"nightmares.and.dreamscapes Season 01 Episode 04" "Ok, so, um..." "I, uh..." "I got one chance to tell the-- to explain what happened and if I'm right," "I've got about an hour to do it and I want to get it right, so... here goes." "Ahem." "My name is howard fornoy." "I was a documentary filmmaker." "I want to tell you about the end of war, the degeneration of mankind, and the death of my brother, robert fornoy, the messiah." "It's a-- it's an epic story, and it's deserving of hours, but, uh, if anyone's watching this, you'll have to settle for the cliff notes version." "What better way than this?" "I guess putting last things first, let's start at the very beginning." "Um... this is us." "Uh, the fornoys of D.C. And new hampshire." "Our summer cabin was overlooking the lake that faces the white mountains." "It's a chain that dates back about 500 million years, which by anybody's definition would be a beginning." "Uh... ok, let's forget the very beginning." "Um, my dad, richard, was a history major who made full professor at hofstra by the time he was 30." "10 years later, he was one of 6 vice-administrators of the national archives in washington, D.C." "And in line for the top spot." "By day, dad kept his eye on the declaration of independence, the constitution, and the bill of rights, you might say he filed by day and rocked by night." "He was a helluva good guy, too." "Give it up, D.C.!" "He had every record B.B. King ever cut, and he was known to play a pretty mean blues guitar himself." "as for mom, she graduated magna cum laude from brown." "Had a phi beta kappa key that she used to wear on this funky fedora." "She became a successful cpa in D.C.," "Met my dad one night at a springsteen concert and took in her shingle when she became pregnant with yours truly." "I came along in 1977." "By '80, she was doing taxes for some of my dad's associates." "By the time bobby was born in 1982, she was handling taxes, investment portfolios, and estate-planning for a dozen powerful men." "She called it "her little hobby."" "Yeah, me," "I was no disappointment to a couple of people with mensa gold cards in their wallets." "I maintained as and bs throughout school, and, uh... thanks to dad, I had an affinity for film." "Like a duck to water, I was wired with the same creative dna." "The winner for best student film is..." "howard fornoy for airborne!" "I was a good boy with a bright mind who grew up in an atmosphere of love and confidence, a faithful boy who loved and respected his mom and dad." "Bobby." "Well... bobby was a whole other story." "Drugs!" "More drugs!" "Come on, honey." "You can do it." "Honey, you can do it, babe." "Just one more push!" "This kid is so gonna pay!" "Nobody, not even mensa types like our folks, ever expects a kid like bobby." "Not ever." "Can you say da-da?" "Come on, bobby." "Come on, honey." "Say da-da." "He's only a year old, richard." "He'll talk when he's ready." "Can you say ma-ma?" "Say ma-ma, honey." "Howie, leave your brother alone." "I mean it, howie." "Bow-wow." "Honey?" "Honey, the boy is speaking." "Bow-wow." "He's saying your name, howie." "My name is howie." "Bow-wow." "Bow-wow." "Bow-wow it was, and bow-wow it was to be." "In spite of the nearly 5 years between us, we were inseparable." "He could be a royal pain, I could be a brat, but when push came to shove, we were the fabulous fornoy boys and there was nothing-- nothing that I wouldn't do for him." "Bow-wow, faster, bow-wow!" "I remember the time we found one of those thousand-piece jigsaw puzzles up in the attic, except we had lost the top of the box it came in, and no one had a clue what it was of." "The forest through the trees, the trees through the forest." "He, uh..." "he had that gift." "He read at two and began writing short essays at three." "Now, that was startling enough, but there was more." "If handwriting was no longer a factor, you would have thought you were reading the work of a bright, if extremely naive, fifth grader." "And then, he developed headaches." "Well, he would wake in the middle of the night screaming in terrible pain." "We were afraid he had some... physical problem." "Hey, son, are you sure this is on?" "Yeah." "Dad, it's fine." "You don't have to talk so loud." "I can hear you just fine." "Go ahead, mom." "Yeah." "Well, we were sure it was a brain tumor." "Your son, mr." "And mrs." "Fornoy, is in a state of extreme frustration because his writing hand isn't working as well as his brain." "You mean it's stress." "You have a child