The World's Greatest/92

I'm sorry.

Transcript

{Darkness. Silence, almost, except for the gentle and distant whir of helicopter blades, which itself begins to fade into the distance. Not long now and all will be forgotten. As everything ends, a voice calls out. It belongs to Quint.}

QUINT: What? I don't understand. What is all this?

{Another voice interrupts Quint. Henry's.}

HENRY: Hello? Who is that?

QUINT: What? Who are you? Your voice sounds familiar, somehow. Which-

HENRY: How could it? I can't fathom any of this.

QUINT: I know just how you feel. I feel like I've always been here and yet-

HENRY: And yet how can I have always been here? I remember nothing. These are the first moments I have perceived.

QUINT: Exactly. This is like, the beginning of my history. But it's all I know. I have nothing to compare it against. It's my own eternity and yet its been a matter of moments. What are we, Henry?

{Short pause}

HENRY: Henry? That's my name isn't it?

QUINT: Yes and...I must be Quint. That sounds right, doesn't it? We know each other, don't we?

HENRY: We must. How else could all this feel so familiar?

QUINT: It's beyond familiar, Henry. It's almost significant somehow. Like our knowing each other was once special, in some strange way.

HENRY: But how can it have been? What here, in this world we inhabit, matters now? It's just nothingness.

QUINT: It looks like it to us. But I feel something else too. I feel like we're lost.

HENRY: Lost? That sounds right to me.

QUINT: Yeah, we had a legacy once, Henry, I can tell. Maybe not a big one, maybe not one anyone remembers but-

HENRY: Well that's just it right? Nobody remembered until now. That's why we're here, Quint. We were remembered.

QUINT: But our legacy wasn't. Anything we accomplished, for better or for worse, has been forgotten.

HENRY: Yep. And soon, I think, we'll be forgotten again too.

QUINT: And we'll return back to nothing, huh?

HENRY: Maybe we will, Quint. But we've both agreed we meant something to someone, right?

QUINT: Right.

HENRY: So before we leave again, we should take pride in that. That in some distant lifetime, you and I were important in some tiny way.

QUINT: Haha. I guess so. Do you think we'll meet again?

HENRY: It's probable. Maybe we'll mean even more next time.

QUINT: You think so?

HENRY: Oh, absolutely not. I doubt we even meant that much before, in a sense. At least, I don't think we even mattered beyond being two interchangeable names and ideas that existed for no other reason than because someone decided we should.

QUINT: Isn't that somewhat cynical?

HENRY: Oh, it is. But what do you see here? We've been remembered alongside nothing. We're abstract concepts. Any change we engineered can't really be seen, not even to the people it mattered most too.

QUINT: I don't follow.

HENRY: That's okay. Maybe it's just a personal thing, but I think I'd rather the things I actually said or did not really matter. They were probably stupid. But if me being stupid helped someone in some small way figure some things out for themselves somehow, that'd mean a lot to me.

QUINT: And I guess if we didn't do that for someone, we wouldn't be remembered at all, would we?

HENRY: I guess not. So I'm grateful we have been, even if it's just for a moment.

QUINT: Myself as well. I love you, Henry.

HENRY: I love you too, Quint. Thank you.

{Their voices fade. All is forgotten, at least for the moment.}

{End}