The only difficulty with answering that question is, I don’t exactly know. You see, my boss is a rather…mysterious figure. I just get e-mails from “timeismoney05@hotmail.com” that tell me where and when I need to go, and what he wants me to get. From what I’ve gathered, my boss is having a real identity crisis. Not in the every-day, “I’m 45 and I’m getting old so I need to buy a cool car” kind of crisis, more of an existential, “what exactly is the true self” kind of crisis. So far I’ve had to travel to the dawn of time to try and chronicle the first moment that man became aware of himself. I couldn’t tell whether it was when he looked into the river and saw his ugly cave-face staring back at him, and tried to punch it, or if it was when he noticed the first cave-babe walking around and decided to suck in his cave-gut. So I just told him there was something about cave-paintings or something. I don’t even remember, but it sounded a lot more scientific than anything I really saw. Pre-historic times were really boring anyway. But I’ve done some really cool stuff. I’ve seen the birth of Jesus, found out who really killed JFK, and hung out with Alexander the Great. I even helped him come up with the name. Yeah, before he met me he thought “Alexander the Good” was the best possible option, but I set him straight.
So anyway, I guess my employer has been having some crazy dreams lately, or been really into that Freud fellow, because he seems to be getting into some surrealism, sub-conscious stuff. And it’s with that that I’m sent off to Rome, in the year 1921 to view the first production of Luigi Pirandello’s "Six Characters in Search of an Author". Apparently this is some sort of surrealist play where these characters interrupt the play that’s going on onstage and try to have their ending figured out for them. Sounds like a real riot to me. But I guess it’s the kind of stuff my employer really finds fascinating, the whole “Are we really playing characters in our everyday lives?” kind of thing. I guess he hopes that somehow I’ll be able to give him some sort of vital information about the essence of our being or something from going to this thing. Here’s the e-mail I received from him a couple days ago:
Mr. Marionetti:
It is of my wishes that you travel to Rome in 1921 and view the first production of Luigi Pirandello’s Six Characters in Search of an Author. I would like you to report back to me audience response and original style of acting. You will be overly compensated for your efforts.
How could I say no to a trip to Rome in 1921? I dressed in my red and white striped shirt, black pants, and put on a thick black fake moustache and was on my way. As I pulled up to the downtown warehouse in which the time machine is stored I was reminded of how much I dislike the actual act of time travel and just how flippin’ hungry I am. All this time travel talk distracted me from the usually very important task of eating lunch. But anyway, I dislike time travel so much, because not only is the vessel I travel in about as big as a couple port-a-potties put together, but there’s not even a place to sit down inside of it. The time machine is made to look like a giant rock, and I suppose it does, enough that anyone who saw it wouldn’t think twice. How it works, I’m not quite sure. I just know what buttons to press. Green, blue, triangle looking knob, then enter the date into the calculator looking pad on the dashboard. And only adding to the horribly boring fact that the time machine has no place to sit inside of it is the fact that each time trip takes exactly 9 hours, 24 minutes, and 15 seconds to complete, no matter how far back or forward in time we’re going. So I get in the machine using my handprint voice identification, set the controls, and away we go.
I step outside only to notice a funny scent of bacon in the air, wondering why exactly 1921 would smell like bacon. Then I see the sky has inexplicably turned green. As I finally begin to figure out what happened, a giant Aardvark wanders up to me, adjusts his overalls and asks what he can help me with. I tell him I must have entered an extra “one” into the date on my time machine by mistake, give him a firm handshake, and head back to give it another try.
After entering the right date into the time machine, I take another bite out of the bacon flower I picked from the ground and travel through the fabric of time. It doesn’t fill me up nearly as much as I would have liked it to. I really should have got a whole bouquet of them. Or maybe even tried some of the bean flavored bark. At any rate, the trip is a long boring one, and 9 hours, 24 minutes and 15 seconds of me sitting on the floor and standing around later, I arrive at my destination. I exit my machine and clearly I’m in the 1920’s. There are women dressed like flappers running around, people with a look of paranoia on their faces as they drink their liquor, and the Charleston being danced all around me. Ah yes, the roaring twent- AW COME ON!! This is America in the 1920s, not Italy. I always forget my time machine doesn’t take me to the place I want to go, just the time.
