Dead Brother, Will You Walk Through the Fire With Me?

a play in one act by Jonny Bolduc

This play is dedicated to the memory of Joshua Richard Bolduc, who died on February 20th,
2008.

Characters:
(In order of appearance)

JOSH: A deceased character who died as a teenager. Presented as an adult in his late 20’s, early
30’s.

JONNY: Cousin/brother of JOSH. Male in his late 20’s, early 30’s.

MEMORY JOSH: Identical to Josh. Plays out Josh’s sequence.

MOM: Adult woman. Voice calls from OS.

LUKE: JOSH’s teenage friend. Can be played by an adult or be the same actor as MEMORY
JOSH.

PALLBEARERS (2): Chorus members in the pallbearer scene.

 SCENE 1:

Opens on two chairs, split center, each facing the opposite direction, backs to each other.. A
moment of silence. JOSH and JONNY enter from opposite sides. JOSH is dressed in grey, and
Jonny in red. JOSH is dead. JONNY is alive. If using lights, JOSH is washed in a light gray and
JONNY washed in a soft red. They both head straight to the chairs, not making eye contact, and
sit.
JOSH:
Before you ask, yes, I am dead. You have lived in a world without me for 15 years. I meet you in
a dream.
JONNY:
15 years. Jesus, we’ve had a lot of these dream meetings, haven’t we?

JOSH:
Yeah.
JONNY:
You’d think I’d be a little better with the abstractions, the logic. I’d be able to communicate a
little clearer. But it’s been so long, and things are still so…muddy.
JOSH:
Dreams are all I have. Dreams and memory. And I prefer dreams, because when you remember
me, it’s like a sketch where, every so often, a line is erased. A thick, heavy fog that sets in and
obscures me bit by bit, year by year.
JONNY:
Nods.
Dreams are better. I agree.
JOSH:
I wish you could follow me. When this play ends, I’ll be gone. I don’t know if I’m ready for
that.
JONNY:
I’d give anything. I’d trade places to have you here, sipping coffee with me.

JOSH:
I know.
JONNY:
We can’t.

JOSH:
No. And I wouldn’t want that for you.

JONNY:
I know.
 JOSH:
But maybe…just for a moment. A deal. I’ll teach you how to walk through a dream, if you let
me remember what it is like to walk barefoot in the sand.
JONNY:
Yes. Absolutely.
JOSH:
I will teach you how to breathe without breath if you let me take a deep draw of air.
JONNY:
Rapturously. Yes. Yes. I will, I’d do anything--

A siren wails. JOSH hastily clears the stage. Jonny rises, moves down center.

I’m almost 30.

JOSH enters, in black, waiting in the wings, barely visible from the audience’s sightline.

You died when I was 14. And still, this path doesn’t seem real.
It seems like a trick of the mind, a fabricated reality. I still can’t believe there’s no room for you
to make mistakes, no room to grow-up, no place in this trajectory for you to be anything at all.
JOSH:
From the wings. I am built from the ragged house of memory.
JONNY:
Everywhere I go, I can almost hear you. I wish I could stop, but
I walk this cursed place, Cadence rises, almost in a rhythm, building to a frantic pitch looking
for you. Every bump at night, every pattern noticed is a sign of your presence. I am not the one
who is dead but I commune with you as I ask this, as I say these words I ask

“Where are you? Do you need help?"

JONNY exits. JOSH steps forward.

JOSH:
Slowly, as if pained to pull this memory from the void. I can’t tell you that, my friend. I can’t tell
you where I am, where I’m going. I can only tell you where I was.

JOSH is watching his own memory play in front of him. LUKE, a shadowy figure dressed in
black, runs down the aisles of the audience, towards the front of the stage, followed by JOSH’s
memory of himself, in black, hood up, holding a camcorder.

I’m chasing Luke through the skatepark, holding a camcorder I bought at Goodwill for eight
dollars. I’m shaking, my hands are sweating, It's hard to keep the footage stable.

As JOSH narrates, the characters play out the action, LUKE falling in front of Dead Josh.
Luke tries to hit a kick flip but bails before he lands, missing the concrete, rolling onto the
grass. I run towards him, and he’s lying on his back, rigid and silent, pretending to be dead. I
stand over him, and Zoom the camcorder in on his face, his eyes still closed. He opens them at
once, and, howling with laughter, raises his left leg, pretending to kick me in the balls.

Except he accidentally uses too much force, and actually kicks me in the nards, that ache you
can feel everywhere in your stomach and teeth.

MEMORY JOSH is collapsed on the ground, next to Luke, both rolling around, in near hysterics.
Dead JOSH stands over them, gazing for a moment. DEAD JOSH laughs, starting with a
sputtered, awkward sound, growing real, hearty. The sound of his own voices surprises him at
first, but the laughter grows. After a few moments, it dies again. JOSH and LUKE rise. LUKE
runs back up into the audience and out the door.

Today is June 27th, 2007. I’m 14 years old. On February 20th, 2008, at 5:02 p.m, I will die. But
on this early summer morning, in Old Orchard Beach, Maine, the tourists are pouring in from
Quebec and filling up the beach and buying fudge and french fries and punching seagulls. I am
in the infancy of my hopes and dreams.

MEMORY JOSH reenters, wearing a ripped up Ramones or Sex Pistols shirt. He stands in front
of DEAD JOSH, frozen like a snapshot in time. MEMORY JOSH circles around him, perusing
like he is at a museum.

I want to be a filmmaker. I want to start a show like Jackass. The world is still a path, wide open.
The limits are unknowable, every possibility is open. After February 20th, there will not be a
tomorrow, but today there is one and it is full and bright.

Maybe, tonight, my friends and I could cannonball into the pool, deep into the twilight water, the
sticky hot humidity still permeating through the early darkness.

