1

THE ROOF

Bruce: Oh, hey, you’re waking up.

You open your eyes. You are sitting on the roof of a parking garage. Bruce stands before you as the sun sets behind him.

Bruce: I was starting to think you wouldn’t. Everyone else left so long ago. [He looks pained.] Oh, did I wake you? [He smiles awkwardly.] Sorry, I’ve just been so talkative today. I guess that’s maybe why they left. People get tired of being grilled, don’t they? I guess that’s why they call it being grilled. Grisly metaphor. Is that what it is? I always get that confused with… synecdoche? Funny word. Not sure I’ve said it out loud before. So, hey, I was wondering… [He walks toward you.] Do you remember the first time you heard the call? [He makes no attempt to give you a chance to answer.] Remember how it was months into the panic? People didn’t know if they should go out at all and everyone was like “I just wish we had a sign to know if it was really bad?” And then the man in charge said they were going to do just that but no one really believed him because he was basically the liar-in-chief? [He looks at the sky for a minute.] You know, your sister is probably the last person in the world to actually remember 9/11? I thought about that when I did it. [He gulps.] So then we actually hear the call. I’m not sure how they did it, actually, but everyone knew what it was immediately. Crazy thing, in this world where senators have trouble debating the color of the sky on a sunny day. All this talk of reds, blues, purples. Brown… They’re all brown shitheads deserve to die. [He clears his throat.] Remember when it went off and people just lost it? Lot of people just offed themselves. I heard that whole Orson Welles thing was fake but shit we should’ve seen this one coming. [He is trying to seem genuine but is trying too hard.] So then when they have to issue the retraction, how it was take your child to work day or something, someone kicked the nuclear football, and we all already felt like politicians were just the boy who cried “Wolf!” so it’s not like it was anything new anyway. [He pauses and smirks.] She claimed she never heard that one but I figured she was lying. Who hasn’t heard the boy who cried “Wolf!” I guess if your parents never told stories to you. [His eyes focus on you again.] Then we wake up one day and someone’s shut the web off. Suddenly we all wish we had killed ourselves with the lucky ones. They had all the porn they wanted in heaven. We bunker down and wait until we hear it again, the call. Will this one be the real one? Will this bell toll for thee? Nah, never. I don’t think we believed it ever would… You know in the wake of all this is when I started to have my troubles. I’m not sure how it first happened, but I would find myself thinking things and then say “no, Bruce, it’s not like that.” And you know, I’d never done drugs or anything like that. I never even drank. Too scared, irrationally, of schizophrenia if you can believe it. As if permanent madness could be contained in a bottle or a blunt. I don’t even believe in free will but somehow I still have night terrors. Absolute terrors. [He thinks for a second.] Yeah, free will isn’t real. Not that it saves me. But yeah, we all freak out since we can’t look up who was the co-star in that episode of That ‘70s Show. And it’s not like everything’s gone but it’s just like my step-daddy said: “We need this one thing that we can’t control, can’t fix, it just exists in the air around us so we call it the clouds but one day it’s bound to rain.” We all start to lose it and I find myself thinking these weird thoughts about if you couldn’t get caught what would you do? What are you capable of doing? What kinds of horrible things? And why? Why is a dangerous question. Eventually I start to think, “Am I really real?” And once I asked that I was off and running. You know the university bookstore Is slow going but when I show up two hours late to a shift and no one reacts I suddenly know that’s that’s what it is. I’m Truman or Elon is right and none of us actually matter. Is that what he said? [He seems to think for a minute.] Who cares? Have you ever read any Kurt Vonnegut? Back when the call would go off two to three times a week and everyone tried to figure out why and someone said it was this guy in the deep state who had been feeding them messages for years in various reports and documents all the way up to the big man in charge. Hm… well anyway I wondered if maybe it was like this thing from Vonnegut. Someone suddenly falls out of time. They know what’s going to happen in the future because that’s where they are from, so they want to help and get this message back to the past but then they’re unstuck, can’t control it, and whenever they pop up they try to get the message out there. They know how to notify us all but they don’t know just when to do it at the right time. [He laughs.] Crazy, right? But what can you expect from someone that isn’t real? I’m not going to come up with real answers. So anyway, this guy, I don’t know why I think it’s a guy, but this guy keeps trying to talk to the past and get them to listen and to realize what’s going to happen and he knows if he finds just the right time, it’s going to work. The world is going to listen. [He grows serious again.] It’s like with your sister… I thought if I found the right time, she would listen, I thought… [He closes his eyes for a second.] So he keeps sending out this call over and over again, every time he can get enough time to do it and then he’s swept up and who knows maybe eventually he gets to that right time and saves the world. Maybe… [He trails off.] They left me up here, you know? And you probably would have too if you hadn’t been asleep. But… [He looks you dead in the eyes.] I figure you must understand, you had to deal with her damn near your whole life, right? I figure… Well. I’m not sure why I did it. I wasn’t angry, you know? I just thought she would get it. Maybe she did. Maybe better than I did. [He makes a sad face.] But not what I wanted. What did I want? I’m not sure why I did it; I don’t think I’ve ever known what I wanted. [He turns around and walks towards the edge of the parking garage.]

The sun has now set. You stand up and begin to follow him.

Bruce: I wonder if I’ll wake up before I hit. [He jumps.]

You look at the space he once occupied for a minute, disbelievingly. Then you check your phone.