Scene: Stone bench in a cemetery on an overcast winter afternoon. A twenty-something male GOTH sits hunched over in a long black overcoat while his black-polished thumb glides rhythmically over his phone screen. He is basically Timothée Chalamet. After a few seconds of silence, an octogenarian OLD MAN hobbles slowly to the bench with a walking stick and a matching black overcoat sits next to him. He is basically Sam Waterston. The GOTH glances briefly and blankly at him before looking back at his phone. More silence. The OLD MAN, taking a scan of the GOTH’s appearance and demeanor, leans over to the GOTH.
Old Man: [smiling warmly, struggling to speak more robustly than he is] Are you in mourning?
Goth: [apprehensively] Not … really …
Old Man: Ah. [Silence.] You’re mourning generally.
Goth: [silence, with a puzzled bordering on annoyed expression]
Old Man: I’m sorry. I only mean to say that I can’t remember many burials taking place here after the 1970s. I think it would be a safe assumption for me to say that you might not have immediate or even distant relatives buried in this graveyard.
Goth: Most of my dead family are buried in Tallahassee.
Old Man: Ah ha!
Goth: Or West Virginia somewhere.
Old Man: So then it wouldn’t be wrong for me to say that you are a general mourner.
Goth: Still don’t quite follow …
Old Man: You mourn no one person buried here, but in your own way you mourn all those buried in all manners throughout the world. And maybe even all those still to be buried, or tragically left above ground.
Goth: I never really thought about it … but I guess so, yeah. [Pause. Considers the OLD MAN for the first time.] You seem more curious than offended.
Old Man: Offended? No … no.
Goth: I didn’t mean to— … Some people are offended by that. By people who have … dark … unusual interests.
Old Man: Who could possibly take offense to that? In this day and age? Where even the blandest office drone has some slightly off hobby?
Goth: Just … people.
Old Man: “Just people.” People on that shiny rectangle there? [Points to his phone.] As if they qualify. What do they know? What is even the matter with “dark” interests? As if there’s no merit in drifting up and down these rows of old headstones. Checking the dates, ages of death, the clever designs, and haunting elegies. [Pauses for a sign of agreement. GOTH offers none, remains mostly stiff.] Is it not a reflection of our inevitable destinies and hope of the good fortune of having a proper and peaceful resting place?
Goth: [conceding automatically] Sure … yeah.
Old Man: What you need is to forget the silent judges, and be with likeminded people. No, maybe that’s not the word I want. Simila— … no. Well, you know what I mean. People like you. People who mourn the buried and awaiting-to-be-buried as you do right now.
Goth: Well, as a matter of fact, that’s what I was hoping to do today.
Old Man: [leaning in intently] Ah …
Goth: I was hoping to meet this girl. But that was supposed to be almost an hour ago and …
Old Man: [sympathetically] Stood up?
Goth: Seems like it. The perils of online dating, I guess.
Old Man: Oh you met her on … what’s it called …
Goth: [polite but registering embarrassment] No … um, I met her on c0v3n.
Old Man: Coven?
Goth: No, c0v3n. Here, let me show you. [Moves closer, holding phone screen so the OLD MAN can see.] So the app will randomly generate a user of your gender preference, like usual, but also practice preference. Like, are you into witches, wizards, high priestesses, vampires, glampires, enchantresses, druids, esoteric magicians? That kind of thing.
Old Man: What’s your preference?
Goth: [slightly more embarrassed yet also more game] I’m a splatterpunk; and I’m looking for a rivethead.
Old Man: I see.
Goth: And so if you are interested you press the star pentagram, which casts a “charm spell.” If you’re not interested you press the goat head pentagram on the right, which casts a “death hex,” and you never see them again.
Old Man: And who was supposed to me today’s lucky lady?
Goth: Right here.
Old Man: [takes out his reading glasses, focuses] Sangre … Esmerelda.
Goth: Esmerelda Sangre, actually.
Old Man: Oh, well the grey streak really brings out the eyes. Did you tell her that?
Goth: No.
Old Man: Son, you’ve got a lot to learn. But don’t let it get you down. You’ll get into the swing of things. [Pause.] Maybe this is fortune giving you a nudge.
Goth: [shrugs, pause] So, I take it you’re in mourning? Actual mourning, I mean.
