Carl: So here’s the story:

1: How can someone explain them self?

2: I was lost on the ocean for so long. I floated for days and days. I was lost for so long, I lost all knowledge of anything. I didn’t wonder who am I, but what am I? I drifted for years it seemed.

1: How can someone truly justify them self?

2: When I landed on the beach, I knew what I was, no longer who, no longer where or when, or how, but what. What. What was the most important thing that I could say. The man asked me ‘have you flown far?’ I said: ‘I come… from America’.

1: Life’s a different story when you’re facing death… I don’t know exactly what else to say.

2: Being lost of the waves caused me to wonder what I truly knew. What I could expect to return to. If I could expect to go anywhere. If I could hope to end up somewhere. If I could believe that there was something out there. There was an island. There was a place. But I don’t know if it was somewhere.

1: When you’re in the thick of something, you can’t wonder about perspectives, you just have to… act.

2: I landed in a foreign place, a foreign land, but still I could communicate with him. He smiled when he looked at me. He had such tenderness in his eyes. I smiled back when I spoke. It was a simple place, a simple time. A simple land. I wondered if it was a simple time.

1: I wonder just what other people have done in the same situation. I wonder- could they have done the same? Would they have done better?

2: Washing up on a beach is so disconcerting. You have no idea what the place could be. Awaking on a stretch of land could mean something like you’ve wound up on a continent, or there could be simply more ocean on the other side of those trees. A beach is a transient place, when you wash up on one, you are part of that transience. You are yourself going to be gone. So soon.

1: Simply surviving. Lasting. That is the only solution. The only answer.

2: I was transient, I ended up on that beach, and on that island. I am just bones. Bones and dust now. What I was is no longer true or relevant. It is simply the frame on which my flesh was draped. I am but bones on a coastline.

1: I survived. I lasted. Should I have?

2: I don’t know how long I lived for. Everything is the same on the equator.

1: I have lived such a life, but there are so many shells in my past, so many questions unanswered. So much time that has been lost for others. The loss inflicted by my hand. Maybe not my hand though… but rather by a hand that also guided mine.

2: I was lost on a island paradise, and no matter how long I lived, it wasn’t long enough.

1: No matter how long they lived, it wasn’t long enough. Their only impact was to become images on a screen. Images of grief, carnage, hate, love, and the true hopelessness of humanity. Murder will always exist. And perhaps that’s my fault.

2: Time disappears; responsibility disappears, once you’re in the Promised Land.

1: Everything I’ve done, what has it led to?

Carl: Two plots, completely unrelated and yet inextricably linked. What can link two stories? What can force two people to be qualified as the same tale? Why are they the same? Are they even different characters? Are they even different thoughts? They link, they are not the same. I tell you this, but can they truly be extricated? Two people talking, or not talking, ever so briefly. Where is the reality in this exchange? Is it just a tale? Is there a kernel of truth? Who are these people? Why are they together?