(GK: Garrison Keillor, TR: Tim Russell, SS: Sue Scott, TK: Tom Keith)
(GUY NOIR THEME)
TR: A dark night in a city that knows how to keep its secrets, but one guy keeps trying to find the answers to life's persistent questions. Guy Noir, Private Eye.
(THEME UP AND OUT)
GK: It was the first week of April and in St. Paul we'd just switched to Eastern time which we do part of the year to help us feel better about ourselves but for a low self-esteem guy like me, it's just an hour of lost sleep, just one more bounced check on the dream account. I was out in Lafayette, Indiana, for a client named Perdue Chickens ---- they wanted to make a major gift to Purdue University if Purdue would just change its school mascot---- I wasn't getting very far.
TK: Sorry. The answer is no.
GK: You don't want to even think about it?
TK: No.
GK: It could be a rooster.
TK: No thanks.
GK: Free range?
TK: No, sir.
GK: Boilermaker has some negative alcoholic connotations.
TK: Sorry.
GK: You don't think there's an image problem there?
TK: No.
GK: Two million dollars toward a new gymnasium.
TK: Already got one.
GK: Library---
TK: Got one of those too.
GK: Two point two million?
(DOOR SLAM) (PAUSE TWO BEATS) (KNOCKS ON DOOR) (DOOR OPEN)
GK: Let me leave you my phone number in case you (DOOR SLAM)---- change your underwear. (BRIDGE) Lafayette is a lively bustling community with a thousand things to do any time of day or night. Exhausted by the possibilities, I retired to my motel room where I was just tuning into the Weather Channel (TV AUDIO VOICE) and settling down for a nap, when----- (KNOCKS ON DOOR) Yeah, come in, it's unlocked. (DOOR OPEN)
TR (NERD): Mr. Noir?
GK: Yeah. Right.
TR: My name is T. Raymond Schroeder, Mr. Noir. I'm a senior in aerospace engineering, ----
GK: Engineering, huh. I sort of guessed that from the ballpoint pens and the white short-sleeved polyester shirt.
TR: These shirts are three for $10 ---- wear one for a week and just throw it away.
GK: Saves time, I imagine.
TR: About twenty-one, twenty-two hours a year, Mr. Noir.
GK: What can I do for you, T. Raymond?
TR: It's like this. I met this girl online and she's in engineering too and we've talked online for a couple years ----
GK: Uh huh, and now slowly, inexorably you're starting to fall in love---
TR: Sort of. She's taking some space courses and we decided that we should explore the possibility of a closer relationship. Also, my advisor thinks I should date.
GK: Your advisor----
TR: He thinks my papers would improve if I could find someone to talk to about them.
GK: Great, and----
TR: And I'm supposed to meet her tonight, Mr. Noir.
GK: Beautiful.
TR: At the computer lab....
GK: Okay...
TR: And maybe we'll go out afterward for a smoothie and a bran muffin.
GK: Right.
TR: I need your help, Mr. Noir.
GK: What's that?
TR: I need you to go find out about her so I'll be able to prepare something to talk to her about.
GK: You realize, this being the Internet, she could turn out to be a thirteen-year-old boy just having some fun----
TR: In that case, there's no problem. We'd have lots of neat stuff to talk about. Could you go through her trash to see what kind of a person she is?
GK: What do you want to know about her?
TR: What she's like.
GK: Ask her.
TR: On the date? But then it's too late. I wouldn't have time to prepare.
GK: You're not planning to do all the talking, are you?
TR: Is that a bad thing?
GK: Get her to talk. That's how you find out who she is.
TR: Oh.
GK: And get your glasses fixed. Without the duct tape. (BRIDGE) T.Raymond went off to prepare for his big date and I was just starting to pack my grip for the trip back to St. Paul when....(DOOR KNOCKS) Come in, the door's unlocked. (DOOR OPEN, SAXOPHONE)
SS: Mr. Noir? I'm Cassandra. I'm a junior at Purdue.
GK: Oh?
SS: Physics.
GK: Figures. It was pretty obvious she was in physics. Only an intimate knowledge of fluid dynamics would have enabled her to slip into the dress she was wearing. It was so tight I could count her ribs. Twenty-four. Twelve on a side. What can I do for you, Cassandra? Don't worry about asking for too much. I've got all evening. Tomorrow. Next week if necessary.
