Ii: Monday evening. A school gymnasium with un-pulled bleachers on one side and a curtained stage area on the other; walls are decked in old bunting and banners of conference and regional accolades. Eight adults merge together, slapping hands to cap the final game of pick-up. Lights high above illuminate the scene, windows equally as high are black with the night sky to the north and the second-floor corridor to the south. Nothing else fills the space.
TIOSOOK: Finally—a mercy kill! I’m getting too old for this—who called the win-by-two?
SERENTINO: No one has to call it, dummy; your team lamely threw away the lead.
TIOSOOK: —and then went dumpster-diving to get it back. We’d be better off to lose by one, some seven ties and twenty minutes ago.
MARROT: See, that’s you school guys’ problem, mullin’ over the math—
SERENTINO: As if the fuzz did anything to help us tilt the balance? The countless shots you took beyond the arc and how many actually landed? I thought you were a sharp-shooter, Gus! Next week bring your rifle site!
MARROT: Guaranteed, baby! Reminds me of something; (sniffs out) not sure I’m supposed to say…
SERENTINO: Say what?
MARROT: Not authorized as yet. At least I think not—z’right, Jon?
TIOSOOK: What am I supposed to do with it? It’s not my call, really,… But might as well, seeing that it’s a closed circle at this point.
DOSTUNE: (leaning in) Shhh—wait a second ‘til Gavin and Beth leave…; you never know with new alums….
SERENTINO: (contrastingly) Hey! Both of you, good run tonight. Don’t shower together!
KING: (far off) You neither. Next week we’re on?
SERENTINO: Next week! See you…
MARROT: Hmmm. Next week may be called off.
SERENTINO: What? What are you talking about?
MARROT: Just that—maybe no next week. Not me sayin’, mind you—
SERENTINO: Cut the cryptic, Gus: what’s going on?
MARROT: Nothing cryptic, really, just a little hard to couch.
SERENTINO: Hey, I’ve got practices to run and games Tuesday and Friday—you need to fill me in.
DOSTUNE: It’s a good point—I’ve been struggling with,… well, how all this might be received—
SERENTINO: All what?
MARROT: All the shooting and screaming and silence that will be going on—
TIOSOOK: Hold your horses, Gustavo, say it better—
SERENTINO: Say it straight—you goons planning on doin’ something?
MARROT: A terrorism simulation.
SERENTINO: Get outta here—
MARROT: Like Beslan, full blown. ’Cept it’d be actors and us, a camera crew to take it all in, a school board review—the whole measure.
SERENTINO: What? And we were supposed to, to know about this—when?
TIOSOOK: Well, that was the tricky point. Monday is Presidents’ Day, kind of inconspicuous and we’ve always had a ‘spring cleaning’ crew come in to wax floors and such—which they’ll still do, only in the middle of the night, when the simulation is declared over.
DOSTUNE: What worries me isn’t actually mopping up the fake blood…
MARROT: We’re going to have to run the whole gamut of a facility lock-down: when to circle, when to stall, then crash in, size up, shoot—
DOSTUNE: Negotiate?
MARROT: —how to negotiate through silence and noise. The whole gamut.
TIOSOOK: The community will know what’s going on, but not too early—it’s decidedly not going to come to a debate—and the school campus will be cordoned off, off-limits completely. At least, I think that’s been established.
SERENTINO: So, to be clear: you were eventually, I mean by-the-by, going to deign to tell… me, for instance, to stay clear of my own gym on Presidents’ Day so as to let this glorified paintball run amok?
TIOSOOK: Eventually, yeah. We were going to fill you in. Like, well, we just did!
SERENTINO: You sons of bitches—this’s gonna be a joke that turns on yourselves.
DOSTUNE: No, no—there’s no joke or no turning—it’s nothing like that. It’s just a sensitive situation with all the annoying innuendo, y’know?
MARROT: Annoying? ‘Al Qaida raids middle America’—how inconvenient! But that’s not your stock simulation. It’s more likely going to be some kinda Columbine in most folks’ memories.
SERENTINO: So which is it? Which one are you simulating?
