The Morning List
Part Three: The Original
The blue envelope arrived three minutes late.
No one mentioned it.
Jonas did.
“The system is failing.”
“The system overslept,” Maron said.
Leda was pinning yesterday’s pages onto the cork wall. Celia’s entrance now occupied three typed sheets, each carrying penciled corrections in different hands.
On the board:
A VEHICLE FOR CELIA VALE
Below it:
FIND THE PICTURE.
Someone—probably Maron—had added underneath:
DON’T PROTECT THE LINE. PROTECT THE PICTURE.
Leda left it there.
Jonas opened the envelope.
“The first statement.”
He cleared his throat dramatically.
“Nothing is original except the mistake.”
Maron smiled.
“I like whoever writes these.”
“You always do.”
“No.”
“Yesterday?”
“I liked the piano.”
“The hotel?”
“The piano.”
Jonas continued.
“Every masterpiece begins as theft.”
Leda held out her hand.
He gave her the page.
She read it twice.
“No.”
“You don’t like it?”
“I don’t believe it.”
Maron shrugged.
“I believe half of it.”
“Which half?”
“The masterpiece.”
Jonas laughed.
“You don’t believe theft?”
“I think that’s too romantic.”
Leda laid the page flat on the table.
“What is the room actually talking about?”
“The line.”
“No.”
“The author.”
“No.”
“The picture.”
She nodded once.
“Better.”
Jonas reached into the envelope again.
“There’s a note.”
“A note?”
“They’ve never sent notes.”
He unfolded it.
Research cannot verify the attribution of Statement Seven.
Maron looked up.
“What attribution?”
Jonas found Statement Seven.
He read it aloud.
“A room remembers the person who was expected.”
Silence.
“I thought Woolf,” Leda said.
“I thought Wilder,” Maron replied.
“I thought nobody,” Jonas said.
He looked back at the note.
“It says the quotation has circulated for years.”
“So?”
“So no one knows who first wrote it.”
Maron leaned back.
“Then whose is it?”
Nobody answered.
The photograph of the Hotel Rio still occupied the center of the table.
Beside it lay a pair of earrings.
Wardrobe had sent them over with a note.
One pair is the original. One pair is the duplicate. Insurance requires separation. We no longer know which is which.
Jonas picked one up.
“They’re identical.”
“To us,” Leda said.
“They’re worth different amounts.”
“Only if someone knows.”
She shook her head.
“No.”
“Then where’s the difference?”
“They participated.”
Maron smiled.
“There you go again.”
“What?”
“You keep making objects remember.”
“They do.”
“They’re metal.”
“They were there.”
Nobody argued.
At ten-thirty the door opened.
Celia entered carrying yesterday’s pages.
No greeting.
She placed the script on the table.
“I have a problem.”
Jonas immediately reached for a pencil.
“What page?”
“Not the page.”
“The entrance?”
“No.”
“The flowers?”
“No.”
“The line.”
She pointed.
“Then show me what it remembers.”
Leda looked surprised.
“You don’t like it?”
“I like it.”
“So what’s the problem?”
“I can’t play remembering.”
Maron stopped writing.
Celia continued.
“I can remember.”
She touched the page.
“But I can’t play this.”
The room became quiet.
Finally Jonas asked,
“What are you trying to do?”
She looked at him.
“I don’t know.”
“Good.”
Leda smiled.
“Now we’re working.”
Maron crossed out nothing but the stage direction.
“What do you want from the clerk?”
Celia thought.
“To stop hiding.”
Jonas wrote on the board:
MAKE HIM STOP HIDING.
Leda shook her head.
“Too direct.”
“What then?”
Celia looked at the Hotel Rio photograph.
“I want him to forget the script.”
“The clerk?”
“Everyone.”
Jonas slowly nodded.
“So you aren’t asking the room to remember.”
“No.”
“I’m asking it…”
She stopped.
Maron waited.
“…to stop pretending.”
Nobody wrote.
Then Leda quietly said,
“Read the scene.”
Celia stood.
She became still.
Not actress still.
Waiting still.
She looked toward an imaginary lobby.
An imaginary clerk.
An imaginary arrangement of flowers.
She spoke.
“Welcome back.”
“No,” Jonas said.
“That’s the clerk.”
“I know.”
She smiled.
“I wanted to hear it.”
Again.
She waited.
Then quietly:
“I’ve never been here.”
The room changed.
Not because the line changed.
Because the action did.
She wasn’t denying the hotel.
She was refusing its script.
Maron drew a line through the stage direction.
Not the dialogue.
The direction.
He wrote:
She makes him abandon the prepared welcome.
Leda nodded.
“Now she has something to do.”
Jonas picked up the anonymous quotation again.
“A room remembers the person who was expected.”
He looked at the attribution.
Without speaking, he crossed it out.
Only the sentence remained.
Maron watched him.
“So we keep it?”
Jonas shrugged.
“The picture wants it.”
“But who wrote it?”
Celia looked at the Hotel Rio photograph.
Then at the earrings.
Then at the script.
Finally she said,
“I don’t think that’s today’s question.”
Outside the story department someone laughed.
A typewriter began somewhere down the hall.
Another room had found its picture first.
Jonas folded the morning list in half.
“Tomorrow?”
Leda smiled.
“Tomorrow someone will claim they wrote it.”
“And if they did?”
She pinned the anonymous sentence beside the Hotel Rio photograph.
“We’ll see whether it still works.”
The room became quiet again.
Not because they had solved anything.
Because they had found the next scene.
Tomorrow, someone else would bring another blue envelope.
Another forgotten line.
Another photograph.
Another piece of history no one yet knew how to use.
The picture would decide what belonged.
The rest would return to the envelope.
WE&P by: EZorrillaMc&Co.
Travel in Life 