An Episode of Remnants.

Content Warnings

• Implications of illness
• Discussions of death
• Implications of suicidality

Transcript

[WIND BLOWS]

APPRENTICE
We’re still.

SIR
Yes. You’re worried this is bad.

APPRENTICE
I don’t know. I think I’ve been coming at this all the wrong way.

SIR
Oh?

APPRENTICE
Mm. Do you see?

SIR
No.

APPRENTICE
They’re everywhere, poking out of the dust. Remnants. Hundreds of them. Thousands, maybe.

SIR
Can you still tell how they connect with one another?

APPRENTICE
Yes and no. There are so many things that bind them all together that it’s just a tangled knot. I couldn’t follow any one thread, not really. It’s all… yeah. It’s all.

SIR
Hmm.

APPRENTICE
Where would you go?

SIR
What do you mean?

APPRENTICE
If you weren’t here, where would you go?

SIR
Oh. I’m not sure that I would.

APPRENTICE
You’ve not thought about it at all?

SIR
No.

APPRENTICE
I have.

SIR
I know.

APPRENTICE
I think I’d go back to that day where Elio found my letters. I think I’d stay, wait for him to come back. Let him talk me out of leaving. It’s all bullshit, you know. I didn’t leave before he came back to make some kind of point out of it, I left because I knew if I didn’t, he’d get me to stay. And I would have.

SIR
And do you think that anything would have changed, if you had?

APPRENTICE
I don’t know.

SIR
If you think it would have, why then? Why that moment? You are so angry at yourself for lying. Maybe you were afraid that Elio would make you stay, but when you left, you were trying to do what you thought he wanted you to, in a way. What you thought you wanted from yourself. You were trying to undo it all.

APPRENTICE
Yeah well, maybe I shouldn’t have.

SIR
Maybe not. It is just interesting to me that this is the moment you say you wish you could undo, that’s all.

APPRENTICE
If you were me, when would you choose?

SIR
I’m not, and I can’t. You know this about the remnants. It does not matter how many times you read them, how many angles you look at the story. It will always play out the same.

APPRENTICE
I know. I’m not— I know I can’t. But if you could choose a moment, what would it be? When could you make it so I…

SIR
I do not think there is a moment in your life that could have happened differently to make it all easier. Too many circumstances depended on things so far outside of your control that I would have to go much further out than that

APPRENTICE
Who, then?

SIR
I thought you said it didn’t matter why the holes in you were there?

APPRENTICE
Well it doesn’t, now, does it? I’m dead and it’s already done. I can’t unpick the knots. Like you said, I can read the stories again and again and pull different pieces out of all of them, but I can’t change them. That’s not what I’m asking. I’m asking when you think it— I’m asking what could have been different.

SIR
A thousand things, perhaps. If George and Gloria’s father had found a new way to channel his anger. If Simeon and Myriad Matzner had insisted on taking you themselves. If the Nazis had never come to power or the Archduke Franz Ferdinand had not been shot. If there had been no East India Company, no Opium Wars. Maybe then.

APPRENTICE
Nobody has talked about those things.

SIR
What?

APPRENTICE
In the remnants we’ve read since I wiped your slate clean. They’ve talked about the war and they’ve talked about power but nobody has got into those specifics. But you know.

SIR
Yes. I do.

APPRENTICE
How? Why?

SIR
I think I have never understood what I am. What you are. What it means that we are made of the same stuff. That all of this is. You, me, the dust, the remnants. Even your pretty statue. We are all the same.

APPRENTICE
So what, then?

SIR
That is something I ought to have paid more mind to. But I couldn’t, before.

APPRENTICE
Why not?

SIR
I was so focussed on making you read that I forgot to listen.

[WHOOSH]

[FOOTSTEPS ECHO. FURNACES BURN]

APPRENTICE
We’re walking.

SIR
Yes.

APPRENTICE
You think it doesn’t matter.

SIR
I do.

APPRENTICE
It’s all different now, can’t you tell?

SIR
Of course.

APPRENTICE
So, to you it’s still the same?

SIR
It is.

APPRENTICE
So why walk? Why move? Why change the scenery?

SIR
Why not?

APPRENTICE
Why not?!

SIR
Exactly.

APPRENTICE
You’re driving me mad. I preferred you when you didn’t know what you were.

SIR
I still don’t, in a way. And you are lying.

APPRENTICE
No.

SIR
You are. You were afraid, before. I remember. You regretted what you’d done to me, even if I scared you before. Even though you knew I had wiped your memories dozens, hundreds, thousands of times. You regretted doing the same.

