Danger Brooks

3/30/00

How the Universe Works

HAKUIN

Good evening. My name is Dan Brooks, and this is how I fall in love.

KID YELLOW enters and stands center.

This is a bat. You might notice that he looks nothing like a bat, but rather more like an actor whom I consistently refer to as a bat in blatant contravention of obvious physical evidence. However, you would be interested to know that to a bat, you look nothing like a person, but rather more like a bat who is consistently referred to as a person in blatant contravention of obvious physical evidence. This is because bats are blind, so they just assume that everyone else looks like a bat, too.

This is a sandwich. I think after your embarassing little bat misconception I don’t need to explain to you why that is. So the bat is blind, and therefore has to navigate by sonar. What he does is, he produces a constant stream of sound and then waits for that sound to bounce off some solid object that he can interact with.

KID YELLOW

When I was younger – like, this morning – I realized I didn’t do any illegal stuff when I was a kid. You know, like vandalism and shoplifting and stuff. They seal your record when you’re eighteen, see. They close it up, and no district attorney or greasy juvenile hall official can look at what you did. And I thought about what a waste it was, my clean record getting wiped clean. I thought about all the fistfights I pleaded my way out of, the comic books I left on the rack. Punisher vs. Woverine # 4 – it was the last one in the series and I bought all of the one’s before that – my two favorite superheroes – and I never read that one, never found out how it ended, because I didn’t have the buck thirty-five. Wouldn’t I be a better person if I had been in those fights? I can’t shake the feeling that my life would make more sense if I knew whether Punisher was really tougher than Wolverine. And I walked by this house, and it had these huge picture windows. Really big, and the sun was going down and it was at that angle where you can’t see through the glass because it’s all bright orange, and there were these big, flat rocks along the road, and all of a sudden I wanted to pick up one of those rocks and through it through the picture window and see what was behind it. And I looked around and no one else was on the road. A sealed record, you know? So I -

DANISH

You have something in your eyebrow.

DANISH brushes KID YELLOW’s eyebrow with her thumb.

HAKUIN

Having located the sandwich, the bat becomes intrigued. He knows that the sandwich is something to be desired, but he hasn’t the slightest idea what to do with it. So he begins to experiment.

KID YELLOW

So how are you doing?

DANISH

I’m all right. How are you?

KID YELLOW

Pretty good. And yourself?

DANISH

You asked me that already.

HAKUIN

Ah! The bat has encountered a problem. Being a simpler animal, he immediately engages his panic response, and deeply ingrained natural instincts take over.

KID YELLOW

Hey, do you want to hear a joke? This duck walks into a bar, and he goes up to the bartended and says, "Hey, you got any beans?" The bartender says, "No. Get out of here," and the duck leaves. So the next day the duck walks into the bar again, and he goes up to the bartender and says, "Hey, you got any beans?" And the bartender –

KID YELLOW

How do you do that?

DANISH

Showmanship.

KID YELLOW and DANISH are still. KID YELLOW faints.

HAKUIN

The bat falls out of the sky and hits the ground. He is absolutely, completely dead.

Bat, sandwich, causality. This is how the universe works.

Blackout.