Ester Freider

Ester Freider (b. 2002) is a Russian-American writer, digital curator, and 'creative academic' residing at the intersection between philosophy and literary studies. She writes autotheory, poetry, and experimental prose; curates and produces live events; creative directs publications; operates as a creative consultant for brands and galleries; makes performance art on the internet. She lives and works in London.

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EVERYONE IS A GIRL: THE PLAY

BY ESTER FREIDER

(Characters BOY 👦🏻and GIRL 👧🏼are sitting at a table opposite each other. They are both eating gummy bears from plates. GIRL uses a spoon to take several into her mouth at once, while BOY carefully slices each bear with the continental knife-and-fork style.)

👧🏼: Minsk.

👦🏻: Kansas City.

👧🏼: Yerevan.

👦🏻: Nottingham.

👧🏼: Marseilles.

👦🏻: São Paulo.

👧🏼: Orpington.

👦🏻: Naples.

👧🏼: Stockholm.

👦🏻: (straining to think) umm… Monaco.

👧🏼: (pointing the spoon at him like a fencer en quarte) Ha! That’s not a city. It’s a city-state.

👦🏻: Monte Carlo then…

👧🏼: That’s an administrative area, a quarter, really, not a city at all. The quarter itself is just a casino and some extra pence.

👦🏻: I can’t go on with this. Let’s do something else. You’re just piquing my pride for your own pure joy at this point.

👧🏼: What else, what else?

(GIRL pulls out a piece of paper and puts it onto the table. BOY comes up behind her and leans over her to see what she is drawing. She draws a fish.)

👦🏻: I think, partially, you objectify me.

👧🏼: We’re all partial objects.

👦🏻: That’s the thought that you hate most though, isn’t it? That you can’t be anything, that you can’t do everything yourself. That you can’t just pummel yourself away into a shape that fits neatly into any custom cubby. It torments you. The inheritance of the angle between your coracoid and your clavicle. The flavor of your spit that reacts unromantically with oyster-water. You’re always WHINING about the line. Ad nauseum. Ad nauseum. The sexual tension between you and nothing is clinically hot.

(GIRL wilts down into her chair like a drying rose.)

👧🏼: (quietly, to herself) I wish I could stay folded up forever, and no one would ever know what’s inside.

👦🏻: (doesn’t really pay attention to her response) Your sexuality is like an incomplete database.

👧🏼: (pauses drawing to look back at him over her shoulder) How about yourself then? You’re a classic classicist ass. Yesterday morning, you shook me awake and pried your thumbs into my shoulders to announce, like Paul Revere on his mare ….

(GIRL gets up for emphasis and throws her fish drawing to the audience. The fish drawing is accompanied with writing that says “We are fish in the pond, all good. What could be better?” BOY sits on the table.)

👧🏼: (imitating BOY, breathing air in in between her teeth, faux-moaning) Oh my god, I think I’ve gotten closer to the TRUTH!

👧🏼: And then you led me through what brought you to that conclusion by taking me down through the steps, down and down; well I think to you, to you (dismissively) it was up and up; you were ascending a Jacob’s ladder with a pristine sheen, up to the pantheon, the empty emporium selling only celestial clarity…. But to me, it was like following the oft-tread steps down to a well-known crypt. A dirty desire path, falsely hallowed…

👦🏻: You’re the one who’s empty.

👧🏼: (ignores him) You’re just magnetized to a phantom. You want to be stone-skinned, rock-ribbed… have you ever considered that what you can build with is also a weight to carry? You’re so heavy, so heavy, and for nothing important. Not even for kindness.

👦🏻: Or, at least, you wish you were empty.

👧🏼: You just want to point…

(GIRL mimes a gun action to get BOY’s attention back and walks slowly towards him, until her finger is against his forehead. As he is leaning/sitting against the table, he is forced to look up at her, rendering his eyes wide and malleable.)

👧🏼: And shoot.

(BOY breaks the moment of vulnerability by rolling his eyes and writhing onto the ground as if hit by a bullet.)

