The Glacier (12 page)

The servers stop working and watch the screens.

MR. STEVENS

You all look fantastic. Thanks for all your hard work. We've got a super program and I know we're going to have a great year this morning. Now we've got a few special rules. First and foremost, as always, the best thing to do is—

CROWD OF SERVERS

Do it right the first time!

MR. STEVENS

As always, let's be in the here and now and focus on the task at hand. After all, how can we be here if we're somewhere else?

CROWD OF SERVERS

No watches!

MR. STEVENS

Absolutely no socializing with the Client tonight. Very important. Remember, we're all on stage here, so let's stick to our roles.

CROWD OF SERVERS

No talking!

MR. STEVENS

And the most critical rule of the evening concerns our dessert item.

We're excited to be serving a very exclusive item but we have an extremely limited supply. So I'm sorry to say that the dessert item is strictly off limits to the staff.

CROWD OF SERVERS

No eating!

MR. STEVENS

All right, let's finish up and take a complimentary meal break and then I want everybody ready to go. Let's stand tall. Let's be alert. And let's have a great show!

The servers applaud obediently.

Jonah notices Simone, also in Kabuki white-face, applauding up at the screens.

***

A smaller corporate banquet hall is filled with rows of long conference tables where the Event Horizon wait-staff are eating their pre-shift meal.

White-faced servers are filing through a temporary cafeteria-style buffet line, serving themselves from aluminum chafing pans, and sitting at the conference tables, eating.

There's a clock high on the back wall, ticking, like in a school classroom.

Simone files through the buffet with her plate and cup of coffee. She finds a seat at a table, submerged in the crowd.

Jonah walks down an aisle and takes a seat at the end of another long table. The room bubbles with chatter and the activity of eating, like a turkey farm feedlot.

He sips at his coffee, listening to the overtones of the collective conversation. The room swells around him and begins to sound like the amplified interior of an airplane, wavelengths canceling each other out into a wash of white noise. The sound balloons until it is overwhelming.

His sound-thought is suddenly interrupted by the bleating signal blast of a bullhorn bludgeoning the air from the back of the room.

A service captain in a black vest makes an announcement.

CAPTAIN

(through bullhorn)

Sorry to interrupt. If anyone wants to smoke, let's do it now.

The servers stop eating and flood the exit. The room empties. Simone is revealed in the exodus, left behind, sitting a few tables away from Jonah.

She gets up to leave as well but then sees Jonah absorbed in his notebook, scribbling sentences. She stands there watching him, curious about this new person.

She waits for him to look up at her, but he does not. She quietly sits back down and takes another sip of her coffee, stalling, watching him, looking into her coffee cup.

The clock on the back wall is ticking incessantly.

Focused on his book, Jonah reaches blindly for his coffee cup. As he does this Simone summons the courage to address him and she abruptly breaks into the silence of the room—

SIMONE

Hi.

—and it scares the crap out of Jonah. He hollers and hurls his coffee. Simone also screams, managing to frighten herself in the sudden eruption.

She catches her breath.

SIMONE

Omigod, I'm sorry.

JONAH

Jesus, you scared me.

SIMONE

I'm so sorry.

JONAH

Whew.

SIMONE

Sorry.

JONAH

No, it's okay. Seems like there's plenty of coffee here.

She laughs out loud, nervously.

SIMONE

That's for sure. You're new here.

JONAH

Yeah.

SIMONE

What are you doing here?

JONAH

(confused)

Same… thing as everybody else, I guess.

SIMONE

Yeah. But I mean how did you wind up here?

JONAH

Oh. Um, for work— What do you mean?

SIMONE

I mean… This is what you do?

JONAH

Oh. No, not really. I just needed a new job.

SIMONE

Uh huh.

Awkward, he's not sure what to say. She just looks at him directly and he can barely take it. They sit in that silence for a moment.

JONAH

No smoking for you, huh?

SIMONE

I guess not! Not today!

She laughs again nervously.

JONAH

How long have you been working here?

She bites her lip and looks up at the clock on the wall.

