Awakenings Page #6

SAYER .

I want to know more about him.

44A. INT. MRS. LOWE'S APARTMENT -LEONARD'S BEDROOM -NIGHT 44A.

An old photograph. A sixth grade class picture from 1930?,

Moving slowly across the young faces to Leonard, eleven, at the

end of a row.

MRS. LOWE 0.8.

Something was wrong, they said,

with his hands. He couldn't write

anymore, he couldn't do the work,

I should take him out of school,

they said. He was eleven.

They're in Leonard's old bedroom, Sayer and Mrs. Lowe. Except

for the Western painting that's missing, nothing has changed in

it in thirty years.

CONTINUED:

REV. 10/13/89 p.28A

MRS. LOWE

He slowly got worse. He'd be

talking, suddenly he'd come to a

stop. After a few seconds he'd

finish what he was saying like

nothing happened, but these

standstills got longer. Sometimes

he'd call to me and I'd come in

and find him at his desk in a

trance. An hour, two hours. Then

he'd be okay again.

CONTINUED:

Sayer glances around the room. It's been preserved, like a

shrine.

MRS. LOWE

One day I came hone from work and

found him in his bed, his arm like

this, reaching.

(pause)

"What do you want, Leonard?"

She pictures the moment in her mind, and waits, it seems, for

the young Leonard to speak, to tell her what it is he wants.

Finally she lowers her arm and shrugs.

MR.S LOWE

He never spoke again. It was like

he'd disappeared. I took him to

Bainbridge later that year.

November fourteenth, 1937.

He was twenty.

Sayer glances away from her to the room itself again.

SAYER:

What'd he do with himself, Mrs.

Lowe, those nine years he stayed

in this room?

She smiles to herself, proudly it seems.

MRS. LOWE

y

He read.

45. INT. EXAMINATION ROOM -BAINBRIDGE -DAY 45

Leonard's face in shadow. Wires emerging from his scalp. A

sluggish EEG pattern.

A blinding flash from a strobe.suddenly lights up the room.

The pupils of Leonard's eyes shrink, but his EEG remains

stuporously slow.

45A. EXT. RESEARCH LAB, NEW YORK -ESTABLISH -DAY 45A.

46. INT. RESEARCH LAB -DAY 46

A monkey flipping switches on a panel built into a laboratory

room, searching for a sequence.

In an observation booth, years of collected data -charts and

graphs, EEG's and notes.

There, Dr. Mann, a contemporary of Sayer's, stares at Sayer Ay

curiously. Eventually he manages —

MANN:

When you say you're working with

people, you don't mean living

people. (

SAYER:

Living people, yes. Patients.

Mann just stares. He's a scientist, they both are, and the

idea of Sayer working with living people, rather than expired

ones laid out on the pathology table, is inconceivable to him.

MANN:

(fearing the answer)

Where?

SAYER:

It's in The Bronx. It's a poor

private chronic hospital called

Mount —

MANN:

(appalled)

Oh, Malcolm, Malcolm, come back,

come on. You're a benchman,

you're no clinician, why would you

lower yourself?

Sayer hasn't an answer for him. » •

SAYER:

How's Hank?

MANN:

How's Hank? He's great, he's

brilliant, look at him.

Sayer glances away to Hank the monkey, watches him. Mann

studies Sayer, chagrined and incredulous.

MANN:

A physician? You?

He slaps him angrily across the shoulders with some papers.

The monkey completes a complex sequence which opens a chamber

revealing an electric train. The animal jumps and hoots with

wild glee. Sayer reaches out and presses the button on the

stop watch dangling from Mann's neck.

SAYER:

Subtract two seconds off his

time.

47. OMITTED 47

48. INT. RESEARCH LAB -LATER -DAY 48

Rats in cages, wired up, manipulating elaborate series of

ladders and pulleys, traversing catwalks, or ratwalks, leading

to glucose rewards.

While Mann, with something less than great enthusiasm,

considers an EEG Sayer has brought, his monkey drags toys over

to Sayer and tries to engage him in play. One of the toys is

an Ouija Board.

MANN:

(to, Sayer)

Don't look at me like that. It's

for his alphabet lessons.

(to the monkey)

We're busy, Hank, go play

solitaire.

The monkey obediently goes off in search of a deck of cards.

Gesturing at patterns on the EEG -

MANN:

Asleep. First stage normal.

Second a little dull. Normal

REM...

He shrugs, lays out a second EEG, and gestures at patterns on

it —

MANN:

Awake. Slightly erratic. No more

so than a lot of people walking

the streets of New York.

(shrugs again)

I give up, what's wrong with him?

SAYER:

You have them backwards. This is

him awake ...

(points to one EEG;

then the other)

This is him asleep.

.-,"- . ^ •

Mann thinks Sayer is kidding. He isn't.

MANN:

This is him awake? This is him

asleep?

Sayer nods. Mann tries, without success, to make some sort of

sense out of that.

MANN:

What are you saying? When he's

awake, what, he's dreaming?

SAYER:

When there's any brain activity at

all, which is infrequent, yes.

Dreaming or hallucinating.

MANN:

And whenhe'sasleep . ..?

SAYER:

When he's asleep he manages to

create a kind of reality. What we

might call reality.

MANN:

That's what you think these say?

SAYER:

1 don't know.

Mann studies the "waking" EEC He points to its one and only

large electrical peak. ;

MANN:

What's this peak? Strobe?

SAYER:

No. This is the strobe.

Sayer indicates a flat section of the pattern where there is

scribbled in pencil a small "s."

SAYER:

This ...

, (the large peak,

marked with an "L") /

. . . is me saying his name to him.

Mann stares rather dumbly at Sayer. Then at Hank the monkey on

the floor dealing solitaire.

49. INT. LEONARD'S DAYROOM -DAY

Tight on Leonard. Something blurs past him but his eyes don't

follow it. Pulling back, the object blurs by again from the

other direction.

Tight on Sayer. The thing blurs past his face. His eyes don't

follow it either. Pulling back, it blurs again.

REV. 10.13/89 p.33

A circle of patients in wheelchairs. The post-encephalitics

reunited. "Waking" just long enough to catch and release the

object, a small beach ball.

Leonard and Sayer, on opposite sides of the circle, ignoring

the ball and the other patients. He's reached a dead end,

Sayer, right where he began, his only "accomplishment,"

this, ball-catching patients.

50. INT. EXAMINATION ROOM -DAY 50.

Sayer alone in the examination room, tired, at its window

staring blankly out.

His perspective:
The empty lot below littered with abandoned

couches, refrigerators, rusting automobile carcasses.

And beyond the lot, the elementary school playground. Laughing

children on swings and slides. Jumping rope. Batting tether

balls. Playing hopscotch.

Moving slowly in on one of the hopscotch games. On a girl

tossing a bean bag into a square. Jumping over it and into the

next square. Turning and jumping back. Balancing on one foot.

Retrieving the bean bag and tossing it down again. Into the

next square of the tile pattern chalked on the asphalt.

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