Swann (45 page)
A group of ten or twelve rapidly assembles and walks
along in lock step toward the bank of elevators.
MUSIC:
a skirling tune, strings mainly, with some bagpipes. The small, silent swarm squeezes through the corridor. An elevator arrives, and the group, acting almost as a single being, pours itself inside.
CAMERA
then picks up the group inside the elevator, where there is total silence except for:
JIMROY
(in vice-admiral’s voice): Twenty-fourth floor, I believe. Right down the hall from my room.
CRUZZI:
Right. (He presses the button, and the elevator swiftly rises.)
ROSE
(gasping): We’re here.
The group exits, with Sarah in the lead. Long
CAMERA
shot of the silent march down the corridor.
SARAH
(stopping before the door): This is it. (She knocks. There is no response.)
WOMAN WITH TURBAN:
Try again.
SARAH
(knocking again): Nothing. (She puts her ear against the door, listening and knocking again. She motions to Cruzzi to listen too.)
Cruzzi presses his ear to the door, listens, and nods, then steps aside for Crinkled Forehead who repeats the procedure.
ROSE
(pushing forward, placing her ear to the door): I hear something. (She holds up a finger for silence.)
Director’s Note: From the distance comes the strangled sound of Lang beating on the wall and calling out. His cries gradually grow louder and more wild, but they are also faintly theatrical and subtly exaggerated.
LANG:
Help! Help!
ROSE
(to others): Did you hear that? Someone said help. (She tries the door.)
LANG:
Help! Get me out of here!
ROSE:
It’s Professor Lang.
Cut to: Interior of Lang’s hotel room. Same time as above.
CAMERA
close-up of the bathroom door, which is tied with a curtain cord, the doorknob looped and secured to the knob of the clothes closet next to it.
LANG
(from inside the bathroom): Get me out of here!
Director’s Note: Because the employment of the curtain cord, a staple in crime films, is intended here to be an ironic, self-referential nod in the direction of the genre, the
CAMERA
lingers on the subject for several seconds before moving into the room and focusing on the intruder in his maintenance uniform. He is a short man, agile, with curly hair, busily stuffing papers into a pillowcase, the same man Rose Hindmarch encountered on the stairway the evening before.
Cut to: The corridor. Same time as above.
ROSE:
I think we should force the door.
CRUZZI
(in reasonable tones): I’m sure we can get a key from the desk —
CRINKLED FOREHEAD:
Someone telephone down. I’ll just —
WOMAN WITH TURBAN:
What’s he saying in there?
JIMROY
(Always a man to honour questions): He’s still saying “Help,” I believe.
ROSE:
The only thing to do is break the door down.
SARAH:
Rose has a point —
BLUE-SPOTTED TIE:
If we all leaned together —
JIMROY
(vice-admirally): One, two, three, push. (Though they all push at once, it is a poorly executed move, almost comically clumsy, and the door fails to give way.)
LANG
(muffled): Help! Help!
ROSE:
One more try. One and a two and a three —
Crinkled Forehead returns with three bellhops, one of them carrying a key.
MUSIC:
a loud orchestral crash, the sort of music that, in western films, traditionally accompanies the arrival of the posse.
Cut to: Interior of Lang’s room. Same time as above.
CAMERA
close-up of intruder who hurries with papers, hearing the commotion in the corridor. He looks to left and right, goes to the window and wedges it open. For an instant he regards the street twenty-four storeys below. He pushes the bag through the window and reluctantly lets it drop just as Jimroy, Cruzzi, Sarah, and the others crowd into the room. The intruder ducks neatly behind the curtain, the same curtain from which the cord has been taken.
LANG:
Help! I’m in the bathroom!
ROSE:
He’s in the bathroom. Look, a curtain cord!
LANG:
Get me out of here.
Director’s Note: The excitement as the members of the symposium cluster around the bathroom door is intense, and not one of them notices the faintly stagy sound of Lang’s voice. Everyone is talking at once, and Jimroy is tugging at the curtain cord.
Cut to: Exterior of building. The
CAMERA
picks up the pillow
case as it falls through the air; some of its contents fly out as it descends, mixing with the snow and carried by the wind into the street.
Cut to: Interior of Lang’s room. Same time as above.
LANG
(staggering from bathroom; he is wearing undershorts and a towel and appears agitated): I was just having a bath and …
CRUZZI
(looking around): Looks like a burglary.
ROSE:
Check the closets. Under the bed —
LANG
(growing hysterical). For God’s sake, never mind that! My papers …
SARAH:
What exactly’s been taken?
LANG
(wildly histrionic): My papers! My years of work!
JIMROY:
… got everything I suppose.
ROSE:
The pillow case … a pillow case is missing!
CRUZZI:
… made the most of his moment —
LANG:
The love poems. Don’t tell me the love poems—(He is waving his arms extravagantly and wailing, but his face is watchful.) I had the love poems over there, on the dresser. The originals!
GINGER PONYTAIL
: Take it easy, fellow, take it easy.
BLUE-SPOTTED TIE:
Give the man breathing room.
MAN WITH OUTSIZE AFRO:
Jesus, he’s in shock, we’d better get a medic up here.
ROSE:
And
the hotel detective.
