Fragment, of a data processing screenplay

[This scene, and perhaps the entire movie, takes place in complete blackness: the audience sees nothing. Some audience members walk out in puzzled disgust. The remaining members watch (nothing), listen, and are entranced, because The Soul selects her own Society.]

[There is a soundtrack. It is a pickup string quartet, whoever you can get from the music school perhaps, if they are any good, playing the second, and final movement of Beethoven's Quartet # 12 op. 127. This movement is marked, Adagio, mon non troppo, e molto cantabile: slowly, but not too much, and with a singing motion.]

He: Sure, my boss is demanding, and,
We cannot get a reasonable price for the house,
Real estate is in free fall, going down as fast as it went up
And for this reason we cannot move near your Mom.
Every appraiser that comes in seems so very dismayed
At the mere marks of a house that was lived in
The signs of long silent laughter of kids now mulish minatory teens
Make those creepy sons of bitches, those appraisers, roll their eyes:
But I shall take their measure
For diamonds are made under pressure.

She: Give me a break.
You are no diamond, although I love you.
Our difficulties aren't making us "better".
Instead, we no longer do it, and the kids despise us. You come home exhausted every night, and you talk to yourself in the kitchen
When you think I cannot hear,
And when you asked Howard for a promotion
He just laughed at you.

He: What do you suppose I can expect?
Nobody is going to hire a fifty year old.
We're trapped,
But like we read in Arthur Miller's play,
Back in Pete Dunderdale's English class at San Jose State,
"A salesman's gotta dream".
I work hard
So hard
Simply to show them that I'm not defeated.
Dammit, Tony's spreadsheet was a mess, and I cleaned it up
Took me until ten.

She: You're not defeated!
Yet.
But sooner or later, that fuck head Mark
Is going to let himself get bought out,
And retire to Cannes, watching the jungle trees while sipping Champagne,
And throw you out on the street.
I think you're kidding yourself. This will kill you.

He: What the hell do you want to do?
We've already ran away to Thailand...thirty years ago. That was fun...me in a Bangkok prison
You going to the Consulate every day to spring me.

She: And I did spring you, remember?
These tits worked wonders on those Foreign Service lifers
These legs worked rough magic on those Ratakasonin gofers
Hanging like fragrant durians above my shirt
Stemming like roses in the general dirt
Tied above my stomach...blew their minds...

He: I think I still love you.

She: And I, you.
But don't bullshit me anymore with sayings
Don't mock yourself with old saws
Don't torture yourself with things on walls
Like "diamonds are made under pressure".
That's soooo Eighties: a dusty VCR tape or music cassette
That will seize up in your mind and make you mad.

Sybilline, and with junglee wisdom upon me now
Sorta like when I dropped acid the first time
I say to you now,
With upraised admonishing gentle hand
Poised, but not to strike, no not ever
A hand you cannot see but in which you believe,
And you know I wouldn't have to be here to say this at all
I could be half a world away
I could be in Chiang Mai
We could be divorced, like Edward and Doris remember them they were crazy about each other
They never stopped loving each other neither nor,
He lives on an island and she's in Vermont with goats

Life is hard,
We love each other hard,
Then one of us dies and the other is alone.
Diamonds aren't a girl's best friend.
You are.

[Fade to black. Oops. We can't do that, can we? Instead, the movement continues to its finish because music reaches the rag and bone shop of the heart.]