An Episode of Remnants.

Episode Content Warnings

Please bear in mind that this work has content some listeners may find distressing, including themes of war, violence, and grief. This episode contains:

Existential horror

Implications of psychological torture Imagery of violence and dismemberment

References to death

Implications of child abuse (a child with injuries sustained from physical discipline)

References to war

Implications of xenophobia and anti-semitism

Distorted audio

Transcript

WIND HOWLS. STRANGE SOUNDS ECHO.

SIR
This is the First and Last Place. That is why you are here. You have taken the job.

No, no. This will not do. Cannot do.

It is not working. It is clearly not working.

What then, what then, what then.

He asks why he is here. He asks why I keep him so. I must answer, and I do, but I cannot tell the truth, because it compromises my purpose. He has been told; he knows. Some part of him, some hundred, thousand of these scraps of him that hide themselves in the dust and slowly transform into part of it, he knows.

It comes back when he remembers. It comes back when he understands. I see it in his eyes, as the memories begin to settle. But there are too many, too many of them for one soul to comprehend. If I let him know, it would break him, fracture him, has done so before. Again, and again.

And still each time he is changed. There should not be a limit on the amount of times we can repeat the process. There should not be a limit on the times he can be read. But I have never read someone so many times. In theory there is no limit.

There is no limit for I have no limit.

So what, then? Some fault in me, some flaw, some failing. Some unseen shard of malcontent, willing him to shatter this frozen gasp, this moment we exist in, again and again.

Apprentice, will you wake?

Will you not wake for me?

SILENCE

SIR
I will make myself more comprehensible.

A WHOOSH, THE FLUTTER OF A CLOAK. WHEN SIR SPEAKS HIS VOICE IS DIFFERENT. THERE IS BREATH BETWEEN HIS WORDS. WE CAN HEAR HIM MOVING.

SIR
There, fool, a facsimile of corporeality that your drifting mind can dream that we are touching. Yes. My hand upon your face. You dreamed that we were touching and you will dream it again because I bid that you will.

SIR TOUCHES THE APPRENTICE, FABRIC RUSTLING.

A PAUSE.

SIR
You will not wake.

Perhaps there was not enough of you left. What then? What then? You turned yourself to dust. Discarded, scattered across this place like the rest of them. How long it took to piece you back together, iota by iota. Are there parts of you that are not part of you? Are there parts of you which were clinging to remnants swept away from my shelves before I had chance to pluck you from them?

Perhaps I do not know you as I thought I did. I should think I could identify every particulate of what remains of you. I should think I could recognise every remnant of your remnants that drifted down here into me. So many times I have examined them that if they were pebbles plucked from a beach I have worn their surfaces into mirrors.

What will you do? What will I do? Every moment, a judgement, but this one, this moment, your moment, your remnant. I am transfixed. I judge without judging, see without seeing, know without knowing. I am, I am, I am, and yet, you are and this is and we are caught inside of it, of me, and you, and all of this.

I suppose it might not make any sense unless you are such a thing as me.

Will you not wake, Apprentice?

STRANGE SOUND. PAPER DRIFTS AND FALLS TO THE GROUND. SIR STEPS TOWARDS IT.

SIR
This is a remnant. It is what remains. It falls here, to the First and Last Place.

HE LIFTS THE PAPER

SIR
I am this place and it is me but we are not one.

Let me see, let me see.

THE PAPER CRUNCHES AS SIR PRESSES IT INTO THE APPRENTICE’S PALM, THE PAPER RUSTLES, LOUDER AND LOUDER AS SIR SPEAKS

SIR
Yes, here, take it in your hand. Do you feel it beneath your finger tips? It was a part of you once. Do you see? Do you know it? Would you know yourself in your reflection, Apprentice? Feel the page in your fingers, the ragged, bleeding edge, torn violently from the book it once belonged to. The smell of the ink, cheap and heavy, filling your head, burning your nose–

WHOOSH

SILENCE

APPRENTICE
I wake, and at first there is silence, but then a sound, a voice on the wind.

At first it seems like it might be my own but then it dissolves and collapses into indistinct, shapeless whispers which in turn twist and blossom into the whirs and clanks of distant mechanisms, thousands of pieces of unseen machinery whirring in the night that reaches away and away from my gaze.

THE DISTANT, CLINKING WHIRS OF THE FIRST AND LAST PLACE AS IT WAS IN PART ONE.

APPRENTICE
Watched, watched from all angles. Naked in the glittering dark. Motes of dust catch and blur into stars which blink and twinkle as they watch me. Their gaze sears me to the bone.

