Speaker 1: Hm, I am the fairy man.
Speaker 2: The human spirit is my business. Their madness, their passion,
Speaker 2: the wonderful and monstrous ways they burn out their brief candle.
Speaker 3: I regret to tell you that very many American lives
Speaker 3: in love.
Speaker 4: Was heard to shut from the car. He's dead.
Speaker 1: Whether he rebird to president.
Speaker 2: Or four hours, people must get up and google identification.
Speaker 2: I am here in the in between, to collect their
Speaker 2: spirits and carry them to what comes next. This road
Speaker 2: is not on any map. It spans the thresholds between
Speaker 2: their most forbidden desires and their greatest fear.
Speaker 1: All I ask for.
Speaker 2: In payment is a tale and accounting of their lives
Speaker 2: and the great temporary that is the land we're living.
Speaker 2: These are their stories. This is.
Speaker 5: The passage.
Speaker 2: I'm making a pit stop today, checking in a particular passenger. A.
Speaker 6: Yeah.
Speaker 2: I do not normally allow my passengers such liberties, but
Speaker 2: for this soul, I've made an exception. It is August.
Speaker 2: It is always August in this place, this place, in
Speaker 2: the in between balance and form and function, and haunted
Speaker 2: by bloody tragedy, the largest single incident of mass murder
Speaker 2: in Wisconsin's history. This place which is not as it appears.
Speaker 2: This place which is and is not spring green, where
Speaker 2: the lines between the brilliant mind that builds it and
Speaker 2: the rest of time and space blurred. The same mind
Speaker 2: which had a hand in the design of the whole
Speaker 2: of the twentieth century. Frank Lloyd Wright a towering figure
Speaker 2: in his field, incredibly prolific in his lifetime. His designs
Speaker 2: will prove to echo through their work for thousands of
Speaker 2: years to come, and his visions represent the first truly
Speaker 2: American architecture. He saw the world shifting. He was an
Speaker 2: architect of that shift. He envisioned an America where mankind
Speaker 2: lived in harmony with the land, where the home was
Speaker 2: the center of life and a hearth the center of home.
Speaker 2: There was a personal cost, however, as he left his
Speaker 2: life in April of nineteen fifty nine, he believed his
Speaker 2: work unfinished. There are no corporeal tools in the Bardo,
Speaker 2: so he worked with all of the material left him
Speaker 2: his own life. And what a construction he has made
Speaker 2: here in the in between. But only he will be
Speaker 2: able to tell us when he's done building. Hello, Frank,
Speaker 2: it's time.
Speaker 4: I didn't see you coming.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's time to get up, Frank.
Speaker 4: I no longer have a body. How do I get up?
Speaker 4: If I don't have a body? Am I a reflection?
Speaker 4: Peras only a shadow?
Speaker 2: Well, your consciousness is all you need. Focus, recall, movement.
Speaker 2: What do you see?
Speaker 4: I see grass on the hill, grass and summer thistle
Speaker 4: bowing to the wind waves of it. An ocean of
Speaker 4: green rushing away from me.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's good, Frank, this.
Speaker 4: Is spring green. I'd know this slope of Wisconsin hillside anywhere.
Speaker 4: I know it as well as my hands know my
Speaker 4: own face in the dark.
Speaker 2: Why have you taken me here? Spirit?
Speaker 7: The soul knows where it needs to go to heal itself.
Speaker 7: Heal the soul, that's absurd. I didn't need any healing
Speaker 7: in life, and I certainly don't require any healing and death.
Speaker 2: But you do. Come on, Frank. Our memories the mother
Speaker 2: of all wisdom. You can access your own memories and
Speaker 2: the memories of others here. These impressions all connect here,
Speaker 2: every memory of every living thing.
Speaker 4: So what do I do?
Speaker 2: Speak the truth, Frank, as you see it, and we
Speaker 2: will be on our way. Speak.
