novufo

JAN: (SPEAKS IN CZECH-ACCENTED, BROKEN ENGLISH) Shhh. Don't waking the baby. ...I know how you feel, Penny, I don't like either New Orleans. But this discovery is the opportunity we were waiting for.

PENELOPE: There's nothing strange about a swamp fire! The roots are wet and the water is wet but the trees are dry. The top of them are.

FRANCINE: Yawn? Yawn? Oh that's right, Yawn. What kind of name is that anyway? Is it a nickname because he's boring? Yeee-aawwnn.

FRANCINE: (TO BABY) Yes! So big! Aren't you? Aren't you? (TO PENELOPE) I brought some Mardi Gras beads. They put beads on me in the nursery!

AMERICAN GUY: Ever since nine-one-one it takes longer. I mean really long. What's the rush? Did it get uncovered by a hurricane or something?

AMERICAN GUY: There are these giant rat or gerbil-beavers, imported to Lousiana from Europe because they ate the kudzu plants that were choking the swamps out! But then, you see, they overran the place, and now there are so many that hunting is rewarded, and some people think it was a French attack on the US, and that the nutria were genetically modified and trained to destroy-

JAN: No, they were not hunting, but snorkeling. (PAUSE) Yes, they were snorkeling in the swamp. They wouldn't see any thing! And you know it's really dangerous. Crocodiles are known to be frequent there. But one kept watching, while the other was swimming around in some silt. Then in the middle of a lagoon--is that how you say it?

AMERICAN GUY: How did it get there? You know they found a human hair inside one of the stone building blocks of the great pyramids...

FRANCINE: I don't know. It just your leaving to Prague and getting married and having your baby here -- not having you around has made me think. I didn't dream you'd be so resistant.

PENELOPE: I just don't like you pretending to be so high and mighty, and honest, the one who doesn't need therapy, when you're lying. I know you left Daddy. Maybe you had good reason, I don't care.

FRANCINE: There were a lot of things going on. He got religion in a bad way. Then his hobbies started up, and he moved out to the swamp. The music, the crazy talk about, oh, sarcophagae...

FRANCINE: Nothing. (PAUSE) Nothing, really, it's just that an Egyptian sarcophagus was one of the last antiques that your father was dealing with before he died. I don't know if you remember the last day you saw your father. Did you know it was thirteen years ago this month...

SCENE FOUR (SWAMP NOISE. HEAVY, GRITTY BLUES BAND PLAYING LIVE WITH AUDIENCE SOUNDS. THE SINGING IS A GRAVELLY VOICE THROUGH A CHEAP AMPLIFIER.)

FRANCINE: Bancroft Masgraves... (THE WORDS BLARE OUT THE AMPLIFIER, DISTORTED AND ECHOEY WITH FEEDBACK) Bancroft come away from that microphone for a moment. If you don't talk to me this instant... I've had it. I am not bringing up our daughter out in this swamp! She can't just change her life on some whim of yours. She just started classes at St. Expeditus! Her life is in New Orleans. And what about the business? Are you listening to me, Bancroft?

FRANCINE: You never...But oh no, that was impossible... Forty five dollars when eight hundred was...Who ever heard of stained glass...Rosaries are important... Kablooey!... Always something...

(A WHIRRING/DEEP PULSATING HUM AND BEEPING SOUND QUICKLY COMES CLOSER, STARTS TO DROWN OUT THE BAND. TREES START THRASHING IN WIND. THE CROWD YELLS IN PANIC)

JAN: But bright side, at least we have an instant babysitter all of the sudden. Your mother isn't seemly so bad. I thought, from what you said, you know.

JAN: We say in Czech there are worse things. If your eggs are scrambled then eat breakfast, what are you waiting for? There are worse mothers. There are some bad mothers! Ho yeah, I mean to tell you...

PENELOPE: Jan, you don't understand the situation and you probably don't have the capacity to, so just don't assume you can judge it in any way.

PENELOPE: I'm not. We're safe in the car. (TIRES SKIDDING, HONKING, ANOTHER DRIVING YELLING.) And I have a reason. My mother told me---one of the comparatively sane statements she made---that my father was doing something with a sarcophagus in New Orleans years ago.

PENELOPE: Is that the real way you got onto this? Did your father dig up some classified document? Is that why you got to know me?

PENELOPE: Bread, rollies, detergent, a nice combination. Mineral water and hair dye. Ah, cereals. Where are they? They were right here. With all these freakish granolas.

PENELOPE: (INTERNAL, WITH PANICKED ALARM) There is birdseed in some of these cereals! Is this even people food? Is this the right aisle?

PENELOPE: (LOUDLY TO THE STORE) What are you trying to do, force me back to New Orleans? I'm not going! I tell you I'm not going!

PENELOPE: I was in a store, asking politely about some cereal, then I woke up in an ambulance with some fat slob massaging my chest.

