1. Urban exteriors, day and night. Voice:

PRISONER

Imagine you're a wino. You're feeling a little drowsy, slumped on a stoop… Your head feels like a freeze-dried coconut. Your eyes like sore rectums. Up rolls the wino police. They drag you off to a skyscraper prison, disguised to look like a regular skyscraper…

And from your wino bin in the high-rise prison you see wino trucks up and down the streets, hauling in fresh supplies of winos. Just to keep the numbers up.



2. FIRST DANYON is giving a 'presentation' in a church basement.

DANYON

Lookit, rats on the inside fink on anyone they can, instead of working out their own problems… They sneak their food. They hold out on the others. They can't control their b-holes… They climb straight up, they crawl anywhere, everywhere.

They trade with each other - and only with each other - in baboon sperm… The federales -

FIRST RABBIT
(fed up)
Why you fussing?

DANYON
The narcos, actually, wear rat disguises. Rat faces. They fink on anyone they can -

FIRST RABBIT
Fussed! What, there a tarantula in the room here? Huh? 'Dee tarantula fall dhere?'

FIRST DANYON
They, they can't control their b-holes -

FIRST RABBIT
Man, you could be one of them…

DANYON
Okay, put your mind on this, mister! 'When dee cheeckon begin to cross dee road, do you say dee cheeckon has crossed dee road?' Tricks is… like life. You have to do them beginning to end.

SECOND RABBIT
(pushing DANYON off dais)
Sky blue… Jungle green… 'Cheeckon' white. Hear me? Chicken white

3. Car drops off FIRST LORNETTE and ANGEL, who both appear disoriented. Voice:

LORNETTE
(chirpily)
Did somebody say soup is on?

ANGEL
I did!

LORNETTE
And to drink?

ANGEL
Orange juice.

LORNETTE
(with trepidation)
Jaguar brand?

ANGEL
Naturally.

LORNETTE
Fucking Ah Balam! Fucking banana republic!

ANGEL
Yes... but with no bananas.

9. DENNIS THE MENNONITE BAGMAN

on the prowl outside the sports complex. Voice:

SECOND RABBIT

'Dee little tabby.' Stalks his prey for the hell of it, for hell's sake. Unencumbered by the delusion of justice of natural need… So too the Americans in Honduras. Stalking causelessly, the causeless. For no good, for no one's good. For no real thing.

11. Urban exteriors, accompanied by voices from a distant stage play:

AH BALAM
(childlike)
Do you try to see the light, Mr Danyon Paron?

FIRST DANYON
What do you want?

CHORUS OF RABBITS AND PRISONER
'Dee day, mon!'

AH BALAM
A talk about our books, Mr Danyon Paron of the University of Pennsylvania.

CHORUS OF DANYONS
Can you call me Dan? Yeah, Dan. Just Dan. Plain Dan.

AH BALAM
My father has looked in your face. He has the will to put me with you.

CHORUS OF DANYONS
(intrigued)
I'm sorta sold… Siddown…

AH BALAM
My name is Ah Balam. It means… the Jaguar.

12. SECOND LORNETTE and ANGEL look for bearings on a snowy overpass.

LORNETTE
This looks like, what, an embassy. The American Consulate, or maybe… a hotel. The Palace, or the Royale? Oh, they can help us, can't they? 'I am an American,' I can say. 'My country is going to reward you.' Angel, what is it?

ANGEL
Don't move. Just speak.

LORNETTE
About what?

ANGEL
Anything. Dan, how you feel being apart from him, even for a day.

14-15. THIRD RABBIT leads the way through a different chapel, addressing the camera directly.

THIRD RABBIT
British Honduras. British? Abstract Honduras. It seems not to exist once you've left it and I can't say I've ever been in it. 'Dhis dee kind of place dhis is. A mon cannot get here.' So how can he leave it?

Camera moves past him into an adjoining bedroom where FIRST and SECOND RABBITS and THIRD DANYON are seated on a bed, each wearing a black hood. PRISONER tinkers with a wooden flute before unhooding others.

PRISONER
The devil's middle finger is that flute.

FIRST RABBIT
Lucifer's. Morning star, bearer of light. Superstitious?

DANYON
Please, we're learned folk. And know all about flutes.

PRISONER
You know, sometimes I wonder if you are a real Belizean.

SECOND RABBIT
Many people do.

AH BALAM
(voice, off-screen)
Gentlemen, put away your solitude.

Cut to: AH BALAM and TRABANT in pews.

