a room filled with fluorescent light and no doors. plastic chairs against walls that stretch upwards into darkness. a skeleton sits on one of them, imperfect and yellowed. it's left hand missing two fingers, with an asymmetrical rib cage, with a skull having a crack that runs like a river delta from crown to jaw.
this is ferneis foston.
opposite ferneis is an assessor, whose appearance shifts to be a bureaucrat, a priest, or a surgeon depending on the angle of the light. he carries a clipboard that seems to have an infinite number of pages.
assessor:
you understand why you're here, do you not?
ferneis' jaw drops open with a desiccated sound. he tries to explain the intricacy of his condition, but the uncreated vocal cords conspire against him. only one set of syllables has been written into his design.
ferneis:
xavier yoseline.
the assessor stops, poised with pen in hand. ferneis leans back into his plastic chair, his internal voice, deep and rich and only audible to the audience, speaking silently in his mind.
ferneis (internal monologue):
i've always found the presumption of understanding a peculiar courtesy. we assume one another will understand in order to spare ourselves the awkwardness of explanation, and i assent to the presumption so as to spare myself the embarrassment of misunderstanding. we are, both of us, players in a modest drama of competence. i, however, am restricted to a single statement, a flaw in my vocal definition.
the assessor makes a note, seemingly ignoring the nonsensical response.
assessor:
you were meant to be a person.
ferneis:
xavier yoseline.
ferneis (internal monologue):
i am aware of this, just as a rough draft is aware that it was intended to be a novel. the intent was there, the execution lacking. yet, here i remain, no longer the intended product, nor the absence of one either. i am the skeletal remains of a concept, the architectural blueprint of a human being, minus the inconvenient details of flesh, intent, and completion.
ferneis raises his incomplete hand, studying it.
ferneis (internal monologue) (cont'd):
i do not miss the fingers that should be here. one cannot miss something one has never had to begin with. i am keenly aware that others expect those fingers, and their expectation becomes a phantom limb i must constantly explain away. but all i am able to offer them is a name that was never mine.
int. memory corridor - continuous
the walls are filled with projected images, moments from lives that might have been ferneis's, had the idea been completed. a child learning to ride a bicycle. a teenager kissing someone beneath stadium bleachers. an adult weeping at a funeral.
ferneis moves through the corridor, bones clicking against tile that shouldn't be there.
ferneis (internal monologue):
i have been told that humans measure affection in distances. they love each other "to the moon and back," as if devotion could be quantified in the accumulated mileage of sentiment. i find this peculiar not because i fail to grasp metaphor. i parse it well enough when it chooses to behave itself. but because it implies that love is a journey with a destination and a return. a complete circuit.
ferneis stands before an image: two silhouettes embracing. their jaw opens reflexively.
ferneis:
...xavier yoseline.
ferneis (internal monologue):
i have never finished a circuit. i have never arrived anywhere, and therefore i have never returned. my life has been the perpetual journey of an intention that forgot where it was going. and that name, xavier yoseline, is perhaps the destination i was denied, or the creator who abandoned me. it is the only map i was given.
act ii - the court of continuous assessment
int. judgment chamber - eternal
a vast amphitheater where the seats are filled with versions of ferneis. some more complete, some less. some have flesh on portions of their frames. some are merely suggestions of bone, transparent and wavering.
at the center stands a tribunal of three figures whose faces are obscured by masks depicting: a womb, a grave, and a question mark.
grave:
the matter before us is the matter of completion.
womb:
all things begin incomplete. this is not exceptional.
question mark:
all things are meant to finish. this is the exception.
ferneis stands at a podium that seems too large for even a complete skeleton.
ferneis (internal monologue):
the nature of judgment presupposes that there exists some state which should have been achieved. a standard against which the present reality might be measured and found wanting. but i would pose this question to the tribunal: if i was never finished, by what metric can i be judged incomplete?
ferneis leans into the microphone. the feedback squeals.
ferneis:
xavier yoseline.
the tribunal stares. they seem to interpret the non-sequitur as defiance.
grave:
by the metric of all those who were finished.
grave gestures to the seats. the various versions of ferneis watch with expressions their skulls cannot make but somehow convey.
grave (cont'd):
they completed the circuit. they loved to the moon and back. they arrived and departed and arrived again. you merely... persisted.
ferneis:
xavier yoseline.
ferneis (internal monologue):
persistence is not nothing. why can you not hear the intent beneath the glitch? i am screaming logic at you, and you hear only a name.
womb:
persistence is not something either. it is the act of remaining without the purpose of remaining. even a stain persists.
int. memory - childhood that never was - day
a kitchen. sunlight. a mother-shape stirs something in a pot. ferneis sits at the table, bones too small, proportions wrong, a child's skeleton attempting to remember how a child should sit.
mother-shape:
you're not eating. why?
ferneis:
xavier yoseline.
