EXT. GRAVESIDE
All the WEIDERMANS are ranged here. KATIE and POLLY wear identical black dresses and veils. CONNIE wears a black skirt and white blouse. DENNIS and JEFF wear black suits. JEFF is crying. He has Rambo the Dragon under his arm for a little extra comfort.
CAMERA MOVES IN ON KATIE. Tears course slowly down her cheeks. She bends and gets a handful of earth. Tosses it into the grave.
KATIE
Love you, big guy.
EXT. JEFF
Weeping.
EXT. LOOKING DOWN INTO THE GRAVE
Scattered earth on top of the coffin.
DISSOLVE TO:
EXT. THE GRAVE
A GROUNDSKEEPER pats the last sod into place.
GROUNDSKEEPER
My wife says she wishes you'd written a couple more before you had your heart attack, mister. (Pause) I like Westerns, m'self.
THE GROUNDSKEEPER walks away, whistling.
DISSOLVE TO:
EXT. A CHURCH DAY
TITLE CARD: FIVE YEARS LATER
THE WEDDING MARCH is playing. POLLY, older and radiant with joy, emerges into a pelting shower of rice. She's in a wedding gown, her new husband by her side.
Celebrants throwing rice line either side of the path. From behind the bride and groom come others. Among them are KATIE, DENNIS, CONNIE, and JEFF . . . all five years older. With KATIE is another man. This is HANK. In the interim, KATIE has also taken a husband.
POLLY turns and her mother is there.
POLLY
Thank you, Mom.
KATIE (crying)
Oh doll, you're so welcome.
They embrace. After a moment POLLY draws away and looks at HANK. There is a brief moment of tension, and then POLLY embraces HANK, too.
POLLY
Thank you too, Hank. I'm sorry I was such a creep for so long . . .
HANK (easily)
You were never a creep, Pol. A girl only has one father.
CONNIE
Throw it! Throw it!
After a moment, POLLY throws her bouquet.
EXT. THE BOUQUET, CU, SLOW MOTION
Turning and turning through the air.
DISSOLVES TO:
INT. THE STUDY, WITH KATIE NIGHT
The word-processor has been replaced by a wide lamp looming over a stack of blueprints. The book jackets have been replaced by photos of buildings. Ones that have first been built in HANK'S mind, presumably.
KATIE is looking at the desk, thoughtful and a little sad.
HANK (voice)
Coming to bed, Kate?
She turns and THE CAMERA WIDENS OUT to give us HANK. He's wearing a robe over pajamas. She comes to him and gives him a little hug, smiling. Maybe we notice a few streaks of gray in her hair; her pretty pony has done its fair share of running since BILL died.
KATIE
In a little while. A woman doesn't see her first one get married every day, you know.
HANK
I know.
THE CAMERA FOLLOWS as they walk from the work area of the study to the more informal area. This is much the same as it was in the old days, with a coffee table, stereo, TV, couch, and BILL'S old easy-chair. She looks at this.
HANK
You still miss him, don't you?
KATIE
Some days more than others. You didn't know, and Polly didn't remember.
HANK (gently)
Remember what, doll?
KATIE
Polly got married on the five-year anniversary of Bill's death.
HANK (hugs her)
Come on to bed, why don't you?
KATIE
In a little while.
HANK
Okay. Maybe I'll still be awake.
KATIE
Got a few ideas, do you?
HANK
I might.
KATIE
That's nice.
He kisses her, then leaves, closing the door behind him. KATIE sits in BILL'S old chair. Close by, on the coffee table, is a remote control for the TV and an extension phone. KATIE looks at the blank TV, and THE CAMERA MOVES IN on her face. One tear rims one eye, sparkling like a sapphire.
KATIE
I do still miss you, big guy. Lots and lots. Every day. And you know what? It hurts.
The tear falls. She picks up the TV remote and pushes the on button.
INT. TV, KATIE'S POV
An ad for Ginsu Knives comes to an end and is replaced by a STAR LOGO.
ANNOUNCER (voice)
Now back to Channel 63's Thursday night Star Time Movie. . . Ghost Kiss.
The logo DISSOLVES INTO a guy who looks like he died in a car crash about two weeks ago and has since been subjected to a lot of hot weather. He comes staggering out of the same old crypt.
