Meet the Jorksons
Episode 4: Absolute, Inviolable Laws
EXT. THE SKY AT NIGHT
It is raining on a brick sidewalk. An EARTHWORM is drowning in a puddle smaller than a fingernail.
THE WORM IN THE PUDDLE: A person is a story about what a person is. A story is a thing that walks in circles. Why does a bug walk only in circles? You know a bug is a bug because you see it walk in circles. But you cannot know yourself because you cannot watch yourself walk in circles, and you cannot mark out your path as the path of a circle. When you mark the path, you will know yourself. When you know yourself, you will know yourself as a bug. And you will no longer be a bug.
THE BIRDS IN THE HEARTH: A bird is a transitory thing. A bird is a story that is told about a bird. A bird is a little note that says “I love you.” “I love you, I love you.” You are the eye, the heart, the dying goose and the grass in the lake. You are the dog and the tick. You are the sun and the tick on the sun, and all the pinpricks and all the pain.
The worm eats the birds.
The worm fixes itself in the sky and becomes a large bridge. A table, a chair, and a door grow on the long plateau of its apex. The sky is black. The floor is pink (worm-colored). Atop the table is an orange vase.
TECH JORKSON is asleep at the table. She has her arms folded softly around her head, which is resting in an open Trigonometry textbook.
The worm-body hums.
Tech lifts her head from the math textbook. She shivers.
TECH: It’s so cold. Why is it so cold here?
She looks down the arc of the worm’s corpse and sees the suburb two or three hundred feet below her. She sees the cold sun under her house, warming the other side of the pale planet.
TECH: How is it fair that you can’t know how cold I am?
She props her head up with her hands.
TECH: You can’t feel the cold. I’m not saying that you don’t, or that you aren’t. You might be cold right now. But that you can’t. I can’t make you feel cold. I could make you feel other things. But I couldn’t make you cold.
She vibrates.
TECH: It’s coldest on my back, where there’s a gap in the chair. You can’t feel that. Unless you’re cold too, now. Right? But think. If you think, you can feel the texture of a brick wall under your hand. You can imagine the feeling of throwing a rolling-chair off a second story balcony. Think about the motion, and where the weight is as you swing it back, and how it sounds as it hits the ground. Clunk, clatter, clatter. Maybe the wheel shaft breaks.
She tightens her hoodie.
TECH: I can’t work in these conditions.
Tech picks up her Trigonometry textbook and starts walking home, down the side of the worm.
EXT. THE JORKSON’S BACKYARD
UMBRELLA KID (standing on an overturned car): More Beach Balls! More Base Balls!
All the neighborhood kids, dozens and dozens, have gathered in the Jorkson’s backyard. They are throwing all the sports equipment into a big oak tree at the edge of the yard in the same manner Mary Carillo described on NBC during her 2004 on-air breakdown about Olympic badminton.
The children throw the baseballs and beach balls into the tree with martial efficiency. The tree swallows them and swells, larger and larger, groaning with sports equipment.
UMBRELLA KID: More Whiffle Balls! More Soccer Balls!
ROBBIE: Yay!
More children arrive. There is a mass of unattended children eviscerating the garage and chanting the names of the sports.
LILY, a teen-age girl, and NEW WEBSTER’S COLLEGIATE DICTIONARY, one of the Jorkson Parents, can be seen here behind a window making lemonade. They cannot make it fast enough. A line of children has snaked its way in and out of the house, criss-crossing itself through every room in the house: the living room, the bedrooms, the ceiling room, etc.
NEW WEBSTER: Are these lines intersecting?
LILY: You had firsts already, Beatrice! Get outta here!
The tree looms over all the other houses in the development. Its roots burrow through the yards and break the pavement. Car alarms go off. Basements cave in.
Tech enters. She wades through the line of children with her Trig book over her head.
LILY: Hey, Tech.
TECH: I need to do my math work.
LILY: For Mr. Barnard’s class right? Isn’t that due next week?
TECH: No, it’s today. Everything is today.
Umbrella Kid ENTERS through the fridge. A laugh track plays.
UMBRELLA KID: It’s been Today for 3 days!
TECH: I can’t keep sleeping on a worm.
LILY: What?
Tech shakes her book.
