ACT ONE

A bilious dawn above the SS Smirk. Two DEAD YOUTH are strolling on deck. Others continue to clump like sneakered lotus-eaters. White sneaker laces vine. The teens are crumpled like lovely soiled money.

Yellowish green money light.

DEAD YOUTH 1: How’s the dawn?

DEAD YOUTH 2: Bilious. An ugly thing. So new, yet it glooms like cholangiocarcinoma. & glops its cellophane.

DEAD YOUTH 1: And how’s the moon?

DEAD YOUTH 2: Green Cheese.

DEAD YOUTH 1: Yuk yuk

DEAD YOUTH 2: What is this, a school examination? Please.

DEAD YOUTH 1: What do I know about school? I breezed through that breezeway.

DEAD YOUTH 2: For me school was a breezey dream. Lit up with puff paint and smelly stickers. My friends, the girls, were budding cosmeticians…How they made a doll of me with the Sun-in and tweezers…Unfortunately I got dragged behind a three-wheeler at a post-prom party in the woods with a length of chain around my lissome neck. That was not such a friendly party as at first it seemed…

DEAD YOUTH 1: Dead to begin with. Dead as a painted moon upon a painted sea…

DEAD YOUTH 2: Oh, but I was dressed to the nines!

DEAD YOUTH 1: Then let’s not get morose. I’m feeling good today. Some bug’s got into my brain. Some kind of post-death inflammation is reanimating me. My circuits are firing like a firing squad. Repeating like a repeating rifle. I feel like I repeat my lines forever. Could finish school! Join the drum corps, dance team…

DEAD YOUTH 2: Junior ROTC!

DEAD YOUTH 1: Hustlers’ Battalion.

DEAD YOUTH 2: Artists’ Rifles.

DEAD YOUTH 1: CCTV! A special episode of Special Victims Unit.

DEAD YOUTH 2: O, we are a patriotic youth.

DEAD YOUTH 1: Today is a busy day. There are two press conferences, at noon.

DEAD YOUTH 2: Press conferences? And is there a press corps around here somewhere? A French Lick? A Coeur D’Alene?

DEAD YOUTH 1: Only us dead student bodies, as per usual. Also known as the Crumb Cohort, the Commingled Human Remains. But Mama Julian says we must keep up appearances. In case we are being surveilled with that green light with which they seek heat on pleasure boats, naughty things. Searching for leaks. For leaky youth. That leak from the throat. [Bends his head back as from a nearly-severed neck]

DEAD YOUTH 2: “They”?

DEAD YOUTH 1: The graduands of ROTC. Our past classmates. Our future campadres in the shadow army of DEAD YOUTH. AKA the Navy Seals.

DEAD YOUTH 2: Hmm. What fanciful names, these gangs today. Tho navy, what a flattering color…

DEAD YOUTH 1: Privacy is a chance operation. One must always have a poem ready in case the mic goes live.

DEAD YOUTH 2: When the cat’s away / the lice do play.

DEAD YOUTH 1: I only regret that I have but one life to give—

DEAD YOUTH 2: —to the hive mind. Bury me standing

DEAD YOUTH 1: In the check-out line. I don’t want to lose my place.

DEAD YOUTH 2: I’m double couponing.

DEAD YOUTH 1: I’m saving up for a doublewide.

DEAD YOUTH 2: That’s why I joined the Navee!

DEAD YOUTH 1: That’s why I R-O-T-C’d.

DEAD YOUTH 2: That’s why I lost a hundred pounds so I could join the USMC.

DEAD YOUTH 1: I wanted to be a kindergarten teacher but couldn’t afford the tuition. Then I got kidnapped and put on television…

DEAD YOUTH 2: “We don’t take applications. Only commitments.”

DEAD YOUTH 1: It’s FUBAR. But YOLO. I’m AWOL. Lost at cee.

DEAD YOUTH 2: And now I’m in the gunsights for some mout breathing MP.

DEAD YOUTH 1: His itchy trigger-finger is hunga-ree for me.

