Act V - Denial

Maine (US): autumn 2023. A murky stone path in the wood, in a late October’s cold grey morning. The narrow trail is surrounded by irregular overgrown vegetation, hiding an isolated wooden house. A rusted gate is there half-open at the entrance, as if it was left abandoned for years, maybe decades. Within the Canadian-style chalet now in ruins, time-gnawed wooden stairs lead up to a room: an icy, dark and gloomy bedsitter attic, where no ray of light can penetrate the sinister silence of which the walls are made. A broken mirror… some half-ripped old photographs scattered on the floor… and, in the middle of the room, a grand piano with its lid closed, above which some music scores, garden tools and empty bottles are confusingly left amidst one inch of dust. On the left side of the room there is a bearded man on his 50s sitting on the bed, who stares at the window with jaded gaze and empty eyes. From Time to Time he casts a glance at his mobile phone left on the bedside table: still no calls from Herman Gray, the lumberjack master. Now it’s been three days he doesn’t call. Without his job, the broken man is running out of cash, again… and even worse, he is running out of whisky. He slowly stands up and, with the left hand pressed against the top of his head as if to restrain a piercing headache, he drags himself to the bathroom. On his way, he stops right in front of the floor-standing half-broken mirror and lingers there, gazing for a while the reflected man: a man who once people used to call Peter Light.

At the same ticking of the pendulum clock, but in a different era and location, a restless man wakes up from another sinister nightmare. Queenstown area, New Zealand: beginning of January 1942. Every night the situation is getting worse, but all those images and visions in his sleep reveal something new each Time. Now more than ever, the tormented Captain Hook is deeply determined to get to the bottom and find out something about the origins of those disquieting images, to figure out who is the faceless man who continues to haunt him at night torturing his soul, like a dark specter he cannot get rid of. Tonight, he got an interesting clue out one of his nightmares: a modest grey colonial estate surrounded by a wooden fence, with a mailbox at the entrance numbered 19-10. Hook is almost sure such strange but so familiar place must be located near Palmerston, Australia, which not long ago was renamed Darwin. He stops for a moment, then suddenly and in schizophrenic haste, the captain collects some essential personal effects and randomly drops them into a large leather bag. After almost 20 years of pure isolation, he slams the door of his shack in the wood, leaving behind a subsistence life made of sleepless nights and frantic monologues. With bizarre gait, he heads straight to where probably his tormented mind must belong.

Two more days have passed in Maine, Autumn 2023, within the isolated residence in the wood. A muffled echo of distant and forgotten dreams still seems to resonate in the gloomy silence of the attic… but the door was shut long ago, leaving outside a youth made of hopes and naïve expectations. Seated on the floor, once again the broken man finds himself torn between tedious apathy and tormenting memories which Time to Time try to penetrate his weathered mind, taking him back to that far March 1996 when, in a blink of an eye, the hourglass run its course and the last note of his grand piano suddenly vanished, forever.

Enters 1st flashback: THE ACCIDENT. Centre Hospitalier de l’Université Laval, March 1996: the heart beats loudly in his head… shapes and sounds are confusingly merged together… people chatter indistinctly and the distant pounding noise of an electrocardiogram shortly interrupts the strong odor of disinfectant. The hospital’s automatic sliding doors open: Peter anxiously enters the waiting room, next to the intensive care unit, with eyes wide open in concern. Mr. and Mrs. Okunarashi are already there seated, impassive. Diana’s mother turns her look towards him with no signs of surprise or empathy for Peter’s presence. Diana had a tragic accident. While leaving the airport, headless of the red pedestrian traffic light, she got on the road to cross it with her large suitcase. Tiredness was clouding her mind. She only wanted to be back home soon. A bus came out of nowhere and the deepest darkness followed. Diana’s left knee was totally shuttered, the chest crushed, her whole body bruised. Today coma is her only gloom company. Now in Quebec City’s hospital, the surgeon exits the intensive care unit: with firm unhesitating voice, he asserts that coma is now irreversible and there is nothing else they can do. Perhaps one day she will wake up again but, if so, nobody knows in which conditions. Peter’s head faintly shakes with dissent, while the left end of his lips cracks as if to hint at a sadistic half-smile pervaded by an utter sense of denial. The young pianist turns his back to the people in the room and goes towards the sliding door, heading home, back there where tonight he will have to face his midnight. a wrought iron gate at the left side of the path and stares at Peter with distressing gaze and crimson eyes: a silent raven.