TIOSOOK: Well, that’s why we didn’t want to debate it. The fact is we can’t be reduced to the two prototypes. Terrorism defies any easy model.
SERENTINO: Easy? No one said anything about ‘easy’. In fact, I’ll be goddamned if any of this is half as thought-out as you think.
TIOSOOK: C’mon, Tony, don’t get testy over this. It’s practical, it’s theoretical—but not the stuff of knee-jerk debate. It’ll be a tempest in a teapot, at best. It won’t involve students or teachers or anybody but actors and cops. It will simply be a troubleshooting exercise.
SERENTINO: Ok, I’ll say in my best untestiest voice: it will be whatever you don’t want it to be. It will define itself as an inchoate beast, lacking purpose and lapping up misgivings. You’re saying there wouldn’t be a place for debate, when time will tell and an arbitrary debate starts to unfold in colors you hadn’t contracted or comic-booked for. The stir of the night will not be the simulated fright of actors. The blood won’t be fake that courses through each cordon-buster, body and brain. You see, even if it goes without a hitch, the unannounced plan, when known, won’t ever be the same.
TIOSOOK: No, I s’pose not—now that you rhapsodized it. And you, good servant of the law, exposed it.
MARROT: And you allowed me to. No harm done: I brought it up only for the greater good.
SERENTINO: (harrumphing) …the greater good…
TIOSOOK: Good riddance—please keep it under your hat for a day or two, ’til we figure out a disclosure method.
SERENTINO: What hat? I’ll need to borrow goofy Gus’s hexagon and practice my DOOM.
DOSTUNE: Always the scout! But that video game is long on the outs—a cyber-generation ago... Unfortunately, Tony, there’s a whole lot worse if you want to see a widening gyre—
SERENTINO: I want to see more of us putting this orange thing through a bottomless bushel basket, next week and again and again and again and again…
Iii: the following morning, several members of the Golden Valley Police Department mill around the receptionist desk of the school. The first bell has rung and most students are in their classrooms, although some stragglers go to their lockers, cast glances toward the officers and shuffle toward the closed doors of their classrooms. When corridors are completely clear, the officers walk slowly, loosely in a group, jotting down particulars on clipboards. The pantomime starts and stops serendipitously, with random looks into trophy cases and pencil taps to the casings of fire alarms. The mumble of voices eventually defers to the principal’s attempt to gather them to a central spot, marked by the school’s coat of arms under their feet. None of them look that far down; instead, heads swivel mostly to the skylights and the scrawl of their clipboards.
SPRINGER: And this is the junction between the academic wings and the ‘common area’—
PORTER: ‘Common’ meaning what, exactly?
SPRINGER: Well, ‘common’. Not sure what else that can mean—
BOURBAN: Kids would be prone to hang out here. We also might have informal gatherings and such.
PORTER: But the big stuff happens in the gym…
BOURBAN: Naturally. From the theater platform—that’s right, isn’t it, Mary?
SPRINGER: (nodding, mumbling) Alice… Mary-Alice, so that these visitors know…
PORTER: Okay, so we’d want to know the various ways from this common area to the theater—any secret passageways, Alice, in the basement, maybe?
SPRINGER: No—Mary-Alice, together-like.
BOURBAN: Didn’t we already send you blueprints of the facility?
PORTER: Apologies. Left them at the station. But I do recall something about…
SPRINGER: Yes, we do have a basement—generally locked.
BOURBAN: From the inside, though? I thought they were lock-release…
SPRINGER: Well, why don’t we go check…
PORTER: We’ll do that, all in good time. For now, pace us through a typical school day. Let’s say kids are in the academic… ah… wings and they want to go, um, common. Or, wait, let’s pretend it’s a, what d’ya call it—assembly, or a basketball game, and kids are going from this common…
SPRINGER: If it’s a basketball game, we lock the doors to the common area and the academic wings.
BOURBAN: Mind you, they’re release-lock, from the inside—
SPRINGER: A school assembly, however, is a very different occasion—day from night, literally. Which begs the question: what exactly is the temporal premise of this simulation?
BOURBAN: Mary, we’ve been over this time and again: we’re not here to debate the premise. The occasion could be anything, from a single lunatic to an orchestrated campaign—
MARROT: Belsan, full blown.
