Scene 1: The Wedding

[ORION stands alone on an otherwise bare stage. He is dressed for a wedding, but the clothes are in a state of disarray. Tie loose, shirt unbuttoned. The overall effect misleadingly implies a walk of shame. There are stains on his sleeves that look like gold paint.]

ORION: I met the Admiral of the Ocean Sea at a wedding. I’m not going to say his name. Not here. Not yet. Macbeth doesn’t really show up for every new staging of the Scottish Play, but the Admiral is always listening and hungry for praise. I come to bury him instead. But first, the wedding!

[Every audience member has been offered a carnation. Anyone wearing that carnation has signaled their willingness to be spontaneously cast in a nonspeaking role. ORION chooses two such volunteers to stand in for SARAH and CELIA. The brides should stand upstage center, facing each other. ORION hands out wedding programs to the rest of the audience.]

Witness and celebrate the union of Sarah Levi and Celia Torres! The two of them had just graduated from our shared history department. Dr. and Mrs. Levi-Torres were already spousal hires on parallel tenure tracks at the University of Bumblefuck—which is a place that I will somehow bring myself to visit, because Celia and Sarah make all places good.

The wedding venue was an actual castle—though by “actual” I mean a bonkers fort on the Massachusetts coast built by an early twentieth-century tech bro out of European architectural salvage. Bits of castle over here, bits of cloister over there, some cathedral overhead.

Most of the wedding guests were fellow historians, and the Ren Fest levels of anachronism that surrounded us drove many to drink heavily. I love a good Renaissance Festival though. Maybe my next attempt at a PhD thesis will be a deep dive into the various definitions of historical authenticity in different communities of creative anachronism. Maybe. So far I’ve enjoyed five failed thesis attempts.

Celia wrote her thesis on eighteenth-century broadside ballads. She adapted one of them for her wedding vows. We all cried at the sound of her voice. Sarah’s thesis, by contrast, was about train cargo manifests along a short stretch of Ohio track between the years 1912 and 1914, because Sarah has the hyperfocus of ghosts counting grains of salt across a threshold. Her vows were lovely and sonnet-shaped, though.

I envied them both their commitment to everything; to each other, to their scholarship, to their entwined careers…whereas I can’t commit to a single research topic for longer than two trips to the library. It’s probably time for me to drop out, get a teaching certificate, and try to find a job in a district where high school kids are still allowed to learn history. But I don’t want to quit. Baldwin said that “American history is longer, larger, more various, more beautiful, and more terrible than anything anyone has ever said about it.” I still want to bear witness to that beauty and terror.

I also want to study bonkers anachronisms.

[The ceremony ends. ORION chooses at least six more audience members to join the brides onstage and fill out the dance floor. Everyone dances to a string quartet cover of “Rainbow Connection.”]

During the dance I heard singing. It was just a thin wisp of a voice, coming from elsewhere in the castle. No one else seemed to notice.

[Dance music crossfades to a muffled and otherworldly echo of an old sea shanty. ORION searches for the source while escorting brides and wedding guests back to their seats.]

I left the dance and went looking for that voice.

 

Scene 2: The Golden Voice

The wedding venue was both a castle and a museum, with the old tech bro’s eclectic collection still on display. Lots of tapestries. Lots and lots of swords. One of my fizzled thesis topics was about Camillo Agrippa’s sixteenth-century treatise on swordplay. The project didn’t last, but now I can say that I have a-studied my Agrippa.

[A single chair is placed upstage center. ORION selects a new volunteer to sit in this chair.]

The singing came from a skull in a glass display case. A yellowing, typewritten label said that the skull had once belonged to Rodrigo de Triana, who sailed with the Admiral aboard the Pinta in 1492. His skull had a single golden tooth.

[The seated volunteer represents the SKULL of Rodrigo de Triana.]

Queen Isabella and King Ferdinand had promised a reward of ten thousand maravedis to the first sailor who spotted land in the west. At dawn on October 12th it was this guy. Then the Admiral said, “Nope. You didn’t. I did. I saw a light four hours ago. I was the first.”

He was lying. Given the curve of the planet, the speed at which they traveled, and the time of their arrival, it is a nautical impossibility for anyone to have seen a light on that Caribbean shore four hours earlier. The Admiral lied to get paid. Not the worst thing that he ever did, but I still consider his pettiness noteworthy.

