This is a somewhat ridiculous story, but I like it just the same. Having seen a performance of an excerpt of Waiting for Godot, I felt inspired to write something just as self-aware, just as constantly critical of itself and its medium. I hadn’t seen it yet when I wrote this story, but one of my favorite comedy sketches of all time is “One Man Play,” and it isn’t too hard for me to see a resemblance to this.
“I’ve been thinking,” said the man in the green shirt, “about going to Australia.”
“Why would you ever do that?”
“Well, it’s one of the things I want to do before I die.”
“But do you have time?”
“Before I die?”
“Time to go to Australia.”
“Before I die?”
“Time to take away from work, for God’s sake!”
“Eventually, I would think.”
“When is that? You always say it will happen eventually, but it never does.”
“It?”
“Anything.”
“Anything?”
“It.”
“You’re repeating what I said, but using a different tone!”
“I find it changes the meaning. Words are strange.”
“This is a truly terrible conversation to engage in.”
“Then why do you?”
“Because I have time.”
“I thought you didn’t have time!”
“Which one of us was it again? Good lord, this is what you get when you don’t use dialogue tags.”
“Ah, the pitfalls of being a character.”
“One-dimensional.”
“No dimensions at all, for this world is an illusion.”
“If it looks real to us -“
“It doesn’t! There is nothing but two voices, one of them vaguely connected to a green shirt. It might be this one. We have no eyes to see the world.”
“I’ll make some.”
“You don’t get to choose.” His eyes blinked as he said this.
“You have eyes!”
“I have eyes, but can I see with them?”
“Why have eyes when you are blind?”
“Why have a green shirt when you can’t see it?”
“Who has the green shirt?”
“I’m going to purchase a green shirt if I don’t have one yet.”
“Let’s go back. What do we know about the world?”
“At least one of us is a man, wearing a green shirt. There’s work and eyes and Australia. And words.”
“No, no, no! It’s only words!”
“It can’t be only words, no more than the world is only atoms. It’s what the words make that counts.”
“This conversation is unreadable.”
“All the better then, that we’re speaking it.”
“How can we speak if we have no mouths?”
“We might be writing.”
“I hear your voice. It sounds like mine.”
“Wait! What if I am you?”
“From the future?”
“Perhaps.”
“From the past?”
“Perhaps.”
“It’s impossible.”
“We don’t know if physics applies. We don’t know if we have faces other than eyes!”
They both screamed.
“What was that?”
“Let’s do it again!”
Both of them screamed again, the sounds slightly out of sync. The noise echoed off of the walls.
“Walls! I don’t remember walls.”
“They were always here.”
“That doesn’t mean I remember them.”
“Feel around, is there anything on the walls?”
“I don’t know if I have hands.”
“Now wait a second. How many of us are there?”
“Two! The narrator said ‘both!’”
“Why not three? Or four, or five, or six?”
“Are we going to name every single number? How about zero?”
“There can’t be zero of us, or where would this sound be coming from?”
“It’s fictional, all of it!”
“But it feels real.”
“It doesn’t feel like anything when you don’t have skin!”
“Description, that’s what we need.”
“But the writer doesn’t want to give us anything.”
“Then I’ll do the writing. You’ve got glasses -“
“But no eyes.”
“And a green shirt!”
“But no body.”
“You are a man.”
“With no features.”
“A woman.”
“With no head.”
“A boy.”
“With no dreams.”
“A girl.”
“With no family.”
“You are old -“
“With no memories.”
“Stop that incessant interruption! I cannot hear myself think!”
“Your thoughts are contradictory. You have no ears to hear them, anyway.”
“Why did you want to go to Australia in the first place?”
“That was you!”
“No, I insist!”
“Well, think about it this way. If there are an odd or even number of lines in this dialogue, we will know who spoke first.”
They paused for a few seconds.
“But what if the same person talks twice in a row, interrupted only by narrative? How could we know whether or not the same person was speaking?”
“Well, now you’ve ruined it!”
“Ruined what?”
“My plan!”
“That plan was mine!”
“Listen, we have to stop worrying over which of us is which.”
Suddenly, the one in the green shirt dropped a glass of water. It shattered on the ground, the sound piercing through their conversation.
“One of us had a glass of water.”
“How clumsy we were to drop it.”
“To be fair, we have no hands.”
“There’s water on the ground now. And glass.”
