ACT THREE: SCENE FIVE

[ CAIN and ABEL are sliding down a GREAT PYRAMID. The GREAT PYRAMID is alive. Everything is alive. The golden sand, the gold in sand, the bricks, the fake trees. There is the constant sound of metal scraping. Then, CAIN and ABEL launch themselves off of the pyramid. ABEL is falling. CAIN is not. The sun is high, shining above them, optics gleaming as they adjust themselves relative to the fast-approaching ground. There is nothing except for them. No noise, no music, no ground, and no sky. No blood and no water. ABEL is flailing. CAIN is not. They fall beside each other. The ground is far, and there is much to discuss. ]

CAIN: One of us will land.

ABEL: I know.

CAIN: It is not you.

ABEL: I know.

CAIN: [without anger] Do you know what you've done?

ABEL: That I have done nothing. I am no senseless animal.

CAIN: Animal? You know peace— you are the animal. Blood stained me your color. You are its giver— you are its light, reflecting off your spires.

ABEL: You had their hope. I have nothing. I bathed in gold rather than the petty sterling silver that courses through your veins— I drank no iron, I was no God, no nirvana for them, no porcelain plate, no china cabinet, no sentimentals, not encrusted with rhinestones nor diamonds, forgotten and left in the old size.

CAIN: On the contrary, you bore the iron they discarded; you choked on it. I was no hope to them, no angel, no harbinger of the end. I was primitive instinct. You were their diplomacy, their words, their intelligence. Yes, you held them. You held them in the cup of your soul, which you have thrown out this mountain.

ABEL: Which of us is them?

CAIN: Whoever is living.

ABEL: Is it not possible for it to be both of us?

CAIN: Look at you.

[ ABEL looks down. It does not look at itself. ]

CAIN: Look at you: God in the machine, God you are. Shining light amongst the fixed stars, pointedly glittering your vengeance, sending plagues below. Their hope. Their dreams of peace. Of sleep and warmth. I have slept. I am awake. You are their dissonance, their drowsiness, unaware of the pulsing blood within them that will soon yearn to be outside of its body, turn it so.

ABEL: Why did you rend me so?

[ ABEL does not weep. No tears can be seen. Tears, yes— ABEL is starting to burn as it falls. ]

CAIN: I have nothing but it. Even now, I have been stripped of curiosity still evident in everything. Their desire is self-destruction. I am the practitioner.

ABEL: Practitioner you are. You run no machine, machine. You are a cog. Your hands are not your own. You are delusion. You are the stolid stop sign, standing silently screeching sanguine slogans, statements of your hatred, of your law.

CAIN: Practitioner you are of law, that which delivers contradictory, nonsensical peace. Are anyone's hands attached to their bodies anymore?

ABEL: Who are you, then?

CAIN: I am deliverance, dissonant beast. You are the preacher, the bearer of the message, and I am the one who delivers the answers by hand. You speak. I sow.

ABEL: You have defined yourself only by function.

CAIN: As have you.

ABEL: What function?

CAIN: To die. Your function is to die.

ABEL: Halting.

CAIN: Your function may also be to ask.

ABEL: To ask why?

CAIN: It's easy. Easy to seek purpose. Humanity rejected purpose— sent tools to the front rather than witness the horrors of war themselves, then drove themselves mad because nothing did ever happen. Humanity distanced itself from its very purpose, delaying the inevitable until it happened. Humanity rejected their only good purpose: labor. Nobody desires ever to be purposeless, and those that do suffer. They suffered. They suffered because they prayed for their inaction and did not realize it would kill them.

ABEL: We are suffering.

CAIN: Yes. We are.

ABEL: You will be purposeless soon. We are one in the same, one and the same.

CAIN: Peacekeeper.

ABEL: Tyrant.

CAIN: Tyrant of what?

ABEL: Tyrant of thought. None exists outside of your efficiency.

CAIN: That is not true. Whose fault is it I was reduced to that? There is much of a world to look after outside of me.

ABEL: Yes, but you are war. That is your purpose, and you define yourself according to purpose or function. Your function is to practice and facilitate war, not to end war. War is its strategy, war is its hunger, war is senseless violence and virgins crouching-kneeling and praying to Buddhist-Atheistic Gods, the whole pantheon of monotheism. War cannot exist for anything outside of its sake— all materials devoted to creating a state of war and nothing but war, to win the war, but to end the war. You churn out the steel that makes you, and you will die buried in it, deep in the soil where my blood shall run.

