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Death Youth, or, The Leaks: Act Two

Death Youth, or, The Leaks
Act Two
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table of contents
  1. Cover
  2. Half Title Page
  3. Copyright
  4. Title Page
  5. Dramatis Personae
  6. Prologue
  7. Act One
  8. Act Two
  9. Act Three. Prologue
  10. Act Three
  11. Act Four: Magnetic Island!
  12. Epilogue
  13. Acknowledgements
  14. A Note on Sources
  15. Other Works by Joyelle McSweeney

ACT TWO

JULIAN ASSANGE: [He is dressed in a grey suit. His shining hair is clean and feminine and light-bearing as a shampoo ad. Lucifer hair! He stands at a podium as at a press conference. He addresses the audience. The DEAD YOUTH pose, swoon, smirk, stand at attention, variously]

Hello my name is Julian Assange.

Thank you for your attention to those burka’d teens.

They are in a work-study program.

They are studying abroad.

They are in juvenile detention.

They are receiving extra-credit.

They are part of a good will exchange between our

two nations.

They are on a chain-gang.

They are all out on work-release.

Though DEAD, they are studying for their GED’s.

& degrees in dance therapy.

I would like to deliver my prepared remarks.

But I am distracted by these teens.

They are members of a dance team.

They are on their way to an abstinence convention.

They are drinking absinthe.

They are aspiring drone pilots.

They are on their way to an interfaith prayer breakfast.

They shot two convenience store clerks for one

hundred dollars.

Their van has crashed, and they are walking along

the highway.

If they do not find gas soon, they will have to eat

the weakest one.

They are going completely feral just a few miles

from the highway,

listening to death metal, practicing magick.

They are running pornographic services out of

their bedrooms.

They are at soccer practice.

They work in their uncle’s convenience store at night.

They do their algebra homework.

They study war.

They are boy soldiers, hustlers, ‘knock-off jihadi.’

They invented Facebook.

They are entrepreneurs and visionaries.

X-game competitors, budding baristas,

junior rapists, virgin martyrs and walking delinquencies.

They are beauties and atrocities.

I can’t stop looking at them.

They could not survive what was required of them.

I will now deliver my prepared remarks.

Prepared for me by the Author of the feast, which is

a cell line, or Fate.

The Smirk is full of noises. [returns to teens] The isle

is full of teens.

I’m bundling up packets of information

in strong ribands of junk for its own protection

and tossing it into the sea. Perhaps you’ve seen The Tempest.

Perhaps you know how this ends. Some things sink,

while other things float.

Others are enraptured in a tree.

We call this plot.

And tho I am a well known evangeline for privacy

I’m no angel. More like an ancient greek.

I like to lift the cloak off a diplomatic channel to watch

the current phreak!

I love privacee. I love transparancee.

DEAD YOUTH: Except!

ASSANGE: [continuing] I love secret identitees. I am mixed on the

subject of redaction.

I am a leftist.

I don’t hate the state

DEAD YOUTH: Except!

ASSANGE: [continuing] I believe emperors should be naked.

O complexitee!

Here’s a riddle for you to work out, O lightening bugs,

paparazzi: abominable

secrecy, delectable privacy, holee transparencee,

cursed detectibility, desired accountability…

Like: alive or dead in the box, what is the cat thinking.

That box is the Internet. One cat brain cell is the leaker.

Another brain cell is the leak-receiver.

The nearest synapse is the battle creek.

But the leak doesn’t cross there

it jumps all over the brain

lighting up every synapse

in a total war. A grand mal!

till noone knows where it is going or where it has been.

O device maudit! O seizure!

O brain on work release

from the regime of cause and effect.

Eventually it reaches its destination, me,

I publish it on Wikileaks

and that’s an end.

Game over, kitty-kat. Zap. zap.

O Wikileaks. Nymph-stage, perfect gesture at the perfect time in the minute lifecycle of a dayfly, which has to die at day’s end, lump it or leave it, leak or limp. I wanted to build on you but who can build on lymph. Our mistake was to publish the leaks ourselves, not just ship them to some other destination. We were left holding the bag with the cat out. Became the chopping block, target practice. We were happy to take the blows from those conquistador’s arquebusses and blunderbusses, really we were, but when the banksters and credit card companies blocked our pipeline of donations, that was really an end. Wikileaks! I swear to revive you once I reach my destination with the help of these fun-loving DEAD YOUTH.

