Press Release

Scene 1

Elise is 31. Courtney is about twenty years older.

ELISE

On that side of the conference table sits Courtney Bides. Her Klean Kanteen has the iconic print of planet Earth. Her briefcase is on the table and popped open. It is empty of paper. The papers are spread alluvially over her end of the table. Earlier today, eight people had sat at this table, where they had discussed. Now Courtney Bides capitalizes on their absence. She leans back in her chair, with her hands behind her neck so she can relax. The back of her chair is like the lobe of a large cactus. A quick survey of the tabletop. Newspaper clippings. Pens, pencils, a staple remover. The Cetacean Fact File, a three-ring binder with brightly colored images of dolphins, whales, porpoises, etc. Their ilk. At Courtney Bides’s end, a coffee warmer whose cord runs to a wall outlet. Courtney Bides had been number twenty, of twenty, in the 2006 office White Elephant Gift Exchange, and she had taken the hotplate from number nine, whoever that had been. It had been Elise Awad.

COURTNEY

Elise Awad is at the other end of the conference table. She has a cup of coffee, too. A thermometer in each of our coffees would show my coffee to be hotter than Elise’s by seven degrees. It may not seem like a lot. That office White Elephant Gift Exchange had taken
place two years ago, and in those two years Elise had never purchased her own heating pad, a fact which two years ago at the White Elephant Gift Exchange would have surprised everyone. To the matter at hand. It should read, ‘This is a very rare, unfortunate
incident.’

ELISE

…Rare, unfortunate incident. That’s good.

COURTNEY

Elise was transcribing.

(to Elise)

Good?

ELISE

It’s good.

COURTNEY

Good doesn’t sound so good the way you say it.

ELISE

I don’t like Courtney Bides. One day, however, I will ask her for a raise. On that day, I will lay out my request cleanly and rationally. I’m already indispensible but timing is like a knife. I will not fawn. I’ll lay it out, and I’ll mean it. I will ask respectfully. And my salary will increase, and no one will feel taken advantage of.

(to Courtney)

What do you think about rearranging it? Like, ‘a very unfortunate, rare incident.’

COURTNEY

Isn’t that what I said?

ELISE

(to audience)

It wasn’t.

(to Courtney)

You said ‘rare, unfortunate incident.’ If we put ‘rare’ second it emphasizes that it was a freak accident. It makes Sea World look better.

COURTNEY

Takes a stronger stance.

ELISE

Takes a much stronger stance.

COURTNEY

Less apologetic. Okay, good.

ELISE

Courtney sips her coffee.

COURTNEY

One more thing. It should read, ‘very unfortunate, very rare situation.’

ELISE

So we’re repeating ‘very.’

COURTNEY

Is that a problem?

ELISE

No, no. It’s a choice.

COURTNEY

It is a choice.

ELISE

It’s fine. Let’s keep it.

COURTNEY

I think the emphasis is appropriate. This is an extreme situation.

ELISE

Very extreme.

COURTNEY

(to audience)

I don’t like Elise Awad. She thinks I don’t notice, but she often makes faint adjustments to her glasses and smooths strands of hair from her temples when I am speaking to her. She has a very serious mouth, faint acne scars a neat ponytail. She is thirty-one and wears thick, gold-framed glasses. She never tells me about anything she’s genuinely interested in. She is very
good at her job, and very smart. I don’t know what her real passions are. It isn’t her work. She dooesn’t accept that even if she doesn’t like her job, she still has the opportunity to interact with people, and educate people, and help them, and she can do good things if she wants, but she chooses not to. Some day, she will ask for a raise, and I will promote her.

ELISE

So we’ve got our statement. Now we need to review protocol.

COURTNEY

Yeah, we don’t need to review protocol.

ELISE

What do you mean?

COURTNEY

We can review it a little. But the training protocol is fine.

ELISE

Do we know that it’s fine?

COURTNEY

Essentially, the protocol is fine. Very unfortunate, very rare incident.

ELISE

Well, earlier in the statement we make a pledge to review our dolphin training protocol.

COURTNEY

So we’re making a pledge now?

ELISE

It was a public statement.

COURTNEY

Sure, sure. And we’ll review the protocol tomorrow. I’ll put someone on it.

ELISE

So we have the protocol on file?

COURTNEY

I’m sure we do. Everything’s on file.

ELISE

So you’ll check the files tomorrow.

COURTNEY

(to audience)

Sometimes Elise even forgets that she works for me. Effectively.

(to Elise)

I’ll check the files. The training protocol is either in our general file, or it’s at Sea Desk. Either way, the protocol is there. Once we find it, we can review it. It’s that simple.