👦🏻: I mean, there’s a reason for aiming. There’s a method for it. It’s better than what you do… melting until you’re level with y=0. I catch whiffs, and I follow them. We all do, even you, although you won’t admit it. You’d recoil at dustmite, at out-of-season pumpkin peel, at pigshit, you pull towards germless geraniums and other seedyless sweetnesses. It’s just the same with our minds. With … (he covers his eyes to do peekaboo, and then uncups them upon the annunciation of the second syllable) truth.

👧🏼: What about old bookshops? And farms? And, quite frankly, geraniums make me faint from the brash appeal to the category of floral.

👦🏻: Ever evading genericisms, are we? (switches to a more small-talk tone) What are you wearing today, anyhow?

(GIRL sticks out her wrist for him to smell.)

👦🏻: Thyme. Nettle. Asbestos. Fog, the kind of fog you’d imagine to be on a gas planet.

👧🏼: “Io” by Piptique. And you?

(BOY sticks out his wrist in return.)

👧🏼: SAUVAGE? WHY?

👦🏻: It works. You like it. You just didn’t notice before.

👧🏼: (doesn’t want to admit it, clasps her hands together) Mmmmmm….

👦🏻: I wonder if there’s abalone in sauvage. Or at least, a simulation of it.

👧🏼: Ha! Abalone! That’s a good example. Something repulsive when raw but its distillation proves it fertile.

👦🏻: Now you’re confusing the manual for the absolute, the kicker for the goal. Art for science.

👧🏼: I really don’t believe in THAT threshold. The graph is also the person who mapped it. The gallery is also an amygdalic outcome… an endocrinal destiny? My interest is my only stone to roll. In the face of my interest I am nothing but docile.

👦🏻: Your wide, wet interest … it’s a god that will kill you. From (he walks around GIRL playfully) lack, of lack, of lack, of lack, of lack.

👧🏼: Disinterest is a luxury for the centripetal. I, on the other hand, am an alien flower caught in a fugal fuss.

👦🏻: There’s just a hole in the middle of you. It’s always so sticky with you, I’m always so certain that, when I put my hand out towards you.. I just think, I’m going to find something… It comes back sticky, and sweltering, and shaking, but with what? With what? It’s odorless. It’s colorless.

👧🏼: It’s all a test of my presence.

👦🏻: Why do you want to TEST ME?

(BOY pauses to lay down on the floor and starts making yoga shapes. Every time he assumes a position, he continues with a sentence.)

👦🏻: What are you testing?

👦🏻: If you want me cornered, you’ve had that for a long time.

(GIRL is laughing more and more as this goes on.)

👦🏻: You can talk like how a horse eats.

👦🏻: But you don’t ever say goddamn anything!

(He falls down from a lunge.)

👦🏻: (dejected) I see you, but I don’t hear you at all.

(They sit in awkward silence.)

👧🏼: (yells) I WANT TO BE NOTHING!

👧🏼: How about now?

👦🏻: (yells) YOU ARE SOMETHING! YOU ARE!

(They both start laughing. It’s so stupid.)

👧🏼: Can physics be used as an aesthetic ontology?

👦🏻: No… (holds his hand to his head) Your virality is like a broken vending machine, really. Keeps slotting out something that no one asked for. Just let people make planes go faster and make light last longer.

👧🏼: I wish you lasted longer.

(BOY is so confused by the suddenness of innuendo in such an disembodied discussion that gets up, stares at the audience, and walks off stage.)

👧🏼: (to the audience) Finally, some solo play.

(She sighs.)

👧🏼: Should I become a lesbian?

👧🏼: I feel like if I was with a girl, we would just keep missing each other. Like two broken keyrings.

👧🏼: Whatever, why not. Let’s try it out.

(She takes out her phone and calls someone.)

👧🏼: Hi, is this Amazon?

👧🏼: Yeah, yeah, I know I can just use the website. But this is more ambient. Can I get a large, pink carabiner; a, um, large, pink double dildo, um… Totinos Pizza Rolls 80 grams pack of 6..

👧🏼: Oh, you don’t take orders here? Okay. I guess the void consumes us. Yeah okay. Bye.

(She puts down the phone. Bored, whistling.)

(BOY returns and stands at the side of the stage.)

