY CHANGES: The yellowish sky progressively gets lighter and brighter, shifting in hue to a brighter yellow color…

MR. LAWRENCE
It’s been bad enough that I started out a slave driver only to turn into a pompous ass. Worse still, I’ve become a shameless hypocrite. All that talk about “the customer experience” when I couldn’t care less about our customers, and, frankly, I couldn’t care less about any of you, my employees, either.

THE SKY CHANGES: The sky gets brighter and brighter as MR. LAWRENCE continues…

MR. LAWRENCE
It’s all been a mask, people, petty play acting to hide my own weaknesses and insecurities. No matter that I’m the boss, no matter that I’m filthy rich, no matter that I’m far more successful than I ever would have dreamed. None of that could change me as a person. None of that could make me any more of the man that I know now I haven’t had the inner strength or common human decency to become.

THE SKY CHANGES: The sky is now as yellow as the sky used to be blue, bathing the inner offices with its warm yellow glow.

MR. LAWRENCE
So please, let me… after all that I’ve done, after all these years… Please let me say to each of you, from the depth of my heart: I’m sorry.

MR. LAWRENCE slumps back onto the desk, grabs the scotch BOTTLE, and takes a big swig.

Long pause.

MR. STEVENS applauds hesitantly, then stops.

Slight pause.

MS. FLURRY
That’s utterly pathetic.

MR. EDWARDS
I agree. Absolutely revolting. What’s happened to you?

JACK approaches the elevator, presses the “up” button. Elevator goes “bing!”

MR. LAWRENCE
Jack and I made a deal.

MS. FLURRY
A deal? What kind of deal?

MR. LAWRENCE
A kind of trade, you might say.

The elevator “bings!” again, the “up” arrow illuminates, and the doors slide open. JACK enters the elevator, and turns to the GROUP.

MS. FLURRY scowls, then walks over to the elevator and enters.

JACK extends his hand, and MS. FLURRY takes it, and turns to look with visible disgust at MR. LAWRENCE:

MS. FLURRY
How could you do this to us? After so many years? After all that we’ve been through? We looked up to you. We thought you were cool. We respected you.

JACK waves “bye-bye” to the GROUP as the elevator goes “bing” again and the doors slowly close.

Long pause

MR. LAWRENCE
Where’s Ms. Roberts?

MR. EDWARDS
Gone.

MR. LAWRENCE
Gone?

MR. STEVENS
With the temp.

MR. LAWRENCE
With the temp?

MR. STEVENS
I’m afraid so.

MR. EDWARDS approaches the desk, and takes the BOTTLE.

MR. EDWARDS
We should have a toast.

MR. LAWRENCE
A toast?

MR. EDWARDS
A toast to the sky coming back on.

MR. LAWRENCE
The sky? Oh, yes, the sky…

MR. EDWARDS takes two glasses from a shelf, fills one for MR. LAWRENCE, one for himself.

MR. STEVENS looks on.

MR. EDWARDS
“To the sky.”

MR. LAWRENCE
“To the sky.”

MR. EDWARDS suddenly STRIKES MR. LAWRENCE across the head with the BOTTLE, knocking MR. LAWRENCE onto the floor behind the desk. MR. EDWARDS goes behind the desk, and starts to relentlessly BEAT MR. LAWRENCE TO DEATH with the BOTTLE.

THE SKY CHANGES: Shifts gradually in color from bright yellow to bright red…

MR. EDWARDS
Your business partner [WHACK!}… Ten goddamned years [WHACK!]… Making you money [WHACK!]… Living in your shadow [WHACK!]… Eating your shit [WHACK!]… Small price to pay [WHACK!]… For leadership [WHACK!]… For guidance [WHACK!]… For se-cur-i-ty [WHACK! WHACK! WHACK! WHACK!]… Now look at what you’ve become [WHACK!]: Pussying-out in the very end [WHACK!], right when we needed you the most [LIFE-ENDING WHACK!].

MR. EDWARDS, visibly exhausted from his efforts, stands and places the bloodied BOTTLE on the desk. MR. LAWRENCE’s lifeless BODY lies prone behind the desk.

THE SKY CHANGES: Shifts from bright red to a deep crimson.

Long pause.

MR. STEVENS
Oh, my, God. What just happened?

MR. EDWARDS straightens himself up a bit, tidying his hair and
fixing his suit and tie.

MR. EDWARDS
Consider this a hostile take-over.

MR. EDWARDS grabs the bloodied BOTTLE and exits the reception area, entering Mr. Lawrence’s (former) office. After a brief hesitation, MR. STEVENS follows him.

FADE OUT on Ms. Flurry’s reception area.

Scene 6

FADE IN on Mr. Lawrence’s (former) office.

MR. EDWARDS sits behind Mr. Lawrence’s (former) desk. MR. STEVENS stands in front of the desk. MR. EDWARDS starts to clean the bloodied BOTTLE with a handkerchief.

Pause.

MR. EDWARDS
What have you got for me?

MR. STEVENS
Phase II.

MR. EDWARDS
Phase II? Of what?

MR. STEVENS
Phase II of “Making The Sky Astonishing”!

MR. EDWARDS
“Making the Sky Astonishing”?

MR. STEVENS
Yes. It’s your new Celestial Experience Branding Campaign.

MR. EDWARDS
Really.

MR. EDWARDS finishes cleaning the BOTTLE, tosses the sullied handkerchief into a garbage can, and places the BOTTLE onto the desk.

MR. EDWARDS
OK, you have thirty seconds.

MR. STEVENS clears his throat, adjusts his tie, and winds himself up to deliver his pitch:

MR. STEVENS
Our marketing experts have discovered through extensive research and development that the essence of sound branding practice has more to do with user perceptions than —

MR. EDWARDS
— Fifteen seconds.

MR. STEVENS
Yes, uh, right.

MR. STEVENS loosens his tie, winds himself back down, and takes a deep breath.

MR. EDWARDS
Ten seconds.

Beat. MR. STEVENS urgently gestures to the window.

MR. STEVENS
Take a look at the sky! The sky is a nice, deep, rich shade of crimson, sir.

MR. EDWARDS
So?

MR. STEVENS
It’s red! The sky is red!

MR. EDWARDS
So?

MR. STEVENS
Red! Red! As in: “Red Swelling, LP”!

Slight pause.

MR. EDWARDS
That is astonishing. Absolutely astonishing.

MR. STEVENS
Thank you, sir.

MR. EDWARDS
Have a seat.

MR. STEVENS sits and opens his laptop computer. Business.

MR. STEVENS
Now then, Phase II will begin with several employee development initiatives…

THE SKY CHANGES: The sky slowly turns from deep crimson to a light shade of green as MR. STEVENS continues his pitch…

MR. STEVENS
…such as the creation of training modules linking the sky’s new hue with the company logo and color palette, employee recognition programs including reinitiating the much maligned yet potentially viable birthday celebrations with both cake and ice cream…

MR. STEVENS stops in mid-sentence as he notices the sky’s evergreening color. MR. EDWARDS stares at MR. STEVENS.

MR. STEVENS gazes at the sky’s transformation with visible surprise, and then fear.

MR. STEVENS
Everything’s gone green, sir.

MR. EDWARDS
Yes, it, has.

MR. EDWARDS suddenly stands, grabs the BOTTLE, and rushes around the desk headlong toward MR. STEVENS.

MR. STEVENS instinctively covers his face with his laptop computer as the BOTTLE is about to come crashing down on —

BLACK OUT.

End.

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