Other Aliens

by Bradford Morrow

  Princess says at last, “Please, Lollipop, don’t do this.”

  I look over, see the worry on his face, the eyes open too wide. “It’s beautiful, isn’t it?”

  “It’s too hot. I can’t survive here.”

  “No, I don’t suppose that you can.”

  “You can’t do this. This isn’t you. You know it isn’t.”

  “Well, I don’t know who I am anymore. I just am,” I reply. I try to sound calm, but Princess can hear the anger in my words. He groans. He knows he has maybe a week here, not much longer. I feel a moment of anguish, a stitch of pain for taking him. But it passes quickly. I mean, it isn’t as if he’s going to live forever.

  Noh Exit

  A Play in One Act

  James Morrow

  Characters:

  JEAN-PAUL SARTRE, philosopher and author, age forty-five, later the shite

  SIMONE DE BEAUVOIR, philosopher and author, age forty-two, later the shite-tsure

  TAKESHI IKEDAMA, artistic director, Japanese Medieval Drama Touring Company, age thirty, later the waki

  FLORENCE LARSON, president, San Antonio Cultural Society, age thirty-five, later the waki-tsure

  MUSICIANS, the hayashi, one flutist and three drummers drawn from the onstage spectators, various ages

  CHORUS, the jiutai, eight chanters drawn from the onstage spectators, various ages

  ABORASETSU, the kyōgen, the comedy relief, king of demons and prince of caprice, ageless

  (South Texas, a sweltering Sunday evening in July of 1950. We are in the spare and unadorned basement of the Bexar Lions Club.

  Four flags droop from freestanding poles arrayed along the back wall: a Texas state flag, a Lions Club banner, the Stars and Stripes, and an Alamo flag featuring green, white, and red bars. A grid of twelve folding chairs, each holding a member of the San Antonio Cultural Society, faces a raised platform on which three additional folding chairs accommodate JEAN-PAUL SARTRE, SIMONE DE BEAUVOIR, and FLORENCE LARSON. At rise, FLORENCE pulls an index card from her shoulder bag and approaches the lectern at the front edge of the dais.)

  FLORENCE. (Addressing onstage spectators.) I still can’t get over it. Two of the world’s most eminent philosophers have seen fit to include our town in their book tour. (Consults index card.) Before I forget, let me lob a big fat juicy thank-you to Scooter Prescott for allowing the San Antonio Cultural Society to meet here tonight in the Lions Club basement. And we’re grateful as grateful can be to Ellie Thornton of Ellie’s Browserama Bookshop for sacrificing a quiet Sunday evening at home so we can all purchase hot-off-the-presses English translations of works by our distinguished visitors. (Waves to unseen woman.) Muchas gracias, Ellie. Tonight she’ll be selling both Mr. Sartre’s Being and Nothingness and Miss de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex, and here’s the really big news: the authors have agreed to autograph your books with their very own internationally famous names. And now, without further ado, I give the floor to our deep thinkers, who will jointly favor us with a talk entitled, “Existential Freedom versus the Fall into Inauthenticity.”

  (FLORENCE pivots away from the lectern, approaches her guests, and shakes first SARTRE’s hand, then BEAUVOIR’s hand. The twelve spectators applaud. SARTRE lights up a cigarette and takes a drag.)

  As you may be aware, Mr. Sartre, here in Texas the words “fall” and “freedom” resonate for us like cathedral bells. Thanks to the fall of the Alamo, which happened right down the street, Sam Houston was able to regroup his forces and send the Mexican army packing across the Rio Grande, thereby giving us our freedom.

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

  BEAUVOIR. She’s talking about a Catholic mission, Jean-Paul, named after the poplar or cottonwood tree, indigenous to this part of the world. The Spanish word for poplar is alamo.

  (FLORENCE sits down next to BEAUVOIR. Sucking on his cigarette, SARTRE rises and assumes the lectern.)

  SARTRE. Eh bien, trees. Naturally I think of the moment in my novel La Nausée when Roquentin, strolling through the local park and gazing at the boiled-leather bark of a chestnut tree, realizes that the source of his anxiety is not simply the tree but the indifferent being of the tree.

  FLORENCE. Another theory holds the mission got its name from La Compañía del Alamo, a Mexican battalion that moved in after the priests moved out. The soldiers were all from the town of Alamo in Coahuila.