APPRENTICE
That doesn’t mean I didn’t prefer it.

You do not what revenge.

APPRENTICE
So?

SIR
Stephen Grenville.

APPRENTICE
What about him?

SIR
A killer whose misdeeds you blamed yourself for. A man whose life so far removed from your own you barely knew his name until Elio made you understand who he was. A mere footnote in your life, working his way into the pages of your narrative, hacking out the people you cared for, and some who you did not even know.

APPRENTICE
Yes. Stephen Grenville was a bad man. What does that have to do with regret?

SIR
With regret? Very little. I am not sure he ever did.

APPRENTICE
How could you know that? We haven’t even read his remnant.

SIR
I have read every remnant here that matters. So have you. You already know. Even if you don’t remember.

APPRENTICE
But I don’t remember.

SIR
Do you have to, to understand?

APPRENTICE
I remember so much now. So many pieces. It’s sharp when I think about it, like there are knives in my head. But I can see the shape of it, the outline, without trying. The shape of how long I’ve been here. Stretching on and on, so far into the past or whatever it is that it doesn’t look like there was ever a beginning.

SIR
Of course there was. This is the First and Last Place.

APPRENTICE
What is that supposed to even mean?!

SIR
It means there is a beginning and an end. It means they are the same when you weigh them in your palms.

APPRENTICE
Why did they crumble, before? Why did they disintegrate? Why do some of the remnants barely hold themselves together anymore when others are so clear and detailed I know I’m missing parts when I read them just to try to make them make sense?

SIR
It depends on what you’re looking for.

APPRENTICE
What?

SIR
I don’t know.

APPRENTICE
You’re not a thing that knows.

SIR
Not before, I wasn’t.

APPRENTICE
So what changed?

SIR
Everything. We’re all the same stuff, Apprentice. If I am different, so everything else. So are you.

APPRENTICE
I don’t feel different.

SIR
Liar.

APPRENTICE
So what if I do? Doesn’t mean anything, does it? The remnants can’t change. If things are different it’s just a matter of perspective. Picking different threads out of the same narrative. The story doesn’t change.

SIR
Perhaps not.

APPRENTICE
So maybe it doesn’t matter if you know or if you don’t. If it’s all the same.

SIR
Perhaps. Or perhaps perspective is the thing that matters, here.

APPRENTICE
So, what? The way I get out is by landing on the right way of looking at things?

SIR
Always, always you want to leave. Always.

APPRENTICE
So?

SIR
This place reaches far beyond what we can see or know or understand, I think. Each remnant has its own threads, its own tangling web. I wonder if maybe what is happening here between the two of us is playing out in infinity between each of them. If it’s as good as random that it is you and I, together. It could be anyone, and perhaps it is, and we just can’t see or hear it.

APPRENTICE
So you’re saying they all talk?

SIR
I don’t know if it’s the same that way. I can’t see it, after all. But I wonder if it’s true. If Lucie stands across from her brother José in some part of this place that is beyond us. If Sally and Max sit together upon some rug and wonder why. It could go on and on this way, you know, forever. There is no end or beginning because all of this is both. Perhaps that is why some Remnants are not as whole as you’d like them to be. They are closer to themselves than you are.

APPRENTICE
Closer to…? I don’t know what you’re saying.

SIR
Could it not be anyone?

APPRENTICE
So why isn’t it? Why is it us?

SIR
This I still do not know. It is beyond me. But I know what we see here is made of both of us and we are made of it, but it is not the limit of it, because this place has no limit. We can touch what we can touch. We can see or not see what we see or not see. It reaches on and outward into infinity and folds back into a space so small as to not exist.

APPRENTICE
So none of it matters, then?

SIR
Ha. Of course that would be what you would say. Of course that is how you would take this.

[WHOOSH]

[QUIET]

APPRENTICE
The hole I dug. With the spade that came from nowhere.

SIR
It came from you. Or me. Or both.

APPRENTICE
You’re scaring me.

SIR
Why?

APPRENTICE
I don’t know, but you are.

SIR
It’s because I know.

APPRENTICE
It always drove me mad when you said you didn’t. When you said you couldn’t, that it was so beyond what you could do that it was outside of what you were.

SIR
Why?

APPRENTICE
Because you knew so much more than I did.

SIR
About what?

APPRENTICE
Everything! I call you Sir. You tell me what to do. I wake up and I’m nowhere and you tell me to read and I do as I am told.

SIR
Only for so long.

