[Editorial note: found, not written. A transcript surfaced alongside a hoodie sample in a box nobody remembers ordering. No camera credit. Filed as received.]
INT. A ROOM THAT IS PROBABLY A FACTORY — CONTINUOUS
The factory is dimly lit and eerie, cobwebs on every surface. TYLER is examining a folded hoodie under a bare bulb. A DUCK IN A TUXEDO enters from the shadows.
DUCK: I have the power of telekinesis.
TYLER: (not looking up) That tracks.
DUCK: That's not the reaction people usually have.
TYLER: You're standing in a factory that showed up in my day without an address. A duck with opinions is not the strangest part of this.
DUCK: I'm also a secret agent working for the government.
TYLER: Which one.
DUCK: (long pause) I'll allow that to remain classified.
TYLER: Fair.
DUCK: What are you holding.
TYLER: A hoodie. Eighty-twenty cotton-poly fleece, ten ounce, garment-dyed. Washed black — the kind that's already worn in before anyone's worn it. There's a word on the back four inches tall and a smaller word over the heart, and nothing at all on the front. No system. No logo doing three jobs. Just the fabric and the two words.
DUCK: What do the words say.
TYLER: STINKIES. Then, smaller: COMMISSAIRE.
DUCK: Those aren't real words together.
TYLER: Neither is "duck who is also a government agent," and yet.
DUCK: I'm not really a duck. I'm a robot in disguise.
TYLER: That was the unicorn's line.
DUCK: I contain multitudes.
TYLER: (a beat, almost the practiced smile, not quite) So does this. Eighty units funds the next print run. The next print run funds a hat. The hat funds — eventually, on paper, on purpose — an actual store, in an actual city, that does not exist yet. Somebody is selling a hoodie tonight so that in three years a door opens somewhere in Michigan. Nobody asked the hoodie to carry that. It's carrying it anyway.
DUCK: That's a lot of weight for a garment-dyed ten-ounce fleece.
TYLER: Everything I've ever been handed was too much weight for the thing holding it. The coin. The letter. Four laws about a sentence I'm not allowed to finish. You get used to objects doing more than they look like they're doing.
DUCK: I know the secret to time travel.
TYLER: (setting the hoodie down, folding it the way people fold things when they've decided the conversation matters more than the object) That was the frog.
DUCK: I'm covering for the frog. He's shy.
TYLER: (the coin comes out, flips once, he doesn't look at where it lands) Tell the frog I said the secret isn't the trick. It's deciding what's worth carrying when you land somewhere you didn't plan to be. A duck figures that out with telekinesis. Everybody else just picks up whatever's closest and calls it the thing they came for.
DUCK: Is that what the hoodie is. The thing you came for.
TYLER: (already looking past the duck, at the door, at whatever comes after this room)
TYLER: I didn't come for anything. I never do. I just don't leave empty-handed if I can help it.
The pizza catches fire somewhere off-camera. Neither of them looks.
END TRANSCRIPT.
The duck was not wrong about the telekinesis. He was also not wrong about the hoodie. Join the waiting list →
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