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JACK

That scares you? It’s just meat. You were married; you should know the depths of men’s depravity. Or think of your doctor, with his experiments—he knows we’re all alike under the skin, all the same color. My father taught me that. When we look at each other, we see only the surface; we feel desire pulling us together, to make life and death in a rush of blood. But the real power lies inside, in mystery. Blood and flesh, miles of tubes and organs which pulse and writhe down deep in the dark where we can’t reach them, without our knowledge or consent. Desire comes upon us like a fever, feeds on us, changes us. This terrible power. I saw it in myself, and it scared me senseless. All I ever wanted was to see it in someone else, just once to catch a glimpse of it. But there was never anything but meat, but blood. And this rage would come over me, this awful fear that perhaps there is no force behind it at all, nothing to direct or drive us. That it was me, only me and always me, alone. Alone. Alone.

(Quieter)

Then it was enough to see red, everywhere. Red streets. Red walls. Red hands. All mine. All mine.

MRS. BENTHAM

Stephen—

JACK

Do you think calling me that will make me him if you only keep on doing it long enough? No more than me calling you by another name would make you her: Mother, perhaps. Or . . . Mary.

MRS. BENTHAM

Stephen, I—

JACK

What is your Christian name, Mrs. Bentham?

If I might make so free.

MRS. BENTHAM

. . . Clarissa.

JACK

Very pretty.

(A beat)

My name is Jack.

MRS. BENTHAM

Oh . . . God. Oh, my good God.

JACK

Is God good, do you suppose? He made the flowers, true enough.

But then—he also made me.

He chooses a knife and paces, shifting it from hand to hand with a very light CHINK of polished steel that increases steadily with the rate of his agitation, like a Satanic metronome. Is he even talking to her anymore? Or just to himself? No matter. Throughout, MRS. BENTHAM—rooted to the spot by fascination, terror, or a combination of the two—fights to slow her own frantic BREATHING, as though trying to will herself invisible.

JACK

(Faster and faster)

Steam under stopper, super-heated. My urge to peel away the skin of the world undone by finding only red garbage underneath—the basest carnal urges, so low they contaminate whatever they touch. Rendering flesh just a shallow mask over life’s hideous facts: What can be fucked must be fucked, always and forever, the result of that fucking being not life, but death. Death in childbirth. Death in abortion. Death by syphilis. Death by cancer. Death by murder. Death by death.

(He rounds on her)

But this talk of a “cure”—all poppycock, a stupid sham, a coward’s way out and nothing more. D’you understand? I might have done the first merely to see, yes . . . yet why go on, as though more might be learned? Why all these others, worse and worse and worse, ‘til SHE—