I feel my flesh peeling back for them to expose that thing within me, that restless, twitching presence some might call a soul. My ribs spread wide like the fingers of grasping hands and dark lights twist like vines along them. There is no pain except that searing, violent heat that is the particular pain of being known.

In this moment, I am at once infinite and miniscule. In this moment the dark lights reach into me and settle on my insides like moths on old clothes, fluttering, constant, dust shifting from their wings, their soft, sharp mouths tearing holes in the fabric of me which are wider than the spans of their trembling, dust-drenched wings.

I wake and I am alone and not alone. I feel and do not feel. I breathe and see dust fall from my mouth which cannot be a mouth for I am nothing. I am an empty space where things used to be, bare threads you can see straight through, delicate as cobwebs.

And yet I am, and I feel, and I touch, and I hear. I raise my head and I can speak and when I do I call, ‘hello?’

I stand and dust falls from me, the me that is, hollow and solid, a ghost in a windowpane, staring over my own shoulder.

I take a step. I know the way. My feet find the path which is not there.

A voice, from the dark, takes a flickering form, a mass of fluttering things which shifts and settles and resolves, a shoal of thoughts and lights and watching dust one moment and the next one thing alone. Through the dusty dark light, over the rattling, chittering, ticking sounds of forever, I reach out to the thing before me.

It looks at me without eyes, from every suspended, glittering mote of stardust which hangs in the absence between us. ‘Ah,’ he says. ‘You are awake.’

WHOOSH.

SIR
No, and no. what more can you see? Will you not wake, now? WAKE.

NOTHING

SIR
No. You are a remnant. You are what remains. These pages are a part of you. Take it.

PAPER CRUNCHES

SIR
You feel the slight depression where the pen nib met the page? Your writing marked invisibly as well as in ink, words etched as well as written, words on this paper, on your soul, the whorls of each letter like the spirals on your your fingertips cut and marred with use and age–

WHOOSH

APPRENTICE

I brush dust from the edge of the photo frame. The metal draws heat from my finger. A woman smiles out at me, caught in a laugh, she leans against a stone post, folded scarf on her head to keep her wild, dark hair from her face. I can almost hear it, though of course I never did.

The door opens behind me. I jump to fold my hands behind my back, twitching the muscles in my legs and sending searing pain up my spine.

‘Teddy,’ says my father. His voice is low, gruff, exhausted. ‘Won’t you sit down?’

‘No thanks,’ I say, clutching my hands tighter against the small of my back. My aunt made me sit the whole bus ride over to my father’s apartment. I felt every stone under the bus’s tyres in the fresh blows from her thin, white cane.

My father eyes me, suspicious. For the first time, it occurs to me that he is an old man. Under his ancient gaze I wither.

‘You aunt says you’re a brat,’ he says.

I feel my cheeks turn red, knotting my clasped fingers more tightly. ‘They said my mother was a Jerry. That’s why I bit them.’

Father runs a hand over his ancient face. ‘Teddy. She was. You know that.’

My face is hotter and hotter, the air in my mouth hot as steam. ‘Not like they meant it.’

Father sighs. He walks to the window, lights a cigarette. ‘Your mother was a German and Jew.’

I feel steel in my guts. ‘Get fucked.’

Father scoffs. ‘How old are you now, Teddy? Seven? Eight?’

‘I’ll be six next birthday.’

‘You’ve a very colourful vocabulary for an uneducated five-year-old brat, Teddy. You need to behave, do you hear me?’

I let my fingernails bite into the flesh of my palms. ‘I hear you.’

‘Very good. I asked you here to get a good look at you before I go away.’

‘Away where?’

‘There’s a war on,’ says my father, as though this is answer at all.

‘Germany, then?’ I say.

‘I’ll go where I am needed,’ father snaps. He raises his chin, staring out of the window. I can see his face reflected slightly in the pane, like a ghost of himself staring over his own shoulder. ‘You be proud of her, understand me? She was German and a Jew. You know that. Be proud.’

I stand straighter, puff out my chest. ‘Yes, father.’

He nods. His ghost in the window screws his eyes shut. I see his shoulders quiver.

‘Father,’ I begin, but have no idea how what I mean to say.

‘Go now,’ he tells me.

‘Alright.’

WHOOSH.

SIR
No and no. What more could you see?

PAPERS FLUTTER

SIR
You see so much, pass so many judgements. A life spent as a voyeur. Is that why you were as you were? You felt the observer, always watching, separate from the lives of those whose paths you crossed. At once imaging yourself as insignificant and superior. You walked the world with the eyes of a fox, the heart of a mouse and the hubris of a god. This is what I think.