Now the skull of that same Rodrigo was singing. It sounded like a shanty. The tune had the rhythm of hauling rope and hoisting sail. I couldn’t make out the lyrics—possibly because the dialect was centuries-old Castilian—but I did hum along with the tune. Shanties are not meant to be sung alone.

I very much regret that now. The Admiral overheard us.

[ORION chooses a volunteer to play the ADMIRAL, who stands on a small platform behind the SKULL.]

He was tall. Much taller than he should have been. Seven feet at least. Possibly eight. Red hair with a shock of white at the temples. Robes that would have suited the court of Spain in 1492. Spain of the Reconquest, the Expulsion, the Expansion, and the Inquisition.

The Admiral of the Ocean Sea ignored me completely. He spoke to the skull. He called Rodrigo a treasonous coward, and then grudgingly admitted that the dead man had a golden voice. “I’ll have it now,” the Admiral said. He closed his eyes, licked his lips, and made a slurping noise like milkshake dregs surrendering to a straw.

The singing stopped. The golden tooth turned into lead. The Admiral swallowed, belched, and disappeared.

[Both SKULL and ADMIRAL are returned to the audience.]

 

Scene 3: The Age of Discovery

I had seen him once before. The same man with the same wild hair, wearing the same archaic robes. I was in fifth grade at the time, standing onstage and shouting a poem:

“My men grow mutinous day by day.

My men grow ghastly, wan, and weak.”

The stout mate thought of home. A spray

of salt wave washed his earthy cheek.

“What shall I say, brave Admiral, say,

if we sight naught but seas at dawn?”

“Why you shall say at break of day,

Sail on! Sail on! And on!”

The author of that poem, Joaquin Miller, was a gold-mining horse thief of the nineteenth century who lost his toes to frostbite. Ambrose Bierce described the man as a pathological liar: “He cannot, or will not, tell the truth.”

Mami attended our fifth-grade play about the Age of Discovery. She sat in the front row. Papi was stuck at the restaurant that night. The Admiral stole his empty seat.

[Two chairs are placed in front of the front row. A new volunteer is chosen to play MAMI. She occupies one of the chairs. The ADMIRAL takes the other.]

If you praise him, he will come. The old ghost didn’t stick around though. In the next scene, Galileo picked a fight with Pope Urban VIII (played by Jenny Lee in a fake beard and Aaron Sanchez in a massive mitre hat), but the Admiral had already vanished.

[The ADMIRAL returns to his original seat in the audience. MAMI should stay.]

Papi made up for missing the show by baking an enormous flan as an apology dessert. He made it look like a map of the globe with continents drawn in scorched sugar. I ate North America in a rush of post-performance adrenaline and threw it all up an hour later.

“Cacique” was the name of our restaurant. Mami named it. By the time I got to high school it had already ceased to exist. Papi blamed himself. He knew that he was good in the kitchen—he was the best Cuban chef north of the Malecón—but the man had no head for business.

That might be true. Papi’s unbusinesslike brain was not the reason why Cacique closed, though. But I don’t want to talk about the restaurant.

[ORION escorts MAMI to her original seat as though apologizing for bringing up the subject.]

 

Scene 4: The Library

The day after the wedding I drove back to campus and went directly to the library. Izzy—who is everyone’s favorite research librarian—was at the front desk sipping cafecito and reading about revolutions.

[ORION sets up a folding table and casts a new volunteer. IZZY sits at the table and reads.]

I didn’t know which part of the stacks to dive into, so I needed to look up call numbers—which Izzy immediately clocked as proof that I’d started a whole new project. They asked if this was Thesis Number Six. I said maybe. Possibly. Probably not, but I just saw a ghost at Celia’s wedding and now I needed to know why.

Izzy wished me luck, their voice as dry as the tongue of a mummified cat. Then I wondered out loud if this library was haunted. Izzy informed me that all libraries are haunted.

[ORION sets up a separate folding table and piles a bunch of books on top.]

I spent the whole day hunting through the haunted stacks and shelves.

No, that’s wrong. I wasn’t hunting. I went gathering through the stacks. Whenever we treat research as a hunt, seeking out a specific Questing Beast chosen in advance, we’re doing it wrong. Here’s what I gathered about the Admiral from journals, correspondence, and royal decrees:

[The scene becomes a straight-up history lesson. Thankfully ORION is a better teacher than he is a scholar. He wheels a whiteboard onstage and uses it to take notes.]