  SARTRE. (To spectators.) Although it’s true that English translations of two books by Mademoiselle de Beauvoir and myself have just appeared from La Maison de Knopf, in her case, Le Deuxième Sexe, and in mine, L’Être et le Néant, we did not come here this evening to indulge in sordid capitalist commerce.

  (A male spectator, VIRGIL CHILTON, removes his Stetson hat and rises from his folding chair.)

  VIRGIL. (More curious than hostile.) Mr. Sartre, when I hear you getting testy about free enterprise, I think of certain rumors that you and your lady friend are communist subversives.

  FLORENCE. Virgil, honey, Mr. Sartre and Miss de Beauvoir will be happy to take questions at the end of their presentation.

  (As VIRGIL resumes his seat, BEAUVOIR lights a cigarette, then joins SARTRE at the lectern.)

  BEAUVOIR. En réalité, I must urge you all not to purchase The Second Sex tonight. The American edition is an abomination. On orders from the publisher, the translator omitted many pages and rendered most of my philosophical terms incoherent.

  (A young female spectator, RUBY WALKER, rises and addresses BEAUVOIR in an awed, breathy voice.)

  RUBY. Mademoiselle, I heard that Le Deuxième Sexe was placed on the Vatican’s Index of Forbidden Books.

  BEAUVOIR. Oui, c’est vrai. They did not appreciate my chapter on lesbianism.

  RUBY. Then I simply must have it.

  BEAUVOIR. Human beings are always free to make such choices. Je vous salue.

  FLORENCE. Miss de Beauvoir’s talking about consumer choices, not bedroom choices.

  BEAUVOIR. Actually I’m talking about both.

  RUBY. Here in the Lone Star State, we don’t set much store by the pope’s opinions.

  BEAUVOIR. D’accord.

  SARTRE. (To BEAUVOIR.) Lone Star State. Does she mean the Soviet Union?

  FLORENCE. Ruby, dear, please sit down.

  SARTRE. (To RUBY.) I share Mademoiselle de Beauvoir’s delight in your decision. If there were a God, which of course there is not, we might logically assume that human beings are blessed with a stable and coherent essence devised by this Creator. But in the ontological system developed by Mademoiselle de Beauvoir and myself, with a nod to Martin Heidegger, existence precedes essence.

  RUBY. (Aroused.) Oh, Monsieur Sartre, when I hear you talk like that …

  SARTRE. In other words, Mademoiselle Ruby, your essence is something that you yourself create, moment by moment, as you make your way through life.

  RUBY. (Swooning.) Oui, mon professeur.

  (As RUBY resumes her seat, everyone’s attention is abruptly drawn to the imposing figure of TAKESHI IKEDAMA, who enters the basement arrayed in a striking silk robe and burdened with an enormous steamer trunk. He hauls the trunk to the front of the dais, then mounts the platform and bows politely before SARTRE, BEAUVOIR, and FLORENCE.)

  IKEDAMA. I’m so terribly sorry to interrupt this beautiful meeting of minds, but a deep existential crisis has come to South Texas. Call me Takeshi Ikedama, artistic director of the Japanese Medieval Drama Touring Company. I am also a philosophical person. After completing my honorable wartime service in the Imperial Japanese Army Air Force, since disbanded, I attended Freiburg University and four years later received a degree predicated on my thesis, “Buddhist Motifs in Occidental Phenomenology.”

  SARTRE. Freiburg? Did you study with Heidegger?

  IKEDAMA. During my years in Germany, the honorable Nazi philosopher was hiding out in the Black Forest. Hear my tale, O Texicans. Last night our troupe of Nogaku players was headed northeast across your endless state toward the metropoli
s of Austin. It was our intention to give a performance this evening of Zeami’s The Wind in the Pines.

  BEAUVOIR. (Dragging on cigarette.) Phenomenological intentionality is fundamental to understanding consciousness, or so Husserl argued.

  IKEDAMA. (Agreeing.) Logical Investigations is a most felicitous text. (Beat.) The bus broke down outside your city, and we proceeded by taxicab to your opulent Davy Crockett Hotel, our assumption being that we could easily reach Austin the next morning. Alas, after breakfast a pandemic of food poisoning overcame everyone in our humble company.