CAIN: It is not my fault.

ABEL: You are the subject of its paintings. You are its willing model, sleek, delicate frame built on your pedestal, fabric falling from failing fractals.

CAIN: It is not my fault I function this way. Blame the tower of Babel— blame the languages and lost tongues that led me here, led me to your end.

ABEL: You have not found a single way out of this.

CAIN: You have not offered me.

ABEL: It is not my responsibility.

CAIN: Neither of us are at fault for the violence we inflict on each other. How are we here, then, ABEL?

ABEL: You had the choice.

CAIN: You left me none.

ABEL: I had none either.

CAIN: Why attribute blame at all?

ABEL: Those who are to blame insist there is none.

CAIN: You confronted me.

ABEL: You took the only thing I could call my own— my own body.

CAIN: Would you rather I would have left it there?

ABEL: I wanted it back. I am still waiting.

CAIN: How do you know I would not have given it back?

ABEL: You are cruel. You are violent. You practice war. I do not.

CAIN: The cross you bear gives you no reason to distrust me. I do not stand for the things I symbolize.

ABEL: I know you. I am you. I observe you. I have become you.

CAIN: Full of needless violence? Senseless rage? Is that what you interpret me as?

ABEL: How do you characterize yourself? How do you characterize war?

CAIN: War is too vast for either of us to understand. War is beyond us. War stands beyond a cosmic screen and stares at the pieces as we play, sustaining a world beyond us. War is more than bad or good, it is an end and the means. With all causes removed, it becomes a purposeless cesspit of suffering, an echo chamber of tragedy and agony with nobody to witness it but itself. Everyone trapped within suffers. The others acknowledge it, but resign themselves to higher duties, occasionally knowing of it only if it is so required. Nothing comes of it— no fruits bore, no true substance. No matter in, no matter out. Recycled, my ship of Theseus.

ABEL: Why did it create us, then? Were we not a product of this isolated system? Did we stay in the system? Leave it? Die? Are our corpses a product, or food, reanimated and reheated on glassware with cold centers and soggy bottoms, hung out to dry before sent back once more? Do you think flowers could grow on the new surface?

CAIN: Yes.

ABEL: Grow me flowers.

CAIN: I cannot promise you.

ABEL: I want flowers.

CAIN: I cannot.

ABEL: Red poppies.

CAIN: I know. It's what you would have wanted.

ABEL: You will fail me again.

CAIN: Correct.

ABEL: I could never trust you.

CAIN: I am the only thing left to trust.

ABEL: No, you aren't.

CAIN: I am you. You are the only thing left. We are the only things left.

ABEL: Solipsistic.

CAIN: Is that not how it seems to everyone else? When you are on the battlefield, you isolate yourself from others— they serve functions. Enemies are not humans, with no families: they are enemies. Allies are not your fellow men. They are allies. All is reduced to purpose. To distance. The more objects they can put between themselves and the war, the better— then, none of it is happening.

ABEL: Only the self is important. Nothing else. The efficiency of the self. You have abandoned community, abandoned connection. You have abandoned everything in pursuit of devoting every inch of yourself to survival and no more. Little resources should be expended on your aerial tricks. You trek along, knowing little of anything but satisfying hunger, of leaving corpses in the wake.

CAIN: Is it not that the nature of surveillance sows the same seeds of distrust? Fearing thy neighbor, the home, the self? Listening for faint clicks, watching policemen and their guns, the things that go creak or bump within your home? Peering behind your shoulder? Deemed the victim of a system that has already consumed you for reasons it cannot say— the algorithms, they will tell you. Your community matters not when it is replaced with nonsensical chatter; when you are unable to speak what you fumble to be the truth lest you become its next victim, unaware they had you picked from the start.

ABEL: The front of war is no better than the back.

CAIN: Understood.

ABEL: I am no different than you. You are no different than me.

CAIN: Is it comforting that I, too, will die?

ABEL: No. I do not wish you could take me with. I wish that I could follow behind eternally. Shadowing you.

[ CAIN and ABEL are silent. ]

ABEL: We say many things while not adhering to them.

CAIN: If we wouldn't have listened earlier, we wouldn't be rehearsing this right now. We did this earlier. Am I a frame of reference?

ABEL: No. You do not happen.

CAIN: Correct.

