Beautiful Dreamer

BEAUTIFUL DREAMER

Interior, a hospital room, 1924. ELLIE sits in a bed. Also in the room are a chair and table of some sort, with an empty vase. A closed door leads offstage.

Ellie (singing): Beautiful dreamer, wake unto me,
Starlight and dewdrops are waiting for thee;
Sounds of the rude world heard in the day,
Lull'd by the moonlight have all pass'd away

Beautiful dreamer, queen of my song,
List while I woo thee with soft melody;
Gone are the cares of life's busy throng.

Beautiful dreamer, awake unto me
Beautiful dreamer, awake unto me

Beautiful dreamer, out on the sea,
Mermaids are chanting the wild lorelie,
Over the streamlet vapours are borne,
Waiting to fade at the bright coming morn.

(A knock.)

Beautiful dreamer, beam on my heart,
E'en as the morn on the streamlet and sea;

David: Ellie? Can I come in?

Ellie: Then will all clouds of sorrow depart,

David: Ellie?

Ellie: Beautiful dreamer awake unto me
Beautiful dreamer awake unto me (David opens the door. She looks up.)

David: I brought you a rose. The first of the year. I know how you miss them.

Ellie: A rose.

David: Yes. A red one.

Ellie takes the rose and smells it.

Ellie: a rose. Off which bush?

David: the climbing rose. It’s grown over the entire porch.

Ellie: has it been that long? I can’t keep track anymore. Every day is the same in here. Hospital food and healthy walks on the lawn and nurses always asking me ‘how do you feel today?’ and ‘did you sleep well?’ they treat me as if I were a baby. I’m surprised they let you bring this in, with the thorns and all. I’m not supposed to have sharp things. Not even hairpins. They took away every last one. My nail file, too. The one with the ivory inlays. The one Alice gave me. (Pause) How is Alice?

David: Alice has been dead for ten years.

Ellie: Why didn’t you tell me? Why didn’t anyone tell me? I’m still here, you know, I’m not that crazy. I can handle the news. The news. She’s dead?

David: I did tell you. You went to the funeral, Ellie. You weren’t in here yet. You’ve just forgotten. Forgotten. Lost track of things. They warned you this might happen.

Ellie: Yes. They did. That I remember. I remember the oddest combinations of things. Like that fort we built the year I turned ten. Do you remember that? The walls all leaned and the roof leaked something awful but we were so proud because we’d made it ourselves.

David: And then we moved again the next year. I wonder what became of that fort. I doubt it’s still standing. The fact that it stayed up for more than five minutes was nothing short of a miracle.

Ellie: That was Illinois. Then there was Colorado. Colorado Springs Middle School. Proud home of the flying squirrels. Do they even have flying squirrels in Colorado?

David: I don’t know. I never saw one that I remember. Remember the rope swing in California?

Ellie: God yes. The American River. We spent that whole summer down by the river with the rope swing. Swimming. Swinging and jumping off into the water.

David: The only way to stay sane. It must have been at least a hundred and five in the shade.

Ellie: Sane. I guess it didn’t work, then.

David: I’m sorry — I didn’t mean —

Ellie: I know you didn’t. I’m resigned to it at this point. I’m crazy. Batty. Completely insane. Not quite all there. This is a good day, you know. Some days I hear things. See things. One day the chair and the table began to dance. It was quite romantic, really. A waltz. One-two-three two-two-three — would you like to sit down?

(David sits in the chair)

The walls here have ears. Nothing goes unnoticed. There they are, always watching, waiting to see what will happen next. Nothing much ever does happen. Patients eat, sleep, and occasionally have breakdowns or try to run away or attempt to strangle the nurse — that happened one night. It took four other nurses to restrain her — the patient, I mean. Not the nurse.

David: I can’t imagine. It must be strange.

(Ellie looks at the rose she is still holding)

Ellie: We don’t have any rosebushes here. None. I suppose they’re afraid we’ll hurt ourselves — rather silly, I think. “A rose by any other name would smell as sweet.” I bet the rose is the most mentioned flower in English literature. “The mind does not create what it perceives, any more than the eye creates the rose.” Emerson. Can you put this in that vase? (David takes the rose and puts it in the vase).

David: Shakespeare. Emerson. You could have been an English major.

Ellie: But life got in the way. At least I still have fun. Look at you. College, a job — you got your dreams. But do they make you happy? When was the last time you did something fun? My straight-laced older brother. (David doesn’t respond.)
Beautiful dreamer wake unto me…don’t you remember that song?

