Synopsis

"I drive. Just drive. Two days ago nothing was wrong... The sun came up, the sky was the right color. I was in my home. Alone as usual in my apartment. I left that day. There was a woman. A woman standing there in the road who I did not see... I heard the sound of her body hitting the front of my car and a rush came over me... It's been two days... What life did I destroy?"

Cowalker tracks a wanderer (Nick Monroy) who becomes lost in a ghost town. Out of gas, the wanderer leaves his car and sets out, finding himself somehow stranded in two places at once - a town, and a courtyard of anonymous buildings. There seems to be no way out of either of them.

I sent Nick sections of the poem in early April and the concept evolved through online discussions and ideas from both of us. Instead of being about a courtyard where the narrator forever wanders (like the poem), it became about a courtyard as a second reality to a town oddly devoid of life.

The impossible seems to be happening in both realities. This is meant to show that every viewpoint, no matter how grounded it may seem (in this case not very), is skewed. Intercut with his house explorations in the town is the courtyard from the poem, and like the poem he can never find what he's looking for because he refuses to "see" past what he wants to see. He drifts back and forth between his two distorted viewpoints as he walks alone through empty houses and dark streets.

The movie features two lines from Edgar Allen Poe's poem about a haunting past, "The Raven" ("darkness there and nothing more" and "(her) eyes had all the seemings of a demon's that is dreaming").

On 8/27/2002 a 17-minute version premiered to friends. At the end of 2003 I created a new cut of the movie, adding a new, now original, synth soundtrack. The music was co-created and co-written by Bill Montalbano and recorded in his basement studio. The 16-minute 2003 cut is the final one.