SPRINGER: That’s not what I meant—I get the purpose, but what exactly is the premise you want? A middle-of-day event, or something in the evening? When kids are coming, or going, spread out in classrooms or assembled in a large place?
PORTER: Yes. All of the above.
SIMMONS: With due respect, sir, Mary-Alice is asking a pertinent question. What are we imagining for our roles this Wednesday?
PORTER: We’re imagining being caught off-guard. So, whatever happens, it’s ‘situation fluid’—and that means now, tomorrow, this Monday—every day thereafter.
BOURBAN: Well put. That’s the premise and the purpose.
SIMMONS: Here’s my idea, for sake of efficiency: one of us keeps an eye out for the small spaces—washrooms, classrooms, nooks and crannies—another sizes up the common areas—
PORTER: Just one common area, I thought—
SIMMONS: Not if we include the gym, the cafeteria, the foyer…
MARROT: I’ll take them. I know the gym inside and out.
PORTER: The point is we all gotta know what we don’t know. Everybody has to be ‘small space’ and ‘big space’, familiar and unfamiliar. Gus, you want gym duty ’cause you imagine this will be some kinda Beslan? Sharon, you want classrooms ’cause you got good grades in school? Hell, I almost dropped out—was frankly looking for any chance to get high—so should I take one of these, what did’ya call ’em, ‘crannies’?
SIMMONS: Yeah, I guess that’s what I’m saying.
SPRINGER: Listen, the bell is going to ring soon—I think we need to proceed with the tour and get relatively out-of-sight when kids pass to their next classes—
BOURBAN: They shouldn’t be affected by authorities checking out the school.
SPRINGER: And our talking Beslan, lunatics, and crannies to get high?
PORTER: Now, Mary, that’s not fair.
SPRINGER: (sighing) I think I’ll leave you to sort that out. Dr Jim, I trust you know the ins and outs and how each lock releases.
BOURBAN: No room for sarcasm, Mary-Alice. This is supposed to be your chance to lead the school through a code-red scenario; there’s nothing more important than what we’re doing right now.
SPRINGER: I don’t disagree, but the bell will ring and students will see us in muddle-mode, not the picture of confidence in code-red.
MARROT: Maybe it’s ‘code orange’ anyway.
PORTER: I always wanted to keep it ‘code x’—neither black or white or any other set color… Fact is, most of these situations wouldn’t care if the code were anticipated or not. Code green is just a trip-wire away from code-red..,
SPRINGER: I don’t understand what or why we’re discussing in the middle of the common area as students are about to tumble our way…
BOURBAN: I can’t understand why you can’t understand.
Iiii: at a park in Golden Valley, under leafless trees. Though the sun is high, a women shuffles in with a sleeping bag over her shoulder and spreads it across a bench as a makeshift bed. Behind her, downstage, a man stops at a message-board pillar and reads what appears to be fine print. With some effort he pulls off a plank of posters—glued one over another—and holds it as a heavy, open newspaper.
ONAIWAH: C’mon, Cole, come and make me warm.
BARNADINE: The sun will do that by itself. Anyway, it’s noon, fer God’s sakes—why don’t you get up finally and get some exercise?
ONAIWAH: Come in here with me and exercise you’self.
BARNADINE: There was a time, no foolin’, I was damn decent a spor’sman. Look here at what’s coming to the Target Center—the Harlem Globetrowers…
ONAIWAH: What kind of trousers?
BARNADINE: I said Globetrowchers—trow..trollers—shit, you know what I mean.
ONAIWAH: No, what d’ya mean?
BARNADINE: They’re trick ball-players that travel the globe—there: Globetrav’lers, no, trow… damn!—doesn’t matter.
ONAIWAH: Well just read it, if you’re not too pissed.
BARNADINE: ‘Trotters’. Of course. ‘the One and Only’—that’s a sly cover for ‘the Original’!
ONAIWAH: Wha’s so special about ’em?
BARNADINE: They beat every team they face, if all for show. I saw them in Chicago at the ol’ Amphitheater, big barn in the middle of the city. Back before everything turned into ‘Target Centers’—
ONAIWAH: They got Target in Chicago?