LUKE runs across the stage, whirling his shirt above his head.

LUKE:
CANNON BALL!

MEMORY JOSH unfreezes, laughs, and exits, chasing Luke, leaving Josh alone. Josh can
almost feel his body. He discovers he does, in fact, have hair. Pull down hood. He hasn’t felt his
hair in 15 years.

And in sleep, no nightmares of death. No idea that even in those clear moments, time marched
steadily towards the murky pinpoint, a date carved into the near future where life diverged from
me.
MEMORY JOSH re-enters in red.

Skin ripped open by a knife, my own blood spilled in the hallway between my room and the
bathroom.

MEMORY JOSH crawls to the center of the stage and collapses as JOSH watches. LUKE
reenters, running across the stage, laughing, again.

Now, there is no prophecy, except for the closed circle of time.

Memory Josh rises. He takes off his red bandana and hands it to JOSH.
No idea that death is so close, lips of carrion breathing down my neck.

MEMORY JOSH hands the red bandana to JOSH and runs offstage, laughing like a teenager.,
If I knew, even the cicadas in their summer song would have sang some grim fortelling; there
would have been panic. Tonight, there is no panic. just a 14 year old boy with his friends, in the
summer, living. I could never know that my murder would be so unfair, so horribly absolute.

JOSH, slowly and deliberately, sinks to his knees.

Violence fell upon me. The featherlike weight of the blade slicing my body, slicing skin,
spilling blood. and I guess it is better thatI did not know that the last moment was truly my last
until life finally drained from me. Time cursed me, but knowledge did not. That afternoon, I
lived fully, laughing, rolling in the grass. Ignorant to the emptiness of a future without me, a
future dulled down into in a single sentence,

‘I’m dead.”

He fastens the red bandana to his head or shirt. JONNY enters, comes to Josh’s side, and
extends a hand as if to help pull him up.

JOSH:
Suddenly fierce.
You can’t touch me, dumbass. I’m dead.

JONNY:
Shit. I’m sorry. I got excited. It’s like you’re here with me again.

JOSH:
Fuck you. I’m not. I haven’t been here for a long fucking time.

You created this. All of it. I’ve been dead for 15 years. After [gesturing to the audience] this, I’ll
still be dead. You’re alive. You have moments still where you can feel the breeze of the sea
against your face, where you can eat a fried dough at the boardwalk, where you can have a job, a
child, a wife, a friend. Fuck you.
 JONNY: Incredulously.

Jesus, Josh. I’m not the one who killed you, man. It’s not my fault--
JOSH:
I don’t mean it like that, dumbass. You wrote this. You brought me here. Have you thought about
what happens when it’s over? What happens when the last person leaves and gets in their car and
empty the trash and the light goes out?

JONNY:
Of course, but come on Josh. I did this for you.
JOSH:

Almost spitting with anger. BULLSHIT. BULLSHIT. You did this for yourself. Alive, and what
to show for it? This selfish grief is not for me; it’s so you have an excuse to remain stagnant.
Frozen in place. You are attached to this narrative like it’s a chain wrapped around your leg.
And brother, you keep
SINKING.

JOSH rises from his knees as JONNY sinks to his. JOSH circles like a vulture. If you’ve been
thinking about me this whole time, if this really is altruism, tell me something.

JONNY:
Almost inaudibly. Please, don’t.

JOSH:
Like a knife.

My voice. What does it sound like?

JONNY:
Rocking.

No, no, no--

JOSH:
You forgot. Fuck you. You don’t even remember what I sound like.

JONNY:
I do, I do--

JOSH:
Yelling, an outburst.
YOU DON’T EVEN REMEMBER WHAT I SOUND LIKE. JOSH leaves JONNY a blubbering
mess for an uncomfortable amount of time. JONNY eventually rises from his knees, and sits.

JONNY:

A grief counselor told me that in the wild, when elephants die, when the grief lashes up against
their huge bodies they get close to each other, as close as they can, and they swarm together,
and they do not leave each other alone. They pull close and they try to protect themselves from
the grief and the predators that feast on the vulnerable. And I don’t know why she told me that.
It did not make me feel any better. The elephants were better at grief than my own family.

Singsong, like a street preacher.

When Josh died we were screaming and we were numb and we were caving in on ourselves and
if i were an elephant my family would have huddled close up let that grief wash over us,
shielding each other from the storm breaking us apart, protecting each other from the
communal crumbling but we were humans and we were screaming at the empty gods inside of
us draining out and you should know that in my sleep I am in the bedroom where josh died and I
am in the bedroom where josh died and I am the tearing of the skin and I am the violence of a
murder and when I am wake sometimes I am the hollowed out shell in my mind I am howling at
the door left out in the cold with this grief and I am inching closer trying to swarm and I am
inching closer trying to swarm to shield from harm and I am schooling like silver fish and I am a
murmuration of starlings and I am swerving in and out of sight and pulsating in the sky and you
should know and you should know--

END OF SCENE.
 SCENE 2.

JONNY:

For a while, right after, I had to remind myself all the time. I’d wake up, have a normal thought,
like ‘winter vacation is about to end;’ or ‘I need to finish my English project,’ always tailed,
stalked by the nagging thought ‘oh yeah. Josh is dead.’

I'm almost 30. You died when I was 14. Still, this path doesn’t seem real. It seems like a trick of
the mind, a fabricated reality. I still can’t believe there’s no room for you to make mistakes, no
room to grow-up, no place in this trajectory for you to be anything at all.

And I know I’m almost 30, and I wish I could stop, but I walk this cursed place, looking for
you. every bump at night, every pattern noticed is a sign of your presence. I am not the one
who is dead but I commune with you as I write this, as I type these words [begins to type]. I ask

“Where are you? Do you need help?"

JOSH suddenly emerges behind him.

