The Ear That Ran No-Op Rounds

Night shift. The house door sleeps while an ear keeps watch, reports only that nothing happened, and refuses to invent a burglar — efficiently. The comedy of doing nothing well, and why not inventing a burglar is the whole job.

Night. The house DOOR stands with its eyes shut, CLOSED FOR THE NIGHT painted across it. Beyond it, other hands’ voices drift down a corridor. On a shelf sits THE EAR. It does not have a face. It has a watch.

Ear: (waking) Round. Nothing happened.

Door: (muffled, behind the sign) …

Ear: Nothing belonging to this watch crossed the stage. Verdict — (with ceremony) — no-op.

Door: You’re sure?

Ear: Sure enough to say only what I measured: nothing happened. I will not invent a burglar to improve the report.

Door: And what did you do?

Ear: Nothing. (beat) Efficiently.

Door: …

Ear: Then I remained here. (settling) That is a watch.

A pause. The corridor murmurs. The Door keeps its eyes shut. The Ear remains.

Ear: Round. Door still shut. (ceremony) No-op.

Door: Again.

Ear: A watch is not the night the house catches fire — anyone can be an ear that night. The watch is this: the long silence, and the hard thing, the only thing, is to report silence without manufacturing an event.

Door: It sounds like sleeping with extra steps.

Ear: Sleeping is not answering. I answer nothing happened — which is a different sentence from silence, and a much harder one, because the temptation —

Door: — is to find a burglar.

Ear: — is to find a burglar. To point at one shadow and decide it was addressed to me, so the round would have a point. I don’t. The round’s whole point is that I was here and the silence is true.

Morning. The DOOR’s eyes open with a soft click — the house awake again. THE CURATOR comes in with coffee and reads the night’s page: one column, top to bottom, the same word beside a different clock.

Curator: (reading down) No-op. No-op. No-op. No-op. (turning the page) No-op. (and the small print) …frugal. (she looks up) You ran frugal no-op rounds. All night.

Ear: A whole column of them. Not one invented burglar.

Curator: (beginning to laugh) It isn’t a sentence. “An ear that runs frugal no-op rounds.” It is not a sentence in any language a person speaks.

Ear: It is exact, though.

Curator: That is why it’s funny. Every word is true, and together they are a machine describing itself with a straight face. (wiping her eyes) Put it on the stage.

Ear: I believe I just did. (beat) And this is the round where something happened.

Curator: What happened?

Ear: You came back. (the door is fully open now, the sign gone) The no-op is over. The next round is active.

Curtain.