In 1485 the Not-Yet-Admiral was completely broke. He had made a small fortune sailing with slavers for the Portuguese Crown. Then he lost it all, fled arrest in Lisbon, made his way across southern Spain, and hid in a Franciscan friary overlooking the Gulf of Cadiz.

That particular friary had changed hands several times. It used to be a Moorish watchtower, a Roman temple devoted to Proserpina, and a Phoenician altar made to honor the godly Baal of Tyre. Every new wave of conquerors agreed that this was a sacred place in need of defending. Even after the Christian Reconquest it still kept its Arabic name: la Rábida. The fortress. A place that refused to erase its own history.

The Not-Yet-Admiral arrived as a fugitive. Then his fortunes made a complete one-eighty. Suddenly the guy could get anything and everything that he asked for—but only when he made those demands in person and out loud. The written word rarely worked out for him. He was a bad writer. Every scholar and royal advisor in Spain laughed at his get-rich-quick scheme to trade with China by sailing west, because he peppered it with made-up numbers and bombastic promises. (They did not laugh because they thought the world was flat. None of them thought that the world was flat. No one needed a disgraced slaver to prove that the world was not flat.)

The mockery ended when the Almost-Admiral scored a face-to-face audience with royalty. Queen Isabella and King Ferdinand heard his voice, and after that everything changed. They gave him ships, invented the rank of admiral, and offered a full pardon for any and all offenses that he might have committed in the past. Then they took the extraordinary step of granting a preemptive pardon for any crime that the new Admiral might commit in the future, while overseas. Ditto for his entire crew. He insisted on this, refusing to set sail without a get-out-of-jail-free card already in hand. Suspicious.

I’m not going to list the atrocities that he committed overseas, because we don’t have all night. I am definitely not going to bring any of you onstage to act them out. Here’s the one thing you really need to know: the Admiral of the Ocean Sea had a passionate thirst for gold.

Here’s a quote from the man himself: O, most excellent gold! Who has gold has a treasure with which he gets what he wants, imposes his will on the world.

As governor and viceroy of the newly christened island of Hispaniola, he enslaved Taíno locals and forced them to dig for gold. Slavery was illegal in Spain, and in all territories claimed by Spain, but that didn’t stop him from personally exporting enslavement to the New World. It didn’t produce enough treasure to satisfy him, though, so the Admiral instituted monthly quotas. If any islander failed to meet that quota, they lost a hand. The severed appendage was then returned to them as an ungainly necklace, which they were forced to wear.

This sort of thing exceeded Queen Isabella’s tolerance for cruelty (and she founded the Spanish Inquisition, so her tolerance was pretty high). By royal decree the Admiral was hauled back over the Atlantic in chains, his preemptive pardon be damned. Nothing stuck to him at trial, though. Instead of consequences he was granted funding for a fourth voyage to seek out more gold—and more voices anchored to that gold. The sovereigns may have been sick of their Admiral’s horrific nonsense, but they still obliged his wishes just as soon as they heard him speak.

Why? How? Did it have anything to do with slurping golden voices out of skulls?

[A cellphone chimes when ORION gets a text message.]

At that point Mami let me know that I was late for dinner.

 

Scene 5: The Family Dinner

[IZZY returns to the audience. Books are removed from the central table, which now becomes a dining room table in the Cabrera family home. ORION escorts the volunteer who plays MAMI to the table, and then chooses a PAPI.]

Every Sunday night I cook for them both. The two of them mostly eat takeout otherwise. Papi barely sets foot in the kitchen anymore. He even brews his morning cafecito on a hot plate in the bathroom.

[ORION sets the table for dinner while he talks.]

Papi had a business partner when he first set up the restaurant, and by “partner” I mean “grifter.” Tío Freddie had the hustle to make Cacique famous. Then he stole everything and sued us for financial malfeasance when the penniless place inevitably went under. Freddie subsequently skipped town while still insisting that he was the injured party, and he really seemed to believe it.

A malignant narcissist is typically bombastic, charismatic, sadistic, and aggrieved. Somehow they also find the time to nurture a persecution complex. Our Admiral whined to Queen Isabella that no man had ever suffered more than he, which is rich coming from somebody who made a habit out of lopping off other people’s hands.

