SHOT - A PLANET

Heidi shrugs.

Heidi hands her the gun. They get out of the car.

EXTREMELY LOW SHOT - CARMEL CARLTON

An airplane flies overhead, tiny in the distance. The camera, remaining on Carmel, swings up to the level of a standard two-shot.

Carmel twitches her head so as to indicate the sky.

She coughs.

Heidi looks over at Carmel. She tilts her head and raises her eyebrows sympathetically.

Heidi looks forward again.

Carmel breathes deeply.

Carmel fidgets and looks distinctly nervous. She puts her knee up, foot on the bumper. She checks her watch. Crosses her arms and leans on her knee. Checks her watch.

Carmel rolls her eyes and turns around, sitting on the bumper. A phone rings. Heidi leans through the open window of the car and picks up the phone inside. She remains in the car from the waist up, talking on the phone. We catch a word here and there, but nothing significant. We watch Carmel watching Heidi over her shoulder. Heidi hangs the phone up and extricates herself from the car.

INT - DARKROOM

lit with red light. Two figures move around inside, but are hard to identify.

The other figure shakes its head.

The second man sighs.

The second man continues working. The first man turns his head and stares at him.

EXT - CAR

Carmel and Heidi, still out of the car but in a different location. Carmel is picking a flower apart.

Heidi is writing on a notepad. She looks up distractedly.

Heidi looks sympathetic.

Heidi fishes pills out of somewhere and holds them out to Carmel.

She swallows them.

Heidi looks at Carmel like she is crazy. Carmel looks at Heidi like she is crazy.

INT - DARKROOM

EXT - CAR

Carmel and Heidi.

Heidi looks bored. Carmel leans into the car and fishes around for her sunglasses. She doesn't find them and gives up.

Heidi looks over at Carmel. She raises one eyebrow.

Carmel sighs.

Heidi relents and gets into the car and Carmel follows suit.

EXT - CAR

which pulls up in front of a bank, though the bank is behind the camera, showing us the car and the street.

INT - CAR

Carmel nods emphatically.

She climbs out of the car and goes inside. Heidi, in the driver's seat, looks flatly out the window. Ten seconds go by and she punches at the radio. Marc Ribot's electric guitar version of Jerome Kern's "Ol' Man River" from Showboat is ending, and Godz' 1968 cover of Hank Williams' "May You Never Be Alone Like Me" comes on. It ends, "Crow Jane" as done by Dave Soldier and the Kropotkins from the 1996 Kropotkins album on Koch Records comes on, and Carmel opens the passenger door and gets in with a canvas bag. Heidi turns the key without saying anything and they drive off.

Heidi turns and looks at her, eyebrows raised slightly and mouth just open. A moment passes.

Carmel leans forward and presses a button. A tape pops halfway out of the tape slot and the music changes to "Enig's Jig" by Amps for Christ, a band Henry Barnes formed when he retired from Man Is the Bastard with the intention of doing home recording on his own. Amps for Christ has released only a single cassette through Shrimper Records. A man is on the side of the road, thumbing for a ride; he has with him a large backpack. Heidi pulls up to the side of the road and Carmel rolls down her window. The man steps up and leans down.

Carmel looks over at Heidi, who is thumbing through a tiny book. She comes to a page near the end and traces her finger across the words. We see that the dialogue that has just transpired is printed on the page. Heidi looks up and nods at Carmel. Carmel reaches back to unlock the back door. The man steps out of frame, we hear the door open, and the backpack is thrown across the back seat. He follows it into the car and pulls the door closed.

Silence for a few moments.

Heidi, expressionless but pleased, glances at the man in the rear-view mirror and then looks back to the road. We see a head-on shot of the man in the back, who falls slightly to the side as the car swerves mildly.

Carmel glances at the man in the rearview mirror and then looks back to the road. After a moment she glances back at the mirror.

Marion, who has more or less been looking at the back of her head, meets her eyes in the mirror and shrugs.

Carmel shrugs, keeps his eye for a moment, and returns her gaze to the road.