Speaker 4: I stand alone in a verdant field. I know this
Speaker 4: to be my family land, But there are none of
Speaker 4: the structures I'd known in life. No Unitarian chapel, no
Speaker 4: twin windmills nicknamed Romeo and Juliet, no country school. I
Speaker 4: am surveying the slopes for any sign of civilization. When
Speaker 4: a man in a black suit appears before me, his
Speaker 4: face is gray and unyielding in his january.
Speaker 8: Your mother send you to work on this farm every summer,
Speaker 8: and every returner did as aft as the day.
Speaker 2: You were born.
Speaker 4: My uncle, James Lloyd Jones, long since dead. I haven't
Speaker 4: seen James in over forty years, but here he is
Speaker 4: just as menacing as I'd remembered him as a child.
Speaker 4: I tried to run away from him, to escape his farm,
Speaker 4: but was found quickly and dragged back screaming. I learned
Speaker 4: two things during those interminable summers of work and prayer
Speaker 4: at Aldebaran Farm. Firstly, that I hated physical labor and
Speaker 4: took it as a sign that I was created for
Speaker 4: loftier things than plows and take shit. The second, and
Speaker 4: more profound lesson that I took from the slopes of
Speaker 4: Spring Green was that America was made for the horizon.
Speaker 4: It was made from movement with the land forward forward Wisconsin, Forward,
Speaker 4: America across the prairie to become the prairie, within the mountains,
Speaker 4: to become the mountains. Forward into the forest to become
Speaker 4: the trees. A manifest expansion. Forward across the globe America
Speaker 4: dessert buildings that reflected this movement, and I was destined
Speaker 4: by God to create them.
Speaker 8: You you are shame on this family might leave this place,
Speaker 8: but you'll never leave. That.
Speaker 4: Is that your own morality speaking or did you borrow
Speaker 4: your thoughts from the town paper again?
Speaker 2: Here's a morality lesson for you, boy.
Speaker 8: We came there from Smarting Dome, the black spotted whales.
Speaker 9: Called that's by hostile or outsiders because.
Speaker 8: Of its religious unorthodoxy, called that really because of its
Speaker 8: religious purity. Honest, godly people civilized this land, Frank, and
Speaker 8: you you gave it back to the devil when you
Speaker 8: stole that man's wife and.
Speaker 1: Brought it here.
Speaker 4: I'm bored of this, James.
Speaker 8: Do you know why you always returned to your mother's
Speaker 8: soft boy? Because you're always looking for a short You're
Speaker 8: probably looking for one right.
Speaker 1: Now, James, face.
Speaker 4: Rigulous, grotesquely, his eyes rolling back, he opens his mouth
Speaker 4: to speak. A dark room of spiders rushing forward between
Speaker 4: his strained lips. He falls to his knees, his body
Speaker 4: engulfed by a thousand of racknets. He's squirming and choking
Speaker 4: on their selven legs. The black soil is beginning to
Speaker 4: quake and froth and open up beneath him. Swallowing his
Speaker 4: gray friend, he struggles to climb out of the hole.
Speaker 2: No, no, no, He.
Speaker 4: Points towards the horizon, and a great white complex materializes,
Speaker 4: as though he's summoned it. It's the Chicago World's Fair Pavilion,
Speaker 4: exactly as it stood in eighteen ninety three. A pathway
Speaker 4: toward the white complex then opening in the grass before me,
Speaker 4: and a crow lands on the root ahead.
Speaker 2: I will leave James to follow it. I will not
Speaker 2: look back. What do you remember about the fair, Frank?
Speaker 4: That was the year that I left the firm of
Speaker 4: Adler and Sullivan and struck out on my own.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, yeah, What do you remember seeing at the pavilion?
Speaker 4: The fair celebrated the four hundredth anniversary of the landing
Speaker 4: of Christopher Columbus in the Americas. Disappointing gowdy architecture, monstrous
Speaker 4: Greek revival buildings, painted ivory, the old ideas of Europe,
Speaker 4: regurgitated by New York architects who came to the Chicago
Speaker 4: swamp land to have their boots lit by their Midwestern colleagues.