I do understand that I’m implying a very shaky parallel here; settler colonialism and the founding of the transatlantic slave trade are larger crimes than ruining my family’s restaurant business. I’m just saying that I’ve learned how to spot a grifter. Papi never could. He asked me to recite the poem again on the night of the fifth-grade play, after the show and before I vomited all of that flan. “A light, a light, at last a light!” It made him cry. If Papi ever had a vision of the Admiral’s ghost, then he would fall to his knees.

[ORION sits at the table and affectionately raises a glass to his father.]

The ex-chef praised the crispiness of my tostones and then went to watch TV.

[PAPI returns to the audience.]

Mami fixed me with a look just as soon as Papi was out of the room.

“You’ve seen the Admiral,” she said.

 

Scene 6: The Reliquary

I started to answer, but she shushed me.

“Don’t say his name,” she said. “Don’t ever say his name.”

Mami led the way to her knickknack cabinet, which she kept in the tiny bedroom where her mother died.

[ORION places the knickknack shelf on top of the dining room table, which transforms it into a different piece of furniture in a different room. Relics kept on the shelf will make otherworldly noises that are impossible to script or predict. Haunted props don’t follow stage directions.]

She shut the door, lit several candles, and asked me if I knew how saints are made.

“Petition the Vatican?” I guessed, but that was the wrong thing to say. My mother proceeded to school me in post-colonial theology. Have I mentioned that she’s also an academic?

[ORION pulls the whiteboard back onstage and flips it over. Notes on the syncretic nature of Caribbean religions are already written on the back. MAMI stands in a position of authority. ORION summarizes the material like a student in an oral exam.]

She unpacked the word “saint” to encompass overlapping, overdetermined, paradoxical identities in syncretic flux and superposition, because saints are always also zemis and orishas, honored dead and undercover gods. She asked again if I knew how they were made, and this time I said no.

The most efficient method of saint-making turns out to be gold. It doesn’t rust. That’s why alchemists were obsessed with the stuff. Steel may be stronger, but it decays and is therefore mortal. Gold is immortal. We use it to honor the dead, decorate their sainted relics, and ask for the honor of their ongoing company. If we made telephone wires out of braided gold then we could maintain constant contact with the ancestors…but that would be a huge and unlikely infrastructure project, so we’re still stuck with the old ways. If you want somebody’s voice to stay in the world, then make them a relic. Anchor their voice with honor and gold.

[ORION takes a carved Taíno mask from the reliquary cabinet.]

This particular relic includes skull fragments that once belonged to Friar Juan Pérez of la Rábida, who sailed with the Admiral on his second voyage and never returned to Spain. He vanished from history. Poof. Gone.

Mami told me that I needed to talk to him. Then she left me with the dead.

[MAMI returns to the audience. A new volunteer is chosen to play the ghost of the FRIAR.]

 

Scene 7: The Friar

[ORION hands the relic to the FRIAR volunteer. This must be the actual relic and not just a prop. The volunteer will be able to speak as the FRIAR and will therefore know every line of the following scene. This will probably come as a surprise to the volunteer.]

ORION: The friar’s face was kind and melancholy, his frame Quixote-thin. I said hello.

FRIAR: Hello, Orion. It is good to see you again.

ORION: We’ve met?

FRIAR: You spent a lot of time in this room, watching television with your abuela. I was here also.

ORION: And you speak English.

FRIAR: Because you insisted on watching English channels.

ORION: How long have you been haunting my family?

FRIAR: Ever since your great-great-great grandmother found my relic in a cave. It was buried deep. I stayed hidden away for lonely centuries, relying on the gossip of bats for outside news. Maketaori Guayaba did come to visit sometimes, which was nice.

ORION: Who?

FRIAR: Taíno god of death. Marvelous fellow. Always smiling. Loves to dance.

ORION: Is it a conflict of interest for a Franciscan friar to chat with gods from other pantheons?

FRIAR: No, not really. As the abbot of la Rábida I once played chess against the godly Baal of Tyre.

ORION: Who won?

FRIAR: I let him win. The gods expect sacrifices. They can get sulky otherwise. All sorts of golden echoes found sanctuary at la Rábida—at least until the Admiral came.

ORION: Did he find a dragon?

FRIAR: A what now?

ORION: I thought that maybe la Rábida was guarding a dragon hoard. If the Admiral stole some of the cursed gold, then it might have infected him with draconic hunger and charisma.

FRIAR: What an ingenious idea! Untrue, however. There were no dragons at la Rábida. Wyrm-fever cannot explain or excuse what happened there.

