A very short play called "Nothing to be Done"

Nothing to be Done

Two persons are sitting in a Doctor’s room. The walls are white, the desk is light brown and cluttered with various files and documents, and on the back-wall sits a colourful, plastic height-measuring chart covered in cartoon animals. The Doctor is middle-aged, his body is dumpy, his face is saggy and jowly, his features are arranged somewhat unusually close together, and he is almost bald, with only two strips of brown hair on his head, one on each side. By contrast, the patient is featureless, genderless and ageless, representing the everyman/everywoman of his/her time period.

Patient: Doctor, every day of my life I’m crippled with anxiety. What do I do?

Doctor: Well for me to diagnose you, I need to know why you are anxious. Why are you anxious?

P: I don’t know really, it’s just that everywhere I go, I get this feeling of terrible anxiety, fear, stress, concern, trepidation, nervousness, apprehension, perturbation, disquiet, disquietude, uneasiness and tension. It pervades my life constantly; it hangs over my head like a black cloud everywhere I go.

D: Hmm; interesting.

P: I’m worrying right now!

D: What are you worrying about?

P: I already told you: I don’t know.

D: Has it got something to do with an evil Soviet atom bomb being dropped one day, completely out of the blue, on the paragon of liberal and democratic values that is the United States of America, incinerating and obliterating out wonderful nation, and everyone you know dying instantaneously, but you surviving, you being forced to wander through the barren, burnt wasteland that was once the happy and sunny place where you lived, staggering and limping, emaciated and haggard, through the grey desolation, only torn and dirtied clothes to cover you as you hobble past the shells of buildings you once knew, along the blackened streets that had once been filled with people and life, past the other miserable survivors whose eyes have melted out of their sockets and are sliding, viscous and gloopy down their face, or those whose skin, horribly discoloured, is peeling off in great sheets to reveal the pinkness underneath, or, worst of all, those with grotesque mutilations and disfigurements, stumbling around blindly, feebly clinging to a futile belief in life?  

P: Nah.

D: Oh, that’s a bit disappointing, I thought I’d got it.

P: No, wait, yes! That’s exactly it, Doctor! I have nightmares about exactly that every night.

D: Ahh; as I suspected. You realise, non-descript patient, that lots of people have contracted this condition recently… at least that’s what I’ve noticed in my job as Doctor.  Thankfully, it’s easy to fix.

P: Cool.

D: See, the thing is, Master/Miss/Mr/Mrs/Ms nameless, I have been to the future, and I can tell you with absolute certainty that no bomb was ever dropped on the US by the Soviets or by anyone else. In the future, they call this period of paranoia and political negotiations between the East and the West – or the Democratic and the Communist, if you like – “The Cold War”. It is “Cold” because no actual conflict ever eventuated – only threats.

P: Well fuck me, that’s a relief.                

D: I’m sorry but I would not like to fuck you. I can give you a prostate check however. That is, if you are a man, non-descript patient.

P: I am neither man nor woman. But yeah, alright, I do love a good prostate check.

It is performed. The curtain hovers above their heads, never quite falling.