APPRENTICE
That doesn’t mean anything.

SIR
How can it not?

APPRENTICE
You’re always telling me I want to leave!

SIR
And you are always trying to.

APPRENTICE
When you wiped my memory, what was it you hoped it would do?! Stop me?

SIR
No. I hoped it would make you see. I can’t. I never could. Or perhaps. Perhaps there was a time when it was possible but I need you to read for me because it is not now. The remnants are so different in my hands. You notice things I can’t, or won’t, or don’t, or didn’t.

APPRENTICE
So you just. You kept resetting me in the hopes I’d, what, land on the perfect way to look at things to make you understand?

SIR
I think so. I think that’s what I need. I need you whole. I would build you up from nothing. I have done it before. Many times. I have found every piece of you that’s here and pieced you back together, iota by iota. I have touched every part of you. You are a thing I have made as much as you are yourself.

APPRENTICE
And you think I made you too?

SIR
Yes. I do think that. But sometimes I wonder… Who is reading who?

APPRENTICE
What do you mean?

SIR
We are all the same stuff, Apprentice. This place is us and we are it, and it is remnants, and remnants are for reading. You are spine without a book, a towering pile of torn out pages, so many of them blank. And I am a the veil I was torn from as much as I am its ragged edge and the scrap I have become. We are remnants, Apprentice. And if that is so, who is reading who?

APPRENTICE
But why would that matter?

SIR
I don’t know.

APPRENTICE
Couldn’t it be both?

SIR
How? You take the remnant and you read it.

APPRENTICE
Yeah, but when I read them, so often they’re about me. Even if they’re not. I’ve thought about it so many times it’s stupid to count them, but I’ve wondered why it feels like that. Like. Maybe the remnants are the most important parts of a life, and it seems that some of the pieces I see are built that way, you know? That these are the things they’d want me to see. I think about Adelaide’s leather gloves and how they are the thing I saw her as even though they were given to her by someone who hurt her, and I think about what you said to me after, that sometimes that is the way things are, that it’s not the best or most treasured thing, it- it’s what shapes you. But did they shape her, the gloves? She killed the man who’d groomed her and made her his pet. She killed him and her hands were bare, then. So why not the carving knife she sank into his neck? Why not a chess piece from a board she treasured? Why the gloves?

SIR
You are saying this like it is an answer, but it is only questions.

APPRENTICE
She didn’t connect with me directly. She is removed from me by threads, our lives never touched. She didn’t see me. But when I saw her, what I saw was the gloves.

SIR
And what?

APPRENTICE
Maybe it’s as much about what I see than it is what’s really there.

SIR
Maybe.

APPRENTICE
You knew that already?

SIR
I’ve told you before. You shape this place, when you look at it. It changes as you see it.

APPRENTICE
No it—

[WHOOSH]

[WHIRRING, TICKING, CLICKING. FOOTSTEPS]

APPRENTICE
It changes by itself! It just did! It moved and shifted under our feet!

SIR
The dust shifts. It always does. It’s the same dust, just rearranged.

APPRENTICE
I’m not picking up each piece of it and moving it all around to suit me!

SIR
Not deliberately, and not to suit. You see. It changes.

APPRENTICE
Only it doesn’t!

SIR
The way it looks to you does.

APPRENTICE
We’re going around in circles.

SIR
Aren’t we always?

[THE APPRENTICE STOPS WALKING.]

APPRENTICE
The pit. The hole I threw things into.

SIR
The one you dug.

APPRENTICE
No, not this one, I didn’t.

SIR
Which of the others came about because you shovelled it, and which sprang into place because you would have? You dug this pit, same as the others.

APPRENTICE
No, I didn’t.

SIR
Where did the shovel come from?

APPRENTICE
What— fuck.

[THE SHOVEL CLATTERS TO THE GROUND]

APPRENTICE
None of this makes any sense!

SIR
Does it have to?

APPRENTICE
Yes! It does!

SIR
Why?

APPRENTICE
I want to understand.

SIR
Don’t you already?

APPRENTICE
No! For god’s— no. I don’t. I really don’t.

SIR
You want to leave.

APPRENTICE
And I can’t.

SIR
I’m not sure that’s true.

APPRENTICE
I— what?! You said there’s no door, there’s no— what? You’re saying there’s a way out of here?

SIR
Not the way you think.

APPRENTICE
Then how?! Tell me!

SIR
I don’t know that. I can’t see.

APPRENTICE
You never can.

SIR
Not anymore.

[WHOOSH]
[END]