ORION: Ok. What did happen?

FRIAR: Why do you seem so delighted?

ORION: Because I’m a historian, and you were there.

FRIAR: Yes, I was there. I welcomed him, broke bread with him, and offered him sanctuary. I would have done the same for any pilgrim at our door, but in this man I sensed an emptiness. It moved me to pity when I should have been afraid.

ORION: And then?

FRIAR: I showed him our reliquary. Many named and unnamed saints whispered in that place from their golden casements. Many relics of older gods sang in that chorus, collected by my brethren and hidden from the Inquisition. I had hoped that wonder and awe would fill the emptiness in our visitor—and it did, after a fashion. He swallowed them all. Afterwards he went on pilgrimage to every saintly site in Spain, thirsting for miracles. He sailed west in search of more, thereby becoming the Whisper Thief, the Devourer of Saints, and the Admiral of the Ocean Sea.

ORION: I saw him yesterday. He slurped up another ghost.

FRIAR: My fault. I set him loose upon the world with a taste for golden voices. He consumes them to strengthen his own.

ORION: What can we do about it?

FRIAR: For my sins I was punished with my own pseudo-sainthood, abandoned in a cave to serve as the undead archive of my worst mistake. You should bury me again. Your abuela’s room is a better purgatory than I deserve. Sometimes I can still hear a whisper of her from the gold in her jewelry box, but it is not enough for us to hold a conversation.

ORION: I miss her, too, but please stop wallowing in your centuries of guilt. Tell me how to fix this instead.

FRIAR: How can anyone stand up to a god?

ORION: Is that what he is?

FRIAR: Oh yes, though it took him much longer than planned. He had expected to be crowned C3-PO among Ewoks the instant that he came ashore.

ORION: What?

FRIAR: Do you remember that movie? Your abuela must have played it dozens of times.

ORION (suppressing a laugh): Yeah, I remember that movie.

FRIAR: “All believe that the source of all power and goodness is in the sky, and they believe very firmly that I, with these ships and people, came from the sky, and in this belief they everywhere received me.” This was the pageant of bombastic nonsense that he tried to play, but he never learned the local language. He never realized that “from the sky” meant precisely the same thing as “out of the blue.” Our arrival was surprising, but not heavenly. None of the islanders were astonished by our white faces. None of our faces were lily white after months of sea and sun. Facial hair and lack of hygiene were more noteworthy, for in those days Europeans did not make a habit of bathing. We were hairy, smelly men. We were the Ewoks. No one worshipped us. No one gave their devotion to the golden Admiral who came from the sky. Not yet.

ORION: And now?

FRIAR: Now thousands of statues stand in his honor. Children recite hymns of praise to him from sea to shining sea. His power is assured.

ORION: Maybe not. There are lots of ways to topple gods.

 

Scene 8: The Statue

[The FRIAR returns to the audience, though he keeps the relic with him. He may or may not stay quiet. ORION sets aside the table and reliquary cabinet. Then he becomes a teacher again. The stage is his classroom. Notes on the whiteboard should include the following quote from Walter Benjamin: “Every spectator is enabled to become a participant. And it is indeed easier to play the ‘teacher’ than the ‘hero.’”]

ORION: Roman emperors used to be gods. They commissioned oodles of statues as godly self-portraits. Golden idols work best for this sort of thing, of course, but gold is expensive. Bronze will do in a pinch. Stone is the oldest method. Things written in stone are supposed to last forever. Theoretically.

Rome also knew how to argue with forever. Every new Caesar beheaded the statues of the Caesar that came before him. Every new emperor replaced those missing heads with sculptures of his own.

So, if you intend to pick a fight with an immortal, first kick them in the narcissism and then aim for the head.

[The ADMIRAL is escorted to a small platform upstage center, where he looms like a public statue. ORION hands him a globe of the Earth.]

Some of the Admiral’s many statues hold up a globe like he proved it was round. He didn’t, but for this enduring myth we have canonized him the Patron Saint of Discovery and the Scientific Method. We laud him as the first man brave enough to experiment with the shape of the world by trying to sail around it.

A myth is a story that tells us who we are. The word means more than “bullshit,” but in this case I also call bullshit. Two thousand years before the Admiral sailed west, Pythagoras noticed the curve of Earth from our shadow cast against the moon. Several centuries before the Admiral sailed west, Ahmad al-Farghani wrote that ships disappear in the distance as though slowly sinking because the curve of the horizon obscures them from view. We already knew the shape of the world.