Which are you then, Apprentice? Mouse. Fox. God. Nothing at all, as you insist to any you let get even slightly close to you. That small numbered few. So many years watching others, content to touch but rarely allow yourself to be touched back.

Do you not understand, Apprentice, that observation alone changes the observed?

Yes, I have see it. I try to mitigate it, where I can. To what end I do not know. I do not know.

In theory we could do this forever. Again and again, once more beyond the breach, around the drain we circle. You wake, you ask me what you are doing here and I wait for you to answer and there are moments it seems we are close. But we never touch it. Never get to the end.

I ought to discard you. Be done with it. I should have done it long ago! What compels me to keep you? You’re of little interest to me. Your petty mind and your low estimations of those whose lives conjoin with yours. Unaware of the fracture path your impact has, the ripple outward begun by your casting of stones. You affect the world as you move through it, however foolishly you think yourself, however small, however insignificant, however clever, however above it all. You are a thing that moved through the world. It is a part of you and you of it.

I strip you of that context here, pare you back to the essentials. No memory. Just what remains of the self when memory is gone. That core, immutable thing which is shaped by but apart from that life you lived. You have shed your skin again and again, and each time you show a different variation on your patterns, but the pattern persists.

You are predictable. You are knowable.

And yet. And yet I cannot judge.

No matter. No matter at all.

PAPERS MOVE AND SHIFT

SIR
Try this, I don’t know what it is. Do you feel it? The grains in the paper’s surface, the softness at the torn edge, almost like cotton. How many pages like this did you touch, dead Apprentice, when you wrote the journals you tore to shreds and the letters you burned? Do you remember the way the smoke clung to the inside of your nose, how you had thought for a moment to climb into the fire yourself. It was too small to consume you but there was a cabinet of liquor right there, and–

WHOOSH

APPRENTICE & SIR TOGETHER
I had drunk so much already there was a chance I wouldn’t have felt it.

APPRENTICE
I looked at the orange glow of the flames on my face in the mirror on the mantel, beside the portrait of myself Lucio had pulled lovingly from the canvas. There is more of him than me in this. In this image my jaw is sharper my eyes more golden my hair more perfectly curled. Yes, with dedication he has carefully etched each strand of hair on my legs, my chest, delicately marked each freckle like an ordinance map, but this is not me.

Close my eyes, I see him, Lucio. The desperate thing ashamed of his home the first time I’d laid my eyes on him. His focused gaze as he moved my body, a marionette whose strings he pulled with every brush stroke. The look on his face when he had finished, when I saw it, the painting, the merging of us two, watcher and watched, a consolidation, a blur. The careful maps he drew with his fingers on my skin, each touch a demand and a promise and a warning and a defence, and all of it ‘I see you’.

And yet…

A WIND BEGINS TO BLOW

We have seen this one before, haven’t we? How many times have we turned this page? How many?

Who are you? WHO ARE YOU?

WHOOSH

SIR
You are my Apprentice!

SILENCE

SIR
Apprentice? No?! Still no, you will not wake? You cannot be gone, not more gone than you already are. All things here are remnants, all remnants are beginnings. All things here and dead and unborn. First and Last. Last and First. You cannot be gone.

In theory we could do this forever.

In practice why not?

How many times have we walked the streets of your mind? How many lifetimes worth of days have we spent idly combing your past?

I should discard you, that is what I should do. Turn you to dust and let the pieces of you settle on the veil with the rest, and only leave here clinging to the remnants of others. I could keep you and be rid of you and I could move on.

But we have forever. An infinity. And I want you to wake.

The judgement is not thorough and I cannot pass it. You are not of great interest. So why?

There have been those before whose remnants have shone for me. Who I have kept and read again and again like some might read old books. The parts of those who knew you are drawn to you like a sink and I find they do not leave and when discarded their dust will not dissipate, though pieces drift away.

WHOOSH

I will bury you in the remnants of remnants, the pieces of the others held here within me. Is that what you want? A place to rest?

You cannot settle on a shelf until you are judged. Until then, until then.

WHOOSH

A STRANGE SOUND, LIKE SHIFTING SAND

SIR
There. Rest, now. Rest.

WHOOSH

TICKING. THE TICKING SPEEDS UP, AND THEN—

THE APPRENTICE GASPS

A SLIGHT RINGING

THE APPRENTICE CHOKES, CATCHING HIS BREATH

SIR
(voice echoing.)
Ah. There you are.

APPRENTICE
W

h—what? Where am I?

SIR
You have taken the job. That is why you are here.

END

---

Found an issue with the transcript? You can report it here!