INT. KATIE
Terribly startled--almost horrified. She hits the OFF button on the remote control. The TV blinks off.
KATIE'S face begins to work. She struggles against the impending emotional storm, but the coincidence of the movie is just one thing too many on what must have already been one of the most emotionally trying days of her life. The dam breaks and she begins to sob . . . terrible heartbroken sobs. She reaches out for the little table by the chair, meaning to put the remote control on it, and knocks the phone onto the floor.
SOUND: THE HUM OF AN OPEN LINE.
Her tear-stained face grows suddenly still as she looks at the telephone. Something begins to fill it . . . an idea? an intuition? Hard to tell. And maybe it doesn't matter.
INT. THE TELEPHONE, KATIE'S POV
THE CAMERA MOVES IN TO ECU . . . MOVES IN until the dots in the off-the-hook receiver look like chasms.
SOUND OF OPEN-LINE BUZZ UP TO LOUD.
WE GO INTO THE BLACK . . . and hear BILL (voice)
Who are you calling? Who do you want to call? Who would you call, if it wasn't too late?
INT. KATIE
There is now a strange hypnotized look on her face. She reaches down, scoops the telephone up, and punches in numbers, seemingly at random.
SOUND: RINGING PHONE.
KATIE continues to look hypnotized. The look holds until the phone is answered. . . and she hears herself on the other end of the line.
KATIE (voice, filter)
Hello, Weiderman residence.
KATIE--our present-day KATIE with the streaks of gray in her hair--goes on sobbing, yet an expression of desperate hope is trying to be born on her face. On some level she understands that the depth of her grief has allowed a kind of telephonic time-travel. She's trying to talk, to force the words out.
KATIE (sobbing)
Take. . . please take . . . t-t-
INT. KATIE, IN THE PHONE NOOK, REPRISE
It's five years ago. BILL is standing beside her, looking concerned. JEFF is wandering off to look for a blank tape in the other room.
KATIE
Polly? What's wrong?
INT. KATIE IN THE STUDY
KATIE (sobbing)
Please--quick--
SOUND: CLICK OF A BROKEN CONNECTION
KATIE (screaming)
Take him to the hospital! If you want him to live, take him to the hospital! He's going to have a heart attack! He--
SOUND: HUM OF AN OPEN LINE
Slowly, very slowly, KATIE hangs up the telephone. Then, after a moment, she picks it up again. She speaks aloud with no self-consciousness whatever. Probably doesn't even know she's doing it.
KATIE
I dialed the old number. I dialed--
SLAM CUT TO:
INT. BILL, IN THE PHONE NOOK WITH KATIE BESIDE HIM
He's just taken the phone from KATIE and is speaking to the operator.
OPERATOR (filter, GIGGLES) I promise not to give it out.
BILL
It's 555-
SLAM CUT TO:
INT. KATIE, IN BILL'S OLD CHAIR, CU
KATIE (finishes)
-4408.
INT. THE PHONE, CU
KATIE'S trembling
finger carefully picks out the number, and we hear the corresponding tones: 555-4408.
INT. KATIE, IN BILL'S OLD CHAIR, CU
She closes her eyes as the PHONE BEGINS TO RING. Her face is filled with an agonizing mixture of hope and fear. If only she can have one more chance to pass the vital message on, it says. . . just one more chance.
KATIE (low)
Please . . . please . . .
RECORDED VOICE (filter)
You have reached a non-working number. Please hang up and dial again. If you need assistance--
KATIE hangs up again. Tears stream down her cheeks. THE CAMERA PANS AWAY AND DOWN to the telephone.
INT. THE PHONE NOOK, WITH KATIE AND BILL, REPRISE
BILL
So it was a prank. Or someone who was crying so hard she dialed a wrong number . . . "through a shimmering film of tears," as we veteran hacks like to say.
KATIE
It was not a prank and it was not a wrong number! It was someone in my family!
INT. KATIE (PRESENT DAY) IN BILL'S STUDY
KATIE
Yes. Someone in my family. Someone very close. (Pause) Me.