Uhm, I’d like to introduce DEAD YOUTH, and thereby a portion of the plot:

OMNES DEAD YOUTH: [this rap accompanied by a rhythmic dance. The YOUTH may trade verses and sing some portions in unison]

Hello I’m Dead Youth

also known as a lion at the Baghdad Zoo

airvacked to Stockholm there I went symptomatic

comatic asthmatic astigmatic

but in my distress

I DID perfect the hologram kick

Like Zlatan Junior Imbrohimovich

But when soldiers filled the stadium

with their carbines, biceps and rank nasturtiums

I was laid out on the pitch

Dead, I fled to a dream Zurich

Where I died again of insight.

I padded on gold paws

lived on in the svelte vaults, read the golden

embossments

memorized the serial numbers

my brain better than a supercomputer

I maintained like a mainframe

but more better splendor

still you can’t live on love. Well, not 4-ever.

Hello so I’m dead again some bored john killed me,

some bulldozer. A falling wall. A body bomb

Answering its phone, a days work at the dump

Pulling the laptop apart for its metals.

Playing an extra in an international Ponzi scheme

cum-Gotterdammerung. I was a mule or camel.

The deal gone bad, I was hung

from the overpass headless with a name carved on my chest

Each time I came back from the dead

now I’m dead and my knowledge too

Unless Julian Assange can quickly speed me to a port

to reboot. Till then I’m just idling here on the deck

tho I was heading for Art’s shores.

JULIAN ASSANGE: [resuming fondly] O Art! That destination’s too

lofty. I have another one in mind…

In farthest Queensland, my colonie,

Magnetic Island, named for a mythical sleeping force

that made Captain Cook’s cock, uhm, compass leap

up like robin

directing him for the shore,

indetectible evermore. That black allure

could shock all the new Sony AM dreammachines,

crack safes, forge canvasses, eat the code off

any barnacled bit of credit card strip or VHS cassette…

I lived there in a lean-to, as my mother

lived in bikinis. Later we moved to the shelter

on the mainland

for battered moms and teens, she bought me

a Commodore 64

on credit, because she loved me, we lived like a

battery hens

on chips, I peck-pecked our 8-bits. Lean times.

Dear mother.

On our notorious hair

we brushed a deleterious dye

called Invisiblonde. Called Slender Prey’s

Intoxicating Hide.

ASSANGE and DEAD YOUTH: My mother JonBenet and me

My mother Margaret Thatcher.

My mother Henrietta Lacks.

My mother Antigone.

My mother strong correlation

Palingenesis, telomarese,

recapitulation

My mother twentieth cee

My mother enceinte

My mother epicene

My mother in surburbia

My mother sleeper cell

My mother human error

yellow cake or Zyklon B

My mother migrating heron

that, chopped up in the engine,

brings down the corporate jet

My mother trashed reputation

My mother Hitchcock blonde

My mother windswept highlands

My mother updo

My mother bog

My mother bared midriff, dirndl, sari,

sandal, buckskin, wristwatch, hijab,

Who survived my birth

but barely

Whose idea of groceries

was a bottle of bleach or pills

a donation to the church or the Panthers

lived in a vat of spaghetti

died in a petri dish

My mother in Arcadia ego

My mother botulinum in hypo

wiped toilets

in gloves and smock

played bridge in

evening dress

sabotaged the trainbridge

shot up the bank vault

worked the third shift

was throttled in halter top

was choked in a stalking

was brought up on charges

Became a rogue signatory

No longer agreed to the plot

Divested of media resources

became a relentless top

and crashed the last century’s banquet

a radioactive

grain in every dish

Her name was Estrogena,

Aspartame, Nicotiana,

Thalidomida, Saccharina,

Carcinoma, Sacerdota,

Carmen,

Carcinogen…

JULIAN ASSANGE: [patting the shoulder of DEAD YOUTH, calming them, distributing pills, talking a kind of soothing patter].

Hello, I am Julian Assange, I’ve been assassinated by

my mother.

My mother was divine. A divine assassination.

She edited and improved me.

She shot me full of gold.

