Act 4, Scene 14: “Thought Possession”

TRL struggles to clean up the yogurt spilled on the kitchen counter, scrap up the soggy Cheerios dispersed like minilife preservers under the kitchen table, dump laundry detergent over C’s underwear where he slid back into pretoilet-training days, get iron supplements and the follow-up prune (to kill the taste of the nasty iron supplement) into C and E’s mouths, brush his own teeth, and then get C and E cleaned up, in jackets and in the car to daycare. But there is screaming at the train table. Horrible, anguished, banshee yelling alerting TRL that though his headache, irregular breathing through his clogged nose, exhaustion from staying up late watching the pretty bad (but evidently not bad enough) movie Let’s Go to Prison while cleaning up his office, and his general disdain for life right now would indicate ignoring the issue, he just can’t. Making the noise stop is an imperative for calming his jangled nerves.

“What is going on,” TRL pronounces clearly and steadily.

All at once, C and E respond on their separate voice tracks. Track 1:

“E took my train.”

Track 2:

“My train. My train.”

Justice isn’t about truth, TRL knows by this time in his life. It is about making the noise go away.

TRL sees that C has the train car in question. “Did you have this?” he asks. C stops crying and nods.

“What’s your story?” TRL says, turning to E. “Did you have the car?”

There is a pause, and in that pause TRL knows the answer.

“I wanted the car,” E finally answers.

TRL is amused to recognize a new way of thinking about an old situation: in kiddie justice, thinking about possession is 9/10ths of the law.

“It’s nice that you want it,” says TRL, “but C was playing with it. You can have it later on.”

He levels a severe stare at E, who seems to have intellectually moved on to greener pastures. E picks up the trains in front of him, C inserts the train car in question into his train line-up, and TRL goes upstairs for his morning cocktail: three rust-colored Advils with a white Tylenol chaser. The aspirin will be a little something for later on.