CRINKLED FOREHEAD:
Water! Get him some water.
WOMAN WITH TURBAN
(to Lang): Here. Take my raincoat. I insist.
Director’s Note: It is important that the confusion in this scene (which lasts less than a minute) be palpable; it must
obscure and animate at the same time, filling the room like a blizzard and numbing the perceptions of those who are acting and reacting. The Swannians have gathered around Lang, and they are all talking at once. Not one of them observes the intruder as he slips from behind the curtain and walks nonchalantly past them, into the corridor, glancing back over his shoulder just before he disappears. Only Willard Lang, struggling into the raincoat and babbling incoherently catches, and holds, the intruder’s gaze for the briefest of moments. The look between them is shrewd and culpable—and ambiguous enough to puzzle the sort of reflective movie-goers who like to dissect the variables of a story over a cup of coffee on their way home from their local cinemas.
Cut to: Corridor. Same time. Long shot of intruder running toward exit stairs.
CAMERA
close-up on Sarah, stepping into corridor, regarding running figure.
SARAH:
Brownie? (She whispers his name, and then repeats it more loudly, even recklessly.) Brownie.
Director’s Note: The intruder—it is uncertain whether or not he hears his name—dives through the exit door, leaving
CAMERA
on Sarah’s face. She looks first puzzled, then wistful, then knowing. Her mouth opens a final time, mouthing the word “Brownie,” then closes abruptly. She closes her eyes, sways slightly, then opens her eyes widely. One hand goes to her mouth, rests there.
Fade to: Interior of meeting room. Later in the day.
A meeting is in session, but there is no one at the lectern and no one, seemingly, in charge. People are seated in a sort
of circle, speaking out, offering up remembered lines of poetry, laboriously reassembling one of Mary Swann’s poems. Sarah is writing, a clipboard on her knee.
Director’s Final Note: The faces of the actors have been subtly transformed. They are seen joined in a ceremonial act of reconstruction, perhaps even an act of creation. There need be no suggestion that any one of them will become less selfish in the future, less cranky, less consumed with thoughts of tenure and academic glory, but each of them has, for the moment at least, transcended personal concerns.
BUSWELL:
We all agree, then, on the first line.
WATTLED GENT
(quoting): “It sometimes happens when looking for”
MERRY EYES:
Yes, that’s it. Did you get that down?
SARAH
(writing in notebook): “It sometimes happens when looking for.” Are you sure?
MAN WITH OUTSIZE AFRO:
Second line?
WISTFUL DEMEANOUR:
It’s a run-on line, I’m almost sure. “It sometimes happens when looking for/Lost objects, a book, a picture or”
CRINKLED FOREHEAD:
That’s it, I’m positive.
SARAH:
Close, anyway. What comes next?
WOMAN WITH TURBAN:
“a book, a picture or/A coin or spoon.”
GREEN TWEED SUIT:
Wait! Is that “spoon or coin” or “coin or spoon”?
BUTTER MOUTH:
“Coin or spoon” I think. Yes.
JIMROY
(quoting): “That something falls across the mind —”
CRUZZI:
“Not quite a shadow but what a shadow would be.”
SARAH
(looking up): “In a place that lacked light.”
MUSIC:
an organ, dense, heavy. The words of the poem grow indistinct; only the rhythm remains strong.
BUSWELL:
“As though the lost things have withdrawn/Into themselves —”
PALE SUEDE BOOTS:
“books returned —”
JIMROY:
“To paper or wood or thought”
CRINKLED FOREHEAD:
“Coins and spoons to simple ores”
WOMAN WITH TURBAN:
“Lustreless and without history”
BLUE-SPOTTED TIE:
“Waiting out of sight.”
MUSIC
continues;
CAMERA
shot of photograph of Mary Swann; CREDITS roll across the photo as the voices continue.
SARAH:
“And becoming part of a larger loss”
CRUZZI:
“Without a name”
WOMAN WITH TURBAN:
“Or definition or form”
JIMROY:
“Not unlike what touches us”
CRUZZI:
“In moments of shame.”
By Mary Swann
It sometimes happens when looking for
Lost objects, a book, a picture or
A coin or spoon,
That something falls across the mind—
Not quite a shadow but what a shadow would be
In a place that lacked light.
As though the lost things have withdrawn
Into themselves, books returned
To paper or wood or thought,
Coins and spoons to simple ores,
Lustreless and without history,
Waiting out of sight
And becoming part of a larger loss
Without a name
Or definition or form
Not unlike what touches us
In moments of shame.
About the Author
CAROL SHIELDS
is an internationally known author who has won many awards for her novels and short stories.
Larry’s Party
won the Orange Prize and was shortlisted for the Giller Prize.
The Stone Diaries
won the Pulitzer Prize, the Governor General’s Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award, and was shortlisted for the Booker Prize. Ms. Shields has also written twelve other novels and short-story collections, three books of poetry, numerous plays and a biography of Jane Austen. She is also co-editor, with Marjorie Anderson,
of Dropped Threads: What We Aren’t Told
. Her latest novel,
Unless
, reawakens the voice of Reta Winters, from her story “The Scarf,” included in
Dressing Up for the Carnival
.