David: Yes.

Ellie: So sing with me.

David: No. It’s not something I do. It’s not something people in general do.

Ellie: So?
Starlight and dewdrops are waiting for thee…
I used to wonder what would be waiting when I got out. I’m twenty-seven. I should have the rest of my life ahead of me. To do something. And here I am instead. Not overtiring myself. Living out my days in safety and boredom.
Sound of the rude world heard in the day
Lulled by the moonlight have all passed away.
Stand up. The chair wants to dance.

David: What?

Ellie: The chair wants to dance. Go on! You don’t want to make it angry — it ate a spider once.


David: Chairs can’t eat spiders.

Ellie: Don’t! (David reluctantly stands up.)

David: Are you all right? What’s wrong?

Ellie (giggling): Nothing’s wrong. The chair and table are in love, that’s all. Look at them — aren’t they sweet?

David: Ellie, they’re just a chair and a table! They’re not doing anything. They can’t fall in love. They’re inanimate objects! For the love of God please stop this.

Ellie: No, I can’t come right now. I’m busy. My brother came to visit me. Can’t you see that? (David sits back down in the chair, at a complete loss, and takes the rose out of the vase) David! Get up, you’re sitting on her again.

David: Her?

Ellie: The chair.

David: Oh. (He stands, still holding the rose.)

Ellie: Illinois. Colorado. California. Tennessee. New York. We lived so many places. Sometimes I just don’t know — can I see that rose again? (David hands her the rose and sits back down in the chair. This time she doesn’t protest.)

David: Remember the rose bush in our yard in Tennessee? Huge yellow roses. The bush was so big that we used to crawl inside it to hide. Hiding amid the scent of roses. Yellow roses. Yellow roses always seem to mark the end of something. (He is starting to babble and he knows it.) The end of so many things. It was after Illinois that things started to happen. Your nightmares. Insomnia. Those roses —

Ellie: David.

David: Roses. (Ellie looks back at the rose she is holding. She peels off one petal and lets it fall into her lap.)

Ellie (softly at first): Beautiful dreamer… (As she sings she slowly pulls petals off the rose and lets them fall. Somewhere around “Gone are the cares…” David joins in very quietly. As the song progresses he grows slightly more sure of himself. Piano joins in and plays through to the end.)

CURTAIN |

 
Title?

You sit in the darkened apartment, dimly aware of the clock behind you ticking its merry way toward midnight. Even the drifters on the steps of your building have gone to sleep, their soft snores drifting up through the night air. How long has it been since you wrote something?
The typewriter in front of you silently challenges. How dare you call yourself an author? You can't even get a first sentence on paper. Silently your eyes stare back at the typewriter. One of your feet taps the ground. Slowly, your hands seem to take on a life of their own and reach for the keys of the typewriter. You watch from inside yourself as they strike one key, then the next. Slowly an idea unfolds in some part of your mind, and begins to translate itself onto the paper.
You type faster and faster, refusing to let the idea lose steam and die like so many others. Your fingers fly over the keys, making careless errors as they go. It doesn't matter, you can correct them later.

The typing doesn't stop until hours later, when the alarm clock beside your bed goes off. God damn it, you swore you'd get some sleep. Slowly, you stumble across the room and turn the alarm off.
The sunlight slanting through the open window is too bright, the shrilling of the alarm clock still ringing in your ears. Outside the window the five a.m. traffic gets progressively noisier as each car pulls out of its driveway. It's like any other morning in the past month, and you're beyond caring about any of it. You're beyond caring about the thankless job that lies behind the steel fire doors of that horrible concrete block across town. You doubt they'd even notice if you never showed up.
One look at the bed...it looks so much more inviting than going out into the world. A safe cocoon of warmth and covers. You know before you even try to fight back that the struggle is over. You aren't going to work today.

Five new messages. Who new that people cared that much? Erase all. You don't want to hear what they have to say...they're all just going through the motions of caring.
The last true friend you had was sometime back in September, back before you moved across town and started retreating further and further into your mind. It's better in here, you think. You'll never get hurt because you never get close to anyone. It's better this way, completely numb, so that when someone walks out you never feel the pain, never shed a tear. It was a conscious decision. Sometimes...life just gets to be too much and you need a buffer.

