I

We hear two weary voices humming a lament over a murmuring heart and ticking clocks. We see the Centaur: half-writer, half-desk. He tells us that the only way he has to understand the death of his son is by re-creating it as a story (“There is a man. There’s a woman. He will walk. She will not”). 

We see the Man, and the Woman, his wife.  The Man can’t bear staying at home any longer and decides he has to go “there, to him.” His wife despairs (“there’s no there”). The Man sings of the night when messengers came to their home to tell them about their son’s death (“they…mercifully, quietly, stood at the threshold and gave us the breath of death”).

His wife brings that night into the present and addresses the messengers (“Don’t be afraid. I did not shout when he was born, and I won’t shout now either”). Man, Woman, and Centaur sing of falling into a void – the absence created by the child’s death (“Come, Chaos”). The Woman climbs atop a belfry and sings of her husband who walks in circles on the hills surrounding their town (“step, another step”).

In a hallucination, the Walking Man conjures up his son: he “empties” his own body so that his son can enter it and live there the rest of his unlived life (“...hurry, my boy... everything now is yes”). The Centaur tells how some of the townsfolk who are also bereaved see the Walking Man, leave their homes, and follow him into the hills: a midwife, her husband the cobbler, a mute net mender, an elderly math teacher. They all walk in a procession towards a barren hill (“It is the brain of the universe… It has no wails, no thoughts. It has no answers, and no love”).

We hear a cry piercing the skies. There is no answer, only a faint echo. The Walking Man sings of hovering between here and there (“I’m walking my mind away”). The music turns into a mantra from which the Centaur emerges (“It breaks my heart, my son, to think…I have found the words.”) The Centaur then addresses the Walking Man (“If you meet him…will you tell him of his brother born after him? Will you tell him that you gave his dog to a boy in the street?”).

One of the walkers (voiced by the Centaur) sees a fly landing on a green leaf without noticing that a spider had built his web. The fly is trapped and killed. (“What?  What is it you know now, that you did not know the moment you were spawned?”) As the Walking Man realizes the futility of his walk and stops (“You were right, Woman, there’s no ‘there’”), the Woman Atop the Belfry sees him far away and blesses him (“Go now, be like him. Conceive him, yet be your death, too…and there, my love, among the shadows of father-son, there will come peace – for him, for you”). Giant, Momus-like drums erupt. The Walking Man hollers a string of questions to his son (“Where? Where are you? How are you there? And who are you there?” The stars mock his questions. A cry pierces the skies. There is no answer. Only a faint echo. We hear the voice of a boy (“There is breath, there is breath. Inside the pain. There is breath”).