Codex Orange

Codex Orange

Dramatis Personae

Lillian Farmworth—school board chair

Rhea Smith—a school board member

Jon Tiosook—a school board member

Helmand Dostune—high school guidance counselor

Dr James Bourban—district 27 superintendent

Mary-Alice Springer—high school principal

Lou Vestral—high school music teacher

Erin Kryzinski—high school literature teacher

Petra Green—school nurse

Sheriff Bohumil Slucha—Golden Valley Police Department

Duputy Phillip Porter—GVPD

Officer Sharon Simmons—GVPD

Officer Timothy Racine—GVPD

Officer Claude van Erdal—GVPD

Officer Gustavo Marrot—GVPD

Detective Soledad Bream--GVPD

Cole Barnadine—a local drunk

Terry Onaiwah—his girlfriend

Father Faye—a priest

Antony Serentino—GV boys’ basketball coach

Beth King—alumnus GV player

Gavin Tate—alumnus GV player

Billy Urskine—current GV player

Becky Tillinger—current GV player

Russel Jonsrud—student

Tracy Quamme—student

Setting: Golden Valley, Minnesota; February, 2010

Ii: Monday evening, after a run

Iii: the following morning, sizing up the school

Iiii: at a park in Golden Valley, under leafless trees

Iiv: Wednesday evening, at the high school library

IIi: Thursday morning at the GVPD precinct

IIii: that evening at the school gym

IIiii: next morning, in AP English class

IIiv: same day, at the GVPD precinct

IIIi: that evening, School Board meeting at GVPD

IIIii: that night, the high school roof

IIIiii: the following morning, after mass

IIIiv: later that afternoon, at Wesley Park

IVi: the next morning, at the school’s common area

IVii: that afternoon, in SPRINGER’S office

IViii: later that evening, atop the school

IViv: the following morning at school

Vi: immediately after, into the common area

Vii: soonafter, with regular rounds of explosions

Viii: at the same time, in SPRINGER’S office

Viv: the following evening, after Mass

Ii: Monday evening. A school gymnasium with un-pulled bleachers on one side and a curtained stage area on the other; walls are decked in old bunting and banners of conference and regional accolades. Eight adults merge together, slapping hands to cap the final game of pick-up. Lights high above illuminate the scene, windows equally as high are black with the night sky to the north and the second-floor corridor to the south. Nothing else fills the space.

TIOSOOK:  Finally—a mercy kill! I’m getting too old for this—who called the win-by-two?

SERENTINO:  No one has to call it, dummy; your team lamely threw away the lead.

TIOSOOK:  —and then went dumpster-diving to get it back. We’d be better off to lose by one, some seven ties and twenty minutes ago.

MARROT:  See, that’s you school guys’ problem, mullin’ over the math—

SERENTINO:  As if the fuzz did anything to help us tilt the balance? The countless shots you took beyond the arc and how many actually landed? I thought you were a sharp-shooter, Gus! Next week bring your rifle site!

MARROT:  Guaranteed, baby! Reminds me of something; (sniffs out) not sure I’m supposed to say…

SERENTINO:  Say what?

MARROT:  Not authorized as yet. At least I think not—z’right, Jon?

TIOSOOK:  What am I supposed to do with it? It’s not my call, really,… But might as well, seeing that it’s a closed circle at this point.

DOSTUNE:  (leaning in) Shhh—wait a second ‘til Gavin and Beth leave…; you never know with new alums….

SERENTINO:  (contrastingly) Hey! Both of you, good run tonight. Don’t shower together!

KING:  (far off) You neither. Next week we’re on?

SERENTINO:  Next week! See you…

MARROT:  Hmmm. Next week may be called off.

SERENTINO: What? What are you talking about?

MARROT: Just that—maybe no next week. Not me sayin’, mind you—

SERENTINO:  Cut the cryptic, Gus: what’s going on?

MARROT:  Nothing cryptic, really, just a little hard to couch.

SERENTINO:  Hey, I’ve got practices to run and games Tuesday and Friday—you need to fill me in.

DOSTUNE: It’s a good point—I’ve been struggling with,… well, how all this might be received—

SERENTINO:  All what?

MARROT:  All the shooting and screaming and silence that will be going on—

TIOSOOK:  Hold your horses, Gustavo, say it better—

SERENTINO:  Say it straight—you goons planning on doin’ something?

MARROT:  A terrorism simulation.

SERENTINO:  Get outta here—

MARROT:  Like Beslan, full blown. ’Cept it’d be actors and us, a camera crew to take it all in, a school board review—the whole measure.

SERENTINO:  What? And we were supposed to, to know about this—when?

TIOSOOK:  Well, that was the tricky point. Monday is Presidents’ Day, kind of inconspicuous and we’ve always had a ‘spring cleaning’ crew come in to wax floors and such—which they’ll still do, only in the middle of the night, when the simulation is declared over.

DOSTUNE: What worries me isn’t actually mopping up the fake blood…

MARROT:  We’re going to have to run the whole gamut of a facility lock-down: when to circle, when to stall, then crash in, size up, shoot—

DOSTUNE: Negotiate?

MARROT:  —how to negotiate through silence and noise. The whole gamut.

TIOSOOK:  The community will know what’s going on, but not too early—it’s decidedly not going to come to a debate—and the school campus will be cordoned off, off-limits completely. At least, I think that’s been established.

SERENTINO:  So, to be clear: you were eventually, I mean by-the-by, going to deign to tell… me, for instance, to stay clear of my own gym on Presidents’ Day so as to let this glorified paintball run amok?

TIOSOOK: Eventually, yeah. We were going to fill you in. Like, well, we just did!

SERENTINO:  You sons of bitches—this’s gonna be a joke that turns on yourselves.

DOSTUNE:  No, no—there’s no joke or no turning—it’s nothing like that. It’s just a sensitive situation with all the annoying innuendo, y’know?

MARROT: Annoying? ‘Al Qaida raids middle America’—how inconvenient! But that’s not your stock simulation. It’s more likely going to be some kinda Columbine in most folks’ memories.

SERENTINO: So which is it? Which one are you simulating?

TIOSOOK: Well, that’s why we didn’t want to debate it. The fact is we can’t be reduced to the two prototypes. Terrorism defies any easy model.

SERENTINO:  Easy? No one said anything about ‘easy’.  In fact, I’ll be goddamned if any of this is half as thought-out as you think.

TIOSOOK:  C’mon, Tony, don’t get testy over this. It’s practical, it’s theoretical—but not the stuff of knee-jerk debate. It’ll be a tempest in a teapot, at best. It won’t involve students or teachers or anybody but actors and cops. It will simply be a troubleshooting exercise.

SERENTINO:  Ok, I’ll say in my best untestiest voice: it will be whatever you don’t want it to be. It will define itself as an inchoate beast, lacking purpose and lapping up misgivings. You’re saying there wouldn’t be a place for debate, when time will tell and an arbitrary debate starts to unfold in colors you hadn’t contracted or comic-booked for. The stir of the night will not be the simulated fright of actors. The blood won’t be fake that courses through each cordon-buster, body and brain. You see, even if it goes without a hitch, the unannounced plan, when known, won’t ever be the same.

TIOSOOK: No, I s’pose not—now that you rhapsodized it. And you, good servant of the law, exposed it.

MARROT: And you allowed me to. No harm done: I brought it up only for the greater good.

SERENTINO:  (harrumphing) …the greater good…

TIOSOOK:  Good riddance—please keep it under your hat for a day or two, ’til we figure out a disclosure method.

SERENTINO:  What hat? I’ll need to borrow goofy Gus’s hexagon and practice my DOOM.

DOSTUNE: Always the scout! But that video game is long on the outs—a cyber-generation ago... Unfortunately, Tony, there’s a whole lot worse if you want to see a widening gyre—

SERENTINO: I want to see more of us putting this orange thing through a bottomless bushel basket, next week and again and again and again and again…

Iii: The following morning, several members of the Golden Valley Police Department mill around the receptionist desk of the school. The first bell has rung and most students are in their classrooms, although some stragglers go to their lockers, cast glances toward the officers and shuffle toward the closed doors of their classrooms. When corridors are completely clear, the officers walk slowly, loosely in a group, jotting down particulars on clipboards. The pantomime starts and stops serendipitously, with random looks into trophy cases and pencil taps to the casings of fire alarms. The mumble of voices eventually defers to the principal’s attempt to gather them to a central spot, marked by the school’s coat of arms under their feet. None of them look that far down; instead, heads swivel mostly to the skylights and the scrawl of their clipboards. 

SPRINGER:  And this is the junction between the academic wings and the ‘common area’—

PORTER:  ‘Common’ meaning what, exactly?

SPRINGER: Well, ‘common’. Not sure what else that can mean—

BOURBAN:  Kids would be prone to hang out here. We also might have informal gatherings and such.

PORTER:  But the big stuff happens in the gym…

BOURBAN:  Naturally. From the theater platform—that’s right, isn’t it, Mary?

SPRINGER: (nodding, mumbling) Alice… Mary-Alice, so that these visitors know…

PORTER:  Okay, so we’d want to know the various ways from this common area to the theater—any secret passageways, Alice, in the basement, maybe?

SPRINGER:  No—Mary-Alice, together-like.

BOURBAN:  Didn’t we already send you blueprints of the facility?

PORTER: Apologies. Left them at the station. But I do recall something about…

SPRINGER: Yes, we do have a basement—generally locked.

BOURBAN:  From the inside, though? I thought they were lock-release…

SPRINGER: Well, why don’t we go check…

PORTER: We’ll do that, all in good time. For now, pace us through a typical school day. Let’s say kids are in the academic… ah… wings and they want to go, um, common.  Or, wait, let’s pretend it’s a, what d’ya call it—assembly, or a basketball game, and kids are going from this common…

SPRINGER:  If it’s a basketball game, we lock the doors to the common area and the academic wings.

BOURBAN:  Mind you, they’re release-lock, from the inside—

SPRINGER:  A school assembly, however, is a very different occasion—day from night, literally. Which begs the question: what exactly is the temporal premise of this simulation?

BOURBAN:  Mary, we’ve been over this time and again: we’re not here to debate the premise. The occasion could be anything, from a single lunatic to an orchestrated campaign—

MARROT:  Belsan, full blown.

SPRINGER:  That’s not what I meant—I get the purpose, but what exactly is the premise you want? A middle-of-day event, or something in the evening? When kids are coming, or going, spread out in classrooms or assembled in a large place?

PORTER:  Yes. All of the above.

SIMMONS:  With due respect, sir, Mary-Alice is asking a pertinent question. What are we imagining for our roles this Wednesday?

PORTER:  We’re imagining being caught off-guard. So, whatever happens, it’s ‘situation fluid’—and that means now, tomorrow, this Monday—every day thereafter.

BOURBAN:  Well put. That’s the premise and the purpose.

SIMMONS:  Here’s my idea, for sake of efficiency: one of us keeps an eye out for the small spaces—washrooms, classrooms, nooks and crannies—another sizes up the common areas—

PORTER: Just one common area, I thought—

SIMMONS:  Not if we include the gym, the cafeteria, the foyer...

MARROT: I’ll take them. I know the gym inside and out.

PORTER:  The point is we all gotta know what we don’t know. Everybody has to be ‘small space’ and ‘big space’, familiar and unfamiliar. Gus, you want gym duty ’cause you imagine this will be some kinda Beslan? Sharon, you want classrooms ’cause you got good grades in school? Hell, I almost dropped out—was frankly looking for any chance to get high—so should I take one of these, what did’ya call ’em, ‘crannies’?

SIMMONS:  Yeah, I guess that’s what I’m saying.

SPRINGER:  Listen, the bell is going to ring soon—I think we need to proceed with the tour and get relatively out-of-sight when kids pass to their next classes—

BOURBAN: They shouldn’t be affected by authorities checking out the school.

SPRINGER:  And our talking Beslan, lunatics, and crannies to get high?

PORTER: Now, Mary, that’s not fair.

SPRINGER: (sighing) I think I’ll leave you to sort that out. Dr Jim, I trust you know the ins and outs and how each lock releases.

BOURBAN: No room for sarcasm, Mary-Alice. This is supposed to be your chance to lead the school through a code-red scenario; there’s nothing more important than what we’re doing right now.

SPRINGER: I don’t disagree, but the bell will ring and students will see us in muddle-mode, not the picture of confidence in code-red.

MARROT: Maybe it’s ‘code orange’ anyway.

PORTER: I always wanted to keep it ‘code x’—neither black or white or any other set color… Fact is, most of these situations wouldn’t care if the code were anticipated or not. Code green is just a trip-wire away from code-red..,

SPRINGER:  I don’t understand what or why we’re discussing in the middle of the common area as students are about to tumble our way…

BOURBAN:  I can’t understand why you can’t understand.

Iiii: At a park in Golden Valley, under leafless trees. Though the sun is high, a women shuffles in with a sleeping bag over her shoulder and spreads it across a bench as a makeshift bed. Behind her, downstage, a man stops at a message-board pillar and reads what appears to be fine print. With some effort he pulls off a plank of posters—glued one over another—and holds it as a heavy, open newspaper.

ONAIWAH:  C’mon, Cole, come and make me warm.

BARNADINE: The sun will do that by itself. Anyway, it’s noon, fer God’s sakes—why don’t you get up finally and get some exercise?

ONAIWAH:  Come in here with me and exercise you’self.

BARNADINE:  There was a time, no foolin’, I was damn decent a spor’sman.  Look here at what’s coming to the Target Center—the Harlem Globetrowers…

ONAIWAH: What kind of trousers?

BARNADINE:  I said Globetrowchers—trow..trollers—shit, you know what I mean.

ONAIWAH:  No, what d’ya mean?

BARNADINE:  They’re trick ball-players that travel the globe—there: Globetrav’lers, no, trow… damn!—doesn’t matter.

ONAIWAH: Well just read it, if you’re not too pissed.

BARNADINE: ‘Trotters’. Of course. ‘the One and Only’—that’s a sly cover for ‘the Original’!

ONAIWAH:  Wha’s so special about ’em?

BARNADINE: They beat every team they face, if all for show.  I saw them in Chicago at the ol’ Amphitheater, big barn in the middle of the city. Back before everything turned into ‘Target Centers’—

ONAIWAH: They got Target in Chicago?

BARNADINE: Something more like a Delta Center or United Airlines—something in honor of ‘His Airness’.  I los’ interest before all that racket.

ONAIWAH: No, they got Target stores in Chicago?

BARNADINE: Well who gives a damn? Target’s everywhere by now, I think.

ONAIWAH: Tell me why you left again. Come snuggle in, ’least lean agains’ my legs.

BARNADINE:  Well, I wasn’t no Clyde Marrow run outta town, but I wore out my welcome too many places. Hard to disappear anywhere, even midst a million peoples. I worked Steinmetz High School on the near north side for a couple years—

ONAIWAH: Janitor.

BARNADINE: yeah, but more to the point I sold pot. Lots, and the place became a bit’uva mecca.

ONAIWAH: but you didn’t get rich.

BARNADINE: you can’t get rich like that—gotta go harder core, then you get killed more likely than get rich. Anyway, I didn’t care for that kinda life. I wanted to coach, y’know, or just even assist some team in city league. But I’m a janitor, right? Who’s that? Can’t know his X’s and O’s or how to lace up shoes, let alone jump to the moon. I got involved in a midnight league, pick-up all night long if kids showed up. Paid me nothin’ but a little room to sleep in, right next to the locker room. Drug trade there was worse than Steinmetz, and, y’know, reputation follows a guy and so I was kicked out, no questions about it. I’d been through a lot’a temp jobs and hoped to get hired back at a book warehouse west of the city, where I played three-on-three every lunch hour and coffee break. Andre Battle, Derek Mays, Nikita Walker—good guys, y’know, who played at Simeon and King and Loyola Academy, some to go on to Division I, but most sputtering out, like me. So then there’s nowhere to go but stackin’ boxes o’ books, and selling dope to make a dent, and… fas’ forward to Golden Valley…

ONAIWAH: Wha’s tha song we like, ‘Erase an’ Rewind’?

BARNADINE: But there’s nothin’ to go back to. May’s well go see the frickin’ Globetrotters game at Target—

ONAIWAH:  O, can we? I’d like us to see a sure win…

BARNADINE: all scripted out—not a game at all. More like a shopping trip, I guess, if you got the cash… Target gets its customers one way or ’nother.

The two settle in to a slumber, with the plank of posters serving more a sun shield than a blanket. Two police officers come by.

VAN ERDAL:  What’dya say, Tim, now or next go’ round?

RACINE: Looks like they just settled in for a long winter’s nap—hard to argue against hibernation instinct, huh?

VAN ERDAL: Not hard at all. Especially since they’re three months late for bear behavior. Let’s rouse ‘em.

RACINE:  Claude, the Dorothy Day’s not available ’til 4; that’s a bunch of hours to push these two from bench to bench, this park to that.

VAN ERDAL:  ’s their problem more than mine. Simple law: no loitering. Nothing I need to interpret, really.

RACINE: Okay, but what if you had to negotiate? We’re supposed to go through that simulation next week, y’know, at the school…

VAN ERDAL: With a couple o’ drunks? That would be easy. I’d let this billy club here do the talking. ‘Never talk to a drunk’, my grandpa used to say. Nothing you can do to squeeze out sobriety.

RACINE: Well that’s what we might encounter: the equivalent of drunks. Terrorists whipped up by their own witches’ brew, not looking to unvex the situation with methods of reason, much less with clear-and-simple adherence to rules, and much much less with billy clubs.

VAN ERDAL: Listen, I’ll let Monday unfold how it will: it’s training, for heaven sakes. Today is already ‘trained’—cops on the beat, rousing drunks, ticketing cars, seeing and being seen. Shouldn’t second-guess what we’re here to do.

RACINE:  You’re Rambo, man, when it’s easy pickins’. I think you’ll shit your pants on Monday, the way they’re talking up the ‘realism’.