FRANCINE: They want to keep you overnight for observation. The doctor said, well I didn't really understand him. He said something about you having an allergic reaction to thinking.

FRANCINE: He's with the baby. He's terribly worried, I think. But he doesn't show it. I mean, I don't know him, but he seems nice enough. Anyway, he's there arguing with the ambulance company about paying. The ambulance got a flat tire.

PENELOPE: These tubes, they're stuck into me everywhere. I mean I've had tubular things in some of those places, well most of...

PENELOPE: Alright, I'll try to listen. I'm feeling quite calm and wonderful, actually. What exactly is that I.V. bottle dripping into me?

FRANCINE: Sometimes it takes a dangerous array of chemicals to find our true selves. Your father used potent plants and ingenious substances in his experiments with reality. Those were the good old days. We had the store and you were a happy child. Then he got his thing about what he called `Ur-souvenirs'. From Nazi memorabilia to Easter Island relics to...the Sarcophagae. Then the preaching started.

FRANCINE: That was okay, an active layman in a respectable church. Until he got excommunicated for playing that music, and invented his own religion out in the bayou and started talking about...

FRANCINE: He wasn't just talking, he was obsessed by these things. He mixed up an aromatic batch of voodoo, Sanskrit, ...some things you don't want to hear about, and, mostly, this sarcophagus.

FRANCINE: You were right, honey. I did leave your father. I left him over his mad talk of an Egyptian mummy in some N'Orleans sluice.

FRANCINE: I couldn't take it anymore. Okay, I left him! And yes I took you away from him! You've never forgiven me and it's all coming out now that you've gone away. I mean he was abandoning us, slowly, going out into the wild. And now you're abandoning me! I admit I left him, but I tried to go back. I tried. And then I watched as he died in that strange...

FRANCINE: He took me straight from my father's arms and he never gave me what he owed but I at least owe you the truth about the way he died.

PENELOPE: (SIGHS) You don't owe me anything, mama. None of it was your fault. Daddy was just a voodoo con artist, a petty trafficker in art forgeries and phony antiques who left his ten-year-old daughter with nothing but a bad reputation to live down...to. You don't owe me anything. You did your best. I love you, mama.

FRANCINE: Ouch! (A SPLASH) That damn nutria bit me. Goddammit... Oh there he is. (YELLING) Ban. What are you doing out there? Did you get those new oars?

FRANCINE: (QUICKLY, BEHIND SOUNDS) Penelope, what--come back! (ELECTRIC WHIRRING SOUND JOINS THE COMMOTION) What is that strange light out there--my God Penelope get away from the window. Penelope!!!

JAN: I once heard a certain saying, or slogan, in English that was intelligent. I'm sorry when I can't remember it exactly. If Jack falls off the horse, he has to get directly back on it, or you have to help Jack off the horse, or something. Do you understand.

FRANCINE: I know what you're trying to say, it's just, especially right now, so soon after Penelope--oh, it would be a little more bearable if they had just found her body. (WEEPING) I keep thinking that maybe she survived, and is walking around, some wretched, zombie-eyed amnesiac...

JAN: The Vltava River is very unforgiving. Ever since the flooding--do you know Kafka? Kafka said that Prague has claws, and the Vltava is a circularisation, a system to circulate blood pumping organ, how do you say it--

FRANCINE: Prague is a heart with claws. Well, it certainly ripped out mine. (WEEPING) Alright Yawn, alright. I sure don't want to stay here.

JAN: I know, the jet lag is horrible. Just a little longer. Maybe we could all just stay in your ex-husband's shack for the overnight?

FRANCINE: You don't understand. These swamps -- marsh gas can affect your vision and your judgement and your... That's what happened to my husband, out here, ending up a rock and roll hermit sealing himself off from the world, retreating into esoterica and gilded gloom...

JAN: I know you're still in early mourning. I am too of course. But I throw myself into my work. (PAUSE, SOUND OF ROCK THROWN IN WATER. SOUND CONTINUES OCCASIONALLY IN BACKGROUND) This is why Penelope liked me.

JAN: No, my missing emotions. See you, Czechs are of the Northern peoples. Of course on the map that is not true, we are in the middle. Middle of the middle, not middle for the Equator, I mean middle of Europe. But we look North. We feel the Norwegians and Scandinavian peoples. We aren't like the Spanish or Italians, hot blood. Passionate dances.

JAN: And Penelope was of the South type. But she wanted away. She had too much of the crazy life. So she liked me. And I did my work, my plan was, someday, when I have enough money in the bank, then it will be possible to have emotions.

FRANCINE: It's okay, go. (INTERNAL) That is the saddest thing I ever... That damn shack. Never thought the shack was still standing. Always imagined it obliterated. Now it's the only thing not obliterated. My Bancroft, my Penelope, my life... Oblivion.