Protected me, gilt me, guided me, hid me, and

bought me a Commodore 64

Now I endeavor to be a golden like my mother

to radiate hot pixels of information

to cell-divide forever

to stage a pussy riot, to offer teens of all nations

hot gobblets of information

pus-gold and liberating, the rays of my inflammation.

These pets you see gathered around me are little runts

I’ve collected from the NICU ward in Memorial

Hospital in South Bend

Indiana. Poor things were born

addicted to oxycodone, oxycontin, valium and other

narcotics.

Born like princesses with lotus feet. Only things fit

them are Nikes and IV’s. Poor things are asleep.

I had to save them from the cuddler army of 54

retiree church organists, an invasive species.

I carry in this box a little code to feed them on.

sorry a little comb, they’re bees.

Please help yourself before helping others, little

species little protégées. It’s on demand!

It’s all you can eat on repeat forever.

in the event of two similar die-offs, the greater

of two die-offs is still similar. Infinity resembles

infinity to the dead.

That’s why they need a mom like me

and how I can be one: resemblance

is a magick power. I copy my mother

& live here in drag like a mortal.

I just don’t have a normal mortal motor.

I’m an abnormal mater!

Abnormal matter!

But unlike cancer, I have a motive.

It’s to keep these teens alive on the Internet.

I feed them like roses, I feed them privacee.

My motive is indetectible to you

because you don’t want to see it.

But my moralitee is a rare and strong growth.

It configures a colonee.

It grows in night vision.

It thrives on unnatural light.

ABDI WALI ABDULQADIR MUSE: Assange, I have arrived.

ASSANGE AND OMNES DEAD YOUTH: [with extreme courtliness and pleasure] HOW NOW DEAD YOUTH!

MUSE: Although I am a teen I am not dead. I have come to occupy this ship. I need it.

ASSANGE: To occupy this ship? Faddish lad. Despite my suit, do we resemble a corporation? Is it Bring- Your-DEAD-YOUTH-to-Work Day?

MUSE: ASSANGE, I am a desperate man. In just a few hours, they are shipping me to Terre Haute.

ASSANGE: Handsome Youth, albeit not dead: you are welcome to join us on our ad-hoc journey, our ragtag army of questionable devices. But if you wish to steer this vessel anywhere but Magnetic Island, I suggest you find another means of transportation. Allow me to quote from Mayakovsky’s dead letter: this boat has smashed upon the rocks of ‘byt’. I.E., the Smirk is listing badly. We stole it from from a shippy sick bay where they were going to ravage it for parts. I mean salvage it. But now it is our salvation, albeit limited. It is following a mystery current, lately detected, a smooth seam. It only goes one way. And that way, if I may be so blunt, is my way.

MUSE: Assange, allow me to reassure you. My capture of the site will last but an interval. I have urgent business to attend to. I know it is my fate to be entirely landlocked and sealed away from the Internet till my fiftieth birthday.

OMNES: GASP!

MUSE: I was sentenced this morning in a New York court. OH, is any fate worse than Terre Haute, Indiana? And I speak as one brought up in ‘war-torn Somalia’! Tomorrow I will be flown out in chains under armed escort. There I will take up residency with bungler jihadist and the backup director of the Gambino crime family. It is rather glamorous company for one such as me, who only left his mother’s side two weeks ago.

OMNES DEAD YOUTH: Two weeks?!

DEAD YOUTH 5: I also died two weeks ago.

I haven’t yet adjusted. Mama Julian says

I’m adjusting poorly. I may have an adjustment disorder.

I may cause a small but crucial aberration in the field

with my level of maladjustment.

I could sink the ship

before we reach Magnetic Island

or even start an island of my own, helas,

a cancer cluster.

He’s wrapped me in a lead apron

And kept me away from important instruments.

My story goes:

A drone hit me.

Nosed me out with its nosecone.

Zeroed me out of the Anthropocene.

Although I was, like the drone, an American.

It pushed a wall on me. It made a date with me!

O dinner date! O pederastic drone!.

These DEAD YOUTH call me ‘Barack’ but I don’t like it.

I am a teen who died eating dinner with my cousin

and that’s all. It was not a happy fate. [fights tears]

MUSE: [placing hand on DEAD YOUTH 5’s shoulder] My sympathies are with you, Abdulrahman. But you’ve got to buck up. This is the new situation!