that is trying to pass a mental kidney stone." "Now, I can prescribe something for his headaches, but he really needs a different kind of drug altogether." "And so, uh, we got him a, uh... a commodore 64... with wordstar for christmas." "Then the headaches stopped." "I only want to add that for the next 3 years he believed it was santa who left the word-cruncher under the tree." "Deadline." "Um..." "I once read a really funny piece that was titled the essential gone with the wind and it went something like this" ""a war," laughed scarlet." ""Oh, fiddle-de-dee."" "Boom!" "Ashley went to war." "Atlanta burned." "Rhett walked in and walked out." ""Oh, fiddle-de-dee," said scarlett through her tears." ""I'll think about it tomorrow, for tomorrow is another day."" "Ba-ba-bam." "The fornoy boys grow up." "Howard went to university, graduated cum laude, and settled down to a successful career as a free-lance documentary filmmaker." "New york." "He was a good son." "Called home twice a week." "Stepped out with a lot of women." "Married one." "Got divorced." "Married another one, got divorced again." "My folks as great role models notwithstanding, marriage was clearly not for me, but career-wise I was doing fine, so I went to hollywood, managed to get myself nominated for an oscar." "And the award for best documentary goes to howard fornoy The search for rosebud." ""Fiddle-de-dee," said howard." "This is the life for me." "But I'm getting ahead of myself." "When I was 12 and he was 7, he told me that he had invented an airplane." "Bobby, I don't know." "I do." "I want you to push me." "Push me hard." "There's no seat belt on that crazy thing!" "I swear I never would have pushed him as hard as I did if I thought the damn thing would actually work." "I'll be all right!" "It's working!" "They say god protects drunks and fools and children." "They also say that the devil's in the details." "Bobby?" "Bobby!" "I did it." "I flew." "You did, and if you ever try it again, I'll kill you." "Ah!" "What'd you do that for?" "See, I'm crying, but I wonder if it's on a sentiment or just the onset?" "I think it's the former." "I better hurry it along, though, just all the same." "The reason I'm telling you this story is because I think the extreme case best illustrates the norm that life with bobby was a constant mind-bender." "What I haven't told you is that 4 hours ago," "I killed my brother by shooting him up with his own discovery." "He called it the calmative." "But... a very serious mistake might have been a better name." "Ok." "We've got about 40 minutes left, depending on my blood type, which I think is "a," but I'm damned if I can ever remember, so I'll just get off the dime." "xxxxxxxxxxxxxx The early years!" "One day when he was 9, he blanked out every radio and tv on our street and the surrounding 4 blocks with his own voice." "For two hours, roughly 3,000 people could receive only wbob, which happened to be my kid brother." "So, thank you, wendell of georgetown for calling with your question." "The reason my dad farts so much in church every sunday is the high sulfur content in the baked beans." "But he gets most of 'em off pretty quiet, or sometimes he holds the real bangers until it's time for the hymns." "He was the youngest student ever to take quantum physics and advanced algebra classes at georgetown university." "Gamma equals the square root of "y" subscript "r" minus "l"" "over "l" minus "y" subscript "F."" "He graduated high school at 10, but he never got a B.A. Or a B.S.," "Let alone an advanced degree." "He went througha physics period, then he was nutty for chemistry." "See, guys like bobby, they come along maybe once in a lifetime." "The da vincisand the newtons and the einsteins and the edisons, and they all had one thing in common-- they're like huge compasses swinging aimlessly for a long time, searching for some true north." "And then one day, they just hone in on it with fearful force." "Bobby was no different." "No, by the time he was 14, it was, uh-- it was archeology." "Then it was anthropology." "He was the only teenager ever invited on an expedition into the rainforests of burma." "But just as quickly as bobby would embrace these headline acts, he'd, uh, he'd move on, still looking for his true north." "Ok, here we go." "Excuse me, honey." "Bravo." "Yes, I was up all night." "When he came back from his latest adventure, he was cheerful but his little boy exuberance was gone." "He wanted to talk about the news, about how bad it was." "You