Heidi jerks around in her seat to look at the passenger.

He hauls his backpack up onto his lap and begins to root through it. Heidi reluctantly faces the road again.

CLOSE SHOT - CARMEL
watching her.

CLOSE SHOT - MARION
removing various items and piling them on the seat next to him.

CLOSE SHOT - HEIDI
driving, beginning to turn but stopping herself, impatient.

CLOSE SHOT - MARION
removing a folded, wrinkled piece of paper from the depths of the bag.

He squints at the scribbling on the wrinkled paper.

CLOSE SHOT - CARMEL
who squints and wrinkles her nose.

CLOSE SHOT - MARION
squinting at the paper.

Carmel turns to look at Heidi and appears about to say something when realization dawns.

Marion blinks and is silent.

Marion looks at his watch.

Carmel looks at the back of her hand, where numbers are printed in thick black.

Marion, deep in thought or just staring out the window.

INT - DARKROOM

The men in the darkroom are moving now towards a black part of the screen. We hear a sliding noise. CUT TO

He holds up the print and we get a closer look. We are just barely able to recognize the face of Soleil Teubner.

The second man's brow wrinkles. He turns to look at the mustachioed man, who is already heading back through the door to the darkroom.

The mustachioed man turns midstep.

He looks pleased with himself.

The second man rolls his eyes.

He turns and goes through the door.

INT - ROOM IN HEADQUARTERS

SOLEIL TEUBNER and KALLEY FETCHER are both leaning back in their chairs, smoking. A MAN enters, carrying a two-foot-high stack of papers and folders. He drops the stack, which stays almost perfectly in place, on the table in front of the two women, and coughs.

The man continues with a more forced-sounding cough.

The man continues to cough.

The man looks daggers at her.

Soleil, with a stricken look on her face, wheels her head slowly to the left. We see no windows in the flat grey walls.

INT - CAR

Marion blinks.

Carmel sneers.

Marion winces.

Heidi glances.

Marion glares.

Carmel raises her left eyebrow as Heidi raises her right.

She shrugs out of her jacket. Carmel helps her remove it and puts it on herself. In the back, Marion takes a swig from a Thermos. He offers it forward, but Carmel shakes her head, rummages around, pulls out her own Thermos, takes a swig, hands it to Heidi, rummages around some more, pulls out a brown paper bag, opens it, removes a foil-wrapped package, unwraps it, takes out a piece of chicken, hands it to Heidi, who has by now put the Thermos on the seat between them, takes out a hard-boiled egg and begins to peel it.

INT - ROOM

The papers are now spread across the table and the floor. The man comes back in with an oversized folder and smacks it down on the table.

Soleil looks up at him and opens the folder, removing two 11 x 17 photographs.

Soleil hands one of the pictures to Kalley, who turns it 45 degrees and gazes intently.

She takes the other photograph from Soleil, turns it 45 degrees, and gazes intently.

Kalley places one photograph on the table.

Kalley hands it over.

Soleil rolls her eyes 45 degrees.

She squints tightly and holds up a picture in front of her and we see that it is a blurred picture of the mustachioed man from the photo lab. She opens her eyes and considers the picture.

INT - CAR

The needle on its gas tank is just below the E. The car sputters, slows, stops. Carmel sighs.

Heidi's head drops to the steering wheel. She sighs.

Heidi opens the door and steps out.

She turns and heads up the road. We see the gas station, a few hundred yards in the distance.

Center screen, seen from behind, she opens the door and steps out. As she passes through, CUT TO

The receptionist looks through a book and checks her computer screen.

She breaks off, confused. The dark-haired woman nods.

Miss Jones turns, allowing us to see her face for the first time, and takes the nearest plastic chair.

EXT - CAR

Heidi, climbing into the car and shutting the door. Carmel is eating a chicken leg. Heidi reaches over and takes a piece of chicken from the bag. She holds it in her teeth and starts the car. They drive for ten seconds and a siren begins to blare. Heidi and Carmel look slowly at each other.