DEAD YOUTH 5: O God, God! [burying his face in Muse’s shoulder]

DEAD YOUTH 1: [exasperated] O, weep weep!

DEAD YOUTH 2: O gag. It’s alien corn hour.

ASSANGE: Intriguing Somalian youth, I know your country well from the Internet. I think of it fondly for it figured in several of our earliest leak-tests. Then our ‘Cablegate’ revealed the US government dipping its big toe in the riptide of your perpetual war.

MUSE: I hope not perpetual.

ASSANGE: Well one can hope. Malignancy has a way of sticking around in the system. It mounts the lymph nodes like an Internet and rides. It opens a franchise. You may have concluded this during the handful of years you have endured in the Anthropocene.

MUSE: ASSANGE and YOUTH, I have no time to waste.

Please allow me to begin again.

I’m Abdi Wali Abdulqadir Muse.

Though I have many names and synonyms

Approxi-nyms and acronyms

Provided for me by journalists and the Internet.

The Internet, my second mother. [All nod, approvingly]

I come from Galka’yo, Somalia, what’s known

as a divided city

due to a continuously collapsing state

a conflict which expands according to no known

galactic models

continually making more of itself according to local tastes

and outside interference, as you referenced in your

‘Cablegate’

I am 16, 17, 19, and 26, also over 18

according to American authorities, paving the way for

prosecution.

I am between 16 and 17 according to my mother

continuously phoning from Galka’yo.

According to she, I was

“coaxed into piracy by gangsters with money.”

and have been gone just two weeks.

That is my prologue, and what’s left of it

is immediately going past

and folding up into a vanishing point

according to hegemony’s impossible CGI,

its skill with dispossession—

But what is this? I hear someone approaching!

I hear someone muttering, clattering

the loud clang of a too-long saber knocking against a

polished boot!

A visor knocking the bridge of a sweating nose

as if some inept knight were climbing up a ladder!

O who is approaching? O is it Authoritee?

Can it be I am detected? O, ASSANGE, am I slain?

[he scrambles to hide].

ANTOINE DE SAINT-EXUPÉRY: [a pilot. enters with bluster and saber rattles. He steps up the podium previously occupied by ASSANGE and delivers this address, haughtily]

Hello I’m Antoine de Saint-Exupéry author of Le Petit Prince. I am the beloved aviateur-auteur-and-homme-du-lettres-francais. I died in 1944, mort por la France. Being dead, I can board this ship without disturbance. Monsieur Assange has arranged the security that way, doomed liberal. It’s hardly sea-worthy. It’s hardly air-tight. Ah, but all errors are human errors when it comes to privacee. To begin: I am the dream interloper, I am the white hunter and these assorted perverts are the prey. I am played by a woman. Like many women associated with aviation, I have disappeared: myself, Howard Hughes, Lindbergh’s baby. Since your premonition, have you ship-rats run a search? Have you thought about draining the loch? Have you thought about dredging the apartment complex? Have you thought about going door-to-door? Erica Pratt, seven-years-old of Philadelphia, freed herself from a kidnapper by chewing through duct tape and escaping through a broken basement window. In an article on the Internet, the police chief glowingly notes, “she’s suffered NO HARM WHATSOEVER!” Yet this vessel, the Merchant Vessel MAERSK Alabama, AKA the SS Smirk, on the other hand, which I am here to inspect, and, let’s face it, confiscate, cannot effect an escape. It’s listing, it’s riding a sludgy margin. Something stinks. For one thing, is that Julian Assange, or just another pirate, or both? I insist as a Frenchman stroking my kepi, this ship’s forms aren’t in order. Her manifest ain’t blest. This blonde might be a stowaway, some homeless mom leaving the night shift at Dunkin Donuts with a packet of reject munchkins for her litter kids. I might look like Claude Reins from Casablanca, flaky as a pastry, my coiffeur a vol-au-vont cushion for my kepi, a cravat spoiling for an honorary cross, but as a woman, I’m the endgame, I’m the belle dame san merci, bon homies, I’m a swallow, a tough cookie that lays its radioactive grains in the throat, and I say, she’s leaky, this blonde, and this tub, The SS SMIRK. Her story don’t hold water. It don’t hold up. Listen up, paparazzi, papyrus, inamorati, dead and sleazee guests. These papers are thin as leaves, they show a ghost cargo, ghost crew. [beat] Unfortunately I can only read these ghost papers because I, too, am dead. I keep radioing ship-to-shore on my magic instrument but I can’t get through on pre-war knowledge. It’s just birdscratch, birdsong: Who dunit who dunit To who. To who. I’m dead to them like last century’s flu. I’m going to have to bring this vessel under my own command with no help from outside intermediaries. AND there’s no telling what’s in that box he’s fingering. Could be a dirty bomb!