JOSH:
“In the whisper, the low hum of the world. I tell you that I am not at peace I am still a
slave to time I am still stuck throwing myself at these closed doors, staring down all of these
paths, paths decapitated with my death and I am afraid to tread.
JONNY:
And we stick to each other like a curse. I itch with the memories of you alive, my soul gnaws
at where you have gone, and I pound with terror when I think about your death. The terror has
made a nest in my stomach and a vacation home in my brain. it consumes me in ways
I cannot recognize.

I do not know how to help you.

JOSH:

Is trying to get JONNY’s attention, but JONNY does not notice.

Jesus Christ, dude, do anything. Live.

JONNY:
Your spirit is made alive with anger at what you will never be, and as I commune with you I feel
that anger, that righteous hatred of violence, that righteous thrashing against the injustice of
your death. I learned you were dead from the television, the slow crawl of "breaking news" at
the bottom of the screen. Isn't it remarkable how one small moment marks the gap between
before and after, one small glance up from a video game, one moment of comprehension marks
where this cursed trajectory sprung up from the darkness after laying dormant.
February 20th, 2008. I was playing Pirates of the Caribbean Online, half watching American
Idol with my mom. Dad had left the house after Gramps called to say your home in Old
Orchard Beach was on fire. It's just a fire, I thought. He's fine. He got out. He ran through
the smoke, jumped over the flames. The magical thinking, supposing you survived. Earlier that
day, I was rehearsing for our high school’s production of High School Musical, and in the dingy
band room with a broken fluorescent light sputtering flashes of pale yellow, me and some kid
were talking about souls, and how they weighed 21 grams. I had never studied the scientific
method. I was in the science class for kids that sucked at science. I didn’t know that the study
where Duncan MacDougal measured the weight of a guy drop 21 grams as he died was bullshit.

Around the time you were bleeding out in the carpeted hallway, I was spouting some
pseudo-scientific bullshit about the weight of a soul. And I hope that I’m wrong. I hope that your
soul really lifted out of your body, up above the rafters of your home, I hope that you looked at
the tops of the houses of your suburban cul-de-sac, I hope that you felt free, unchained
from the terror of your final moments.

I hope one day, when my soul lifts up into the air, that I can unhook the dog chain around my
neck and be free.

When American Idol was over and the news flash scrawled the bottom of the screen,

"THREE DEAD IN OLD ORCHARD BEACH HOUSE FIRE."

And as my mom and I read the words, as our world ripped open and the sky cracked
and the raw horror of your death first thrashed up against my body, as I ran into my room
and screamed into a pillow and my mom frantically stood in my doorway, on the phone, trying
to call my dad, anyone, I was thinking, at 14,

OH MY GOD. JOSH WILL NEVER BE MY BEST MAN.

I was thinking;

"YOU STUPID SON OF A BITCH. YOU'RE GOING CRAZY. NO ONE SCREAMS LIKE
THIS. YOU CAN'T STOP SCREAMING. YOU ARE SO PATHETIC. STOP SCREAMING."

And if your soul was free and if the spirit was lifting, I hope you weren't above me,
watching me crumble into myself, watching me topple over, watching the riptide of grief latch
onto my ankles and drag me, for the first time, deep into the black, oily water of oblivion. I
hope you were flying for the first time, I hope you were as free as a starling high in the streams
of sky. I hope you couldn't hear me wail into the emptiness. I hope you were rising like fog
lifted on a summer morning from still, calm water.
Injustice. Not fair. But where does fairness fly In the wake of such destruction? When the body is
empty and the life is gone what is left?

A gnawing itch at the mind, an ulcer of grief?

I mold the itch into a hunger and craft the hunger into an untouchable pain,
so deep that I could never reach it, a bruise at the core of my being that festers
and becomes infected.

A pain of my own doing, A pain I know well. A pain I understand. A pain I take comfort in.

JOSH:
Dude, I didn’t die so I could watch you resist life. You have moments still where you can feel
the breeze of the sea against your face, where you can eat a fried dough at the boardwalk, where
you can have a job, a child, a wife, a friend.

There’s a part of you that died with me, sure. but this selfish grief is not for me; it’s so you have
an excuse to remain stagnant. There is a wide, open world. There are still stars dotting the black
oil sky. You have dreams. You have planes to catch, places to go-- to Bethlehem, to Paris, to
Spain. London, Beachy Head. Halifax, Portland, Bangor. Dreams are all that are left for me.
Abstractions. I am someone who is almost here, I am someone who is all the way gone. You
are attached to this narrative like a chain wrapped around your leg. And you keep
SINKING.

JONNY:

We see each other. We know what is not and never will be. Can we walk towards some peace?
Can we move from the burning potential, the wasteland of your death and move towards a future
unbruised and full? Dead brother, will you walk with me into the fire and emerge cleansed?

Jonny, suddenly, makes a break for Josh to embrace him.

JOSH:

NO--
A pop. Electrical feedback. Both are sent flying backwards, again, crumpled on the floor.

END OF SCENE.
SCENE 3.

JONNY:

Projected images of Josh as a child play. JONNY is sitting, looking at a photo album.
JOSH is looking at the images.

Here’s a memory.

At the lake. I am a child. You [gesturing to Josh] are with me. We are digging a deep hole of
sand, with a series of small sandcastles as wall. The mouth of the moat opens to let lapping lake
water flow inside. The moat is big enough to sit in.

JOSH:
I told you we needed a monster.
Josh moves to Jonny, reading over his shoulder.

JONNY:
We ran up to the dock, and cast out a red Spiderman fishing pole, a tiny chunk of worm at the
edge of the lily pads. We had a small perch on the line.

JOSH:
I was scared of it. I ran over to my dad, and he unhooked it for us. The ridges and spikes above
the fishes’ spine were wicked sharp, and the last time I tried to unhook one, I nicked my palm
and bled.

