Thrive - Part 1

INT. WAITING ROOM - NIGHT

BILL JANUS sits on a waiting room bench in a hospital. He stares into the camera, his eyes questioning the audience from the very beginning. Why are they watching him at a time like this? Why is there a time like this? He is staring like he knows that he has been created to suffer for the entertainment of strangers. He pauses in total resignation to whatever evil has caused him to exist, and then is overcome by the idea that he was placed here to suffer so that others may suffer less.

A voice comes from behind him.

NURSE: Mr. Janus.

Janus holds his stare for a second longer, then looks over his shoulder slightly bewildered. A nurse stands over him. There is no one else in the waiting room.

JANUS: Yes?
NURSE: I will take you in.

Janus stands up and takes a step toward her, remembers his bag, steps back and retrieves it. Looks up at the nurse realizing that she is taller than he is.

JANUS: Ok.

The nurse leaves the waiting room through a door and Janus follows. They walk through a long hospital corridor, in the first rooms the oldest people Bill has ever seen are sitting up in beds, they are connected to respirators and intravenous tubes. They are as brittle as dead spiders. Janus and the nurse turn a corner, now rooms contain retirement aged men and women eaten by cancers, drowning from congestive heart failure. They turn again and pass middle aged people, wheezing because their lungs do not work or yellow with kidney failure. The next turn leads to young adults, accident victims, blood-stained sheets. The final turn leads to children: leukemia, birth defects. The nurse stops in front of a doorway.

NURSE: In here.

Janus nods at her and enters. His seven-year-old son, SOLOMON, sits on the rough grey carpeting. He is taking legos out of a bucket. He sticks two or three together and sets them onto the floor, then gets a few more, sticks them together and puts them somewhere else. He is already surrounded by a patternless mess of different-sized Lego clusters.

JANUS: Solomon.

The boy looks up at his father.