DEAD YOUTH 2: Yum yum! Well when he finds you

BOTH: save some for me!

JULIAN ASSANGE: [Entering, pushing a white cart full of beauty, hygienic, and pharmaceutical supplies]. What’s the buzz? What’s this I hear, bumblebees? Awake already? Like the Internet, the sea’s a casino, it keeps a clock not based on human experience. Le-Roi-Soleil. No hours on the see but the sun’s hours. Shine and shine. That’s my motto, and that’s the sun’s. [The DEAD YOUTH wake] Time for your morning treatment, sons. We blondes cannot manage the raw light much longer. We must have our morning ichor, our sun cream. Now, who can tell me what IV’s, hypos, bee-stings, and bone meal all have in common.

DEAD YOUTH: They are all vectors!

JULIAN ASSANGE: That’s right, geniuses. Of what?

DEAD YOUTH 1: Infections

DEAD YOUTH 2: Nutriment

DEAD YOUTH 3: Antigens

DEAD YOUTH 4: Information.

DEAD YOUTH 5: Everything but secrecy.

JULIAN ASSANGE: That’s right. Secrecy is a landlocked ship. Like that ship up on blocks in the Massif Central where Jean Genet learned to be a sailor. Secrecy can’t breathe. Privacy is another matter. Privacy will find its subterranean channel. Darkling privacy breathes like a sea. On privacy we are a-drift. Tho lately, something is scripting us. Something tugs.

DEAD YOUTH 1: Perhaps we’ve sprung a leak.

DEAD YOUTH 2: Perhaps our lymph is out of whack.

DEAD YOUTH 3: Perhaps we need a lumpectomy or

DEAD YOUTH 4: Federally funded mammogram or

DEAD YOUTH 5: Perhaps we’ve failed the smear test.

JULIAN ASSANGE: Enough. DEAD YOUTH, I adore you, and I have personally vouchsafed you here at my maternal bosom, even though I am a very hunted man. Mine may not be the very safest of bosoms in which to hide your lean, rodentine faces. As in the self-portraits of Frieda Kahlo, you may find yourself punctured from a number of difficult angles before the casual comedie is complete. Now, to continue the lesson: secrecy cannot move but information must. Because information is like air, mon amour, mon sacre coeur, and air hates vessels. A little air bubble in the vessel and the brain goes: stroke! But seamen love vessels and seminal vesicles and stroking and gossip contra secrecy. And we are seamen. At least temporarily.

DEAD YOUTH 1: Then what moves the ship?

DEAD YOUTH 2: And don’t say ‘love.’

OMNES DEAD YOUTH: AND DON’T SAY ‘LOVE’!

JULIAN ASSANGE: I wouldn’t dream of it. Our good ship, the SS Smirk, moves on dreams, and also because it is imbalanced. [beat, worriedly, studies each of boys’ faces]. Some jerrybuilt wiring, some imbalance in the server load, is causing the ship to list. Then, something from the outside is pulling it off track…

DEAD YOUTH 3: A current?

JULIAN ASSANGE: A dream current, maybe… like a hot seam of toxic cells… a self-generating tumor… It’s better than stagnation but, still, I am concerned. We are trackable when we move. We may be traced. That’s why we must continually change our hairstyles.

DEAD YOUTH 2: Is it true, Julian, what my brother DEAD YOUTH tells me, that there will be two press conferences today?

DEAD YOUTH 1: Perhaps some military recruiter has gained access to the ship? Perhaps he wants us for a troop surge?

DEAD YOUTH 2: Some surge! More like a synth-track on loop.

DEAD YOUTH 1: More like a trackmark in a diseased forearm: suppurating. Skin coming loose.