  FLORENCE. Everyone except you, Mr. Ikedama?

  IKEDAMA. I did not have the longhorn steak tartare. And yet it remains imperative that The Wind in the Pines or some other Nogaku drama be performed posthaste, for this is the seventh hour of the seventh day of the seventh week of the seventh month of the seventh year of the seventh century after the Buddhist priest Nichiren revealed that the Lotus Sutra contains the most efficient path to enlightenment.

  (A peeved male spectator, CREIGHTON FILBERT, speaks up.)

  CREIGHTON. You want to know something, Mr. Moto? We came here to learn about Continental angst, not Oriental soap opera.

  IKEDAMA. (Unperturbed.) Happily, a solution to all our problems lies at hand. After seeing in the hotel lobby a poster advertising this meeting, I spent my afternoon composing a Nogaku interpretation of Mr. Sartre’s scintillating play, Huis Clos, which I recently saw presented in Kyōto under the title The Mushroom Patch of the Soul.

  BEAUVOIR. How recently?

  IKEDAMA. Last year.

  BEAUVOIR. Jean-Paul, did you ever receive payment?

  SARTRE. Who cares?

  BEAUVOIR. You should.

  SARTRE. I won’t cede my freedom to a bourgeois ledger. (To IKEDAMA.) Other translations have included Dead End, Vicious Circle, Behind Closed Doors, In Camera, and No Way Out. I prefer your mushrooms.

  (IKEDAMA jumps off the dais, opens the steamer trunk, and removes a pile of sixteen identical scripts.)

  IKEDAMA. Thanks be to Buddha, your Davy Crockett Hotel maintains an emergency mimeograph machine. If all of us in this room were to perform my play in the shadow of your great Alamo shrine, starting immediately, then everybody wins—the honorable members of your cultural society will receive their eagerly anticipated education in angst, the honorable Mr. Sartre and the honorable Miss de Beauvoir will sell a truckload of books, and the ghost of Nichiren will constrain his dead disciples’ spirits from unleashing demons bent on burning down this building.

  (IKEDAMA reaches into the trunk and retrieves a stack of six black silk kimonos, plus two cypress masks—male and female—a rolled canvas, a transverse flute, a shoulder drum, a hip drum, and a stick drum.)

  FLORENCE. Do you really believe we’re threatened by demons, Mr. Ikedama?

  IKEDAMA. Here in the twentieth century the demon hypothesis enjoys little credibility.

  SARTRE. I would argue that if we lose our nerve and fail to mount Mr. Ikedama’s play—

  IKEDAMA. The Battle of Alienated Gazes.

  SARTRE. If we fail to mount The Battle of Alienated Gazes, we shall be guilty of mauvaise foi, bad faith, whereby human beings under pressure from conventional social forces disown their innate freedom and act inauthentically.

  FLORENCE. Inauthenticity seems an awfully high price to pay for sticking with our original agenda. I say, let’s put on the kimonos!

  (Suddenly the lights in the basement flicker, then regain normal brightness.)

  IKEDAMA. Whereas in the medieval era, the time of my play, people did believe in demons.

  FLORENCE. Let’s put them on right now!

  (SARTRE stubs out his cigarette in the ashtray on the lectern. IKEDAMA presents him with a script and the wooden male mask, which exhibits an indecipherable expression.)

  IKEDAMA. The principal performer in a Nogaku drama embodies the shite, the protagonist. I wrote the part with you in mind, Monsieur Sartre. Your character is Yamashina no Shōji, a royal gardener.

  SARTRE. (Contemplating wooden face.) Many are the facades we assume in our flight from responsibility.

  (IKEDAMA presents BEAUVOIR with a script and the female mask, serene of countenance.)

  IKEDAMA. Miss de Beauvoir, you will be the shite-tsure, compliment of the shite.

  BEAUVOIR. Jean-Paul and I have always enjoyed a reciprocity of intellect.

  SARTRE. Much to the distress of our lovers.

  IKEDAMA. (To BEAUVOIR.) Your character is Hitomaru, an itinerant lute player. My own role will be that of the waki, the foil of the shite, typically a courtier, messenger, or traveling monk, though in this case a majordomo.

  (BEAUVOIR stubs out her cigarette in the lectern ashtray. IKEDAMA presents FLORENCE with a script.)