VAN ERDAL: Pardon my boredom, boy scout—Hey! You two, get up! Rise and shine and give God your story, story—just don’t tell me, and don’t let me see you lounging on these benches again—they’re tax-payer property.

BARNADINE:  Huh? Whe—(coughs) Where we at now?

RACINE: Sir, you’re in Wesley Park. Do you have a residence you can return to for a more appropriate sleep?

BARNADINE:  We’re here with the Target Center show—

ONAIWAH: We’re on the team that always get beat…

VAN ERDAL:  Don’t tempt me with that invite!

ONAIWAH: Maybe I seys what’s true—you ain’t a judge and you can’t push us around like that. Rodney King—we all saw that police brutality.

VAN ERDAL: You got ten seconds to move your asses! Or maybe you want a couple nights in jail—I wouldn’t blame ya—but what you can’t do is loiter.

BARNADINE: Come on, girl, I got an idea anyway.

VAN ERDAL: What’re thinking of doing?

BARNADINE: None of you damned business—we’re leavin’ your ape-shit city furniture and you can’t do nothin’ more. Freedom o’ speech an’ assembly, and freedom to keep you out o’ ours.

RACINE: Sir, the Dorothy Day Center, down this road a couple miles, opens at 4, if you need their services.

ONAIWAH: And Target is open righ’ now—we gonna go an get beat.

VAN ERDAL: Whatever, just not on my beat, if you catch my drift.

BARNADINE:  I smell your pig methane…

RACINE: It’s enough.

BARNADINE:  More than enough. (Turning to Onaiwah) Girl, I done dreamed up an idea!

Iiv: Wednesday evening, at the high school library, a meeting of the school board in a conspicuously small space between reference shelves and computer terminals.  Coats are still on, as the building is somewhat chilly. Lights are off except directly above. In the shadows are an array of books on display, student art, a mezzanine balcony and study carrels.

FARMWORTH:  Appreciate your attendance here tonight—extraordinary meetings may happen at the discretion of any board member, and—

TIOSOOK:  Point of semantics, Lillian: extraordinary or ‘extemporaneous’?

SMITH: Is there a difference?

TIOSOOK:  Sure—worlds, really. I mean with ‘extraordinary’ we’d still need to publish its taking place, its minutes—all in accordance with the by-laws: did you mean for that to happen tonight?

FARMWORTH:  No. Indeed this is an extraordinary extemporaneous meeting—really no reason to Roberts Rules it.

DOSTUNE:  Sorry, I don’t understand that reference—the ex’s I get, but who is Robert?

BOURBAN:  Before you Westernized, Helmand—a sometimes fuddy protocol that requires recognition from the chair, motions and seconds and other ‘Rules of Order’.

FARMWORTH:  Well, I wouldn’t say ‘fuddy’ or ‘duddy’ or anything disparaging—it keeps contentious issues civil.

SPRINGER: And sometimes ushers in a civil war.

BOURBAN: I wouldn’t say protocol does that any more than chaos theory.

SPRINGER: Energy can be channeled any which way, toward civility or corruption; entropy is your chaos theory, and those molecules just go their own way—they don’t look to clash.

DOSTUNE: Okay, I get it. In honor of my remaining friends in Afghanistan, let’s hope for civil entropy.

TIOSOOK: The question remains, though: are we meeting in an official capacity? You called some of us, not all, and drew poor Helmand away from his…

DOSTUNE: Harem?

TIOSOOK: Don’t get me in trouble! I assume you have one lady friend that you’re courting…

DOSTUNE: One, and counting..

SMITH: Gentlemen! Can we get to business? The courted of us have kids at home being babysat by the television.

FARMWORTH:  Indeed, I want this to be quick, candid, off-the-record, troubleshooting—

SPRINGER: How apropos. This will be a great opportunity to shoot our troubles away.

BOURBAN: I think we’re painting devils on a process that remains a training event, and that by the GVPD. It’s not really our business—not in our interest, I’d even suggest—to trouble-shoot anything. Monday comes, the actors assemble themselves as the police have pre-arranged, they do their thing, videotape it for their internal use, share it for our internal use—maybe an ‘extraordinary meeting’ opens it up to comply with the Public Information Act—

SPRINGER: Maybe WikiLeaks beats us to it…

BOURBAN: Is that a threat? Mary-Alice, whose side are you on here?

SPRINGER: Is that a paraphrase of George W?

FARMWORTH:  Folks, listen. I think, civil or otherwise, these are exactly the questions that we are trying to troubleshoot. And… I’ve been scratching my head since last week… I don’t know exactly how this simulation is supposed to meet the public.

BOURBAN: I don’t think it needs to, exactly.

TIOSOOK: But Jim, the campus cordoned off, dozens of police cars and SWAT personnel, I understand ambulances need to rush to and from—this isn’t something we can hide, on Presidents’ Day or the Fourth of July.

BOURBAN: We’re not hiding anything. We’re following the expressed mandate of the Golden Valley Police Department—that on the advice of Homeland Security—to have them put this event on and clean it all up. We don’t have to answer for anything.

DOSTUNE: But sir, all due respect to that point-of-view—and I assume this is the reason the board asked me to be here tonight—there will invariably be some counseling ramifications, kids painting chimeras, wondering if the hypothetical is more immanent…

SMITH: Yes, that is precisely the concern. And talking it through will definitely be your area of expertise, but in a way, we haven’t talked through anything for ourselves. I mean, this event never came to a vote—arguably, it’s not sanctioned, no matter who holds the guns.

BOURBAN: Again, I think you’re being too provocative—presumptuous, even.

FARMWORTH: Funny. I always hoped, from 5^th grade student council ’til now, for discussions like this.

TIOSOOK:  On the record, or off?

FARMWORTH: Well, that’s just it—no yes or no. It’s like this library. Some meetings I wish the whole place were filled, listeners swinging legs through the balcony railings, speakers sticking enough to the agenda but enough off the cuff to keep it interesting. Maybe someone fetches a book to ‘check the record’ or some words of wisdom—something Lincoln might say about houses divided or angels of our better nature. Lights would be on, passers-by would wonder what’s going on and perhaps muse, nostalgically: the school’s in healthy shape—it wants to be peopled even off-hours. The learning doesn’t end in the classrooms, with some kind of final exam. There’s your extemporaneous, Jon—we have to maneuver as we go, a bit like Star Trek maybe.

SMITH: I think the kids understand The Matrix better…

DOSTUNE: I don’t know what they understand. There’s a scene from Bowling for Columbine where—

BOURBAN:  Oh, please!

FARMWORTH:  No, go on:

DOSTUNE: Well, not to be suggestive here, but… Michael Moore interviews Marilyn Manson

BOURBAN:  (mock-screeching) “I’m not a sl—ave to a g—od that doesn’t exist!”

SPRINGER: Jim, quit it! Helmand, say more.

DOSTUNE: Yeah, that song is in the background, but then there’s a quiet moment, when Moore asks Manson, who was scheduled to do a concert in Denver that spring, what would he say to kids wondering about all that happened at their school. And his response was, ‘I wouldn’t say anything, I’d just listen.’

BOURBAN: Pro-found. Is this a role model of yours?

TIOSOOK: It’s a reality of ours.

FARMWORTH: I feel like adjourning on that note.

SPRINGER: If only. For once I want us to keep going—

FARMWORTH: Of course, I’m being facetious. We haven’t hashed out anything yet.

SMITH: But a purpose to listen. And not just to the sirens on simulation day.

BOURBAN:  Okay, so. Brass tacks: we post on the schoolnet an innocent message that the campus will not be accessible Monday for—keeping it simple—a police-coordinated training exercise. Nothing about its scale or target, nothing even indicating that Tuesday will be any different for the activity that passed. We put the same brief message around the cordon—a firm-but-gentle ‘stay out’—and that’s that. The police will need to watch the cordon—

TIOSOOK:  Shouldn’t our school security do that? They’re all supposed to be present, but what are their responsibilities?

BOURBAN: I’ll find that out. Good point.

SPRINGER: And another thing that we’ll probably need to anticipate is—

Outside the library, but clearly inside the building, a tumbling of what sounds like stacked furniture.

TIOSOOK:  What was that?

FARMWORTH: No one’s supposed to be here, right? Speaking of security?

DOSTUNE:  I’ll check it out. Could be just said security.

BOURBAN:  or a Gremlin.

SMITH: one of us!...

SPRINGER: I was just about to say, at least it’s not one of us…

IIi: Thursday morning in a rather barren room at the GVPD precinct. Sheriff Slucha sits at the front of the conference setting with Detective Bream at his left, pointing out some detail on a chart they have between them. Deputy Porter sits at his right, staring straight ahead, fidgeting with his mug. Officer Racine is directly in front of him in the first row of chairs, essentially doing the same. Officers Marrot and van Erdal enter the room boisterously, followed by Officer Simmons who seems not in on their banter. They all find their seats in the second row.

PORTER: Alright, all’s here who needs to be—let’s get this briefing underway.

MARROT: Wait, just this few? What about—

BREAM: (clearing her throat) A word about role-calls: we know who’s here and who could be, but let’s not get out of order with subjective suggestions.

MARROT: Due respect, Detective, we are objectively few

BREAM: And could be one fewer—

SLUCHA: (clearing his throat) Phil’s right—we’re all here, and with scant time to get prickly. Gus, you’ll give more than ‘due respect’ for these days, I’ll trust…

MARROT: Yes, sir. Completely.

SLUCHA: Someone shut the door please—thanks, Sharon. We’ve got the lock-down to plan as our main agenda, but I gotta say, it’s disconcerting that last night’s call came up empty…

VAN ERDAL: Last night, sir?

BREAM: Not everyone’s aware, Bo.

PORTER: And on my watch, so—with permission, sir?

SLUCHA: Go for it.

PORTER: The high school, which is why we’d scheduled this meeting weeks ago, was apparently visited last night by, well, we don’t know, but also no one who was invited by the school board that had been meeting, unannounced, in the library—

BREAM: They called us, let’s see, at 9:37—Sharon, you took it.

SIMMONS: Yes, they were a bit spooked.

MARROT: They?

SIMMONS: Dr Bourban is the superintendent—it’s his domain—and Lillian Farmsworth was chairing the meeting. Five others, I think.

PORTER: Not four?

SIMMONS: Others? Eight overall? No, seven—we entered as they were wrapping up, anyway.

VAN ERDAL: And what was the 10-83?

PORTER: Nothing elevated to that level—we didn’t ascertain a disturbance, per se—

BREAM: You reported their sense of an intrusion…

PORTER: Affirmative, as in the record. We searched and determined no threat.

MARROT: Camera surveillance?

SLUCHA: is sub-par, and that leads us to where we meant to be today.

VAN ERDAL: Wait, I’m confused. You studied all the camera data at the school that evening?

PORTER: No, not all. But enough to know that their system is, as the sheriff attests, sub-par. We can’t gain much from static, non-strategic, isolated zones. The school board members were skittish—sensed the noises were coming from the ceiling of the corridor outside the library area itself, so ear-witness was sketchy at best.

MARROT: But they thought someone was in?

SIMMONS: They did.

MARROT: And you… also had to believe someone was in?

SIMMONS: What do you want us to say, Gus, that we didn’t catch what we didn’t see or hear?

SLUCHA: It’s enough, and filed appropriately. We’ve actually benefitted from knowledge of the school’s inept security cameras, so the timing couldn’t have been better. We’ll have to rig up our own for Monday’s simulation.

VAN ERDAL: Apparatus which will not stay permanent to the site after Monday?

SLUCHA: What are you suggesting, Claude? The school keep the few cameras we have?

VAN ERDAL: I’m not saying that, but it seems erroneous to take out what we can provide, especially when they’ve called us in on exactly that need.

SLUCHA: Fair enough. We’re scheduled for Monday at the high school. To a far lesser degree, we’re scheduled next month at the nursing home—less cameras there to begin with, less 10-83s, you’d agree?

VAN ERDAL: Of course I’d agree. I just thought the point germane.

BREAM: It is. We’re acting—in two senses of the term—with what we’ve got. So let’s get to the original agenda. Monday morning—Presidents’ Day, of course—we show up to work naïve to the call we’ll get at around 10am.

MARROT: Should it be so specific?

BREAM: I said ‘about’—

MARROT: Yeah, but it could be 5am just as likely—

BREAM: 5am for a terrorist raid on civilians?

MARROT: Theoretically, why not?

SLUCHA: Reign it in, Gus. We got your point, I think, that you wanna be purist in the sense that anything can happen. And so it can. This is more than a required fire drill or, to our more direct consideration, a lock-down the students and their teachers have only begun to practice in these post-9/11 years.

MARROT: Respectfully, sir, would you include post-Columbine, which technically occurred earlier?

SLUCHA: Of course, as you well know. And, as you well know, such incidents tend to happen into the actual school day—

MARROT: Beslan began beforehand…

PORTER: I call rank, Officer Marrot, in the interest of what we need to prepare for this Monday, here—not anywhere else. Even if…

BREAM: And that’s where we need to springboard. We will start from station at roughly 10am on a call that will come in from a hidden button under one of three designated positions at the school.

VAN ERDAL: What positions are those?

BREAM: Immaterial, really, but we have non-telephone connections from the receptionist desk, the principal’s office, and a more mobile capacity from a counselor named Dostune—

VAN ERDAL: ‘more mobile’?

BREAM: It’s enough for you to know, ok? Fact is, we don’t need to know who presses this extraordinary button, but that it’s pressed. Lock-down ensues. Kids have been through this drill once or twice since September, at least in their nonchalant ways. Reminder, though: kids won’t be there on Monday, so we’d have to assume that a) they’d be there and b) they’d be somewhere between nonchalant and not.

SLUCHA: There’ll be actors in the stead of students, on the scale of some 20 or 30…

MARROT: That’s not nearly enough.

SLUCHA: That’s what the actors’ guild could provide on the terms of this contract.

VAN ERDAL: We’ll just have to imagine more.

SLUCHA: That’s the spirit! And, moreover, you’ll never be sure what the actors’ guild will supply in combatants.

RACINE: Wait, what? We won’t know which actors are playing which roles?

PORTER: Well, think about it for a second, Tim. How would anybody know who the good guys and bad guys are on a hair-trigger response? In fact, the point of the exercise is to put everything off-kilter… Dr Bourban even suggested an attitude of ‘chaos theory’ to help us on our way—

SIMMONS: Do we really want to go there?

PORTER: Where?

SIMMONS: ‘Chaos theory’?

PORTER: Well, I don’t know, but—

BREAM: Listen, I’m on the analytical end, and that when the event’s usually done. But I see the dilemma here, pre-event: we gotta go in, 10am or whenever, not knowing what to expect; we also gotta go in prepared, knowing what our roles need to be, if necessarily fluid. It’s code red, for God’s sakes! Fake guns will be pointed at fake students’ heads, and you’ll need to fake-respond in a way that will become real in the minds of everyone present—

RACINE: and everyone absent.

BREAM: Indeed. We must assume the higher order of what we’re doing in this simulation: namely, preparing ourselves beyond ourselves, in order to prepare the civilian core, starting with the school personnel. We face the false terrorists’ fire and destroy that threat by Monday afternoon, then…

VAN ERDAL: we call it a day!

MARROT: we call it a fuckin’ day!

SLUCHA: No, we analyze accordingly and support what inevitably follows.

PORTER: Aftershocks?

SIMMONS: Ghosts in the machine we never figured out, partner.

PORTER: huh?

RACINE: I think she’s referring to—

SLUCHA: we don’t have time. Here’s the map of the school. Sharon, I want you and, ok, Tim to understand these upper floor challenges; Claude and Gus, you study the front façade, parking lot to what they call the ‘commons’; Soledad and Phil, put the finishing touches on our plan. We have a half-dozen actors playing SWAT—

BREAM: I’m in contact with actual SWAT, from Hennepin—

SLUCHA: good—rubber bullets, I assume; and on that note I’ve communicated with the fire department and ambulance regiment what they’d deem appropriate as things unfold…

VAN ERDAL: Them knowing it’s all for naught?

SLUCHA: Don’t you dare say that—nothing’s for naught.

VAN ERDAL: Apologies, Chief. But are we going to rehearse this thing?

SLUCHA: Claude, the rehearsal is when it happens for real, and that’s just gotta be the final word. Unless anyone else needs to weigh in?

MARROT: There’s a high school basketball game tonight.

PORTER: So?

MARROT: I think as many of us who can show, even plain-clothes, may make us more ready.

SIMMONS: I’m on duty—may seem strange.

RACINE: I’m not, technically, but by Monday…

VAN ERDAL: For fuck sakes, it’s a night out cheering on the Griz!

BREAM: I’ll underscore the plain-clothes element to all of this…

SLUCHA: And I’ll vouch for your preferred R & R when this all blows over…

PORTER: Meeting adjourned?

BREAM: Except for the details (handing out stapled copies) of the campus, apparatus, protocols we all updated as recently as August,

SLUCHA: Review them, please.

BREAM: and an altered rotation for Monday. Even before then, get good rest.

SLUCHA: On that note, thanks, Sharon and Phil, for coming in on a morning off.

PORTER: Had to file that 10-83 anyway,..

SIMMONS: illusion that it was.

IIii: that evening at the school gym. The bleachers are full and the Golden Valley pep band, in gold and black, is playing at one side, while a lesser Eden Prairie drum corps, in red and black, plays on the other. The announcer calls for attention and recognition of the starters and coaches for each team, even as some spectators are still finding open seats.

TATE: Coach! Fancy seeing you here.

SERENTINO: At a home game?

TATE: Girls’ game.

KING: Gavin, that sounds sexist.

SERENTINO: ’Atta girl. Keep him in line!

TATE: What I meant was, you always seemed exhausted with us after practices, scouting other teams and such—didn’t think you’d have the time to take in a game for pleasure.

SERENTINO: As if your cadre of gunslingers gave me pleasure? More likely an aneurysm! Anyway, my niece is now playing Varsity, at least she’s suited up.

