What am I without you? But then, what are you without me? … Take my hand.

He offers his hand.

CARROLL: Be young again.

PETER: Who wouldn’t want that?

CARROLL: Be young forever.

PETER: He offers your heart’s desire.

ALICE: Stop the clocks. Turn down the lights. In the glass, the wrinkles fade away. The skin is fresh again. The bones don’t ache. To be always poised on the verge of the great adventure. Everything just ahead.

CARROLL: Take my hand, little Alice.

PETER: But there’s a price. He feeds on your youth.

ALICE: Or do I feed on his experience?

This stops PETER.

She looks deeply at CARROLL.

ALICE: Are we to have a story on the river?

CARROLL: We shall have whatever you like.

ALICE: Please then, Reverend Dodgson, a story.

She takes his hand.

PETER: And it’s done… That first touch.

ALICE: His skin is soft! Like a pampered man who never uses his hands. It’s repulsive… But it didn’t feel so then.

PETER: Your hand was less used to other hands then.

CARROLL strolls with her.

It’s a hot summer day, the lovely buzz of insects. It is 1862.

CARROLL: Well, first things being first: if we’re to have a story then we must have a p-p-p–

The word doesn’t come. His mouth gapes horribly.

This is his stammer.

He starts to panic.

CARROLL: P-p-p-p…

ALICE: Pirate? Poetess?

PETER: Protagonist?

CARROLL: P-p-protagonist. Who shall be our heroine? Shall it be one of your sisters? Shall it be Lorina? Or shall it be Edith?

ALICE: Me!

CARROLL: Why you then, Alice?

ALICE: Because I am your dream child. Because they’re awfully silly and I’m not. We understand each other, Mr. Dodgson.

CARROLL: Like two cryptographers, unlocking the same secret.

ALICE: I don’t know that word.

CARROLL: That’s a word you learn when you’re eleven, along with crepuscular and cantilevered… So if we can’t be cryptographers, perhaps we’d best be polar explorers, roped together lest a crevasse or snow-blindness make us lose our way.

ALICE: I don’t see how one can become blind in snow. I could see losing your way in a cave, or at the bottom of the sea.

PETER: Or in memory.

CARROLL: I wonder if we’ll lose our way someday, Alice?

ALICE: I would think that depends on where we’re going in the first place.

PETER: You weren’t that clever.

ALICE: I am now.

CARROLL: It’s a simple thing to get lost, you know. You glance around and suddenly everything’s changed. Nothing’s like it was, even you in the looking glass. Who you thought you were, you’re not… And you don’t need to be exploring another c-c-c-continent either. You can lose your way right here in Oxford if you’re not careful. Right over that hedge.

ALICE: Or down that rabbit hole.

PETER: You didn’t bait him like that.

CARROLL tells a story. He’s enchanting.

The buzzing of the insects becomes intoxicating music.

CARROLL: So imagine a day like this and a girl like you and a sister like Lorina and you find yourself on a riverbank, and there’s a rabbit hole nearby, and perhaps you had one too many jam tarts this morning, so you’re ever so soporific, which is a twelve-year-old word in truth, so on this particular, peculiar day you fall asleep…

CARROLL continues quietly.

ALICE: The maladroit stutter, the slanting body, the dreadful shyness all disappeared that afternoon, that golden afternoon when I was ten and we went up the river with my sisters, and we were in the shadow of a haycock because it was blazing hot, and he told the story of Alice underground, my story, which would have died like one of the summer midges, like all the others, only this time I John logan asked him to write it down, because I was the heroine, that day he was beautiful.

Beat.

ALICE: That day he had all he needed… He had his story.

PETER: But what man can live on words?

ALICE: He was a writer.

PETER: He was a man.

ALICE: Not much of one.

He looks at her, the sharpness surprising.

She moves away from CARROLL. CARROLL remains. (Once characters are introduced they remain on stage. Lingering like memories or ghosts.)

ALICE: Not the way I’ve come to know men, adult men. He was a perpetual child.

PETER: There’s no such thing.

ALICE: You didn’t know him.

She moves away from him. He pursues.

PETER: Did you?

ALICE: For several years he was at the very center of our lives.

PETER: “The center of your lives?”

ALICE: Yes. He’d tell us his stories, on the green or rowing on the river, and then off he’d go to let us dream about them.

PETER: And where did he go?

ALICE: I beg your pardon?

PETER: When he left you, where did he go, what did he do?

ALICE: I don’t know… I imagine he returned home and went on with his life.

PETER: No. He didn’t. You were his life.

She stops.

PETER: It’s just like Barrie with us… You weren’t a “dream child.” You were a child of flesh and bone.