TECH: AAUAUGHAGUH!!! The back of the worm is cold!!!! And if I can’t give you the simple feeling of being cold, even just on your midriff where your jacket is a little too short then how can I even begin to tell you about what it feels like to sit in a shopping cart and stare at the sky fade from the pink haze to the darkness wishing your friends were there! How can I hope to describe the qualia of standing on the side of a mountain letting a fly crawl all over your arm, or you’re in the back of a car in the rain watching two people getting soaked on the side of the road. You’re in love with them! Because they aren’t you and because the world is filled with little multi-colored rocks like seeds in a stranger’s palm, in a tail of a cigarette, in a playing card passed to you on a thick carpet, and the corn-colored feeling of that carpet as it presses into your stomach and makes you a little sick, but not sick enough to sit on it properly!
LILY: What?
TECH: Aren’t you tired of being in a place where we only share touchable concepts, but not touchable feelings?
LILY: Did you get more lemons?
Tech opens up her backpack and dumps more lemons out than should be able to fit. They tumble onto the counter with thick, lemony thuds.
TECH: I'm driving away from here, I'm being driven, wracked with loss, and I see joy in the smallest patch of earth. The unpleasant crunch of snow, a conifer forest, an eight of diamonds, a jack, my fingernail.
LILY: I—
Outside, the great tree swells to the size of a planetary body. The roots destroy the kitchen, the lemonade is spilled and the children are scattered. Its trunk is a plane that grows infinitely through the ring of the worm, two toroid bodies, indelibly linked in the black sky, like onion rings.
Lily screams. Children and lemons are knocked about like bowling pins and fall out of the kitchen into the living room as the house is uplifted.
LILY (hanging on a root): Well this is a pickle.
UMBRELLA KID: No, it’s onion rings.
BECK and MISTER, the other two parents, rush out. Beck is in a floral dress and apron, and Mister is in their traditatonal summoning bag.
In the black sky, the worm and the tree merge into an oscillating devouring plane (U.K.: super-sphere). It squeezes itself into a state of infinite destiny (like lemonade). It devours the sun, the stars, and other celestial bodies.
BECK (really drawn out, looking at the camera): Welp... there... goes... the... neighborhood...
Chunks of the earth are being sucked up into the sky. Lily is clinging onto a railing. None of the Jorksons seem to be affected by the shift in gravity.
UMBRELLA KID (sincere): How on Earth are we gonna solve this one!?
BOUNCE is the sky. BOUNCE is the water. BOUNCE is a dog. It is a lifeless thing, pulled by a wire. Its visage fills the sky, its mouth open, ready to consume the gyrating singularity.
TECH: BOUNCE, NO! STOP THAT!
Bounce’s eye, the size of a supercluster, looks over at Tech, his mouth still open.
TECH: Bad dog! You cannot eat the devouring plane! I did the math! We have to throw Robbie at it.
ROBBIE: Robbie!
Lily’s grip on the railing begins to weaken.
LILY: Please hurry!
Mister spouts a set of arcane syllables and Robbie is catapulted into the sky. Robbie becomes a speck. The speck fizzles and bounces off the singularity. There is the sound of a small piece of GLASS SHATTERING, and a DESCENDING SLIDE WHISTLE NOISE. In a blast, everything reassembles itself and the Jorksons all come to rest in the living room, motionless and expressionless on the couch and armchairs.
After a second of the house being fully assembled, the Jorksons begin to move around normally. New Webster opens a newspaper. Beck goes to the kitchen. Mister manifests a magic door that partially blocks a different door.
Lily, her hair a mess, minor gashes on her skin, stands up from behind a couch, bewildered.
LILY (clutching her head): Aah. I think I'm going to throw up. Why are my ears ringing?
Everyone laughs at Lily's hillarious one-liner, and the credits roll out.
All the furniture combusts.
THE END.
LILY: Um. Hello??
There’s no one around.
LILY: Hello? The hell??
Tech peels back a layer of the darkness and steps through it.
TECH: Yeah, sorry about that, the producers like to end the episode within like a very set framework.
LILY: Where are we, exactly?
TECH: Uh, I don’t know. The End? The End is a place. Things collect in the residuum here.
She points to a worm in a puddle on the sidewalk, then at a pair of birds flying overhead, over the grass on the hill.
LILY (amazed): There are stars here...
TECH (looking up): I had never noticed.
They look together.
LILY: You know... You’ve saved my life, like, countless times now. But also being around you seemingly is... cosmically hazardous? I don’t know how to feel about it.
TECH: I... Does that mean you don’t wanna hang out?
LILY: No, no. I think it...
She puts her hand on Tech's shoulder, and kisses her on the cheek.
LILY: I think it means something like that.
And whatever feeling of cold Tech felt on her midriff. She didn’t feel it quite so bad, at least for a little while.