Apocalypse Monologues: Nuclear

B is offstage the entire time. A is on stage with a walkie talkie, or some other device. All communication with B is through the device. Every lights up/lights down should accompany either an electrical humming or walkie-talkie static.

[Lights up.]
B. It’s your move.
A: Okay. I move my horse up two and left one.
B: It’s a knight. Knight to G4.
A: Yeah. I believe that’s checkmate.
B: No, no it’s not. Not even a little bit.
A: Did I sink your battleship?
B: What? Bah. No. Do you want to do something else? We can watch a movie?
A: Yeah, okay.
[We hear B start a movie. A listens on his end via the walkie-talkie. A opens a bag of pre-made popcorn. We hear the crunching as lights go down.]

[Lights up.]
B: I spy with my little eye something that starts with the letter G…
A: Green beans.
B: Yeah.
[Lights down.]

[Lights up.]
[A is loudly weeping. B is consoling him.]
[Lights down.]

[Lights up.]
A: When my mom had this bunker made, it was just another sign of her mental wacky. The preacher fed her this fairy tale, and she just believed it. For whatever reason, it just made total sense to her. My dad put up with it, because he pretty much did whatever it took to placate her. She promised she’d take everything in a divorce, and he feared losing his money more than a lifetime of misery. So, Mom got her Rapture fortress. I never got the logic of that. If she believed in the Rapture, wouldn’t she assume she’d be saved? If so, she doesn’t need to hide in a hole. I mean, nobody thinks "The Rapture is real and I am fucked!" Only the self-righteous believe in the Rapture. It was like her carrot on a stick, which was also what she used to beat me.
B: Maybe she built the hole for you, sinner, what with all your Krispy Kreme gluttony and Alyson Hannigan posters.
A: Ha! Yeah, well, if she built the hole for me, I really wish she would have populated it with more DVDs of Buffy and porn and less Ten Commandments and VeggieTales. I mean, VeggieTales? What the fuck? I’m not eleven! She doesn’t know anyone who is eleven! Instead, here I am, whiling away the rest of my, what?, years? months? memorizing the commentary track to the 1923 version of the Ten Commandments. I mean, really, if I survived the Rapture, doesn’t that mean my soul is a lost cause and she could just allow me to happily wallow and die in my degenerate filth?
B: It would be pretty awkward for everyone involved if your mother stocked her Rapture bunker for you with porno. Can you imagine your mother shopping for you for porno? You’d probably get VeggieTales-themed porno.
A: Ha! Yeah, with titles like --
B: You know, what? Let’s not go down that route right now.
A: Okay. But when it all went down, of course, it wasn’t angels or demons or fairies or unicorns or whatever. It was crazy religious nutjobs.
B: Like your mother.
A: Ha! Yeah, I guess so. Except my mom didn’t have nuclear weapons. If she did, she would have bombed San Francisco a long time ago, in an attempt to please God? (That’s the kind of logic she would work with.) So, it all went down and my parents were, you know, in Cabo and I was at home on the couch.
B: Watching Buffy.
A: Watching Buffy. And now Cabo’s gone and I live in their basement.
B: …
A: What about you? Any funny stories about your mom?
B: … My mother was a school teacher when she was younger, but she had been living in a nursing home when the strikes landed. She had Alzheimer’s-related dementia. I don’t know if she would have known what was happening. Cognitively, she probably wouldn’t have been aware. I like to hope not, anyway. I would like to think that it would have been over before it hurt her.
A: Did you ever visit her?
B: Rarely. I loved her. Of course, I loved her. But visiting her… I would be with her and find myself missing her. Missing her in her presence. It was awful. I didn’t like seeing her like that. And she had no idea who I was. It was horrible. After a while, I found myself going more to keep up appearances with the staff, so that they wouldn’t think I was a crappy son. Maybe if they thought I cared, they would be nicer to her. I don’t know. Soon after, I slowly stopped going. My visits became less frequent. I would just pay the bill. That was my way of visiting. … Man, sorry. This is miserable.
[BEAT.]
A: Are there good memories?
B: Of course. Of course there were. She taught me to drive. That was funny. Even though she was a nervous wreck, she still tried to be patient and lighthearted, though she was obviously going nuts in the passenger seat. I wasn’t doing anything crazy. We were in an empty parking lot at the mall, going fifteen miles per hour in her station wagon, and she was still grinding her foot into her invisible brake and clenching the dashboard, as if I was driving like Steve McQueen.
A: Who?
B: As if I was driving like someone in The Fast and the Furious.
A: Ah.
B: She was clearly going nuts. It was like her smiles were all just well-intentioned lies to help me feel comfortable and confidant, while, really, the fear was tying her up in knots, as if she expected me to accidentally hit the auto-destruct button on the car. And the noises she made! Just inarticulate sounds that kept her from cursing! But she suffered through with this horribly ineffective façade of pleasantry. And, of course, this did not at all make me feel comfortable and confidant. It made me feel like I was doing everything wrong and I was about to kill us both in a fiery wreck! It was definitely not a fun afternoon for either of us, but a good memory. That’s the mother I miss. And I had been missing her for years before she died.
A: …
B: …
A: What do you think the surface is like?
B: Poison.
[Lights down.]

