by Stephen Fry
LEO picks up his chocolate and leans back. He closes his eyes.
LEO
Yes. In theory it is possible.
MICHAEL
(triumphant)
I knew it! What did I say? We can go back! In time.
LEO
Not go back. I can, as you put it, transmit. At least I believe I can. It is possible. In principle it is possible.
MICHAEL
So we erase him! If we wanted to, we could liquidate Hitler.
LEO
(violently)
No! Absolutely not!
MICHAEL
But . . .
LEO
You think the thought hasn’t crossed my mind? You think the idea of being able to rid humanity of the curse of Adolf Hitler isn’t something I think of every minute of my waking life? But listen to me, Michael, listen to me. The day I was first told what happened to my father, what happened there in Auschwitz, that day I made myself a promise. I swore before God and the Universe that never, ever, would I involve myself in war, in murder, in the harming of another human being. You understand me?
MICHAEL
Respect.
LEO
So don’t talk to me of killing.
MICHAEL
That’s cool. I read you. But if that’s all true then tell me this. Why were you so wild to read my thesis? And why did you invite me to your lab and show Tim off to me? When I asked you yesterday, when I said, “Why me?” you remember how you replied? “A feeling,” you said. Remember that? A feeling. What did you mean “a feeling”?
LEO
I’m not sure. I—I don’t know.
MICHAEL
Yes, you do, Leo. You thought I could help you, and I can. I can help you wipe the memory of Hitler from the face of the earth.
LEO is agonized.
LEO
I told you, Michael! I said to you. I cannot kill. I have sworn.
But MICHAEL is ready for this. He replies with a pleased smile.
MICHAEL
Who said anything about killing?
LEO stares at him. MICHAEL beams triumphantly and takes out his wallet. He scrabbles around inside and holds up, between forefinger and thumb, a SMALL ORANGE PILL.
CLOSE on the orange pill.
MICHAEL
(continuing: smiling wickedly)
We just make sure the motherfucker is never born. Know what I’m saying?
CUT TO:
EXT. ST. MATTHEW’S COLLEGE—DAY
CRANE up to the window of LEO’s rooms. At the same time we see the outline of LEO, drawing the curtains shut.
MUSIC: SAINT-SAËNS ORGAN CONCERTO.
CUT TO:
A MONTAGE of shots in various locations at different times of day.
INT. LEO’S ROOMS—DAY
LEO and MICHAEL pore over an old street map of the town of Brunau-am-Inn in Upper Austria. MICHAEL is pointing to a particular street. LEO nods and makes notes.
CUT TO:
EXT. NEW CAVENDISH LABORATORIES—AFTERNOON
High establishing shot, moving from the Royal Observatory over the road to the huge tanker of liquid nitrogen, the forest of satellite dishes and the physics laboratory.
CUT TO:
INT. LEO’S LAB—AFTERNOON
MICHAEL is sucking from a liter bottle of Coke. He is perched on a stool and watching LEO as LEO tests part of “TIM,” LEO’s device. TIM has its casing stripped off, and various probes attached to the circuitry inside.
CUT TO:
INT. MICHAEL’S NEWNHAM HOUSE—MORNING
JANE wakes up and sees MICHAEL sprawled, fully dressed, on the bed beside her. She gives him a nudge. He rolls over and, with his back to her, continues to sleep.
JANE frowns, puzzled.
CUT TO:
INT. ST. MATTHEW’S COLLEGE,
PORTER’S LODGE—MORNING
MICHAEL, yawning, is inspecting his pigeonhole. He pulls out a small yellow parcel. He turns it over in his hand and sees that it bears an Austrian postmark. He rips it open excitedly. We see that it is a bundle of schematics, facsimiles of blueprints or plans of some kind. MICHAEL is very excited.
MICHAEL walks out of the Porter’s Lodge, his head buried in what he is reading. He barges straight into DR. FRASER-STUART, who is wearing a fetching kimono. MICHAEL apologizes hastily and instantly goes back to reading.
