If Only In My Mind;
How February Comes Sooner Now; Act 4/5
Written By ∞intimation∞
4th draft: January,14 2005
EXTERIOR: Daytime- Bright Sunlight. Vision spinning, View- clouds, sky… settles beside a still lake
INTERIOR: Cell-Night-Small window in corner shadows of moon on wall, no overhead lights.
J- Who are you?
Ax- They say, say, they say I’m a gull…
J- Why would They ever say something like that?
Ax- Maybe since I am…
(Ax walks across the room, sits on the mattress in the corner)
J-(loudly)- They sent you to get It out of me, didn’t they!!
J- (fierce)- You aren’t the first one they’ve sent, you know!!
Ax- I’m not on “Their” side, just drop it, I’m not WITH anyone.
J- (seething with unexplainable anger)- I won’t let you take anything, you won’t get it!!
Ax- (confused)- Now just what, What the HELL are you ever talking about!
J- You know! I can recognize voices, you know, to faces, what you are saying… I… I know!
Ax-(Shortly)- How long have you been in this place?
J- I’m not sure, one of the guys with the pills said something about 14 years so far… I just don’t, can’t know or be for sure anymore…(trails off)
Ax- You too eh?
J- Yeah, I used to have a good sense of time and now, now, I, I can’t tell an hour from a day from a year form a nanosecond, I feel like I am in like an, er god’s great magnificent, singular oil painting but all the colours have been washed and all mixed in together… . I just can’t be sure I can be sure a about reality anymore.
Ax- I know… it seems to me like I have been in here somewhere near 30 years, but I know truth from things I hear through my walls… I’ve only been here 14 years.
J- You know nothing, you are just a follower in this huge and open world!
Ax- The pills they stuff down our throats, they make money off of them, with us, it’s a, wait, we are, the industry. The shocks they jolt us with, the way they act like they have just forgotten us… it puts years on, years we shouldn’t have had. The desperation gets to be too much, sometimes it’s more than I can bear.
J- I don’t believe you know nothing of THEM. You must, I can feel you probing my subconscious, sifting through my words when I answer you, hoping to unlock my brain.
Ax- (emphatically)- I’m not with them, and I bet if I did know Them.. I’d hate em for how long they have had me locked up like a beast along side you!
J- If you haven’t been coerced into aiding Them, as you say, then why all of a sudden have they put you here, in this room, where I have spent 14 years… all alone until now, that means no visitors- at least no one who ever stayed very much longer than a cup of Tea has to take to get Ready…
Ax- you can’t honestly believe this has been YOUR room the whole time… You must know that this has always been my room! I have never had a different room. You were just transferred in here yesterday morni…
J-(Interrupting)- You really are crazy! I know this is, and always has been my room. I know this chipped brick…
Jake walks to the corner, points to a brick at just above head level, sure enough, it has Markings in it
J-(pointing to a wall on the other side of the room)- And those markings there on the wall, I made them!
Ax- You’re the crazy one! How could anyone believe you’re anything but pure nuts! I hope “They” really do come after you
J- (sobbing)- This has been my HOME!
J- (wildly screaming)- WHY DO I HAVE TO STAY HERE? It’s not my fault I tell you!
Why do I stay, all I hear is blame from every one!
Ax- SHHHHH, who blames you for what? And shut up, stop fighting with me, or they’ll come in here!
The door clicks and unlocks, two men walk in, Ax hide’s in the shadows while the two men sedate Jake, just before he slips into unconsciousness, Jake notices how the two men completely ignore Ax, he is furious.
Scene 2
Jake wakes up in his cell, looks around for Ax but he isn’t there.
INTERIOR: Cell-Night-Small window in corner, sliver of light shines across the cell floor, no overhead lights.
JAKE-(soliloquy)- There’s only one way to prove that this actually is my room, and They didn’t just sedate me and switch my room, but I know I’m not crazy. I have to check where I scratched my name and the date that I was put in here on the wall. It will say Jake, May 1, 19 - what year was it again? Here I am, doubting myself, and talking to myself, babbling like a crazed fool, they can’t be right, I won’t let them be right.
