Bringa - Paper-thin.doc

Paper-thin by Bringa (http://bringa.deviantart.com/art/paper-thin-23120198)

The following story is a work of fiction. All events and inhabitants are fictitious. Any resemblance to real persons, living, dead, or supernatural, is entirely coincidental. Take my word for it: it's all made up. Never mind what the story says.   
      
         
       ACT I; Scene 1
       This is a true story. I have recorded everything as it happened and have neither added nor removed anything.   
       Curtains up!
       We open upon an opened home: imagine an apartment building minus the façade, like a doll-house, its rooms exposed for the divine female from beyond to reach inside and pose its plastic inhabitants in humorous situations. We do not see the little girl playing with her little world, but we can picture her: blond, of course, and pony-tailed, immersed in her own miniature play. She breathes life into those static toys and settles their fates between luncheon and dinner.   
       She is not malevolent.
       Let us inspect the house again. Barbie and Ken have never lived here. There are three floors of identical layouts: floor-bathroom, left, and floor-kitchen, right, frame a triptych of three human lives. The walls between: paper-thin.
       The curtains fall again and a bodiless voice announces tonight's play.
       "paper-thin. Filmed in front of a live audience."
       Hesitant applause. Then: silence. Someone blows their nose; it sounds vaguely like an elephant.
       In the pause that follows, one could comfortably draw and release one's breath eight times.
       A sudden scream rends the silence; it is an expression of anything at all, from anger to irritation.   
       The left curtain is opened ever so slightly. It reveals a room with novelty wallpaper: there are Greek letters and mathematical symbols and functions, arranged haphazardly. A zoom-in reveals a tiny spider creepy-crawling forth and back. It pauses on infinity and contemplates its spider life. The scream continues.
       Open left curtains completely: they reveal a man screaming at the spider and infinity. There is some applause as the man is revealed. He is wearing an ill-fitting suit and now his scream breaks and falters as his lungs run out of air.   
       The spider is not impressed.
       The man starts counting to eight and screams again.
       Now the curtains open fully. The light in spider-man's room is dimmed and the spotlights are pointed at the central room. A man sits in the middle of that room in an armchair, back turned toward the audience. In front of him hangs a large mirror in which we see his face. There is also a man in gray clothing standing in the corner of the room, facing the audience, but holding a hand in front of his face.   
       In the room to the right, dimly lit, hardly visible, a shape—probably a man—swings back and forth on a swing suspended from the ceiling. We do not pay attention to him yet—the camera zooms in on the face in the mirror until it fills our vision.
       "And Alex screams his lungs out again; each night, each night, each night he vents his complaints with life, finds a critter of some sort and spews forth what sewage has amassed during his day. Through the walls, I can only hear him.   
       "But I fear them more than his screams. These walls! These walls that make a private man of me!"
       We hear a voice from off-screen:
       You are not Hamlet.
       We zoom out to see the man in grey standing in the corner, most of his face obscured to us by his left hand. He continues.
       Repeat after me: I am not Hamlet. I will not make monologues nor speak soliloquies for I have not the words.
       "This is David. David is a voice in my head. He's always with me; sometimes silently summarizing my movements through this life, other times punning cleverly on everything I say or see."
       Man, adverbs totally suck. You needn't describe every other verb.
       "Most of the time, though, he comments on my diction and register, on continuity and word usage; David is that part of me which still has hopes and aspirations, although he is too bitter to ever admit it."
       Explicit characterisation! You're doing it again!
       "You've met Alex; you've met David; that leaves Thomas."
       The lights dim in this middle room and come up again on the right. Thomas swings a final time and then jumps off the swing, toward the audience. He takes a few brisk steps to the stage's edge and shields his eyes from the light above as he looks into the crowd. Then he steps back into his doll-house room and inspects himself in a mirror: he is wearing a chequered shirt and red suspenders. He nods at himself and puts on an old straw hat. There's a knock on his door.
