What the Water Knows
A Play in One Act
Characters
- JULIAN: Eli’s secret lover. He knows Eli’s nocturnal silences, yet tonight he realizes he never truly knew him at all.
- MARCUS: Eli’s inseparable training partner. Direct, physical, bewildered by the invisible.
- LIAM: The close friend and confidant. Observant, attuned to the hidden undercurrents of the mind.
- THE SHADOWS IN THE GLASS: The reflections of the three friends cast against the tall, uncurtained window.
Setting
The living room of Eli’s high-rise apartment at night. Upstage, a wide, uncurtained picture window opens onto the pitch-black void of the city. Because the room is lit solely by a single floor lamp casting a dense, amber glow, the glass acts as a dark mirror: whenever Julian, Marcus, or Liam move, their reflections float suspended in the outer darkness, their gestures appearing slower, graver, and more distant than their actual bodies. In one corner sit a swim bag and a basketball; on a shelf rest dream journals, raw mineral stones, and a bronze singing bowl. On the coffee table lie folders stuffed with Missing Person flyers and cold mugs of coffee.
At rise, the three men are motionless. They look like figures trapped inside a display case being watched from the void. Liam stands by the front door, his fingers resting on the heavy deadbolt. Marcus sits on the edge of the sofa. Julian stands near the picture window, not daring to press his hands against the glass.
Scene
LIAM. —(Slowly letting go of the deadbolt). Eli installed two steel latches and a chain on this door last month. He always double-locked it before going to bed. He thought securing the wood was enough to keep danger out in the hallway... We bolt the doors of our homes believing we’ve foreseen everything that can be foreseen, never realizing the world doesn't end at our walls, and that tragedy never makes a sound when it slips through the lock.
MARCUS. —There has to be a trace somewhere, Liam. We hit all four hospitals in the district, the precincts, the county morgue... We looked into steel drawers nobody should ever have to look into. He’s not on the intake logs, not in holding, not among the John Does. A grown man doesn't just evaporate from city records like smoke.
JULIAN. —We’ve been repeating the exact same thing for fourteen days just to keep from falling silent. We talk and talk around his absence so the quiet doesn't come crashing down on us all at once. I’m terrified of the minute we run out of paperwork to file or hospitals to check... That’s when something inside us is really going to tear apart.
LIAM. —(Staring at the window). Look at us in that glass. Ever since night fell, I’ve been afraid to look up. It feels like we’re at the bottom of an aquarium, and there’s someone out there in the dark watching us wait—someone who knows a simple, terrible truth we still haven't figured out.
MARCUS. —There’s nobody out there, Liam. We’re on the sixth floor. It’s just the three of us—the only family he had in this world. (Pause. He rubs the back of his neck, uneasy). Well... I thought we were his family. After what you told us an hour ago, Julian, I feel like I spent five years training next to a complete stranger.
JULIAN. —He wasn't a stranger to you. He loved you in his own way.
MARCUS. —He never breathed a word to me about the two of you! We trained together almost every single day. Pickup basketball in the evenings, swimming laps at dawn, out-of-town tournaments, every sport you can name... I was his shadow on the court and in the lane. We spent hours in the steam room and under the locker room showers, wrapped in fog, talking about life, exhaustion, whatever nonsense came to mind... How can you stand naked across from your best friend for years and never once suspect he’s in love with another man?
JULIAN. —(With a tired, razor-thin half-smile). Maybe you just weren't his type, Marcus.
MARCUS. —(Looks up, without anger, caught in genuine doubt). And what if I was? Who ever really knows what’s going through the head of the guy standing next to you? Maybe if he’d said a single word, if he’d given me a sign in the steam... Eli wasn't a bad guy. Far from it. Maybe our friendship could have been something more...
LIAM. —(Interrupting, thrown off). Come on, man, don't start spinning things. You’ve had a girlfriend for years—you’re about to move in with her. That’s the exact reason he kept his private life from you, because he saw you settled in your world and didn't want to make things weird.
MARCUS. —I didn't say it was impossible. You think you know what you want until something is taken right out from in front of you. I always had a soft spot for him; he had a way of looking at you that just put you at ease. And honestly... his body was a sculpture. When he’d pull himself out of the pool and just stand there catching his breath on the deck—a guy isn't made of stone. You see beauty like that even if you don't know what to call it.
A thick silence settles over the room. In the glass upstage, the reflections of the three men look paler and more motionless than they do.
LIAM. —(Softly). It’s strange... Yesterday we would have talked about him the way we always did, trading jokes, but all it takes is for someone to vanish for us to see them for the very first time. We live months and years shoulder to shoulder with someone who maybe doesn't belong to this world anymore, and we’re blind to it. They say ordinary, indifferent things: “Pass me the towel,” “Looks like rain tomorrow,” “We’re out of coffee”... They smile the way people smile when they’re afraid of being misunderstood, and we answer without thinking, while entire continents are collapsing inside their chests.