Curtains fall, but as Jake is going over to the wall, he instead goes to the wall and sits down against it.
End scene
Scene 3 act 2
Jake is sitting against the wall still, slowly banging his head against the padded cell wall. The door opens, and Ax is thrown in. The door is slammed behind him
INTERIOR: Cell-Night-Fully lit with bright and cold “sanitary” neon hospital lights.
Ax- Are you still in here?
J- Yeah, why wouldn’t I be?
Ax- Well, I figured since you get the kingly treatment in here you would have been given a first class room or something..
J- Now I don’t know what on earth you’re talking about!
Ax- Well you go screaming at the top of your lungs, and then they come and drag me away, give me all kinds of treatments, its more like torture I say! And then when I ask if they’re going to punish you too, all they do is give me a blank stare!
J- Yeah, you’re just bloody hilarious, why don’t you shut up now, I have already told you that I am not THAT crazy, not yet anyway!
Ax- It seems like the longer I know you, the more ridiculous and unbelievable your statements seem, I would like to know what could drive you to be so completely crazy as…
J-(suddenly defensive)- Yeah, I’m sure you would love to know all the secrets I’ve got hidden in my head, they’ve been trying to get it all out since I got put in here! They have sent in one after another… everytime they seemed to know me, and to be able to gain my trust in such an easy way. I almost told them the whole thing.
Ax- What whole thing? (Pause) Okay, fine, nevermind, you don’t want to be a friendly roommate, I guess I’ll just have to entertain myself, and maybe let you know a bit about me by just starting to talk… any questions, just ask away. I may be crazy, but I’m also bored and lonely, and I need someone to talk to, even if it’s just myself…or you…or myself
J- Go ahead, I can’t promise I’ll listen all the time, but I actually agree with you on one count, it does get lonely in here, I haven’t heard someone just sit and tell me a story in way too many years.
Ax- I was an author at one time…
J-(slightly interested)- what did you write?
Ax- I though you were just going to sit and listen to a story… I wrote grand tales, epic stories about the daily struggles, the desperations, the most inner workings of my characters…
Ax- One story in particular, it received amazing reviews, the great world, not just ‘American’, novel, a sensation... it was about the way a man’s psyche can be deformed and bent all out of place through the loss of someone he dearly loves, I wrote it after my wife was killed by a deadly disease I had never even heard of before she passe… That god damn February, it was the last one I would ever look forward to.. she died that march, but I knew it would happen in February… and all I can think of is how it was so cold out, I was busy that year, we used to go on vacation together in February, time must pass at a different pace now? No?
J- (laughing with spite) That sounds like the biggest cliché I’ve ever heard, no wonder they put you in here… Just to get you away from the pen and paper, so you would stop that self pitying drivel!
Ax-(with a sudden and strong rage)- you are a soulless bastard!
J- at least I’m not a hedonistic fool! You idolized the past and seem to have seen everyone praise you. I wanted to be a writer at one time too…
Ax-(Savagely) and why didn’t you? Couldn’t bring yourself to give the world something that would last beyond the years of your life, because all your writing was inconsequential, as of the date of publication? (Snumff..)
J- no! Quite the opposite, after I read your meandering books talking about nothing and at the same time attempting to falsely tear up your audiences hearts, pulling them away from their own time, their own lives to think about your own miserable loss! The way you dragged the reader down into the murky depths of your warped reality, you wrote inanely about endless tragedies all telling us how the world was going to hell… And all the while the earth kept spinning, kept on orbiting the sun, electrons, protons, atoms, all stayed constant, your words mean nothing in reality. Did you really expect the world to weep with your unimaginative words? Did you really think they wanted to share your pain? “the way the leaves dropped from day to day, like memories, as they crunched beneath my feet”…or “the garbage and smog filled sunset, clouded from my view”… or “each day a little more, I would miss the way she smiled”. Are those things supposed to show some solemnity or clairvoyance about the world? What is your great insight my friend?