know, the nightly greatest hits had left us all reeling as if we were watching a 10-car slam-up." "It depressed everybody, but it depressed the hell out of bobby." "It's the hair." "I told him he should have a little trim." "The hair?" "It looks good." "Thank you." "It's always with the hair." "Why are people so damn mean?" "Why are they so damn mean?" "Are we supposed to answer that?" "Somebody needs to." "Pretty soon, too, the way things are going." "They're going the way they always went." "And I guess they're doing it because people were built to be mean." "Yeah, if you want to lay blame, blame god." "No offense, mom." "None taken, dear." "That's cynical." "I don't believe that." "And don't try to tell me that it's because of economic pressure or conflict between the haves and have-nots because that doesn't explain everything either." "Original sin, then." "That works for me." "It's got a nice beat and you can dance to it." "A year later, here we were." "Right here." "Labor day had come and gone, as had the summer people." "We'd stayed an extra week because we just couldn't bear to go our separate ways." "Most of the stuff was packed up and the place had that sad... deserted look that it always got." "But it was a sweet, sweet morning." "And it was a beautiful day in the neighborhood." "I remember the light on the water was so perfect." "The tv was on..." "and diane sawyer... it was katie couric." "That's ok, mom." "Go ahead." "The show was interrupted with a special report... and your mother said... dick!" "Boys!" "You gotta come and see this." "There's been a tremendous explosion." "We can see thick ash and smoke rising." "I'll tell you, but that second tower's not visible from here." "There was a shower of sparks and fire and now... it almost looks like a mushroom cloud explosion." "Large billowing smoke rising from the second tower." "This is the second of the two towers hit." "You can't see behind us..." "Maybe you're right, big brother." "Maybe it is original sin." "But then what's the instrument?" "Have you asked yourself that?" "Instrument?" "I'm not following you." "What do you mean?" "Maybe it is the water." "Huh?" "It's that old joke." "Maybe it's something in the water." "Or maybe something that isn'T." "In looking back, I think that was the day he finally found it." "His, um..." "his true north." "That was the day." "All we could hope was that things would get better." "Of course as you know, they only got worse." "And the world continued on its merry way-- looking for a band-aid here, a band-aid there, a quick fix and fast-fast-fast relief and I think instant cure-all wasn't even remotely possible anymore." "As for bobby, he continued on to points unknown." "We'd get a postcard back for a birthday or an anniversary, and he always promised that he was coming home soon." "But I didn't see him until he showed up in my apartment4 years later." "Bobby." "Hey, bow-wow." "Come here, you jerk." "Where the hell you been?" "Good." "I got a lot to tell you." "Yeah." "Well, I should think so." "It's certainly been a while." "What can I offer you?" "A beer?" "Sure." "What've you got there?" "Bees and wasps." "Wasps and bees." "Ok." "What kind of crazy-ass thing are you up to now?" "Do you see this?" "What is it?" "Water, white lightning?" "Well, it's both actually, if you can believe that." "It came from an artisan well in la plata." "It's a little town in texas." "Now before I turned it into this concentrate, there were 5 gallons of it." "It's only water, but it's still the damndest popskull the human race has ever seen." "This is it," "The big one." "The cure for the worst disease to which we homo saps fall prey." "Cancer?" "No." "Wars." "Barroom brawls." "Drive-by shootings." "Meanness." "This, big brother, this is going to change it all." "This is going to bring about an end to the whole mess." "I think you ought to get your hand out of there now, bobs." "Relax." "You ever see a bee sting a flower?" "You don't look like a flower." "Hell, you think bees actually know what flowers look like?" "No way, man." "They know I'm sweet because I excrete sucrose dioxin in my sweat, although I did eat a box of chocolate-covered cherries on the plane." "Jeez, bobby." "Some 400 bees had investigated him." "Only one had stung." "Make that two." "So... have you directed anything good lately?" "Piece on nazi art theft for pbs this fall." "I could screen it for you if you like while you're here." "Oh, that'd be great." "Bobby, what the hell are you up to?" "Hey, could