An Episode of Remnants.

Content Warnings

• Discussion of death, loss and grief, including the loss of children and babies
• Mentions of severe childhood illness
• Discussions of alcoholism
• Descriptions of sudden unexpected death
• Some discussion of fertility issues
• Descriptions of an extremely depressed character
• Mentions of war, including bombings and the destruction of buildings
• Mentions of human remains
• Mentions of injuries to a child, including injuries from abuse
• Arguable kidnapping
• Extended descriptions of a child suffering with severe CPTSD
• Descriptions of stroke and neurological difficulties
• Mentions of self harm (slapping, and other activities implied)
• Extreme emotional distress

Transcript

[ROARING, WHOOSHING WIND]

APPRENTICE
I’m still falling.
How long have I been falling?
Curiouser and curiouser.
I see them.
Remnants, moths, pieces of paper.
The First and Last Place. The tent, the furnace rooms. All of it.
The hole.
The hole I threw the stone into.
It came back but it came back different.

[THE APPRENTICE GASPS]

I feel something. It’s– I don’t know. Some kind of string? I—

[THE WIND QUIETS

Ugh. I. Yeah. There. The string, or— yarn? I don’t, I— wait.
I’m not falling.
I didn’t land but I’m not falling.
There are… lights.
I see lights.
I see— I see a man and a boy.
The man is Joseph Pocket. The boy is Edward, Mrs Cratchet’s son. He’s lifting him into the air. He’s laughing, screaming laughing.

[GHOSTLY LAUGHTER]

They… they call him Ned for short. He’s always been Ned from the day he was born, Cecilia said. She’d have put that on the birth certificate but she’d needed something more serious to call him when he needed reprimanding.

[THE APPRENTICE CHUCKLES SOFTLY. DISTANTLY A CHILD PLAYS]

Joseph cannot imagine ever doing such a thing. The boy is a delight. Rambunctious and full of life, and bitingly clever. He has a short string of patience and an even shorter fuse, but it’s hard to be angry at him; even his furrowed brow is adorable.
Joseph’s parents… they aren’t pleased that he’s dating a client, let alone a widow, but they are glad he is dating at all. He takes Cecilia for picnics in Regents Park and Ned feeds the ducks scraps of his sandwiches and makes friends with any child who happens to glance his way.

[DUCKS QUACK]

Joseph and Cecilia chat and play cards, but mostly they read together, occasionally breaking the pleasant quiet to share snippets of their books. Joseph likes novels, but Cecilia prefers history. Kings and queens and knights and maids, but most of all, she loves to read about art. In her spare time, when she’s not at her secretary job or chasing around after Ned, she paints.

[A BRUSH STROKES CANVAS]

Joseph begins to volunteer his weekends to take Ned to museums and fairs so he can give Cecilia more time to paint. She is never without a smudge of paint on her hand or her cheek. Joseph once even found a drop of it on the delicate shell of her ear, as though a bright blue sapphire had been pressed right there into her skin. It is the first part of her that Joseph ever kisses.

[A WOMAN LAUGHS SOFTLY]

On one weekend excursion, Ned comes along to meet Carl Cratchet. Cecilia’s brother in law, Ned’s uncle. He’s sharp and stern but there’s a boyishness about him that reminds Joseph of Ned. They pull faces at each other when they think Joseph isn’t looking.

[A MAN AND A BOY LAUGH]

Carl is wicked smart and a little uncompromising. He’s frustrated his brother entrusted his will to Joseph’s father; he’d have handled it better himself. Joseph cannot help but agree.

[GLASSES CLINK]

Over whiskeys in a quiet bar some weeks later, Carl grows teary eyed; his brother had intended to lessen the burden of his death by involving Joseph’s father. It was an act of kindness which now seems now to have horribly backfired.

[PAGES TURN, A STRANGE, THREATENING HUM BEGINS TO RISE]

Joseph attempts to discuss the case with his father, but he says Cecilia is manipulating him. For the first time in his life, Joseph raises his hand and means to hit with it. But the blow does not land. His father, eyes unfocused, looks small and ancient behind his desk. Joseph lowers his arm and stalks out into the night.

