The Sound of Waiting
(excerpt)
By
Mary Anne Butler
“Jesus knew that there was a place for everything, and it’s not necessarily everyone’s place to come to Australia.”
Tony Abbot, 2010
The Sound of Waiting - © Copyright, Mary Anne Butler 2018
CAST:
HAMED – an Asylum Seeker [male]
ANGEL OF DEATH – an Angel of Death [male or female]
The playwright actively encourages cross-cultural and diverse casting across all her works.
SET:
A small wooden boat on a wild ocean
Under the Pacific Ocean
ERA: Now
**
ANGEL OF DEATH: There is a space between sea and sky
It is a tiny space
A cranny
A nook
a fissure
a chink
a gap
the size of a child’s first tooth.
It is a sliver of liquid silk, where the oceans meet the heavens.
The whisper between hope and despair.
And if a person can reach in there - if they can grab that tiny sliver of light-capped possibility - then the rest of their life; the rest of their children’s lives, and their children’s children’s lives will become golden-edged with opportunity.
But how to reach in there, how to grasp that light, is…
A lottery of chance.
***
A sudden flash of light. It could be sunrise, it could be a bomb blast.
HAMED: Eardrums ripped from my head.
ANGEL OF DEATH: Soundless.
HAMED: Teeth flying past me.
ANGEL OF DEATH: Weightless.
HAMED: Hair and eyeballs.
ANGEL OF DEATH: Floating.
HAMED: Sinew and cartilage.
ANGEL OF DEATH: Buoyant.
HAMED: Limbs and hands and fingers and toes
ANGEL OF DEATH: Every single nerve:
HAMED: cartwheeling through the air.
ANGEL OF DEATH: attuned. Alive.
HAMED: A river of blood, running down my street.
My wife’s head scarf flies past me.
Red. Soaked.
ANGEL OF DEATH: Lightweight, and whisper-thin.
HAMED: Still wrapped around her…
jaw? …her…
cheekbone?
What part of her is this? I don’t even know.
Pieces of my wife, flying down my street.
And other body parts, of other people.
The flesh and skin of strangers, mixed in with my wife.
And I don’t want to look.
ANGEL OF DEATH: Slip through wind and cloud.
HAMED: Don’t want to see.
ANGEL OF DEATH: Sun and moon.
HAMED: Want to close my eyes forever.
ANGEL OF DEATH: Ocean and earth.
HAMED: …but I must look…
And he is there, my son.
The foot of my son.
His small foot, with a tiny stubbed toe
The rest of the toe is perfect.
…but the foot…
it is detached from his body.
And my first thought is so logical; so rational. I think: we are citizens here. Ordinary citizens. We’re not soldiers, or politicians. We’re not part of a government agency. We’re just ordinary people, going for a walk as an ordinary family. And then the next minute we’re heads, bobbing up and down in an ocean of blood.
I can’t even bury them; there aren’t enough pieces.
ANGEL OF DEATH: Outside the exosphere
cosmic dust whispers down like rain
Dark nebulae build: dense. Impervious.
A tiny flash of blinding light heralds the birth of a new star.
The deepest of deep space still simmers with life.
Plummet down, down through the thermosphere
air so thin, breath is vacuumed from my lungs.
Spill through the mesosphere.
Atmospheric waves combine and clash
to form the perfect storm.
Plunge through layer after layer of stratospheric sky:
the speed
the power
the majesty.
Free-falling
falling
falling from the sky.
Enter the troposphere:
ground comes up to meet my face, my eyes.
Extend wings
engage alulas
flex
brake
slow
level
still
soar
hover
the stillness, up here.
The peace.
HAMED: I am a mathematician.
ANGEL OF DEATH: Survey the earth:
HAMED: Everything has a logic.
ANGEL OF DEATH: minor dominions.
HAMED: Must have a logic.
ANGEL OF DEATH: The harried hurrying of homo sapiens.
HAMED: Why my wife was running ahead with my son
ANGEL OF DEATH: Tiny.
HAMED: Laughing.
ANGEL OF DEATH: Insignificant.
HAMED: Racing to buy ice cream.
ANGEL OF DEATH: Actions paltry and hapless.
HAMED: Why I was six metres behind, tying up my daughter’s shoelace.
ANGEL OF DEATH: Filling in their futile time between birth and the inevitable.
HAMED: Any event can be explained by the theory of probability.
ANGEL OF DEATH: It all ends the same, people.
HAMED: The law of large numbers.
ANGEL OF DEATH: There IS no point.
HAMED: The central limit theorem.
ANGEL OF DEATH: Hark.
Call of the Host.
HAMED: But why was it them, and not me?
ANGEL OF DEATH: Never have I heard his tongue so urgent, immediate.
HAMED: It should have been me.
ANGEL OF DEATH: Summoned.
HAMED: A man can only be still for so long, before he can no longer be called a man.
