We are outside at the curbside. A cab is parked. The trunk is open. Derrida is standing with his bag on the ground with the driver by the open trunk. The French has opened the other back door and is taking off his overcoat. In the background of the street, amidst other traffic is a parked Baltimore police cruiser .
The American is on the sidewalk Looking at Derrida, he says, as if giving him instructions, and confirming them at once, "So, to the hotel, ...then the university..."
Derrida gives thumbs up.
In the back of the cab, Derrida settles into the backseat beside the other Frenchman, who is already reading the manuscript again..
In the front of the cab is some small paraphernalia of the Baltimore Orioles, the baseball team. It should show the bird mascot. It should be a small pendant that hangs from the mirror, or something that can oscillate materially on the dashboard.
As the cab goes into motion, the French colleague takes out the manuscript and looks at it, as if he is absorbing it as quickly as possible. Derrida turns and looks out the window.
Derrida, looking out the window, asks him about the orange and black bird.
The driver says, "that was from the World Series. You know what the World Series is?
"Ah yes, the World Series. Brooklyn Dodgers," says Derrida
"Dodgers? No not the Dodgers. We beat the Dodgers. We swept 'em. Four games to nothing. Four to nothing. We're the Orioles, the Baltimore Orioles. You're in Baltimore. Baltimore, Maryland. Baltimore won the World Series this year. Not the Dodgers. And not the Yankees either. You probably know them I beat. They're our rival. But we beat them this year, and we beat the Dodgers.
During their conversation, and in the conversational silence that follows, we see Derrida's face gazing out the window, his face and superimposed over it, around it, on the glass window, we should experience a hyper-kinetic montage sequence in the classic style of Slavko Vorkapich.
The montage should consist of what is reflected in the window of the City of Baltimore, while Derrida would be seeing it, during his way to his hotel. It should be like a many-hued primary color kaleidoscope of fragments, some coherent, sometimes too blurry, with too much velocity, to make sense, then settling into outlines of focus. The kaleidoscope need not be strictly realistic of what he would. It can be fantastical, and even imaginative, but should nevertheless remain in the ambiguous area where we cannot tell whether or not it is something in the physical world he is seeing.
Let's not specify all the things he should see yet. We can fill them in later. We will probably have ideas for this as the story goes on.
Emblems of autumn, to establish time of year of story. A stoplight changing from red to green (must see this). A yellow tow truck.
While this is happening, perhaps we hear a bit from Cecil Taylor's Unit Structures album, which came out in 1966.
Like a carousel riding coming to its conclusion, the reflection montage should come to an end with a static image, on the exterior of a hospital, specifically n emergency ward entrance. An ambulance is parked. Orderlies open the rear door.. They go inside then they carry woman very pregnant on a gurney. A nurse comes up to the gurney and bends over the woman. All this happens very quickly, almost at once.
At that moment, and for just a few beats, we are suddenly inside Derrida's black and white memory, where we are in the waiting room of a French maternity ward, and with Derrida through the window we see infants in cradles. We see his wife with the baby, and Derrida in their presence. Derrida's wife's name is Marguerite.
Derrida's memory is interrupted by his colleague's voice, expressing joy and excitement, in giving his reaction to the manuscript, and tapping the paper with his fingers.
We are back inside the cab, which is stopped. Derrida is looking at his friend. His friend seizes his sleeve of his jacket with urgency.
"Oh--oooh" (or some equivalent exclamation a French person of that era would make)
In English, "They are going to like you...or not like you. Not like you very much.
You are going to hit the home run!"
He looks at the driver for quick confirmation of his use of the term. The driver nods his ascent. We see the Oriole oscillating.
At that moment, for a beat, while Derrida absorbs this in the cab, slackening in his joviality, perhaps now for the first time experiencing the gravity of the moment, we begin to hear a speaker's voice, beginning to address an audience in formal terms of an introduction...
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