KING: Which one is she?

SERENTINO: Last on the bench. Littlest.

KING: Bet she can steal.

SERENTINO: oh, yeah—and dribble and shoot. But she’s a freshman and, well, let’s hope for a blow-out one way or another so she can get some playing time.

TATE: “one way or another”? That’s treachery! Grizzlies come first—you taught me that!

SERENTINO: In this life, Gavin, you gotta keep an open debate. I’m an uncle first tonight, but even as a coach I’d think objectively: fate may have it that twenty points in favor of the good guys will put her in; twenty points the other way, late enough to make a difference, I’d play my bench. She’s a fair future for this school. May even challenge your game-high record someday, Beth.

KING: I’ll root for her. I certainly had elders to shoot for.

TATE: Tip-off tip: my money’s on black.

KING: Our trim versus theirs? Let’s see…

SERENTINO: I just want a good, safe game.

More or less, it is. The lead changes eight times in the first half, neither team hitting their threes or dominating in the paint. Conservative set plays are working, to the general satisfaction of the crowd. At intermission, cheerleaders from each school do more advanced routines than earlier time-outs had allowed; announcements fill the transitions, including a Presidents’ Day program at the Sister Kenny Courage Center for rehabilitation services, “charitable donations welcome at the snack shack tonight.” Then, to some confusion, the announcer gives over the microphone to an older man dressed as Uncle Sam.

BARNADINE: Yes, folks, I’m here in patriotic garb to give a tangible boost to the Courage Center—God knows the good work those folks do. My assistant and I tonight, on their behalf, are here to entertain you, Globetrotters’ style, so dig out your pocket change and give a Golden Valley whoop to Aunt Samantha, my lovely better half! Woo-hoo! There you go, now, Miss Samantha: with that reception you gotta reflect on our success. Aint it true we never, ever, lost a game o’ two-on-two.

ONAIWAH: (taking the mic) I never lost a game of one-on-one, if you wanna get technical! Don’t you remember when I whipped your behind just the other—

BARNADINE: (snatching back the mic) I’m only on your side, honeybuns, but I wonder if we have two brave souls out there to take us on—we’re undefeated, if we hadn’t made that clear. C’mon you couch spuds—it’s all for a good cause! And maybe you’ll be the first to do what no Washington General duo has done for thirty years—

ONAIWAH: (swiping the mic) that’s twenty to you, mister!

BARNADINE: (accepting the mic back) adjusted to woe-be-gone time (whispering into the mic)—that’s good for us, smooches, they’re lost in the math— (back to full voice) Ball boy, give us one of those orange things. Aint there any from the ABA? No, well shame on you. Does it bounce ok?

ONAIWAH: (heading to the home basket) It’ll do.

BARNADINE: Now, who’s gonna take us on?

SERENTINO: Sounds like it’s tailor-made for you two!

TATE: Sounds like clap-trap to me.

KING: C’mon, Ace, are you suddenly scared?

BARNADINE: (pointing to the crowd) There’s the back-and-forth we’ve seen a thousand times. Come on down, you false-debaters! Challenge the red-white-and-blue in front of you. Be the first to think you’ve beaten us already—and the last to leave us unbeaten, if ya know what I mean! That’s right, Golden Valley, let’s hear it for these gladiators comin’ down the aisle!

TATE: (whispering) I will get you for this, shooting queen.

KING: (more audibly) We’re on the same team, sexist!

BARNADINE: Ok, let’s give it up for—wha’ d’we call ya, Curly Neal?

KING: I’m Beth.

BARNADINE: The star of Bethlehem! Christmas never comes too late! And you?

TATE: Gavin Tate.

BARNADINE: Nothin’ there, mate. You got a pretty girl, though.

TATE: Be careful, clowny.

BARNADINE: Trash-talkin’ Tate—love it! Now, you two know how to play this game?

KING: Ask the crowd.

BARNADINE: (nodding to the noise) Evidently not. Good for us, right, Sammy?

ONAIWAH: (below the basket, missing lay-ups) Shut up and let somebody concentrate!

BARNADINE: Reminder, folks, all wagers go to charity (taking off his hat and leaving it beside the mic at the mid-court stripe) Hurry, Sammy, the young guns ’re comin’! Pass ’er here!

ONAIWAH: (missing another lay-up while KING and TATE jog up) Oh, for heaven sakes! (then passing long to BARNADINE, who dribbles to the away basket and makes an easy lay-up)

TATE: What?

BARNADINE: Wrong basket! Embarrassing!

TATE: Whatever, so we’re going this way (snatching the ball and dribbling the other way, passing to KING at the arc, who swishes her shot to the crowd’s greater roar). You counting by ones or twos? What d’you give that three?

BARNADINE: Um. Time out. Sammy? And bring us th’ ball.

ONAIWAH: Simple question, ain’it?

BARNADINE: Time in! (dribbling wildly away and launching his own three-pointer, which misses by a little) Call it a two.

KING: (grabbing the rebound and racing the other way) Ally-oop, then, for 5-2! (lofting for TATE, who executes a crowd-thrilling dunk)

BARNADINE: Yeah, but…

ONAIWAH: Oh, they’re just young folks, Papa; here, may’s’well try’n tie it up for ’em (dribbling slowly with no defense to the other end) What we playin’ up to anyway, Sam?

BARNADINE: Seven! and our winning streak is on the line!

ONAIWAH: Oh, in that case (turning around and throwing it back to BARNADINE, unguarded at the home side of the court),  put ’er away, Dr J!

BARNADINE: (catching and dribbling quickly away from TATE’s sudden awareness) Holy smoly! (barely making a fingertip roll off the backboard) There! and finally in the right basket…

TATE: Say what?

BARNADINE: 7-2, General. Better luck next time!

ONAIWAH: (grabbing the hat at mid-court, with the mic) Let’s give gen’rously to these pretty good losers, yeah? Good-looking, too!

KING: (coming over and giving ONAIWAH a hug, then taking the mic) Don’t know what just happened, folks, but sure is good to be back on this floor! Go Grizzlies!

URSKINE: (emerging from the bleachers) This is a frickin’ disgrace! Who th’ hell are you clowns?

SERENTINO: (yelling from a distance) Billy! Don’t step out there.

URSKINE: (apparently unhearing) You tryin’ to curse us or somethin’?

ONAIWAH: Don’t know what you mean, young’un but—

URSKINE: Making fools of the home team on our own court. Who the fuck you think you are? And then you want to collect ‘charity’ on this shit?

TATE: Bill, not worth it—

URSKINE: No, it is worth it—these rakes took the microphone and led us all on. This isn’t for fun, first of all, or for some charitable cause.

TATE: Cool it, c’mon, second half’s starting.

URSKINE: Not ’til they remember what cause. I do. Do you?

TATE: No, frankly, but I see coach coming down to kick your ass, so that’s the cause I’d be most worried about.

URSKINE: Name it, clown (snatching the hat), or you don’t get this back!

BARNADINE: You win, whippersnapper: the cause was just to entertain, as maybe we didn’t do so well with you.

URSKINE: That wasn’t the cause—you’re lying, still. I’ve seen you around town, drunk as a skunk—

BARNADINE: Hey, now—

URSKINE: Swindlin’ there, swindlin’ here.

SERENTINO: Billy, lay off!

URSKINE: (throwing the hat hard at BARNADINE’S face) God damn you!

BARNADINE stumbles back and slips over the microphone cord. ONAIWAH slumps to him while TATE rushes to restrain URSKINE from further response. Dozens from the crowd close in, several vociferously. URSKINE breaks away from TATE but then finds himself surrounded by peers both for and against his point-of-view. Tempers rise and a melee threatens. From the far side of the bleachers, SIMMONS, in uniform, calls into her shoulder piece and strides to where RACINE, in plain clothes, has already descended.

SIMMONS: Tim, it’s the teen-agers we’re isolating, yes?

RACINE: Roger that, and you’ve called cover? I don’t see anyone else?

SIMMONS: Yes, Phil also said he’d be around. For now… (to the teens) Break it up, now! Everyone move three steps back. Now!

URSKINE: Hey, go after those crooks before they get away!

RACINE: Quiet! You’ve been ordered to step back!

URSKINE: I was making a citizen’s arrest—how am I the bad guy?

SIMMONS: No talk of arrests yet—you need to step back and let us take charge of this.

URSKINE: ‘Us’? Who’s us?

SERENTINO: Dammit, Billy, shut your trap! There’s enough ‘us’ here for you not to question.

RACINE: There’s a group around the clowns I should attend to, if we’re good here—

SIMMONS: We are good here, yes?

SERENTINO: Billy?

URSKINE: Not really.

SIMMONS: Then we’ll call your parents to escort you home.

URSKINE: Not necessary. They’re up there.

SIMMONS: True?

SERENTINO: (looking up, sighing hard) Yeah, that’s them.

SIMMONS: You may join them directly—the rest of you, too, be warned that further outbursts may result in an arrest.

PORTER: (rushing in, confused) Is this part of the drill?

RACINE: (coming over to meet them) Adults are cool-headed. More amused than bemused, I think.

PORTER: Wha’s that mean?

SIMMONS: It means we can get on with the second half. You can inform the ref and coaches, Beth.

KING: Me?

SIMMONS: You got the authority. And you’ve got a knack for making this place happy.

IIiii: next morning, in AP English class, MS KRYZINSKI writes on the whiteboard and students dutifully write it out in their notes. She walks the rows to check work and whisper particular clarifications. Students, on the whole, concentrate silently.

KRYZINSKI: A volunteer to read out the quote, then someone else to interpret… Yes, Russel, go for it.

JONSRUD: A certain Peter Stockmann says, “You have an ingrained tendency to take your own way, at all events; and that is almost equally inadmissible in a well ordered community. The individual ought undoubtedly to acquiesce in subordinating himself to the community—or, to speak more accurately, to the authorities who have the care of the community’s welfare.” Henrik Ibsen, An Enemy of the People, 1882. Whew.

KRYZINSKI: Indeed, it’s a biggie. And the play we’ll be studying after the extended weekend. Someone to get us going on the quote?... Not everyone at once.... Not nobody at once! Ok, thanks Tracy.

QUAMME: Well, we don’t know the ‘you’ here, so that makes it kind of tough.

KRYZINSKI: Make a conjecture.

QUAMME: And we don’t know who the speaker is, really—I mean, Peter Stockmann can be anybody.… But I’m gathering he’s none too happy about potential rabble-rousers.

KRYZINSKI: Because?

QUAMME: Because the community’s interests outweigh the individual’s, and the “well ordered” seems threatened by “your own way”.

TILLINGER: Like “your own way” is wayward…

KRYZINSKI: How do you make that equation, Becky?

TILLINGER: From the title—a singular ‘enemy’ that ‘the people’ may have to root out.

JONSRUD: But maybe this Stockmann is the enemy—what about that?

KRYZINSKI: Or his younger brother, as it turns out. Peter Stockmann is the mayor of the town, and his brother, a physician, has discovered that the public baths—an important business for this town—are contaminated. Dr Stockmann is intent on publishing his findings.

QUAMME: And the mayor is trying to stop him. Typical.

JONSRUD: Like I said, he’s the enemy.

TILLINGER: But he says, ironically, that the authorities—the mayor’s office included—care about the community’s welfare. What better care than to keep them from a health hazard?

URSKINE: Or a scam dressed up like the 4^th of July!

QUAMME: Jesus, didn’t you sleep that off? That was capital M-barrassing. Ah, I see it now: you’re the rabble-rouser! Good call, Miss K!

TILLINGER: Yeah, coming out of the locker room was kinda surreal—what could have been so upsetting?

KRYZINSKI: Let’s not get into that—I had Ibsen’s play on my planner since the beginning of the year. We shouldn’t presume anything at our school would—

URSKINE: Why not? I mean, isn’t this class supposed to make thematic connections? And what do you mean, Tracy, calling me the rabble-rouser? You had to recognize what they were doing, more than making fools of us—well, you anyway—

JONSRUD: Hey, man, chill. It was unplanned entertainment—we finally had a half-time show worth paying attention to.

URSKINE: You didn’t pay close enough attention! Those fools planned it, and you fools supported their scam. Applauded it.

QUAMME: It’s pocket change, dude. And homeless people.

URSKINE: Good luck with ponzi schemes down the road.

KRYZINSKI: Well, as much we should stay civil, Mr Urskine brings up another quote I was going to leave to next week, but might as well add it to your notes. Ready? It’s from a character named Billing, who’s an editor for the local newspaper: “A community is like a ship; every one ought to be prepared to take the helm.”

TILLINGER: There’s that word ‘ought’ again—what, is Ibsen some sort of moralist?

KRYZINSKI: That, my dear—my dears—is a crucial question. Everyone has copied it down?

URSKINE: Mindlessly.

KRYZINSKI: (pursing her lips and placing stacks of the books at the front of each row) Well, more than mindlessly read the introduction to get some context of Ibsen’s world. (DOSTUNE enters and stands to the side) You don’t have to start the play itself until after Presidents Day.

JONSRUD: (muffled) Yay!

QUAMME: More time to kick homeless people.

URSKINE: or your ass.

DOSTUNE: (clearing his throat, catching KRYZINSKI’s eye, then sliding over to URSKINE’s desk to whisper) Not the best timing, Billy. I already needed to talk with you and wish I hadn’t heard that. Follow me, please, to my office.

URSKINE: May I bring my Enemy of the People? I hear it’s good prison reading.

DOSTUNE: (still whispering) I’d rather keep you in a basketball jersey than in prison, so to speak.

QUAMME: Call me, Billy—even if it’s your one-and-only allowed.

KRYZINSKI: Tracy, that’ll do.

IIiv: same day, at the GVPD precinct. PORTER, SIMMONS and SLUCHA speak around a table in one corner, while RACINE and VAN ERDAL sit at another at the opposite end, evidently on a coffee break.

SLUCHA: As much as you handled it according to protocol, I don’t like the timing of this…

PORTER: It’s apples an’ oranges, chief, no one who was there would make any connection.

SLUCHA: But they might in a few days.

SIMMONS: They will. Two nights in a row requiring our response? That’s unprecedented. And then a major thing that we’re not going to make public?

SLUCHA: We’re working on that, Sharon, you know how tricky this all is.

SIMMONS: Without a doubt. I’m just saying last night didn’t help the cause.

PORTER: C’mon, maybe it did in disguise—kind of, whad’ya call it, ‘reverse physology’

SLUCHA: ‘psychology’? Care to expand?

PORTER: Isn’t it phys—physio… like physical exercises? Psychology… ok, yeah I guess that’s what I meant. I guess if people see us doin’ our jobs and some of ’em might have even recognized Tim being off-duty… (calling across the room). Say, Tim, did anybody make it known last night you were a cop?

RACINE: Wasn’t it obvious?

PORTER: I mean, did they think you were at the game undercover?

RACINE: Was I? I was just following Claude’s rah-rah about supporting the Griz (turning to VAN ERDAL, sipping his coffee), which you should look into one of these days, Claude.

VAN ERDAL: (sputtering to finish the swallow and respond) May-m-ayb-e (coughs more fully), maybe I was there!

SIMMONS: Just like the ghost the night before…

SLUCHA: Officers, let’s reel this in. Soledad is dead-set in keeping objective information pure from speculative, even if in jest.

SIMMONS: She wasn’t there, though, either night, so she’ll need us to discern what’s objective or speculative.

SLUCHA: True, you’ll be central to that, both of you.

PORTER: I still think it’s apples an’ oranges. When we questioned the clowns—

SLUCHA: Let’s call them by their names, please,

PORTER: The suspects—

SIMMONS: Are they? We barely could hold them for petty fraud—they collected a grand total of, what, twenty-seven bucks? Which was donated with their blessing to Sister Kenny—

PORTER: Didn’t matter. They invaded a public event under false pretenses.

SLUCHA: You read their Miranda rights, yes?

PORTER: Of course!

SLUCHA: In the crowd’s viewing, or where?

PORTER: We had to usher them to the side to see if they were just clownin’ about the clowning, like a practical joke, so it wasn’t an immediate arrest…

SIMMONS: For the record, I don’t believe we had to bring them in… They weren’t a threat any more than that kid—

PORTER: Sharon, we had to have them questioned.

SLUCHA: This gets us back to the bad timing. An arrest not made on a possible break-and-enter, an arrest made on a possible practical joke, a thing on the horizon that we know is a simulation but must treat as real… The PR on this is going to look messy.

enter BREAM with a folder in hand

VAN ERDAL: (mumbling) At least the messenger looks good.

BREAM: I’ve finished with them, Phil, if you’d do the release.

SLUCHA: Actually, before that, Soledad, could you bring them here for a little off-the-record—I’d rather not do so in my office.

BREAM: (exiting with PORTER) As you wish.

SIMMONS: If I may, sir, what ‘off the record’ direction do you want to go? Wednesday’s 10-83? Because I think that would complicate Soley’s re-

SLUCHA: No, not further questioning, but thank you for that safeguard. No, I don’t mean to meddle where I shouldn’t or tap into these civilians as resources or anything like that. I would have liked to be there last night—

RACINE: So would Claude, cheering on the Griz!

SLUCHA: Are you guys still on break?

RACINE: Right-o, apologies.

SLUCHA: At ease, but I would have liked to see the school as it is nowadays, before we’ll see it Monday.

SIMMONS: And these two are going to give you insight?

SLUCHA: Well, I’d at least like to see.

enter BREAM, PORTER, BARNADINE and ONAIWAH, the latter two in last night’s costumes, now with coats in hand.

VAN ERDAL: Well, I’ll be damned! Tim, you never described them as them!

RACINE: Get off the couch then, and see more of the world.

BARNADINE: I thought you said we was free?

SLUCHA: (glancing at the file) Indeed, Mr Barnadine and.. Ms..Ona..w..

ONAIWAH: Onaiwah! Can’t speak Ojibwe?

SLUCHA: Pardon me, Ms Onaiwah!