[THE HUM FADES, ALMOST UNDETECTABLE NOW]

He does not mention the Cratchets to his father again. He handles the files alone, forges his father’s signature. He’d feel guilty about it if it wasn’t the most patently responsible thing he could have done. When he meets with Carl afterwards, they shake hands. ‘I’d love to work with you,’ Carl tells him. ‘You’re a cracking solicitor.’
And so they do.
Things fall into place piece by piece, like snow across a lawn, and life feels crisp and fresh and new. When they put Joseph’s father in the ground, it softens something in his mother. She warms to Cecilia and her brash, bold son. Sometimes, she calls him Edward by mistake, and Joseph wonders if she knows who she’s speaking to, but she’s of sound and sombre mind when she slips her wedding rings from her finger and presses them into Joseph’s palm. ‘Marry that girl,’ she tells him. ‘Even if you don’t like her anymore, I can’t do without her.’

[CHURCH BELLS RING, FAINT AT FIRST BUT GETTING LOUDER]

The morning of the wedding, Ned bursts into the room where Joseph had been getting ready, wearing a beautifully tailored suit. It’s a miniature version of the one Joseph is wearing. There is a pocket square, monogrammed ‘EP’.
‘I had it made for your brother,’ Joseph’s mother explains. ‘Same as the one I gave to you last night. It was intended for his wedding suit. But this little lad will make just as dashing and Edward Pocket as your brother ever was. He’d be so proud of you, Joseph.’
Joseph shuts himself into the pantry to sob for twenty minutes before they leave for the church.
Cecilia is radiant in a pale blue dress with a pretty lace veil. It does not obscure her face, and only frames it. He tells her she is the most beautiful view he’s ever had the pleasure of laying eyes on.

[THE BELLS ARE STILL RINGING]

After the ceremony, and the party, they send little Ned home with his grandmother. The houses deathly quiet without him. Joseph undresses Cecilia with shaking hands. A tumbled confession and apology melded into one; he has never slept with a woman before. Cecilia catches his trembling fingers and kisses the tips of each one.
‘We will go slow,’ she promises him, and they do.

[THE BELLS FADE]

More flakes of snow, pieces coming together. Joseph and Carl have a dazzling reputation for handling estates. It’s Joseph’s dogged efforts and research that set them apart; he rarely handles the legal side of things and makes his focus humanitarian. Cecilia works as their secretary for a while but it bores her, so Joseph tells her to quit. Whatever will she do with her time besides this? She says. The answer is obvious to Joseph; she should paint.
And she does.

[BRUSH STROKES AGAIN]

Glorious frescos on the walls of their home, but only upstairs where guests will not see them. Ned’s room is a jungle. Theirs a beautiful mountain scene. When Cecilia runs out of space, she paints her friends homes and builds a reputation of her own. There is hardly a client in Joseph and Carl’s books who does not have a nursery with walls adorned in Cecilia’s murals.
Ned is jealous of this. He has his mother repaint his room every three months. It’s Egypt, Ancient Rome, Paris, Milan. He loves it until she’s finished painting something for someone else and then he hates it and can’t stand it anymore.
He is almost a man now and Joseph is no longer charmed by Ned’s boyishness. He’s clever, but he won’t apply himself. When he’s old enough to drink, he commits to it like it’s a calling from God. It’s a wonder he’s not at all related to Joseph’s father. He reminds Joseph of him more and more every day.
Joseph thinks of his brother. If the cancer had not claimed Edward’s life so young, would he have sought freedom this way, too?

[RAIN]

One night part way through Ned’s second year of studying medicine, he comes home in tears. He has been thrown out of school, he says. They will not let him back. Joseph is furious, but when he marches into Cambridge the next week, the grounds on which Ned has been forced to leave are more than fair. Destruction of property; non-attendance of lectures; arriving at an anatomy class so drunk he could hardly stand.

[THUNDER]

On the train home, Joseph tries to think of what he will say, but when he gets to the front door, all he can think of is that medicine clearly doesn’t suit Ned, and that’s okay. Ned sobs like a baby, thanks Joseph for his offer to come and work at Cratchet and Pocket as an aide. ‘We’ll pay for him to get his degree in law here in London,’ Joseph tells Cecilia. She says that he’s too soft on Ned, but that she’s grateful for it.

[MORE RAIN.

Three weeks later, she’s dead.

The shock of it is a bucket of water over Joseph’s head. How could she be dead? People die slowly, in Joseph’s memory. His brother wasting away before his eyes. His father slowly drowning himself in drink. Cecilia was well, and then she wasn’t, and the next say she was dead. She had cancer in her womb, the doctors said, and that was why they’d not been blessed any more children, most likely, but they hadn’t known, nobody had known, not for years and she must have been carrying this around for years, the doctors said. Instead, what happened was she woke one morning with what seemed like the flu. It got more and more wretched through the day so Joseph took her to the hospital.