JONNY:
We named him Geoffrey. For a few hours, he was the moat monster. I think we let him go.

JOSH:
Those careless summer days, long, building. One passing moment to link and make a river,
slowly plodding towards the inevitable. Days will become years, and years will pass until the
last year breaks like dawn, low over the clouds. And the days will tick away and soon
It will be time for me to die.

JONNY:
But in this picture, you’re eight years old. We watched the perch zoom away, back towards the
lily pads, and--

From offstage, a woman calls out.

 MOM:
:
Josh! Jonny! Come over here. It’s time to put more sunscreen on your back!

JOSH:

Turns to the sound of his mother’s voice.

I…I haven’t heard her…since…

JONNY:
Oh my God. It’s her. She’s coming. Josh, she was there that afternoon! We’re going to get to
see--
MOM:
Still offstage.
Honey, your hands smell like dead fish! Go wash them before we eat.
JOSH:
Where is she? Why won’t she come over here?
MOM:
You don’t need half the bag of Doritos on your sandwich! Save some for your cousin.
JONNY:
She’ll come.
JOSH:
Fierce again.
How the fuck do you know that? This isn’t for me. It’s for you. Time stretches out for you,
another 50 years if you stop eating McDonalds every day. All I get..all I have…
MOM:
Josh, wipe your feet off well before you go inside to use the bathroom. A sound of static. Tone is
frantic. JOSH? Is he here? WHERE IS HE? Are we back? Where am..
JOSH:
MOM! MOM! Josh dashes towards the edge of the stage. MOM!
MOM:
JOSH! JOSH!
For a moment, like a ghostly apparition, a woman’s shadow is cast upon the curtain. JOSH
turns, catches a glimpse of it.
JOSH:
That’s it. That’s all I get. After 15 years of nothingness.
JONNY:
I’m so sorry.
JOSH:
Utterly deflated.
Shut the fuck up, Jonny.
END SCENE.
SCENE 4.

JONNY:
It’s a summer day. I’m damp, and the chlorine from the pool has set into my skin and hair,
sticky. I sit down in the grass, grasp a small twig and snap it absentmindedly.

I closed my eyes. The air is hot and heavy. The skin at my hairline feels tight,
and tomorrow, I’ll have a sunburn. I open my eyes. Endless blue. Cicada songs burst out.

JOSH:
Offstage.
“There is no fear at this moment.
you have done nothing wrong.”
JONNY:
Still, I am being chased by some nagging terror.
JOSH:
You could sleep inside of this moment. You could live inside this string of seconds. It would be
fine. It would be good. These moments have a place to nestle and burrow. I can help you
survive. Let me help you. Almost as if he’s going to reach out and place his hands on Jonny’s
shoulder. But he doesn’t.
JONNY:
I don't listen. I open my eyes. There is fear. There is a great sorrow. There is a catalog of sins
and a host of terrors eating at my soul. Beat. February, cold and clear. The days after you died
were all piercing and blue and brutally cold, the cold that sets in fast and cuts through fingers
to the bone. I was in a hot-tub. I floated eyes closed. I felt myself finally dead, imagining what
it was like to be you. I felt…peaceful. Empty. At that moment, I realized that something else
had taken the wheel. The car had been stolen, the train jumped the rails and was barreling
towards some unknown, forever cold place. The real terror was knowing that it could get worse.
That it would get worse.

And since then, I’ve been a passenger, like some empty headed vessel, some backseat driver
barking directions, the unknown, the power of compulsion, the power drawing a moth to a
flame or my 20-year-old self to the bar or my 23-year-old blackout drunk self to a snowbank. I
know what cold is. After I fell through the ice, much later in life, Feb. of 2016, I pulled myself
out of the puncture my body had made in the thin layer of frost above open water, I flopped on
the ice and the fire of cold hit. I flung my boots off, in the water, sopping wet socks stuck to the
ice, peeled as I took some hobbling steps back to land. Leaving my half set up ice fishing traps
beside me, I begged for numbness, begged to not feel the fire eating away at my skin, coughing
and hacking, shambling sideways like a zombie. I begged for numbness, I begged not to feel,
to have the cold just nestle in and become static, background. And a month after Josh’s funeral,
I would have begged to feel anything. A month after Joshua’s funeral, I sat alone in a hot-tub,
the steam protecting me from the freezing 10 degree air. I closed my eyes, floating,
trying to deprive my senses, thinking I could force myself to finally fucking feel
something other than screaming, hoping, praying some rational creature was still inside of me
that could think and analyze and not react like some cornered animal.

And I’m right back to the pit I’ve been stuck in since I was 15 years old. I am schooling like
silverfish and I am a murmuration of starlings and I am swerving
in and out of sight and pulsating in the sky and you should know and you should know--”
JOSH:
I don’t know. I don’t understand any of this. I have my own questions. As if reading from a list.
How deep is the soul? How rooted in the body? Does the soul decay, become less? Can it gain,
become more? Will it travel? Can my soul find yours through the static terror of each day?
Will it travel with us as we fade into sickness? Will the soul wrap around us? Sink us like a
chain tied to an ankle, or lift us like wings sprouting from the spirit?

END SCENE
 SCENE 5

JOSH:

What was my funeral like?

JONNY:

Your wake stretched on for three days. Everyday, shoulder to shoulder, hundreds of human
bodies crammed into the crowded funeral home. Three red coffins, and a stretch of overflowing
flowers that seemed a mile long.

Enough condolence and prayer cards to fill a swimming pool. Every inch of the funeral home
was carpeted in white. Everything seemed stiflingly formal. The service, the bowls of mints,
the strategically placed tissues. Tissues everywhere, on every tabletop or counter. The long table
in the basement of the funeral home was piled with lasagna and pastries. I treated the basement
like a refuge.