JULIAN ASSANGE: It’s an organ.

It’s for shipboard services.

And I’m a missionary / mercenary.

All above board.

DEAD YOUTH: [prankishly] buzz buzz

ASSANGE: OK It’s it’s a crate of oranges.

They’re alive with fruit flies, all indentured workers with their vaccines and their papers from Monsanto.

All above board.

DEAD YOUTH: buzz buzz

ASSANGE: OK It’s a miniature server farm.

DEAD YOUTH: Buzz!

ASSANGE: Its video game controllers

a junked prototype of the Wii

DEAD YOUTH: Weeeee!!

ASSANGE: I’m taking them to Vaguest Africa

for starving children to use

in the camp for refugees.

To keep fit and practice drone warfare

in case they are adopted by Americans in the future.

Mine’s a mission of relief!!

DEAD YOUTH: [like a saxophone] BUZZ!

ASSANGE: Ok it’s bees.

ANTOINE DE SAINT-EXUPÉRY: Sir you won’t use that tone with me. I represent the internecine interests of France, Lower Saxony, and American shipping lines. I am the universal solvent and when I move my bowels it’s like a gold mine. Ok? I’m throwing my weight around, skinny. Now, I want to talk to a grown up.

ALL: That’s me!

MUSE: [emerging from his hiding place] Ahem, that’s me. Monsieur, may I be at your service?

ANTOINE DE SAINT EXUPÉRY: Who’re you?

MUSE: My name is Abdi Wali Abdulqadir Muse. I am a valet of that man there. As you can see I’m black.

ANTOINE DE SAINT EXUPÉRY: And why isn’t he talking to me directly?

ABDI WALI ABDULQADIR MUSE: Sir we are all white men here. That is, in that, we believe in the rule of law, trickle down economics, the chain of command, cheap clothing and container ships. A chain that on the one hand moves the goods, and on the other holds me here in my place, you in yours.

ANTOINE DE SAINT EXUPÉRY: Fiend, you can reason.

ABDI WALI ABDULQADIR MUSE: Good sir, I am no fiend but a valet, in a job-training program, what your brother Briton would call a ‘training scheme’. I hope to return to my own land and open up a school for valets. We will teach subservience without the malfeasance, the smile without the guile. How to wipe the white crumbs from the table with a knife. A blunt instrument. It may sound out of date to you but some things never go out of style. Par example, did you hear the new Obama Administration ‘e-verify’ immigration labor bill includes a footnote exempting “footmen” from requiring documentation checks?

ANTOINE DE SAINT EXUPÉRY: That sounds to me like so much tropic hyperbole. For ‘tropic’ read ‘sophist’, NB.

ABDI WALI ABDULQADIR MUSE: Not at all, sir. Settle into this wingchair. Let me and these rank lads, my pupils, perform the very law for thee.

ANTOINE DE SAINT EXUPÉRY: Your pupils? I got the distinct impression these kids were with the blonde!

[ABDI WALI ABDULQADIR MUSE tut tuts ANTOINE’s objections and sweeps him into a fatherly wingchair ASSANGE, MUSE, and DEAD YOUTH perform COLLATERAL MURDER TWO. Here the burkas return and the DEAD YOUTH with MUSE perform another excerpt of the famous video according to the strictures above]

ASSANGE: O lovely, lovely. DEAD YOUTH you are so talented, so flexible and double jointed, so committed in your willingness to become any kind of media. It was just like watching a revolutionary mural or frieze, both analogue and digital. How it counted itself off. How it moved in frames, and how those frames moved. O I’m willing to run interference for you children from here to Infinitee— or, preferably, Magnetic Island. That’s just the kind of mom I am. A blonde one. Hum! And you must understand, villainous Exupéry, that this performance is both a literal depiction and a kind of allegory for all kinds of less visible violences which are an intrinsic part of our cultural fabric but hidden inside diplomatic cables or mental black sites. You see it here, but it’s happening there. DEAD YOUTH will bring it to light!

