It's Such a Beautiful Day (2011)

[GabrielAlejo2341]

(thunder rumbling)

(sharp inhale)

(zapping)

(thunder rumbling)

(zap)

(low buzzing sound)

Bill.

Can you hear me, Bill?

Look at me, Bill.

Look at me.

140/90.

Bill, can you hear me?

-Bill?
-Bill?

Can you hear me?

(static)

(roaring)

(wind blowing)

(bell ringing)

The last thing Bill can remember is speaking to his ex-girlfriend...

(film exploding)

(whooshing sound)

...bird wings, and the smell of black licorice.

(water dripping)

He watches dust float across the sunbeam above his head.

And then he goes back to sleep.

His roommate's name is Matthew, a paralyzed young man hidden by curtains who communicates to the nursing staff through a row of buttons that can play five different electronic sentences, but more often than not, he only presses one of them.

"I am in pain."

Every afternoon, the reflections of sunlight from the traffic below cast colorful patterns across their ceiling.

In the mornings, the sunlight illuminates Matthew's curtain and makes it look beautiful even though it's just gray.

His ex-girlfriend's been visiting lately, and they talk for hours about current events.

Sometimes they eat ice cream bars.

It's the happiest he's been in a long time.

(thunder rumbling)

(rain falling)

Bill is introduced to a new doctor and given a short interview.

He doesn't know what month it is, but he's aware he's in a hospital.

He can't remember his address, so he supposes he must have always lived here.

His vision's a little blurry and he no longer has strength in the grip of his left hand.

Bill is asked to describe a series of photographs.

He's able to put words to many of these objects but is very confused by some of the others.

(rain falling)

He also has difficulty distinguishing the faces of people he knows.

All of these people really just look the same, and though he can recognize his ex-girlfriend because of her long hair, he can't remember her name.

He tells the doctor he has a fish living inside of his head, possibly a trout.

It'll be another night before it dawns on him that something seems missing.

All the memories the doctor asked him to recall today are suddenly out of his grasp.

So many years of faces and moments are mostly just a vague feeling now.

The years are slipping out of his head.

Yesterday, a gardener with a hose blasted all the sparrow nests from the second story awning of the building next door, raining mud and little broken eggs into the parking lot.

(medical equipment hissing)

Another test has been arranged and Bill is taken to a white room.

A radiologist makes an incision and pushes a catheter into his femoral artery.

The catheter is carefully pushed through his stomach to his heart, up through his chest and into his head, where a special dye is introduced to flood the blood vessels in his brain for x-rays.

Bill is then asked to raise his arms and count to 20.

A powerful anesthetic is introduced to temporarily shut down the left hemisphere of his brain, and for the remaining half of Bill, the test begi--

Bill, can you hear me?

Bill, can you look up here for me?

Can you tell me what these objects are?

Bill, can you tell me what this is?

Bill, can you add up these numbers for me?

You're doing great, Bill.

Okay, and what do these numbers add up to?

Look at me, Bill.

Look at me.

Bill, look at me.

Okay, Bill, can you tell me who this is?

It's okay, Bill, you're doing great.

And can you tell me who this is?

Bill, can you tell me who this is?

Do you remember her?

Today she's joined by her boyfriend, a young man named Steve who spends most of the afternoon in the corner quietly staring at Matthew's curtain.

"I am in pain."

The doctor explains to her that Bill may be having trouble understanding past tense and present tense.

It may also be difficult for Bill to understand which of his memories are real and which are imagined.

When the brain is confronted with major memory loss, it often fills in the blanks with confabulated stories, false memories, people who never existed; invented conclusions to make everyday life less confusing and to somehow rationalize what's happening to him.

Today, they will chat awkwardly.

Bill's been unable to stay on one subject for more than a few moments and seems to get easily frustrated.

She will say she didn't know why she'd brought Steve along yesterday and admits he'd been so shaken by the experience that he quietly cried in the car on the way home.