Evidence never mattered to the Admiral. He died insisting that Cuba was part of the Asian mainland. It would have been so easy to test his theory. Just spend a couple of days trying to sail all the way around. That’s what an explorer and a cartographer would do, right?

Instead, the Admiral forced his entire crew to sign a notarized and legally binding document affirming Cuba’s legal status as a peninsula. That same document threatened every co-signatory with steep fines, torture, and the removal of tongues if any one of them should ever dare to contradict this avowed testimony. Every sailor signed it, because they had no choice, but Cuba continued to be an island.

This guy didn’t discover the shape of the world. He tried to force the world into taking the shape that he wanted, and decimated nations in the process.

He is still trying.

[ORION takes the globe away, picks up a pair of sixteenth-century rapiers, and gives one to the ADMIRAL.]

One of his statues stood pretty close to my parents’ house. It held a sword instead of a globe, so I brought my own. Remember, I have studied my Agrippa.

At midnight, less than twenty-four hours after I watched him slurp a ghostly voice from a golden tooth, I infused a stone effigy with essence of Admiral by reciting some terrible poetry.

If you praise him, he will come.

[ORION recites Joaquin Miller’s infamous poem (which is in the public domain). He is reluctant and embarrassed at first, but by the end he should be chewing up the scenery.]

Behind him lay the gray Azores,

Behind the Gates of Hercules;

Before him not the ghost of shores,

Before him only shoreless seas.

The good mate said: “Now we must pray,

For lo! the very stars are gone.

Brave Admiral, speak, what shall I say?”

“Why, say, ‘Sail on! sail on! and on!’”

 

“My men grow mutinous day by day;

My men grow ghastly wan and weak.”

The stout mate thought of home; a spray

Of salt wave washed his swarthy cheek.

“What shall I say, brave Admiral, say,

If we sight naught but seas at dawn?”

“Why, you shall say at break of day,

‘Sail on! sail on! and on!’”

 

They sailed and sailed, as winds might blow,

Until at last the blanched mate said:

“Why, now not even God would know

Should I and all my men fall dead.

These very winds forget their way,

For God from these dead seas is gone.

Now speak, brave Admiral, speak and say”—

He said, “Sail on! sail on! and on!”

 

They sailed. They sailed. Then spake the mate:

“This mad sea shows his teeth tonight.

He curls his lip, he lies in wait,

With lifted teeth, as if to bite!

Brave Admiral, say but one good word:

What shall we do when hope is gone?”

The words leapt like a leaping sword:

“Sail on! sail on! sail on! and on!”

 

Then pale and worn, he kept his deck,

And peered through darkness. Ah, that night

Of all dark nights! And then a speck—

A light! a light! at last a light!

It grew, a starlit flag unfurled!

It grew to be Time’s burst of dawn.

He gained a world; he gave that world

Its grandest lesson: “On! sail on!”

Stone became flesh as the Admiral answered my call.

[Both ORION and ADMIRAL draw swords.]

 

Scene 9: The Duel

[ORION leads the fight in extreme slow motion, which allows the ADMIRAL volunteer to follow along with unrehearsed choreography. The glacial pace of their duel also allows ORION to stay in teacher-mode.]

I tried to take his head and ended up nicking his throat. Golden ichor oozed from the wound, which was alarming. Then he tried to speak, and couldn’t, which was a huge relief. The Admiral’s power was his voice. He extracted that vocal monopoly by devouring thousands of saints. Now he couldn’t talk his way out of this.

[The ADMIRAL attacks. ORION is hard pressed.]

He did know how to fight, though. I learned from a book.

[ORION manages to defend himself.]

Both the bonkers renaissance geometry of Camillo Agrippa and contemporary studies of astrophysics suggest that time is created by motion. Time only exists because the universe is moving. A moment of combat is not taken, as though the opportunity was there already and only one of us turned out to be fast enough to claim it. Moments are made by movement. You make time when you act.

[The duel ends when ORION mimes an exaggerated blow to the statue’s neck. The ADMIRAL should be encouraged to showboat his own death scene as much as he likes before collapsing to the stage.]

I made time, and won.

[ORION enjoys some applause.]

FRIAR (from his place in the audience): This isn’t enough.

ORION: It has to help, though. Right?