       With comical strides he walks to the door and tears it open. We see a startled pizza boy stumble backwards and almost lose his pizza box.   
       "Come on in now, son", says Thomas with a drawl, "I needa fetch my money-sock." And so he does: from under his mattress he produces a bulging, rough-knit sock. The pizza boy steps in and looks around. He seems a little scared.
       "It ain't a thang I do real oft', orderin' food like this. But Ma's gone ahead and got herself killed, so I've got to feed the kids. Ye know?"
       The room is hardly big enough for one man to live in; there is a mattress on the floor, a mirror on the right-hand wall, and a desk; and that is all. Most of the small room is empty space, empty stage. There are definitely no children.
       "Uh... yeah. I'm, uh, sorry to hear that. About your... wife." Silence. "Anyway, that's eight dollars, sir."
       A scream from off-screen. A quick and violent zoom-out reveals Alex in his room, quite upset. Zoom back in on Thomas.
       "So you dinn't cut that here pizza up into slices, like I told you not to on the phone?"
       "That's right, sir; this pizza is uncut."
       "And don't I get no discount, on account of you bein' twenny minnets late'n all?"
       "I'm afraid we don't have a policy to reimburse you on delayed delivery."
       "Thass all right, now; got me lots of money from the old lady's life insurance. Why don't you keep the rest of this?"   
       He hands him a bill.
       "But that's a twenty, sir."
       "I reckon as much. So you doin' this for a livin'?"
       "I'm... actually studying philosophy. This is just to keep me afloat, you know?"
       "You look like you're fixin' to tell me sometin' else. Now if'n you need someone to talk to, oul' Tom here's a good lissenner, they say."
       "What? I'm... no, no I'm not."
       "Never-you-mind," says Thomas, now drawl-less, "I was just rehearsing my lines. Have a good day now."   
       He closes the door.
       Lights out in Thomas's room; we can barely see him now. He stands quite still, holds the pizza box, and looks at the closed door. After a moment, he sets the box down on a table and starts stripping. We pan back to the middle. Lights on in the central room; the face in the mirror speaks to us. We zoom in on it.
       "Thomas is an actor; an outstanding actor, I hear. Directors know his favourite brand of chocolate and they sometimes print his name on banners bigger than the play's."
       Meanwhile, the camera has lazily zoomed out to reveal once more the whole of the doll-house. In the half-darkness, we can see Thomas wearing a tuxedo now. He picks up the pizza box and leaves his apartment.   
       Alex is walking circles in his room; he seems agitated.   
       The man in the mirror continues.
       "On stage, he breathes life into the subtlest roles; he makes kings of royal rags on those boards which mean the world to him. I asked of him his secret: he purges over-acting from his system when it doesn't matter."
       Don't elucidate, illustrate!
       There is a knock on Alex's door: eight careful raps.   
       "Sometimes you'll hear him say things like..."
       The lights are dimmed in the middle room and turned on in Alex's; Thomas stands in the door. He has brought the newly-bought pizza with him.
       "Sir, I have accidentally acquired this dinner of questionable nutritional value; far be it from me to insinuate that such inferior sustenance would in any way appeal to a fine gentleman such as yourself, but if you were to find yourself in want of food tonight, I'd be most grateful to have this pizza duly disposed of."
       The light switches back to the central room; in the dark to the left we can faintly see Alex thanking Thomas and a pizza changing owners.   
       "He is the soul of these hallways; he... but you will see."
       Good boy. You get to talk about yourself now.
       "My name is Martin, and if I told you anything else about myself, David would get upset. This is my daily monologue. I need to speak until I start talking, shovel words from the back of my head until they start flowing; I need my mind to find rhymes and slant them, bend sentences and end them with prepositions or variations thereupon."
       We've got the point! Move on!
       "Language is at best an inexact approximation of the things we think we think; this is why I so enjoy to work with these imperfect words: like a man who builds a ship with fifteenth-century tools or a geek who programs on an age-old machine; not because he doesn't have anything else, but because he likes the challenge.
       "Oh, and I have other ways of communicating with myself; I have my thoughts and David to keep me company when no one else will talk to me."
       It's not as if I had a choice.   
       "But I choo...