BARNADINE: Something more like a Delta Center or United Airlines—something in honor of ‘His Airness’. I los’ interest before all that racket.
ONAIWAH: No, they got Target stores in Chicago?
BARNADINE: Well who gives a damn? Target’s everywhere by now, I think.
ONAIWAH: Tell me why you left again. Come snuggle in, ’least lean agains’ my legs.
BARNADINE: Well, I wasn’t no Clyde Marrow run outta town, but I wore out my welcome too many places. Hard to disappear anywhere, even midst a million peoples. I worked Steinmetz High School on the near north side for a couple years—
ONAIWAH: Janitor.
BARNADINE: yeah, but more to the point I sold pot. Lots, and the place became a bit’uva mecca.
ONAIWAH: but you didn’t get rich.
BARNADINE: you can’t get rich like that—gotta go harder core, then you get killed more likely than get rich. Anyway, I didn’t care for that kinda life. I wanted to coach, y’know, or just even assist some team in city league. But I’m a janitor, right? Who’s that? Can’t know his X’s and O’s or how to lace up shoes, let alone jump to the moon. I got involved in a midnight league, pick-up all night long if kids showed up. Paid me nothin’ but a little room to sleep in, right next to the locker room. Drug trade there was worse than Steinmetz, and, y’know, reputation follows a guy and so I was kicked out, no questions about it. I’d been through a lot’a temp jobs and hoped to get hired back at a book warehouse west of the city, where I played three-on-three every lunch hour and coffee break. Andre Battle, Derek Mays, Nikita Walker—good guys, y’know, who played at Simeon and King and Loyola Academy, some to go on to Division I, but most sputtering out, like me. So then there’s nowhere to go but stackin’ boxes o’ books, and selling dope to make a dent, and… fas’ forward to Golden Valley…
ONAIWAH: Wha’s tha song we like, ‘Erase an’ Rewind’?
BARNADINE: But there’s nothin’ to go back to. May’s well go see the frickin’ Globetrotters game at Target—
ONAIWAH: O, can we? I’d like us to see a sure win…
BARNADINE: all scripted out—not a game at all. More like a shopping trip, I guess, if you got the cash… Target gets its customers one way or ’nother.
The two settle in to a slumber, with the plank of posters serving more a sun shield than a blanket. Two police officers come by.
VAN ERDAL: What’dya say, Tim, now or next go’ round?
RACINE: Looks like they just settled in for a long winter’s nap—hard to argue against hibernation instinct, huh?
VAN ERDAL: Not hard at all. Especially since they’re three months late for bear behavior. Let’s rouse ‘em.
RACINE: Claude, the Dorothy Day’s not available ’til 4; that’s a bunch of hours to push these two from bench to bench, this park to that.
VAN ERDAL: ’s their problem more than mine. Simple law: no loitering. Nothing I need to interpret, really.
RACINE: Okay, but what if you had to negotiate? We’re supposed to go through that simulation next week, y’know, at the school…
VAN ERDAL: With a couple o’ drunks? That would be easy. I’d let this billy club here do the talking. ‘Never talk to a drunk’, my grandpa used to say. Nothing you can do to squeeze out sobriety.
RACINE: Well that’s what we might encounter: the equivalent of drunks. Terrorists whipped up by their own witches’ brew, not looking to unvex the situation with methods of reason, much less with clear-and-simple adherence to rules, and much much less with billy clubs.
VAN ERDAL: Listen, I’ll let Monday unfold how it will: it’s training, for heaven sakes. Today is already ‘trained’—cops on the beat, rousing drunks, ticketing cars, seeing and being seen. Shouldn’t second-guess what we’re here to do.
RACINE: You’re Rambo, man, when it’s easy pickins’. I think you’ll shit your pants on Monday, the way they’re talking up the ‘realism’.
VAN ERDAL: Pardon my boredom, boy scout—Hey! You two, get up! Rise and shine and give God your story, story—just don’t tell me, and don’t let me see you lounging on these benches again—they’re tax-payer property.
BARNADINE: Huh? Whe—(coughs) Where we at now?