Speaker 2: You're editorializing, Frank, What did you see there?
Speaker 4: I remember Frederick law ownsteads beautiful glass boats in the
Speaker 4: man made lagoon, and here one arrives on the placid
Speaker 4: water suddenly before us? Shall we board?
Speaker 9: After?
Speaker 2: You continue?
Speaker 9: There?
Speaker 4: Ahead of us wooded island located in the center of
Speaker 4: the water forward to Hodin, meaning Phoenix's Palace. It was
Speaker 4: a recreation of a temple that combined several centuries of
Speaker 4: Japanese architecture and history into a tea garden and three
Speaker 4: single story buildings that moved horizontally with the island from
Speaker 4: east to west, forward with the island to become the island.
Speaker 4: It commanded the eye with the subtle beauty. It vibrated
Speaker 4: with life in the foreground against the hulking white giants
Speaker 4: on the parallel shore. My hands itch for a pencil
Speaker 4: and drafting table.
Speaker 2: Your hands itched for a pencil, and they found one.
Speaker 2: You found a shortcut. What are you suggesting here?
Speaker 1: Spirit?
Speaker 2: You know precisely what I'm saying.
Speaker 4: Old didn't confirmed ideas I'd already had. They were my
Speaker 4: own ideas. If they were not, then it was providence
Speaker 4: that I should make them known to the world.
Speaker 2: This is a story of theft. You can leave when
Speaker 2: you can see who did the stealing.
Speaker 4: I refuse to dignify that with a response.
Speaker 2: You are the progeny of devoted unitarians. Tell me, Frank,
Speaker 2: what is the seventh commandment?
Speaker 4: The shot not commit adultery? Oh the Phoenix temple, it's
Speaker 4: caught fire and now was gone the mirage. I'm back
Speaker 4: in the field with an accusing spirit.
Speaker 2: These are your belongings, Frank, not mine. What was her name?
Speaker 4: Her name was Mama. I met Maema when she and
Speaker 4: her husband, Edward Cheney, were clients of mine. I was
Speaker 4: commissioned to build them a house in Oak Park, near
Speaker 4: the home that I shared with Kitty and our six children.
Speaker 4: The affair didn't happen immediately. By the time Maema and
Speaker 4: I were discovered, I was already determined to release myself.
Speaker 4: I'd found my soul's match in Maema, my intellectual equal,
Speaker 4: and there was no staying with Kitty and the children.
Speaker 2: After that.
Speaker 4: Consolagration of body and spirit, every time I returned to
Speaker 4: the house in Oak Park, who felt like enslavement, to
Speaker 4: endure an early and unfit marriage, the monotony of domestic
Speaker 4: life and needful mouths of children, the unpaid debts mounting.
Speaker 4: Maema and I agreed that the falsehood it took to
Speaker 4: continue our respective marriages was greater than the sin of
Speaker 4: living an authentic truth. I built Taliassen form Mema. It
Speaker 4: was to be our home and safe haven and spring
Speaker 4: green away from scavenging, report of a place where I
Speaker 4: could work and Mama could continue translating the works of
Speaker 4: ellen Key while we waited for our divorces to shake out.
Speaker 4: I wish to return to Talias in spirit, to Meema.
Speaker 4: The pond below Tallyassen shimmers and warps like a desert mirage.
Speaker 4: And there it is. It's there, it's real, We're here.
Speaker 2: It's nice asant it And now.
Speaker 4: Is that not Mema but a small figure sprinting towards
Speaker 4: us from the courtyard, past the stone walled garden, bursting
Speaker 4: with flowers, tolder than she. There's a ringing in my ear,
Speaker 4: growing more intense. He approaches. It's Martha Cheney, Mama's daughter.
Speaker 4: I know her distinctive page boy hair cut well, her
Speaker 4: sapphire ring, her white summer dress flashing in the sun.
Speaker 4: Martha Cheney eternally eighty years old. This isn't my memory.
Speaker 5: Spirit.
Speaker 2: Yeah, there is no U frank, no point where you
Speaker 2: end and this begins. No single horizon line, no individual timeline.