you get this other one?" "I keep telling myself if I'm so damn smart," "I should be ambidextrous, but my right hand still has the I.Q. Of like 6." "You see, bow-wow, bees are nature's kamikaze pilots." "They don't sting you unless they have to, because it kills them." "Remember that time in the cabin when you told me we'd go on killing each other because of original sin?" "Ok." "if that's true, if--if there is a god who loves us enough to send us on a rocket sled to hell just because stupid eve took a bite out of a bad apple, then maybe the curse is this" "he made us like wasps, instead of bees." "Howie, what the hell are you doing?" "Just hold still and I'll get it." "Ok.The two bees that stung me, they're dead because their stingers are barbed like fishhooks." "They slide in easy enough, but when they go to pull out, they disembowel themselves." "That's pleasant." "wasps,on the other hand, they have smooth stingers." "They can keep stinging you as long as they want." "Of course, on the third or fourth time they're out of poison, but they can keep on pumping you full of holes if they feel like it." "And usually they do." "That's the same reason we go on fighting." "On and on and on, bow-wow." "We got smooth stingers." "Now watch this." "So... what's with the folks?" "They're good." "They miss the hell out of you." "You should try to see them while you're here." "I will." "Let's roll." "Hey, what are you doing?" "Same old wuss." "See, the thing with bobby is, is that when you were with him for more than 5 minutes, he hypnotized you." "He was lucy holding the football, promising this time for sure, and I was charlie brown rushing down the field to kick it." "Don't kill 'em!" "You might as well kill babies for all the harm they'll do you." "That's the whole point." "Get that out of here!" "I'm gonna ask you to do something for me, bobby." "No!" "I want you to trust me." "No!" "Are you out of your mind?" "!" "Come on." "Come sit down over here." "Come on." "Come sit down." "Look, they're just dandy." "Their behavior isn't drugged, and yet they're not terminally pissed off, either." "Watch 'em, watch 'em." "Pretty cool, huh?" "I think I knew even then that something was going to go terribly wrong." "These are amazing." "*********" "*******" "As you know, texas is,per capita, the most violent state in the union." "They just love to shoot each other down there." "It's like a state hobby." "Except for la plata?" "they like their guns there, too." "They just use them on each other a hell of a lot less." "The thing is, when you feed enough statistical data in the computer about this little town, what you get back is a whopper of an anomaly." "It took us 6 months to come up with this program." "I call it a calmquake." "What am I looking at here?" "The numbers represent the incidence of violent crimes in each particular circle." "Murder, rape, assault and battery,you name it." "The computer assigns a number by a formula that takes population density into account." "Now, this... it says zero." "So it does, bow-wow." "You see, the old joke was right." "It is something in the water after all." "And the water in la plata-- it's a doozy." "We weren't the first to test the water." "Most people there have wells, so the water's tested regularly." "But we were the first to test it submicroscopically." "And that turned into really weird stuff." "What kind of weird stuff?" "breaks in the chains of atoms, subdynamic electrical fluctuations, and this unidentifiable protein." "And the protein was the interesting thing, because as far as we know, it only occurs one other place." "That's the human brain." "What we've come up with will greatly suppress human aggression." "It'll make people unable or unwilling to fight." "Bobby," "I love you, man." "But this-- this is the craziest thing that I've ever heard." "You want crazy?" "Protestors continue to clash with... that's crazy." "They are talking..." "Studies support" "Bombing raids will continue to target... second The fire,which is still raging... that's crazy 8 ways to beat the band." "Me?" "I'm not crazy." "Ok." "Here we go. just arrived." "Throat dryness." "there's not so much so far, but I can't kill myself, so, uh... god, I got so much to tell." "Suppose it can all be done, ok?" "And suppose it all goes completely according to plan." "You don't have the slightest idea what the long-term effects might be." "Howie-- -d-don't even suggest that you do, bobby, because you don'T." "You remember thalidomide?" "nifty little