2

THE ROOF

Scene opens on the roof. There are a few bottles strewn around. Bill and Sarah are sitting, huddled close together. You are sitting further away facing them, but from an angle.

Sarah: Do you know what a meme is? Outside of the picture jokes thing?

Bill: Not really. Aside from the internet definition.

Sarah: A meme is a parasitic idea.

Bill: I don’t think so.

Sarah [looking up, beyond Bill]: Hey, why don’t you weigh in?

You hand her a card which she studies for a minute and hands to Bill.

Sarah: Oh, well memes. It’s a thing that transfers from person to person in a culture and can change over time. It’s an idea that evolves. That’s an important part, you can track it like you would biological evolution.

Bill: I think I remember that Dawkins made it up?

Sarah: Remember when everyone was obsessed with Inception? People were talking about it as a verb; you could “incept” someone…

Bill: Sure, good movie. Sure.

Sarah: Nolan, short for No Ladies, Never. A meme is an idea that evolves on its own outside of human minds. It exists, somewhere. But how does it start? Where’s the inception?

Bill: Um… [He reaches for a bottle and takes a drink.]

Sarah: What are the first words babies learn? Stereotypically.

Bill: …Ma, pa?

Sarah: What if those are just sounds babies can make at a certain age and have no meaning for the child?

Bill: Well, does that work with different languages? They must have different words.

Sarah: Who cares? It’s a metaphor. The point is that something is communicated without intended meaning. Language is formed from nothing.

Bill: Memes are what?

Sarah: Ideas, behaviors, concepts that move from person to person through imitation. There’s this word in Greek…

Bill: You don’t know Greek.

Sarah: There’s this word a lot when you read Plato.

Bill: Ancient Greek, different language.

Sarah: Mimesis. [She reaches for the bottle in his hand and drinks from it.] Imitation, like mimes? Are we getting close?

Bill: Mimes, memes, limes, lem…urs. No.

Sarah: Memes live, evolve, exist, reproduce, populate by imitation.

Bill: Retweets. [Looks forlorn.] At least retweets have citations.

Sarah: Yes, in a way, but a retweet is stabilized. It can’t change. Memes are like genes, supposedly the word was coined to honor the etymology of the word “gene.” It’s like a game of telephone; you know when you were a kid?

Bill: Of course.

Sarah: Maybe they don’t. [Points to you.] Maybe someone else is listening. I’ll explain: five kids sitting in a line, one of them whispers a phrase into the next one’s ear and they share this whisper four times. At the end, the whispers have changed, have morphed, become something else entirely.

Bill: Sure. [Imitates yawning.] Sarah yawns. Oh, I guess they are contagious even when they aren’t real.

Sarah: Like babies saying “ma” or “pa” because these are sounds they can now say and, even though there’s no proof of understanding of meaning, parents are overjoyed.

Bill: Is this for real or is this still just a metaphor? [He sticks his tongue out at her.]

Sarah: Look, I could be all wrong; I could have had too much of this [she motions with the bottle], but it’s not easy to figure out this stuff anyway. Back when we could search things on the internet, if you tried to read about the concept of “memes” and how it might relate to something like a game of telephone, the internet just spat back a bunch of internet memes.

Bill: I think [he makes quotation marks with his fingers] “meme,” the word, was a meme that evolved into a new [he makes them again] “meme.” Sarah laughs and falls toward him.

Sarah [looking down at the ground]: Yeah, I think so. [She looks up at Bill once more.] So if memes evolve like genes and genes are alive, what are memes?

Bill: Are genes alive?

Sarah: [reaching for his pants leg] I don’t know, are these jeans alive? [Bill leans into her and reaches for the bottle.]

Sarah: If genes are alive, what are memes? Do our ideas live?

Bill: The Platonic Ideals. Some perfect version of the idea.

Sarah: That is imitated through mimesis and made less perfect through the evolution of memes.

Bill: But where did it start?

Sarah: The inception. [She winks at him.] When do our thoughts become our thoughts? Are our ideas alive? Do they live their own lives?

Bill: Seems a bit odd for the God hater to come up with. [He finishes the bottle.]

Sarah: Do you want to get out of here?

Bill: Abso-fucking-lutely. [He stands up and helps her up; as they begin to walk away he looks at you.] You good? [You nod.]

Sarah: [trying to whisper to Bill]: What do you know about Carl Jung?

You continue to stare at one of the remaining bottles. Half full, half empty?