(SOUND MONTAGE: THE HUMMING/BEEPING/WHIRRING AMID WIND BLOWING AS IN GREAT SPEED, THE HUMMING INCREASING IN DEPTH, BLENDING WITH PARTS OF THE BLUES SONG AND WITH ECHOES “DUB STYLE” OF SNATCHES OF DIALOGUE THAT HAVE OCCURRED UP TO NOW IN A FORM OF SUMMARY OF EVENTS, ALL CONTINUING IN ADDITION TO THE OTHER SOUNDS, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE FOLLOWING AT THE DISCRETION OF THE DIRECTOR: )

THE BLUES SONG IS NOW AN ENTIRELY ELECTRONIC VERSION OF THE SONG, BLENDING WITH ALTERED, DISTORTED DISTINCTLY “ALIEN” VOICES AS IN DIALOGUE WITH THE ECHOES OF DIALOGUE CONTINUE, INCLUDING SNATCHES OF DIALOGUE YET TO COME.)

(THE SOUNDS CRESCENDO DURING THE FOLLOWING, WHERE THE ALIEN VOICE BLENDS WITH BANCROFT MASGRAVE'S SPEAKING UNINTELLIGIBLY, WHICH IN TURN BLENDS WITH FRANCINE'S INTERPRETATION UNTIL BOTH VOICES ARE SPEAKING TOGETHER IN ENGLISH BY MIDPOINT. AT THE END FRANCINE'S VOICE DROPS OUT, LEAVING ONLY BANCROFT MASGRAVE'S RESONANT VOICE)

FRANCINE: (OVER OTHER VOICE) Only the pyramids cared enough to shed their secrets like snakeskin water running in rivulets down their sides running together like mohawked poodles packing in the nighttime streets returning their fangs to a fresh kill though by the rays of the sunrise they whine to be petted. A whining sound over our heads we see out of our eyes beaming vision in projections...

FRANCINE AND BANCROFT MASGRAVES: ...not of punk rock Anubis in flight but of rays guiding our craft through the short term cosmos until we reach the end of our wits and calm down and land and say we should have been more fatherly all along even when we were children. When the parents act like children the children parent and no unleavened bread is left over to crumble over the salamanders that left when the swamp turned into desert. I dried up and blue days were recorded all along the burial chamber walls depicting the canceling of slavery and the reconstitution of landlocked icebergs denoted glaciers -

BANCROFT MASGRAVES: ...the flaming chariots were not worth a single bowl of ice cream on the shady porch of a shack in the swamps where the only guided missiles are crocodiles easing over to a clueless duck, a clueless duck turning over and over and over a spinning galaxy in peril, Penelope.

POLICE OFFICER: You can't---that glass bottle you're dragging along, if it breaks... That looks like some kind of intravenous fluid.

PENELOPE: My father was defrocked and I wear his frock of shame as I wander the world, even here, under these beautiful French balconies. Still, this isn't Paris, is it, monsieur gendarme?

PENELOPE: Within the context of the South, Yankee is a term describing Northeastern Americans. Fortunately between them and us are large, unnavigatable swamplands full of impossible murkiness, slithering reptiles and giant man-eating clams. Yes, the swamps, that's what I'm after...

FRANCINE: (INTERNAL) I could never have conceived of such hardworking, naïve anthropologists. And from...the heart with claws. New Orleans doesn't rip your heart out at all--it smothers your heart in butter, powdered sugar and loss. So you take a break out in nature, and nature finishes you off. Gives your mind a chance to decay in step with the rest of your body. Slow but certain, slow but certain. Is your body decayed now, Penelope? Is it down in the water stuck under some bridge? Or washed out into the sea? Was it a better way to go, all of a sudden? Is your body going to fragment and flow back home, eventually, back to N'Orleans?

FRANCINE: (TALKING AS ADULTS DO TO BABIES) Don't cry, babykins. Baby doesn't like swamp? Don't worry, crocodiles won't eat you! No they won't!

FRANCINE: There's someone in the shack. What do they think they're doing? (PAUSE) Oh God, my sanity really is fragmenting. I thought I saw Penelope. (MOVEMENT IN BUSHES CLOSER) My god, I see Penelope. (CALLING) Jan! Come help me, I'm going insane!

PENELOPE: I walked. Like I was sleepwalking into the old shack. Then a damn nutria bit me and I heard some people over here and---

JAN: Everybody, look, we've found it! It is authenticated sarcophagus for the Ramses period! Probably fell off some steamboat in the 19th centuries when Egyptian collections were so popular here. And look, the colors aren't faded even, the silt of the swamp must---Penelope, I can't believe it, how is it possible?

JAN: You can't open it, it... That's strange. The top, it's not a normal lid. It's seeming hermetically sealed. Look, the edges around, some kind of pressurisation material--