But they have stopped.

Marion claps his hand to his forehead and slumps down in his seat. He rummages in his bag.

Carmel hands them back and he puts them on. Heidi glances in the side mirror at the police officer approaching the car. CUT TO

The door next to him opens and a uniformed arm reaches in, takes hold of his arm, and hauls him from the car. Carmel and Heidi look at each other, slightly wide-eyed, and they get out. The officer has Marion handcuffed on the back of the car and is frisking him.

Carmel and Heidi hesitantly get back in the car and whisper to each other; we cannot hear what they are saying. CUT TO

They each produce identification. The officer glances at them.

He squints.

He walks back to his car and uses the radio to check on the names. Returns.

He turns to leave.

He turns and leaves. The police car drives off. Heidi's head hits the steering wheel.

Carmel closes her eyes, thinks, and shakes her head slowly. Heidi rolls her eyes.

Carmel folds herself into the back and looks through Marion's backpack. She removes things from it and strews them around the back of the car.

Carmel returns to the front seat, clutching a fistful of scraps of paper.

Heidi grabs one.

Carmel looks up from her papers.

Heidi blanches.

Carmel reaches in back, gets the bag, and empties many more slips of paper onto the front seat. They look at each other and each pick up a handful.

INT - PHOTO LAB

They look at the nearest door, which says in backwards block printing INTELLIGENCE DEPARTMENT. They sigh.

She shrugs.

She shakes her head.

INT - CAR

Carmel and Heidi driving along. They pass, on their left, a large house. Inside the house are the dead bodies of 39 young men, all Caucasian and aged from 18 to 24. The men wear black tennis shoes and black pants, but we cannot tell what they are wearing on their upper bodies. The tragic scene has unfolded as the final result of the victims' involvement in a strange religious order. The order is on the net, on the web, on the chain, and people insist on saying "The times, they are a-changin'" when they hear about it on the news, as if they did not know other people had been saying it for hours, depending on when they turned on their televisions and how often they checked CNN, FOX NEWS, MSNBC. The news anchors say in puzzlement that it seems to have been the group's holy week, maybe not realizing that it is the holy week of Christianity. The families of the victims, for the most part, do not yet know of the deaths of their sons and brothers. When people join cults, they become hard to reach, and the friends who went to high school with the dead boys are no longer in touch, visited occasionally when Los Angeles residents can spare the time to make the voyage down to San Diego; the boys, who are not embroiled as tightly at that time, show their friends around and take them to a function held by the Church Group, Bible Study Group, and the visitors are made to feel at home, are not asked to convert, are respected when they say that they are at the stage in their lives when they need to take a little bit of time, be it a couple of weeks or a couple of years, to try and sort out what they believe, regardless of whether they ever spend any time with old or new tomes, whether or not they ever give any thought to what they believe and instead focus on actual life. Carmel and Heidi are struck by this, somehow sensing it. They feel a twinge of guilt, not for Marion, but for the disappointments we all suffer in life, feeling that despite having no intentions of wrongdoing, their best-laid plans gang aft a-gley and they cannot, no matter if they try with every fiber of their beings, please everyone, at least not all the time. They consider trying to articulate this; they want to look at each other, thinking that even if their vocabulary won't hold up, perhaps a glance will suffice in that way that people say the eyes are the window to the soul, even as they know full well that the eyes themselves don't react except to light and the lack thereof and that the tiniest line around the eye is far deeper and more moving, more expressive than eyes, which are the windows to the soul only inasmuch as they have a glassy finish. They try to look at each other but something holds Carmel's chin down and Heidi's straight ahead, possibly a fear that the look will suffice only on the surface, make them think that they have exchanged knowledge or feelings but at the same time will leave a speck of doubt, leaving the real point unarticulated and destroyed by this faux-expression. If they could express what they wanted to, they would jackknife the car across the road and talk, but they fear they would miss the point - and surely this would destroy them. They know they must be cool and have taught themselves that cool is distant, emotion is clichéd, and if you keep from smiling, eyelids slightly lowered, then you are the embodiment of need, you have the same smoldering sexuality that causes the gents to weep hotly - for Carmel and Heidi have many times, without even looking, exchanged the knowledge that emotion is hot and never cool, and one weeps only hotly. It is implicit that this is a part of what causes, everywhere they go, the disappointment that haunts them by keeping them from a perfect achievement, but in the end they know that they aren't quite sure if there's more to it than that, and if they try, even if they get that part, the part they haven't even thought of will get taller. And then what would they do? They drive on without movement noticeable to the other.

