FADE
IN on a street scene in a Northeastern college town, late 90s, late autumn.
It’s cold – people are dressed in layers, they shudder against the wind that
doesn’t blow trees or leaves because there are none. Instead, we see trash bags
and paper flyers and parking tickets and faded receipts and coffee cups swept
into invisible vortices, dust devils sketching lazy figure eights across the
empty PHARMACY PARKING LOT and imploding when someone pulls into the LOT in an
elderly automobile to buy bottled water. We’re looking at this STREET from a
HIGH ANGLE shot, across from the PARKING LOT, camera motionless. The camera
starts to TRACK to our right, and we see the PARKING LOT disappear, dust and
detritus devils continuing their waltz without us. We see the PHARMACY itself –
graffiti on the walls, duct tape over a crack spiderwebbing across the lower
half of the door, parka-ed store patrons slipping out the door under its
watchful electronic eye. The storefront is long, and we see windows decorated
with Thanksgiving turkeys and red-and-orange tinsel and the first wave of
winter supplies – ergonomic snow shovels, brightly colored plastic toboggans,
insectile ski goggles. We continue TRACKING to the right until we pass the
PHARMACY and see an EATERY. Sleek, modern, monochromatic, stylishly curved
couches arrayed about artfully undersized tables, nearly empty at this early
hour in the bleak mid-autumn. There’s someone at the table by the window, and
we stop TRACKING and ZOOM IN on her – THE GIRL. She has a large coffee and a
croissant. She’s reading the New York Times. She looks like Jean Seberg
in Breathless, blonde hair cut short and helmeted down over an
attractive but somewhat severe face. She is aware of and cultivates this
similarity. We stop ZOOMING and see a MEDIUM SHOT of her in the EATERY. The
camera stays there. Out-of-focus bodies come into the shot briefly and leave
again, clouds crossing the sun, but the sun gives no heat in this weather. Up
to this point, the only audio is ambient street noise – the occasional car, the
constant wind. While we watch THE GIRL ignoring her coffee, that ambient noise
gets louder and louder, as if we were getting off that rooftop across the
street and standing outside the eatery, as if we were one of the anonymous
bodies, wrapped tightly in swaddling scarf, hurrying down the STREET to our
job, or to the PHARMACY to buy bottled water, and we see her, THE GIRL, sitting
in the EATERY, not touching the breakfast laid out in front of her on white
paper napkins. FADE TO BLACK. Ambient noise from the EATERY continues over the
FADE but ends just before the next SCENE.
FADE IN with camera at eye level in the
spindly tripod of a chair across from the tripod where THE GIRL will be sitting
momentarily. Another MEDIUM SHOT, encompassing the table and the chair and a
parallelogram of plate glass showing the STREET in front of us. She sits down
across from us, holding the coffee cup, wrapped with a cardboard sleeve so her
hands don’t burn, and the croissant. She puts them down on the table in front
of her. She pulls the Times out of her bag and bisects it, reading the
upper right corner of the front page while she doesn’t drink her coffee and
doesn’t eat her croissant. The door opens and closes. Out-of-focus people pass
by the window in front of us. People order breakfasts, people order coffee,
people talk, and all this noise is a low hum. We can clearly hear THE GIRL’s
copy of the Times – pages ruffling as she scans the interior to find the
continuation of Page One’s story about embassy attacks in Southeast Asia. Pages
creasing as she continually refolds the rectangle into readable shapes –
morning origami, tabloid geometry. Camera is stationary through this whole
SCENE. She pulls her chair in closer to the table, sending vibrations through
the tile floor to the table legs, through the thin, curving metal legs to the
table surface, through the tabletop to the coffee cup, making the coffee in the
cup oscillate, creating tiny waves, sending the coffee spilling over the brim,
the camera ZOOMING IN, EXTREME CLOSEUP on the tan droplets dripping down the
sides of the cup, reaching the Times, soaking through the thin paper.
She grabs the cup and lifts it from the table, creating more oscillations in
the depths of the liquid filling the cup, spilling more coffee over the brim,
the STAIN growing on the paper as the camera holds on the space where the cup
was, watching the coffee soak through each page, propagating the STAIN through
the layers of paper. THE GIRL curses. FADE TO BLACK.
Fade
in on THE GIRL and THE BOY, sitting at the same table. It’s some time later.
