VOICE-OVER

I have the most terrible feeling this has never happened before ... or that it has, in fact almost exactly this way, innumerable times, to someone else ... who I am meant to take myself for. And that person ... well, I feel sorry for him. Because whatever I was supposed to do for him, as him, I haven't. I can say this with confidence because I haven't done much of anything today, and today is the day that has never happened before, never happened to me ... it sounds maybe crazy, if I can permit myself the resonanceless word, but after all it's not so confusing ...

What I mean of course to say is that I'm having a problem of dissociation, dissociation from my past. That there is a very definite line drawn between the sum of my days to date, which signifies the me to which things are happening, and this day, which signifies the things happening to this me. Nothing especially addled or vertiginous about that. Everyone is I think conscious of this division, to some degree, and perhaps I've chosen a queer way to look at it, but it is a queer business, when you come down to it, the indispensable illusion of continuity ... even if you resist the temptation to let whatever metaphor you employ for its understanding run away with you, I think you'd agree your immediate waking self exists in a position of antagonism to the greater bulk of your whole self, buried in the passage of time, which passage in a fairly awful sense defines that self. You late risers, you lingerers in bed, you deliberate, quizzical breakfast eaters, you at least know what I'm talking about. Each day as the death which is sleep rolls back like an ebbing tide, leaving your body exposed on the shore, it is as if you had been born anew, born again as a sort of awareness whose mission, as far as you can tell, is to go experience time for sixteen hours or so. Because that's all this brief self can really accomplish, by itself ... and so enter the proscriptions, the plans, the uncompleted works of the past self into your field of awareness, in the sham trappings of rescuer, savior, leader, depending on the individual construction.

What can we say of these transmissions from the parliament of deceased daily selves? We could probably say a number of things; but very few of them would not involve profanity. If we could limit ourselves, then, to remarks of a truthful but non-inflammatory nature, we might say they very simply provide structure. This structure can be utilized several ways. It can provide some grounding for the nebulous sense of individual identity. It can show the way to the least futile expenditures of effort -- that is, direct us to the sedimentary continuation of works already begun by the dark council. Barring this, it can at least offer helpful, if woefully vague, advice concerning the obviously foolish and alternately reasonable undertakings available to us on an average day. This is an admittedly hasty list, but broadly speaking, it would about cover the uses of the data any of us allegedly acquired in the past. Because it does have its uses ... most certainly it does ...

My point, however, is that the mechanics of these uses are, well, mechanical ... that the way in which the past self offers assistance isn't very different from the way we might be assisted by a book, or set of recorded messages, or videotaped footage of ourselves -- though actually, the last isn't quite appropriate, in that it might be somewhat trustworthy -- assistance, for all its specific relevance to us, of an irremediably sterile, foreign character. I could dramatize it this way -- having managed to wake up, and then exhaust, one by one, the possibilities of the television, newspapers, personal hygiene, one at last stumbles upon a parcel of envelopes slipped through the mail slot of the front door. This parcel could in truth have been left by anyone, for any number of purposes, but the individual is meant to discount this troubling possibility. The evidence against it, meager but convincing, is that someone, in a reasonable facsimile of the subject's hand, has signed his name to each one. Do you understand? The subject tears open the first envelope, unfolds the letter within, and reads: GO TO WORK or some such nonsense. He rips open the second, produces perhaps a more verbose message: YOUR BOSS, WHO IS A MISERABLE, STUNTED FOOL, WILL HARASS AND DEMEAN YOU. ALLOW HIM TO. I think now the idea can't be lost on you. One must not only accept on faith that he was the author of these, but that he really meant them, despite their often obviously forced, self- divided tone. Throw into this that somewhere down the line truly dubious instructions, ala CALM DOWN. HAVE A FEW BEERS, crop up, and the terrible arbitrary nature of these commands can't help but become evident. For even could we know for certain, somehow, that we really wrote them, that "we" of the past could very well be careening, or alternately slipping bit by bit into an absolute abyss, these helpful hints could suggest exactly the behaviors we must renounce entirely if we hope not to destroy ourselves ...

In just this way I question the utility of the vague objectivity I've assumed, rather unconvincingly, for the last page or two. I look back, note the drunken veering between these "wes" and "ones" and "yous," wonder no less at what this attempted drawing in of a non-existent audience is intended to accomplish than its utter failure to draw even me in ... but there's the catch, I suppose: If to speak honestly is to speak crazily, then to speak intelligibly is frankly to lie. I meant I think to demonstrate how much, on some level, I am like you, the hypothetical reader ... and so I went immediately wrong ... because I'm not much like you at all. Oh, it's very good to pile up these metaphors, and perhaps you felt a twinge of recognition somewhere or other, probably the part about jobs, but what separates me from you, and my past, is that I believe them; that to me these are no metaphors but my best attempt to describe my, uh, problem.