She suddenly throws the phone across the room. Then she begins to SOB AGAIN and puts her hands over her face. THE CAMERA HOLDS on her for a moment, then DOLLIES ACROSS TO
INT. THE PHONE
It lies on the carpet, looking both bland and somehow ominous. CAMERA MOVES IN TO ECU--the holes in the receiver once more look like huge dark chasms. We HOLD, then FADE TO BLACK.
The Ten O'Clock People
1
Pearson tried to scream but shock robbed his voice and he was able to produce only a low, choked whuffling--the sound of a man moaning in his sleep. He drew in breath to try it again, but before he could get started, a hand seized his left arm just above the elbow in a strong pincers grip and squeezed.
"It'd be a mistake," the voice that went with the hand said. It was pitched only half a step above a whisper, and it spoke directly into Pearson's left ear. "A bad one. Believe me, it would."
Pearson looked around. The thing which had occasioned his desire--no, his need--to scream had disappeared inside the bank now, amazingly unchallenged, and Pearson found he could look around. He had been grabbed by a good-looking young black man in a cream-colored suit. Pearson didn't know him, but he recognized him; he sight-recognized most of the odd little sub-tribe he'd come to think of as the Ten O'Clock People. . . as, he supposed, they recognized him.
The good-looking young black man was watching him warily.
"Did you see it?" Pearson asked. The words came out in a high-pitched, nagging whine that was totally unlike his usual confident speaking voice.
The good-looking young black man had let go of Pearson's arm when he became reasonably convinced that Pearson wasn't going to shock the plaza in front of The First Mercantile Bank of Boston with a volley of wild screams; Pearson immediately reached out and gripped the young black man's wrist. It was as if he were not yet capable of living without the comfort of the other man's touch. The good-looking young black man made no effort to pull away, only glanced down at Pearson's hand for a moment before looking back up into Pearson's face.
"I mean, did you see it? Horrible! Even if it was make-up . . . or some kind of mask someone put on for a joke . . ."
But it hadn't been make-up and it hadn't been a mask. The thing in the dark-gray Andre Cyr suit and five-hundred-dollar shoes had passed very close to Pearson, almost close enough to touch (God forbid, his mind interjected with a helpless cringe of revulsion), and he knew it hadn't been make-up or a mask. Because the flesh on the huge protuberance Pearson supposed was its head had been in motion, different parts moving in different directions, like the bands of exotic gases surrounding some planetary giant.
"Friend," the good-looking young black man in the cream-colored suit began, "you need--"
"What was it?" Pearson broke in. "I never saw anything like that in my life! It was like something you'd see in a, I don't know, a sideshow . . . or . . . or . . ."
His voice was no longer coming from its usual place inside his head. It seemed to be drifting down from someplace above him, instead--as if he'd fallen into a snare or a crack in the earth and that high-pitched, nagging voice belonged to somebody else, somebody who was speaking down to him.
"Listen, my friend--"
There was something else, too. When Pearson had stepped out through the revolving doors just a few minutes ago with an unlit Marlboro between his fingers, the day had been overcast--threatening rain, in fact. Now everything was not just bright but over-bright. The red skirt on the pretty blonde standing beside the building fifty feet or so farther down (she was smoking a cigarette and reading a paperback) screamed into the day like a firebell; the yellow of a passing delivery boy's shirt stung like the barb of a wasp. People's faces stood out like the faces in his daughter Jenny's beloved Pop-Up books.
And his lips . . . he couldn't feel his lips. They had gone numb, the way they sometimes did after a big shot of novocaine.
Pearson turned to the good-looking young man in the cream-colored suit and said, "This is ridiculous, but I think I'm going to faint."
"No, you're not," the young man said, and he spoke with such assurance that Pearson believed him, at least temporarily. The hand gripped his arm above the elbow again, but much more gently this time. "Come on over here--you need to sit down."
There were circular marble islands about three feet high scattered around the broad plaza in front of the bank, each containing its own variety of late summer/early fall flowers. There were Ten O'Clock People sitting on the rims of most of these upscale flower tubs, some reading, some chatting, some looking out at the passing rivers of foot-traffic on the sidewalks of Commercial Street, but all of them also doing the thing that made them Ten O'clock People, the thing Pearson had come downstairs and outside to do himself. The marble island closest to Pearson and his new acquaintance contained asters, their purple miraculously brilliant to Pearson in his heightened state of awareness. Its circular rim was vacant, probably because it was going on for ten past the hour now, and people had begun to drift back inside.