We’re looking in from the street. MEDIUM SHOT. They’re each reading different
sections of the Times. She looks up.
THE GIRL
Are
you afraid of getting old?
(pause)
I am.
THE BOY
No.
(awkwardly)
Drink your coffee, it’s getting cold.
There’s
another cup of coffee sitting on the table between them. It’s been there for
some time – no steam curls up from the surface. Spilled coffee marks the sides
of the cup. She drinks from it, grimacing at the temperature, and sets it back
on the table.
THE GIRL
Seriously.
THE BOY
No.
I don’t think about it.
THE GIRL
You
should. Every day goes by, and
all I can think about is how I’ve
wasted it.
(pause)
How we’ve wasted it.
She
sips from the coffee again, but grimaces once it reaches her lips. She twists
around in her chair and throws the half-full cup in the TRASH.
THE GIRL
I
don’t know, maybe that’s cynical.
He
flips to the next page of the Times before speaking. He looks hurt.
THE BOY
Yeah,
I think it is.
Again,
we hear the EATERY noise throughout this SCENE. It’s indistinct, so much so
that if we totally ignored THE GIRL and THE BOY, we wouldn’t be able to make
out words or even distinct sounds, because there’s a hum coming from THE GIRL
and THE BOY. Nothing audible, but something that dogs could hear. A sound wave
canceling out the other noise. A magnetic field. An oscillation, a force, a
power that commands us to focus on these two, even when we try to look away.
THE BOY looks younger than THE GIRL. He’s reading the Times the way she
was before. He’s leaning back in the spindly chair. It appears about to fall,
but he pushes back anyway, daring gravity to tip him. He has short hair, thrift
store clothes, fashionably unfashionable black plastic glasses, and an attempt
at a mustache. He sighs, turning another page in his Times like his
father would at their breakfast table – purposefully, with an air of finality.
THE BOY
You
get like this before your birthdays.
THE
GIRL looks irritated. Or hurt. Or impatient.
THE GIRL
Let’s
go.
They
get up and leave. The camera ZOOMS IN on the table where they were sitting.
Just off center, on her side, there’s a coffee STAIN left by the cup she threw
away. CLOSEUP on the STAIN. FADE OUT on this shot, the STAIN remaining, a
luminescent afterimage on the lens like the autumn sun outside leaves on our
eyes – purple like a bruise, crescent-shaped like the moon.
FADE
IN. Camera is outside the EATERY, facing the door, positioned somewhere in the
STREET. We’re TRACKING to our left, keeping THE GIRL and THE BOY in the center
of as LONG SHOT. Out-of-focus cars pass through our vision, not like clouds
this time but rather like fish close to the surface of the sea. We move with
THE BOY and THE GIRL slowly, stopping when they stop. THE BOY gives a quarter
to a BUM sitting on a stoop.
BUM
Thanks
mister you and the lady have a
nice
day alright.
He
ignores him. She smiles at him. The wind pushes at the her hair, but it is
motionless, static. The street noise is louder here than in the EATERY: the
spell’s been broken. They stop to look at store windows. They enter a
bookstore. We wait outside with the BUM, who keeps up a steady patter. He has
short hair, thrift store clothes, no glasses. He holds a dirty coffee cup. He’s
shaved recently. He’s white. He talks quietly, but we can hear him, even from
the street. When THE BOY and THE GIRL leave the bookstore, he watches them go. We
continue following them down the STREET. We ZOOM IN as they reach a decade-old
Volvo parked on a cross street. We hold on a MEDIUM SHOT of THE BOY, THE GIRL
and the car. They talk, we can’t hear them. They drive away. The camera stays.
Time passes. The BUM walks into the frame, turns at the corner, and walks down
the cross street. We watch until we can’t see him any more. The cross street
looks much like the STREET, and we can see dust devils blow into the frame from
the CVS LOT. They chase each other up the cross street, disappearing before
they make it to the end of the block.
It
starts to SNOW. The SNOW is grayish, wet, and melts almost as soon as it hits
the ground. It could be a blizzard of coffee cups, shreds of Styrofoam absorbed
by the macadam. There’s a newspaper in the street, so illegible from the SNOW
falling that we can’t tell if it’s the Times or not. It disappears as
the SNOW begins to stick. The CREDITS roll over that shot: SNOW falling on an
intersection off the STREET. FADE TO BLACK.