BARNADINE: Warden wants the pardon! That’s rich!

SLUCHA: I wanted only to wish you well on your release. I understand this isn’t your first time on record here but also that you’ve never been formally charged for a crime.

ONAIWAH: Wha’z your point? You releasin’ us or not.

SLUCHA: You are free to go and we have no interest in qualifying that, but hope you can also be free from any future arrest.

BARNADINE: On what? What didja even bring us in for this time?

SLUCHA: Detective Bream has defined that, as we have on record—it’s not my intention to go over anything again. But to wish you can find the best ways to interact with our city…

BARNADINE: That’s what we were tryin’ to do. Got a few laughs, gotta admit.

SLUCHA: I wasn’t there.

BARNADINE: But these folks were. ’Cept for that’un. He’s Officer Unfriendly.

VAN ERDAL: I serve this city with valor, mister.

BARNADINE: Good on ya, so I’m glad you’re on the record, so to speak.

SLUCHA: Well, we’re not here to discuss anything further. You’re free to go.

ONAIWAH: Free to go to basketball games?

SLUCHA: That I would steer clear of for a while.

BARNADINE: Why, pray-tell?

SLUCHA: Your right to do so might clash with the crowd.

BARNADINE: Could say that ’bout anybody. That kid, f’r instance.

ONAIWAH: Or that pig—

VAN ERDAL: Watch your mouth.

RACINE: (softly) Cool it, Claude.

BREAM: I think everyone has had enough. With permission, sir?

SLUCHA: Yes, fully, Detective. That will be all.

BARNADINE: The king’s pleasure has been had.

PORTER: It’s not really been a pleasure.

SLUCHA: (leaving for his office) Everyone back to work, please.

ONAIWAH: C’mon, Cole, we don’ wanna be late!

IIIi: that evening, members of the School Board arrive at GVPD. The briefing room is arranged to accommodate the visitors, if only with a rough circling of chairs and a pan of carrot cake near the coffee urn.

FARMSWORTH: So, it’s a little odd for me to convene this meeting—I feel I’m on the set of ‘Hill Street Blues’ and haven’t memorized my lines yet.

SLUCHA: Oh, it’s pretty easy—the day’s details are passed about on paper, then some predictable banter with a few ‘what ifs’, then the quintessential “Hey, be careful out there!”

PORTER: Story o’ my life.

FARMSWORTH: Well, you’ve made this rescheduling easy, as I think it would have been a grave mistake to have your presence at the school a third day straight.

PORTER: Hey, the familiarity ain’t bad—

SLUCHA: —but we know what you mean. Your building needs a calm couple of days…

SPRINGER: Calm before the storm?

SLUCHA: Before the simulated storm.

SPRINGER: I meant the message-handling to the public. That won’t be simulated.

BOURBAN: Then again, that’s why we’re here.

FARMSWORTH: Well, yes and no. We had that as our main agenda item before, um, last night’s ruckus…

PORTER: I wouldn’t call it a ‘ruckus’, exactly.

SMITH:  I was there, and I’d call it a ruckus.

DOSTUNE: Well, I wasn’t there, but I’ve had to deal with a couple students—one in particular—who might just have more on their minds than actions that transpired, or anything we’d define.

SLUCHA: What do you mean, sir?

DOSTUNE: I don’t mean to speak out of turn—

FARMSWORTH: No, go ahead—we’re not on Robert’s Rules…

DOSTUNE: Hm, those again! Well, what I have to contribute here is probably too subjective for the need to plan for Monday,

SPRINGER: We’re planning for post-Monday, at least as far as I’m concerned.

DOSTUNE: Yes, I’m with you there.

PORTER: Wait, aren’t we planning Monday?

BOURBAN: We’re planning for everything, it’s just catching us by surprise that it’s no longer a one-day operation.

SLUCHA: Which means, I think, the initial conception has already done half its job.

FARMSWORTH: You mean, we have already put this theoretical concern to a practical test?

BOURBAN: That is what I believe, and what I think is happening fairly perfectly, these recent little hiccups included.

FARMSWORTH: I’m still interested in what the counselor had in mind: what’s this thing on your mind that’s ‘too subjective’?

DOSTUNE: With your indulgence, I don’t mean to extenuate.

SPRINGER: Speak freely, Helmand.

DOSTUNE: Appreciating that, and even the cue of my name, which you all know is associated with ‘Helmand Province’ and the longest-running war involving US soldiers.

SPRINGER: I didn’t mean to—

DOSTUNE: I’m glad, actually, for this segue, as perhaps it can be fruitful. My identity is rather opaque to kids at our school and—if I may say so—not just in the ways of statistical, brown-skinned presence. Adults, more likely, wonder about my Afghan heritage and how in the world I got here, or how I’d characterize the scariness there, if rarely I’m really asked.

BREAM: I empathize, for the record.

SLUCHA: Technically, we’re off the record, Soledad, if too many times today! (clearing his throat) Um, what I mean, is…we can all chime in as need be.

BREAM: Very reassuring! But also true. Go on.

DOSTUNE: I didn’t see as much of the war in my motherland as most of my peers. My uncle lived in Turkmenistan, to the north and in the Soviet Union; from 1979 onwards I was back-and-forth between my village near Mazar Sharif and Charjou, the ancient crossroads of the ‘silk route’, if you ever want to know about that. I was a kid when the Soviets invaded Afghanistan—you know it, perhaps, from Jimmy Carter’s boycott of the Moscow Olympics, but it was much different from our perspective, concerned more about our local ‘bazaar’ than the stakes of the Cold War. Eventually, after the Soviets couldn’t claim a win and Gorbachev also spun into oblivion, I decided to study at the Pedagogical Institute in Charjou, named for Lenin in my first two years and Maktumkhuli in my final exams.

PORTER: Ma-tum who?

DOSTUNE: Maktumkhuli, a Turkmen poet, but that’s beside the point. I was there is the early 90’s when one day a largish Russian man came into our canteen, the place I’d eaten breakfasts and lunches by routine—porridge and bread and jam by morning, broth and cabbage and boiled meat each noon, with endless ladles of warm green tea—brings back memories!

BOURBAN: Are we going anywhere with this?

DOSTUNE: Pardon, I knew I might digress…

FARMSWORTH: No, please—I, for one, am interested.

SPRINGER: Robert’s Rules: I second.

DOSTUNE: Um, ok. Well, I brought this up for something that happened at that canteen—some things that happened, without which, I don’t know if I would have become a high school counselor today.

PORTER: What happened? And—before you say—has everyone had a piece of carrot cake? Can we pass that pan around?

BREAM: We can, Deputy, and I guess I’ll also second the motion.

PORTER: Thanks. Can I get anyone a coffee?

DOSTUNE: I’m fine.

SPRINGER: Me, too; Helmand, what was the issue with this man?

DOSTUNE: As it turned out, he was the estranged husband of one of the regular servers, a happy lady who always put some garnish on our plates—a sprig of spinach from her own little garden, or a lot more butter than we’d need, some pomegranate seeds that the canteen budget wouldn’t have factored, which she’d always coyly deny…. She was as white as mashed potatoes and seemed so happy in a job that served the sashlik-colored students: Turkmen, Uzbek and refugee me. None of that mattered, though, when this big man burst through the door, demanding something she owed him, but not so descript as money, or a key to some safe, or anything we could tell. And we weren’t trying to tell: it wasn’t our business to eavesdrop, as it were.

SLUCHA: I’m curious, naturally, what the law enforcement situation was there at that time.

DOSTUNE: I’m as curious then as now, and as clueless either way. I never saw security at the Pedagogical Institute named after Lenin or Maktumkhuli, even if I saw a thousand traffic cops along my journey there and back to Mazar Sharif. And maybe that’s where I’m going with this. The man went away after a tirade we could probably translate, but had become desensitized to—a domestic quarrel spilling to the streets, about as mundane as a drunk guy singing anthems after midnight… The energy will exhaust him, and any lost winks of sleep will not affect the next day’s dawn.

PORTER: I got issues with drunks singing after midnight, but…

FARMSWORTH: Go on.

DOSTUNE: I also don’t diminish anything as passé anymore. The guy came back a second day, this time with a knife that’s designated for Kurban Bajram, the day of sacrificing sheep. He burst into the canteen doors and yelled in Russian, ‘enough’s enough’; he pummeled into the counter where we had just been served our soup and eager for pilaf—I think that’s what was cooking that day—and, swashbuckling, he swore he’d kill someone today. At first I froze, but ethics commanded that someone would have to suppress this maniac, and I eyeballed who would be with me and realized no one looked above their bowls: they were not involved and pretended to care less, which bothered me then and still today. The guy was too fat to climb over the counter but barreled in through the side door and and bull’s-eyed for his wife, who stood and screamed with nothing more to defend her than the ladle she’d use to give us extra soup.

TIOSOOK: She continued to ladle soup?

DOSTUNE: No, she tried to run away, notwithstanding the limited pathways of the kitchen.

BREAM: Was anyone else back there?

DOSTUNE: Not that I saw, so I leaped over the counter and pushed her to go faster on one turn, then reverse on another as the husband changed course. He had some disadvantage with his red-eyed rage and lack of bearing, but he made up for that by flinging pots and picking up a cleaver.

PORTER: Shouldn’t that have been her instinct?

DOSTUNE: What’s instinct in such a situation? Hers was flight, not fight.

TIOSOOK: And yours?

DOSTUNE: Also flight…with her—I guess that’s a third category. Anyway, I yelled over the counter for some help, some bodies to shoulder the door shut after we’d get through—

BREAM: The fat man heard that, too?

DOSTUNE: Maybe, but I used Turkmen, which he likely wouldn’t understand. Anyway, he slipped on some floor grease and that enabled our breakaway. I kept shoving the lady out the main door, trusting that the shoulders of skinny students would barricade the man in. She was hyperventilating, but we managed to waddle to some administrative safe point, as silly as that seems in my imagination today.

SMITH: You saved her.

DOSTUNE: I did nothing more than what a student-teacher should do.

VAN ERDAL: You were a first-responder when others slurped their soup.

DOSTUNE: I didn’t mean to make myself the point of this, as I only said it to make a point—

BOURBAN: namely?

DOSTUNE: (suddenly struck)  I..I don’t know.

PORTER: What?

DOSTUNE: I thought I had something relating to what we need for Monday…

SPRINGER: Hearing what I’ve heard, I think we can all agree that—

VAN ERDAL: Quick response means everything.

BREAM: I heard other things. Quick response means something, but also some acknowledgement that common sense is not all that it’s cut out to be. Common sense often assumes someone else will step in…

DOSTUNE: Yes, and we have some mechanisms for finding that ‘someone else’—dialing 911, for instance. But that’s not what I grew up with, personally. And to some degree, the independent thinking required in a crisis is unscripted learning.

FARMSWORTH: Our dilemma exactly. The simulation is for our education—as administrators—but we’re going to have to relay a measure of what we learn to the community, including kids. Our mandatory lock-down drills will never be the same.

SLUCHA: A good thing, no?

SPRINGER: Important, yes. It’s hard to say ‘good’ in the onion folds of each person’s experience.

BOURBAN: Onion folds?

DOSTUNE: That’s the fitting analogy: it was pilaf that day, and she would have topped each plateful with a boiled onion.

PORTER: Sounds delicious. Claude, pass the carrot cake, at least.

IIIii: that night, the high school roof. ONAIWAH and BARNADINE emerge from the darkness, the former lighting their way with a Bic butane, the latter, burdened with bags and a rope, holding on to her ponytail.

ONAIWAH: (whispering) Go’damn, Cole, keep up wi’ my reaso’ble pace or else find the way in by yourself.

BARNADINE: Terry, you gotta wait for a man in his prime. This was my brainchild in the first place.

ONAIWAH: Is that what we’re doin’, raisin’ your brainchild’? Holy moses, this is somep’n that’ll stop my dead granny’s heart. This means we gettin’ married, Cole.

BARNADINE: Hush, would’ya? this means we gotta mission to fulfill. No time fer jokes and public attention.

ONAIWAH: We did a bang-up job o’ that las’ night, bringing the house down.

BARNADINE: Right, my exac’ point. We already done the tomfoolery to a rave review—the cops’ report, which jus’ puts us in the back page o’ th’ news, but co’ceivably puts us in the imagination of all who want a show, ’specially something like what the Harlem Globetrotters do.

ONAIWAH: You said it right, honey.

BARNADINE: ’Preciatin’ your support.

ONAIWAH: No, I mean the name o’ tha’ team.

BARNADINE: Globetrotters? I grew up on their shenanigans. I know ’em like the back o’ my hand. More importan’ly, I think we pushed those buttons right.

ONAIWAH: C’mon here, this is where we entered the gol’ mine.

BARNADINE: We got nothin’, jus’ so you remember.

ONAIWAH: O, there’s gold there yet. You gotta have a li’l faith now, Cole.

They open a door that functions like a cellar entrance, stairs immediately going down. On the thirteenth stair ONAIWAH hits a light switch to a distant bare bulb and ceremonially blows out her Bic. They open their arms—BARNADINE dropping his armful—and smile at their surroundings, a rather vacant attic.

BARNADINE: An’ it’s jus’ that easy—you’d think they would have locked that bad boy—

ONAIWAH: All their ’tention was on us, remember? They thought we got in wi’ the reg’lar payin’ customers!

BARNADINE: It’s a matter o’ time before they do a sweep an’ lock that door—

ONAIWAH: Ever’thing’s a matter o’ time, Swee’heart. For now it’s our very own penthouse.

BARNADINE: Well, if not that, it sure beats park benches and the Dorothy Day.

ONAIWAH: Agreed—cozy as can be. So le’s get some sleep—

BARNADINE: If it all’s so easy. Gettin’ in, r’member, is not the only thing we wanted out of this.

ONAIWAH: Ok, Meadowlark, remin’ me.

BARNADINE: We got in here to get in further, tappin’ into the nest egg o’ this place.

ONAIWAH: You got th’ code for the safe?

BARNADINE: No, not exac’ly. But we did damn right getting to that gym floor and almos’ prizin’ away their charity box.

ONAIWAH: Right—almos’, like a police report away.

BARNADINE: They had nothin’ on us, we was only some stumblin’-in sideshow.

ONAIWAH: ’xactly like the Globetrotters.

BARNADINE: Not exactly: people pay to see that stuff. We were, wha’ you call it…?

ONAIWAH: Spontaneous?

BARNADINE: Yeah, gir’, that’s exactly what we were. A force from fantasy.

ONAIWAH: a Deus ex machina.

BARNADINE: a what?

ONAIWAH: That’s somethin’ I remember from my last year in school, good ol’ Miss Johnson and some scenes we read from Midsummer Dream.

BARNADINE: You paid attention in school? This is news to me.

ONAIWAH: Shush, you caveman, I’m wise to you and those who’d say I’m nothin’ better than a drunken Indian find her way to the safety of th’ Twin Cities. Well, I’m a birthchil’ of practically ever’thing tha’s going on, cities or beyon’, white folks, brown, schooled enough or part o’ some gover’mental ‘no child left behind’. It’s been decades ago, you know by my body (which sometimes still turns you on), I was not a bad reader, I’ll let you know. In tha’ play with Miss Johnson we untangled some stuff, Puck the untang’ler, or tangler in some sense. I forgot who was pushin’ him to do what he did, but he put certain lovers to sleep to have them wake up in their midsummer dreams—here I mean not jus’ dreams that you dream but, like, some sort of fantasy. And this Puck was the doer of all o’ that, and so they’d wake up and, well, I forgot really what the result was…

BARNADINE: Maybe that dreams aren’t what they’re cut up to be?

ONAIWAH: No, it wasn’t that easy.

BARNADINE: Broken dreams aren’t easy.

ONAIWAH: Ok, but that wasn’t what we were studying. Somehow, I ’member Miss Johnson gettin’ us to think beyond the concep’ of a dream, like not ‘what if this would happen’, but ‘what if this were happening to me’—she said it that way, ‘to me’, but looked around the class to toss it elsewhere, as if it were some sort of demon she could cas’ away, her to me and me and me.

BARNADINE: You talkin’ crazy.

ONAIWAH: No, I’m recollectin’ clearly. ‘What happens when we wake?’ she said as clear as day. And then, ‘what Deus ex machina must facilitate’… well, I can’t remember word for word, but…

BARNADINE: I think I get your point. Somethin’s gotta make sense from the stuff we dream.

ONAIWAH: No, it wasn’ jus’ that simple. Like another thing about Miss Johnson, should I tell?

BARNADINE: Tell what?

ONAIWAH: Well, about her.

BARNADINE: Why not? You got my interes’

ONAIWAH: It’s more than that. She was a real good person. Still is, I ’spect. Better than the rest of us, anyway.

BARNADINE: Not sayin’ much.

ONAIWAH: True, that, but she was a sophisticate. She told us once she wrote some article to publish about her Jaguar—

BARNADINE: her wild animal?

ONAIWAH: her car, as it turn out. She said the thing came back with some red ink that the ‘fineness’ she wanted to say about this car should have been ‘finesse’, like the fineness of the leather seats were not what her editors wanted to hear.

BARNADINE: She tol’ you as high school kids?

ONAIWAH: Yeah, she did. Come to think of it, she seemed to pass that info onto us as if we’d have a way of weighin’ in. Anyway, that day of Jaguars came an’ went, and then we had lessons on other stuff—it wasn’t at this point Shakespeare’s Puck—when one day we came to class and it was (now I remember, ‘Great Expectations’ movie version) and she blah-blah-blahed for a while before she pulled the screen down to show us what I didn’t want to see.

BARNADINE: Why didn’t you want to see?

ONAIWAH: I had read that and knew the movie wouldn’t be so good. Two orphans more in lust than love—I’d already imagine’ it too much to see a Hollywood hack-job. It wasn’t for me, and I asked Miss Johnson if I could skip the film and jus’ rely on my memory, ’cuz I read it—

BARNADINE: You read what?

