All Back Full

By Robert Lopez

Act One: At a kitchen table, a husband and wife discuss the news, nudists, and lie to each other about the ways they no longer connect.

Act Two: At a kitchen table, a man and his friend discuss the weather, the state of public transportation, and lie to each other for the sake of something to say.

Act Three: At a kitchen table, three people discuss, mostly, nothing, and watch the threads unravel as their lives come apart at the seams.

Told in a genre-defying style that melds the depth of the novel with the honesty of the stage, All Back Full charts one day in a marriage at once usual and unusual, exploring what we say to each other when we say nothing, and the ways we speak to each other without words.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Dzanc Books
• Release date: Feb 20, 2017
• ISBN: 9780982797556

Book preview

ACT I

The setting is an ordinary setting. A kitchen. One table and four chairs. A counter with a sink. Cabinets across the room from the table and chairs. A door that opens into the kitchen.

The principals are at the table. They are married to each other.

The man is middle-aged. He can be tall or short, but is probably not thin. He is portly, but not rotund. He can be bald or have a full head of hair. If he has hair, some of it is gray, but not all of it. He is not the sort for all of his hair to be gray. It is certainly not silver.

He can be any ethnicity. Say, for now, he is a white man. Another time he might be black or brown or some other color.

The woman is anywhere from thirty to fifty years of age. She is taller than her husband and probably younger, but not much younger. They are contemporaries, sharing similar histories and backgrounds. She can rest her chin on the top of his head. Years ago they’d perform this trick at parties. They called it a trick even though it is not a trick.

Past that she is not at all distinctive.

The man is reading a newspaper. This is a time when people still read newspapers. It might be Sunday. In fact, it probably is Sunday. It is Sunday morning.

The woman is also reading a newspaper. It is the same newspaper. They are trading sections back and forth. She enjoys the magazine, the week in review.

They do not read a daily newspaper. They do not sit down at the table to read the newspaper together every morning, trading sections back and forth. The subscription is for the Sunday edition, though sometimes it takes them all week to read it.

He will sometimes bring a section to the park with him. He will sit on a bench and try to read. Most often he is unable to concentrate.

The other people distract him, as he is easily distractible.

She tries to find time at work to read certain stories she couldn’t finish on Sunday. She does this during lunch or on breaks but never during actual work-time.

The table has on it two coffee mugs and a plate of breakfast pastries. We can presume that one or the other woke early this morning and drove to the bakery.

It is not important which principal drove to the bakery.

For the sake of fair play, let’s presume they take turns doing this, alternating Sundays. Let’s say that today it was the husband’s turn to drive to the bakery.

They read like this for a time.

It is quiet. There is no sound, save the occasional sip of coffee, the placing of a mug back down on the table or the turning of a page.

This quiet goes on for what might seem like a long time. It might feel like five minutes or months or years.

How the time feels depends upon if you are the man or the woman or someone observing the man and woman.

Finally, the man says, without looking up, Was that your friend?

The woman says, It was, also without looking up.

The man says, How is she?

The woman says, The same.

It is quiet again. They look up and at each other, maybe past each other or through.

The man says, The same as always?

The woman says, The same as ever.

They go back to reading.

The man is asking after the woman’s friend. He is curious about this friend as she is something of a new friend for the woman. The woman has any number of friends but this is a new one. He has only met this friend once or twice and isn’t sure how he feels about her.

The man doesn’t have any new friends. He’ll make new acquaintances as people do in the course of living a daily life, mixing with people at work and in public, but these never turn into friends. No one he can make plans with, no one he can call on for counsel or aid.

He has only the one friend, the same one he’s had for years.

This friend is coming over later.

This will likely be a problem for everyone, particularly the woman.

But neither principal is thinking about this now. Now the man is thinking about the woman’s new friend and the woman is thinking about something else.

The man heard the telephone ring earlier and assumed it was the woman’s new friend. They seem to talk on the telephone once or twice a month, always on Sunday mornings.

The man thinks this is intrusive and presumptuous.

No one else calls on Sundays, let alone in the morning.

The man says, Was she naked?

The woman says, When?

The man says, When you spoke with her?

The woman says, I think she was. Yes.

The man says, Did you ask if she was naked?

The woman says, No, I forgot to.

The man says, Did you forget or did it not occur to you?

The woman says, What’s the difference?

This is a short pause because the man likes to think about certain questions, pondering the whys and wherefores. He enjoys nuance and language and the language of nuance.

He likes to think about time and how it can feel like five minutes or days or years, depending upon everything and nothing all at once.

The man says, I’m not sure.

The woman says, Neither am I.

They go back to reading. It seems as if this conversation is over.

When it says they go back to reading, this isn’t entirely true. The woman does indeed go back to reading. She is in the middle of a feature about the proprietor of a new business downtown that combines industrial design and Zen meditation.

The woman is invested in her local community and feels like a part of it. She is a part of it. She is known around town as someone who is part of the community. She has always wanted to know what was going on, who was doing what and where they were doing it and who it was inconveniencing. She volunteers. She contributes.

The man, however, is not actually reading. The newspaper is open in front of him, but he is not reading it.

The man says, I suppose one implies something and the other doesn’t.

The woman says, What does?

The man says, Forgetting and failing to realize. Oblivion, or rather, obliviousness. Obsolescence, if you will.

The woman says, I won’t, thank you.

The man says, One implies forethought, intention, or something to that effect. To forget something is to have once remembered it. To have once concentrated, considered…at least, you take note of it. You walk down the street and look at a tree. Maybe you don’t study the tree or examine the tree, you don’t consider the make or model or how old the tree is, but you notice the tree. You look at the tree and you register a tree. The rest of the world falls away in that moment. Failing to realize something is ignorance or a kind of ignorance. It’s walking past the tree and not even seeing it. It’s not being aware of what is going on around you. This is what I mean by oblivion. I think this is right.