FRASER-STUART looks back towards him, mystified.
CUT TO:
INT. ST. MATTHEW’S COLLEGE,
LEO’S ROOMS—MORNING
The furniture is pulled to one side and the floor is covered with the schematics MICHAEL received from AUSTRIA.
LEO watches from his chair, his fingers hovering over the keyboard of his COMPUTER, while MICHAEL, lying on his stomach, carefully traces a line of conduits with a highlighting pen on the schematic. He stops, takes a pair of dividers and measures a section against a scale on the side of the schematic. He calls out to LEO, who taps a number into the COMPUTER.
CUT TO:
EXT. NEW CAVENDISH LABORATORIES—NIGHT
Establishing shot of the physics lab by night. We move in on a burning light on the first floor.
CUT TO:
INT. SATELLITE COMMUNICATIONS ROOM—NIGHT
A high-tech palace. Television monitors in a row are labeled “Met.Sat IV,” “Geo.Sat.II” and so on. The screens show thermal-imaging pictures, weather systems, spectrographic analyses and similar images. Below them desks of knobs, lights and keyboards. Dazzling and expensive.
MICHAEL is perched on a bench, pulling a wedge of pizza from a box. There is a security badge pinned to his T-shirt.
LEO, also equipped with a security badge, has TIM open on a stool under a satellite comms desk. Cabling is connected from TIM to the control array.
MICHAEL watches, faintly bored. The TV monitor above TIM shows an area of Central Europe at dusk. Underneath is given the time.
Suddenly MICHAEL jerks upright and looks at his watch. LEO looks up with horror.
CUT TO:
INT. THE NEWNHAM HOUSE—EVENING
JANE is sitting at the kitchen table, elegant in a beautiful black evening dress. A half-finished bottle of wine is beside her.
The door flies open and a panting MICHAEL stands there. JANE gives him a murderous stare.
CUT TO:
INT. ST. MATTHEW’S
SENIOR COMBINATION ROOM—NIGHT
JANE and MICHAEL enter the S.C.R. in evening dress. MICHAEL’s collar is awry, he is pink, shiny and panting, Jane is pale and angry.
The S.C.R. is filled with chattering FELLOWS and GUESTS, also in evening dress. JANE grits her teeth and beams apology at the MASTER of the college, who does not look pleased.
MICHAEL stares across the room at the immaculately dressed LEO, who shakes his head, tut-tutting and looking at his pocket watch reprovingly.
CUT TO:
INT. ST. MATTHEW’S OLD HALL—NIGHT
A formal banquet is taking place at High Table. College STEWARDS, white-gloved, are pouring wine and serving soup. JANE and MICHAEL are sitting next to each other, JANE has her back pointedly to MICHAEL.
An OLD PROFESSOR stares at MICHAEL’s ineptly tied bow tie. MICHAEL attempts to improve the situation by adjusting the bow tie in the reflection from a large silver epergne in the center of the table. The result is comically worse.
MICHAEL sinks back frustrated and bored. He shoots a look at LEO, who raises his eyebrows. MICHAEL looks a question back at him.
LEO winks. MICHAEL smiles as LEO rises from the table and bids farewell to those sitting either side of him clutching his temples as if he had a terrible headache.
MICHAEL waits for him to go and then does the same thing: rises, clutches his temples and
grins a boyish and apologetic grin.
JANE slaps him hard across the face.
Soup spoons are dropped, eyes pop. MICHAEL leaves the room.
CUT TO:
INT. SATELLITE COMMS ROOM—NIGHT
LEO, jacket off, black tie undone, smiles as MICHAEL, also rid of his jacket, ruefully strokes his cheek.
LEO turns to TIM, rubs his hands and throws some switches.
FADE TO:
INT. SATELLITE COMMS ROOM—NIGHT
CLOSE on MICHAEL as he starts awake. LEO is gazing down at him, shaking his shoulder.
MICHAEL
What time is it?
LEO
Six. We should be gone.