ONAIWAH: ‘Great Expectations’—aren’t you hearing me?

BARNADINE: Pardon me, I guess I lost that,

ONAIWAH: an’ anyway, she said I could jus’ put my head down on my desk as she pulled down the screen, and wha d’ya think was there?

BARNADINE: On that screen? the start-up of that film, ‘Great…

ONAIWAH: No, she hadn’t started the film yet. What was there taped on the screen was a gorgeous centerfold of… care to guess?

BARNADINE: centerfold? of you, perchance?

ONAIWAH: that flatters me. No, this was far more photogenic, a Playboy fold of Miss Johnson, who pulled the screen upon herself, looked upon the awkward laughter, then jimmy’ed the full screen up into its sleeve before she thought a while and said, “that was fifteen years ago, when I was studying at Oxford, and bills bein’ what they be, this photoshoot paid plenty.”

BARNADINE: Really? She said that?

ONAIWAH: Really only that. I remember feeling like we could’ve spoke much more on what we’d seen. It wasn’t pornography.

BARNADINE: What was it?

ONAIWAH: It was a teacher breaking free. She tol’ us it paid for university. But more than that, she seemed content that we’d seen it, well, maybe not content…

BARNADINE: ‘resigned’? Is that the way she seemed it?

ONAIWAH: She seemed larger than the stuff we were reading.

BARNADINE: What did the boys say what it seemed?

ONAIWAH: Does that really matter? They were tight-lipped like everyone, as the circumstances should have been.

BARNADINE: So you were right at home in school—

ONAIWAH: Miss Johnson’s class, anyway. And, if we fas’ forward, this pen’house is pretty nice.

BARNADINE: Long as it lasts.

IIIiii: the following morning, after mass at St Margaret Mary Church. Father Faye addresses a modest gathering with routine announcements.

FATHER FAYE: Thank you for celebrating our Lord’s feast at St Margaret Mary’s today. Our services tomorrow are, as ever during the school year, at 8am and 10:30. Wish summer would comply with due attendance, but… God has other plans with you in that vacation time, I trust after all these years. Monday is Presidents’ Day, an unexpected little vacation if you like, and thus our offices are closed. So, that also means choir and AA won’t meet that evening, regretably, if I may editorialize. (smiling at the hint of chuckles in the shadows of the sanctuary) Ok, I shouldn’t editorialize. And vacations are indeed a human effort to ‘remember the Sabbath’, made for man, as Mark chapter 2 reminds.

SERENTINO: (clearing his throat and inching up his right hand) Father, if I may?

FATHER FAYE: Of course, Anthony, that’s what this time if for.

SERENTINO: (again clearing his throat, swiveling to the dozen or so assembled) We usually have after-school events at the high school during a holiday—that’s just how tradition has gone—but I feel it should be known that, be it basketball practice (tapping his chest twice) or, if I recall it right, adult literacy on Monday nights or something else—

GREEN: First aid course, ongoing.

SERENTINO: Yeah, knew it was something else, those won’t be happening this Monday, due, um,.. to,  well, they won’t be happening this Monday.

FATHER FAYE: (waiting some seconds) Ok, things unfold and, in this case, stay folded. First aid returns the following Monday, shall we say?

GREEN: Absolutely, ongoing.

FATHER FAYE: Great. God’s will be done. Are there other announcements?

RACINE: (also clearing his throat) Not an announcement, but a prayer request—

FATHER FAYE: Ok, here or privately, as is always welcome…

RACINE: Can’t be really private, as a couple thousand lent witness—

SERENTINO: (under his breath) Tim, you don’t wanna—

RACINE: (perhaps not hearing) Thursday’s basketball game was not, how should one say, the most neighborly thing on display. I also don’t want to, as you suggest, Father, editorialize, but if we can pray for cooler heads to prevail when things get hot—

SERENTINO: If you’re talkin’ about Billy, just please leave that to—

RACINE: I’m not talking about a student, per se; as you know me, I’m about the general peace and good standing.

FATHER FAYE: Indeed, well noted, and—

SERENTINO: that’s not in doubt, Tim, but when a minor is concerned, you should think about protocols.

RACINE: —protocols of prayer, Tony? or public relations?

SERENTINO: What’s that supposed to mean?

FATHER FAYE: Gentlemen, please… Our service of mercy and grace continues.

RACINE: Pardon me, Father.

GREEN: It wasn’t so bad, in my opinion.

SERENTINO: C’mon, Petra, you see we’re not in a closed-context here.

FATHER FAYE: (raising both arms to the few dozens assembled) We’re a family of faith, and, as we close every mass in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit (signing the cross accordingly), go in peace, serve the Lord,

CONGREGATION: thanks be to God.

SERENTINO: (leaning a couple rows toward RACINE) Crisis averted.

RACINE: What? You got something sensible to say?

SERENTINO: I always do. I sense what’s sensible and, by the way, stay silent when that’s the wiser way.

RACINE: Huh? Silent on the need to prevent riots?

SERENTINO: You’re outta line, Tim, to talk details of your own department’s ongoing investigation—

RACINE: And you’re looking to stack the deck in the favor of your athlete that caused the trouble. I was just askin’

FATHER FAYE: Guys, this isn’t the place—

RACINE: for community calm, and, since we’re in God’s house, the prayer that should go with it!

GREEN: The request was forwarded like that, you gotta admit.

SERENTINO: I don’t ‘gotta admit’ anything. You wanna paint folks into corners, then call it an exercise of community good will. Well, I know your game—

RACINE: You’re thinking of Gus: you know his game—

SERENTINO: Oh, ok, so you’re now going to play the wise ass—

FATHER FAYE: Gentlemen, please—why don’t we go into my study?

SERENTINO: to pray for what’s been been made a bigger mess?

RACINE: Yeah, I guess that’s a good way of expressing it, Tony. And you well know that a ‘bigger mess’ is in the scheme of things this week.

GREEN: What? Would you macho yourselves down a bit and be true to the reasons you came here today.

SERENTINO: I came to worship and know my place in the Kingdom.

RACINE: Yep, exactly. All of us too.

FATHER FAYE: Jesus challenges the sense of ‘place’ often enough: “the first shall be last, the last shall be first”…

RACINE: and healing on the Sabbath, as you alluded to—

SERENTINO: What, now you’re a priest in training?

GREEN: He listens well. I quite like that bit about Sabbath made for man, even as a woman,

SERENTINO: and a nurse, right, so the ‘healing’ bit got ya.

GREEN: Why not? What bee is in your bonnet, Tony?

SERENTINO: Ok (looking around to ascertain the congregation has largely left), since we’re hashing things out between us, I do have a bee in my bonnet, folks, and its this: a couple of drunks and an paranoiac exercise is threatening my season—

RACINE: your season?

SERENTINO: our season if you’re so into communal harmony, Tim: our season as a God-blessed varsity boys’ basketball program—

GREEN: coinciding with girls’

SERENTINO: Yes, why not?

GREEN: ’cause that where your up-and-arms happened, remember? And I don’t see Coach Jenkins having existential problems.

FATHER FAYE: Who is Coach Jenkins?

SERENTINO: Yeah, why do you wanna bring her in to this ‘prayer concern’?

RACINE: Funny you should ask, as she barely made an impression on Thursday. You and your star were front and center, and Jenkins and her squad just huddled up like it was an extended time-out. Perhaps she was, in her own way, praying the situation through…

FATHER FAYE: which is possible. Is she Catholic?

GREEN: Not that I know of. Then again, what do any of us know?

SERENTINO: I know that, as Father fully said, there’s public and there’s private and there’s protocol for both.

RACINE: Right, exactly. So what I did what bridge that divide in the safety of this service.

SERENTINO: Really? You want to be on the record for such altruism? Taking the law beyond the courts?

RACINE: I was off-duty on Thursday night, I’ll have you know.

SERENTINO: Oh? so you’re in it for citizen’s arrests and vigilante stardust?

RACINE: No, I’m in it for ‘prayer requests’, as I stated at the beginning.

GREEN: We’re in it for the health of kids—let’s be honest here.

FATHER FAYE: I’d say yes—how could anyone disagree—but where are the kids in what’s being argued about?

SERENTINO: There’s just one kid at stake, Father, and Tim knows exactly who I’m talking about.

RACINE: I really don’t, Tony; Petra probably does, but I didn’t bring up this whole concern for what you have on your mind and—frankly speaking—active roster. You’ll need to take that up with your admin and counselor—what’s his name? Dosulm? Dosulem?

GREEN: Dostune. Helmand.

RACINE: Oh, a Muslim. So, that’s interesting, Coach There’s-Nothing-Here…

SERENTINO: I resent what you imply.

RACINE: I’m sitting here as a fellow Catholic, Tony. I don’t imply a reason to divide.

SERENTINO: You do. You think I have some prejudice somehow. Against the homeless bums that started this fiasco, the some narcissist that runs my team, the counselor that Golden Valley High School hired to keep ‘Katie by the door’!

RACINE: Hey, you’re saying it, not me.

FATHER FAYE: And no one should be saying ‘it’, especially here in the afterglow of mass we’ve shared together.

GREEN: While I agree, Father, I see a need to get these issues out.

RACINE: Amen. That’s why I voiced the thing—

SERENTINO: the ‘thing’ that costs you nothing.

FATHER FAYE: No one has to suffer here. I continue to absolve the sins that need the full confessional.

RACINE: I’ll stay here, Father, as long as I’m off-shift.

SERENTINO: Oh, that’s rich! I’ll stay, Father, three times as long, as I’ve got this stupid day-off to compromise the simple season I always try to make take shape.

GREEN: You’ve been underway for two months, Tony…

SERENTINO: Oh, so now you’re on their side, Princess P.

GREEN: I have no idea what are sides or angles or faces or…

SERENTINO: middle school math. You’ll get my Billy or another in your office soon, after Dostune minces as he will. The ‘holiday’ for presidents stands before a crucial showdown with Jefferson, if you get my drift.

FATHER FAYE: from Bloomington?

SERENTINO: exactly so. That’s our greater neighborhood.

RACINE: I don’t deny that, Tony. I only wanted to weigh a prayer concern—

SERENTINO: in the way you wanted it…

GREEN: Isn’t that the way of any prayer?

FATHER FAYE: That’s one way of looking at it… Since no one has another thing to say… I’d suggest a human hiatus, letting sleeping dogs lie, so to speak…

SERENTINO: Are you serious?

RACINE: Tony, yes he is.

GREEN: You’ll anwer for a priest?

FATHER FAYE: We answer, all, for God.

IIIiv: later that afternoon, at Wesley Park. The high barometer makes for blue skies and crisp late winter temperatures. Four players shoot a game of lightning and then gather around a boom box as if it were an oil drum fire. ‘Computer Blue’ plays as a sort of background, though players chug water and swap tidbits unconscious of the music.

KING: So, Becky, that’s what I’m talking about—

TILLINGER: posting higher, then fade-aways?

KING: Maybe, if it fits, but more generally spreading out your skill set.

URSKINE: like an eagle, baby..

TILLINGER: watch it, Billy, or I’ll tell Tracy—

URSKINE: See if I care—I’m on death row anyway…

TATE: You idiot, there’s no death row in Minnesota—not even metaphorically.

KING: Don’t even play with that, Gavin.

TATE: Why, would we’d miss something in translation?

KING: Yeah, ’cause we’d do just that. Witness our own idiocy the other night.

TILLINGER: I have to say that was so funny, with that Uncle Sam guy—

URSKINE: Really? You gonna go there?

TILLINGER: Yes, why not?

URSKINE: That whole fiasco shut us out of the gym today—‘Closed for Security Protocols’ on every door—

TATE: So what?

URSKINE: So the riff raff invades our space and makes us pay and nobody but me was standing up to it.

TILLINGER: You know, Billy, you got a lot of tactical shit to figure out.

URSKINE: Umm.. betwixt.. posers and.. a true patriot?

TILLINGER: No, it just isn’t that complicated. Between—or ‘betwixt’—you and me, for instance, with or without the witness of these alums. I don’t imagine I’d beat you in a given game, but I don’t really care. I got a sense of self worth that eclipses yours.

URSKINE: Meaning what, exactly?

TILLINGER: Meaning you’ve got this ‘lord it over’ arrogance that doesn’t stand a chance with me. Or Tracy, for that matter.

KING: Tell it, girl! Fems against the men, 11 by 2, no make-it-take-it.

TATE: Agreed. You in, Hotshot?

URSKINE: What’s the point?

TILLINGER: The point is your pouting problem. You got game but no common sense.

URSKINE: Ok, so you got the balls to prove your own sense of game?

TILLINGER: I don’t need balls, Billy, just one to grind like Darling Nikki.

KING: —two Darling Nikkis, as it were.

TATE: Sounds sexy.

TILLINGER: Bear in mind I’m underage, like Billy-boy.

URSKINE: Let’s just get on with it.

They play a heated 2-on-2, with the rest of ‘Purple Rain’ to drown out the smash of rebounds and kick-outs and URSKINE’s slam dunk to punctuate the final point, despite KING’s formidable defense.

URSKINE: and one and game, amateurs!

KING: bloody hell! I just watched him take the open lane—

TATE: don’t be so hard—

TILLINGER: I should have slid over.

URSKINE: Wouldn’t have mattered. The game was in the bag.

TATE: 11-8 isn’t a rout.

URSKINE: I’d like to travel back to the era of hand-checks. Gary Payton style of play. Then it would’ve been a rout.

KING: (dropping her head in amusement) That’s rich, Billy. Hand-checks!

URSKINE: Gotta like ‘The Glove’!

TILLINGER: I’ll play you that way, no problem.

URSKINE: Not today—it’s too cold to keep going. Unless you want to break into the gym—

KING: Right, that’s gonna happen.

URSKINE: It’s been done already, and I’m no dumber than Uncle Sam.

TATE: Holy shit, I think I see him!

URSKINE: Who?

TATE: (pointing to BARNADINE, taking a leak beside a tree) Hey! Uncle Sam!

URSKINE: Can’t be serious! (yelling over) Old Man, get your ass outta here!

TILLINGER: Billy, cut it out—

URSKINE: I can’t fuckin’ believe it. It is him, minus the outfit.

KING: Where’s the other one?

URSKINE: (starts to run) Don’t care—I’m seein’ red.

BARNADINE: (not quite done) Wha—? hey, hold on there—hey!

TATE: (running after URSKINE, with KING and TILLINGER) Don’t touch him, Billy!

BARNADINE: I recognize you!

URSKINE: (diving at him and punching wildly) Scumbag! Intruder!

BARNADINE: Ho, police! Help me for a change!

KING: (joining TATE in the scrum to get URSKINE off) Stop! Get off him!

TILLINGER: Billy, you’re crazy! There’s nothing worth—

URSKINE: fighting for? My scholarship’s in jeopardy.

TILLINGER: an’ this is getting it back?

TATE: (picking up URSKINE in half nelson) Knock it off, already!

KING: Mister, are you alright?

BARNADINE: (panting and feeling his jaw and nose) Uh, um…

TILLINGER: Let’s call an ambulance.

BARNADINE: No, I’ll survive. Been through harder fights than this—

KING: We are so sorry, Mister—

TILLINGER: Say so, Billy: apologize!

URSKINE: Fuck, no.

TATE: Beth, you stay here. Becky, help me drag this brat to—

URSKINE: (grimacing) to common sense?

TATE: Yeah, for a start!

The three leave with URSKINE now in a full nelson. KING kneels and reaches for BARNADINE’s wrist.

KING: I’ll take your pulse if you don’t mind.

BARNADINE: What’ll that do? I said I’m alright.

KING: Sometimes shock sets in.

BARNADINE: I’m only shocked a person cares. Well, beyond the abstrac’, that is.

KING: I liked what you were trying to do the other night, at school.

BARNADINE: Stealing from a charity?

KING: Getting me and Gavin back on our home court.

BARNADINE: Wasn’t our objective, truthfully.

KING: Where is Mrs Sam, anyway?

BARNADINE: Left her home so I could hunt and gather.

KING: So you do have a home? Sorry to presume, but… I wouldn’t have guessed that, stealing from a charity and so forth.

BARNADINE: There’s houseless folks and homeless folks and all those in between. I’ve slept lovely summer nights in this park and most in Minneapolis. Know the lay o’ the land pretty well. What I don’ know is how to cultivate. Make a picket fence and weed a garden. Pay the ’lectric bills. Keep my nose clean, so to speak. Is it bleeding, by the way.

KING: A little. Mostly snotty, actually, if that’s ok to say.

BARNADINE: You’re asking my approval? Hm. You are an angel, if that’s ok to say.

KING: Let’s just get you on your feet. And probably you should zipper up, in case you forgot how this all started.

BARNADINE: (blushing, and complying) Is that what got his goat?

KING: I can’t imagine, honestly. I barely know the kid. In fact, I probably know him less than I know you.

BARNADINE: That’s either not saying much or—

KING: saying too much? Yeah, I’m one of those folks in between.

BARNADINE: Was my pulse ok?

KING: You’re good enough to go.

BARNADINE: You too, I guess. Tell him no hard feelings.

KING: I just hope that little hand-checker finally learns to feel.

IVi: the next morning, at the school’s common area. Various members of GVPD and the High School faculty walk about, some with clipboards, a few with cameras. The lights are naturally low due to pre-programmed weekend energy protocols; down each hallway, doors that are typically locked remain open for the preparations of the coming days; motion detectors have also been disabled. Distantly, a muted horn ensemble practices ‘On Broadway’.

PORTER: So, here’s ground zero, we could say.

SPRINGER: Why on earth would we say that?

PORTER: That’s what you implied last week—that students gather in this area most of all.

SPRINGER: I called it a ‘junction’, I think, as there really is no reason for students to hang out here—

MARROT: ’cept to study the trophies of glories past.

SPRINGER: But why would you bring in ‘Ground Zero’?

