April 12, 2002

 Future Shoes 
"Treatment"

by Michael Finley

I have an idea for a movie. The way Hollywood promo types talk up an idea, it's "Moscow on the Hudson" meets "Day of the Jackal."

Movie begins in the industrial section of a Midatlantic city -- a bad part of Wilmington, Delaware, perhaps. Camera pans from the giant fuel storage domes to the chimneys flaring spent gas, to the litter in the streets, to the guy buttoning his overcoat as he steps out of the adult video gallery. Message: America stinks.

Cut to an attractive, olive-complected young man walking down the sidewalk, almost but not quite John Travolta-style. He glances about as if he's sizing the place up, finally turns into a cheap motel and asks for a room with a carport. Haggard old woman wearing tag saying "CONCIERGE" in script lettering asks his name, he replies Ahmed Al-Hallab. She lifts an eyebrow at him and hands him a key.

Inside his room he unpacks and it is clear he has an agenda. Papers, bits of gun barrels and soft packets. He opens the drape and looks out over a massive chemical refinery. He holds up a blueprint to the window, exactly matching the refinery. He lights up a cigarette, lies back in his cheap mattress, and stares unblinking at the rotating fan blade.

But there's an obstacle. Little girl lives in the building, named Hannah, with a missing front tooth. She's a latchkey kid and a busybody, always bursting in on guests, asking questions. At first Ahmed repels her with his coldness. But one day she smashes into him on the sidewalk on her terrible metal roller skates and skins her knee. He performs first aid for her in his room. She asks him what the papers stacked on his dresser are for. He ushers her out of the room.

But now he's invested in her. The next day he inquires about her wound. She tells him she used to have a friend in the neighborhood, but her family left because of layoffs at the chemical plant. She lives with her mother, who's an alcoholic working as a cocktail waitress. But she dreams of her father, who's an actor in a situation comedy, and he is waiting to send for her.

In the next scene we see Ahmed, from a distance, meeting another man on a street corner. The man hands him keys to a late model Ford Econoline van parked at the curb. Later, we see him studying a fuel storage dome standing 50 feet inside a chain link fence at the end of a T-intersection.

One day a drunk bangs on Ahmed's door, telling him to stay away from the little girl. Ahmed confronts the man. There is pushing and shoving. It turns out the man is Hannah's TV star father -- a line worker in a chemical ordnance plant in New Jersey, a roughneck who calls Ahmed "towelhead" and "camel jockey" and pushes him down the stairs, breaking his wrist.

Now it is Ahmed's turn to be nursed, by Hannah. Hannah asks him what kind of world it is out there, and if there is any chance of happiness in the world.

Ahmed describes a beautiful memory he had as a boy, a vision of a fig grove in a desert, with scores of children playing in rushing water, and birds chattering among the fruit. Cutaway to an actual flashback of Ahmed's miserable upbringing, in a house made of mud, electrified by a long red extension cable, and the death of his teenaged sister by an errant artillery shell.

But he doesn't tell Hannah this, instead he comforts her with the fantasy of the oasis. In return, she shows him her playhouse, which she has made from a packing crate. In it is the image of a perfect American family -- everything Ahmed despises, and Hannah envies.

In the early morning hours we see Ahmed praying fervently, kneeling on his apartment floor in the direction of an indeterminate point in the east. At night we enter his dreams. They are full of flame and strife. He is driving the van in the dream, accelerating toward the T-intersection and the chain link fence. He is in a lather of perspiration., saying, "I can't, I can’t." But he overcomes these feelings and shouting to the flame, pedal to the metal, "I must, I must."

We see a package arrive by UPS, a tube containing two rolled-up decals. Ahmed unfurls then. They says "DOW CHEMICAL CORP Inspection Engineering." We see him applying it to the doors of the Econoline.

Finally it is the day of decision. Furtive phone calls from nearby payphones indicate the schedule for the deed he has been sent to perpetrate. We see him mixing chemicals from 5-gallon plastic jugs and packing dry handfuls of the mix in the trunk of the van, then driving in a daze through the city streets.

Camera focuses on Ahmen'd face only, his eyes a cipher, the fuel storage domes and gas chimneys reflected in the car windows. We are unsure whether he is going to go through with his assignment or bail out.

Finally he stops his car, and the camera pulls back to show him letting Hannah out. She has a frozen custard that he has bought her in one hand, and it is melting all the way down her elbow.

She steps in front of the car and runs up the steps of the old hotel, and Ahmed puts the car into gear and drives away.

Credits scroll as the car dwindles in the industrial haze.

Copyright (c) 2002 by Michael Finley

Future Shoes
_{COPYRIGHT (c) 2001
by MICHAEL FINLEY}

Comments on the site