MICHAEL sits upright. He has been lying along a bench, his dinner jacket bunched into a pillow under his neck. He springs down to the floor.
LEO
Youth. It would take me ten minutes to stand up after lying in that position. Come. Breakfast.
CUT TO:
EXT. KING’S PARADE—MORNING
We crane down from King’s College, past the chapel and Porter’s Lodge and onto the exterior of The Copper Kettle, a tea room. Through the window, we see the profiles of MICHAEL and LEO, sitting at a table. We hear their dialogue, over.
MICHAEL
(over)
Well?
LEO
(over)
I prefer the eggs a little less runny.
MICHAEL
(over)
You know what I mean. How close are we?
CUT TO:
INT. THE COPPER KETTLE—MORNING
LEO is taking a sip of hot chocolate. Over the mug he looks gravely at MICHAEL.
MICHAEL
(continuing)
A week? Ten days? What?
LEO
A few more tests.
MICHAEL
What kind of tests?
LEO
It is difficult. Like the ring pulls on soda cans.
MICHAEL
Say what?
LEO
The only way to test a ring pull is to use it. But when it is used it is destroyed. You see the problem? It is the same with a folded parachute. Or a crash barrier. Impossible to test.
MICHAEL
What are you saying?
LEO
I’m saying that I can go over the math so many times. I can check the programming so many times. In the end, the only real test is the use.
MICHAEL
(leaning forward in an urgent whisper)
WHEN?
LEO
Next week, I think. Thursday. But Michael . . .
LEO touches MICHAEL’s sleeve.
LEO
(continuing)
. . . you have to understand what we are trying to do here.
MICHAEL
I understand.
LEO
I don’t believe that you do. Nothing will be the same.
Nothing.
MICHAEL
But that’s the point!
(excited)
Everything will be better. We’re going to make a better world.
LEO nods and stabs an egg with his fork. The yolk squirts out all over the plate.
LEO
Maybe.
CUT TO:
EXT. NEWNHAM—MORNING
MICHAEL bicycles to his house. He passes the NEWSPAPER DELIVERY GIRL, who gives him a wide berth, swerving dramatically to avoid him. MICHAEL smiles to himself. He lets himself into the house and closes the door behind him.
CUT TO:
INT. MICHAEL’S HOUSE—MORNING
MICHAEL wheels the bicycle into the hall quietly and tiptoes towards the bedroom.
The bed is empty. MICHAEL stands and stares. He goes to one of the closets and opens it. Bare.
He goes to the study. JANE’s desk is swept clean. There are boxes piled up. He stares at the labels.
PLEASE LEAVE: TO BE COLLECTED
MICHAEL hurries to the kitchen. On the table, propped up against a teapot, there is a NOTE. We move onto the note at speed. It reads, in a strong, feminine hand:
THIS TIME I MEAN IT
FADE OUT.
MAKING MOVES
Leo captures a pawn
I sat there for a bit, at the kitchen table, feeling seriously cheesed.
I fade from Hollywood screenplay format to dull old, straight old prose because that’s how it felt. That’s how it always feels in the end.
I said it before and I’ll say it again: books are dead, plays are dead, poems are dead: there’s only movies. Music is still okay, because music is sound track. Ten, fifteen years ago, every arts student wanted to be a novelist or a playwright. I’d be amazed if you could find a single one now with such a dead-end ambition. They all want to make movies. All wanna make movies. Not write movies. You don’t write movies. You make movies. But movies are hard to live up to.
When you walk along the street, you’re in a movie; when you have a row, you’re in a movie; when you make love, you’re in a movie. When you skip stones over the water, buy a newspaper, park your car, line up in a McDonald’s, stand on a rooftop looking down, meet a friend, joke in the pub, wake suddenly in the night or fall asleep dead drunk, you’re in a movie.
But when you are alone, dead alone, without props or costars, then you’re on the cutting-room floor. Or, worse, you’re in a novel; you’re onstage, stuck inside a monologue; you’re trapped in a poem. You are CUT.