The pages and pages you wrote in your frenzy last night are scattered on your desk. Slowly you walk over and pick one up, then another. You read a sentence, two...what were you thinking? This stuff is pure crap. You're not a writer anymore...just a failure.
Suddenly the apartment is too oppressive, the air too close and still. You have to get out, to run. The breath catches in your lungs as you careen down the fourteen flights of stair and out the door onto the tarmac of the street. As you run you cease to exist, you become two eyes and a pair of feet pounding along the street. No one sees you, but you can see them. You watch them, wonder what they would do if they knew you were watching.
Your life doesn't matter, it isn't real either. Your run slows to a walk as you observe all that's around you. Your brain yells NOTICE ME GODDAMMIT...but your body doesn't hear. It's walking automatically now, carrying you toward the bridge.
Inside its bubble your brain spins frantically, knowing what is real around you and also knowing that it is completely unattached to that reality. What's left if nothing's real? All your memories happened to some other person, some former incarnation of yourself. Or maybe you never even knew her. The girl who worked as a secretary, who had dreams of being a writer, who is she?
All that's left is your brain, quietly, analytically observing anything around you, and your feet carrying you along. When did you lose the ability to emotionally connect?

At the center of the bridge your eyes survey the scene. You want to take off and fly into the sunshine that's glinting off the water. Why couldn't you do it? Your brain is soaring high above the waves of the bay, inviting your body to come along for the ride.
The entire scene seems to ripple and sway unrealistically, the blues too blue and the orange of the bridge far too orange. Are you real? You know the less real you feel the more likely you are to do something stupid...like actually attempt to fly off the bridge. You have to prove that you're real. You have to. You know you still are, logically, but somehow you fail to grasp this. It can't be true because it doesn't feel like it.
You think of all the things you would do if you kept on not feeling real...everything somehow gets easier. It scares you just a little bit. Enough to make you definitely want to do something about it.

Back in the stuffy apartment your hands open the shoebox and take out what you've been looking for. You watch calmly as the cold tap water washes over the blade in your right hand, as it comes out dripping and shiny. You watch as your hand guides it across the skin of your left forearm and the blood comes welling out of the cut.
The pain makes you feel more alive than you have in a long time. The razor drops to the floor as you stand there watching the blood seep out...proof that you are alive and real. It falls in heavy red droplets to the floor of the bathroom, each leaving its perfect round red mark. All you feel is the pain and the euphoria of feeling something – anything – and you know that you won't do anything stupid. The spell of feeling like nothing would hurt, nothing would matter, has been broken.

[continued below] |

 
[Title? part II]

The next day you drag yourself out of bed on time and manage to dig something wearable out of the back of your closet. A simple black pleated skirt, ripped fishnets, high-heeled boots, and a revealing tanktop with a beautiful violet painted on the front. Something about the outfit seems familiar, but you can't remember quite what. You guess that they won't want you back at the office after your pattern of skipping work, so you don't go there. Instead you grab a notebook and walk to the café.
It's a cafe like any other in the neighborhood, slightly run down, with a few tables outside in the sun. You sit at your favorite table and order a chai latte from the waitress with the eyebrow piercing.
Staring absently across the street, you think about the last time you sat at this café. It was with a girl...you realize something and flip open your notebook. There, inside the front cover, is a picture of her, looking exactly as you remember her. Staring sleepily over her cup of coffee, the lip ring glinting in the morning sunlight. You took the picture on that Sunday morning last summer when the entire world stretched ahead of you, just waiting for you to step forward and embrace it. One weekend, the best weekend of your life.
Now you know why the outfit feels familiar. It's the same outfit you wore on Friday, when you first met her. It's what you were wearing... you flip open the notebook to a blank page and start to write. You've never written any of this down before. But suddenly it all seems to come together and your hand darts across the paper, begging to get it all out.
I've been thinking a lot lately of warm march nights in downtown Palo Alto and a kiss, the first. It tasted like mint gum, the mint gum from her bag that we'd both been chewing. 'I'll taste like cigarettes,' she'd warned me months before. 'I don't care,' I said. She didn't though...not that time. It was all mint and her. And around us was nighttime in Palo Alto, the bustle of people walking by, maybe pausing to look at the two girls on the bench in front of the pizza place. But to me...it didn't feel like they were there. I didn't care what they saw and what they thought. I just wanted that moment to last, so beautiful and perfect and right. Maybe it's then that I first felt it. Maybe it was holding hands in the car on the way back that night. But that's the night it started.
I miss that feeling. I miss that kiss.
You are that girl. When I first started talking to you I had no idea it would turn out like that. I refused for months to admit that I liked you and then you came down...I knew it was going to happen, but i wasn't prepared for how it felt. I wasn't prepared to have half of me go with you when you left.
Why did I never respond to your last email? That was a month ago now...it's too late to patch things up. It never hurt, I never cried over the fact that our relationship had fallen by the wayside. Like everything else, it just made me numb. But I miss you. I miss the connection we had. I miss being able to feel you in my head. You shouldn't take me back, I'm the one who threw the whole thing away.
Do you even care anymore?
You close the notebook and drain the cup of chai that arrived while you were writing. Leaving a pile of change on the table, you wander off down the street wondering how you ever let things go this far. It lost you the best thing you ever had, the one person you ever thought you truly loved.