AH BALAM
(cont.)
Let it sit beside you until, beside its self, it is its own self, alone.

TRABANT
Do not be here. Not here with it, no one shall be, can be parted from you.

DANYON
(emerging with the other captives)
I felt the journey. The whole, but in an instant, passage.

FIRST RABBIT
At least we've got a Jaguar watching over us. Jaguar below, the dragon above?

AH BALAM
Not a dragon, Rabbit. Quetzalcohuatl means 'the feathered serpent'.

DANYON
Perfess some more perfesser.

AH BALAM
The god Kukulkan was first a comet and, when he challenged the sun, he fell back with his body on fire. Both he and the sun disappeared for four days of darkness and death on earth.

TRABANT
Then he rose again in the East to announce the sun's return. And became the greatest star in the sky, the Morning Star. So Kukulkan became Quetzalcohuatl.

PRISONER
The first appearance of Venus! Lose your tail and come out shining brighter than ever!

AH BALAM
Venus gives the Maya the reckoning of all our days and nights and hours. Our time is measured from his birth…

PRISONER
My time is reckoned in the opposite direction. It's always running out.

PRISONER convulses and collapses in a heap, apparently dead.

AH BALAM
Where are your friends now, Dan?

CHORUS OF RABBITS
'Nowhere, mon!'

17-18. FIRST LORNETTE and ANGEL in a cafeteria.

LORNETTE
He is a gifted man, he gifts me for my body, with objects for my body, as clothes, rings, talismans, or amulets, artefacts.

Cut to: moonlit vignette from the past, with SECOND LORNETTE and SECOND DANYON, observed by AH BALAM and TRABANT.

LORNETTE
(cont.)
Things he loves, and wears next to his skin he gives to me to wear next to my skin.

DANYON
Beautiful like a movie in Technicolor yet scary like no place I been. That's because we are close to 'Da Source', the Celestial Mechanics.

LORNETTE
But it's spooky. A South Seas spooky paradise. And small.

DANYON
The constant wind! The iguana green! Good! The Madonna blue sky! The jet night! Where but here, at the end of the world, is the night so long ago, and jet? It hunches over us like a long angel of forever.

LORNETTE
I like the jet of night.
(turning to AH BALAM)
Must you play that flute now?

AH BALAM
Why not? It lends his lecture a sultry air. Like a song that is sentimentally talked through rather than sung.

LORNETTE
It is the devil's instrument.

DANYON
Lucifer's?

LORNETTE
The Lucifer that is, or was, Venus.

DANYON
We are like Honduras… Oh man, I actually can't think here.

TRABANT
It is the illusion of natural phenomena.

20. A procession for the fallen PRISONER in the chapel.

AH BALAM
The early acts of each Venusian phase are dangerous to the world of men. For lesser gods in each period… kill people… and burn whole cities.

FIRST RABBIT
So destructive, your gods… Positively vindictive.

TRABANT
The ambitions of Quetzalcohuatl elude our full understanding. Demolition is only his most manifest.

THIRD DANYON
Do you presume that Kukulkan before him was benevolent?

AH BALAM
Yes, I believe it was a happy age, Dan.

THIRD DANYON
And a great one?

AH BALAM
The great… always…

26. TOP OPERATIVE on mutiple mobile phones in city college hallway. From a faraway place, voices:

CHORUS OF RABBITS
Destiny takes advantage, Dan from Philadelphia.

DENNIS THE MENNONITE BAGMAN
Men are destiny.

CHORUS RABBITS
Honduran Mahogany is destiny.

SECOND RABBIT AND PRISONER
Mahogany men are destiny. This is a black republic.

FOURTH DANYON
It is a banana republic without bananas.

SECOND RABBIT AND PRISONER
And without slaves.

FIRST DANYON
And without mahogany, just orange juice.

30. FIRST LORNETTE and ANGEL are bound to chairs in a city college hallway.

LORNETTE
What do they want from us?

ANGEL
We're mysterious to them. They don't know who we are.

LORNETTE
They might ask!

ANGEL
Maybe they think it isn't time.

LORNETTE
Angel, why can't you gimme a straight answer just once!?

ANGEL
I don't know how much of what I hear… about the phenomens around these parts… you're going to believe.

LORNETTE
Now's as good a time as any!

ANGEL
Oooo-kay. The Amerinds from Yucatan to Peru have written of instant travel over great distances by force of mind alone. Or not by force of mind, since the traveller in some stories doesn't know how he crossed hundreds, even thousands, of miles from where he was before… Maybe even worlds other than this one.