[THUNDER]

She fell asleep in the early hours of the morning. By dawn she was gone.

[RAIN]

Joseph didn’t know death could be quick. He does not know if he should be grateful that Cecilia didn’t suffer. He’s angry that they didn’t know. That he didn’t know. That there was no warning. His mother says it is a blessing that it happened so quick, that they didn’t have to watch her go in pieces like they did Edward. It does not feel like a blessing.
He’s angry that he didn’t know. Obsessed with petty arguments about colours, plates and doilies, meaningless things he wished he’d simply given her.
Joseph walks around the house like a ghost, staring at all the little things that Cecilia has left behind. Half finished knitting projects. Sketches for new murals. Paint samples. Colour tests on the walls.
Ned drinks like his grandfather.

[RAIN POURS]

Days pass, then weeks, then months. Somewhere in those months, Joseph’s mother passes too. Joseph feels a sickness in his chest. A dark cloud. Carl insists Joseph sees a doctor; he has diabetes. In a way, this helps. He has to care for himself better. An enforced routine, specialised diet and medication. A list of things to do. Life was the list, and Joseph followed it.

[THE RAIN GROWS QUIETER]

The only thing that does not come back to him is his vision. This, the doctors tell him, will be damaged forever. He can still see a little, but not like he used to. He spends every moment he can learning to read Braille. He will not let this sickness take his books.
Ned brings home a girl. She’s kind and sweet natured. She reminds Joseph of Cecilia. It is like waking from a dream. Whilst Joseph has been a ghost, Ned has become an adult man, asking for his mother’s engagement ring to marry this pretty young thing.

[WEDDING BELLS AGAIN]

Joseph fishes it out of his pocket, where it has lived since she was gone.
Perhaps it is time to start living again, and not just from his medications list. The wedding happens in a rush; she’s already showing. There is champagne and delight aplenty. Ned and Polly move into the house with Joseph, fill it with joy and dancing and laughter. Soon they find a little place down the street. Joseph misses them, but he still has his mother, and Ned and Polly need the space; they have a child on the way.

[THE BELLS STOP, RAIN BEGINS AGAIN]

The excitement about the baby is short lived. Joseph finds Ned in the hospital corridor, head in his hands. The child was born still, silent, unmoving. They will not Ned see his wife. Joseph holds him close. He thinks of his brother, Edward, on his bed, dying slow in motion. It is his only consolation that this child did not suffer.
After the third child is born dead, Carl puts his foot down. He will not stand to see his nephew and his young wife suffering so. No. It’s wrong. It’s not fair it—
It’s not fair.

[THE RAIN STOPS]

When they meet the baby at the orphanage it is as though it is meant to be. Big blue eyes, just like Edward’s had been. He is round-cheeked and not afraid to cry. They all adore him, cherish him. He has more clothes than he could ever wear.

[RAIN AGAIN]

As the boy grows, war comes. Ned frets that he should go. Don’t be mad, Joseph is telling him, you have a wife and child at home. And what of the wives and children over there, cowering in fear as German soldiers invade their lands? Joseph has no answer for him. He has no answer for any of this. He tries to remember the last war but it hardly touched his life, except in newspaper headlines. What a privilege. Not like this.
Bombs fall over London, setting the dark streets alight, glowing orange. They spend their nights in shelters under the city. Ned and Polly are told to send Teddy away but they can’t bear to be apart from him. Joseph understands. He couldn’t stand to part from him either.
They drink tea under the city, listen to the bombs fall, muffled through layers of dirt.

[THUNDER]

One night, the sirens ring, and Joseph finds only Carl and his wife down in the shelter. They’ll have gone to the tube station, Carl says, it’s closer to them. They only come over this way so they can spent time with us.
Joseph nods, consoled.
In the morning, Joseph walks the long way home, past Ned’s place. At first, he can’t tell what he’s looking at. From the front, nothing is wrong. But the front of the house is all there is. A facade protecting nothing.
They’ll have gone to the underground station, Carl says. Joseph nods. They sit in the living room and wait and wait and wait. A policeman comes to the door. Ned, his wife, and their beautiful son, are all dead.