Speaker 2: This is all you, converging, intersecting all sight, sounds, memories
Speaker 2: and fantasies, all simultaneously, statuette scan fluid. You can access
Speaker 2: every memory in this plane, not just your own. This
Speaker 2: memory belongs to the land. It is carved into the
Speaker 2: shining brow of the hill itself, and everything you see
Speaker 2: is your reflection, including her.
Speaker 3: And perhaps she's here to guide me back to Meema,
Speaker 3: who's inevitably punched over a book somewhere, or drinked on
Speaker 3: a duck chair in a elegant way, Mark.
Speaker 2: Bright, Young Martha.
Speaker 4: She's spirit. Why is she running with her arms out
Speaker 4: like that? She's not running towards me. She looks to
Speaker 4: be running away from something. She's mouthing words, but I
Speaker 4: can't make out any sound. My ears are completely wiped
Speaker 4: out by high pitched ringing Spirit. I can't hear over it.
Speaker 2: She said, my feet spirit. I can't touch her.
Speaker 4: My hands go right through her. The tidy page boy
Speaker 4: haircut is unzipping itself.
Speaker 5: Ah h.
Speaker 4: I cannot see her murder, only her small body unraveling
Speaker 4: before me. The blows keep coming from Martha's phantom assassin
Speaker 4: was two three in quick succession. She is looking at me,
Speaker 4: her skull belching blood, red rosettes blooming on her white dress.
Speaker 4: One two free the feld sapling Martha eternally eight gone
Speaker 4: in one two free. A girl is a gash, a
Speaker 4: red plot of the earth. The ringing is gone. But
Speaker 4: I hear the clandestine kiss of a match and gasoline
Speaker 4: outside of the house. I hear the immediate and elemental
Speaker 4: fear of trapped men howling. I. I can't Spirit, it's
Speaker 4: too much, I can't continue take my sight.
Speaker 9: Spirit.
Speaker 2: Let's go a little further this time, Frank, please no.
Speaker 5: He's here now.
Speaker 4: Starched, white servant's jacket, now splatted with blood and blackened
Speaker 4: with soot. In his hands, a hatchet and empty can
Speaker 4: of Ghastly, it's Carleton, Jillian Carlton, the murderer, and I
Speaker 4: come here to visit my angels, and instead I'm haunted
Speaker 4: by my demons.
Speaker 2: Have courage.
Speaker 4: What more do you want a me demon, You're not
Speaker 4: already taking everything from me?
Speaker 9: Just one thing? I want what ma'am wanted?
Speaker 6: Luncheon served on the private patty hole overlooking the pond.
Speaker 6: She wanted a great many things for herself. She wanted
Speaker 6: a man who wouldn't limit her into elligence. She coveted
Speaker 6: another's husband, and coveting is a secret signal for the selfish.
Speaker 6: She loved a linen chemise because it is simple. She
Speaker 6: loved the Swedish language because it is not. The workmen
Speaker 6: would be eating near the kitchen in the east wind,
Speaker 6: after drafting houses and mending fences. The workmen wanted to
Speaker 6: be praised for their discipline. The workmen wanted to be
Speaker 6: praised for their industry and their humble beginnings. The workmen
Speaker 6: wanted to be praised by a man who was praised
Speaker 6: among men. Everyone kills something. As a man of ideas,
Speaker 6: you just kill slower. A spirit called to me from
Speaker 6: the trees, a whisper in the wind. The spirit revealed
Speaker 6: to me that the house and the people were filled
Speaker 6: with evil. The spirit told me that the cheers were
Speaker 6: stuffed with human hair. The spirit he grows from the cellar,
Speaker 6: and he grows from these shadows and the spirit he
Speaker 6: paints in Cherokee red. The spirit demands to be seen
Speaker 6: as you are seen, equal in beauty and in cruelty.
Speaker 6: A revolutionary design executed without regard for the human costs
Speaker 6: or the laws of physics.
Speaker 9: The spirit demands to.