So after traveling for three long boring weeks across a boat overseas and then through Europe, I finally arrive in Italy. I had the time machine shipped with me so that I wouldn’t have to go through the same thing after I was done with this stupid play. Not only was the ride long, but the food on the trip was horrible, I’m barely eating enough of this garbage to keep me alive, and man am I HUNGRY. At any rate, Italy isn’t nearly as much of a rip-roarin’ place as the Unites States was, it seems grainy to me and has the overall look of a country that had just been through a massive war. After stopping off for some disappointing pizza (give me a slice of Uno’s any day) I finally make it to the theatre where this play is happening. I speak fluent Italian, something I picked up from my many days playing Super Mario brothers, so I walk right up to the ticket taker and order myself a couple of tickets. It’s around 7pm and the theatre is dimly lit. It’s a fairly large theatre, seats about 400 people, and the house looks to be nearly full to capacity. Most of the audience seems to be dressed fairly nicely, and there seems to be a decent mix of genders and races in the audience. Mostly Italian looking people though. I walk in and find my seat, I’m right in front, and sit down. The curtain is already drawn on the proscenium style stage, and the set looks to be rather bare.
I sit down and……wow. This chair is very comfy. Man alive, I don’t know if I’ve ever sat in a more comfortable chair. If I wasn’t so hungry I’d fall asleep right- hey wait a tick! Is that over there-? Why I believe it is! Old man Luigi Pirandello himself. Right down to the Freudian beard, the super bald head and the extremely melancholy look on his face. I wanted to go over and try to cheer him up, and maybe see where I could get a good meal around here, but some guy came on stage and started banging the floor, so I had to be quiet and pay attention. I think he was part of the production, but at this point I don’t really care, all I want is some food. The first act of the play is excruciatingly long and after about thirty minutes all I can think about is how this Luigi guy think he’s soooo clever, but little does he know that I’m the one with the time machine. Not so smart are you know, Luigi? Jerk. I decide after about twenty-five minutes that I’m going to play a joke on him during intermission, and so I start to formulate it in my head. I start to daydream until the curtain falls and it looks like the break is upon us. Most of the audience looks a little confused, but I follow Mr. Pirandello out to the foyer area.
I start talking to Luigi, telling him how I thought the play was presenting some interesting ideas, and he asks me to introduce myself. I tell him my name is Henry, and we continue talking. After a few minutes of chatting, I walk into the room and stand next to myself and Luigi. I introduce Luigi to myself, also, as Henry, and continue talking. You see, what I had decided to do instead of watching the play, is make old Luigi really question reality and what his true self was. So I made sure to think about how when I got back I’d go back again to this exact moment in time so it would look like there was more than one of me in the same place at the same time. Now instead of doing this just once, I thought I’d do it three other times, and each time introduce myself as Henry, so there were four of us standing there. Right when the fourth one of us walks up, Luigi makes some snotty comment about how he’s Henry the Fourth, and how that gives him an idea for another one of his plays. Instead of being amazed at four of me being in the same place at the same time, he’s thinking about plays. What a jerk. He probably just figured we were quadruplets anyway. Oh well. I’ll still show him, I’m just not sure how. The bell rings and I go back to my seat, the other three of me go find seats of their own as well.
I watch the rest of this boring play, again thinking about how hungry I am, and again thinking about how comfortable the chair I’m sitting in is, when it suddenly hits me. Apparently I figure it out just in time too, because the play seems to be over. One of the characters ran off the stage laughing and the audience looks very confused and upset. I don’t really care because I’m busy trying to rip the chair I’m sitting in off the floor so I can put it in the time machine. Then I’ll have something to sit on AND stick it to Luigi by taking chairs out of the theatre that the premiere of his stupid play was in. I hear the audience start to boo and yell things out at the stage- man, they must really not have liked this play. They start to leave as I give the other versions of myself a heads up and they start taking their chairs out of the floor. They’re dispersed throughout the theatre and I guess everyone else likes the idea of messing with the chairs, because they stop in their tracks on the way out of the theatre and start ripping their chairs out of the floor and hurling them at the stage. A few other people light fire to the curtains and a full on riot has broken out after the premiere of this play. My selves and I run out of the theatre with our chairs and out to our time machines, realizing that we’ve just accidentally incited a riot which will go down in history and give Luigi Pirandello much of his fame as a controversial playwright, when really all he did was write some crappy play that the audience would have booed and walked out of if we didn’t start stealing some chairs for our uncomfortable time machine.
I went back and told my employer that I improved upon his time machine by putting a comfy seat in it, and that the play he wanted to know all about was boring.
Needless to say, I never worked for him again.
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