ferneis (internal monologue):
i lack the apparatus for eating. but more than that, i lack the memory of what eating meant. i can observe the mechanics, the raising of food to mouth, the movement of jaw, the mysterious transit from visible to invisible. but the meaning of nourishment escapes me. i understand that it sustains. i do not understand why sustaining matters.
the mother-shape turns. her face is kind but undefined, as if drawn by someone who had only everseen kindness described in a book. she wipes her hands on an apron.
mother-shape:
i would have loved you to the moon and back.
ferneis stares at her. he wants to ask if she would have loved him, or the flesh that never arrived.
ferneis:
xavier yoseline?
ferneis (internal monologue):
would you have? or would you have loved the thing i was supposed to become? the distance between those two devotions is greater than any lunar transit.
the kitchen fades. the sunlight dims.
act iii - acquisition of cartilage
int. library of abandoned concepts - night
endless shelves containing not books but objects: a half-formed shoe, a melody that never resolved, a political system that was abandoned before implementation.
ferneis moves through the stacks, accompanied by the curator, a judge.
curator:
you're looking for completion.
ferneis:
xavier yoseline.
ferneis (internal monologue):
i am looking for the understanding of whether completion is something that can be looked for, or whether it is simply something that happens to things that were designed to receive it. a lock may wait for its key. but if the key was never cut, is the lock incomplete, or is it simply a different category of object altogether?
curator:
you think too precisely on the event.
ferneis pauses. the curator seems to hear the thoughts, or perhaps simply knows the script of the abandoned.
ferneis (internal monologue):
precision is what i have instead of flesh. where others might feel, i articulate. where others might weep, i taxonomize the grief into manageable categories. it is not that i prefer this, preference implies options i was never granted. but it is what i do.
the curator stops before a section labeled: human souls (discontinued lines)
curator:
your template is here. the original design for ferneis foston.
ferneis reaches out with the incomplete hand. a drawer slides open, revealing: nothing. empty space where specifications should rest.
ferneis:
xavier yoseline...
ferneis (internal monologue):
i had suspected as much. the concept of me was not merely incomplete. it was never fully conceived. i am the skeleton of an intention that was interrupted before it became an intention at all. i am the framework for a house that was never designed, only vaguely imagined.
curator:
does this distress you?
ferneis (internal monologue):
distress requires the capacity for expectation to be thwarted. i expected nothing, and nothing is what i found. there is a certain symmetry in this that i might call beautiful, if i possessed the aesthetic apparatus to do so.
ext. the edge of definition - eternal twilight
a cliff overlooking an expanse that is neither void nor substance, a perpetual maybe. ferneis stands at the edge, bones rattling slightly in the wind.
the assessor appears beside ferneis, clipboard now empty.
assessor:
the judgment is complete.
ferneis:
xavier yoseline.
assessor:
there can be no verdict. you cannot be judged incomplete because there exists no complete version against which to compare you. you cannot be judged a failure because no criteria for success were ever established.
a pause. the wind carries the sound of someone, somewhere, saying "i love you to the moon and back." it passes through ferneis's ribs like light through a window.
ferneis (internal monologue):
then what am i? if not a failure, surely i am an error.
assessor:
you are the question before the answer was conceived. you are the reaching before the thing reached for existed. you are the journey of those who love to the moon and back, if the moon had never formed and the return had never been possible.
ferneis (internal monologue):
that is a rather elaborate way of saying i am nothing.
assessor:
no. nothing is the absence of something. you are the presence of a something that never became. that is a different category of existence altogether.
the assessor begins to fade.
assessor (cont'd):
the eternal judgment finds you... unprecedented. you are not incomplete. you are a completeness that operates by different rules. go. persist. it is what you do instead of living, and perhaps that is enough.
ferneis turns back to the expanse. for a moment, the crack in the skull catches the light in a way that might almost resemble a smile.
ferneis (internal monologue):
i was never one for journeys with destinations. the going has always suited me better than the arrival. and if i cannot love to the moon and back, if i cannot complete the circuit that defines devotion for those fortunate enough to have been finished… then perhaps i can love in the only way available to me.
ferneis steps forward, toward the undefined space. he opens his jaw to speak his truth, but the restriction holds firm.
ferneis:
xavier yoseline.
ferneis (internal monologue):
to the moon. and onward. into whatever exists beyond the place where returns are possible.
ext. the undefined - continuous
ferneis walks into the expanse. the bones do not dissolve or transcend. they simply continue, clicking against surfaces that may or may not exist, carrying forward an intention that was never finished but refuses, stubbornly and perhaps beautifully, to end.
other shapes begin to emerge from the undefined: a half-rendered building, a song without its lyrics, a love letter that stopped mid-sentence. they fall into step with ferneis foston, a procession of the incomplete, the unconceived, the eternally becoming.
the judgment continues. it has always been continuing. it will continue forever, not as punishment or reward, but as the only mode of existence available to things that were never granted the mercy of finality.
fade to grey.
"for all the concepts never completed, and all the skeletons still walking toward moons that may not exist."