Speaker 6: Be compensated for the affordances made for progress, for civilizations
Speaker 6: gallop over people and nature.
Speaker 10: The spirit he told me to collect for the lash
Speaker 10: and the cotton, and the coffee, and the sugar, and
Speaker 10: the blankets covered in your diseases.
Speaker 6: To collect on the commission of suffering, for the blankets
Speaker 6: keeping you warm and free from consequences. The spirit tolt
Speaker 6: me to affect the tools of equilibrium, the ass and
Speaker 6: the fuel, to move with the stealth of opportunity, with
Speaker 6: the instincts of the pioneer, to burn all useless brush
Speaker 6: on the warmstead.
Speaker 9: To make the land and those on the land.
Speaker 6: Servile, to call it holiness, to call it the manion.
Speaker 6: The spirit told me to collect now or never. Man
Speaker 6: with her hair pinned and a chinyong, the same beautiful
Speaker 6: head that laid on your pillow, revealed its secrets to
Speaker 6: me with the singles strike of my hatchet.
Speaker 9: Her son was not challenge all.
Speaker 6: The Martha saw it coming, a frightened bird flying into
Speaker 6: the expos guy. I culled them all and stained my
Speaker 6: crisp white coat. I harvested them first, and then went
Speaker 6: to serve the workmen their soap.
Speaker 9: They did not.
Speaker 6: Notice the blood on my hands, only the little felling debules.
Speaker 6: They did not notice me, except when I was the
Speaker 6: black bastard who refused to saddle a white mas's horse.
Speaker 6: They did not notice me or my wife, who made
Speaker 6: the soup serf to them with bloodied hands. They did
Speaker 6: not notice the river of gasoline suddenly onto the dining
Speaker 6: room table, and the orange gown flames twirling at their feet.
Speaker 6: They did not notice my blade waiting for them on
Speaker 6: the other side of that locked door, breaking their bodies
Speaker 6: into a course of screams, a courus of witnessing crows
Speaker 6: and agony, flecks of wet brains scattered like the petals
Speaker 6: of a cherry blossoming grain, a ritual transfiguration of.
Speaker 9: God made flesh.
Speaker 6: With each rise and fall of the hatchet, to hear
Speaker 6: the pleas and squeals of grown men rusting like figs,
Speaker 6: like the big bastards that they were like you are
Speaker 6: the pig bastard who stole what wasn't hysterotic. I am
Speaker 6: speaking to you and through you. Now I say onto you,
Speaker 6: it is easier for a camel to go through the
Speaker 6: eye of a needle than for a rich.
Speaker 9: Man to enter the Kingdom of God. I enjoyed it.
Speaker 9: I enjoyed it. Even the little girl. Her screams.
Speaker 6: Her screams were as white as the driven snow. Her
Speaker 6: screams were spring lilies in the mouth of an avenging dog.
Speaker 4: What does he want?
Speaker 9: I only want to be seen.
Speaker 1: You shown me this spirit.
Speaker 2: Tell me now you design the scene, Frank, this is
Speaker 2: your point of view, and you will be condemned to
Speaker 2: witness these projections again and again till you learn.
Speaker 4: What is there to possibly learn about the murder of
Speaker 4: the woman I loved? Surely I'm not responsible for the
Speaker 4: actions of that mad man. I look upon these ruins,
Speaker 4: the gaping black hole left by the fire, and the
Speaker 4: beautiful hillside is no less empty, charred and ugly in
Speaker 4: my own soul, What am I to take away?
Speaker 6: What?
Speaker 11: Hmm?
Speaker 4: Something of madness? What? But it is my fault? In
Speaker 4: what universe is that possible. Maybe my lesson is an
Speaker 4: destruction rather than creation, and madness is some kind of genius?
Speaker 4: Would that do? Who's allowed to be a genius? Who's
Speaker 4: allowed to steal from another his land, his art, his wife,
Speaker 4: his dignity, his comfort? Who is a madman in a
Speaker 4: said country? Nothing about an affair so evil that it
Speaker 4: should condemn anyone to witness this horror for an eternity.