INT - CAR

Enough time goes by that Carmel and Heidi implicitly agree that the time has passed and that they have each foregone the idea of addressing the subject.

Carmel throws Heidi a look like a question mark.

Carmel is intent on unwrapping a tiny foil-wrapped chocolate egg. She peers at it.

Carmel inspects her chocolate.

Carmel is pretty sad.

Heidi glances, looks at the road, looks at Carmel sidelong.

Carmel nods. She is still sad.

She indicates.

She indicates.

Heidi cocks an eyebrow.

She leans forward and peers up through the windshield. Carmel cranes her neck around and looks.

Carmel thinks.

She thinks.

If you're a celebrity you can't go to the movies, and you have to buy your own home theater system and hook it up yourself. If nobody knows you you can do whatever you want.

not because they knew about it. Because it was there.

The radio program still was on whether or not people listened to it in particular. It still exists in the radio,

even if it isn't on.

because the name of the experience is the same even if they have different samples. It doesn't matter. Even if they had the exact same program, even if the radio stations were all playing your John Oswald album and started it at the exact, exact same time, different people would recognize different samples.

Why is it there if people aren't listening to it? Why does it exist in the radio if it isn't on? That's the difference between old and new, analog and digital. Film and video!

Film is still there, there's still a picture when you're not looking at it, and video's not. Video's only there when you look at it, and radio's only there when you listen to it.

Heidi remains silent.

She screws up her face, appears slightly agitated.

Carmel smiles broadly. Heidi exhales sharply, emotionally shaken,

happy, relieved.

They mean legerdemain. Magicians, what they do is misdirection. When you direct people's gaze away from the video, it doesn't matter whether it's there or not. Nobody is there to see it. The thing about the tree in the forest is rhetorical because it's not supposed to be taken literally.

because he's trying to think, that maybe the tree doesn't make a sound, because nobody can prove it, and he's learned that you need proof of existence. It's speculation.

People need to apply the ideas of closure to everything.

Remember that you know things are there if you can't see them. That backpack is still in the backseat even if

Heidi starts to turn and look in the back.

Heidi wants to look.

The world doesn't work that way, it doesn't appear and reappear like Harry Blackstone.

Carmel smiles.

Heidi holds out her right hand. Carmel takes it and puts it over the seat, guiding it to the backpack.

Heidi looks slightly embarrassed. She is not embarrassed, but that's how she looks.

Do you know anyone dead?

CARMEL (cont.)

it happened and it's part of the world, or not. Do you see?

If something happened, then it exists with us.

Heidi looks around.

An instant of pause.

Brief silence.

INT - ROOM

Clone Jones is standing up. The camera pulls back to show Doctor One, who is slumped back in his chair, eyes wide open, and DoctorBaker, who is slumped forward on the table. Clone Jones straightens her clothing and walks slowly out.

INT - CAR

Carmel is shuffling around.

Carmel makes a point of looking all around.

She trails off as they approach a dead end and thousands of trees just beyond it. There is a road perpendicular to the one they are on, and a small street sign reading FOREST. Heidi looks at Carmel and hits the left turn signal.

INT - HALLWAY

Clone walks deliberately up the hall, hands in pockets.

INT - CAR

Carmel is inspecting the gun. Heidi notices.

In Marion's backpack, still in the back seat, a telephone rings.

Heidi gropes wildly in the back seat for the bag and brings it into the front seat with her hand inside.

Carmel sticks her hand into the bag also, and the two of them rummage around inside.