JONAH

No, I meant in general.

Simone nods, comprehending his meaning, but she keeps looking at the clock, as if it were a puzzle that needed to be solved, the adding and subtracting of hours passing silently across her lips.

Jonah watches her, waiting, and then he sits back and watches the clock with her. He bounces his knee absentmindedly, in a second-hand rhythm, and he rubs his left wrist where his watch used to be. He gnaws at his thumbnail and looks up at the ceiling, checking out the fluorescent lights and he scans the room until he sees something that causes him to freeze.

He is momentarily captivated like a deer in the headlights, looking intently across the room, directly into the camera.

The camera slowly pushes toward him.

Simone breaks free of the clock and looks at him and follows his gaze, so that they're both looking into the camera, but she doesn't see anything unusual.

SIMONE

What is it?

Jonah puts his finger to his lips, gently indicating for her to be quiet, as if some wild animal were in the room.

She looks back across the room but still sees nothing. She gestures to him…

SIMONE

(silently)

What?!

He delicately points in the direction of the camera, indicating that something is there, and that it can hear them. He silently motions for her to follow his lead. Then he cups his hands around his mouth and initiates a fake conversation as if to cover up a real one.

JONAH

(in a loud monotone voice)

HOW WAS YOUR CATERED LUNCH?

SIMONE

(mimicking him)

TERRIBLE. HOW WAS YOURS?

JONAH

MINE WAS VERY EXCELLENT. THANK YOU FOR ASKING.

SIMONE

WOULD YOU RECOMMEND THIS PLACE?

JONAH

I WILL COME HERE AGAIN AND AGAIN AND AGAIN AND AGAIN AND AGAIN…

His voice trails off, simulating a receding echo, and he smiles at her.

SIMONE

You're funny.

JONAH

I am?

SIMONE

I guess we both look pretty ridiculous.

They're just looking at each other, smiling softly.

SIMONE

What are you writing over there?

He puts his hand on the book and fiddles with it.

JONAH

Oh it's just a… thing I'm working on. Thing I'm trying to figure out.

SIMONE

What are you trying to figure out?

JONAH

(reluctantly)

Oh…

He gestures in an attempt to beg off the question, but something kicks on, and the sound of the airplane fuselage seeps back into the room. Slowly the room begins to fill up with sonic gas.

Jonah rubs at the back of his neck, suddenly wincing in a bit of neck pain. He stretches his head down, and to the side, trying to stretch it out. Then he holds himself tightly at his left arm and raises his eyes and looks at her.

JONAH

Something is happening. And there's nothing anyone can do about it.

Just Simone's face. All of a face. She watches him as he continues to speak in his warm Midwestern drawl.

JONAH

It's organizing us to build it. Self-organizing. It is us, building itself from the inside out. We're conspiring to engineer the annihilation of ourselves. We can't help it. We're falling.

The sonic vacuum begins to overtake the room, very slowly drowning him out. He's looking down into the book, reading from it.

JONAH

The shape of things is the tragedy we impose on ourselves in order to understand. The shape we take in the free-fall. Like the dihedral of migrating birds. A drop of water. Or a wavelength of sound. The atomic mythology of matter is inside us, projecting a map of itself. But the screen is actually blank and we are moths, flaming in the light of the projection, flickering in the frame-rate. On and off. On and off. Faster and faster.

The sound of white noise is traumatically loud, like a jet-turbine blasting through the room.

Simone covers her ears, blocking out the unbearable jet wash.

On one of the tables, on a crisp white tablecloth, is a perfectly arranged table setting: Clean white plate. Shiny fork, knife, spoon. Napkin, coffee cup and saucer. Silent, civilized, horrifying perfection.

Across the room, Simone is screaming at Jonah to stop, but he can't hear her. He's absorbed in his book, reading aloud, inaudibly. The two of them are tiny signals enveloped within a cottony, oceanic distortion. A surreal agitation, their inability to hear each other.