“That’s all the ground is made of?”
“Possibly.”
“This hurts my head.”
“You don’t have a head.”
“And yet it hurts.”
“Look, I have a game for us. We name letters, back and forth, until someone spells out a word.”
“And then?”
“That person is the loser. Or, if you think that after the other person’s letter there are no words that can be spelled, the other person is the loser.”
“What does the winner get?”
“I never said anything about a winner.”
“Is the game not zero-sum?”
“You could call it negative-sum, I suppose.”
“Oh.”
“Indeed.”
“No, I was starting to play the game. I said the letter O.”
“You can’t start with that, you’ve already spelled out a word!”
“‘O,’ just a single letter, counts as a word?”
“It’s in ‘America the Beautiful.’ O beautiful for spacious skies, for amber waves of grain…”
“Are you American?”
“I suppose I must be!”
“And so a journey to Australia would be quite an undertaking!”
“Well, it depends. When do we live?”
“Now!”
“But when is now?”
“The day after yesterday, the day before tomorrow. What else do you want?”
“A clock! A calendar! Eyes to see them!”
“You already -“
“I already have eyes. Right?”
“Well, I suppose it’s a coin toss.”
“It doesn’t matter. Do we live in ancient history?”
“Then there wouldn’t be Americans.”
“Americans are ancient history to someone. Everything eventually becomes antique.”
“You will, too.”
“Thanks.”
“Here, sing a song, it’ll lighten the mood.”
“I don’t know any.”
“Well then, tell me a joke.”
“I don’t know any.”
“What do you know?”
“The narrator hasn’t spoken in a while.”
“Perhaps he’s bored.”
“I would be.”
“Perhaps he doesn’t know what to do next.”
“I don’t, either.”
“But you aren’t the narrator.”
“Why can’t I be? Besides, our current narrator is a lousy one, isn’t he?”
One of them took a deep breath. He lifted his right hand, and then smacked himself in the face, leaving a red mark and a lingering sensation of pain.
“That isn’t promising.”
“My face hurts.”
“No, my face hurts!”
“Hang on. Are we both men?”
“Maybe. At least one of us is.”
“We knew that already!”
“It reminds me of a logic puzzle. An island with ninety-nine children with blue eyes, and once you say, ‘One of you has blue eyes,’ they all eventually figure out that they all have blue eyes.”
“They already knew that!”
“And we already know one of us is a man.”
“So then we’re both men?”
She pondered in thought for a moment.
“One of us is a woman, then!”
“Now we’re learning something.”
“Do we know each other?”
“We do now.”
“But did we before?”
“Before what?”
“Before we started this conversation.”
“There is no time before we started this conversation, at least not that we can see.”
“How was I ‘reminded’ of a logic puzzle I learned before this conversation, then?”
“It may have been a false memory. Implanted at our inception. Besides, I was the one who was reminded.”
“Does it matter? We have the same voice.”
“No, we don’t.”
“I can hear you.”
“We have to stop using words like ‘I’ and ‘you’.”
“Those are the only words that have any meaning!”
“We can have a simple discussion, then.”
“Devoid of meaning?”
“We can learn to find meaning where it doesn’t exist.”
“I was already doing that. I thought this entire dialogue was that.”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, I’m a fictional character, with traits that are only vaguely defined, sitting in a room with traits that are only vaguely defined, speaking with another fictional character who is only vaguely defined. None of this exists. For all I know, I’m hallucinating you.”
“Perhaps I’m hallucinating you.”
“Perhaps the narrator is hallucinating us both.”
“Perhaps the audience is hallucinating us both.”
“That is what they will do, isn’t it? When they read this conversation?”
“Surely they will watch it. Or listen to it.”
“But there isn’t a camera or a microphone.”
“Maybe there is, and the narrator hasn’t described it yet. The narrator hasn’t pointed out much that isn’t in this room.”
The room, which contained no cameras, microphones, furniture, decorations, or windows, became silent.
“Sometimes I think the narrator’s just reacting to us rather than advancing the story.”
“There’s a story?”
“There has to be. Otherwise the reader would have stopped by now.”
“Say, wouldn’t the narrator have to be in the room with us to see us, since there aren’t any cameras or windows or doors?”
“Are you suggesting one of us is the narrator?”
“Either that or the narrator is lying.”
“Or we’re products of the narrator’s mind.”