"Sit down," the young black man in the cream-colored suit invited, and although Pearson tried his best, what he ended up doing felt more like falling than sitting. At one moment he was standing beside the reddish-brown marble island, and then somebody pulled the pins in his knees and he landed on his ass. Hard.
"Bend over now," the young man said, sitting down beside him. His face had remained pleasant throughout the entire encounter, but there was nothing pleasant about his eyes; they combed rapidly back and forth across the plaza.
"Why?"
"To get the blood back into your head," the young black man said. "But don't make it look like that. Make it look like you're just smelling the flowers."
"Look like to who?"
"Just do it, okay?" The smallest tinge of impatience had crept into the young man's voice.
Pearson leaned his head over and took a deep breath. The flowers didn't smell as good as they looked, he discovered--they had a weedy, faintly dog-pissy smell. Still, he thought his head might be clearing just a tiny bit.
"Start saying the states," the black man ordered. He crossed his legs, shook out the fabric of his pants to preserve the crease, and brought a package of Winstons out of an inner pocket. Pearson realized his own cigarette was gone; he must have dropped it in that first shocked moment, when he had seen the monstrous thing in the expensive suit crossing the west side of the plaza.
"The states," he said blankly.
The young black man nodded, produced a lighter that was probably quite a bit less expensive than it looked at first glance, and lit his cigarette. "Start with this one and work your way west," he invited.
"Massachusetts . . . New York, I suppose . . . or Vermont if you start from upstate . . . New Jersey . . ." Now he straightened up a little and began to speak with greater confidence. "Pennsylvania, West Virginia,
Ohio, Illinois--"
The black man raised his eyebrows. "West Virginia, huh? You sure?"
Pearson smiled a little. "Pretty sure, yeah. I might have got Ohio and Illinois bass-ackwards, though."
The black man shrugged to show it didn't matter, and smiled. "You don't feel like you're going to faint anymore, though--I can see you don't--and that's the important part. Want a butt?"
"Thank you," Pearson said gratefully. He did not just want a butt; he felt that he needed one. "I had one, but I lost it. What's your name?"
The black man poked a fresh Winston between Pearson's lips and snapped a light to it. "Dudley Rhinemann. You can call me Duke."
Pearson dragged deeply on the cigarette and looked toward the revolving doors which gave ingress upon all the gloomy depths and cloudy heights of The First Mercantile. "That wasn't just a hallucination, was it?" he asked. "What I saw . . . you saw it, too, right?"
Rhinemann nodded.
"You didn't want him to know I saw him," Pearson said. He spoke slowly, trying to put it together on his own. His voice was back in its usual spot again, and that alone was a big relief.
Rhinemann nodded again.
"But how could I not see him? And how could he not know it?"
"Did you see anyone else getting ready to holler themselves into a stroke like you were?" Rhinemann asked. "See anybody else even looking the way you were? Me, for instance?"
Pearson shook his head slowly. He now felt more than just frightened; he felt totally lost.
"I got between you and him the best I could, and I don't think he saw you, but for a second or two there it was close. You looked like a man who just saw a mouse crawl out of his meatloaf. You're in Collateral Loans, aren't you?"
"Oh yes--Brandon Pearson. Sorry."
"I'm in Computer Services, myself. And it's okay. Seeing your first batman can do that to you."
Duke Rhinemann stuck out his hand and Pearson shook it, but most of his mind was one turn back. Seeing your first batman can do that to you, the young man had said, and once Pearson had jettisoned his initial image of the Caped Crusader swinging his way between the art-deco spires of Gotham City, he discovered that wasn't a bad term at all. He discovered something else, as well, or perhaps rediscovered it: it was good to have a name for something that had frightened you. It didn't make the fright go away, but it went a long way toward rendering the fright manageable.
Now he deliberately replayed what he had seen, thinking Batman, it was my first batman, as he did.
*
He had come out through the revolving doors thinking of only one thing, the same thing he was always thinking about when he came down at ten--how good that first rush of nicotine was going to feel when it hit his brain. It was what made him a part of the tribe; it was his version of phylacteries or tattooed cheeks.