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| [Lights up on a series of images. Music up: 25th Variation, late version. Playing area 1: the Eames chair. The Puritan presides, writing on his yellow legal-length pad. Playing area 2: a hospital bed. The Perfectionist in residence, propped up facing the audience. Playing area 3: the keyboard, the Prodigy stands, lost in feeling.] | |
| PRODIGY: | I was playing the piano beside the picture window this afternoon. A cardinal flew against the glass right in front of my face ... |
| [Sound: fish sting.] | |
| PERFECTIONIST: | She never really understood in those days, Jessie. She wanted things just so and ... [small laugh] I suppose I was a cocky little so and so ... |
| PRODIGY: | ... its body landed in the snow. I sat there and waited for the bird to recover. |
| [He sits on the piano stool.] | |
| PERFECTIONIST: | We cared too much. That was our problem. |
| PURITAN: | [writing] In late summer conducted experiments with elevated wrists. These inaugurated to alleviate unnatural burden in indented fingers, thumbs and knuckles. |
| [The Prodigy waits for the cardinal to recover.] | |
| PERFECTIONIST: | I remember once I came home from school expecting to find her in the kitchen putting my lunch on the table - tomato soup, peanut butter and honey, and glass of skim - yunno, the lunch. I came in the door and ... she wasn't there. |
| [The Performer enters, sees the Perfectionist in his sick bed, pauses to watch him.] | |
| I went all through the house looking for her, calling for her. No answer. Well, this panic overcame me. I was a little boy and mummy wasn't where she was supposed to be. I was crying by the time I found her in the back garden. I went up to her, just mad as the dickens, and said: Mummy, promise me that you will never die! [pause] She promised. | |
| PRODIGY: | Two full minutes. No movement. Just the wind in its breast feathers. |
| PURITAN: | The experiment resulted in a complete loss of control. |
| PRODIGY: | [coming to his feet] I went out into the snow in my stocking feet. Four o'clock, a February afternoon in Ontario. That beautiful light between the trees. |
| [The Prodigy bends in a slow gesture of grief.] | |
| PURITAN: | ['narrating' the Prodigy's move] Tried holding wrist tightly from beneath so as to use it as fulcrum-like constant. At the same time tipping the head towards right shoulder and moving it as a unit so the fingers would be there when needed. |
| PRODIGY: | I picked up the broken bird, such a wild exclamation of colour - |
| PURITAN: | One day wonder. |
| PRODIGY: | - carried him back inside. I've been playing the 25th Variation over and over again ever since ... fitting it to the mood of the moment ... the wistful and weary core of this day ... |
| PURITAN: | No longer possible to play even Bach chorale securely. |
| PRODIGY: | ... slowing it down ... relaxing the moments between the notes. |
| PURITAN: | Parts were unbalanced, progression from note to note insecure. |
| PRODIGY: | ... opening a space for his final flight. |
| PURITAN: | Nothing prevents the gradual deterioration of image. |
| PRODIGY: | There's no such thing as 'going too slow' in a moment like that. |
| PERFECTIONIST: | She was in the dream I had last night, Jessie. She was sitting in the window chair at Uptergrove watching a bird at the feeder. She turned when she heard me enter the room. 'I am about to die and that is as it should be,' she said, 'Why have you come to see me?' |
| [He extends his hand to the Performer. The Performer moves to comfort the Perfectionist. It is an act of compassion and surrender.] | |
| [reminding himself] I believe in the hereafter, Jessie. I believe that all the spiritual energy that has ever been is with us now, radiant and invisible. We must not confuse ourselves with these bodies. I am not this body. I am an electromagnetic field that animates this body. Our atoms were forged inside exploding stars. Think of it, Jessie. [looking at his hands] Billions upon billions of years old. | |
| [Lights fade on them.] | |
| PRODIGY: | The cardinal is on the kitchen table in a Birks box. When dawn comes I'm going to bury him like an Egyptian pharaoh. In the meantime, there is a grace note in this silence. The tone of the experience without the experience itself. I stand in the nave of Bach's cathedral. I listen. |
| [Sound: the moan of Arctic wind. We hold this image for a couple of beats. Lights fade. Another note from the ground bass.] |