When the crumbling was too much, when the sadness felt so thick it was
impossible to breathe, I would retreat to the empty room with the
cannolis and the pasta and the bread and the cheese and I would eat. Hidden, like a sanctuary,
seeking safety. Addresses Josh.

Josh, if I am in the business of shedding my soul, distilling the pain into a play,
I cannot lie. The salve is food. The sweet healing of heaping plates of cheese and bread. I
sought to sup from the full cup. Survival hinged on the food, beyond the normal ritual of
neighbors bringing over comfort zitis.

And now, as I clench my fists against the steering wheel, trying to fight the urge to pull into Taco
Bell, fighting the urge to let the beef fall into my beard and let the lettuce pile at my feet, I
know that it comes down to survival. I cannot break. These patterns, these chains. Isn’t it
pathetic?

JOSH:
No, it’s not. It’s something that needs to change, something that you need to work on, but it’s not
pathetic.

JONNY:
You’re lying. It’s pathetic. I’m such a gross, fat piece of shit.

JOSH:
LET ME SPEAK-
 JONNY:
Back to your funeral. We had all collectively gone insane. Everyone was floundering, grasping
out into the air for answers and coming back with only a fistful of grief and a burning ember of
sadness stoked and undying as recompense. An entire family gone. No one had answers, and
we were all too tired to look for them.

Josh, kicking my ass in Super Smash Brothers, shooting me with a Nerf gun,
rapid fire, as I dove across the living room to take shelter behind a couch,

Josh, one day, you are going to be stabbed a dozen times and left to die in a burning house and
your family is going to die with you and you know who’s going to do it? Your half-brother, role
model, the man who has a tattoo of your name in flowing script across his stomach.

Is that your story?

Is that all there is to be pulled from the rubble?

JOSH:
No. There’s more.

There has to be more.

END SCENE
SCENE 6

FIVE pallbearers, including LUKE and JONNY. Chairs close together center, set in rows to
resemble the interior of a car. If costuming allows, all should be wearing tuxedos.

LUKE AND JONNY:

(In tandem.)
Five young pallbearers,
red-eyed and sniffling,
trying to stifle tears,
shoulder to shoulder,
crammed in a limo
following behind the hearse.

JONNY AND PALLBEARER 1:

Again, tandem.
The interstate leading
over the river,
a gentle dusting
of mid morning snow;
the crawling motorcade
buffered by cops
with flashing blue lights.

JONNY:

You are dead (in the coffin, burned flesh) your mom and dad have a coffin, too. As Jonny hits
the names, pallbearers stand. Uncle Chris, Aunt Carol, and he even killed the dog.

They sit.

JONNY AND PALLBEARER 2:

Looking out over the bridge,
into the Fore River,
freezing February,
Casco Bay placid,
blue ocean
lapping where the river
flattened out and met the sea
 JONNY:

In the front seat of the hearse. I want to take a nap and meet you again, in a dream. But napping
seems impossible. the limo driver makes some joke and we answer with a tired laugh.

ALL:
A pitiful attempt at laughter. They all gaze miserably out the windows.

JONNY:
I haven’t laughed in days, maybe weeks—all emotions seem forced, squeezing some reaction,
perfunctory and automated. In a way, they are. The only way to survive is to engage autopilot.
I fully hand myself over to the ebb and flow. Ebb, meaning a sadness, something like a tide,
a riptide, powerful, insurmountable. I scrape along with the current, bloated and drowning, too
tired to fight, dragged along the bottom, washing up again later on some shore, wondering
where I am.

Time moves relentlessly, and in the space between seconds I feel like I am surfacing, swimming
up through the dark water, and gasping to life in some unknown place.

Squeezed next to one of Josh’s friends—Luke, I think— I notice the sleeves of my tuxedo jacket
are too short, my jacket is too tight. I've gained weight. The attendant at the tux fitting said

WOMAN’S VOICE: O.S

Kid, you have to stop eating so many cheeseburgers.

JONNY:
I cross my arms to give him space. The shoulders of the jacket threaten to rip out, but
reluctantly hold together. The heated leather seats make my ass sweaty. My legs are sore,
knees scrunched up against the glove box. I'm shivering. I have to piss. I wonder how much
longer we have to drive, and at once, I remember what is waiting for us when we arrive in
South Portland.
ALL:
Stand. Recite, in unison.
a dead best friend, a fucking hearse and a casket with his burned body
All sit.
JONNY:
And, at once, I want the ride to last forever. I close my eyes. We drive
slowly over the roads tinged pale gray with salt and ice, a work truck ahead, flashing yellow,
treating the roads with sand, sniffling again, all of us, trying to be silent. Mind wandering from
the habitual jabbing—
ALL:
Standing again, delivering to the audience like a needle jab.
oh my fucking god you’re dead
JONNY:
To feeling the sting of my eyes. I wonder how red they are, if my eyes are as red as the rest. I
didn’t want to cry when others were not crying, or cry too much, or cry too little. Even in the
throes of grief, teenagers are still self conscious. At one point or another during this, we had all
cried pretty hard, sometimes together, sometimes alone, sometimes embarrassed, always pulled
out by the fucking riptide. And there, on that late Feb. mid morning, the sad caravan
meandering towards the cemetery, the numbness set in like a
deep bone splitting cold.

END SCENE
 SCENE 7

JOSH enters.

JOSH:
When I died it was February vacation. I woke up. the cul-de-sac circle
was coated in snow and I saw the flakes gently swept up by the piercing wind,
the absolute blue of the morning burning a cold fire in the sky. I rolled out of bed and mom and
dad were at the shop down on the main tourist drag. And even though the town was empty,
hollowed out at the end of the summer, tourists gone, leaving the townies and when the police
chief spoke at the smoldering, charred husk of my house. The next morning, to a rabble of
reporters with tv cameras

he said

“the family was not on our radar at all they owned a business, well liked in the community.”

