QWERTY

A cold wind blows.

Slowly, achingly slowly, almost imperceptibly, lights gradually rise
on a bare, spare room, lit by flickering candlelight or dimly
protesting lamps. It's hard to tell.

By the meagre light, we see The Oldest Man in the World. Frail,
wizened, weary.

He sits on a feeble chair somewhat upstage, facing us; before
him, on a rickety, barren wooden table, looms The Oldest
Typewriter in the World.

Beside him, neatly stacked, perches a teetering pile of yellowing
onionskin pages—obviously, at this rate, the result of years or
more likely decades of painstaking composition.

The room, whose outlines we can barely discern by the meagre
light, is small, like an attic, and almost devoid of ornament. Maybe
he has a grimy beaker of water (or it might once have been wine),
and a battered old tin coffee cup; maybe the rotting remnants of
something on a plate sits near. But these are far from fresh.
With furrowed brow, The Oldest Man types. So gradually it's
almost grudging, one finger at a time, he hunts and pecks and
types and taps. We can feel the concentrated effort, we can
almost see the focused perspiration beading on his forehead with
the effort.

With a sharp intake of breath, the Oldest Man pauses, gnarled
hands poised high above the keys...and waits. And waits. Maybe
his eyes close for a moment, his tongue creeps out of the corner
of his mouth...

Then a flurry of action, a mad inspired frenzy, all fingers and
wrists and elbows and the top of his head, he really leans into it,
typing and tapping and pecking and hunting away for all his
ancient life is worth. The table before him shakes and shudders
with his efforts. The teetering mountain of manuscript, so carefully
assembled and painstakingly stacked wobbles...teeters...
threatens with each new keystroke to collapse like the Tower of
Babel. But it holds, and on he presses.

The page pushes forward and up.

Progress! Slam, ding! goes the carriage return at regular, rapid
intervals.

And then, with an air of finality, the exhausted triumph of an
alpinist reaching the summit at last, the Oldest Man. Pecks. Out.
The. Words: [tap-tap-tap] The. [tap-tap-tap] End. [tap!]

He wrenches the page from the roller and holds it at arms' length
before him, and we watch his yellowed eyes dart over the words,
devouring the results until he reaches the end. And stops.

Pause.
Pause.
Pause.
Pause.

It gets uncomfortable. Still he pauses. Is that, could it be, a faint
smile trembling at the corner of his sunken and downturned
mouth? Is there a new spark in those ancient filmy eyes? He
stares in still silence, almost holding his breath, unwilling to
believe. Until he lets it all out in a slow, contented "woosh!"

His body seems to swell up within its shrunken frame and the
years appear to fall away, his eyes now discernibly sparkle with
mischievous achievement. He might wriggle with mirthful delight,
chuckling to himself. Ahab has slain his Whale. The line has
hooked the fish. Odysseus has sighted the shores of home.

With unmitigated, unmistakable glee, The Oldest Man clears his
throat, eyes still flashing over the paper nearly as wrinkled and
flimsy as himself, and draws a deep breath to read.

And stops short. His eyes widen as his body is wracked and
clutched with some deep, sharp, nameless pain from within. He
half rises from the chair, gasps, then settles back into place and
seems to hang almost suspended in time and space, his body
drained of energy but still poised on the brink. And he pitches
forward, his head plunging straight onto the keyboard with a
clustering clackety-clack and a final "ding!"

Dead.

As breath and strength leave him, the page flutters from his
fingers and floats forlorn to the floor. A final twitch from his lifeless
foot nudges the neat stack of pages beside him and this time, with
an air of inevitable doom, the tower slides and topples and
disperses. Pages upon pages covered with the tidy crows’-feet of
typescript scatter.

Stillness and silence descend. Slowly, achingly slowly, the lights
flicker and dim and go out until we are left again in the dark.

A cold wind blows.

End of play.