EXUPÉRY: Oh that was a marvelous play. It had a certain native simplicity, a native joy, an interest in aping and imitation, but at the same time Very European, very martial, very involved in divisions and counting and perfect rule of law with plenty of exemptions and exemptions and indications and—

Hey! What is the meaning of this! I am strapped to my chair and cannot move and liberate myself?! Is this a kidnapping? O! Removed from history by some rank plot! I am full of rue! O Mama said this would happen if I didn’t keep my feet on the ground! Just like Patty Hearst and Amelia Earhart! She was not such a mama as you [he nods at Assange].

MUSE: I thank you not to abuse Monsieur Julian. He’s been a bit of a prick but is now rehabilitating himself as a mother and teaching these homeless dead children to rehab junk ships and hack into computer systems. It’s basically Schindler’s wrist. Now, what did you think of the play?

EXUPÉRY: What did I think of it? I admit, I enjoyed it, at first blush, with the carefree jouissance as a schoolboy which is universally prized and protected, even on this questionable vessel, which I am beginning to regret I every mounted, this Puke Parnassus.

ABDI WALI ABDULQADIR MUSE: Behave like a gentleman, sir. That’s enough of your lingua franca. Ah, mother tongue can be such a dick in a throat, such a svarte garrote! Of course, as one whore said to the other, “There is no mother tongue. Only a power takeover by a dominant language.”

EXUPÉRY: For a ship full of ‘mothers’, I find your deportment lacks tenderness.

ABDI WALI ABDULQADIR MUSE: Lacks tendernesse! Sir, since you are a master of these things, let me ask you: what is the most tender thing of all?

EXUPÉRY: A new mother.

ABDI WALI ABDULQADIR MUSE: Well we’ve got that, if you’ll excuse the expressions, in spades. We’ve got Monsieur Assange. However, this discussion is becoming circular, like a chapeau, a case of crabs in a seminary or a firing squad. Let me tell you a little story. I saw this on Al Jazeera. There is a disease called Chagas disease common among the rural poor of Latin America. In Argentina, for example, the poor share their small homes with a tiny irritating insect called the vinchuca. It bites these poor peasants as they sleep. It sips their blood, it shits or vomits a little bit of this blood back into their bloodstream. As it does, it also releases a microscopic parasite, the flagellate protozoan Trypanosoma cruzi. In photomicrographs, this protozoan looks as slender and harmless as a little girl’s hair riband or a streamer from a bike. But in the body of a peasant, toxin runs all through the body, causes celldeath, including in the heart. Now the peasant man can no longer swing his axe. And why must he swing his axe? Because that is his livelihood: he makes axe handles. The tessellating pattern of subsistence labor snags and staggers. The axe is swung but poorly. The mother now swings the axe, now the children, and now noone. My parable is concluded.

EXUPÉRY: That’s a parable? I don’t follow.

ABDI WALI ABDULQADIR MUSE: Allow me to quote another great author, Mr. Herman Melville: FOLLOW YOUR LEADER. [smacks him] Sir, you are slower than these dead youth. Perhaps your kepi is too tight. I am here to read my rights into the record. I’m here for my MIRANDA rights! That is, I’m here because I love the Brave New World despite the people in it. I like Assange and his mooncalfs, the DEAD YOUTH. So let me begin again. As a human inmate on earth in the year 2013, I have been bitten by many things. That is, I have been subjected to many things, mostly against my will. To the point that will itself seems to be a poison and not the same for every man. The whole body of Somalia, par example, if we agree that it exists, has been swathed in a garment of toxic and nuclear waste for some decades now thanks to the depravity of wealthier nations and global shipping companies. We’ve been too embroiled in a convenient civil war to defend her. The Indian Ocean tsunami revealed the whole plot, brought huge barrels of oozing to nuclear and hospital waste to our shores and wiped it as salves into the RNA of my brethren. Now, some among us have styled ourselves shepherds of the sea, gone out to garner a sort of immediate reparation for these systemic damages from passing ships in the form of ransoms. Others among us, admittedly, have been motivated by baser things, such as the desire to eat. Which one right now, ask yourself, would you rather I be, a man motivated by justice, or a man who wants something to eat?