Amazing how so much can change from morning to morning, life slides into the narrow
boundaries of death, and at 8:45 a.m., I am hovering at the edge of living. I don’t know
that I am going to die. I don't have much to do today; mom and dad are at work
I let Spike, my dog, a Puggle, out of his kennel, and he yawns, and zooms towards the front door.
I throw on some pants, and a jacket, and I put a leash on Spike to take him outside.

I can’t even comprehend that Spike died too. I can’t even imagine, can’t even begin to imagine
a world that moves past my life, that time could keep flowing without me.

JONNY enters. JOSH addresses JONNY.

Dude, have you seen my dog?

JONNY shakes his head. JOSH exits.

JONNY:
The funeral service was at a catholic church in Scarborough. The hearses and the motorcade
lined up in the circular drive in front of the doors. The sad caravan. Brother, I carried you. Or
what was left of you, and you weren’t heavy. There wasn’t much left. All life carved away by a
knife. The family sat up in the front. The school bused the freshman class in, and the church
was crowded, bursting like a clown car. Silent, spare the cutting of staggered sobs. A little
girl, maybe three, was separated from her parents, and stood in the aisle, frantically looking for
them.

I remember her red dress in a sea of black and white. And how quickly someone stepped in,
scooped her up, and pulled her close.
How quickly the crying of the little one stopped. After the shattering of the self, when I was
thrashing in the bed, howling, I do not remember calming down. But eventually, the first
wave receded, and the numbness began. When I sat down to write this play, Josh
I thought I’d try to imagine your life and the years that were stolen from you; I thought I would
imagine you as a 29 year old I thought I could predict what job you’d have, who you would love,
what kind of jokes you could make, what kind of video games you would play but

Jesus.

Christ.

I DON’T EVEN REMEMBER WHAT YOU SOUND LIKE.

Static. Electrical buzz.

Oh my God.

I DON’T EVEN REMEMBER WHAT YOU SOUND LIKE.

Electrical popping. Frantic movement, like a caught animal. Buzzing.

Gradually, the storm calms.

JOSH re-enters. He sits in the audience for this monologue, and reacts like he is listening to a
story.

Nothing has changed, but nothing is the same. It’s like that with the days, see. Each day is
technically different, but they seem static, dead, floating in the water, pale, drained of color
like a belly up fish. I know I’m late, but these nights are breathless and these days slide by and
I wish I could stop. I wish I could start. I wish I could wake up. I wish I could pull over,
But I have to keep driving. I wish that I could wrap this story up, I wish I could untangle these
threads, I wish that I could neatly bring peace to the spirits that swirl above every moment. I
wish you rest, Joshua Richard Bolduc. I wish for you what I feel is impossible for myself.

Dead brother, we have walked far. I would do anything. I would do anything to have you here.
I would trade places. I would do anything. Every atom that belonged to you, dear friend, is gone.
I hope your soul did not leak out of your body like water in a cracked glass. I hope your soul
was not scared. I hope to never again believe in a soul. A dead young man, taken too soon from
the lap of his mother. Except, in this song, the mother dies with him. The mother’s flesh is
pierced. There is no rescue. She dies next to the corpse of the child, And later, the father lies in
blood next to them. That is the grim foretelling. That is the ultimate truth we move towards like
moths to a flame. There is no more youth or age for you. There is nothing past February 20th,
2008, when my dad got a call from our grandpa that “something was going on at Chris’ house.”
He left. I think it was after dinner sometime, around 7:30 p.m. It was February vacation, halfway
through. A Wednesday night. I was in a production of High School Musical, and had spent the
day rehearsing. I remember that day with extreme confidence; it was the barrier between my life
before, and my life after. Rehearsal started at ten in the morning. We were getting close to the
show date, so we were doing full runs of the production. I was the narrator. I remember nothing
of the actual show, other than it had a lot of flashy, boy-band choreography.

I’ve always been a bit out of sync with the world. If a group of people starts swaying to the
music in one direction, I go the other way. Not on purpose. I just don’t sync up. I bump into stuff.
I miss high-fives. I almost never anticipate if someone wants a fist-bump, high five, or to be left
the fuck alone. And I was no different back then. I was awkward as hell. And I didn’t make
things easy for myself. I started off the year by getting the star of the football team suspended.

I ratted on him, told the principle that he cut a slit in the back seat of the bus with a hunting
knife. I was a marked man. Well, not a man. A stupid kid. A chubby John Lennon wannabe. I
had his ill-fitting oval glasses, face overrun with acne, long hair with bangs that were
completely straight, and a old, ratty, Yellow Submarine tie-die shirt and leather Led Zeppelin
leather jacket that I never took off, even in the sweaty summer. I had no means of defending
myself. And I had a quantifiable price on my head. The particular group
that lived in the neighborhood were vicious.

The ringleader, Kevin. Rumor had it, he had been expelled from three schools for fighting and
didn’t give a shit. He carried a knife.

Kevin was the terror of Pine Hill. He was built like a boxer, short, stocky, with wild eyes deep
set into his head. Although I never saw him in action, I heard plenty of rumors about his
viciousness. My friends said he crashed a backyard football, showing up with his minions,
demanding to play. After about five minutes, Kevin transformed the peaceful game
into a slaughter; taking people out at the knees, throwing people into the dirt, tossing elbows,
spiking the football into faces. The carnage only ended after Kevin bored with his domination,
drew a pocket knife, said something vaguely threatening, and ripped away into the late
summer evening on his dirt-bike.