JONAH

(barely audible)

It feels like it's coming soon because it's happening all the time now. And the closer we get to it, the slower it seems, like a wheel moving so fast it appears to be spinning in reverse. There is nothing we can do about it because there is no such thing as time. It all happened so fast, as though it happened in one instant. One instant stretched into one infinite instant filled with an infinite number of instants—

Jonah looks up and sees her screaming silently—a face of Kabuki white-face horror—and all the deafening sound is suddenly sucked out of the room—

The room is quiet.

Simone slowly lowers her hands from her ears.

And then the cockroach crawls back out of Jonah's mouth and quickly disappears under the table.

Simone shrieks and covers her mouth.

JONAH

(quickly)

What?! What was it?!

Horrified, she gets up and leaves the room.

Jonah is left alone, sitting in the silence of the empty conference room.

***

Robert sits in his lawn chair in the front yard. He is asleep, with his head hung back and his mouth open.

A black hearse pulls up and stops quietly in front of the house. A chauffeur in a black suit gets out of the car. He shuts his door, awakening Robert from his nap, and crosses around the car to the sidewalk.

CHAUFFEUR

Mr. Adams?

ROBERT

Yes?

CHAUFFEUR

It's time for your Last Supper.

The chauffeur opens the passenger side door.

Robert gets up from his chair, walks across the yard, and gets into the car. The chauffeur shuts the door and crosses to the driver side. He gets in and the hearse pulls away.

The lawn chair sits empty on Robert's dirt lawn. For a moment, the chair is just a still-life, sitting in front of the house, in the dirt, in the cold air.

Then a tiny, invading wave of sound, as if bleeding and rising from the exposed ground around the empty lawn chair.

Thousands of tiny voices entering. Human voices with inhuman qualities. A mass of the living and the dead. A shapeless horde, speeding up and slowing down, stacked and parallel. Electronic, insect, and familiar.

People. All of them. And finally stabilizing. A crowd of simultaneous conversations. Just voices, congregating invisibly around the empty lawn chair. The masses.

***

The Main Hall of the Convention Center is full, filled with guests. 5000 guests moving to their tables and sitting at their places. Tables and people, for as far as the eye can see. The 360-degree ring of video screens deepens the interior landscape, displaying various live mirror images, or a reality-feed of the room and all the guests entering.

Robert moves through the controlled chaos looking for his table. He marvels at the room like a wonderstruck, well-behaved kid in a fantastic, new world. The lights, the ambient music, the screens, the people, the spectacle of it all.

He finds his table, #260, and takes an empty seat. He nods and smiles reservedly at a few fellow guests. He puts his napkin on his lap and examines his polished spoon, inverting his reflection as he turns it in his fingers. He flips his coffee cup right side up for service.

A dark tone fills the air, droning ominously through the event hall. The lights dim and a fiery sunset fades up on the giant screens, a red sun melting into a black and molten sea.

A red spotlight rises on the stage, revealing a large gospel singer in a choir robe. She moans along with the music. A choir echoes mournfully behind her.

A gospel lamentation the fat lady now will sing.

GOSPEL SINGER

(singing)

Hear my prayer, O Good Lord, hear my prayer. Hear my prayer, to heaven, hear my prayer. O Good Lord, won't you lead me from this life of despair and hear my prayer, to heaven, hear my prayer—

The sun sets.

The spotlight fades.

The hall is dark.

GOSPEL SINGER

(singing)

I woke up beneath a burning sky!

The hall explodes with light. Mushroom clouds ignite across the screens. The choir launches into a fiery gospel call and response.

GOSPEL SINGER

I stand upon a ground of fire!

CHOIR

And death done sown my field.

The crowd claps to the rhythm of the beat. Robert claps along with his table and the rest of the crowd.

GOSPEL SINGER

Preacher man come to plant the seed!

CHOIR

Death done sown my field.

GOSPEL SINGER

And satisfy my principal need!

CHOIR

Death done sown my field.

Looking down on the hall, round tables are arranged in concentric circles around the circular stage. Circles within circles. The room spins in a carousel of grand spectacle.