Awakenings Page #4

barely audibly, a melody.

SAYER'S VOICE

Can you hear me? .

16. INT. EXAMINATION ROOM/OFFICE -BAINBRIDGE -DAY 16

Distant music of children's laughter. Perhaps real, emanating

from outside; perhaps imagined, remembered, playing in a remote

region of the woman's damaged mind. Arrested of all movement,

she stares, transfixed, at the blades of a fan.

SAYER'S VOICE

Do you know where you are?

(nothing back)

Do you remember being brought

here?

(nothing back)

Do you know what has happened?

If she does, she gives no indication. No word or gesture. No

change of expression on her mask of a face. She is elsewhere

(or nowhere), cut adrift by her illness, living in a private

world (or hell).

SAYER'S VOICE

Can you hear me?

Sayer, wearing a white lab coat, tries to read her eyes.

Behind thick lenses, uncleaned for weeks or months, the eyes

are inscrutable. . ••

REV. 12/5/89 (BLUE) Pg.-lO

16.CONT. 16.

Sayer reaches to her face and carefully pulls the glasses from

it. He cleans them with a flap of his lab coat — they are

loose, bent out of shape*— and gently slides the temples back

over her ears.

He turns away from her and types at a manual Underwood. The

form in the machine, at the top, reads — BAINBRIDGE HOSPITAL /

ADMISSIONS / CONSULTATION REQUEST / NEUROLOGY. Sayer types in

a lower section headed — FINDINGS / DIAGNOSIS.

He turns back in his chair to find the woman doubled-over in

her wheelchair, one arm very close to the floor, the hand

clutching the glasses. She is not moving, but she has moved.

That, or she is dead.

Sayer rights her, takes the glasses from her hand and slips

them back onto her face. He studies her for a moment, and for

that moment remains as still, as entranced, as her.

He takes the glasses from her face again and sets them on the

floor. He waits. She doesn't retrieve them. He picks them up

and holds them out to her. She doesn't move to take them. He

lets go of them and she lunges forward, catching them the

instant before they hit the floor. Sayer just stares.

SAYER«S VOICE

Her name is Lucy Fishman ...

r

16B. INT. CORRIDOR OUTSIDE EXAMINATION ROOM -LATE AFTERNOON 16B.

Dr. Kaufman, the hospital's Chief of Medicine, notices a number

of patients lined up in their wheelchairs as he passes them on

his way into Sayer's examination room

SAYER'S VOICE

She was found by neighbors with *

her sister, several days after the ,

sister had died ...

17. INT. EXAMINATION ROOM -LATE AFTERNOON 17.

The same room as before. The same woman. All that has changed

is the light. It's late afternoon.

SAYER (CONT'D)

According to the neighbors, *

she's never set foot outside her *

apartment, has no other living *

relatives, and has always been the *

way she is now -without any *

comprehension or response. *

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