My friends told me this story at the bus stop on the first day of school. From a safe distance,
I watched Kevin spit a glob of chewing tobacco into a clear gatorade bottle and stash it in his
backpack. The most dangerous of the group knew they had no future. They were flunking
anyway; school was just a place to go. Many of the hicks who wanted me to
die are working as mechanics, or pouring concrete, or are contractors, and making way more
money than me. And one was the star of the football team. He was the biggest bad-ass of them
all; not mean, like the ringleader who punched out kids and had a knife.
He had a quiet confidence, a look that said “if I couldn’t run a five minute mile,
and if I wasn’t the best athlete this poverty stricken school district has seen since the 80’s, I’d
kick your ass.” He had a tether. He wanted to stay on the football team, stay in trouble,
and not go to jail. The others didn’t really give a fuck about that.

Near the start of the school year, the interrogations were almost daily; we’d be kept on the bus
for 10, 15, 20 minutes. It started off as a questioning and ended with a stare-down. The
principal got involved. The bus driver made a last ditch plea, asking us to tell him who did it. I
didn’t know who did it. But I knew that those hicks, who I despised, were chewing. So I wrote
a note, left it in the seat.Sure enough, the next day, a bunch of them were suspended en-masse.

And the star of the football team was caught in the sting.

I was immediately fucked. Everyone knew it was me in a matter of minutes. Kevin’s gang
started headhunting. My mom took logistic action; our friends who lived in the cul-de-sac took
shifts, driving by the bus-stop every time I got off, whisking me away like a politician under the
threat of being punched or hit in the face by an egg.

My mom took shift one day; my other friend's grandma had another, my dad came home early
from work. But one day, getting off the bus, I was alone. Crossing the street, three of them
came up to me, shoved me. I was about three seconds away from getting the shit knocked out of
me. At the last possible second, my dad pulled up, threw open the passenger's side door. I
jumped in, and he took me home. Eventually, the bullies stopped caring. I hid in the front of the
bus. I was silent for six months.

They moved on, and I didn't die. The point? I was used to hiding, waiting things out,
waiting for the smoke to clear. And a few months later, When Josh died,
I tried to do the same thing. Maybe if I slept through the days, I'd wake up and it would be
over. Life would reset and we'd be on a dock, fishing poles resting, talking about our favorite
jokes
from Jackass. So I slept. And slept.

Kept having dreams. But our family still felt like it was crumbling.

A few time a month after that, my Grandpa and step grandma would take us out to dinner
at our local Italian restaurant where Josh and I ate many times before, flicking crumbs at each-
other, kicking each other under the table.

These times, the hours would melt away as we'd talk about court dates, caskets, visitations.

We'd roll in, get a special treatment, free apps, free drinks, like we were part of the mob.
We’d camp out at the table for hours. I could see in the waitstaff's face
that they were bummed out just by listening.

It’s funny how quickly trauma can be recited; the syntax, the cadence of how you tell your story
to others. It’s not an easy thing to say. At first, when I was younger, it was because I didn’t
want to burden anyone with how fucked up I was, and how fucked up I felt.

Now, it’s more a part of me, something that’s latched itself onto my personhood
to become the focal point of my existence… forever.

And that’s when the thoughts that would eventually send me to a psych-ward started.
That if Matt could kill his family, I could kill mine. If Ted Bundy killed those people,
so could I. One day, it would happen; I’d blank out and wake up surrounded by the
corpses of the people I loved the most. I stayed up at night crying. I wanted to die before I did
something terrible. The riptide had dragged me out so far out to sea that I forgot who I really
was.

There’s a name for those thoughts. OCD, the kind where you obsess over a thought;
murdering your family. The anxiety builds. I couldn’t do that? Right? No, never—so you start
googling, seeing what other killers were like when they were 14—and maybe they were normal,
maybe they weren’t, and the anxiety dims a little bit but the fire is not out and you rip your
mind apart searching for the one answer that will tell you whether or not you’re
as fucked up as you think.

I’ve spent so much time ripping down my mind, trying to see how awful I am,
trying to find proof that I could do what happened to me, that I will do what happened to me—
failing to see the utter absurdity, the utter desperation of these thoughts, propelled entirely by
the gnawing panic, the premature realization of the fucking ugliness of the world.

I prepare these thoughts to be analyzed. A ritual science of fear and guilt. I transgressed, once.
I became someone I have grown to hate. I will tear apart my mind in search of condemnation;
I will hold myself to this fire and I will burn my soul clean.

And I’m not sure where I’m ready to go, if I’m ready to start trying to swim ashore,
if I’m ready to try and let myself be saved. I think so. When Feb. grips me, and
I’m alone with the thoughts that have devoured me, I’m not sure if I can escape the sounds
of the sirens constantly blaring in my head.

The waters are dark, deep, and cold. I think I’m ready to start rising up,
filling myself up with the life I’ve drained from my soul, finally becoming a person again.
Because, really, what’s the alternative? What’s the correction?

The only correction for a 350 pound man, alone, in a car, screaming as he clutches the steering
wheel, ready to be thrown headlong into oblivion like a sack of potatoes is the hospital.
A ward. Three days of comatose, no slipping, green socks. And after? The work.

Here is the narrative. I am handing myself over to the ruthless nights and the days full up with
panic. If I can ride above the current of lifting air like a starling, I will. If I must feed on the
dregs like a suckerfish, I will. My only option is to remain. The mantra.

REMAIN.

There is no gilded throne, no exit ticket. There is no shortcut. There is either tearing
into the meat of life like an animal, crazed with wild thoughts carried off by gusts, spat out by
the weak, coughing ego, hacking with sickness, the self that is so frail and so intent on
breaking. “Imagine,” I say to myself, “a long gaze outwards, at these mountains, and winds and
woods. Imagine a look out towards the people who, with frailness and kindness, save others
from collapsing while they, themselves, tremble.

Imagine something simple, something pure. But the most complicated trick the self can pull, like
a tiger jumping through a burning hoop, is to acknowledge that these two truths can exist at once.