ASSANGE: Ha, ha, DEAD YOUTH. Look at you, you’re half corrupted, dear to me, but insipid as a flotilla of aspidistras in a locked office or an Easter Lily in June. You are waging no war the army wants, but I daresay you could mount one it doesn’t! [twinkles] Still, I confess, I’ve heard that rumor myself, I heard you scratching in the skirtingboards last night, little rats, and it gnaws me like poison cheese…it drills me like a rotten tooth… I’m certainly not dressed for a duel, and I don’t know who my second could be. This mystery raconteur’s not one of you precocious corpses? With what did you signal the press? With your rancid grave-breath? By pressing the button in your knock-off Air Jordans, my Nikes of Samothrace, my croaked boy-dolphins of the River Styx? Phew, Dorothy! “There’s no place like home. There’s no zone like the canal zone.”

DEAD YOUTH 2: Julian, have you stopped to wonder if there’s someone else on this ship?

ASSANGE: Someone else on this ship? Well that would make for a very ripe situation. A very ripe cheese indeed. This ship’s already as fetid as the team bus back to Belfast after a track meet. That is, more fetid than any ship’s got a right to be.

DEAD YOUTH 3 & 4: I have an announcement. I had a vision in a dream, a fragment.

DEAD YOUTH 1: Well, make it quick, that sun is getting high.

DEAD YOUTH 2: I’d like my portion of bone meal while we’re waiting.

[ASSANGE with eye dropper, hypo, IV goes around feeding dead youth during the following speech. Other youth may foil each other’s hair]

DEAD YOUTH 3: I was awake, all of a night.

I was awake, all through the night.

I think it’s because it’s my thirteenth birthday.

And also my aniversaree.

DEAD YOUTH 1: He means of the day he died.

DEAD YOUTH 3: And also my aniversaree.

Of the night they wrapped the barbed wire around me

and threw me into the river.

I was chained to a cash register.

Forever. Legal tender.

So I could purchase knowledge.

So I could chase after knowledge forever

In the madrassa of the muddy river

and never come up again.

Eli eli Allah Allah

How the river broke my teeth

forced its knowledge into me

gave up all its information

hammered it into my brainstem

O I knew everything then

at last and for the last time

I was smarter than a pentium chip

smarter than a flash drive

the moment I died

DEAD YOUTH 2: This one thinks he’s a visionary.

DEAD YOUTH 4: And also it was my anniversaree

So I was also walking the deck last night

Reliving my handful of memories…

O on the night I died

I had been up that night coding

I had been up all night coding coding

On the night I died on the night I died

That was the night before the day we’d go live

But ‘we’ never did go live

I deleted I from we

I permanently destroyed the encryption keys

The day before the night I died

And all that death caught up with me

I had to go meet it in the closet

I had to go meet the knot

I couldn’t beat it so I soldered

like a soldier off the base

I had to go meet it with a tie wrapped round my throat

I had to meet it with a bag over my face

DEAD YOUTH ONE: And this one’s an entrepreneur.

DEAD THREE AND FOUR: We had to go meet it on the deck last night

We could not sleep, our anniversaree

Kept rising in us like a moon or a rumor

We had to go meet it on the deck

We strolled like a couple of lady journos

Circling the globe to rapturous applause

Telegraphing back to rival papers

Our arrivals in split skirts and dusters

O, that anniversary kept compelling us ‘round the deck!

Like a couple of planets or a couple of clockhands

Diminutive, dwarf things that could wreck no orbits

We circled, clasped hands, and moaned.

Then with our eyes we did espy

With the aid of our steamy lorgnettes

A rubber craft sidle up to the vessel

And a young man scale the Smirk walls!

It was a young man, as beautiful as the night

With beautiful teeth like the cancerous growths

Enpearling hot organs en la crevasse de l’autopsie

O his smile irradiated our dirty gazes

And his dark suit flapped around him like a piece of night

But was a piece of nylon, for it had that signature bark

So we knew him for a teen

And he climbed and he climbed the ladder

rung after rung, rung after rung

he climbed the sheer flank of the vessel

when he arrived at deck-level

our vision failed; we think he disappeared into some coil.

JULIAN ASSANGE: Youth, this is indeed a vision.

YOUTHS 3 and 4: But that is not all, that is not all.

No sooner had the dark-clad teen

disappeared into the vessel,

than another figure arose on the opposite flank.