PORTER: Just a term. Where things start, where we can build from…

SPRINGER: Where New York was brought to its knees—

PORTER: Well, I didn’t mean that…

BOURBAN: I don’t think we were brought to our knees, Mary-Alice. Americans stood tall that day.

SPRINGER: Hey, I didn’t bring this up. It’s not relevant to the limitations of time we’ve got today.

BOURBAN: We’ll take as much time as needed. We’re going to do this right.

SPRINGER: As long as you factor in that I’ll need to stay after—on a Sunday, no less—to post a message to the community to stay away tomorrow, then another draft to explain what had happened, and—the tricky part—why.

BOURBAN: If you’re not up to that, I will.

PORTER: Yes, seeing that time is of the essence, let’s get started.

SPRINGER: Well, where are the actors? We can’t plan without them.

PORTER: The actors? It’s us, really—

SPRINGER: No, I mean the the ones who’ll play the terrorists.

PORTER: They’re, um, not available today.

SPRINGER: What? Are you kidding?

BOURBAN: Yes, I also assumed they’d be here, at least to understand what’s on or off the table in terms of a simulation—

BREAM: If I may, sir. (turning to PORTER, who nods his head, then to BOURBAN) I wasn’t here for last week’s visit, and while I can’t speak for the actors, there may be some advantage to their element of surprise tomorrow—

SPRINGER: their element, or ours?

BREAM: both, I suppose. We’re using blanks in our firearms and only smoke canisters which—we checked with the fire department—won’t set off alarms.

SPRINGER: Speaking of them, they also have a role tomorrow—why aren’t they here?

BOURBAN: Budget, Mary-Alice. We could afford them once, not twice.

PORTER: And we sorta represent their interest in this anyway. They’re aware of what to do.

BREAM: And that awareness is trained for in such simulations throughout our periodical reviews. The fact is, simulations cannot be over-prepared in the sense that everyone must react beyond the makings of a script, deal with the unexpected—

PORTER: That’s the ‘chaos theory’ you talked about, Jim.

BOURBAN: Well, I..

SPRINGER: I have to bring the chaos to some reasonable explanation before Tuesday morning, so—script or no script—we gotta have some plan, like when the show is over, arrests made or terrorists go charging through the community, kids collapsing in the aftermath, stuff that really underscores an event like this is never truly ‘over’.

GREEN: Yes, the nurses’ office would be overwhelmed—

DOSTUNE: counselors, too.

BREAM: That’s well said. We’ll establish a series of gradual stoppages to ensure we respect that need to transition.

BOURBAN: Maybe pray for heavy snow to close us down on Tuesday! Would buy some time, anyway.

PORTER: So, as time is of the essence—

SPRINGER: déjà vu.

PORTER: Let’s establish how we’ll find the place and who’ll do what. And speaking of ‘what’, what’s that sound coming down from that way?

SPRINGER: Jazz Band. I gave them permission to practice.

BOURBAN: Huh? This was supposed to be a confidential meeting!

SPRINGER: You can face the fury of Lou Vestral—I’ve got enough to do today.

BOURBAN marches down that hallway while PORTER points BREAM, MARROT and SIMMONS to pair up with SPRINGER, DOSTUNE and GREEN. They point at phrasing on their clipboards and directions spanning from the common area. Just as they are about to disperse, VESTRAL stomps in, a stride ahead of BOURBAN.

VESTRAL: This is outrageous! I’m not having my kids leave when they rearranged their schedules—

BOURBAN: Lou, like I said, this exercise trumps our individual schedules—

VESTRAL: Trumps goin’ to church as well, I see. We’ve practiced most Saturdays for 15 years ’til yesterday’s unannounced closure. Know some pretty pissed off basketball players, too.

SPRINGER: I didn’t know about them.

DOSTUNE: Was Billy Urskine among them?

VESTRAL: I think. Not sure.

DOSTUNE: He’s under temporary suspension, so…

VESTRAL: Is that what this is about? We weren’t even part of that fracas Thursday night—

PORTER: No, this is unrelated. We’re just doing…

BOURBAN: a routine protocol, Lou, that you cannot question or undermine. I’m sorry if communications were conflicting—

SPRINGER: I was told, Jim, to close up the school on Saturday; no one told me we’d have the same prohibition of entry today.

BOURBAN: But nothing goes on here on Sunday, especially Sunday mornings.

VESTRAL: ’cause we all should be at church!

GREEN: I go on Saturdays, by the way. Just saying.

DOSTUNE: Mine would be Fridays! Haven’t seen that prospect for a while.

PORTER: Listen, I think we’re fine if your kids stay in the band room. May give us a sense of realism, anyway.

VESTRAL: Realism for what?

BOURBAN: (sighing) Lou, you got your permission—let me walk you slowly back.

SPRINGER: And that’s how Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday is gonna go. Any volunteers to walk each member of the school community slowly back?

BREAM: I can be available. We’ll be debriefing through the week at any rate, and, I agree: we need to take the pulse of the community.

MARROT: I’m confused. No one’s supposed to know what’s going to go on—only us and those actors.

DOSTUNE: People will see vehicles pull up—

PORTER: Without sirens, they’ve been instructed.

DOSTUNE: But simulated gunfire. I know that would set in motion a mobile-phone freak-out.

PORTER: We could put on the cordons ‘simulation—do not interfere’…

BREAM: That would help…

SPRINGER: Unless real terrorists would want it to look that way.

MARROT: Huh?

PORTER: We’ll figure that out in due time.

SPRINGER: which is of the essence.

IVii: that afternoon, in SPRINGER’S office. DOSTUNE and GREEN sit at the small, round conference table and work off of a single laptop. SPRINGER stands behind her desk looking out the window, twirling the phone cord with her left hand and pressing the receiver against her ear with her right shoulder. In her right hand is sheaf of papers she’s able to thumb through like a deck of cards. Though the office is open, SIMMONS knocks obliquely, not to look in or be seen until called.

SPRINGER: (turning, still giving the phone a few more rings) Yes?

SIMMONS: May I come in?

SPRINGER: Certainly. Always when it’s open door.

DOSTUNE: An underused provision, in my experience.

SIMMONS: Thanks. I just—oh, sorry, I’ll wait.

SPRINGER: (hanging up the phone) No need… No answer.

DOSTUNE: If I may ask, was that to any news affiliate? Because we probably should troubleshoot any reporters passing through…

SPRINGER: No, and while that’s a consideration, I assume the PD would handle that prospect… Would you happen to know that, Sharon?

SIMMONS: Uh, well, um… I could run and ask the chief—he’s just been called and sent me to say they’d—well, we all would—be here 10am, as planned.

SPRINGER: Thought it was an hour earlier… That’s why I’m trying to get the actors’ guild on the phone and in the frickin’ loop.

GREEN: Sunday’s popular for shows—I bet most are putting on their stage face.

DOSTUNE: Funny to think about, going from role to role like a masquerade party.

SPRINGER: When was the last time you been to one of those?

DOSTUNE: Never. Though I saw the tragic equivalent in Afghanistan, brothers fighting brothers for betraying their brothers… I was just a kid when the Mujahideen were returning from the mountains, some to gravitate to Taliban groups, some to vie for university, some to harvest heroin, some to miss the Soviets…

GREEN: That must have been tough.

SPRINGER: Tougher than this week, to put it into necessary perspective.

DOSTUNE: Well, I don’t preach relativism, really; the life of anyone who suffers in our midst is always job number one.

SPRINGER: Agreed. And that’s what’s missing in my mindset right now. No one—maybe besides me, at the risk of self-pity—is suffering in this simulation, but it’s all about suffering to the extreme. I agree with what Petra said earlier: the aftermath is usually worse than the shock. And lock-down by lock-down we develop a weird sort of ‘before-math’, the looming of monsters yet (and maybe sure) to come.

DOSTUNE: Do you believe that?

SPRINGER: Do I have to?

DOSTUNE: Well, just that you’re the principal. Your beliefs have influence.

SPRINGER: I’m principally a witness of a thousand strands of process. What I do is watch how learning is or isn’t taking root, and maybe then I exert some influence. But again, no self-pity shall come forth! I know I’m grousing about all this too much, but I’m loath to tick it off a chart of protocols that demand some evidence of preparation—

GREEN: Nurses do that all the time. Preventative care and first-aid training—

SPRINGER: Yes, you’re right. Again, I shouldn’t grouse. This does matter in ways I’m not projecting well. We don’t prepare enough for Code Green, for instance.

GREEN: Me?

SPRINGER: (smiling somewhat) Code Petra, I’d call you, and that is as bedside manner as what I meant by Code Green.

DOSTUNE: Agreed. We also don’t prepare very well for Code Blue.

SIMMONS: They’re calling this thing at the station Codex Orange. As a fan of autumn leaves and pumpkins, I’d like to think that color is not a threat.

DOSTUNE: Some say someday we’ll be color-blind. I think that’s code for ‘not so prejudiced’.

SPRINGER: ‘Someday’ is beyond the purview of this work-week.

GREEN: We’ll let you get at it. You picking up dinner, Helmand?

DOSTUNE: (closing the laptop and blowing out his cheeks) A last supper of sorts? Just fooling. Mary-Alice, care to join us?

SPRINGER: I’ll need to be here for a while. Thanks, though.

DOSTUNE and GREEN exit. SIMMONS waves their invite off and, still standing in the same spot, looks around the office.

SPRINGER: (dialing the phone again) Have a seat.

SIMMONS: I didn’t mean to stay.

SPRINGER: Well, you’re welcome to.

SIMMONS: I just thought you might want a reader for what you said you need to draft…

SPRINGER: That’s nice, if not as Porter’s spy—

SIMMONS: Of course not. We both have clownish bosses—

SPRINGER: As a spy might say… (puts down the phone and smiles) Kidding! I’d love an audience for this thing. And my clownish boss, for one thing, reads between my lines, so I’d like you to imagine him doing that.

SIMMONS: In his underwear?

SPRINGER: What?!

SIMMONS: (blushing) Stupid way to say: reading privately or in public?

SPRINGER: Both. And forget about his underwear.

SIMMONS: Roger that.

SPRINGER: So, here goes. This is the easier one, which says what’s basically going on.

SIMMONS: Shoot. –so to speak…

SPRINGER: ‘Dear Golden Valley Community, as is vigilant and responsible in the operations of schools across the country, we at GVHS will conduct a closed lock-down drill on Monday, February 15, 2010. This day has been selected for its absence of students (Presidents’ Day is a natural holiday) and there will be no students or other community members on campus. GVHS is working closely with Golden Valley authorities—especially the Police Department—and therefore will appreciate your respect for this to be a completely closed exercise.’ End of paragraph.

SIMMONS: paragraph? How long do you intend?

SPRINGER: I have another to follow, but why—too wordy so far?

SIMMONS: No, it serves its purpose. And there’s nothing controversial—

SPRINGER: Well, that’s waiting in the next few lines.

SIMMONS: Ok, but for which audience? I think most would be fine with what you’ve just read.

SPRINGER: Paragraph two, maybe just for me: ‘As an administration we take the extenuating circumstances of our work very seriously. The decision—

SIMMONS: Wait, ‘extenuating’?

SPRINGER: Yes? too intrusive?

SIMMONS: I don’t know… read on.

SPRINGER: ‘The decision to post rather late notice of this drill is due to several factors. Lock-downs by definition are spontaneous and thus need to be practiced as such. The fact that this is only a drill does not mollify the real threats that necessitate our preparedness, and that conversation needs to follow. We ask your patience and cooperation as we attend these tandem needs: to be prepared and to be open about all concerns. Sincerely, Mary-Alice Springer, blah, blah’… So?

SIMMONS: So? it sounds right to me.

SPRINGER: ‘mollify the real threats’?

SIMMONS: It’ll help them study for their SATs.

SPRINGER: This if for the parents, really, and they’re long done with SATs.

SIMMONS: What’s your true worry about Dr Bourban?

SPRINGER: Do I know you well enough?

SIMMONS: Sorry, I shouldn’t put it that way.

SPRINGER: I like you more than know you. And vice versa with Jim.

SIMMONS: Is he a divide-and-conquer guy?

SPRINGER: Yes, and a faux-uniter. He wants a community in lock-step, especially on things like lock-downs. He speaks for safe zones and space to learn—and who can argue otherwise—and closes doors to questions of the same. We all have working definitions of the things we believe in—that was Helmand’s probe a little while ago—and to say we wear a common hat is, well, to deny we spend our most profound moments in our underwear. Maybe I should rephrase that: ‘we wear a common underwear’—

SIMMONS: but that’s not true, either. You could add a third paragraph on that.

SPRINGER: How we regard our underwear?

SIMMONS: Yes, our common underwear.

SPRINGER: You’re right, I don’t know you well enough.

SIMMONS: I should go.

SPRINGER: You can stay if you want.

SIMMONS: I’m a bit surprised they haven’t clued me into what they’re responding to—

SPRINGER: Why didn’t you go with?

SIMMONS: I’m off-duty, technically—shouldn’t have even come in uniform. Plus, Phil wanted me to tell you why he and Gus skipped out so fast.

SPRINGER: Did they look nervous.

SIMMONS: Not particularly. Why?

SPRINGER: I wonder how everyone will look tomorrow.

SIMMONS: Including yourself?

SPRINGER: Naturally. I’m fairly self-absorbed.

SIMMONS: No, you seem to care for far more than yourself. Your second paragraph attests to that: instead of covering your ass, as any of us do, you’re sticking your neck out to see what else is there.

SPRINGER: I’m hitting send with that endorsement of my vulnerability. School website, (tapping her keyboard dramatically) do your best and worst!

SIMMONS: See? Catharsis. 

SPRINGER: You’re right. We’re in some kind of theatre. Or intermission thereof.

SIMMONS: So let’s split. I’ll treat you to a last supper.

SPRINGER: That’s plagiarism!

SIMMONS: Par for the course.

IViii: later that evening, atop the school. ONAIWAH and BARNADINE sit before a bunsen burner under a grill of something apparently they’ll eat. The attic space is dark, despite the two utility lamps hang at helpful spots between the rafters.

ONAIWAH: Think it’s safe to burrow for more stuff?

BARNADINE: Don’ know, Missus Barnadine—it sounded active for a Sunday afternoon.

ONAIWAH: You haven’ married me yet, buster. And even if you had, what makes you so sure I’d take your ’perialist name?

BARNADINE: Imperialis’, I think you mean.

ONAIWAH: What I mean is you ain’t indigenous for me to go changing names.

BARNADINE: So I should be Mr Onaiwah if this is s’posed to work out?

ONAIWAH: You said it, not me. Couldn’t hurt, though.

BARNADINE: Anyway, back to the burrowin’—which can’t be too often, understand—it seems we’ll have a free day tomorrow due to the holiday.

ONAIWAH: Which one’s that?

BARNADINE: Presidents’ Day—Lincoln, Washington and th’ like.

ONAIWAH: Who likes ’em?

BARNADINE: All of us should. ’Specially if we put on a show to tha’ effect. When we was kids it was only them two founding fathers—

ONAIWAH: Lincoln came after them—

BARNADINE: Yeah, I think that’s true, but anyway, Congress had the brainy idea to smash ’em together as one—less days off of school, more presidents to bow down to!

ONAIWAH: Including Obama?

BARNADINE: Rather him than some others. He’s working on our health care—

ONAIWAH: Believe it when I see it. Meanwhile, flip those grits ’fore they catch on fire.

BARNADINE: Wonder if anyone in this town is gonna do anything holiday-like.

ONAIWAH: Meaning what?

BARNADINE: Well, Sister Kenny and charity campaigns may do what they’ll do, and kids will sleep in an’ celebrate the lack o’ chemistry tests and such. But wha’ else? What makes a holiday in this grand country o’ ours, anyway?

ONAIWAH: Consciousnes’—or the chance of it.

BARNADINE: So, I’m the average joe and tomorrow I wake up more conscious of our presidents?

ONAIWAH: Better than waking up to middl’v th’ night knocks on your door.

BARNADINE: Amen to that! But you and me had lots of them such midnight knocks.

ONAIWAH: ’cause we break the white mens’ law, dumbshit!

BARNADINE: An’ how’s that relate to Presidents’ Day?

ONAIWAH: They all sign the laws.

BARNADINE: Obama’s not white, though. What d’ya call what he signs?

ONAIWAH: I call it ‘wait an’ see’. So tha’s my consciousness as today becomes tomorrow.

BARNADINE: Fair enough. These look ready now. Where did you say you got ’em?

ONAIWAH: Kitchen recycle. Still fresh.

BARNADINE: I don’ know—that’s a couple days ago.

ONAIWAH: Well, what did you bring home las’ night? All day pissin’ around, getting punch’ out at the park, found yourself a bottle though—

BARNADINE: which you’ve drunk half-way through.

ONAIWAH: What else I’m s’pose to do? Bake like Dolly Madison?

BARNADINE: Who’s that?

ONAIWAH: President wife.

BARNADINE: Obama’s?

ONAIWAH: No, but I hear she’s all into home-grown food.

BARNADINE: Maybe we should start a garden up here…

ONAIWAH: Under these lamps? Marijuana, mos’ likely.

BARNADINE: Let’s just see.

ONAIWAH: You wanna journey down? Maybe break into the vending machine?

BARNADINE: That would blow our cover, probably. I’ll risk this cuisine an’ sleep on it tonight. Tomorrow should be chance enough to explore what’s down there.

ONAIWAH: Thanks to Presidents’ Day.

BARNADINE: and to their wives.

ONAIWAH: I think you’re tryin’ to be romantic.

BARNADINE: We all sure need our holidays. And ways to keep our nose clean.

ONAIWAH: You still worried ’bout your nose?

BARNADINE: Took a beating yesterday. But no, not worried ’bout it being broke.

ONAIWAH: Just about it stayin’ clean.

BARNADINE: Rel’tively speaking. I like this place too much to see us booted out too soon.

ONAIWAH: Oh, I see. I promise I won’t sneak down to the vending machines.

BARNADINE: I’d understand—it’s freedom to enjoy a midnight snack…

ONAIWAH: But not if a midnight knock would follow.