SS: I've been feeling so trapped, Mr. Noir. I went into the sciences because I'm good at it but ----- I don't know ---- this morning I was in the cafeteria and they were out of 2%, so I was calculating the ratio of half-and-half to skim milk to make three tablespoons of two percent figuring that half-and-half is half whole milk or 3 f percent fat, and half cream, which is 20 f percent, and the coffee is a medium roast, which is more acidic, and the logarithm of the reciprocal of hydrogen ion concentration in gram atoms per liter changes with the national derivation of the beans, but of course you have to convert from metric to standard-----
GK: Of course.
SS: And the heat of the coffee influences the breakdown coefficient of the lipids in the cream. And then ---- it suddenly hit me.
GK: The coffee hit you?
SS: I just thought ---- why am I doing this? Maybe I should start drinking my coffee black. Living on the edge. You know what I mean?
GK: I'm trying.
SS: Black coffee. Life with all its bitter beauty. Angst. Desperation. Poetry. Life.
GK: You're thinking about switching to the humanities----
SS: I feel----- trapped in physics. The tables and charts. I want to get beyond the quantitative -----
GK: To the humanities----- Are you flunking, Cassandra?
SS: No! I completed my senior project in my sophomore year, it was about velocimetric equidistribution of schematic variables as coefficients of fluid flow phenomena in the oscillation of the orthogonality of the heat transfer grid in harnessing the energy of the melting polar icecap.
GK: I look forward to reading it.
SS: Do you understand Boolean algebra? Or vector calculus?
GK: Vector calculus. I think I went to high school with him.
SS: Anyway, I wrote the paper and then I realized that Robert Frost said it best when he wrote,
Some say the world will end in fire,
Some in ice.
From what I've tasted of desire
I hold with those who favor fire.
----- I want to be a poet, Mr. Noir. Physics is all about matter. I need to be ---- I need to engage people!
GK: Maybe you should try sales.
SS: But I need to use my imagination.
GK: Sell real estate.
SS: I long to be a poet, Mr. Noir, and speak to the human condition.
GK: The human condition, Cassandra, is boredom and lack of sleep. But go ahead. Write poetry. It's a free country. Not Indiana necessarily but other places----
SS: I have written poetry. Here-----
GK: I'm a private eye, Cassandra. I don't do criticism.
SS: Just read it. Please.
GK: Forgotten
The area code of my youth
Combination to the cataract of the heart
Did I lock that door and who are you,
O tiny bearded man dancing?
That's wonderful. What do you need me for? You've done it. It's beautiful. It says everything. First time at bat, you hit a home run.
SS: I need you to help me get it published.
GK: What? You mean a book? Naw. Publishing is over, Cassandra. It's all Internet now. You need to get yourself a website.
SS: I already did, Mr. Noir.
GK: And----?
SS: Six weeks and only seven people have actually read it.
GK: That's all.
SS: I've had thousand of hits but that's only because I can't keep myself from checking on it. (BRIDGE)
GK: There was something about Cassandra that made me want to know her better, so I visited the website.(INTERNET ELECTRO MUSIC. SS ONLINE VOICE: Hi. I'm Cassandra. Thanks for visiting my website!) There were a bunch of little bearded men dancing a sort of jerky computer-animated dance and the toolbar with a menu ---- About Me, Favorite Bands, Hot Engineers, Favorite Quotes, Pictures of Me, Favorite Links, My Poems ----- I clicked on Pictures of Me and (HEARTBEAT) (SEXY SAX) ----- her in the library, her with her Mom and Dad, her with Mike ----- who's Mike----- oh, her brother. Her getting her Phi Beta Kappa pin. I clicked on "My Poems" ----
The pony on the high-wire
Guillotine cockroach midnight
Orange bathtub teeth
Tell me about the futility of your elbow,
Leaning on reality's gray facade.
(KNOCKS) Come in. (DOOR OPEN) (FOOTSTEPS, CLOSE) Oh. T. Raymond. How was your date?
TR: Not so good, Mr. Noir.
GK: My advice didn't help?
TR: I said, "Are you Megan?" and she said, "Are you Raymond?" and I said yes and she said, "Then I'm not Megan."
GK: Oh. Sorry.