[Lights up.]
A: How long will we be down here?
B: You should stop thinking of here as temporary. You live down here now. There is no up there. This is your world. The hole you live in is your home.
A: But for how long? Months? Years? Decades?
B: Forever. There is no surface. The world is an evil, burning husk. There is no civilization. There is no culture. There is no surprise party waiting for you to poke your head out like a groundhog.
A: Damn, man, how do you know? How do you know? You don’t know that!
B: I do know that, and so do you.
A: There must be other people out there.
B: I bet there are, but they’re other mole people, like us, living in holes, watching DVDs, eating canned goods. Maybe some people are living communally. Maybe some families are living in luxury holes. Maybe some people were able to make contact with others, like us. Maybe some people are living alone, without even VeggieTales.
A: It sucks not knowing.
B: You know. You know you know, you just don’t like the knowing.
A: Maybe someone’s coming.
B: No one’s coming.
A: …
B: I’m sorry.
A: At least I have you.
B: At least I have you.
[Lights down.]

[Lights up.]
A: Do you think the mole people who aren’t alone are trying to make babies? To keep the human race alive?
B: I bet there are people trying to procreate. I don’t know how smart that is, with limited food, water, air, space. With no health care. No nothing.
A: If there were another person in my hole, I’d want to have as much sex as possible.
B: You’d probably have as much sex as you had before.
A: Damn, man. Why you gotta go there?
B: Plus, what then? You’ve added another person to your hole. What happens then? Where do you go from there? It’s not like the holes are going to be connected with a series of tubes, where all our holes will form some underground city.
A: Shouldn’t they try to reproduce?
B: Reproduce with what? Their siblings? What’s the point? Why would you raise a kid in a hole? What would you teach it about the world? "This hole is the entire world!"
A: There’s an existentialist crisis waiting to explode.
B: And why? Just to check "Did my poorly thought-out part to save humanity" off a list? Do they just plan to keep filling up their holes with inbred offspring? So, that, what?, when the space aliens of the future come and open our holes they’ll find a cluster of dead mutants? Doesn’t sound like much of a plan to me.
A: Man, sometimes you sure do suck.
B: Sorry.
A: You talk as if we should all just be patiently waiting to die.
[Lights down.]

[Lights up.]
A: I think about all the petty, stupid shit a lot.
B: Me, too.
A: Like trying to hunt down the various issues of the Buffy comic book. Like it fucking meant something. "Hey, look at me! I have a perfect collection of Buffy the Vampire Slayer comic books! Bask in my oily sheen!"
B: Squabbling with my then-wife.
A: Not talking to that girl at the comic book store.
B: All the moments of potential squandered with bickering.
A: I watched a Hell of a lot of TV. Like, I really studied Buffy the Vampire Slayer, you know? And Angel. You could have asked me anything about it, and I would have the answer for you.
B: We would fight over the stupidest things, like leaving the lights on.
A: Like, of all things, that was my specialty: the lives of fictional characters. That was what I was really good at. That was the one thing.
B: Or vacuuming. God, I hated vacuuming, but, really, it was just vacuuming.
A: I never fought back.
B: I became so small and dark.
A: My life sucked sometimes, and I never fought back.
B: It was like my crappy life was a kingdom, and I fought to preserve it. Preserve it from stupid crap, like having to vacuum.
A: I never stood up for myself.
B: If I were her, I would have left, too. And if I could be me, again, I would have done a better job.
A: I just took the beating.
B: I loved her. I should have really done a better job.
A: I took the beating, and then watched TV.
B: I think about things I should have done differently thirty years ago. What kind of life is that?
A: I should have done a better job with me.
[Lights down.]

[Lights up.]
B: So, the clock is ticking down, it’s 37 to 35, [STATIC]
A: What?
B: [STATIC] dribbling down the court, and even though the crowd is going absolute—[LONGER STATIC] can’t hear a thing
A: Hey, man, you’re breaking up.
B: and I leap out from half-court and hurl the [STATIC] worth and the clock is ticking, [STATIC]
A: Hello?
B: ball flying through [STATIC], buzzer’s about to [STATIC]
A: I can’t hear you.
B: 3-2-[STATIC]
A: Hello? Hello! HEY! Are you there? [rattles device around] HELLO?! Hello? No.
[Lights down]
…