The sparrows have already begun to rebuild, but he's not sure if he feels happy or sad for them.

He dreams he's part of a rocket crew reentering the earth's atmosphere.

As they rapidly descend, it's believed that eating ice cream bars will help prevent them from having strokes.

As the heat intensifies, Bill eats his ice cream bar and secretly hopes that if something bad had to happen, the ship wouldn't explode, but just that everyone else would have strokes.

A final battery of tests are ordered to positively rule out the chance of surgery.

Highly drugged, Bill will have no memory of these tests other than a terrible noise to his right and a brief vision of a seahorse and a falling tree.

(medical equipment running)

This morning, he can't remember the last time his ex-girlfriend had come to visit.

It could be hours, or maybe it's been weeks.

His uncle, whom Bill had not even noticed in the room, looks out the window and talks about Bill's mother.

Then he says, "It's too bad people don't say how they feel until it's already too late."

And then he says nothing.

The TV in the room is always on mute, and behind his uncle's head, Bill watches a superhero quietly melt a monster's face.

His doctor visits and asks if Bill might be more comfortable at home for a few days under family care until the final results come in.

(door opening)

(keys clanking)

A neighbor must have put these groceries in his apartment for him, which was a very nice gesture.

It's kind of a really nice day.

He decides to walk around the block.

On the side of the road, he sees a woman's tennis shoe filled with leaves and it fills him with inexplicable sadness.

He walks down his side street, alongside the bridge past the farmers' market, and back up the main thoroughfare.

(birds chirping)

It's kind of a really nice day.

He decides to take a walk around the block.

On the side of the road, he sees a woman's tennis shoe filled with leaves and it fills him with inexplicable sadness.

He walks down his side street, alongside the bridge past the farmers' market, and back up the main thoroughfare.

(birds chirping)

It's kind of a really nice day.

He decides to take a walk around the bl--

(door opening)

(keys clanging)

That hand is dropping everything.

Wasn't he supposed to call somebody?

What was her name?

What in the hell is wrong with this mug?

(keys clanging)

Does he really need this much food?

There's a doctor on his answering machine.

(beeps)

Has he been sick?

A doctor carefully explains test results with him.

He goes over numbers and information that Bill doesn't understand, and reiterates things that Bill doesn't remember.

He's momentarily quiet and then tells Bill he doesn't have very long to live.

It's kind of a really nice day.

He decides to walk around the block.

On the side of the road, he sees a woman's tennis shoe filled with leaves and it fills him with inexplicable sadness.

He walks down his side street and sees striking colors in the faces of the people around him, details in these beautiful brick walls and weeds that he must have passed every day but never noticed.

The air smells different, brighter somehow, and the currents under the bridge look strange and vivid, and the sun is warming his face and the world is clumsy and beautiful and new.

And it's as though he's been sleepwalking for God knows how long, and something has violently shaken him awake.

His bathmats are gorgeous.

The grain patterns in his cheap wood cabinets vibrate something deep within him.

He's fascinated by the way his paper towels drink water.

He's never really appreciated these things.

All this detail he's never noticed.

Detail he's never noticed.

He's alive, he's alive.

He's alive, he's alive.

Never noticed.

He's alive.

The stars rattled him to the core.

All these lights have traveled for tens of millions of years to reach him at this moment.

How somehow far away, our own sun looks just like one of these.

How many of the stars no longer even exist, but whose ancient light is just reaching him now.

An impression from a ghost, an amazing infinite time machine every night above his head that he's ignored for most of his life.

He wants to stop people in the street and say, "Isn't this amazing? Isn't everything amazing?"

He runs to the car rental place and finds himself a freeway and drives all night, following directions in his head to a place he can't remember, absorbing everything he can before it all fades again with the morning.

He's got the keys to this car.

He also has keys to a motel room, but he can't remember the last time he slept.

He's sitting in the sun outside of a laundromat.