ELISE

That’s good.

COURTNEY

That’s good.

ELISE

The only thing to think about–

COURTNEY

Oh for Chrissakes.

ELISE

The only thing is to make sure whatever training manual they have at Sea Desk is in line with the actual protocol. Who knows what they’re using as guidelines at Sea Desk. We have to make sure the official protocol is being carried out. God, protocol, protocol, protocol.

COURTNEY

Mm.

ELISE

Do you ever think—sometimes I feel like we talk about protocol too much. Do you ever get that feeling?

COURTNEY

Are you kidding me?

ELISE

I mean, let’s get back to basics. Here. Here’s a new press release. The other day, two dolphins jumped out of the water during an exposition. Mid-air they collided. One of the dolphins died. Sharky, who was thirty years old. Dead.

COURTNEY

Fatally struck.

ELISE

A thirty-something dolphin.

COURTNEY

Sharky was thirty. Don’t romanticize it.

ELISE

They collided mid-air. Mid-air.

COURTNEY

Mm.

ELISE

Sharky died for entertainment.

COURTNEY

You know, Sunday’s necropsy results came back. The exact cause of death was not immediately known.

ELISE

What?

COURTNEY

I’m saying, the cause of death was not immediately known.

ELISE

So. You’re saying—wait, what are you saying? Like maybe it had a seizure? Heart attack? Maybe it herniated coincidentally?

COURTNEY

All I’m saying is, we don’t know what killed it. Not really.

ELISE

That’s very abstract of you.

COURTNEY

I’m trying to make a point. You’re not thinking like Sea World. You’re thinking like a human brain. Cut that out. Obviously we need to add this new fact to the statement. ‘A necropsy was performed Sunday, which results suggest that the immediate cause of death is unknown.’

ELISE

‘Which results suggest’?

COURTNEY

God, I’m embarrassed I hadn’t brought this up earlier. See, we get so steeped in details. Which word we put first. Very unfortunate or very rare. Obviously it’s both. But we lose sight of the big picture. We don’t even know what the immediate cause of death was.

ELISE

Well, we know.

COURTNEY

But we don’t know. We don’t really know.

ELISE

Let me see the report.

COURTNEY

We haven’t written it yet.

ELISE

Not our report. The necropsy.

COURTNEY

(to audience)

I peered at Elise long and hard. Long and hard. I found nothing. I scanned the tabletop and found the report.

(to Elise)

Fine. Here’s the fax.

ELISE

‘The exact cause of death is not known.’

COURTNEY

We don’t know.

ELISE

Exact, exact, exact. We know that the cause of death was dolphin-oriented.

COURTNEY

Yeah.

ELISE

Dolphin-centric, even.

COURTNEY

I think we’re not disagreeing, Elise. Not really. Not if you look closely.

ELISE

Courtney sipped her coffee, and when the mug came away she was smiling slyly.

COURTNEY

Dolphin-oriented…

COURTNEY

(to audience)

You have to admit. It was a funny situation. We were struck by it: a funny situation we were in.

ELISE

This is a fucked situation. I mean, what in the fuck.

COURTNEY

I’m glad the other dolphin is okay.

ELISE

Is it?

COURTNEY

It’s doing fine. We’re monitoring it, but it’s showing no signs of death so far.

ELISE

That’s good.

COURTNEY

It is good.

ELISE

That fucking murderer.

COURTNEY

Aw, come on.

ELISE

How does one dolphin die in mid-air, and the other emerge totally unhurt?

COURTNEY

(to audience)

For the first time, it was like Elise was opening up to me.

ELISE

Did it keep doing tricks after? For the crowd? They say dolphins are so smart. Like they blow bubble rings and swim through them. They save surfers, sing songs for each other.

COURTNEY

I don’t know. Let’s stay on track here.

ELISE

Maybe it was a mercy killing.

COURTNEY

What?

ELISE

Here they are. Two dolphins. Trained together. Lived their whole lives in captivity, jumping through hoops.  I know I’d be depressed. Then Bob decides to give Sharky the greatest gift of all.

COURTNEY

The greatest gift of all.

ELISE

That’s right. You know what I’m talking about.

COURTNEY

Do I?

ELISE

Death.

COURTNEY

You’re a very dark person, aren’t you, Elise?

ELISE

I’m not a dark person. I’m just saying, one dolphin got annihilated and the other was unhurt. Maybe they had an agreement.

COURTNEY

That’s very dark.

ELISE

I’m not a particularly dark person. I just happened to have been born during a very dark time.

COURTNEY

This isn’t the dark ages.

ELISE

Not exactly.