Old Man: Well, my grandfather and grandmother are over back that way.
Goth: I’m sorry.
Old Man: Don’t be. I barely remember them at all. I was a boy when both of them keeled over. In fact my grandfather’s walking stick [He holds up his stick.] is the first thing I ever inherited.
Goth: Ah cool.
Old Man: Shit lot of good it does me now. Crotchety bastard was a foot and a half shorter than I am. [Chuckles, pauses, reverts to wistfulness.] But … you could say that I am in a specific sort of mourning.
Goth: How so?
Old Man: I, too, was stood up by a … similarly minded woman.
Goth: Really?
Old Man: Well, it’s more complicated than that. You see, I’m not as unfamiliar with “dark” interests as it may appear. In fact, you could say I had quite a few growing up. Like you, I was gloom-minded. I dressed like an undertaker nearly every day. Dyed my hair with shoe polish. I wanted my first car to be a hearse. I even had a cape … though I never wore it in public.
Goth: [stifled laughter] That’s … that’s commitment.
Old Man: But we didn’t have things like “c0v3n” … or phones without wires. Luckily I was the only boy with dark interests in town, and I knew the phone number of the only girl with dark interests in town. Deena Ray Allen was her name. Maybe not by conventional—even darkly interested—standards a pretty girl, but boy did she have the look and the sense of a sorceress. I don’t know that we ever dated seriously. But you could say I took to her. She had that way about her, always wanting to stand out, especially among the people who already stood out. Greasier than the greasers. More aural and visual than the audiovisual club schlubs. You know what I mean?
Goth: I think so.
Old Man: Deena Ray always wanted to go that extra distance. Because there wasn’t much else distance she could go. Her father worked as a pharmacy manager and led youth Bible study. The only non-religious books he ever liked were adventure-war novels, cheap Hemingway ripoffs. They never travelled out of state … rarely went into the city. She was stifled. It wasn’t enough to read Poe or Stoker at school. She wanted to read Baudelaire and Huysmans. In the original! She struggled in French class to make that possible. She wanted Mario Bava in the city over Roger Corman at the drive-in. She wanted Robert Johnson on records over Roy Orbison on the radio. Do you know Robert Johnson?
Goth: Sort of.
Old Man: Well, we never quite agreed on that. But when her parents went to the lake on weekends, we’d smoke cigarettes and sway in unison to Johnson and Orbison in her rec room. And when they were around, we’d sneak out to meet in this very burial ground. She always had this aroma about her. It wasn’t quite perfume, but it was distinct. She called it “amber nocta,” her own concoction. Said she’d mixed it with some of her own blood. Whatever it was, she’d lay it on thick at night and fill the cemetery’s air with it.
Goth: So what happened?
Old Man: Well, that’s a bit more complicated, as I said, but … one summer, I’d say between junior and senior year this was, we’d go to the cemetery quite a lot. I think it’s because we both had jobs nearby. She was at the pool snack bar, I was over there. [Points his stick away from the stage.]
Goth: At Chipotle?
Old Man: [laughs] It used to be my father’s dental practice. Anyway, one night we came here doing our usual thing. Nothing out of bounds. Sometimes we’d kiss, sometimes while lying on slabs. But mostly we’d just be together. Avoiding our mutually drearier situations including but not limited to being the only people with dark interests in town. Now you see that mausoleum all the way at the edge there, the one with the opened gate?
Goth: Yeah.
Old Man: One of the oldest plots in this place, for the first rector of the church. It was our favorite place in here. We’d sit and make up stories about the rector. That he was this powerful warlock and that he would cause women and children to disappear in service to his satanic desires.
Goth: [laughs]
Old Man: Yeah, so stupid in retrospect. [Rueful pause.] One night we snuck out some of her dad’s bourbon, each taking some strong swigs out of it, she even got me to wear my stupid cape. She started running all over the place. I happily and dizzyingly chased after her. I found her swinging on the loose gate of the rector’s tomb reciting parts of Le Fleurs du mal. She was amazing like that. I told her to get down but she went inside. I followed her in. She was sitting on the slab smiling, more giggling and giddy than I’d ever seen her. She came back down, said something not really comprehensible, more bad French I thought, and gave me a burning bourbon-and-amber nocta-scented kiss on the lips. Then she ran out. I saw her duck around back of the mausoleum. I thought I was chasing her around it but when I stopped she was neither in front of me nor behind me. She was nowhere. I called out to her. Nothing. I ran into the woods just behind the tomb but only vomited. I went home and vomited some more. [Pause.] I never saw her again.