Movies are action. In movies things happen. You are what you do. What’s inside your head means nothing until you act. Gesture, expression, action. You don’t think. You act. You react. To things. Events. You make things happen. You make your history and your future. You cut the wires that defuse the bomb, you lay out the villain, you save the community, you throw your badge into the dirt and walk away, you fold your arms around the girl and slowly fade to black. You never have to think. Your eyes might dart from the alien monster to the fizzing power cables as a plan comes to you, but you never have to think.
The perfect stage hero is Hamlet. The perfect film hero is Lassie.
Your history—“back story” they call it in Hollywood—only counts insofar as it informs the present, the now, the Action of the movie of your life. And that’s how we all live today. In scenes. God is not the Author of the Universe, he is the screenwriter of your Bio-pic.
Lines you always hear in movies:
Don’t talk about it, just do it.
I’ve got a bad feeling about this.
Gentlemen, we have a situation here.
I don’t have time for a conversation.
Move it, mister.
Lines you always read in novels:
I wondered what he meant.
He knew in his heart it was wrong.
She loved, above all, the way his hair stuck up when he became agitated or excited.
Nothing made sense anymore.
So there I sat, in a state, in a novel, in a kitchen, rhythmically tugging at my hair and staring with dead eyes at the dead note. No action possible, only contemplation.
This time I mean it.
I had planned—that was the joke—I had planned to tell Jane all about everything that very morning. No, not tell her all about everything. I would avoid mention of her little pill. The thing would be dressed up as an experiment, something that Leo and I were doing as it were in vitro. An investigation of time and historical possibility. A project undertaken for fun and scholarship. This would explain my unusual sleeping patterns, my abstraction, my air of barely suppressed excitement, my spaced-outness, without hinting at danger or recklessness.
The weird thing was that Jane had not once, over the past week or so, asked me what I had been up t
o. She had not stood, arms folded, at the kitchen door, tapping her slippered foot on the floor with a what-time-of-the-night-do-you-call-this-then kind of an air. She had not stared me down with a fearsome “Well?” nor breathed heavily out through her nostrils nor, in pretending to ignore me, had she hummed jauntily to annoy as lovers often will.
Nothing. Just a faint, sighing distraction, a sad distance.
And now she was gone. For good. Or ill.
Maybe, I thought, maybe destiny was clearing the decks for me. Emptying my present life of connections so that I could embark on the new life that Leo and I were preparing to create.
It was insane of course. I knew that. It couldn’t possibly work. You can’t change the past. You can’t redesign the present. Hell, you probably can’t even redesign the future. Hitler was born, you can’t make him unborn. Crazy. But what a test of my knowledge. I— who knew more than anyone about Passau and Brunau and Linz and Spital and all the other tedious details of little Adolf’s squalid upbringing—was being tested on that knowledge like no one ever had been before. The historian as God. I know so much about you, Mr. So-Called Hitler, that I can stop you from being born. For all your clever-clever speeches, and swanky uniforms, and torchlight parades, and death-dealing Panzers, and murdering ovens, and high-and-mighty airs. For all that, you are entirely at the mercy of a graduate student who has boned up on your early life. Eat it, big boy.
For Leo, of course, it was a mission with meaning. The real truth of that mission, the blinding shock of it, came out two days after Jane left me.
I had tried to find her, naturally. As before I had gone to her laboratory in search of reconciliation. I would dance a charming, silly dance and Jane would pat and patronize me and all would be well. Ish.
Red-haired Donald was there. The grotesque lump of his Adam’s apple bounced up and down in his white neck as he gulped his embarrassment.
“Jane has . . . er . . . sort of, you know . . . gone off.”
“Eggs go off. Pints of milk go off. Bombs go off. What are you talking about?”
“Princeton. A research grant. She didn’t tell you about it then?”
“Princeton?”
“New Jersey.”
Great. Fucking A.
“No phone number, I don’t suppose?”
Donald lifted his bony shoulders a couple of times.
I looked at him with loathing. “What’s with that? Semaphore for her dialing code?”