Midnight

Chicago, United States, year 2085. All the distant noises of city life remain outside the thick glass walls of a modern stylish apartment, located on the eleventh floor of a downtown skyscraper, in this gray February afternoon. A 24-year-old girl is sitting at her desk, in front of her computer, totally naked. Her name is Kayla and she is a portraitist. Her beautiful brown owlish eyes reflect the marvel of all sorts of masterpieces that slide on her computer screen. Kayla lingers fascinated on every single image for about 30 or 40 seconds, contemplating the beauty of all shapes, features and colors, then she moves on to the next one: a mural, an oil on canvas, a tattoo, a tapestry, a body-painting... although coming from the most diverse art movements, each of these pieces of art reveals something magic, special and unique, yet something that relentlessly belongs only to the past and thus inevitably creates a distasteful antithesis with the epoch in which Kayla lives. The digital clock on her screen strikes 4.00 PM: it is now Time for the young lady to experiment… to create something new… to let all her artistic inspiration flow and materialize on her own body. As usual, the whole process takes hours, but each passage must be carried forward with perfect and graceful balance and with special attention to every single detail, as if it were a religious rite. The color selection is the first essential step: Klein Blue, Silver Chalice and Persian Rose today are the chosen ones. By means of a charcoal black pencil, the young artist patiently begins to delineate the curves on her own body. Once the process is completed and the colors on the body have dried off, Kayla lies sensually on the pearlwhite couch and takes a few 3D shots of herself, by means of four automatic cameras which are strategically positioned at the corners of her bright living room. Having the proper light is of fundamental importance and cannot be left to chance. Finally, she will redraw the selected 3D image on one of her white canvases, perhaps changing part of the background or adding some details to the colors, but without ever altering the image of her body or face: her shape must be indeed always faithful to the original. While she is about to complete her masterpiece, after 7 hours of unceasing work, on the selected 3D photo she tragically notices a thin disgusting white hair amidst her thick raven-black mane. She pinpoints it on her head and frantically rips it off with a strong sense of repugnance. Neither this nor the disgraceful wrinkle on her forehead were there two weeks earlier, during her latest bodypainting. A strange sensation pervades Kayla and her naked skin begins to shiver. A trauma. Days devour days, her beautiful colors turn to grey more and more, youth and beauty slowly turn to dust… and who then is the real Kayla? Her young body, like any human body, is everchanging... her pureness is fleeting ... and the beautiful girl she has just portrayed on the canvas already belongs relentlessly to the past.

Back to 1942, February 19th, in the harbor of Darwin, Australia. A rickety wooden sailboat moors in and, once the anchor is dropped, Captain Hook throws himself out completely drunk, falling on the pier. A few seconds later, he gets up again and takes another sip from his bottle of aged rum. With a husky and quite unclear voice, he murmurs "19-10" and obsessively repeats it, again and again. Strangely, the town is almost deserted, but the Captain’s disoriented and distracted eyes do not notice there are only a few officers and sailors around. He then finds his way to the outback and walks for hours into nowhere. Twilight falls and the sound of the sea waves crashing on the coast slowly vanishes in the distance. The flickering glimmer of the silent desert reflecting the Australian starlit sky is now Hook’s only company. Almost half an hour later, the dirt track in the sand leads the deranged man to a small colonial village just outside Darwin, which is delimited by a wooden fence: it is a kind of ranch. It apparently seems that people live there. Hook wanders for a while, when suddenly his gaze glimpses an abandoned estate looking very familiar: getting closer, it looks precisely the same one that haunts him in his bizarre dreams. And there is that mailbox at the entrance, marked with a faded number, where it is barely readable “19-10”. The discolored white picket fence is partially broken, the late-Victorian porch is in ruins, the unhinged wooden door is left halfopened. Lit only by the moonlight glow, Captain Hook steps in and suddenly his mind gets torn by a horrible sensation. A shudder... a long-chocked breath... then another vision. And Hook falls on his knees. Hanging on the peeling wall, there is an oil lamp: overwhelmed by panic, the poor captain gets back on his feet and throws himself against it. There are matchsticks next to the lamp so that Hook finally manages to make some light. But all of a sudden, the sight of old dusty family photographs, hanging on the walls all around him, spread an open-wide vortex in his mind, bringing to light a stream of dormant memories about his past... a past made of violence, sexual abuse and suffering. The faceless man who appears in his dreams was probably his father. Was he for real? While reliving those reminiscences buried long Time ago, panic and bewilderment increase and nausea begins to pervade him. That clock ticking away in the distance is now striking ever louder. However, the captain's twisted mind plays tricks on him, as if to preserve and protect him once more, thus pushing that flow of memories in the opposite direction, so as to bury again those horrible visions into oblivion, forever. This is for Hook the most difficult challenge he has ever fought against himself. This is his most recondite trauma.

Trauma

Minutes seem like hours, while Hook finds himself sitting on a creased couch in his native home, just outside Darwin. He stares into the void, with wide open empty eyes, letting all those tormenting and pounding noises resound persistently in his head. However, one of those reverberates louder than the others. Another one follows, like an explosion: the old photographs hanging on the walls tremble, the ground quakes. It almost seems that the unrelenting din which was pervading his chronomentrophobic mind has turned inside out… and now it is everywhere, all around him. Hook suddenly wakes up from his trance-like state, and immediately runs out of the ruined estate. All around him there are flames, black smoke and destruction… people scream and run everywhere, passing him by. Then a thunderous buzz over his head makes him look up to the sky. An “Aichi B7A” of the Imperial Japanese Army Air Service (大日本帝国陸軍航空本部) drops another bomb. That very house, full of repugnant and repressed memories, explodes and thousands of splinters and shrapnel blow up everywhere, wounding the unfortunate man to death. With half of his body totally excoriated, Captain Hook now lies on the ground, staring at the pitch-black endless sky, while the confused and muffled noises around him grow less. All of a sudden, with a last dying breath, his voice explodes in an ultimate sadistic and schizophrenic laugh. This is the irony of life. This is the bitter end. The sky turns darker, and that distant ticking clock finally fades away.