ACT THREE

[Dawn’s Early Light. It is literally sickening, nauseous, unwell. DEAD YOUTH rouses itself]

DEAD YOUTH 1: Is it dawn? Or still night? O Christ it smells like a hospital gown

DEAD YOUTH 2: Hey presto, everything’s going green. It’s like the lockerroom at Greenpeace.

DEAD YOUTH 1: It’s like something from a pamphlet at an STD clinic in a movie on TV.

DEAD YOUTH 2: “Sweet youth’s temple, defiled!” Or misfiled, maybe. Misfired? Fumbled its missile sheild? Oh, damn the torpedoes!

DEAD YOUTH 1: Still, it stinks. Nausea gets its name from the sea.

DEAD YOUTH 2: So does the Seahag. Plus, we’re in a total doldrum. We ain’t goin nowhere!

DEAD YOUTH 1: This boat’s got no motivation. It’s got no inclination. It just sits and rocks.

DEAD YOUTH 2: It’s like those pamphlets they give you at juvie.

DEAD YOUTH 1: It’s like those pamphlets they give you at the job center

DEAD YOUTH 2: Tips for going nowhere, for DEAD YOUTH.

DEAD YOUTH 1: Could it be we’re in one of those useful Shakespearean mists, perhaps brought on by too much beauty cream on our eyelids or a frozen knock-off laptop screen or a tremor in the laser that reads the disk? Moments like these, which appear stagnant, are infact rich as cream, because a bug can enter the soup of plot and curdle the whole tureen. In the same way black energy moves in dark matter. Empty space can still conduct a field. An asp can emerge from aspic and scramble the mold! Then the gelatin flowers died for nothing. I mean the horse’s crumply soles… Moments like these are in fact quiveringly equivocal bottoms for plot’s top.

DEAD YOUTH 2: Ooh, you’re so dirty with your bodily functions and horse hooves: “Give me a liver, a grille and a place to stand and I will eat the world.” Well, who’m I kidding. I’m half rotten already. I’m ready to be upset. I’m a dead teen hockey team manager, for god’s sake, not a veal calf. If I wanted safety, I wouldn’t have spent all those evenings sneaking out to the parking lot behind the Jiffy Lube to meet grown men.

DEAD YOUTH 1: I’m always impressed by the sordidness of that story. It carries its bad outcome in its mouth. It’s like a gleam where a pirate holds his knife between his teeth as he mounts the boat in silent moonlight on a painted sea in a picture book for kids, not even teens. Torn shirt and breaches. It leaves me breathless.

DEAD YOUTH 2: Well, me too, ultimately. Tell me this: have you got the itches? Do you find this nylon’s starting to chafe?

DEAD YOUTH 1: I do. My scalp feels like a wig. My skin’s going raw in places. There’s nothing to eat on this boat. If I don’t get some defragmentation soon and Big Gulp of sweet tea I’m not sure what’s going to what.

DEAD YOUTH 2: Oh, why are we on this boat at all! You, me, the rest of the DEAD YOUTH, Mama JULIAN, ABDI WALI ABDULQADIR MUSE?

DEAD YOUTH 1: We’re the rejects, the rejectimenta. Though its not true that we aren’t somehow necessary for world’s preferred plot to function, there has to be some cannon fodder, some credit card malfunction, some junk DNA, some user error, there has to be some losers, statistically, “success is counted dearest / to those who ne’er succeed,” or else Utopia would arrive and stop the clocks forever, that’s called evil. Evil decadence, evil pause. Arcadia Dance Party all ages but underage’s the best… Mama Julian’s just gathered us all up using some kind of juju algorithm or fishtank dipper-net. He’s snipped the exterior links and resutured us. He’s removed us from the plot.

[Large Thunderclap or Kaboom]

DEAD YOUTH 2: Sound like the plot wants us back!

DEAD YOUTH 1: I think it wants its ship.

[Thunder and lightening / Kaboom and flares]

DEAD YOUTH 2: Maybe they want the containers. Or the shit that’s in the containers.

DEAD YOUTH 1: Mama Julian says its hundreds of metric tonnes of flip flops, slides and shower shoes. To be worn in worker dorms, assembly lines and correctional facilities. They serve as casual indoor shoes for all interior weathers and make it harder to run. But who would want to? And where to run to? O what to wear when you run when you have to to wherever you have to? But you know, at the factory where I worked making iPhones, they had to build a wall around the facility to keep jobseekers out! Of course it didn’t work. That’s human nature. It’s also human nature to confess. A confession’s a form of boast: unbecoming. That’s what Mama Julian says. Anyway, they couldn’t keep me out. I wouldn’t tow the line. Well, I didn’t actually work on the line. Instead I ran a, well, a concierge service, running numbers and a, you could say a matchmaking service. Until a big dog collared me and ran me out.

DEAD YOUTH: [PROLOGUE steps on to the stage to help sing this]

That’s human nature.

Every part of this story.

Part and parcel and particle collider and plastic

carrier bag and shreds of particulates that turn the sea

to slurry and lodge in the albatross guts

bringing permanent curse on the shipping container

making is stop in its tracks

And from that toxic non-biodegradable preservative

also rises a fume

which is a human face

which only has eyes for historee.

Historee is porn for humans.

A mise-en-abyme, a dummy company

a self-programming story written by victors.

It always gets the main points right.

A thousand points of light!

It gets right to the point.

To knifepoint, gunpoint.

To lablight and pornlight.

[Thunder and lighting]