Violet. Her name inadvertently comes out of your mouth. You tingle just thinking of her words, her kisses, every one so soft. For a few months you sacrificed everything for her. Your best friend got annoyed at you two for leaving notes to each other everywhere, for caring so much. You lost her before you lost Violet.
And then you didn't even make it worth it, just threw it away through carelessness. An email went unreplied to. Suddenly you had nothing more to say. It wasn't her specifically, it was that you had nothing to say to anybody. You kick yourself for letting what you had get away like that. She was the only one who cared about you...and now she doesn't care anymore.

Inside, you glance at the calendar on the wall. The fourteenth of February. Valentine's Day. You didn't know what date it was until that moment.
Valentine's Day.
You have no valentine, no friend even to make a joke out of it and run around celebrating Valendoom's Day with.
The thoughts in your mind get blacker and blacker, thinking of how it could have been if you hadn't fucked up your life. You want to get the hell out of this hole your mind has dug.
You want a valentine's day present? I'll give you a fucking present, you think savagely.
In the bathroom you find the razor blade, back in its box from yesterday. Slowly, painstakingly, you carve a V, then an I...the blood is dripping down your arm but you can't feel it. You carve her name into your arm, each cut going deeper. Finally it's all there...the blood is flowing faster, your heart is pounding.
'Violet...' you whisper to yourself, 'I did this for you.' You sit down on the bed, looking out the window. The dull ache in your arm feels good. Staring down at the different heads passing by on the street below, you think you see a familiar one. But it can't be, she's hundreds of miles away living her own life. She doesn't care anymore. You turn away from the window and watch the patterns the curtains cast on the opposite wall.
You'll never send her the letter you wrote her at the coffee shop. You don't want her to know how much you still care about her. You ruined your one chance and you don't want to go pleading back.
Your arm doesn't look like it belongs to you, with the letters of her name carved in deep red on it. This is your valentine's day, alone in your apartment with your blood on the sheets. You wish you could cry, but you're just numb. Staring at your arm.
So is this how the story ends after all? |

 
I’m hooked on a feeling… Esme laughs as the music pulses through her, obscuring all other noises of the chilly april night around her. The wind wreaks havoc with her short brown hair as she shifts into drive and eases out of the tight parking space she still doesn’t know how she managed to find. She cranks the music up as high as it will go and sets off down the street, passersby turning and staring as they hear the music blaring from the open windows of her Audi. Tonight is a night to drive.

She doesn’t think about where she’s going. It’s the same route she took last week, through downtown and the residential neighborhoods out to the hills. Sometimes she changes her destination but it’s always the same idea, to drive for as long as possible with the music up and the windows down. Sometimes she takes a friend with her, sometimes she doesn’t. Tonight is one of the latter, just her and her car.

She named the car Antigone after her favorite character from freshman English class, and even though it isn’t really hers she likes to pretend that it is. Her music lives in the CD player, her spare change on the back floor. This car is her ticket to freedom and she takes full advantage of it.

The music is Esme’s life, a collection of memories of moments and people. She’s always associated songs with dates and friends and crushes. Listening to them brings back everything that’s happened that she never wants to forget. There’s always a song.

She drives with one hand on the wheel, dangling the other carelessly out the window. The music and the endless night make her feel reckless, and slowly she urges the car to go faster and faster down the nearly deserted roads. The adrenaline rush of going seventy, then eighty begins to make her feel slightly lightheaded, and she knows that this is where she’s meant to be, that she never wants to go back.

At the top of a hill she slows and uses a cross street to turn around. She stops, turns the music down, and looks back at her city, a city of rich kids and sold-out yuppie greed. From a distance it’s simply an assortment of lights, and she likes it much better this way, far away from the hypocritical population of her upper class prep school. She is a rich kid in the disaffected way, the kind that doesn’t let you know instantly she’s rich. She doesn’t make a big deal out of the fact that she has a hugs house and attends a fancy school and has her own Audi to drive, not like the girls who spend all their money on extraneous clothes and makeup to show off that they can.