BARNADINE: Pass me tha’ bottle, Missus Barnadine. I got a palate now for what we cooked.

ONAIWAH: Shouldn’ we say grace?

BARNADINE: To Greater-than-all-Presidents, thank you for this place!

ONAIWAH: Hal’luja to that.

IViv: the following morning, just before 8, eerily quiet for a Monday at school. DOSTUNE parks his car and heads toward the main entrance, the key to open it in hand. As he approaches, URSKINE slides out from behind a shrub, not at first catching DOSTUNE’s attention. Just as the door clicks open he dashes to ensure he’ll get in with his counselor.

DOSTUNE: Billy! It’s a day off, you must know.

URSKINE: Just get in.

DOSTUNE: Well, I can’t just—

URSKINE: You will or I’ll blow your balls off.

DOSTUNE: What? (noticing what may be a gun in URSKINE’S jacket) Ok, don’t push—let’s get inside as safe as should be.

URSKINE: Lock it up, just like you’re supposed to.

DOSTUNE complies, turns to URSKINE and shrugs, with keys hanging from his left index finger. URSKINE doesn’t take them and instead pushes DOSTUNE into the common area.

DOSTUNE: Where to, chief?

URSKINE: I wouldn’t lip off to a desperate guy with a gun.

DOSTUNE: Well, Billy, my whole career is about getting through desperation—positively, of course—and

URSKINE: Shut up! This isn’t your appointment to define.

DOSTUNE: Ok, I’m just trying to keep in character.

URSKINE: What’s that supposed to mean?

DOSTUNE: Nothing evasive. I’m the same Mr Dostune you’ve known for a couple years. I can’t say this is a pleasant way to come to work, but I’m ready to help you, come what may.

URSKINE: That’s awfully confident—pretty cavalier, in fact. So help will happen, come what may.

DOSTUNE: That’s what I said. And that’s what I mean.

URSKINE: Horton the Elephant, laying an egg.

DOSTUNE: Pardon?

URSKINE: Missed that, huh? Don’t have books in Afghanistan?

DOSTUNE: Not many anymore,…sadly. Can you tell me about this elephant?

URSKINE: For fuck’s sake, open your office—that’s stop number one.

DOSTUNE: And number two?

URSKINE: Depends on how you do. Incentives, see?

DOSTUNE: Ok. So this might be the time to ask: how do I know what’s in your jacket isn’t a squirt gun or only your hand?

URSKINE: Not going to do anything in front of surveillance cameras. But you gotta know how concealed carry works.

DOSTUNE: I do. I’ve been in your shoes before.

URSKINE: I don’t buy that. Just open the door and don’t do anything rash.

DOSTUNE: Ok, we’re in.

URSKINE (removing a Rugar from his pocket) Get over to that chair—not near your desk; I know you got a crisis button under there.

DOSTUNE: That is true, Billy, because it’s my job to help in crisis.

URSKINE: Or in my case, to help make the crisis.

DOSTUNE: If you’re talking about the temporary suspension from the team—

URSKINE: I’m talking about losing the whole house—you know the track record for suspended recruits!

DOSTUNE: I know that a drawn gun cannot help you in the least.

URSKINE: Unless that drawn gun convinces you to erase what you put in my file.

DOSTUNE: I haven’t put anything in your file, Billy.

URSKINE: Bullshit.

DOSTUNE: Not your university application file, at least. That’s easy enough to prove if you’ll let me.

URSKINE: I got a scout or two or three comin’ to every game now. What they know about me being suspended is much bigger than general applications.

DOSTUNE: Ok, so what do you want me to do. Talk to those scouts?

URSKINE: No—the opposite. I want you to go into the database and remove evidence of my suspension. Then tell Serentino you’ve seen the light—

DOSTUNE: I’ve seen the light?

URSKINE: You’ve seen that I’ve seen the light—whatever works. Make this suspension disappear and never mention it to anyone.

DOSTUNE: Bill, that’s a really trusting proposition. You’d watch me tap onto some ‘database’—whatever you have in mind for that—and assume that, poof, what people already know won’t question it.

URSKINE: They aren’t the issue—you are. You pulled me outta class and got that wheel rolling. Nobody else did—not even the cops.

DOSTUNE: So I keep my mouth shut, you keep playing for the scouts, the scholarship comes and you’ll never worry if I’ll spill the beans.

URSKINE: It wouldn’t matter at a certain point. I could kill you anytime I want, with various levels of satisfaction or return. I could wonder if you’d blackmail me like some jihadist—

DOSTUNE: jihadist? You really don’t know what you’re doing here, do you. While your plan hasn’t made any sense, at least I respect what has passed for your intelligence—

URSKINE: Shut up! Open your damn computer—stand as far from it as you can and make sure nothing touches underneath.

DOSTUNE: (heaving a sigh and moving lethargically) I assure you I won’t make any moves to that crisis button—

URSKINE: Just focus on what exactly you need to type in—

DOSTUNE: —not that anyone else is here to respond to a crisis call.

URSKINE: Oh, I know there’ll be people here. I’ve figured out the rabbit-in-the-hat.

DOSTUNE: What? It’s not rational what you are—

URSKINE: Just focus on the screen. Slowly click which icon you need.

DOSTUNE: (pointing) This one.

URSKINE: Don’t point and don’t talk. Just fill the fuckin’ password and get to where you need to change my status. Go faster!

DOSTUNE: I can’t go faster than the speed of light, or whatever drives the internet. (He clicks several screens and scrolls to what indeed is a message box in URSKINE’s student record. ‘Temporary suspension from extracurriculars for disorderly conduct as a spectator of a home basketball game, 02.11.10; reinstatement pending review. HD, 02.12.10’ highlighted and deleted.) Shall I log out?

URSKINE: Yes, and shut down. Good. Now move slowly away from the desk and over here.

DOSTUNE: What, you’re going to shoot me now? As if that tiny sentence weighs heavier than murder?

URSKINE: I already told you: I can kill you anytime I want. It aint for you to say. And as agreed, you will not say anything about this to anyone.

DOSTUNE: So, you’ll leave me and let me return to what I planned to do today?

URSKINE: Not exactly. Give me your keys and move where I direct you. Also, fork up your mobile phone.

DOSTUNE: And my wallet? my watch and gold teeth?

URSKINE: Just move it without another word. I think you know the day is on a hair-trigger.

DOSTUNE starts to respond but thinks better of it, then walks out of his office down the hallway URSKINE prods him. A rattle of a door from the common area cause them both to look that way before URSKINE forces their scurry in the opposite direction.

Vi: immediately after, SPRINGER leads PORTER, MARROT, SIMMONS, VAN ERDAL and RACINE into the common area. They look around as if unfamiliar, though nothing of the scene has changed in the fifteen hours that most of them had last seen it. The dim lights in the trophy case are on; the hallways remain darker than the common area, which benefits from numerous windows.

MARROT: Should we turn on the lights?

PORTER: I kind of think ‘no’, at least not until the actors come.

SPRINGER: Did you get a hold of them? I tried for hours last night…

PORTER: Left ’em a message, ’cause they weren’t responding to my calls either. So the reply was—

SPRINGER: —and from whom, by the way? I never got a name beyond Twin Cities Actors’ Guild, ltd.

PORTER: me neither. That maybe fits their message—let’s see… (getting out his phone, and scrolling) Ok, so after I texted them to get in touch, it says here ‘we’ll be there without fail, full regalia. in the spirit of the event, we’ll operate unannounced. yours, Phantom Crue’—looks like they spelled themselves wrong… Shouldn’t that be an ‘F’?

SPRINGER: Is this all you’ve heard? Call ’em again right now—we need to coordinate with them who will play victims, terrorists, how we’re supposed to negotiate an end game, all that.

VAN ERDAL: Maybe don’t even call it a game—that may supply their own agenda…

RACINE: And, so what is our agenda exactly? We technically would be off campus when things went down.

PORTER: True, that. I had it in mind that we’d meet the actors, have them set up, plan their…terrorism, without our full knowledge of course—

MARROT: sorta like a football huddle—

PORTER: yeah, you could say that, and then we’d exit for a while ’til the school—that would be you—

SPRINGER: Unless I’d be tied up and gagged…

PORTER: granted, but someone would alert us to approach, secure, engage as necessary.

SIMMONS: and negotiate, I thought you said.

PORTER: Yes—all that we reviewed in summer and over the past week.

VAN ERDAL: Spot on. We’re ready.

MARROT: Wish the actors were here already—would like to get the show on the road.

PORTER: Just take it easy—we have all day if needed.

SIMMONS: Unless another, actual call comes in. What was it last night, anyway?

PORTER: Suicide attempt. Talked him down.

RACINE: Really? Where, and for how long?

Pounding from the main doors cause them to turn around. SPRINGER recognizes QUAMME, TILLINGER, KING and TATE.

SPRINGER: Closed today—no exce—

QUAMME: (panicking) We need to know where Billy is! Please open up!

VAN ERDAL: These the Phantom Crew?

MARROT: I play basketball with two of ’em. And ‘Billy’ rings a bell.

SPRINGER: (opening up and allowing them to pour in) Billy isn’t here. No one is—the campus is closed for a security protocol.

TILLINGER: We know—we saw the notice from the website—

SPRINGER: surprised you’d check; I drafted it for parents, mostly.

QUAMME: Most of us get RSSed, and Billy must’ve too, ’cause he posted something scary on Facebook—

SPRINGER: Wait—have you checked if he’s at home?

QUAMME:  Yeah—he’s not. His mom didn’t know where he was—

SPRINGER: Last night or this morning?

QUAMME: He posted at midnight or something—I only woke up to it and called Becky and—

SPRINGER: What exactly did he write?

QUAMME: I…can’t…

TILLINGER: ‘The school is gonna explode tomorrow’ and ‘good riddance’ and stuff like that!

PORTER: Is this a real account, young lady—you’re not putting us on?

QUAMME: (sobbing) No-oo!

SPRINGER: We need to get the counselor involved. (searching for DOSTUNE’s contact on her phone) Sharon, could you run to see if he’s in his office—you remember where it is?

SIMMONS: You bet. (runs down that corridor)

SPRINGER: Tracy, why don’t you go into my office, relax a bit—we’ll sort this out. (puts the phone to her ear, then announcing generally) Well, it’s ringing… Becky, you want to go with her? (to the phone, in a hush) Pick it up, will ya?

PORTER: Anything I could do?

SIMMONS: (returning from the corridor) He’s not in his office—it’s all dark.

SPRINGER: And—that’s odd—his phone stopped mid-ring. I thought he had an answering service.

From another corridor, just as dark, the sound of broken glass causes all of them to turn. As MARROT and VAN ERDAL start to run that way, the latter unbuttoning his holster, a similar sound from the direct opposite corridor, toward SPRINGER’s office, causes everyone to freeze.

TATE: What the fuck is going on?

PORTER: The simulation must have commenced—Tim, I need you to come with me this way, Claude and Gus, go as you were.

SIMMONS: I’ll stay central.

PORTER: Check that.

SPRINGER: I really can’t have students here if this is what your operation entails.

KING: We’ll take Tracy and Becky back if—

An apparent explosion from MARROT and VAN ERDAL’s side causes KING, TATE, SPRINGER and SIMMONS to duck and cover their heads. RACINE runs from the other side and across, pressing into his epaulette radio a call for backup, 10-80. Like clockwork, another explosion sounds from the corridor he had left, causing him to slide and join SPRINGER in a dash toward her office. They’re met by PORTER, TILLINGER and QUAMME who push them back to the common area, where everyone huddles within the linoleum circle of the school seal. There are no more explosions or broken glass, or any other sound for the minute of their collective held breath. PORTER motions a need to check on the status of MARROT and VAN ERDAL, who at that very moment emerge, gingerly.

MARROT: (in a whisper) Nothing really there, chief. I think this is a smoke-and-mirrors trick.

PORTER: (also in a whisper) What d’ya mean?

MARROT: Explosions seems a ploy to get us disoriented. Like phantoms, as they said.

SPRINGER: I gotta get more support than this…

PORTER: I thought you said you wanted people out—

SPRINGER: I don’t have any more idea than you, evidently, on moving anyone in any direction. What I do want is professional support. (dialing a number, and crouching further to speak discretely)

SIMMONS: Simulation or not, we gotta get these students out.

TATE: 10-4 that, lady. This is not what I bargained for.

KING: We came here to advocate for Billy, you selfish turd.

QUAMME: (still sobbing, if mutedly) If I could.. just talk to him…

TILLINGER: You’ll stay here with us—he can talk from whatever dark zone he’s put himself in.

QUAMME: Go to hell, Becky, you vamp. He needs me, not ‘us’…

TILLINGER: Tracy—

QUAMME: You jockish sense of heroism is what prob’ly pushed him to this mess!

MARROT: Girls, pipe down.

QUAMME: Fuck you, Fuzz!

SPRINGER: (lifting her head from the phone) None of that—I still hold court here.

PORTER: Technically, I’m ranking officer here, and I agree—(through his teeth) let’s all behave!

TATE: Those who’re making the explosions seem most in charge…

KING: (whacking him, and also through her teeth) Gavin!

PORTER: You said you got more support on the way?

SPRINGER: Do you?

SIMMONS: We need the fire department anyway, for those blasts—

MARROT: But as I said, they were smoke-bombs to deceive—

SPRINGER: Call them anyway—Sharon’s right: we gotta have more outside help. And—

Two shots fire from far down the middle corridor. The echo pulls them in like a lasso and hovers before a the rattle of machine-gun fire from the other corridors, in near perfect orchestration. A minute passes ominously with no sounds of reloading, as if were a patient jungle cat.

QUAMME: (whimpering) This can’t be Billy…

SPRINGER: (clasping QUAMME close to her, mumbling into her hair) It’s simulation.

TATE: Swear to God?

SPRINGER: (breathing out and looking to the darkness) Where the hell is Helmand?

Vii: soonafter, with regular rounds of explosions and gunfire from all around the school. ONAIWAH and BARNADINE embrace each other in the attic. Just one utility lamp is plugged on but not hung up, so the light barely casts from the floor boards.

BARNADINE: If there was only voices from a crowd, I believe this’d be a Presidents’ Day cel’bration.

ONAIWAH: I don’t hear nobody cheerin’ or crying out or nothin’. It’s spooky.

BARNADINE: Maybe they’re tryin’ to fish us out—some psychologic warfare…

ONAIWAH: I don’ think nobody cares that much ’bout us. Get us out to push us where?

BARNADINE: Jus’ push us around. Like we’re shuffleboard.

ONAIWAH: Better that than a dartboard.

Explosion, this time followed by vague voices shouting for an end. Gunfire answers and a tumble of unknown movement seems to intensify the battle. Sirens harmonize at distance and gradually add to the cacophony.

BARNADINE: They’re gonna come up here from the outside.

ONAIWAH: How can you be sure?

BARNADINE: Tha’s what SWAT teams do, an’ we’re gonna be firs’ in their sites!

ONAIWAH: Jus’ surrender, then—we don’ wanna fight.

BARNADINE: No, but we’re not the guys they’re after, either. Hear that? I think there’s more folks in trouble down there than’re perpetratin’.

ONAIWAH: So you s’pose givin’ ’em company’s gonna help us all out?

BARNADINE: I s’pose stayin’ put is gonna be more dangerous, like we’re hidin’ out.

ONAIWAH: Well, tha’s exactly what is. The good hide from the bad—

BARNADINE: But SWAT’ll say we’re waitin’ for an ambush. I jammin’ this board ’gainst the door to slow ’em down, and sugges’ we descend the ceiling hole—

ONAIWAH: Into all that shootin’?

BARNADINE: Maybe we can get the good ones in here—at leas’ that gives us safety i’ numbers.

ONAIWAH: Well then I’ll wait up here, throw the rope down for you.

BARNADINE: Keep the lamp off, and hide more in the corner. You know my whistle if I need the hatch.

ONAIWAH: A foolish lack o’ plan, this—

BARNADINE: like any day we manage thus far.

He opens the square and throws through the knotted rope they’ve tied to a beam. Descends and blows a kiss above before ONAIWAH gathers back the rope and closes herself in; BARNADINE looks to both ends of the corridor he’s reconnoitered before. He slinks from classroom door to classroom door, and down a stairway where he stops short but cannot evade a similarly slinking TIOSOOK. They stare each other down and slowly come together.

TIOSOOK: (almost noiselessly) Are you part of this operation? It’s incredibly realistic.

BARNADINE: (nonplussed, answering almost as quietly) Uh..m, that could be…, ’pending on wha’ you mean by ‘part’—

TIOSOOK: means you’ve got a role to play? I see cops and students but haven’t yet detected who’s behind the fireworks…

BARNADINE: So they are fireworks!

TIOSOOK: Gotta be! what’dya think? And who exactly are you?

BARNADINE: I’m uh, the watchman—one of ’em, least.

TIOSOOK: Nightwatch? 

BARNADINE: Shifts vary. Night turns into day.

TIOSOOK: That it does. Say, listen to those sirens—I was lucky to get in before they came.

BARNADINE: So you’re not authorize’?

TIOSOOK: No, no—don’t get me wrong. (elbowing him lightly) Wouldn’t want you to turn me in! Truth is I’m on the school board, so when we planned this thing some months ago, I thought it good to give it an audit—unannounced, naturally.

BARNADINE: Sounds reasonable. But some of them explosions seem over th’ top.

TIOSOOK: I’m really impressed. From a handful of resources they got everybody on their toes. Well, you and me, too—they forced us to find our own shadows and pray Almighty not get caught.

BARNADINE: Technic’ly we caught each other, could turn ourselves in.

TIOSOOK: (elbowing him again) That we could. Say, since you’re a known entity round here, why don’t you simulate in your own right and march me to the cops—that would fit your job description.

BARNADINE: We’d get caught in the crossfire—

TIOSOOK: It’s not live! All blanks, as agreed.