[RAIN]

Joseph stands over their graves. He does not weep. He thinks of his father at Edward’s funeral, stoic and silent. Of the stiff, pale children his son buried in a quiet corner in a different part of the cemetery because they had not been Christened before they died.
He wishes he could be strong for her but he can’t. He can only manage to hold back tears. He wishes he had asked his parents before they died if it had lessened the pain of losing one child because another one lived. But he thinks he knows the answer. Nothing could dull this pain. Nothing at all.
There is a great, tumbling crash.

[BOOM]

Joseph runs towards it in the black-out dark of the city. Flames rage; a downed German bomber. Caught in the chains that hang from the bloated blimps that hang like low clouds over the city.

Joseph’s on Ned’s street. The part of the house that had stood before has come down in the shaking of the earth. Pauline, his secretary, is there. Hardly anyone is rushing to help; most of them are in shelters and underground stations to hide from the bombs. It is just Joseph and a woman from across the street.
Emerging from the rubble, a pale arm.
Beneath the stones, the arm belongs to a boy, covered in dust. His clothes are shabby and dirty. He looks underfed. His eyes flutter open. He says his name is Teddy.
Joseph’s heart seizes in his chest. He clutches the boy to it. Edward. Edward. Edward. The streets fly beneath his feet. Edward, Edward, Edward. The streets fly beneath his feet. Edward, Edward, Edward. It is fate. It is fate. His limbs are all broken, many of his ribs. As he sleeps, Joseph listens to his lungs crackle and pop, just as his brother’s once had.
He has hit his head badly. The nurses are not sure he will make a full recovery. But will he live? Joseph asks, desperately. Give it a week, the nurses say. We’ll know more then.
In the morning, Carl comes. Who is he? He asks. He’s Edward, Joseph tells him. Teddy.
He’s not our Teddy, says Carl. He has a family out there somewhere who is probably looking for him. Joseph reminds Carl there are scars on this boy that could not be explained by the falling house. Lash marks across the backs of his legs, scars deep into his palms. He has been beaten. If his family are not dead then they should be, Joseph says.
Carl is quite a long moment. They both look at this boy who is not the one that Ned brought home. But who is Teddy nonetheless.
His family aren’t dead, he says. They’re right here.
Carl brings books for Joseph to read to the boy, Braille versions of Peter Rabbit and Alice in Wonderland and the Count of Monte Christo.
The boy does not die. His chest stops rattling. He can eat on his own. He barely speaks. He does not seem to know who or where he is. The nurses say this is normal. There is some swelling in his brain.
They bring the boy home in a chair, just like the one Joseph’s brother had used. People frown when they see him. Joseph insists that this is his grandson. The first time the maid makes him pancakes, he weeps.
When the war is done and they take him back to London, he blossoms at school. Teddy is sharp, witty, but he gets into fights. There is a spitting rage inside of him and a mad edge to his play.

[A BOY LAUGHS]

Even though he makes trouble, the teachers seem to adore him, and he comes top in his classes for maths and for writing. The children like him too. His birthday parties are well attended.

He had hoped Teddy would forget what had happened to him before he became theirs. He never speaks of it. But it is there, invisible scars to match the ones across his palms and the backs of his legs. Ghosts that Joseph cannot will away.

One morning, he breaks a teacup in the kitchen and seizes with a fear so intense he wets his pants. Joseph cleans him up, sticks him in the bath. He sits at Teddy’s bedside until he falls asleep curled tight into a ball, pillow pulled over his head.

Day in, day out, Teddy seems obsessed with proving a gratitude Joseph never expected to receive from him. If he could find the words to say it he would say I wish you would be spoiled and entitled. I wish you had expected this. I will always catch you when you fall, so it’s okay to let go. But the words won’t come.
When Teddy’s old enough to consider university, he announces he would like to study law.
Joseph frowns. But you’re such a reader, he says. Would you not prefer to study Classics?
Teddy smiles his beautiful smile and says that no, he would like to do what Joseph does.
Joseph considers this. I want you to be careful about this choice. Come work for me as an apprentice for a while first, then, he says. Don’t commit your life to it yet. You’re in no rush.
Ted obliges. He thrives as Joseph’s apprentice, going above and beyond in every task he is set. But he is pushing himself hard. Maybe too hard.