My problem, yes ... did I tell you the fable of my morning? I believe I did. I call it a fable because, like most legends, it conformed to the truth only inasmuch as it left a number of dissatisfying gaps where details should have lain. My memory is ... shall we say ... cloudy? Broken? Disturbed? Or more simply, not there? The truth is, I have no idea how I got out of my house this morning; I only know it was difficult. Things sort of, uh, resume motion just outside the front door ... yes; it's not precisely that I have no memory of what preceded this moment, but that I have a handful of ... stills, isolated images so static they seem to disallow any location within a sequence of actions. And from this rather, I agree, unbelievable motionlessness, where if time marched at all it did so as if waist-deep in quick-drying cement, I, again, with a suspicious inexplicability, emerged ... onto the front doorstep, where a breeze brushed my forehead, and the sounds of children playing echoed from down the street, and one moment followed another as naturally as if, as if ...

There's something that used to happen in old video games ... I don't know if it happens with the new ones; probably not. Anyways, as the games all challenged the player to feats of eye/hand coordination, the best of them naturally excelled by both multiplying the computerized aggressors and endowing them each with a semblance of independent motion ... this criterion for selection was recapitulated within the play of a single game; as the skilful player advanced through its levels, difficulty was increased in precisely the same way. To end an over-lengthy detour, however, in the end a terminal difficulty is achieved where there isn't enough memory, or the computer can't move the bad guys any faster, or something like that, anyhow, the only way to at this point increase the difficulty is to further multiply the player's pixelated enemies at the expense of memory devoted to movement ... causing this phenomenon: Time within the game briefly slows down, until the player eliminates those opponents exceeding the limit associated with the terminal difficulty. Imagine falling objects frozen in midair, music warped and elongated, a blink crashing silently through a sudden eternity of space, and you may glean some idea, some hint both of what kind of morning I had, friend, what kind of completely terrifying shit I saw and was supposed to act, once I got outside, and things got normal, as if had also been normal, and secondly, and secondly, and ... the ... relevance of the detour, or description ... to what the real start of my day, outside a locked door, felt like. Time, or motion, or alternately my perception seemed suddenly to accelerate into ... its customary ...

And if that doesn't convince you of my sanity nothing will. But let us proceed to the next chapter of an action-filled day. Whether or not you believe me you will grant, were this sort of thing to happen, you would expect me to be frightened, as I was. I was ... petrified, figuratively and literally; I stood perfectly still for probably ten minutes, listening, watching, fearing even a shift in weight might return me to unintelligibility, and then I bolted. Didn't actually run, no, that would have been less of a giveaway; I walked, extremely, too fast, occasionally jerking my neck in this repulsive way that was the result of an incompletely suppressed desire to look over my shoulder. Eventually I found my way to a park. Here, noting a densely overgrown corner, I decided to take a few minutes' invisible rest, with remarkable speed I concealed myself in the bushes. Once hidden I breathed a little more freely, felt fractionally relaxed as I considered my next move; at least here I didn't have to worry about the peering of strange eyes, recognizing me for what I was, which is, in short, someone with no idea what he was doing, or would do next, or ever ... ah, memory, I thought, staring between the leaves, a beetle crawling up my knee, you are a queer companion. Why when you speak most clearly, and with the least prodding, do you so often lie? Or no ... I exaggerate ... a lie would at least be direct ... why am I so certain that, were knowledge of how to pull a trigger all that lay between me and certain death, you would prattle on instead about Paul Cezanne, or an episode of Gilligan's Island, or that girl you say I saw, just for a moment, by the fountain that summer ... you supply me with everything except what I desire, which makes you I suppose pretty much like everything else.

This brought to an end my small meditation, where I found myself left no closer to any logical-looking next action. More insects had joined the one on my knee; I was gathering thoughts, alright, but were they mine? Even the rhetorical dialogue with my memory rang false, like something I'd seen in a movie ... though again, I was definitely circling the problem, if unable to name it. And again, unprovoked, I wondered if memory ever truly failed, or if what did were one's ability to look at it ...