pill, caused birth defects all across the globe." "Or how about the aids vaccine that they found?" "Stops the disease but all the test subjects turn into incurable epileptics who died within the first 18 months." "Howie, this is-- no, how do you know this isn't the same thing?" "How do you know that this is not going to come back and bite you in the ass?" "I don'T." "I don'T." "It's too late, man." "The way we're going now, there might not be a long-term." "The world needs heroic measures." "Maybe we can cure the whole mess." "Or maybe we're giving heroin to a patient with terminal cancer." "I don't know." "But either way, we stop what's happening now." "We put an end to the world's pain." "Help me, bow-wow." "Please." "Please help me." "Please." "look at the time." "depending on my blood type, which if I'm wrong is" "did I already tell you that?" "Ok." "A week later I flew to la plata where I met up with bobby and duke rogers-- geology professor extraordinaire." "How are you?" "You got a good flight?" "Not bad at all." "Not bad at all." "Duke rogers, my brother howie." "Nice to meet you." "Very nice to meet you." "A pleasure.Let me take that." "Watch this." "You're not going to believe it." "2 males, 30s." "Intoxicated." "Talk about a sociological bull moose." "Look at my car, man." "Anywheres else in the country, them boys would be in the police blotter with name tags on their big toes." "here's to you." "This is what we've been brewing, howie." "It's pacifist white lightning." "Now, the water in this part of texas is fierce, but we've been able to make this stuff I sprayed the wasps with 10 times more potent." "We've got near 6,000 gallons now." "By the end of the year, we'll have 14,000." "Come next june, 30,000." "but it's not enough." "We need more of it and we need it faster." "And we need to transport it." "Transport it where?" "Why, to the volcano." "This is the island of gulandio." "It lies 120 miles due east of borneo." "The natives call the volcano that's on it mount grace." "It's pretty perfect,isn't it?" "Like krakatoa, grace is going to explode." "When krakatoa erupted, debris from it literally encircled the globe." "Changes in climate lasted 5 years." "Nipa palm, which is grown only in africa and micronesia, suddenly showed up in south and north america." "Krakatoa seeded them there." "That's the way I want to seed la plata water all over the earth." "I want people to walk out on la plata water when it rains and it's going to rain a lot after mount grace goes bang." "I want them to drink the water that falls in their reservoir and bathe in it, wash their hair in it, soak their damn contact lenses in it." "And you're going to do this how?" "We need to synthesize 50-70,000 gallons of the high test, then we airlift it over to mount grace, drop it in." "Of course, it's going to take money to do that." "A lot of money." "And that's where you come in, big brother." "You're sure this stuff is safe?" "Of course, you wouldn't want to drink the concentrate." "That's a real brain-buster.But... the way we're going to disseminate it, it's perfectly safe." "No problemo." "And this little time bomb of yours, when exactly is it wired to go off?" "By october next year, probably sooner." "How much money?" "It cost millions." "Lots of millions." "But still, it was less than a blink in the eye of what we spent on defense any month that year." "I raised most of it myself." "Some by hook and some by crook." "I had made a lot of friends in high places." "Some in low places." "in short, I knew a lot of folks who thought that things weren't changing that much no matter who was in the white house." "We did it." "We distilled the water into high-test and airlifted it over to gulandio-- grace, fate, destiny, what have you." "man." "That blows." "What is that?" "Hydrogen sulfide." "Talk about your ultimate fart, huh?" "It's as if god himself busted through all the business-as-usual transmissions" ""This is your last chance,jerkwads!"" "You sure about this, bobby?" "As sure as I can be." "I ended up running at the football while my laughing, wildly intelligent brother held it one last time." "That volcano we called grace blew just when it was supposed to." "Everything went sky-high, and for a while, everybody's attention turned away from whatever and toward the skies." "And then fiddle-de-dee,just like that, it happened pretty fast." "There were 3 years of indian summer." "3 years like eden." "I mean, everybody stood down." "The world got like the wasps in bobby's