Ax has an ashen look of surprise on his face
J- Oh please, don’t look so damned surprised all the time, I know all the trite things you said in those neatly prepackaged little books of rhetoric you wrote… or should I say borrowed from the greats, each idea you had was nothing more than a diverging path from an established path that had been blazed centuries, decades, even millennia before, you merely took the greatest ideas, the truly original thoughts, expressions and beliefs of others into that recycling plant of a brain of yours and repackaged them.. Have you ever seen a package of something that says new and improved? No? well I have, and I can tell you that that may be acceptable when we are talking about a soup that has had a little more or less salt added in, but when we are talking about LITERATURE… I just will not accept it!
Ax- I wish you could have lost someone you deeply loved. Seen the life sucked right out of their body, and seen the way they lay silently in an eternal slumber, so close to you, yet lifeless and infinitely far away, gone forever. Never again hearing the laugh that you had grown so accustomed to hearing daily, never again to see the smile that could light up a place in your heart like nothing else could.
J-(beginning to weep)- You must think my life started the day I entered this place. Huh? You, a “writer” should know better than anyone that to know a character, you must realize that everyone is constantly thinking, changing, be they meandering down the gentle river of thought, or tumbling down white water rapids of desperation seeking salvation, could they be sailing across an ocean of desire, wishing and seeking a time in their mind when everything seemed ok?. Just as you have your own minds eye, so too do all the other people in this world, myself included. It is what makes us human. You must try at all times to imagine, or even try to deduce, what is occurring in the deepest darkest recesses of the daily thoughts of those people you encounter. One individual lifetime is much too short to grasp what is the true purpose of all that is…and all that isn’t. You must understand everyone you see, and gain their knowledge, only then is it possible to get even a small handhold on what this universe is. Since I was a child I have tried to do this, and it has always been my dream that minds could be read. So I might be able to see life from the eyes of every person I encounter, rather than relying solely on my own limited vision of experiences, and trying to interpret their thoughts and motives based on barely perceptible gestures and twitches, distinguished somehow from their ticks and mannerisms and barely audible murmurs.
Ax- if you have been thinking like this for so long and have been dreaming of being an author, why then did you never succeed? I surely have never heard of you, and quite frankly I’m not sure I would Want to read anything by you, as you seem a very dull and tirading type person.
J- Oh, but I did, I had written a great stack of books, all so interconnected that to publish just a single one at a time would be foolish, as it would make no sense, the markets would Demand more, and I would be unprepared for their demands, thus rushing my writing and making the result of a lower quality, however, once the books were all combined the result startled and amazed even the most seasoned admirer of Literature. They were all in the final stages of creation, myself holding the lone copies of all the materials. And it was right around that time that It happened. My queen. I was driving to. It wasn’t my fault. I did my best. the other driver was drunk. Or fell asleep or... maybe I had too muccc… I pulled her limp body out. But it was already too late. She was taken away from me before I could even pass on my feelings for her, I held her close to myself. I was praying to God to let her in through the gates quickly once she got to heaven, so she wouldn’t be scared in her time between heaven and earth…My tears were the salt that mixed with the salt in her blood, marking the last time I could see her face, the expressions she used to have, her smile, her frown, and the way she would laugh at the little things in life. She went into whatever passes for an afterlife in this crazy world, without me getting a chance to impart my undying love to her.
J- After that I buried my manuscripts with her. The last surviving copy of my epic “revelations of a thousand voices”, painstakingly written in a state of constant unawareness, creating lives for characters, while I could have been living out a happy life with my love, resides only here now
Jake taps his temple with two fingers
Ax- so that’s what’s so important that you are afraid people are going to try to get out of you?