Heidi shoots Carmel a look. Carmel almost smiles.

INT - ROOM

The waiting room. Clone Jones walks up to the receptionist's window.

The receptionist's jaw drops.

Clone Jones rolls her eyes. The receptionist comes from behind the desk and heads down the hall. Clone Jones leans back, watching the receptionist leave, and walks off camera.

INT - CAR

Carmel and Heidi rummaging around inside the bag. The phone is ringing.

Heidi rolls her eyes.

Carmel withdraws her hand, holding a banana, and puts it to her ear.

She notices.

She hands it to Heidi, who puts it halfway to her ear before she notices and glares at Carmel sidelong. Carmel almost bursts into hysterical laughter. Heidi sighs deeply.

Heidi pauses, then speaks quickly for dramatic effect.

They both comprehend and dig back into the bag.

They root through the bag some more.

Their arms stop moving.

They dig through.

They stop moving.

They start looking again. The phone rings.

She pulls out the phone and answers it.

Heidi holds the phone with her left hand and covers her right ear.

Carmel raises an eyebrow.

Carmel raises both eyebrows.

Carmel is looking intently at Heidi.

Heidi nods and puts the phone back to her ear.

Carmel looks forward and watches the road.

She throws the cellular phone out the window.

Heidi looks at Carmel.

She produces the cellular phone. Carmel's face lights up.

She snatches the telephone and throws it out the window. CU as it hits the ground next to the wheel, shattering plastic bits. Smiling, she turns back to Heidi, who is shaking her head slowly and smiling.

EXT - DARKROOM

The two men sit at a table, photos spread out. The man with the mustache holds his head in his hands. The other man has his arms crossed on the table and is resting his head on them. He speaks, his voice muffled.

The mustachioed man speaks without moving.

INT - ROOM IN HEADQUARTERS

Soleil and Kalley sit in their chairs, looking at the neatly arranged photographs in front of them: Soleil, Kalley, the two men in the photo lab, Clone Jones, Marion, Carmel, Heidi, a couple more. Their eyes are wide.

Soleil does not move. Kalley leans forward and looks at the picture.

Soleil leans forward and looks.

I make them.

If I just took them, it doesn't help at all. It's just being the agent of a camera.

A pencil is hardly technology.

A brief pause.

We hear a thump as Kalley falls off her chair, as she has been covering her mouth and laughing, muted, uncontrollably.

Kalley intends to apologize but is laughing too hard.

Kalley shrugs.

He indicates the pictures on the table.

He indicates the table, though he seems to particularly indicate the pictures of Heidi and Carmel.

Soleil returns.

Kalley points her finger, speaks loudly.

Us. Mon Dieu. I refuse.

Soleil laughs loudly and abruptly.

Kalley and Soleil stare.

Kalley and Soleil stare.

Pause.

Aching pause.

Kalley and Soleil sigh in frustration.

Kalley goes to the table and picks up a photograph. She scrutinizes it. She shows it to Soleil and they whisper to each other.

Clone Jones does not smile, though she considers it briefly.

He looks embarrassed but slightly proud of himself.

They look at each other, trying to figure out whom she is asking. None of them is sure and so they all self-consciously nod assent, trying not to appear as if claiming authority.

She concentrates.

Clone Jones' jaw drops. The man's eyebrows raise. Soleil looks around.

Clone Jones nods.

Clone Jones nods.

Clone Jones nods.

Indicates Clone Jones.

Kalley is silent.

Pause. Soleil walks out.

INT - CAR

Carmel and Heidi are driving.

Carmel looks at her.

Carmel nods and looks forward again in one motion.

She thinks.

Heidi pulls the car over to the side of the road, where a nattily dressed man stands, smiling, hands behind his back. As the car pulls up next to him, he extends his arm to Carmel, who hesitantly shakes hands.

Carmel and Heidi are surprised.

Carmel looks at Heidi.

He pulls a pocket dictionary from his pocket.

Heidi shushes her. The governor looks up, distracted.

A moment.