BARNADINE: Awfully realistic.

TIOSOOK: Damn straight. Now—should I resist or…

VAN ERDAL: (spinning the corner with his handgun levelled at the pair) Down! On the floor, hands spread—now!

TIOSOOK: (shaken, but smiling) You got us—well played.

VAN ERDAL: (into his radio) Tim, give me backup second floor stairwell west side. I got two of ’em and wouldn’t you know it’s that old drunk vagrant again—

BARNADINE: You got witness here to brutality—

VAN ERDAL: Haven’t done any yet. Still thinkin’ about it.

BARNADINE: Hear that, school board guy? I think it’s time to end this ’fore it gets nasty.

TIOSOOK: I’m just—

VAN ERDAL: Shut the fuck up! You got the right to remain silent—

RACINE: (running in) Miranda? Are you simulating, or whata we got?

VAN ERDAL: Can’t you see? It’s him! The old guy we had in the clink for a day, now taking his revenge!

TIOSOOK: If I may, he’s an employee of this school, so—

VAN ERDAL: An’ who the fuck are you?

TIOSOOK: You heard him right—I am a standing school board member, the very reason you’re here today!

VAN ERDAL: Stay down on the ground. You have the right to (hearing SIMMON’s tortured voice on his radio, ‘10-54 in the boys’ locker room—assistance needed’) Holy fuck! Tim, you or me?

RACINE: You go—I know I’ll be better up here.

TIOSOOK: What’s a 10-54?

VAN ERDAL: Game over! (runs out)

Viii: at the same time, in SPRINGER’S office. URSKINE clings to QUAMME in a stomach-to-back clump in an armchair. TILLINGER kneels behind the desk, crying, and SPRINGER anchors the middle of the room, moving very slowly, if at all.

SPRINGER: He did that to you, then?

URSKINE: He did.

TILLINGER: I don’t believe it, Billy.

URSKINE: You don’t believe me?

TILLINGER: I don’t believe it.

QUAMME: Let’s just all believe, ok.

SPRINGER: Yeah, I agree with you, Tracy. Let’s be good about all this. It’s… um, it’s a good thing to…

URSKINE: Oh, cut the bullshit! The guy tried to fuck me and I wrestled away his gun, and except for those cops and firetrucks outside, I’d be in South Dakota by now—which I got every right to be, seeing how he tried to fuck me, and—

QUAMME: Billy, please, not so hard—

URSKINE: You can come with, Trace, ’cause he’d prob’ly try to fuck you too. There’s no counting on things around this place.

SPRINGER: Billy, I could help you get there. But Tracy has to—

TILLINGER: Let her go, goddammit!

QUAMME: Becky, you should just get the hell outta here.

TILLINGER: I wish I could just go home, and you also just go home—

URSKINE: Then go, then. That’s also what I’m expecting, right? So, Ms Springer, just let us get through the fuckin’ army out there—

SPRINGER: I don’t have that power, Billy. I can let you speak to your situation—that might be the best way to get out—

URSKINE: Don’t try to trick me. I came to your office as a safe zone—you can’t throw me to them wolves—

SPRINGER: True, true—that’s well put. Just let’s keep talking this out, ’cause I wasn’t trying to trick you, only trying to help. Some suggestions are, you know,

QUAMME: playin’ for time?

SPRINGER: No, well, not in any bad sense. I just—

QUAMME: hope the cops come here before Billy shoots me in the back?

TILLINGER: Oh, my God!

URSKINE: Aint nothing happening that shouldn’t, and why would I do that to the only one I love? Just get us out the fucking door, Ms Springer, so she and I can make our way—

TILLINGER: to fucking South Dakota? South Dakota State, Division II?

URSKINE: (jumping up and shaking the Ruger) That’s where you, prima dona, are gonna die!

SPRINGER: (shielding to the extent that the 10 feet between them could allow) Everyone here is gonna live—Billy, you can go this very second to South Dakota or wherever and I will absolutely walk you past anyone who’d say otherwise. I… I think that’s the..

URSKINE: You think I’m in some line that needs to go to the school library. Or maybe the gym to see a guest magician—yeah, that’s gotta be conducive to a well-rounded education. Or maybe I should see the school counselor as someone who cares about my well-being, when privately he only wants to fuck me. You still don’t believe that, do you? You still pay union dues on that one, don’t you.

SPRINGER: You’re smart enough to know, Billy, I’m not influenced by union dues.

TILLINGER: I don’t know you are smart enough—just let Tracy go!

SPRINGER: Becky, stay put please—

TILLINGER: like a puppy? or like someone’s bitch!

QUAMME: Becky! STOP! Don’t claim this like your stupid legacy—

TILLINGER: That’s exactly what Billy’s trying to do—

URSKINE: Keep talking, Becky, exactly like someone I knew just a little while ago—

SPRINGER: Really, I’ll take the pistol in my own ribs and guarantee you walk out of here—

QUAMME: It’s not about a pistol, lady…

SPRINGER: Of course it’s not, Tracy, and if you wanna go out, too, that’s all the better—come on, though, being stuck inside this office can’t being doing the exit any good.

URSKINE: Becky, you front us and tell any cops they need to go to the boys’ locker room.

SPRINGER: That’s good thinking—Becky, do that. Authorities need to get there, then we’ll all be freer.

URSKINE: Don’t be my interpreter, please—

TILLINGER: She’s your principal, and she cares—

URSKINE: Tell that to your counselor, who wants to fuck you up the ass.

SPRINGER: Becky, that’s enough—front us and tell…

URSKINE: any cops…

TILLINGER: yes, I get it: to the boys’ locker room. I’m going. Don’t shoot—

URSKINE: Don’t say that—stick to the marching order for once in your spoiled rotten life!

TILLINGER: Here I go. Boys’ locker room.

She mechanically exits, as does SPRINGER, then QUAMME and URSKINE toward the common area, vacant, to everyone’s surprise. TIOSOOK enters from another corridor, followed closely by BARNADINE and RACINE, who has his handgun drawn.

TIOSOOK: Mary-Alice! Excellent to see you, and in true leadership form—

SPRINGER: Jon? I was trying to call Lillian or Rhea, for God’s sakes—

TIOSOOK: What’s so wrong with me? Same capacity to witness, no?

URSKINE: (pointing his non-Ruger hand at BARNADINE) Is that the asshole who started this mess?

BARNADINE: (squinting, trying to process in this light) I’ve been called an asshole before, but wh—

URSKINE: (angling the Ruger to QUAMME’s head) Everyone down, except for clowny. Cop, you kick me your gun—and do it like a lawn fairy, delicate and no headgames. (RACINE, understanding, complies; URSKINE picks up and pockets RACINE’s firearm) Good. Now, clowny and Ms Springer, head me and Tracy to the door and don’t make any indications that it’s anything but a natural release from the headache this school day has become—make anyone who looks at you believe that, ’cause fucking that’s what the rest of us have had to do since we left kindergarten, fake the ‘what I learned in school today’ all the way to college applications—

SPRINGER: which I’ll endorse, Billy, as your long-term interests always are our front-and-center concern—

QUAMME: Don’t bullshit him now, of all times to—

BARNADINE: (continuing his pace, but twisting backward) Billy, your name is? and basketball your game?

URSKINE: (lifting the Ruger) Don’t you dare talk to me!

BARNADINE: (twirling an imaginary basketball) I’m only Curly Neal today—you must know that name! When you saw me last—

URSKINE: I’m warning you—

BARNADINE: I was more like Meadowlark, equally as fine, but something tells me you need dribbling today—

URSKINE: I will shoot you in the head—

BARNADINE: An’ I will take that bullet, boy, if you can break my press (he jumps away from SPRINGER’s side and corkscrews toward RACINE)—

URSKINE: (shooting three times at BARNADINE before SPRINGER wrests the Rugar from from his hand) You snakeskin Uncle Sam! You dragged us to your devil’s nest and (pulling RACINE’s handgun out to nail the coffin shut) made us mock our core beliefs—

TILLINGER: You preach it, man! Aim your message right at me!

RACINE: (sprinting at his own discharging gun) Aim it right at—

QUAMME: God, you fucking jerk, you finally—

SPRINGER: (clawing to bend URSKINE’s arm to incapacity) Tracy, pound him in!

TILLINGER: (diving) I got the other gun. Jesus, just too late! Billy, do you recognize these guys are gonna die?

Viv: the following evening, after mass. The church has a sombre feel of Tenebrae, even as Lent has yet to begin. A larger crowd than usual mumble as they lean between the pews, some hugging each other, most shaking their heads at arguments unsaid, if not unheard. FATHER FAYE makes his way from the chancel to join one group, then another, then another.

GREEN: It’s just…beyond…any—

SERENTINO: I can’t believe I was angry with him on Saturday—

FATHER FAYE: No, Anthony, it wasn’t unloving; you and Tim had a meaningful friendship. And now you have a bond beyond the confines of this world.

SERENTINO: Yeah, but I’m angry now more than before. Only my sorrow and shock are keeping me from exploding—

GREEN: Let’s not use such a term today.

FATHER FAYE: Psalms encourages us to lament—that’s the term we’ll use, and in the practice of our faith.

GREEN: Father, what is going to be the way we honor both of them?

FATHER FAYE: Prayer is boundless, Petra—and by ‘both’ I think you’re only referring to those who died—

GREEN: Yes, and that just one will have his funeral here.

SERENTINO: What else could we do as a parish? Tim was in our fold—

GREEN: I don’t disagree, Tony, but we are suffering beyond the measure of who belongs and who sort of comes along and… they come along… and (wincing, then crumbling into FATHER FAYE’s surplice)

FATHER FAYE: (embracing her) and they grace us for a while. Indeed we have a boundless fold… And a shepherd who knows each by name, lost and found and black and white…

SERENTINO: Drunk and sober, invading and inviting—

FATHER FAYE: Anthony, we need to see as Jesus sees, not as pharisees.

SERENTINO: I’m just looking at him now, standing in the shadows like it’s just another drifting day—

GREEN: (looking toward the vestibule) Do you see a ghost?

SERENTINO: One could say so.

FATHER FAYE: Go, then, in the spirit of Luke’s gospel, and greet him with ‘Peace to this house’…

SERENTINO: But that wouldn’t make sense: he’s in our house, not vice versa—

GREEN: I get your point, Father, and it’s not even that cryptic… (walking towards their focus)

SPRINGER: (incidentally, stepping out from a pew in the middle of the sanctuary) Oh, Petra, my God, how are we even here and… Goddamn!

SIMMONS: (next to her, nudging) Shh—not how it works here: ‘damn’ is not what we’re supposed to say in the name of God…

SPRINGER: (half-joking, evidently) Damn what we’re supposed to say—nothing we plan tends to work, anyway. (drawing SIMMONS in, and whispering) I’ll need a crutch these goddamn days like I’ve never needed before…

SIMMONS: (whispering as well, but aiming at GREEN as well) We’ll keep each other’s back—that’s the only rule I’ve learned to do consistently. Petra, how are you holding up?

GREEN: I’m frankly not. I come here every week and have no better way of handling—

SPRINGER: You can handle anything! That compound fracture on the football field? The girl who slit her wrists after not getting into Stanford?

SIMMONS: You saved her?

SPRINGER: Yes, she effectively did.

GREEN: I caulked it and called in time for help. Blood is not my bogeyman, so to speak; it’s imagining a soul-less aftermath, with no one really there to, well, as Sharon said, have anybody’s back. I wake up in sweat to dreams like that. It isn’t even necessarily someone I would know—I remember one dream that played out endlessly, twenty different nights, randomly: a woman in the upside of her broadcasting career—smart and pretty as any of us—sets herself behind the anchor desk and starts to read the nightly news, and—this is where I start to know in dreaming state that I am also not in any control—she plies into a rhythm. The nightly news is importantly mundane: a southside incident, Alberta Clipper coming in, and how we all at home receive it, somewhat by her tilted head and segued smile, or pursed lips as we’d all imagine. Then, suddenly, timed like a commercial break, she drops all telegenic pretense and begs what seems the cameraman or gaffer to stay calm—she’s preaching to herself, ’cause nothing on the TV screen reveals shows any effort to stay calm. And like that Pennsylvania politician shooting himself at a televised press conference, I see this anchorlady beg someone to cut away, at least, and then we see shots to her head do damage before we hear them ping, the camera goes wonky and the gasp of futility is witnessed in the seconds before it all goes to black screen…

SIMMONS: (mouthing a start, then pausing to let some seconds pass) You’ve dreamed that on twenty nights?

GREEN: Or maybe it just seems so much.

SPRINGER: (weighing extant thoughts) You take a ton onto your shoulders, Petra, as—and this will challenge my ancient merit badges at a church that wouldn’t recognize me anymore: ‘God gives us only such tests as we can handle’…

GREEN: Father Faye actually spoke on that verse a couple weeks ago, from 1^st Corinthians…

SIMMONS: See, Mary-Alice, you’re not so ancient—

GREEN: I should catch another ancient in the exodus I see happening, but quickly— (drawing near to SPRINGER) did they ever figure out this ‘Phantom Crue’?

SPRINGER: You’re asking me? or Sharon?

GREEN: Between the two of you, I guess—which side of the operation would more likely know?

SIMMONS: (blowing out abruptly) Only the phantom knows! No, that’s worse than ‘lol, jk’—forgive…

SPRINGER: Forgive what? That those actors either played it out like geniuses or like fools?

GREEN: Clarify, please.

SPRINGER: They’re virtually phoneless—maybe a faktura for their earnings will eventually draw them out of their underworld—but, likely staying to some warped script, they texted your boss, Sharon, that they got lost in traffic and regretting missing out on all the fun…

SIMMONS: (under her breath) Those motherfuckers would have watched the nightly news. And if they had a modicum of your care and courage, Petra, they would have dreamed the newsroom being attacked, and not with theatrical props, either.

GREEN: We kinda don’t talk that way in church, but… (smiling, and reaching to hug them both) I’m gonna go greet the shadows.

GREEN walks upright yet with a head cocked like a squirrel, as if the world is simultaneously in slow motion and quick to grab what any possessor has. She turns back to FATHER FAYE’s announcement, nearly spoken as an afterthought:

FATHER FAYE: (self-consciously, if still practiced for projection) Whereas we don’t have details, exactly, we invite you to attend and bless the funeral of a hero and a friend, Officer Timothy Racine, who will be laid to rest in the days to come—please check our church website, which we will update by the hour…

SPRINGER: (distantly, to nobody—not even SIMMONS, who stays by her side) which we did not at all successfully..

GREEN: (having heard FATHER FAYE’s announcement, but not having slowed down) ‘Peace to this house’…

BARNADINE: (confused, but quickly recognizing her) Yes, um…thanks; peace back at ya.

ONAIWAH: (leaning in, like SIMMONS had done a few minutes before) Say it better, Cole: ‘Peace of th’ Almighty be also with you’.

BARNADINE: I don’ think nobody’s sizing anybody’s holiness, not even here, if that makes for some irony..

GREEN: I’m glad you came. I wish I could have been there just to see how you and Tim faced—

BARNADINE: I’m no hero, Lady. I lef’ my better ha’f in the attic for the SWAT team, for heaven’s sake!

ONAIWAH: They never could get me, Cole! We all did fine the way we was. Partly thanks to this gal here, who found me and huddled in—

KING: (not wanting to be drawn into the light, if smiling instinctively) I loved the way you crashed into our school—even if it’s not my school anymore, technically—

GREEN: But it is. There’s no one more ‘Griz’ than Beth King—you’re the one who kept that halftime graceful…

BARNADINE: You was present at that hare-brained plan?

GREEN: Had to be, as nurse on staff. And wanted to as well.

ONAIWAH: But as for crashin’, we weren’t tryin’ to, um…

BARNADINE: What Terry means is… well,

KING: You guys really don’t bear any blame for the tragedy—

BARNADINE: I never fathomed a Billy before. Never thought I’d have to worry ’bout what a punk could do. How in God’s name (since I’m here) did I press his buttons an’ push him to th’ brink? He got tools enough to raise the Metrodome when it gets sunk—I’ve seen it like a diaper needin’ changing—and folks who eviden’ly loved him.

GREEN: He’ll need that love like never before, facing life in prison.

KING: Is that for certain?

GREEN: The trial will tell, but the facts are against him: he’s already 18, he’s killed a cop, and—this is key—he’s going to be charged first-degree.

KING: Because of the Facebook post?

GREEN: That certainly doesn’t help, yet Detective Bream has debunked his claim that Helmand ever had the gun, let alone laid a hand on Billy, based on forensics of both their bodies. I’m not wishing any further torments on Billy’s soul—he’s gotta have one—but heaven forbid… (closing her eyes for a momentary search) he misrepresent the goodness of my closest friend on staff.

KING: God! How could Billy think he’d make a break-away?

BARNADINE: Wish he’d woulda break’d out from the prison of his anger. There’s nothin’ wrong with teaching how to bail when bailin’s right.

ONAIWAH: You learn that in school?

BARNADINE: Yep, in Aristotle’s, walkin’ through my thoughts.

GREEN: (trying to smile) Speaking of walking, how’d the hospital get you on your feet so fast?

BARNADINE: Bullet went clean through the bottom of this shoulder. It’s sore, but nothin’ more.

ONAIWAH: An’ Obamacare hasn’ kicked in yet to give him what he should.

GREEN: You have a place to stay?

BARNADINE: Never’s been a problem—

ONAIWAH: That means not exac’ly. But Beth’s been helping...

KING: least I can do. And… (lifting her voice as SPRINGER and SIMMONS approach) maybe the school could hire you as a watchman duo.

SPRINGER: (likewise trying to smile) Assuming it’s still standing after all the dust settles, I’ll put in a word.

BARNADINE: (playing off ONAIWAH’s gleam) Very obliged. We’d do our best.

SIMMONS: And maybe coordinate our future protocols.

GREEN: And present convalescence.

                                                            Exeunt.

 Daniel Martin Vold Lamken (2017)