Goth: Did you tell anyone?
Old Man: Of course I did! I may have had dark interests but I was no creep. I called her home and asked where she was. Her parents said they were about to ask me the same question. So they called the cops and I gave a painstakingly pathetic rendition of that night for the police report. But with so little other evidence to go on they just treated it like a runaway.
Goth: Were there suspicions?
Old Man: It was closer to ridicule. I don’t want to say the town broke me, but … after a while some regular items in my wardrobe became less regular. I traded in the black suits for cardigans and denim. I washed most of the shoe polish out of my hair. My first car was an Oldsmobile 98. [Whispers.] I like John McPhee. [Pause. Resumes normal tone.] But I stuck around. I became an archivist, I got married, we had two kids, a boy and a girl, both maybe a bit older than you. I got rid of the cape. Not necessarily in that order.
Goth: Man … tough break.
Old Man: I’m not too bitter about it. I guess if it didn’t happen, I might be worried. But I come back here every so often. On my “constitutions.” You know … just in case. But mostly to mourn what’s probably lost forever.
Goth: You think she’d come back? Like … reappear?
Old Man: Some days I hope for that less than I want to; other days, more than I should. Over time I convinced myself that the best answer is the simplest one: she’d come to see me just as she’d seen Roger Corman and Roy Orbison: small time. She just couldn’t muster the courage to tell me. Otherwise she may well have taken me with her and I may well have had to say yes. Though I’d probably say no. I think of Deena Ray in her element: in Prague or the Left Bank, reading a volume of Mallarmé and sipping a green or purplish elixir. [Pause.] But my guard isn’t always up. Without warning I think I hear some clumsy French, but it’s only a dog barking. Or I think I smell her amber nocta scent, but it’s only wet leaves after it’s rained. [He gazes ruefully out across the stones. Silence.] It all sounds very boyish to a modern sort like you.
Goth: No … no, it’s … it’s endearing, actually. I don’t think there are many like you. Romantics, I mean.
Old Man: [hastily] Mind you, I love my wife. A darling woman. A Leslie Gore fan. A different type, but not an inferior one. [Pause.] You get to a certain age—gain a certain trust—and you allow each other these little … [Chuckles to himself.] … little lapses. These moments where you don’t have to force yourself to let go, like every other adult. [Pause.] One thing I never got rid of, though, was this. [Goes into his coat pocket, takes out a small pin and hands it to the GOTH.] It’s pin with a skeleton on it. Deena Ray gave it to me one Halloween.
Goth: [examining it] That’s really awesome.
Old Man: Got kind of rusty over time.
Goth: It’s still pretty cool.
Old Man: I see no reason not to give it to you.
Goth: I … I don’t thin—
Old Man: No, I insist. It doesn’t seem right to hold onto it after all this time. Maybe this meeting is fate.
Goth: It’s very vintage. Are you sure you want to give it to me?
Old Man: [contented] I’m sure.
Goth: What do you want in return?
Old Man: Oh … no need for that.
Goth: I just figured you’d have an easy online bidding war with something like this.
Old Man: It’s not quite a bowling trophy or a lava lamp.
Goth: No … sorry. I didn’t mean to put it down. It just seems more valuable.
Old Man: And yet much more so than your own valuation.
Goth: I don’t get it.
Old Man: What about this? “Il me semble parfois que mon sang coule à flots/Ainsi qu’une aux rythmiques sanglots.”
Goth: I got like C minus in Spanish, man.
Old Man: Well, I hope who ever finds you here can teach you what it means. [He goes to get up.] I’m not worried about you. You will be a luckier man than I ever was.
Goth: [perplexed, touched] Thank you?
The OLD MAN begins to walk away. He stops and turns back to the GOTH.
Old Man: I am happy, but I was never lucky. I think I finally grew up once I knew there was a difference.
The OLD MAN exits. The GOTH is left looking appreciatively at the pin. Silence. His head shoots up and turns behind the bench as if he heard something.
CURTAIN.