nest-- the ones that didn't stink--sting too much." "But, like they say, the devil's in the details." "Ok." "Listen,you know how we... mom?" "Hello, dear." "You have 6 darts, 9 balloons on the board." "3 balloons have prizes." "Pop those 3 and you'll-- mom, I've been trying to reach you all day." "Where you been?" "I've been so busy." "I wanted to get this done before the baby was born." "How was school today, dear?" "It's about mom." "Dad and I just got back from the doctor." "Bobby... she's got alzheimer'S." "What do you mean," "This is our calmquake graph charting the acts of violence increasing as you left la plata." "Right." "Now this graph shows the incidence of something else." "Something else?" "People are going to get very silly very young." "Alzheimer's?" "In spades." "It's going to sweep the land." "You're sure?" "There was no way to know that the potency, rather than level off gradually like we thought, would keep increasing exponentially." "How many?" "Oh, everybody." "Everybody on la plata?" "No." "Everybody." "Ain't that a cosmic kick-in-the-head." "my gears are starting to get a little sticky." "Should've hurried more." "Never mind." "It's too late to change things now." "Let's move on." "Moving on." "Zippity-doo." "Roll tape." "All our prognosticators suggest that this new virus will make the aids epidemic look like a mere blip on the radar." "There appears to be simply no... and I repeat no way to contain it." "After a brief flurry of optimism, the W.H.O.Has acknowledged it is having no... countering the disease which is... spreading around the globe at an al-alarming... rate." "As you know by now, it created worldwide panic." "Me and bobby were as careful as we could be for the next two years." "Drank only bottled water and wore big sleek-- slickers in the rain." "So, no war, but everybody got a little... silly." "Almost everybody on this big round world of ours." "It wasn't reversible, there was no immunity to it, no vaccine, nothing we could do." "Nada." "Zip." "Now, pop..." "I need you to sign this so that I can take care of you guys." "Do you understand?" "Are you from the government?" "No, dad." "It's, it's howie." "I'm your son." "They're doing things in the basement." "Terrible things." "It's ok." "It's all right, dad." "It's ok." "everybody let's have some fun you only live but once and when you're dead, you're done so let the good times roll let the good times roll" "I don't care if you're young or old get together..." "My folks died raving and pissing in their pants, but I never stopped loving 'em." "concentrate, jerkwad." "Concentrate." "Bobby went on with his research at la plata but to no avail." "Then one morning he couldn't sleep, and he went into the laboratory early." "dude, no loafing on the job." "Don't stand out in the rain, fool." "Glad to see you." "Remember when you could see the high-intensity arc-sodiums from north conway?" "Not anymore." "Just the white mountains out there now." "I need to ask you to do something for me." "I need a favor." "A big favor." "I'm not doing it, bobby." "I can't do it." "A wuss right until the end." "I'm a wuss." "I'm a candyass.All right?" "I always was," "I always will be." "That's who I am." "It's no big whoop, kiddo." "Just one little push and a final ride." "Bobby, come on." "There's got to be another way." "Please." "Push me, bow-wow." "Push me hard." "I did it." "I killed him by shooting him up with a highly concentrated dose of his own discovery 4 hours ago" "I'm sorry." "I made the world full of fools and dumbbells." "better fools and dumbbells than a big black cinder in space." "Forgive me." "Promise me." "Tellid, ba-wa." "Tell... story... what happened." "Swear." "I will." "This was all predicted." "Revelations said the end would come." "That god would strike the infidels and that judgment would be his." "And now the end has come." "And now I think I'm done." "What do you think?" "Is anybody watching this?" "Bobby, bobby." "Way to go, bow-wow!" "My name is howie." "Faster, bow-wow!" "Goodbye, goodbye." "Time to stop." "Goodbye, bobo." "Not your fault." "Hi, dad." "I forgive you, bobby." "It's not your fault." "I'll be all right!" "I did it." "I flew!" "And if you ever try it again," "I'll kill you!" "What'd you do that for?" "I love you." "Goodbye, bobo." "Time to stop." "Goodbye, bobo." "Goodbye." "Goodbye." "I forgive you." "It wasn't your fault." "I forgive you.It wasn't your fault." "I forgive you," "I forgive you." "I love you." "I forgive you." "I love you." "ÿÿÿ"