TR: And then we had a cup of coffee anyway, and she wanted to talk about gender!
GK: Really.
TR: I'm in engineering, Mr. Noir. We don't have gender.
GK: Of course you don't. Don't take it too hard, Raymond. Women are like buses, Raymond. After a while, you think you'd rather have a car. (BRIDGE) He went away, disappointed, lonely ---- I promised we'd keep in touch ---- and I went back to the Website and a moment later, the poet herself walked in.
SS: Hi. The door was open, so----
GK: I'm glad you did, Cassandra. (SEXY SAX) The mechanics of the halter-top she was wearing made me think of a suspension bridge. Suddenly engineering seemed more interesting. I wanted to know how it worked.
SS: Mr. Noir, I've done it.
GK: What?
SS: I've made a breakthrough. I've created something that's more important than the printing press. It's bigger than the Internet. ---- I call it EMPTI. Electro-magnetic poetic text imaging.
GK: EMPTI. Interesting. What does it do?
SS: It flashes a poem directly to the brain, using wireless telephones.
GK: How does it work?
SS: I'll show you. Here's the design. (PAPER UNFOLDING) Are you familiar with vector calculus in the logarithms of light-waves?
GK: Not as much as I used to be. I haven't really kept up.
SS: Well, here's the EMPTI hardware. (CLUNK)
GK: It's no bigger than a breadbox.
SS: Microchips. Anyway, it works through the mobile telephone spectrum ---- anytime you dial a one on a cell phone, you'll hear what sounds like a click of static, but actually it's a burst of infrared data compressed into sound and the poem goes directly into the synapses of the brain and you see my poem, but it's not like you're reading it, it's like you're thinking it.
GK: Amazing. And does it work?
SS: It does. My mom called me up long-distance on her cell phone and the first thing she said to me was, "Do you have a pony on the high-wire or a problem with guillotines or cockroaches at midnight?"
GK: Amazing.
SS: I said, "Mom, how are you?" She said, "Aside from these orange bathtub teeth, I'm feeling a sort of futility about my elbow."
GK: So you have the power to put your poems directly into the minds of millions of people without them being aware of it----
SS: Yes. And thank you, Mr. Noir. Thank you for listening. (BRIDGE) She was no sooner out the door than I noticed she left behind the hardware and the blueprint. I called T. Raymond in his dorm room.
TR (ON PHONE): Yeah?
GK: T. Raymond, do you know anything about explosives?
TR: Explosives?? Oh wow. I love explosives!! Neat. I got a whole basement full of stuff.
GK: Can you be back in, say, fifteen minutes with everything you have?
TR: Sure.
GK: I have some things I need permanently removed. (BRIDGE. OUTDOOR AMBIANCE. SEMIS PASSING ON A FREEWAY) Fifteen minutes later, T. Raymond and I were in an open field near the freeway and he was wiring up plastic explosives to the EMPTI hardware and stringing them to a detonator behind an earth berm. ---- How you coming there, T.R.?
TR: (OFF) Just fine. Have her ready in another minute. (FOOTSTEPS APPROACH) Say, what are we blowing up anyway? A breadbox?
GK: It's an infernal machine, T.R. A machine that has the power to drive millions of people berserk and bring this country to its knees.
TR: What's that?
GK: A machine for putting poetry straight into people's hard drive.
TR: Cool.
GK: Not cool, T.R. This is totalitarianism. This is 1984.
TR: This is 2001.
GK: Sorry. I forgot. You got that wired? Good. T. Raymond, whether we're engineers or private eyes or poets, we have to respect the sanctity of the human brain and the right to privacy, right?
TR: Yeah?
GK: Imagine if, years ago, somebody had destroyed the idea of giant scoreboards in arenas that also do commercials? It's a far far better thing we do than we have ever done. (A SERIES OF MAJOR EXPLOSIONS W. TR EXCLAMATIONS) ---- (PAUSE. MORE SEMIS PASS.) Let's go have a look, T. Raymond.
TR: Wait----
GK: What? (ONE MORE GIGANTIC EXPLOSION)
TR: All clear.
GK: Thanks.
(THEME)
SS: A dark night in the city that keeps its secrets, where one guy is still trying to find the answers to life's persistent questions - Guy Noir, Private Eye.
(MUSIC OUT)
(c) 2001 by Garrison Keillor