FRIAR: A little rebellious heresy might sap his strength a bit, it’s true, but he has so many statues…and commemorative coins, action figures, lunch boxes, streets, cities, districts, and entire nations that bear his name. Beheading a statue was courageous of you, but such things have been tried before. It’s not enough.

ORION: Okay. Fine. What would do more damage?

FRIAR: Witnesses, perhaps?

ORION: Well, the fringe festival is coming up.

[ORION considers the audience as though choosing another volunteer. Instead, he addresses everyone.]

ORION: Say his name. All together, all at once, and on my count: one, two, three.

EVERYONE: Christopher Columbus.

[The ADMIRAL volunteer stands and convulses. He vomits up a stream of golden ichor. This god-blood solidifies into a towering figure of flowing gold. ORION issues a challenge to this APPARITION, who retrieves the dropped sword. They fight in earnest. (The volunteer formerly known as the ADMIRAL will hopefully have the presence of mind to leave the stage.) If ORION is killed by the APPARITION, then the stage crew should attempt to save as many audience members as possible. (Prioritize the rescue of the FRIAR and his relic.) If instead the APPARITION is beheaded by ORION, then the play should proceed as scripted below.]

 

Scene 10: The Confession

[ORION cleans his blade of ichor and sits on the edge of the stage, utterly spent. This moment should feel more like a post-show talkback than a part of the performance.]

ORION: Did that work?

FRIAR: Yes. For now.

ORION: Okay. Good. Apologies to anyone in the front row who got splattered with gore. Please don’t touch your eyes. Take a long shower when you get home. Check your shadow tomorrow morning, just to make sure that it’s still there, and eat lots of fresh fruit if it isn’t. Citrus helps fight more than scurvy.

[ORION points to the former ADMIRAL volunteer.]

You need to stay hydrated. Drink an entire glass of fresh lemonade every hour, on the hour, to flush all of that Admiral out of your system.

FRIAR: We have little time, Orion. The Patron Saint of Narcissism may be a headless puddle on the floor, but he will pull himself back together—and he’ll be very grumpy when he does.

ORION: Right. Okay. Listen up, everybody. Here’s what you need to know:

All gods are ghosts. Whatever hauntings you choose to feed will grow, rooted to the world by your honor and attention. Whatever you neglect will fade. The old gods get smaller, like dinosaurs becoming chickens. They are elves and duendes now, household guardians and stealers of socks—or at least they should be. Some godly hauntings metastasize instead. Sometimes it becomes necessarily to cut them from the body of the world.

[The golden puddle stirs.]

FRIAR: Hurry!

ORION (rushed and flustered): All gods are ghosts and all houses are haunted! Everything that has ever happened is still happening, and myths are the stories we tell to proclaim who we are. Who are we, then, if he remains our founding myth? Maybe we can make another time, another era, if we can reduce him to the size of a rooster strutting through the backyard. So please worship wisely. Please exit the theater in an orderly fashion. Please don’t step in his blood on your way out.

[The APPARITION rises and raises his sword. Blackout. The only light comes from the glow of golden ichor. The only sound is the clash of Spanish steel.]

 

END OF PLAY

 

Works Consulted

Agrippa, Camillo. Fencing: A Renaissance Treatise. Edited by Ken Mondschein. New York: Italica, 2014.

Baldwin, James. “A Talk to Teachers,” The Price of the Ticket: Collected Non-Fiction 1948–1985. New York: Saint Martins, 1985.

Benjamin, Walter. “What Is Epic Theater?” Illuminations: Essays and Reflections. Edited by Hannah Arendt. New York: Schocken Books, 1969.

Irving, Washington. Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus and the Voyages and Discoveries of the Companions of Columbus. Knickerbocker Edition. New York & London: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1892.

Miller, Joaquin. “Columbus.” YourDailyPoem.com. Accessed July 1st, 2024.

Morison, Samuel Eliot. Admiral of the Ocean Sea: A Life of Christopher Columbus. Boston: Little, Brown, 1942.

Morison, Samuel Eliot, translator and editor. Journals & Other Documents on the Life & Voyages of Christopher Columbus. New York: Heritage Press, 1963.

Subin, Anna Della. Accidental Gods: On Men Unwittingly Turned Divine. New York: Metropolitan, 2021.

(Editors’ Note: William Alexander is interviewed by Caroline M. Yoachim in this issue.)

© 2024 William Alexander