Speaker 4: Nothing I have stolen justifies this?
Speaker 9: Then?
Speaker 2: Why do you find yourself here again and again and
Speaker 2: again and again and again. Your soul understands what it
Speaker 2: needs to learn from this tribulation. You have designed and
Speaker 2: built this purgatory for yourself. It's it's gorgeous, A frame
Speaker 2: constructed of hope, yes, but a foundation of fear. What
Speaker 2: do you fear?
Speaker 11: I buried maybe with my old hands. I wrapped her
Speaker 11: body in flowers. I thought I had paid my portion
Speaker 11: of Greece? How do I I still deserve?
Speaker 2: What makes you so sure you do deserve this?
Speaker 4: I should have been there, I could have stopped it. Yes,
Speaker 4: that's it. I became complacent. A man should protect the
Speaker 4: relationships he builds. Yes, that's it. That's his blessing and
Speaker 4: his curse. Yes, I get it. It's it's my fault. Satisfied,
Speaker 4: Now you satisfied, it's my fault. I need to lie down.
Speaker 2: A gosh, It's time to get up, Frank. Start your
Speaker 2: story again, and this time tell yourself the truth.
Speaker 4: I no longer have a body and I get up?
Speaker 2: Do I? How do I move?
Speaker 4: If I don't have a body?
Speaker 2: Your consciousness is all you need? Focus? Recall movement? What easy.
Speaker 4: I can recall movement?
Speaker 2: What do I see?
Speaker 4: I see grass on the hill, grass, and some the
Speaker 4: distle bowing to the wind waves of it, the ocean
Speaker 4: of green rushing away from me. Yes, yes, yes, I
Speaker 4: stand alone in a verdant field. I know all this.
Speaker 4: I know this to be my family land. But there
Speaker 4: are none of the structures I must leave.
Speaker 2: Frank now stranded in this matrix of wood and stone
Speaker 2: and prism, glass and remorse, or the lines between his
Speaker 2: mind and the universe or blurred. Frank is lost inside
Speaker 2: of his own ego, tumbling through a vortex of questions.
Speaker 2: What do you owe those around you? From who you
Speaker 2: take and borrow and steal? What amount of yourself, your success,
Speaker 2: your life do you owe them in return? How long
Speaker 2: must you punish yourselves for your own transgressions. Frank will
Speaker 2: be the great designer of his own punishment, for many
Speaker 2: loops to come before he's able to break the bonds
Speaker 2: he has fabricated, reliving the horrors of his life, an
Speaker 2: echo of trauma folding in on itself again and again.
Speaker 2: But there is no greater destroyer of ego than grief.
Speaker 2: He will discover the truth eventually, even if he re
Speaker 2: envisions this place a billion times, and only then will
Speaker 2: he complete his passage. Well, I have faith in him.
Speaker 2: He is, after all, one the hell of an architect.
Speaker 2: The Passage stars Dan Fogler as the Ferryman.
Speaker 4: This episode features Michael Cook as Frank Lloyd Wright, also
Speaker 4: featuring Kevin Hines as Julian Carlton.
Speaker 5: Written by Christinel Casciba.
Speaker 2: Our executive producers are Nicholas Dakowski, Matthew Frederick, and Alexander Williams.
Speaker 5: First Assistant director, script's supervisor and.
Speaker 2: Production coordinator Sarah Klein.
Speaker 4: Music by Ben Lovett, additional music.
Speaker 2: By Alexander Rodriguez. Casting by Sunday Bowling, Kennedy and Meg Mormon.
Speaker 5: Editing and sound designed by Dan Bush.
Speaker 8: Dialogue editing and sound mixing by Juan Campos, additional sound
Speaker 8: editing by Racket Sound.
Speaker 2: Our supervising producer is Josh Thane. Created by Dan Bush
Speaker 2: and Nicholas Takowski. Produced by Dan Bush. The Passage is
Speaker 2: a production of iHeartRadio and Cycopia Pictures