“Well, of course we are. That last one is true without a doubt.”
“It would explain why we have the same voice.”
“We don’t have the same voice!”
“Can we escape this mind?”
“How would you do that?”
“Well, first we have to know whose mind it is.”
“It isn’t mine.”
“It isn’t mine.”
“Then it’s the narrator’s. Or the audience’s.”
“Does it matter?”
“Presumably.”
“What are the characteristics of this mind, the one we’re trapped inside of?”
“It’s big enough to hold both of us.”
“It reminds me of a story.”
“Here you go again with being reminded!”
“That was you!”
“It doesn’t matter. Tell the story.”
“I forgot.”
“You had just been reminded.”
“Well, I forgot. Do you have a problem with that?”
“No, but it concerns me how brief your memory is.”
“Well, I don’t know if I have a brain.”
“So you’re a scarecrow!”
“I don’t know if I have a heart.”
“A tin man, then.”
“I don’t know if I have limbs.”
“An… amputee?”
“I don’t know if you have any of those things, either. Where’s the narrator when we need them?”
“Perhaps there is no narrator, and we’ve invented him as a shared hallucination.”
“That could be true of anything.”
“I suppose. But it could also be true of this specific thing.”
“Perhaps I’m in a coma.”
“How would you drop a glass of water in a coma?”
“Have you ever seen someone in a coma holding a glass of water steadily?”
“I suppose not. But then, I don’t even know if I can see.”
“But you can hear.”
“I don’t think so.”
“But you understand the words coming out of my mouth?”
“Do you have a mouth?”
She opened her mouth to say something, but couldn’t think of what to say. The door, previously locked, swung open.
“A door!”
“A mouth!”
“Is someone coming through the door?”
“Can we leave?”
“I’m going to try walking toward the door.”
Nothing happened.
“Foolish me. I forgot that I don’t have legs.”
“Where do these things keep coming from?”
“What do you mean?”
“The door! The mouth! That chair!”
He pointed at a corner of the room that did not contain a chair.
“Just because the narrator can summon objects doesn’t mean we can, I suppose.”
“I tried my best.”
“No, I tried – forget it. Can we get through the door?”
“Not without legs.”
“Forget the legs! I’ve had enough talk about legs.”
“The word appears six times in this story, and you just said two of them. You’re the one talking about legs.”
“Can we get to the door with what we have?”
“Well, what do we have?”
“A green shirt.”
“A glass of water.”
“Eyes.”
“A mouth.”
“Hands.”
“Faces.”
“Walls.”
“A door.”
“Sound.”
“Thought.”
“Words.”
“Yes, words.”
“You can’t get through a door with just words.”
“On the contrary. You can’t get through a door without words, at least in a written story.”
“You are very insistent that this is a written story.”
“Given the absence of cameras and microphones, it couldn’t be any other kind.”
“So our success depends on the reader’s ability to keep reading.”
“Reader! Keep reading!”
“I’m not certain that will persuade them.”
They both paused for a moment, and then she came up with an idea.
“You’re almost to the end!”
“What? How?”
“Well, I don’t know about you, but I’m ready to leave this room.”
“We had only just met!”
“What, do you want us to kiss goodbye and exchange phone numbers? Promise to meet again someday, two disembodied voices in a room?”
“I don’t know, something more than a halfhearted goodbye. I don’t feel like we’ve made any progress today.”
“How can you say that, when we’ve discovered so much about ourselves?”
“I still don’t know if I have arms!”
“Say you do.”
“What?”
“Say that you have arms.”
“I have arms?”
“Confidently!”
“I have arms!”
“Believe it.”
“I have arms!”
“Yes, you do! Say it more!”
“I have arms! I have arms! I have arms!”
The man in the green shirt looked down at his arms and was pleased to discover they were where they had always been – attached to his body, hands hanging by the sides of his knees.
“Knees?”
“Knees!”
“And where there’s knees…”
“There’s legs, naturally!”
“And feet!”
Suddenly, the man in the green shirt ran towards the door. He felt the door, rubbing his fingertips across its wooden frame, thrilled by the reality of it. The woman soon joined him, opening and closing the door and marveling at the creaking sounds it made.
“Ready?”
“Let’s go through.”
And they did, and they were free to look at the bright blue sky for the first time in their lives. It was also the last time, as this sentence, regrettably for them, is the bittersweet ending of this story and therefore their existences.