ANGEL OF DEATH: Wheel about.
HAMED: And so I wrap my surviving daughter into my arms; the only thing which remains of my heart…
…and I run…
ANGEL OF DEATH: Engage:
primaries
secondaries
coverts
KEEL!
HAMED: Past the university now burned to the ground.
ANGEL OF DEATH: Pump
Thrust
Propel
Beat
HAMED: Past the hospital, pock-marked with bullets.
ANGEL OF DEATH: Pump
Thrust
Propel
Beat
HAMED: Past a park riddled with the gravestones of children.
ANGEL OF DEATH: Pump
Thrust
Propel
Beat
HAMED: Past a city now brought to its knees.
ANGEL OF DEATH: The air whirrs thick with it:
Angels of Death, stirring up the skies.
Millions; billions of us.
HAMED: In this world there is only one language:
ANGEL OF DEATH: The stratosphere hums with it.
HAMED: The language of money.
ANGEL OF DEATH: The oceans vibrate with it.
HAMED: So I sell my wife’s wedding jewelry, and my sisters sell their wedding jewelry, and my Uncle Salman takes all his savings: For a house. For a car. For his children to be educated.
ANGEL OF DEATH: Approach home base.
HAMED: They urge me to find a place of peace, and stillness. Where there is freedom.
ANGEL OF DEATH: Zig-zag
HAMED: Hope.
ANGEL OF DEATH: Zig-zag
HAMED: Safety.
ANGEL OF DEATH: Zig-zag
in.
HAMED: My sisters argue that my daughter should stay here with them -
but I know the loss of both parents will break her in two.
…and to be without her will break me…
ANGEL OF DEATH: The gathering is dense: immense.
Every Death Angel from every hemisphere, summoned here together.
HAMED: I call up my friend Kadir, who knows these paths
and he sells me some papers:
ANGEL OF DEATH: The task must be colossal.
HAMED: New passports.
New names.
New lives.
ANGEL OF DEATH: We form our order: the highest to the lowest ranking.
HAMED: He organizes transport: gives us contacts for the rest of the journey.
ANGEL OF DEATH: The hierarchy is clear.
HAMED: Under cover of night me and my daughter get into a taxi and we drive to the armoured gates of this city.
ANGEL OF DEATH: Finally the Host appears.
HAMED: We find the soldier with the yellow badge on his collar -
the one we’ve been told to approach.
ANGEL OF DEATH: Struts and frets.
HAMED: He cradles an AK47 like it’s his own child.
ANGEL OF DEATH: Parades his status.
HAMED: I hand our passports through the open window;
a hundred US dollars tucked neatly inside each one.
He looks at the passports.
ANGEL OF DEATH: Aloof.
HAMED: Looks at us.
ANGEL OF DEATH: Removed.
HAMED: Looks at the passports again.
ANGEL OF DEATH: Detached.
HAMED: The sound of waiting is like a cannon in my chest.
This one man can end our lives right now.
If he doesn’t like the look of us.
If he doesn’t like the smell of us.
If he simply chooses.
ANGEL OF DEATH: Finally he clears his throat.
HAMED: Looks at my daughter.
ANGEL OF DEATH: Decrees: Complete eradication.
En masse.
HAMED: Where’s your mother?
ANGEL OF DEATH: Quick.
Clean.
HAMED: She’s dead, my daughter says.
ANGEL OF DEATH: Simultaneous.
HAMED: They killed her.
ANGEL OF DEATH: Enhance natural selection.
HAMED: They killed my brother as well.
ANGEL OF DEATH: Spring clean for the planet.
HAMED: He sees me holding in my loss.
ANGEL OF DEATH: Stave off global warming.
The Boats, the camps, the war-torn cities.
The displaced souls, which belong nowhere.
Better off without.
HAMED: What’s your name? he asks.
ANGEL OF DEATH: The assignments drop upon us: million, billions of them.
HAMED: Amal, she says. My name is Amal
- and my heart stops dead.
She’s forgotten that the name on her passport is a new one.
ANGEL OF DEATH: The detritus of lives wafting down from above.
HAMED: The soldier looks at her. Looks at the passport. Looks back at her.
ANGEL OF DEATH: Mine lands in my hands: Male.
HAMED: I can see him deciding.
ANGEL OF DEATH: Widowed.
HAMED: His mind ticking over.
ANGEL OF DEATH: Last surviving son.
HAMED: Amal means hope, she says.
ANGEL OF DEATH: Child: immaterial. Someone else’s job.
HAMED: Yes, he says. I know. My daughter is also called Amal.
ANGEL OF DEATH: But the man is mine.
HAMED: She stares at him without fear.
He slips the money from the passports deep inside his pocket.
Holds the passports back out to me.
He nods to my daughter. She nods back.
…and then he waves us on…
END EXCERPT