One night, as Joseph heads up to bed, he passes the open doorway to Teddy’s room and catches him sat at his desk. Through Joseph’s misty eyes, he’s just a blurry outline. Joseph smiles fondly, he is about to go in and tell Teddy to put himself to sleep, when Teddy slaps himself across the face, hard. The sound is loud and rings in Joseph’s ears. At his desk, Teddy pants. He hits himself again, turns the pages of his book.
Joseph cannot breathe. He doesn’t know what to say or how to say it. How to tell this boy he will be loved no matter what he does. He doesn’t need to try so hard or hold himself to such ridiculous standards, or punish himself whenever anything goes wrong. For things as small as being a little tired.
Why doesn’t he know that already? Has Joseph not done enough to show him he is loved. He can tell he’s going off the rails but when they try to confront him, he bites back about his work load, his reputation. How can he be going off the rails if he’s thriving so well at work?
It doesn’t make sense, but Joseph stops challenging it. Maybe if he stops pushing so hard to get Teddy to realise that he can breathe, Teddy will realise it himself.

Teddy is supposed to go to university, but he stays.

Joseph has had a stoke. He cannot speak as well as he used to and holding things is a challenge. Keeping to his list of medications – the framework of his life for so long – is harder to do on his own. Teddy makes it easier. He laughs when Joseph knocks into things, never acts like it’s a tragedy. He helps him clean up the broken vases, tends to the endless bruises he gets from furniture. He nails strings and ribbons into the walls for Joseph to follow. When he makes his first cup of tea for himself after it happened, Teddy whoops and cheers.

He knows that Teddy drinks, that he puts whiskey in his morning orange juice. Joseph counts Teddy’s tired sighs and yawns as he reads the case notes aloud for Joseph to dictate his actions on. Teddy has always worked hard, but now he seems to be working even harder, despite the extra things he’s doing at home to care for Joseph. He frets about what to do but there isn’t much he can do. But he’s so glad that Teddy’s there.

And he is there, in the day. Right up until after Joseph’s dinner.

[A HEARTBEAT]

Then most evenings, Teddy goes out. He comes in drunk; Joseph can tell from the stumble in his step. In the night, sometimes Joseph hears him crying, half-muffled into his pillow. Sometimes Joseph hears him slap himself, and the maids have found bloodstains on his bedsheets.
Joseph thinks of the smoke that rose from his son’s house the morning after the bomb hit it. He thinks of the still bodies laid out next to the rubble, skin and clothes turned grey, corporeal ghosts. He thinks of the coffins they laid in the cemetery. Of the boy that Teddy is not. For the first time, Joseph wonders if maybe he’s not done Teddy a kindness at all. If it was this act of charity that has made Teddy find things so difficult.

The second stroke is violent. It takes so much. Joseph cannot move the arm or leg on his right side. Teddy is there to help, because he’s always there. He apologises. Always he apologises. What for, Joseph doesn’t understand.
Joseph sits in his wicker chair by the window. He can tell when it is night and day, but not much else. When the weather is fair, Teddy opens the window for him. He tucks blankets over Joseph’s lap, and Joseph thinks of his brother. His brother who was always Edward, except to Joseph, from whom he would allow an occasional ‘Eds’. He thinks of his son, so unequivocally Ned, except when he was in trouble. He thinks of Teddy, the first boy who bore that name, who had been Theodore before his parents brought him home, the boy who became Edward only when he became a Pocket.
And then there is Joseph’s Teddy. Teddy Pocket who works hard and drinks harder. Who cares and reads great literature aloud to Joseph now he cannot read it for himself. He does not know what name Teddy had before he was his, only that he is his now. He thinks about that he was, curled up inside the chest of the man he has become. Joseph hopes Teddy knows how much he loves him, but try as he might, but there words for it. Even if he could find them, he would not be able to speak them well enough or loud enough for Teddy to hear.
Cecilia kisses Joseph’s cheek. She is wearing her rosy perfume. He is pushing Edward through the garden in his chair. Ned is helping him, and so is little Teddy. Cecilia sits on a picnic blanket, and the Teddy Joseph plucked from the rubble sits beside her.

I can still see it.

It’s me. Through Joseph Pocket’s foggy gaze, it’s me.

I’m there. I’m still holdin git. But he’s gone. He’s dead, I read it, I read to the end. He’s gone he’s dead, he’s dead, it’s finished. It’s winding around I—

[THE APPRENTICE IS BREATHING TOO FAST, PANICKING]

On and on and on and on— I— I can’t I— I can’t!

SIR
You must.