J- No one must read my works, ever, I can’t let someone else waste a life thinking about life in the same patterns that I have. I won’t let the hurting I’ve felt through my journeys be transferred to my readers. It is not fair to them.
Ax- But it is only by letting oneself be given to the understanding of the thoughts of others that one can understand the words that their minds speak to them. You said that yourself…
J-Don’t put words in my mouth…
Ax- No! I won’t accept that now, now you’re sounding like all the mindless masses, willing to let your thoughts die in the cloudiness of the past.
J- I won’t let someone follow in my footsteps! Wasting the real, tangible moments because I was spending my life analyzing what I thought others feelings and thoughts were.
Ax- Ah, I see, Then I am sorry, but I no longer can be here to help you Jake.
I just have to leave now. I truly am sorry for you, Perhaps one day you will find the courage to let those things out. Until then I must ask that you not keep bringing me here to talk to, it will get you in trouble, and you know it isn’t good for making you sane again…Goodbye my friend…Remember, you don’t have to believe that creating is always to be left up to the gods...
J- WAIT, No, don’t go just yet! You may be right. I need to get this Blood Stained Murder weapon out of my mind! It’s been running through my head, and tearing, slicing, removing sutures from the already tedious patchwork of brain stem attachments, sawing through the connections, like electrical interference misguiding the electrical pathways, and all I can say is that it has turned my mind into a war zone.
Ax- Goodbye Jake, I have done all I can do for you here. Now you must Know what has to come next, I think you know how this story ends.
Ax- (with hope) Well Jake, I just hope you still remember, who made me, and all the details that made me seem so realistic the first time around.
(Jake is now fully Alone)
J-Creating Is what god does… I Made That Man? I am a creator, I am god? How could I really be the one creating something? Unless I myself was god? Maybe just a little arm, or a finger, just a sliver in the tip of his baby finger even? Was I prophetically inspired? Still, when I was creating, I was The God. In the universe that I Created, the events went according to MY design, according to My plan, and no matter what, no person could alter what I set as fact. Does this make me an egotistical manipulator of reality? Perhaps…
Whether or not I had incorporated some part of god inside of me, or not, is not really the matter up for debate. If, as is hypothesized, god created all, one must assume that since I am observing the world, and as anyone can see, I act upon it, causing results, I must be part of this “all”, in turn, I must be a creation of god, all I know is what is in my thoughts, so equally my own thoughts could have given birth to me, where then is my god when I seek him?
Jake looks around the sparse room he now sits in, he notices for the first time that he is now alone…but the room he is in no longer looks like his cell. It now is a Small Cottage style house, with a loft. There are BEAUTIFUL PAINTINGS everywhere, Jake looks up at the loft. There stands Abbalee, Jakes wife. She holds out her arms to Jake and they embrace. Ax watches from an easy chair nearby, along with several others. This vision begins to blur, as the ancient eyes of a man come SLOWLY into focus. There are still Many beautiful paintings on just about every surface available. A WOMAN’s voice calls out,(muttered) “God damn it,” (Yelled) ”Mr. Axlee. I SWEAR. You know you really do wear me out somedays!. T.E.A., ALDOUS J AXLEE!”(to herself) Shit, damn Crazy old man, must be in one of his catatonic trances again.(Aloud again, addressing Mr. Axlee) “Aldous, I have been calling you to tell you your tea was ready since about 10 minutes ago now, and I know your heard me, I heard you yell something back when I first called you… where were you off to? Off rescuing the universe from aliens, or more likely figuring out what really makes quantum mechanics work? I must admit how I truly love your sense of creativity, I swear if not for those beautiful paintings you make, I would think you were just lost in your own little world like all the others, I think you are different though Aldous… I know if well, I understand why you create those things, I know if I were going to have to basically be a vegetable, I would wish to be able to have nice places to go to and visit and run around in, If Only In My Mind…”
Exterior: Daytime- Bright Sunlight. Camera is spinning: Stops Suddenly View- clouds, beside a still lake
Fade to Black….
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