COURTNEY

Alright, let’s finish this report. It’s getting late.

ELISE

It’s not the dark ages but it may as well be, you know? It’s not looking so rosy. When I got a job here it was because I wanted to work with animals. I liked animals. Right? But the animals are fucked. Institutionally fucked. The system is set up that way. To fuck them. And you only realize it once it’s too late, once you’re already in the middle of it. Smack-dab in the dead
center of a giant dolphin-fucking machine.”

COURTNEY

What are you even talking about.

ELISE

A lot of people are happy. I get that. But there’s just all these impossible problems.

COURTNEY

Well I guess I picked the wrong business. I guess I shouldn’t try and do any good, or teach anybody about ecosystems or animal life or anything. I guess it’s high time I retire.

ELISE

High time? That’s so funny you say that. Have you ever read Marcel Proust, Remembrance of Things Past? No?

COURTNEY

Parts of it.

ELISE

There’s this one line I’ll never forget. The narrator says, It was high time I left Paris. High time. How sad, right? High time. It has that feeling like a time has passed you by without you even realizing it. Scary enough. I loved that line. And then, get this. I gave the copy away. I forget why. I gave it to a friend. Then when I buy a new copy for myself, I read it again
and I get to the part where It’s high time I left Paris. But in this translation it says It’s time I left Paris. Not high time. Just time. And this translation is better. I checked the French. It’s things like that that make me wonder. Maybe the translator was writing Proust better than Proust, you know? Because, high time is so sad. It’s perfect.

COURTNEY

Or maybe it was just a mistake.

ELISE

No. It’s perfect. High time you retired. It is high time you retired. But tomorrow you review the protocol. Protocol review first. Alright, come on. Come on, hey. Now let’s write this thing.

COURTNEY

We finished writing the protocol. It’s hard to say if it mattered though. The next day, something very odd happened. I had gone to the pier, where my boat was tied to the end of the private dock there. I took it out into the ocean, not far, to go fishing. It was summertime and it was something I did after work when the weather was right. I was on the boat when it happened. From shore they could see it, everyone could see it: a tumult in the waves. That’s what one of them called it afterwards: a tumult. It was all at once. It came to every part of the water at once. There wasn’t any warning. It was as if all the water had reversed. But it hadn’t reversed. I was on the boat. The water shuddered. You could see the pellets we used on the
water shuddering on the surface of the wave. Then all the water changed. It was like cat’s fur pet backward into whitecaps. But everywhere at once. They were on shore when they saw it. There were many of them on the shore watching, but I was on the boat. The surfacing
was a roar. Nobody knows why. From the shore you could see it: the tide retracted 9 feet they say. They say you could tell from even the landlocked boats. Some of the boats were 9 feet long and that’s exactly how far away the water went from the shore. Everything in the ocean came up. Every animal went up into the air. But I was in the boat. But there were more than just animals.  All of everything, every alive thing in the ocean, and the ocean is made of nothing but that sort of thing. Jellies. Huge fish. A huge fish blocked the sun and it was a bright orange outline and its black body. Everywhere was orange diamonds of water. There were terrific green sludges like ivy climbing but the sky now, red claws were tangled up in it and you could see them still flexing the meat of their claws, and the smell of salt, the fresh and the dying, was
overpowering. Jellies came up, casements of jellies whose schools had got caught up together. Starfishes came up squirting, water lanced off the backs of remoras bent in L shapes. The water coming from the whales moved like it was slower than the rest of the water, the whales were further from me thank God, undulating and heaving, blasting water, sea cucumbers
came twisting up and you could see the alien black fish come up too and they were blind with milk instead of eyes, and at the time what could I think? Where could I have been but there? And now what can I think? And what could that have been like, for the fish, all of a
sudden it’s low pressure and blinding sun? And what could it have been like for them on the shore, when the dying off started? That they started dying as soon as they’d left the water? That aome didn’t die on impact but were injured terribly, as if the collisions were
planned for maximum damage. As if they’d come up in pairs for each other. What could it have been like, seeing it from the shore? Oh, but I was on the boat. I was on the boat.

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Evan Winchester is a writer and editor who, in May 2012, completed an MFA in Creative Writing at San Francisco State University with an emphasis in prose. He makes theater and film with PianoFight, a production company based in San Francisco. He majored in Integrative Biology at UC Berkeley, and has worked as a researcher and writer for California State Parks. He lives in Oakland. www.evanwinchester.wordpress.com.

This piece was read as part of a production of “Action Fiction!”, sponsored by Fiction365 and Omnibucket.  

Read more stories from Action Fiction! productions.

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