Well done, Dr. Freud, a phantom voice cried out; and I stood up. This committed me to some further movement so, nonchalantly as you please, I exited the bushes and sat down on a bench. Only here did the true hopelessness of my situation begin to sink in, assisted by the instinct of raw fear I had made a reasonably competent escape, but faced now with the more problematic task of intersecting with, rather than avoiding something, I had no choice but to look for guidance from within, and it was here, as paralysis sank further into me, that the gulf, the chasm between myself and the corporation I am reputed to represent opened wide, the ground falling away with a dizzying speed. For here was the goal the past self suggested: LET'S GET OUT OF HERE. Alright, I said, nevermind where "HERE" is; why? BECAUSE WE ARE TRAPPED. Are we now? Well, right, yes, I'll grant that. But can you offer any tips on how I might, uh, start the getting out of here? To which of course the past self responded: THERE WAS ONLY EVER ONE BATMAN, AND HE WAS ADAM WEST. That's when, if I guess correctly, my eyes started darting back and forth in that homeless way that says, "It looks bad, I know, but it isn't me, it's this fellow I'm sharing my body with; I'd walk away too, except ..." You see, this was where I realized that not only was it unlikely that I was this guy I was supposed to be, but that, disturbingly, it didn't seem likely he was either ... that this guy was a fiction he wrote, and I read ... or something ... because, you see, the memory can hardly be controlled. You listen very hard, your ear against the door, hoping to hear something useful, in my case any fragment of practical instruction, and wait for the whispering to begin. Wait long enough and you'll be rewarded with a torrent of words, names, images, but, should it contain the answer to your question, it's probably an accident. Had there been answers among the transmissions from mine I would have called it rather providence, because the substance of his or my memories had nothing, absolutely nothing to do with his, or my, life. Not a shred, not a particle of a genuine detail of, or reference to, his actual, physical existence, or the arenas in which it played out, an astonishing, some would say impossible lack, a shrieking vacuum of an absence where the concrete being of this individual should have been. No occupation, no inclinations, acquaintances, activities, habits, no clue, in short, as to how this guy had actually acquired our common memory. Because the memory itself is extensive ... if useless ...

It consists of a lot of movies. Movies and books. Songs, pictures, photographs, overused turns of phrase. An unusually rich sense, knowledge of history. Some philosophic, critical conceits. Large vocabulary. Strategies for playing, uh, video games ... you get the idea. Specialized, abstract ... useless ... or effectively so, if your goal is to "GET OUT OF HERE," or short of that translate the goal into something more specific. Yes, that's how I'd put it. "As I sat down on the bench, it became evident my memories were foreign, the recollections of another man; the longer I sat, the clearer their irrelevance, even to him, further became." This is, in fact, more or less how I did put it, starting with the yes, which, I admit, made me laugh, although somewhat nastily. An old woman and her birds edged nervously away from me as I took stock of crowd reaction to my outburst, which made me laugh again ... indeed I sat there for some time, arms pulled tight around my chest, shaking and shaking while tears trickled down my face, on account of how funny, what a stretch the whole thing was ... how entirely preposterous he was, this fairly elegant imbecile, devoid of practical knowledge, whose identity I had inherited ... how lucky I was not to really be him, how bad it had to be being him, how much, really, like being me ...

If nothing else I hope I've made clear that I've spoken in metaphors ... that there's no other way I could have spoken ... that I know there is a difference between metaphor and reality. The problem in recounting my thoughts, describing them the only way I can, is exactly how much like a certain kind of madman's delusions they sound. The kind of madman whose ravings, if you listen long enough, come so tragically close to making sense that, clearly, he must be considerably saner, or crazier, than he appears. The way this madman might talk about his life is the way my life is. And I know, believe me, to say such a thing sounds ... crazy. But these are the facts as I see them.

Because I know the world is waiting to kill you. Because I know that to survive one must be extremely lucky, if only in the station to which one is born, or very adaptable, very capable of landing on one's feet. One must acquire a variety of useful skills, so that when opportunity arises, it can be exploited without hesitation. Had I the duration of a life at my disposal, I can tell you I would have hardly wasted my time educating myself the way this guy had ... I would not have been able to so carelessly paint myself into a corner, where, completely alienated from the merest of physical realities, I would archly note the thematic correspondences between various items of media ... by this time in my life, were it only my life, I would have friends to call on, a vocation with which to support myself, some understanding of the way things actually work, I assure you, assure you with all conviction. Isn't it obvious that I am paying attention, that I care, that I am painfully concerned with where this life, call it mine if you must, is going?