👦🏻: Maybe you’re right about the point and shoot thing. Growing up I was always trying to be the gunner… we would play SWAT, and I would chase the criminal – a pink, plush flamingo whose legs were wielded into a run by the other, more compliant boys like the men who walk Chinese dragons – with my water gun, until we would have to hang the poor thing out the windowsill to dry. Other times I was a fireman, a detective, a zookeeper…

👧🏼: I never wrapped my head around that sort of thing. Why did you play if you knew how it would end?

👦🏻: I don’t know. Why do people see Greek plays?

👧🏼: Because they’re too lazy to come up with new ones.

👦🏻: Oh, come on. What did you do as a child then?

👧🏼: (thinks) I… don’t really remember much. I didn’t really.. I didn’t really know how to “play” properly I guess.

👦🏻: What do you mean?

👧🏼: I mean I was just too bored to follow a narrative. I insisted on dwelling on the rules, only, and perfecting my predictions. I lingered over categories, archetypes, arrangements of angle and grain.

👦🏻: EXAMPLE?

👧🏼: Okay. So. I would get all my stuffed animals. And I would dump them all onto the ground. All in one mass, a treatment in bulk. And then I would divide them into piles by some new criterion. Color, or subcategory of animal type, etcetera. I would spend however long sorting them, and then I would stare at the piles with a grim, bureaucratic satisfaction, and then… I would just mix them all up again.

👦🏻: I mean, that seems equally, if not more, neurotic to me. I was soothing by playing out the narrative. You were soothing by surveilling what dictates the narrative. By surveilling the rules.

👧🏼: (sighs and sits down onto the ground) Yeah, I guess they’re both just masturbatory exercises. There are two genders: hero’s journey and ouroboric logistics.

👧🏼: Is all of humanity just a fanfiction about God?

👦🏻: What do you mean?

👧🏼: I mean, are we always just striving for an ideal neutrality, even when we pretend to opt out? Is everything we do derivative of an original master code, a dead-centre wet dream? Are we just smashing windows made of candy-glass?

👦🏻: I prefer to think of it as archontic, not as derivative.

👧🏼: You still have faith that we’ll dig something up. Some sphere that is smoother than the rest.

👦🏻: Stop being so gnostic!

👧🏼: I’m not! I don’t KNOW ANYTHING!

(Boy takes out a piece of paper, and starts drawing circles. He’s trying to draw the most perfect circle possible.)

👧🏼: I can’t tell whether you believe it’s possible to make something new.

👦🏻: I can’t tell that about you either.

👦🏻: Sometimes we just have to keep approximating the curve, coaxing it, petting it, to see if it’ll act up.

👧🏼: And what will you do, when it does?

👦🏻: Become you, I suppose.

👧🏼: Not exactly seventh heaven.

👦🏻: Well, what I don’t like about it is that it’s fatty, it’s got sinews to a fault. I want to keep slim, keep my bones slightly jutted, and keep my head in my business!

👧🏼: But how do you know what your business is? There’s so much that’s been egyptianized here: (lax, bored tone of listing things) your business, the body versus the mind, what’s bones and what’s fat… all just nicely sanitized with inherited resin, with big-man bandages that you found lying square-centre on history’s boulevard. The truth is it’s all fat! Everything!

👦🏻: You’re like a Roman conqueror…nothing this, everything that, excess, excess, renewal, renewal … (stands up on the table and puts his hand on his hip, Cesarean and enterprising) I’m going to make this whole world AQUILINE!

👧🏼: (laughs) You’re really trying to catch me, aren’t you?

(GIRL helps him off the table.)

👦🏻: All I want is something to hold. All I want is to know your shape so I can hold you.

👧🏼: You’re my pearl. I’m the vinegar.

👦🏻: (like a detective) There must be an animal your confit came from.

(More awkward silence.)

👧🏼: Come here.

(She takes BOY by the hand and they both sit under the table facing the audience.)

👧🏼: Let’s dull our tongues. Silver to pink.

👦🏻: Silver to pink.

👧🏼: Let’s just pretend, for ten minutes, that we are somewhere else. Somewhere small.

👦🏻: And primary.

👧🏼: And quaint.

👦🏻: And the only numbers are one and two.

👧🏼: And the only sound is your voice.

👦🏻: Salt and pepper.

👧🏼: Yes and no.

👦🏻: On and off.

👧🏼: And for now… off.

👦🏻: Off.

👧🏼: Off.

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