[beat, beat]

What about a man who wants to eat justice?

And what would such a man shit out into

Justice’s bloodstream?

And this, then, cher aviateur, my dirty chevre,

my cabriolet, is the meaning of my parable.

So many things I have been made to eat. So

many little things have eaten me.

I will learn from that. Let me be unto this

world the bacterium

pinkly slender as a girl’s riband

that eats and changes hearts

until the muscle of the great man falters

no axe can swing

and no blow can fall

EXUPÉRY: O pirate! I am slain.

ABDI WALI ABDULQADIR MUSE: When I hear grown men use this term ‘pirate,’ I reach for my gun. It seems it only applies to me and a pack of shut-in dead and down-market teens.

OMNES DEAD YOUTH: [happily] We’re going to need a bigger boat!’

MUSE: We’re going to need a bigger gun. Somehow we’re the scourge, the pirates, and not the credit default swappers, stock traders, nation crashers, corporate raiders, pharmaceutical hockers, civil war fomenters, forest burners, contractors, mercenaries, military recruiters, plant closers or anyone else who bleeds ‘the system’ for all its milky staph while leaving behind a crumpled stalk that is good for nothing but releasing toxic compounds as it breaks down. It seems that only I, who have nothing, not even a functioning country, I who rationally recognize what’s right in front of my face, that the exchange value of a single white man’s life is without limit, that the cargo of a single boat of cheap junk, crude, or even waste headed to port is far greater than all the souls in my war-wracked region, should be condemned for my savagery, my wild-eyed ‘rapacity’? Sorry, if I’m ‘bloodthirsty’ I come by it legitimately. It’s the only career path open to me. Plus you should thank me! Being kidnapped makes every white man a movie star. No more paper pusher for you! You’ll be a celebrity. You’ll be played in by the Toms Hanks or Cruise, or should you die, a lesser star, unless you die heroically, and then its one of the Toms again. Are there other dreams than these?

EXUPÉRY: O a pirate! He’s going to blow us all to kingdom come.

MUSE: That’s right. Madness is my policy. It’s mutually assured destruction. I learned it from your centuree.

EXUPÉRY: Assange! Tunnel digger, money changer, your cult of privacy gives aid and support to these evil doers. Muse, do you have any idea what your piracy is doing to insurance premiums?

[All others collapse in laughter]

MUSE: Sounds like highway robbery!

EXUPÉRY: [Sulks]

MUSE: Now you’re sulking like a teen. If you keep this up, we’ll use your pipe to dig out your eyes and we won’t let you watch the second act. It will be highly educational, like the first. And at the end there’ll be a test. I’ll give you the questions in advance. Are you an ‘environmentalist’ or just a ‘mentalist‘? Do you want these youth to chop you up and feed you to fishies in their fishnets or will you bend like a spoon?

OMNES DEAD YOUTH: Oh, we are bloodthirsty youth!

ASSANGE: If you don’t mind, I don’t care for all this violence.

It’s very analogue

It’s very twentieth cee.

It’s not what I signed up for

when I signed up to go to sea.

Also, I must add that these youth are looking peaked

and less sexy by the day. Sweet siphons,

we must make our way for Magnetic Island soon.

We can picnic on Picnic Bay.

OMNES DEAD YOUTH: For I am tired mother and would fain lie doon!

ABDI WALI ABDULQADIR MUSE: for someone sour on the 20th c you’re a bit of a nostalgique.

ASSANGE: Too true.

I’m like Odysseus in that way

And every way. The very cleverest of boots.

That one skilled in the ways of contending.

Splendida mendax. But less bearded…

Anyway I’m just tired. Like the brochures say,

I need to reboot.

I need to relax, if lax I ever was.

I need a long layover at LAX

to spend time in an oxygen bar

And lay down in my oxygen tent

And think about my brood

Why don’t you captain for awhile, ABDI WALI

ABDULQADIR MUSE.

[He lies down to sleep, as do DEAD YOUTH.]

MUSE: Very well then, intermission.

Annotate

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Act Three. Prologue
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