An older guy in a baseball cap stands at a payphone and nervously lifts and hangs up the receiver.

He asks to borrow Bill's pencil and then places a call to his daughter.

He tells her he loves her and he's proud of her, and that "one day soon, we'll finally have our day."

Then he says, "Fantastic, fantastic," and hangs up the phone.

Although it looks like the wind had been knocked out of him, he presents the pencil back to Bill with a little flourish, as though proud no harm had come to it while in his possession.

He dreams of fog on the dark edge of a cliff where hundreds of feet below the deep sea swells up against the rocks.

And if you lean over the edge and squint your eyes just right, you can barely make out the gray shapes of all the cars that had driven off the cliff over the years sunken deep beneath the surface.

And as each wave washes slowly over them, the undertow quietly pulls their headlights on and off, on and off on an endless loop growing slowly dimmer over the years until the day comes that they fade completely.

He's at a house now.

When he was little, he would run through a house just like this with a flashlight pointed at the ceiling, pretending he was an astronaut soaring over the moon.

A familiar person's here.

He's not sure how he found him, maybe he's been followed, but they're talking now and Bill is given an address, an address his mother never wanted him to have, he says.

But it's important Bill have it now, an address where he can find his father, Bill's real father, a man who was gone before he was born, a man he'd only met once but was too young to know it.

And he's driving again now, for several hours, he's not sure, and with every mile, he loses a few more memories.

And he finds another motel, and that night he eats a lot of ice cream and doesn't remember his dreams at all...

doesn't remember his dreams at all...

...remember his dreams at all, his dreams at all.

He's in a nursing home.

Is he old?

Is he old?

A room full of windows.

A room full of windows.

And he gives a name on a paper that's not in his handwriting to the front counter, and a frail old man is being wheeled to see him now, a man who's been here for over ten years but rarely had a visitor.

Neither of these two people remember why they're there or who exactly this other person is, but they sit and they watch a game show together.

And when it's time for Bill to leave, he stands and says something beautiful to him.

And neither of them understand what he means exactly, but the old man begins to cry anyway, and they will never see each other again.

He's driving a car, and every time he realizes he's driving a car, he figures he should just keep driving the car, and sometimes he sings and sometimes he cries, and the left side of his body is beginning to grow slack and numb, and all he wants to do is just keep driving, somehow to keep on driving.

He has no more directions to follow, but he fills the car with gas again and again and keeps going into the night.

He wants to keep going.

He wants to go forever.

(wind howling)

(birds chirping)

It's such a beautiful day.

Wait a minute, he's not gonna die here?

But he doesn't die here.

No, no, no, Bill, get up.

Get up, Bill. Bill, get up.

He can't die here.

He's not gonna die.

He can't ever die.

Bill?

Bill?

He will spend hundreds of years traveling the world, learning all there is to know.

He will learn every language.

He will read every book.

He will know every land.

(soft pop)

He will spend thousand of years creating stunning works of art.

He will learn to meditate to control all pain.

As wars will be fought and great loves found...

...and lost...

and found.

Lost...

and found.

And found.

And found.

And memories built upon memories until life runs on an endless loop.

He will father hundreds of thousands of children whose own exponential offspring he'll slowly lose track of through the years, whose millions of beautiful lives will all eventually be swept again from the earth.

And still, Bill will continue.

He will learn more about life than any being in history, but death will forever be a stranger to him.

People will come and go until names lose all meaning, until people lose all meaning and vanish entirely from the world.

And still, Bill will live on.

He will befriend the next inhabitants of the earth, beings of light who revere him as a god.

And Bill will outlive them all...

...for millions and millions of years...

...exploring, learning, living, until the earth is swallowed beneath his feet.

Until the sun is long since gone.

Until time loses all meaning and the moment comes that he knows only the positions of the stars and sees them whether his eyes are closed or open.

Until he forgets his name and the place where he'd once come from.

He lives and he lives until all of the lights go out.

(quiet nature sounds)