THE PLOT: In a bistro in Paris a young woman (A) tells her three girlfriends (B, C, and D) about the affair she had with an American tourist, who returned home promising to write, and hasn't. It's been over two weeks; something must have happened to him. (She has just learned she is carrying his child, but she doesn't tell her friends.) B tells her to call him; C to e-mail him; D to forget all about him. Enter a fat American couple; each of them has a different speech impediment. They order food. The man chokes. A performs the Heimlich maneuver on him, and saves his life.

JACK
Iain Matheson

SOMEWHERE THAT is(n't) here four voices score a cave like wax in water; hers first.

VOICE 1
It was great. I thought it was great. But it's been a fortnight and--he said he'd call; and he hasn't called.

VOICE 2
Maybe he's lost your number. Maybe he's hurt. Maybe he's shy!  You don't know. Take some control! if you want to talk to him call him!

Subjunctives--modals: imperatives: pragmatics; all true-to-type, all violent as the Kleins, the Levi-Strausses.

VOICE 3
No; mail him. It's more electric. He can't disconnect from the...summons as easily--

VOICE 4
[snorts]
Fuck all that. He lives in another country. He knew he'd have to leave. And you're surprised he hasn't called?!  Fuck that dick. Or stop fucking him. Either way let him go.

She gives no voice to me of course (though) I am efficiency and element of this game. She doesn't remember me: she is at talk.

VOICE 1
Oh....

No....
I don't bark: I gaze at, glaze everything in this matrix; don't worry about my articulation, here I am media. Here I am the only ontic. Everything else is a ruck in me.

Look here, upon this angle and on that.--A couple enters: aged, Bostonian, each wearing a chewed rose colour-matched to the other's hair. One speaks to an unengaged waiter as if in response to a question.

"Oh: table, planed woods, sheet, mats, cutlery for two please. Thank you."

The waiter seats them brings them menus and departs. They read--one whispering hesitant unaddressed definitions of and the other pointing to each item.

"Oh-ot's this oh-ain course here oh-ax?"

"I wholly understand."

Victimised they order slowly. Slowly they are served and eat.

And suddenly the first is choking, drawing on, halting at some forgotten pit, guttering under glass: and in an instant Alexandrine is on her feet; nothing but the Heimlich, tinnitus, a cathexis, a release.

Twisted into non-identical sound she remembers: O God I'm pregnant: there is in me that awaits origin, cleft....

So what's its medium--huh?

Bernadette, Colette, Delphine are frozen as one: an arch of piscine images.

There are two curved dawns, a false dawn, a slow dawn.