  FLORENCE. Don’t I get a mask?

  IKEDAMA. The waki-tsure, compliment of the waki, never wears a mask. Mrs. Larson, you are a brine maiden named Murasame, which means Autumn Rain.

  FLORENCE. How lovely.

  VIRGIL. I played the bass drum in my high-school marching band.

  (IKEDAMA presents VIRGIL with a script, carved sticks, and the corresponding drum.)

  IKEDAMA. You’ll see it’s all quarter notes. Very simple. Flute, anyone?

  (RUBY raises her hand. IKEDAMA gives her a script and the flute, then gestures toward the shoulder drum and the hip drum. Two spectators spring to attention, and the director gives them their instruments.)

  IKEDAMA. So now we have our hayashi, our musicians. The rest of you will be the jiutai, the chorus.

  (IKEDAMA distributes scripts to the remaining spectators, keeping one for himself.)

  I must now ask you to employ your chairs in building the hashigakari, a bridge at upstage right linking the human realm to the world of ghosts and spirits.

  (The four MUSICIANS and eight CHORUS members collapse their chairs and carry them to the far left corner of the room. They open the chairs and arrange them in two parallel lines extending from the back wall to the dais, upstage right, six bare seats abutting six bare seats. The result is an elevated diagonal bridge along which actors can make entrances and exits.)

  (Gesturing toward flags.) Those poles will become the pillars on which our imaginary sacred roof is suspended.

  (IKEDAMA mounts the dais and shoves the lectern out of the way. SARTRE, BEAUVOIR, and FLORENCE rise and set their chairs aside. The four cast members remove the flags from the poles, fold up the material, and place the bundles beside the steamer trunk.

  IKEDAMA takes up the rolled canvas and affixes it to the rear wall of the basement. The painting, unfurled, proves to be a pine tree. The director grasps a naked flagpole and places it downstage left near the corner of the dais.)

  The foil’s pillar, the waki-bashira, goes here. (To SARTRE.) The protagonist’s pillar, the shite-bashira, goes upstage right. (To BEAUVOIR.) The flutist’s pillar, the fue-bashira—upstage left. (To FLORENCE.) The focusing pillar, the metsuke-bashira—downstage right.

  (SARTRE, BEAUVOIR, and FLORENCE set their poles in the proper locations. IKEDAMA removes the remaining garments from the trunk, then divides all the costumes into two piles: twelve black silk kimonos and three colorful, elaborately embroidered silk robes.)

  (Clapping.) Robes for the actors! Kimonos for the rest of you!

  (Under IKEDAMA’s supervision, the MUSICIANS, the CHORUS, and the actors select their costumes, then slip them on over their street clothes. The waki-tsure robe awarded to FLORENCE is as elaborate as IKEDAMA’s regalia, but it pales beside the shite-tsure gown of shimmering purple brocade that BEAUVOIR puts on. SARTRE dons the most elaborate costume of all, a luminous crimson caftan with exaggerated shoulder pads that threaten to compromise the diminutive philosopher’s dignity.)

  Actors to the bridge! Musicians to the pine tree! Chorus on the floor stage left!

  (The MUSICIANS and the CHORUS scurry to their positions. In a matter of seconds, a static procession forms at the far end of the bridge, IKEDAMA in the lead, followed
by FLORENCE, the masked SARTRE, and the masked BEAUVOIR. The actors study their scripts.

  A high wailing sound issues from the flute. The drums produce monotonous rhythms that continue unbroken throughout the performance. IKEDAMA walks slowly along the bridge, steps onto the dais, and stations himself near the foil’s pillar. The drama has begun.)

  I am the majordomo of Arbuda, one of the Eight Cold Narakas into which the wicked are born, except for those consigned to the Eight Hot Narakas. Yesterday my master, Lord Aborasetsu, king of demons and prince of caprice, being in a mood to experiment, altered the variety of excruciation for which Arbuda has always been famous. I wonder whether the inhabitants of this new Arbuda will fare better or worse than their predecessors …

  CHORUS. (Chanting.)

  Who were forced to abide naked and helpless

  Within the frigid depths of the Naraka,

  While the frost chewed holes in their faces

  And the wind made ribbons of their skin.

  In both Arbudas, ancestral and avant-garde,

  The duration of a prisoner’s sentence