And a dirty choco bar––Hershey please.

(Slides back down under the newspapers.)

Not too sweet and textured like...mud.

(Makes the noises of a small tortured animal.)

TECHNIQUE:

Are you okay?

FEAR (Pushing back the papers and crying out) :

ME!? What about you! You breeze in & out, looking for

yard action, or sour machines. Who knows where you

go! But you never bring back any money. Cash, you

know green stuff!

TECHNIQUE (defiantly) :

Why work? I’d rather make wishing a policy, or try

theater. Workers are unappreciated––it’s a chronic

condition.

FEAR (grudgingly) :

Hmmhmh.

TECHNIQUE (defensively) :

Hey! Just last month I had a job, right? But my boss

was so full of shame he embarrassed me. He had no-

self. So all my satisfactions drained away after working

for him––I felt diminished, though he didn’t intend

that. He was so sensitive to insinuation that I became

very subdued––finally I didn’t show up for work.

(incredulously.)

Then he fired me! Now...it’s just a slow period. I’m

paused.

(She puts on her leather jacket.)

Get used to it, baby.

FEAR(slides back under her newspapers) :

Hmmhmh.

TECHNIQUE(snatches the newspapers and crumples them) :

Listen––I’m the thing I’ll make my fortune off of. Off of

this.

(Points at her head.)

I just have to find my socket. ‘Cause I’m an engine, a

plane-jane. And I’ll be gone, when I’m gone.

(TECHNIQUE grabs her notebook & strides out towards

the audience; FEAR runs after her; stops short. TECHNIQUE sits at the

edge of the stage as though it were the steps to the apartment. She

flips urgently through her notebook until she locates a blank page.)

TECHNIQUE:

(To audience, intensely and intimately)

FEAR is an exaggerated escapade. Her thunder thighs

open, close. In a ‘between’ moment, FEAR crosses the

threshold.

(TECHNIQUE scribbles a note in the notebook.)

FEAR is always increasing. Living in the gaps, every

tear in the social fabric is her domicile.

(Behind TECHNIQUE, in the apartment, FEAR slowly pulls off her

sweater.)

She draws the huge life and the vicious impulse

together. FEAR loses her head, so that her murders

cannot be explained. At the moment of death,

unexpected pleasures come to her, as ghosts slip into

her body with rushing movements.

(TECHNIQUE hastily scribbles another note.)

FEAR splits the daughter from the mother, into new

life. Each relation destroyed makes another new life, so

the daughter, FEAR, has many lives.

(FEAR slips behind a curtain.)

FEAR’s part is her Sex. She runs down the hall after

what appears and vanishes, enclosures without their

promises...But she always stops and comes back, for

FEAR never leaves the house.

(TECHNIQUE walks back into the apartment, carrying her note-

book and a paper bag. She looks briefly for FEAR, shrugs, then sits

in her chair, takes a hard boiled egg out of the bag and begins to

read one of her newspapers.)

FEAR:

(Peeking out from behind the curtain.)

Hello. May I come in? I’ve been irradiated. I need

enclosures as a third tongue.

TECHNIQUE (peeling her egg) :

Is that it?

(Gives her a chocolate bar and cigarettes from the paper bag and

resumes reading.)

Come in or not.

(FEAR breaks the chocolate bar into tiny pieces and eats one. She

opens her Dunhills, smokes one luxuriously without lighting it.

When she notices she’s being ignored, she tosses the cigarette at

TECHNIQUE.)

FEAR:

I can entertain you with stories from a childhood with

brothers and snakes.

TECHNIQUE:

Hmmhmh.

(Resumes reading.)

FEAR (approaching TECHNIQUE) :

My brother Clancy was on the phone with one of his

pet snakes wound round his neck.

(Snatches TECHNIQUE’s newspaper and rolls it up.)

It bit him––under his arm.

(Shoves the rolled up newspaper under her arm)

Shrieking, he lay down with both arms straight back,

while my other brother and I tried to get the snake out.

(She backs to the couch and collapses.)

We pulled and stretched but it only ground its teeth

deeper and deeper into Clancy’s underarm flesh. The

snake would not let go.

(FEAR sighs.)

TECHNIQUE (deep in thought, scribbling in her notebook) :

You can be ethnic, and I’ll be demented, elemental..

FEAR:

But I’m not ethnic! Clancy had a baby iguana which

grew to be six feet long. It slept in his bed.

TECHNIQUE:

(Looks up, annoyed.)

Stop seeping.

FEAR (defiantly) :

I like sky writing. Your editing capabilities don’t

interest me.

TECHNIQUE (snaps her notebook shut and advances

menacingly) :

Understand, it is ominous to derive a past. Your

interest in negotiating the explicit darkens recognition

into flattery.

FEAR (backs off) :

My slogan in white cloud!