All clad in white, neither man nor woman.

In a crisp uniform that did not flap

and a hat like a piece of new moon concentrate.

And climbed up the opposite flank, the opposite flank

And disappeared likewise in the bowels of the ship.

JULIAN ASSANGE: Youth, this double vision is full of fancy.

OMNES DEAD YOUTH: Yes full of fancy, full of the night.

JULIAN ASSANGE: I fear it like fancy, I fear it like the night.

OMNES DEAD YOUTH: I fear it like fancy, I fear it like the night.

JULIAN ASSANGE: Youth, I do not know what

mad double agency joins us.

What doppelganger, what devil a deux

What mad double thought, what one and what zero

does not equal two,

Which antigen, which antidote. But I do know

that I must speed up my preparations for my press

conference.

I will deliver my address as a means of securing

my hold on the plot

and thus hastening us to our destination

which I shall reveal so shortly, but which for now I hold

to my breast, a secret,

as I hold you, dear children.

While I ready myself, please perform the short masque

we have rehearsed. [exits]

DEAD YOUTH 1: [to audience] Ladies and gentlemen,

may we perform for you

An act of infamy:

a video leaked by Private Bradley Manning (allegedly!) and published to the world by Julian Assange on the website, Wikileaks. It took a borrowed supercomputer to decrypt this information. It took the hiviest of hive minds. You will note it is green like any act that grows in the dark of the crypt. You will note it lives.

Ladies and gelignites

Collateral Murder!

[For this short night ballet, the light on the stage shifts to suggest night vision. The DEAD YOUTH shroud themselves in black robes like burkas. The vision should be grainy like radioactive grains; action should leave green lines on the air like vines in the work of Aubrey Beardsley. A portion of the audio to the famous ‘Collateral Murder’ video should play, while the DEAD YOUTH play the part of the bodies in the videos, walking, taking shelter, being shot, arriving in the van, being shot, being pulled into the van, being shot. The DEAD YOUTH do the DEATH DROP. The figures of the DEAD YOUTH should almost seem to be ‘recycled’—shot and revived and reentering the stream of violence represented in the video. For a fancy special effect, the video may appear to ‘rewind,’ ‘loop,’ or ‘repeat.’ Such DJ effects are up to the company.]

DEAD YOUTH 1: [removing his burka, wiping away sweat] Phew! What an atrocity.

DEAD YOUTH 2: What a day at the races.

DEAD YOUTH 1: It’s hard work, this afterlife.

DEAD YOUTH 2: It’s hard work, being a teen-corpse on the SS Smirk sailing for who-knows-where with the blond assassin, Julian Assange.

PROLOGUE: [entering stage. Gravely.] Yea, verily. What an atrocity.

What an atrocity. What an atrocious leak.

O it leaks a bilious green that carries black matter with it.

O it leaks all over the screen.

O it is all too recognizable, the grief of mothers.

O it is like acid poured on the face of the Internet

O it turns all flesh to fluid so that it might leak

O it runs ideas together

Brain fluid flusters in the nose

Of the schoolgirl, of the pharaoh.

The DEAD YOUTH are all dressed as mothers

in this scene.

O it might bring on a vengeance.

O it might bring on a spell of vengeance.

O it might draw a violence to the scene.

O it must, maybe it must!

O watching face. O humanitee.

You like to ape the moon. Peel your face back

to the skull. At the seat of the skull: the teeth.

That vicious jewelry

wears a merchant’s grin. As it peruses the wares.

It always wears that same bare face.

Vanity, vanity,

The mind is media

for a life of crime

but wants to pretend otherwise. That’s what

the leak divines.

It taps the flux and drains the pus from the line.

Where it will live on into infinitee

on the Internet. Take it from me.

Mother of a very immortal line.

My cells live on in culture in their malignancy.

I’m dead so I can live two places: everywhere

and on the Internet.

Only malignant cells can divide like that

i.e. unto infinitee. That’s the bottom line.

And I’m the heavy-weight champeen.

And that’s atrocitee.