So when I said being like him could be being like me I meant that the, uh, distance between this guy and his knowledge, in its extremity, struck me as similar to the distance I perceived between myself and his memories, his past self masquerading as mine. And that's all. Eventually I stopped laughing.

But where then was my past? How could I explain the switch of his and mine, mine and his? And what was I to do if, for all its unlikeliness, my crazy-sounding appraisal of myself were correct? This much was clear: Whatever I decided upon, I would have to accomplish it, probably even select it, by the same means as I would were I truly this guy, namely, through the use of his identity, recollections, knowledge. Distressing as it was, there existed no alternative. So I sat back and started sifting through everything I could find in his memory. And eventually, yes, after a few humiliating hours in a now-empty park, I came up with something, not much, but something, appropriately enough, the kind of something that represents the closest thing to going nowhere while still going somewhere ... or have I gotten that reversed ... anyways, the sort of particular item that, discovered belatedly in the wasteland of this guy's supposed everyday life, struck me as ... humorous? Ironic? Like choking on ashes? Ah, words fail me ... I suppose, in the end, it just made too much sense, that the only actual place this guy knew of to go was, in short, a café ...

Yes, dear reader, the café I sit writing in now. Yes, the very one I've sat in most of the day. Do you mean the one that will be closing soon? Why yes, yes, that's the place. Frankly angry as I was to find it, there it was, the name, the address, the way there ... or here ... and so, lacking any other avenues, I came. Imagine my secret terror as I woodenly returned the greetings of unrecognizable employees who knew my name ... or observed the waitress' satisfaction as she took what must have been my usual order ... or fended off the mildly deranged café-dwellers who lure anyone into something like conversation by insisting they've spoken with you before. After a while I bravely struck up a conversation with the friendliest of the help, hoping she might drop some clue as to what it was I did, exactly ... a fruitless venture, naturally, but pretty damn funny, from a certain point of view ...

So I sat, drinking coffee, and began writing everything I could remember ... the café was the deadest of ends, obviously, but from the waitress I procured pen and paper, from the coffee some return to the urgency of the morning's revelations, some degree of which I hope has informed their description ... for I've something of a plan, you see, a plan which I hardly hope will succeed, but is nevertheless the most I can do ... and thus have I wandered, for a second time, from the house to this place, where my certainty falters, and an inevitable end approaches.

For as the afternoon dragged on, the unavoidable, painfully distinct awareness of the impossibilities involved in a straightforward reading of my situation was subsumed by the general gloom attending my thoughts, fell back to become but one voice in the chorus of doom surrounding me. Like a dream fading from memory my trust in my perceptions began to wither, and the creeping notion they reflected a disorder of my own, rather than the world's, or this hypothetical other's, grew gradually more plausible. I found myself tired, tempted to submit to the easy proposition of my insanity, barely able to complete the task of setting forth my woefully similar counter-proposal, and now that I have more or less finished, I look back at what I've written, and despair. Very little of my meaning emerges ... it seems frankly a mess ... desperate, heartfelt, but feeble, unable really to rise off the page, or from the confusion of its circumstances. And in a few minutes the café will close, leaving me nowhere to go, nowhere but ...

In a moment I shall sign these papers, fold them up, and put them in my breast-pocket, where if he doesn't interfere, you shall find them tomorrow, next self that is after all the only reader I could be addressing. Perhaps it will be I who either reads and remembers or recognizes the absence of this message, but it doesn't seem likely, indeed, the whole thing is unlikely, because if I'm not crazy, and he exists, he will certainly interfere, which means, were you to receive this, you would in so doing render it meaningless ... or as senseless as it seems ... but no, I can't accept that this all is the result of a blow to the head, or a failure to take some medication, or ... there is too much I can see, and the gaps are too surgical, too ... he must exist, apart from and likely before me. The question is whether this happens to me every day, and I am unable to remember, or to a different subject each time ... which again, from my point of view, amounts to pretty much the same thing. Regardless, as much as I'd like to run, resist exhaustion and return to that, my, house, I don't know the first thing about where I'd go ... it took me all day to get to this café, for God's sake. I don't see where else I can go, although, believe me, it's the last place I want to ... because, as "my" memory, the memory I'm fairly certain really is my memory, begins just outside the house, it stands to reason that, inside it, it will ... well, whatever answers there are, whether or not I survive them, they can only lie there. I should have gone there sooner, were it not for how very terrified I am, what suspicions I harbor ...

2 EXT. CAFE - NIGHT

The cafe viewed from outside. Four rectangles of light, through which we see chairs stacked on tables, the solitary writer, employees tidying up.
The LIGHTS DIM.