RACINE: Sir, you’re in Wesley Park. Do you have a residence you can return to for a more appropriate sleep?
BARNADINE: We’re here with the Target Center show—
ONAIWAH: We’re on the team that always get beat…
VAN ERDAL: Don’t tempt me with that invite!
ONAIWAH: Maybe I seys what’s true—you ain’t a judge and you can’t push us around like that. Rodney King—we all saw that police brutality.
VAN ERDAL: You got ten seconds to move your asses! Or maybe you want a couple nights in jail—I wouldn’t blame ya—but what you can’t do is loiter.
BARNADINE: Come on, girl, I got an idea anyway.
VAN ERDAL: What’re thinking of doing?
BARNADINE: None of you damned business—we’re leavin’ your ape-shit city furniture and you can’t do nothin’ more. Freedom o’ speech an’ assembly, and freedom to keep you out o’ ours.
RACINE: Sir, the Dorothy Day Center, down this road a couple miles, opens at 4, if you need their services.
ONAIWAH: And Target is open righ’ now—we gonna go an get beat.
VAN ERDAL: Whatever, just not on my beat, if you catch my drift.
BARNADINE: I smell your pig methane…
RACINE: It’s enough.
BARNADINE: More than enough. (Turning to Onaiwah) Girl, I done dreamed up an idea!
Iiv: Wednesday evening, at the high school library, a meeting of the school board in a conspicuously small space between reference shelves and computer terminals. Coats are still on, as the building is somewhat chilly. Lights are off except directly above. In the shadows are an array of books on display, student art, a mezzanine balcony and study carrels.
FARMWORTH: Appreciate your attendance here tonight—extraordinary meetings may happen at the discretion of any board member, and—
TIOSOOK: Point of semantics, Lillian: extraordinary or ‘extemporaneous’?
SMITH: Is there a difference?
TIOSOOK: Sure—worlds, really. I mean with ‘extraordinary’ we’d still need to publish its taking place, its minutes—all in accordance with the by-laws: did you mean for that to happen tonight?
FARMWORTH: No. Indeed this is an extraordinary extemporaneous meeting—really no reason to Roberts Rules it.
DOSTUNE: Sorry, I don’t understand that reference—the ex’s I get, but who is Robert?
BOURBAN: Before you Westernized, Helmand—a sometimes fuddy protocol that requires recognition from the chair, motions and seconds and other ‘Rules of Order’.
FARMWORTH: Well, I wouldn’t say ‘fuddy’ or ‘duddy’ or anything disparaging—it keeps contentious issues civil.
SPRINGER: And sometimes ushers in a civil war.
BOURBAN: I wouldn’t say protocol does that any more than chaos theory.
SPRINGER: Energy can be channeled any which way, toward civility or corruption; entropy is your chaos theory, and those molecules just go their own way—they don’t look to clash.
DOSTUNE: Okay, I get it. In honor of my remaining friends in Afghanistan, let’s hope for civil entropy.
TIOSOOK: The question remains, though: are we meeting in an official capacity? You called some of us, not all, and drew poor Helmand away from his…
DOSTUNE: Harem?
TIOSOOK: Don’t get me in trouble! I assume you have one lady friend that you’re courting…
DOSTUNE: One, and counting..
SMITH: Gentlemen! Can we get to business? The courted of us have kids at home being babysat by the television.
FARMWORTH: Indeed, I want this to be quick, candid, off-the-record, troubleshooting—
SPRINGER: How apropos. This will be a great opportunity to shoot our troubles away.
BOURBAN: I think we’re painting devils on a process that remains a training event, and that by the GVPD. It’s not really our business—not in our interest, I’d even suggest—to trouble-shoot anything. Monday comes, the actors assemble themselves as the police have pre-arranged, they do their thing, videotape it for their internal use, share it for our internal use—maybe an ‘extraordinary meeting’ opens it up to comply with the Public Information Act—
SPRINGER: Maybe WikiLeaks beats us to it…
BOURBAN: Is that a threat? Mary-Alice, whose side are you on here?
SPRINGER: Is that a paraphrase of George W?