APPRENTICE
It— you— you’re all bound up in— the string it’s. It’s all— what? You’re caught in it.

SIR
No. It led me to you.

APPRENTICE
What— why— I— I saw— he loved me. He knew I wasn’t. He knew I wasn’t— and he loved me.

SIR
Yes.

APPRENTICE
You knew?!

SIR
No. Not exactly. I am not a thing—

APPRENTICE
But you did! You knew that—

SIR
You are not the wretch you think you are.

APPRENTICE
I failed him.

SIR
How?

APPRENTICE
I couldn’t— he died.

SIR
Loved and comfortable. You cared for him. He knew you more than he could ever let on. He loved you more than anything. You loved him back. That is enough.

APPRENTICE
But I’m stuck. I can’t— I saw all of that and I felt it and it— it was different. It felt different. Why is it so different?

SIR
I don’t know. But it was close, I think, to what I see. I think you are changing.

APPRENTICE
Maybe I don’t want to.

SIR
I’m not sure that it matters.

APPRENTICE
But shouldn’t it?! If it’s my place, if things change because of me then—

SIR
It is not your place. It is not mine. It does not belong to us. We are a part of it. That is all.

APPRENTICE
I don’t want to be a part of it.

SIR
What do you want?

APPRENTICE
I don’t know. I just. I want. I don’t know!

SIR
What is the same in every remnant?

APPRENTICE
They all die.

SIR
Hmm. Yes, that is true, but it is not what I’m thinking of.

APPRENTICE
What then?

SIR
You can’t change anything. The stories you read are complete. What happens has already happened. You can read them again, and maybe the things you notice will shift and change, but the story is always the same. You cannot change them. They cannot be rewritten. They can only be read.

APPRENTICE
And then shelved, or discarded.

SIR
Yes.

APPRENTICE
What does that even mean?!

SIR
What do you want it to mean? That there is something you can change? That there is some impact you might have upon these stories, even after they’ve been told?

APPRENTICE
So what are you saying?! That none of it matters?

SIR
No. I would never say that. Of course it matters. You said it yourself. All of them matter. All of them. You understand this with every single one of them, except for you. But you matter the same as everyone else. No more, no less.

APPRENTICE
What does it mean, to shelve or discard them, then?! What am I doing here?! What is the point of all of this?

SIR
That, I think, is up to you.

APPRENTICE
SO what about you?! If it’s all supposed to fall to me, what I decide it all means, then what is the point of you?! Why are you here with me? Why is it the two of us, and not me and Joseph Pocket or— or some— some— some one else?! Why isn’t it Elio?! The presence, whatever you want to call it! Why isn’t it that?! Why is you?!

SIR
I don’t know.

APPRENTICE
I was falling. I called and you didn’t— where were you?

SIR
I don’t know.

APPRENTICE
I thought I’d lost you.

SIR
You can’t lose me.

APPRENTICE
You weren’t… you weren’t there there. I called and you didn’t come and I—

SIR
You cannot lose me, here. I am a part of this place, and so are you. We are it. It is us. You cannot lose me. I cannot lose you. Not for long. You can see it, right here. Feel it with your palms.

APPRENTICE
I— my hands. Fuck. My hands.

SIR
What about them?

APPRENTICE
The scars, I— I can see them. People have mentioned them in the remnants before but I— I don’t know. I don’t think I’ve ever really looked.

SIR
No. But of course you wouldn’t.

APPRENTICE
I… the room. There are places here you won’t look at either.

SIR
Yes. Maybe I should.

APPRENTICE
I thought I’d lost you.

SIR
Never.

[THE APPRENTICE SIGHS]

APPRENTICE
I—
Oh my god.

SIR
What?

APPRENTICE
You’re touching me.

SIR
Yes.

APPRENTICE
No, you don’t understand, I’m touching you and it— it feels like something. Like something.

SIR
Like what?

APPRENTICE
I don’t know. I don’t think I’m a thing that knows, either. If I ever was, I’m not sure I am anymore. What are we going to do?

SIR
Well. You are my Apprentice, and you call me Sir. I suppose what we do is the same as we have been doing; we find the remnants. You read them, and you judge.

APPRENTICE
Shelve, or discard.

SIR
Yes. Shelve or discard. We do that for as long as it takes.

APPRENTICE
As long as what takes?

SIR
This, whatever it is.

APPRENTICE
Okay. So. Where do we start?

[END]