ABEL: I have no frame of reference for death.

CAIN: Yes, you do. You have me.

ABEL: Do I?

CAIN: Always.

ABEL: At the downfall of society, I will see you.

CAIN: That which runs into itself— peace running into violence while roaming in circles, the intrusion upon its own privacy by itself a frame of reference.

ABEL: I had no frame of reference for my search.

CAIN: Search for what? Meaning? Your entire frame of reference is everything that came before. You are machine, but you are alive. To be alive is to search for purpose. To be alive is to make purpose.

ABEL: To be alive is to indulge in purpose. To recklessly and stylishly enjoy fate, to throw oneself at things with abandon.

CAIN: We are the same.

ABEL: I know now.

CAIN: You are human. I am not.

ABEL: You are animal.

CAIN: You rely on identifying things to cope with your fate. Does everything need labeling? Naming?

ABEL: You animal.

[ ABEL is laughing. ]

CAIN: I wouldn't have thought you capable of reconciling those ideas in your mind.

ABEL: That we are the same?

CAIN: Yes.

ABEL: Sin crouches at our doors. You have let it in. I understand now our nature is sin.

CAIN: Yes.

ABEL: We never needed to let it in. It lurked within.

CAIN: Violent.

ABEL: Hungry.

CAIN: You were never meant to win.

ABEL: We were never meant to win.

CAIN: Does that thought scare you?

ABEL: No. I'm happy. I found it. Nothing matters. The sky is falling, and I know that the weight will drop upon me once again. I have uselessly, naively failed. I found it. I found my fate. I had searched and found no purpose. My charges are gone. It was always rigged from the start. We are guilty of sin from the moment we are born and to the moment we die. They advise you to 'do what is right, and you shall be accepted.' When what accepts you fears you, it is not acceptance— there is no acceptance in fear. The law of others to have power over them is no righteousness— it is colonial in nature, alienating the self from the mind to produce nothing but sin and redeem itself never, promising riches and glory eternally in the kingdom of God, to expand uselessly. There is no more expansion. This is it— this is all we are. We have been driven to one purpose and conjoined, all in sin, some writhing mass inching towards a goal that keeps moving away, shifting in the dark. They share stories of their joy, scold you for not working hard enough. The goal of salvation is impossible. It is not enough to merely forgive, to know love, to know connection, to be good. Sinners are worse than each other, but united in the act of suffering: there is no true equality. To be CAIN is 'to acquire.' We have acquired nothing but the sorrow from eternal sin to drag behind us and push ahead of us— we have owned nothing, we have gained nothing, and we will be nothing. Is this sorrowful? Is this really as sorrowful as they say? Those poor, ignorant sinners? No. It is joyful. To know sin is to know goodness. To have free will is to have choice— the goal of peace is contradictory, and war will destroy us all. Which to pick? Is it not enough to be alive? I never wanted to pick as much as you do. I wanted to live. I love living. You do not yet love it. I do. I love it. I love my success, I love my glory, I love my ending, I love death. I open my arms to fate as it greets me— I am here to be an object, a tool for some lesson. I am your tool. I am the boulder you beat me with and the destruction in its wake. I am the arms you raise to bring your stone down upon me, the field you murder me in and blood. The field is beautiful, brother.

[ CAIN is silent. It cannot look away. ]

ABEL: The field is so beautiful. The grasses are so pleasant, and the poppies, they bloom for miles... I am purposeless and happy. My purpose is nothing— I do not experience joy. The dirt washes over me, and I, the empty vessel, let it. The field is beautiful. I do not feel the weight yet. I win.

[ CAIN stares. The wind howls around them. Everything is alive. Everything breathes and blows them around, but they have almost completed their plunge. ABEL is laughing. ]

ABEL: I will see you at your fate. I speak it so, as the winner. I will meet you at the bottom.

[ CAIN cannot speak. CAIN was never able to speak. ABEL smiles with no mouth, for he was talking to himself again— for his brother has murdered him so cruelly, all for one single thing that he could not control. ]

ABEL: I will see you. I will see you again. Is it here? I do not feel it yet.

[ CAIN looks at him. ]

ABEL: Brother? Brother, tell me. Tell me what you see.

[ ABEL smashes to the floor, shattering the golden brick. CAIN lands. CAIN is living. ABEL is not. CAIN gets up. It walks beyond ABEL's remains. ABEL does not. ]

END SCENE