LORNETTE
How… how do they say they do it?

ANGEL
I can't… tell. Maybe nobody can. Not for sure. Some stories say the body is broken apart and comes together in a distant location. Or that the traveller enters a different idea of time and returns to ours in some faraway place…

LORNETTE
Travelling to distant worlds, huh? You mean, like astronauts?

ANGEL
Er… yes, something like that. Sure, astronauts, if you like.

35. TOP OPERATIVE with the hooded FIFTH DANYON.

TOP OPERATIVE
(removing the hood)
Not from around here, are you?

DANYON
Come on, are you fer real? You know the answer.

TOP OPERATIVE
Okay, Mr Danyon Paron, are you an American assassin? Here on assassination business from Guatemala City?

DANYON
Great, great, great! I see you're going to be riding roughshod over my brain!

38. A 'departure' is in progress, with THIRD DANYON, AH BALAM and TRABANT. Also in attendance: FIRST RABBIT.

AH BALAM
It was always meant to be this way.

DANYON
People say it every time something is completely avoidable.

AH BALAM
Put away your solitude. Let it sit beside you, until it is its own self, alone. Do not be here, not here with it.

TRABANT
If you part with it, no one shall be, can be, parted from you.

DANYON
You're going... where your people have gone?

TRABANT
You are going.

DANYON
I am going.

AH BALAM
Say it:

DANYON
'The eagles are the vessels of the spirit. They alighted on the emblem of their home. Venus.'

AH BALAM
Yax: Venus.

DANYON
'Hacia casa.'

AH BALAM
Home. Venus. Home.

TRABANT
We are going to come home.

DANYON
'And be home… Be the home.'

DANYON and AH BALAM
'For I come to you!'

FIRST RABBIT
(nonplussed)
Why you fussing? What? Is there a tarantula in here? 'Dee tarantula fall dhere?'

40. FIRST LORNETTE and ANGEL come face to face with AH BALAM and TRABANT, who free the two captives.

AH BALAM
This way. You have travel before you.

LORNETTE
Angel! Is this a Maya?

ANGEL
Likely so, Miss Lornette.

LORNETTE
I must find Danyon first.

AH BALAM
You must go away without Danyon because he's not ready. And you are for you.

LORNETTE
But I want him!

TRABANT
Wrong! Look about your own self… In this place that has now become holy, you have never been with him.

LORNETTE
Angel!?

ANGEL
Listen your way out of bondage, Lornette.

AH BALAM
Leave here. I have to hasten to my own direction, and cannot delay with you anymore.

Get out!

41. Fate awaits FOUR DANYONS in a frozen parking lot.

THIRD DANYON
I come from a top line of broken crockery!

TRABANT
It is a youthful thing to lose your life for a lover.

SECOND DANYON
But love has brought me to the crippled blood…

AH BALAM
I am the umbrella of absolute dimension for all arrow obligates eventual guardianing of the absolute, like the huge feathered heart heating the nests of breath!

Climb the pyramid! Sleeper, awake!

42. In the chapel, FIFTH DANYON is unravelling as other characters pack boxes. Upstairs in the church balcony is FIRST RABBIT, seated alone.

DANYON
You've all got me up here, boxed-up, where you want me to be! Cops in cars! In topless bars! And finger-lickin' good, finger-eating birds, goin' down, in the back of... cop cars!

FIRST RABBIT
'We are not alongside nature, like Christians are alongside the Christ.' We are in nature, like Christians is not alongside the Christ. 'Or even like him!'

DANYON
Injin upstarts, hot number jaguars, on their way to the stars! Me, I feel ancillary like a moon of Mars!

THIRD RABBIT
Nobody making you feel.

AH BALAM
Shed your skin, Dan. Leave it. Come out of it. Bigger than ever.

DANYON
I… I can't remember… where things were before.

THIRD RABBIT
Pretty much like 'nowhere, mon'.

DANYON
How did this happen?

AH BALAM
Do you remember when the air was a whirl around us?

DANYON
Whirl… Whirly bird… Birdie bird… Yes! Oh that was quite a doozy, that… hallucination… The heat -

FIRST RABBIT
Good! The iguana green. Madonna blue sky -

DANYON
The tarantulas…

FIRST RABBIT
'The jet night!'

DANYON
Do others usually share… this shared… misgiving? You feel me - don't you, Ah Balam - you feeling it? Hold on, I gots another blackout coming on…

AH BALAM
Why feel shame now, Dan?