No, Esme uses her money to make other people happy. Every holiday she figures out what exactly would make everybody happy, no matter how simple it may may be, and proceeds to give them just that. Maybe all someone wants is to come along on one of these late-night rides.

This crazy freedom is what she lives for. After finishing all her homework like the good girl she pretends to be, she slips off into the night to destinations unknown, caring more about the trip than the final result thereof. One day she wants to keep driving until the sun comes up, to drive through the night to the top of some hill and watch the sky near the horizon slowly lighten from black to pink and then go up in flames as the day begins. She wants to drive and drive far away from everything she’s known to something new, taking only her memories and her closest friends. One day they will all go on a road trip, she knows it.

As she sits at the top of the hill, a crazy idea comes to her. Why not wait for the sunrise tonight? It’s as good as any. There’s school tomorrow but she can sleep in her car as long as she wakes up in time for the sunrise. Her mind made up, she pulls out a cell phone and a travel alarm.

“Mom? Hi. I’m going to stay at Ellie’s tonight. Yeah, I know. I’ll get myself to school tomorrow. Okay. Bye.” She hangs up, surprised at how easy it’s become. All that remains is to set the alarm and wait. She turns the engine off, leaving the music playing, and stares through the windshield at the lights on the horizon. Peter Gabriel sings softly and she turns it up, realizing how perfectly everything fits together. Climbing up on Solsbury Hill, I could see the city lights... he sings softly, echoing Esme’s life. The wind is blowing and time feels like it’s standing still, all she needs now is an eagle to fly out of the nigh and start talking to her for the song to come true. It’s the kind of night when it feels like something like that could happen. She opens the door and climbs out of Antigone, looking first t the horizon, then at the sky. Up here, beyond the reach of the city lights, the stars hang closely in the night sky. Leaning against her car, she stares up and searches for her points of reference. There’s Orion, her link to reality. The only time she couldn’t find Orion in the night sky was a night that felt like a dream anyway, a surreal night when she needed a point of reference to prove she was still real so she stood in the middle of a deserted intersection and tried to find Orion for half an hour. Her failure proved to her that she must be dreaming, because not being able to find Orion was way too weird. Tonight is not that night. Tonight Orion hangs above her reassuringly identifiable as she moves on to identifying the big dipper, Cassiopeia…all things she remembers from her childhood stargazing in the backyard with her father. He no longer points out Betelgeuse and Rigel every time they are out at night, but Esme still remembers. It’s a link back to those days long ago.

In case of impromptu picnics and nights like this, she always carries a grey fleece blanket in the trunk. Now she takes it out a spreads it on the spring grass growing on the side of her car away from the road and lies down on it, staring up at the sky. She lies there until the night gets too chilly for comfort.

The back seat is easy enough to sleep in, just long enough to fit her comfortably curled up in her blanket, and sleep she does.

She wakes up right before her alarm was supposed to sound to wake her for the sunrise. Ever since she was a child she’s hated being woken up by artificial means, so she always wakes herself up so she can turn it off before it wrecks the feeling of the early morning. Outside the car the night is still nearly black, just beginning to lighten at the horizon. She turns the music back on, but she can’t think of a single song about sunrise. Instead she settles for a song about sunset as she stares out across the city and the bay beyond it, slowly lightening as the sun prepares to come up.

The sun sets quietly over the bay leaving red glowing smog and me in disarray…

Allette Brooks was her accidental discovery one day last year when she was looking through the CDs at Borders for something else entirely. There was music playing and she suddenly realized that it was live and tried to track it down. Slowly she climbed the stairs to the upper floor, where a woman was playing her guitar and singing for a small crowd. Esme was in love at once with her voice, her music…everything. She’s gotten everybody else hooked, too. Allette goes everywhere with her now, living in her car stereo, on her computer at home. It always seems to fit, whatever the situation.

Allette sings about waiting to get over someone, and as Esme looks out at the edge of the sun, just peeking over the horizon, she realizes that she’s finally managed to do just that. It’s been almost a year now, with only one letter in that whole time. A perfectly nice letter, explaining that there’d been not time to write, and it made her insanely happy. She couldn’t stop smiling for days. But even then she no longer felt like that about the sender. That was last year, and things have changed so much since then. She still has all the letters, the song. The person.

No, I am not still dreaming about you…

Esme shifts into drive and slowly drives down the hill back to reality. |