FARMWORTH: Folks, listen. I think, civil or otherwise, these are exactly the questions that we are trying to troubleshoot. And… I’ve been scratching my head since last week… I don’t know exactly how this simulation is supposed to meet the public.
BOURBAN: I don’t think it needs to, exactly.
TIOSOOK: But Jim, the campus cordoned off, dozens of police cars and SWAT personnel, I understand ambulances need to rush to and from—this isn’t something we can hide, on Presidents’ Day or the Fourth of July.
BOURBAN: We’re not hiding anything. We’re following the expressed mandate of the Golden Valley Police Department—that on the advice of Homeland Security—to have them put this event on and clean it all up. We don’t have to answer for anything.
DOSTUNE: But sir, all due respect to that point-of-view—and I assume this is the reason the board asked me to be here tonight—there will invariably be some counseling ramifications, kids painting chimeras, wondering if the hypothetical is more immanent…
SMITH: Yes, that is precisely the concern. And talking it through will definitely be your area of expertise, but in a way, we haven’t talked through anything for ourselves. I mean, this event never came to a vote—arguably, it’s not sanctioned, no matter who holds the guns.
BOURBAN: Again, I think you’re being too provocative—presumptuous, even.
FARMWORTH: Funny. I always hoped, from 5th grade student council ’til now, for discussions like this.
TIOSOOK: On the record, or off?
FARMWORTH: Well, that’s just it—no yes or no. It’s like this library. Some meetings I wish the whole place were filled, listeners swinging legs through the balcony railings, speakers sticking enough to the agenda but enough off the cuff to keep it interesting. Maybe someone fetches a book to ‘check the record’ or some words of wisdom—something Lincoln might say about houses divided or angels of our better nature. Lights would be on, passers-by would wonder what’s going on and perhaps muse, nostalgically: the school’s in healthy shape—it wants to be peopled even off-hours. The learning doesn’t end in the classrooms, with some kind of final exam. There’s your extemporaneous, Jon—we have to maneuver as we go, a bit like Star Trek maybe.
SMITH: I think the kids understand The Matrix better…
DOSTUNE: I don’t know what they understand. There’s a scene from Bowling for Columbine where—
BOURBAN: Oh, please!
FARMWORTH: No, go on:
DOSTUNE: Well, not to be suggestive here, but… Michael Moore interviews Marilyn Manson
BOURBAN: (mock-screeching) “I’m not a sl—ave to a g—od that doesn’t exist!”
SPRINGER: Jim, quit it! Helmand, say more.
DOSTUNE: Yeah, that song is in the background, but then there’s a quiet moment, when Moore asks Manson, who was scheduled to do a concert in Denver that spring, what would he say to kids wondering about all that happened at their school. And his response was, ‘I wouldn’t say anything, I’d just listen.’
BOURBAN: Pro-found. Is this a role model of yours?
TIOSOOK: It’s a reality of ours.
FARMWORTH: I feel like adjourning on that note.
SPRINGER: If only. For once I want us to keep going—
FARMWORTH: Of course, I’m being facetious. We haven’t hashed out anything yet.
SMITH: But a purpose to listen. And not just to the sirens on simulation day.
BOURBAN: Okay, so. Brass tacks: we post on the schoolnet an innocent message that the campus will not be accessible Monday for—keeping it simple—a police-coordinated training exercise. Nothing about its scale or target, nothing even indicating that Tuesday will be any different for the activity that passed. We put the same brief message around the cordon—a firm-but-gentle ‘stay out’—and that’s that. The police will need to watch the cordon—
TIOSOOK: Shouldn’t our school security do that? They’re all supposed to be present, but what are their responsibilities?
BOURBAN: I’ll find that out. Good point.
SPRINGER: And another thing that we’ll probably need to anticipate is—
Outside the library, but clearly inside the building, a tumbling of what sounds like stacked furniture.
TIOSOOK: What was that?
FARMWORTH: No one’s supposed to be here, right? Speaking of security?
DOSTUNE: I’ll check it out. Could be just said security.
BOURBAN: or a Gremlin.
SMITH: one of us!...
SPRINGER: I was just about to say, at least it’s not one of us…
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