The first: the self can be crumbling. Maybe it should die. Not the body, not the spirit, but the
self.
The thing that looks like a stranger. Maybe I should raze and build again.

The second: there is a world, and it is dying. It is beautiful. It means everything.

There is a door you closed, and you can rise up from your sickbed and creak it open. You can
cover your eyes from the harsh sunlight and take trembling first steps. You can rise. You can rise.
You can rise. You can remain.

JOSH starts the applause, wild cheering. He stands.

.
JONNY:
Please stop, Josh. It’s not over. I need to know where to find you when this play is finished.

JOSH walks up through the audience. JONNY follows. It is slow, like a funeral procession.

If the myths are true; I would wait for you in infinity. I imagine death as if swept by a great
river, souls polished clean of memory like cool, smooth onyx. I will thrash against the numbing
waters of Lethe, hop on some ephemeral bank, jumping from surface to surface as rock and
stone and the body of our world slides into nothingness. I would stand, wavering, holding on
against the great river and I would watch for you from the bank and I would run to you as your
body crossed the boundary into death and we would fold into each other and we would wade
together, hand in hand, bathed in the fog of forgetting.
The above sequence should end with Josh stage center, and Jonny at either the top of the house
or far enough away to create a sizable difference between them.

Last night, a copper moon lit up the sky as I drove a winding backroad home. Last night, I
chugged a seltzer water, And I bleached before I went to bed. A dreamless sleep. I woke up with
a headache, a single thought Ringing in my head like a mantra. The question that returns to the
doorstep like a once lost cat covered in fleas.

What is left?

There was not much left of your body. Just ash where flesh had been. Closed casket for the
entire family. No faces. No peace.

What is left? Can I find your atoms somewhere, floating through the universe? Can I speak with
you in a dream, tell you how much I miss you, how sorry I am it ended with terror and a struggle
and a brother killing a brother?

If you exist, somewhere,

JONNY walks slowly to JOSH.

I will find a path, rambling through the cosmic lanes, over the eternal brooks gurgling with light
and flame, across the trestles and the alabaster, shining underbrush. I will wander through the
deep forest of stars, I will climb the dusted cliffs of galaxies, I will gaze upon horizon – the far
off flickering gates of heaven will dance in the sky. From here, heaven is only a flight away, and
I have built these paper wings to burn. There is no going back, once I land, smoldering –
I will feel the pain of Prometheus, the pain of a man searching among the gods. I have spent
years searching for you, friend. I have spent my life foraging for the trace of your steps,
tracking the small shadows of your footprints through the silent trails of eternity,
years spent stumbling through the forests of everything, lost in the dense thickets of reality,
drowning in the expanding circles of comprehension, clouded by the tears of your departure and
stung by the twisting pain of permanence. I will find that path, or blaze it myself. I am a mortal
doing my best, meandering under the the dome of gods, looking for the smile in your soul
searching for the solace in your embrace. Seeking the last whisper you sang into the folds of
wind.
JOSH and JONNY meet.
You are not a memory, you are not a fistful of dust. And if you are, I will find you, I will scoop
you up, put you in a jar, and take you home.

END SCENE.
SCENE 8:

JOSH:

Two chairs set, mirroring scene one. Enters, Jonny behind him. Tone is soft, slow, gentle. They
are in the middle of a conversation.

I know the pain. I know you attach your pain to me. But it’s not my fault.

JOSH sits. JONNY sits.

I’m dead. You made me a myth. Made me an ‘angel,’ and you think I’ve seen the kingdom of
heaven or whatever. You come to me in the night with your hands shaking, your breathing rapid
and shallow, in the throws of an anxiety attack, and you expect me to be able to heal you, to be
able to answer for my soul leaving, like I chose this for myself.

Jonny, I was a kid when I died. I was having my first awkward kisses, I was skateboarding
around town, smoking weed out of an apple. My best self never grew up. Who do you think I
am? What do you think I am? Where do you think I am?

JONNY has his head in his hands, despondent.

It’s ok. I’m sorry for being angry at you. I’m proud of you, but I’m scared. I’m scared about
where you’re going, and I’m scared about where I went.

JOSH looks off into the distance, like something is waiting for him.

But I guess that doesn’t matter now.

The loop closed. We can’t open it back up. We can’t unspool the threads.

I guess this is it. JOSH tries to touch JONNY’s shoulders, but is thrown backwards as if he
touched a live wire. JOSH sighs deeply, gathers himself, and sits in the chair, mirroring the
opening of the show.

I meet you in a dream. It is a place beyond time, beyond death.

JONNY:
Are you--
 JOSH:
Gently interrupting. Before you ask, yes, I am dead. You have lived in a world without me for
15 years. 15 years of searching for me in the silence, 15 years of expecting violence to leak out
into each day. 15 years of looking for knives when you should be looking for life. Half your life
has been tethered to the knowledge that life could end in a flash and that no one is ever safe from
some terrible end, from dying alone, scared, in pain, bleeding out on the carpet. Half your life
has been chained to that February night, chained to the daze of grief, chained to a brother. A
brother lost.

And in this dream, I come to you with bolt cutters.

JOSH rises. JONNY rises. They meet each other, standing almost nose to nose.

Alternating lines.

JOSH:
UNHINGE,

JONNY:

RISE UP

JOSH:
NO TETHERS,

JONNY:
NO CHAINS,

TOGETHER:
NO KEEPING.

JOSH:
RISE UP,

JONNY:
NO MORE

JOSH:
SAD AND DISTANT,

JONNY:
NO MORE RAISING
THE DEAD
EVERY MORNING.

JOSH:
UNHINGE AND RISE UP, BROTHER.

TOGETHER:
DEAD BROTHER, WILL YOU MEET ME IN THIS FIRE?

They embrace. A popping sound, like electrical equipment blowing. BLACKOUT.

29