JULIAN. —(Flatly, eyes on the floor). And now he’s dead.
LIAM. —We don't know that. Don't put that into words yet. He might still walk through that door.
JULIAN. —After two weeks? Two weeks is the exact cutoff where even the detectives fold their hands and write a missing person off as dead. They pat us on the back, sure, but to them Eli is already a cold file. Either he’s in a ditch, or he was abducted off some highway, or they harvested him for organs in some back-alley clinic...
MARCUS. —Don't go there, Julian! Shut up! What if he comes back tonight and hears you saying that sick stuff?
JULIAN. —And what if he’s been dead since the very first minute he stopped answering our texts, and here we are sitting under his lamp, dividing up the pieces of who he was and wondering who he wanted to sleep with?
Suddenly, both Marcus and Liam shudder at the exact same instant and snap their heads toward the dark window, as if someone had whispered their names from the night air outside.
MARCUS. —(Touching his shoulders). Did you feel that?
JULIAN. —Feel what?
MARCUS. —A weird chill... My skin just crawled all at once, like when your back is turned and you feel someone staring dead at you from across the street.
LIAM. —(Without taking his eyes off the glass). Maybe he’s listening to us right now. We don't know how far the soul reaches around the living once the body gets lost.
MARCUS. —I don't think he’d be listening like that, like he’s hiding behind the couch. If he’s not on this plane anymore, spirits show up in more symbolic ways, don't they? They don't use words... they send a sign. Something breaking, a shadow that doesn't belong, a light that...
Before Marcus can finish the sentence, the single lit floor lamp flickers with an electrical buzz and dies completely. The apartment plunges into a bluish twilight, lit only by the distant glow of the moon and the streetlamp haze filtering through the window. Now, the silhouettes of the three men are sharply backlit against the glass.
MARCUS. —(In a whisper). ...a light that goes out.
A long pause. None of them dares to reach for the switch.
JULIAN. —(Whispering in the dark). They say when grief enters a house, everyone inside thinks the exact same thing at the same moment without speaking it. We all have the same image of him burned behind our eyes. Let’s test it. If a trace of him is still floating between these walls, let’s close our eyes. Forget the morgues and the police. Let’s ask him in silence what he would say to us right now.
All three close their eyes. They stand rigid in the gloom. The silence of the apartment building seems to amplify.
JULIAN. —(Eyes still shut). Red. That’s what he told me. Like a rush of blood or a heavy cloth dropped over my face.
MARCUS. —(Opening his eyes slowly, unsettled). I saw a flame. Small, smokeless, burning dead-still in the middle of nothing.
LIAM. —(Opening his eyes, heavy with sorrow). I saw a river. Slow water dragging dark branches toward the other bank... (He sighs). So it doesn't work. Not even in the dark can we find the same Eli.
JULIAN. —Or maybe it did work, and the messages are different because he was never just one person to us. He left each of us the piece we could bear: for me, the red wound; for you, the fire of the body you admired in silence; and for Liam, the current that carried him out of our hands.
LIAM. —He never cared for things that show themselves easily. While we thought life was about winning a game, paying rent, or grabbing dinner on Fridays, he’d sit on that rug meditating at three in the morning. He saw impossible worlds behind ordinary things; he talked about his dreams as if they were places more real than this room... He had too much thirst for a life this narrow.
MARCUS. —(Looking down at his own hands in the dim light). What if he really did die... and at this exact second he already knows all the secrets we’ll never figure out?
JULIAN. —What are you talking about, Marcus?
MARCUS. —Think about it. The great mysteries of life and death he was always chasing with his eyes closed. If he crossed over to the other side, he already knows what’s behind the curtain. He understands why we’re born, where the pain goes when you run out of air... He’s infinitely ahead of us now. He’d be looking down at us from somewhere high up, watching us shiver in his living room knowing nothing about anything, like scared kids behind a windowpane.
JULIAN. —(With a cracked laugh, on the verge of tears). And what if he’s alive? What if he just got sick of our tiny little lives, went off to walk without a map, and when he gets back he laughs in our faces for turning into philosophers and ghosts while he was gone?
LIAM. —Too much speculation... We talk too much because we don't know how to hold his name without it burning our mouths.
Liam’s last word drops like a stone into a well. An eternal, absolute, almost unbreathable silence takes over. Nobody moves. They seem to have finally become the mute, spiritualized figures of the shadow play reflected in the window. Time freezes.
Suddenly, from the hallway outside, shattering the sepulchral stillness of the night, comes the unmistakable metallic scrape of a key finding the slot of the apartment's front door.
All three hold their breath as one.
The key slides into the cylinder. The internal mechanism turns with two heavy, dry clicks, drawing back the deadbolt Liam had touched at the beginning. The metal door handle slowly presses down, about to push the door open.
Julian, Marcus, and Liam stand petrified, eyes wide and locked on the wood as it begins to separate from the doorframe, suspended between the terror of the impossible and a miracle.
SUDDEN BLACKOUT