The woman says, Genus.

The man says, I wouldn’t call it genius, per se, but it’s close.

The woman says, There is nothing close to genius. Genius is absolute, like…pregnancy. It’s like death. The rest of the world falls away when you die, not when you look at a tree. I have never been so enthralled with a tree that I…

She loses her place in the conversation and then regains it. This takes maybe four or five seconds.

The man has learned to be patient whenever these displacements occur. Years ago he would try reminding her of what it is they were discussing, where he thought she was going, what she was about to say or trying to say. He learned to stop doing this after she cursed at him during a dinner party. She said, Don’t ever fucking tell me what I’m about to say, you presumptuous fuck.

Maybe she didn’t actually say this at the dinner party, but this is how he remembers it.

What she probably said at the dinner party was, Excuse me?

It was how she said it and where it was said and who got to hear it and what they might think.

The woman continues, I don’t think anyone else has, either. Maybe dendrophiles, if there is such a thing. I’m sure there is. I read yesterday that a man was caught having sex with his car. It was in the newspaper. Not in his car, but with his car. Do you understand what I’m telling you? He was having relations with an automobile. Apparently it had been going on for years, this affair with a car. Of course, they didn’t disclose the gentleman’s name. Or the car’s, for that matter. I can’t remember what kind…it’s all the same. This is the world we live in now. Men fuck cars and they report this in the newspaper. We deem it newsworthy.

While the woman did read this in the newspaper, it is probably important to note that it wasn’t yesterday’s newspaper, but rather last Sunday’s edition.

However, it is possible she read this in a magazine at the doctor’s office. Yesterday the woman went to the doctor. She experiences pain in her head and jaw, one whole side of it. She’s felt this pain for years. She doesn’t know what’s wrong with her and neither do the doctors.

Otherwise, she overheard someone saying this about the man and his car while at the doctor’s office or any of the myriad public places she’s been this past week.

It’s also possible she saw this on television. There might have been some kind of human freak show on one of the so-called learning or discovery channels having to do with aberrant behavior and sexuality.

Paraphilia describes the experience of intense sexual arousal to highly atypical objects, situations, or individuals. Examples include sexual interests that can motivate one into committing sexual offences—such as pedophilia, zoophilia, sexual sadism, and exhibitionism—but also include many harmless sexual interests, such as transvestism. There is no consensus for any precise border between unusual personal sexual tastes and paraphilic ones, and multiple, overlapping definitions exist. There is debate over which, if any, of the paraphilias should be listed in diagnostic manuals, such as the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) or the International Classification of Diseases.

It is not known how many different kinds of paraphilias exist; one source lists as many as 549 paraphilias.

Both trees and automobiles are on this list.

The man says, It is our collective concern.

This comment, that it is our collective concern, is not altogether true. The man sometimes feigns concern. The man sometimes pretends to care about certain issues of the day, what goes on in the neighborhood, injustices both here and abroad, but the truth is he doesn’t care. He knows he is supposed to care, but he doesn’t. He has never written a letter, signed a petition, or protested anything. He has never marched. He has never been arrested.

He has never done anything on anyone’s behalf.

Sometimes the woman invites him along on one of her community endeavors. She tells him that it’s good to help others. She mentions altruism and karma.

The man says, I’d like to help.

The woman looks at him. He looks back. They continue looking at each other like this for five minutes or days or years. Then she walks away. He calls out to her, says, Have fun or Be careful or Everyone appreciates this.

The man would like for everything in the world to be just and fair, for everyone to be equal.

He thinks most of the efforts to accomplish these things are futile. He thinks the people who lead the charge are fools, as are the people who follow.

He calls them bangers.

He says this to his one friend, the one who is coming over later. He says, The bangers were out in full force today.

He says, One could hear the drums from across the street, from across the city proper, from across the universe divide.

His one friend agrees with him whenever he goes on like this. Later he is coming over to drink and maybe watch the baseball game. It’s possible he will stay for dinner.

This friend chews on toothpicks, carries them around in a case.

This friend used to smoke cigarettes, but quit years ago.

The man can’t remember if the friend chewed on toothpicks at the same time he was smoking cigarettes. As such, he’s not sure if the toothpicks serve as some kind of oral substitute.

The man told the woman that his friend might come over to drink and maybe watch the baseball game. He said it was possible he might stay for dinner.

He wasn’t sure if this was a good idea.

He wasn’t sure if having the friend over was a good idea and he wasn’t sure that telling his wife the friend was coming over was a good idea, either.

He said this yesterday while she was on her way to march for pedestrian safety.

Last week two children, a brother and sister, were run over and killed by a reckless driver. The children were walking on the sidewalk when a truck jumped the curb and pinned them against the side of a building. This happened in front of their mother, who was busy tying the shoelace of another child. To the woman this is unimaginable, every part of it.

The woman cannot imagine conceiving, carrying to term, bearing and then rearing a child, let alone more than one, then watching this child or these children get killed by a truck in the middle of the day.

The march lasted two hours and probably did no good at all.

She told him she didn’t think it was a good idea, the friend coming over for dinner.

She told him next time he should think.

Sometimes the man doesn’t think. The man knows this about himself and considers it a problem.

Sometimes the man and woman agree with each other.

The man doesn’t think of his wife as a banger. He likes that she is a good woman, that she has a big heart.

He doesn’t think the woman knows all of this about him, but she does. The woman knows almost everything about him.

The man has never tried transvestism, which is something she probably knows.

He is sure that trying on one of his mother’s skirts when he was a teenager doesn’t qualify.

He’s never applied makeup in his life, nor has he worn women’s jewelry or shoes or even tried