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This is the story of a man marked by an image from his childhood.
The violent scene that upset him,
and whose meaning he was to grasp only years later,
happened on the observation deck at Orly Airport
a few years before the outbreak of World War III.
Parents take their children to Orly on Sunday to watch the departing planes.
Of this particular Sunday,
the child whose story we're about to tell
would long remember the frozen sun,
the setting at the end of the deck,
and a woman's face.
Nothing distinguishes memories from ordinary moments.
Only later do they become memorable by the scars they leave.
That face was to be the only image from peacetime
to survive the war.
He often wondered if he'd really seen it
or just invented that tender moment
to counter the moments of madness to follow.
The sudden roar,
the woman's gesture,
the crumpling body,
and the cries of the crowd, blurred by fear.
Later he realized that he'd seen a man die.
Soon afterwards, Paris was destroyed.
Many died.
Some considered themselves victors.
Others were taken prisoner.
The survivors settled in underground passages beneath Chaillot.
Aboveground, Paris, like most of the world,
was uninhabitable, riddled with radioactivity.
The victors stood guard over a kingdom of rats.
Prisoners were subjected to experiments
apparently of great concern to those who conducted them.
The outcome was disappointment for the experimenters,
and for the subjects, either death
or madness.
One day they came to select a new guinea pig from among the prisoners.
He was the man whose story we are now telling.
He was frightened.
He had heard about the head experimenter
and was prepared to face the mad scientist
or Dr. Frankenstein.
Instead, he found a reasonable man
who calmly explained that the human race was doomed.
Space was out of the question.
The only hope for survival lay in time.
A loophole in time might make it possible
to reach food, medicine, energy.
This was the aim of the experiments:
To send emissaries into time
to summon past and future to the rescue of the present.
But the human mind recoiled.
To wake up in another time
was to be born again, as an adult.
The shock was too great.
After sending lifeless or unconscious bodies into different time zones,
the inventors now focused on men with powerful mental images.
If they could conceive of or dream of another time,
perhaps they would be able to enter into it.
The camp police spied even on dreams.
This man was selected
due to his fixation on an image from his past.
First, the present and all its supports must be stripped away.
They start again.
The subject doesn't die
or go mad.
He suffers.
They continue.
On the tenth day,
images begin to well up like confessions.
A peacetime morning.
A peacetime bedroom. A real bedroom.
Real children.
Real birds.
Real cats.
Real graves.
On the 16th day, he's on the observation deck.
It's empty.
Sometimes he finds a day of happiness,
but it's a different one.
A happy face, but it's a different one.
Ruins.
A girl who could be the one he seeks.
He crosses her path on the observation deck.
She smiles at him from a car.
Other images pour out and mix
in a museum that is perhaps his memory.
On the 30th day, the meeting takes place.
This time he's sure he recognizes her.
In fact, it's the only thing he's sure of
in this timeless world that amazes him with its riches.
All around him are astonishing materials:
Glass, plastic,
terry cloth.
When he shakes off his fascination,
the woman has disappeared.
The experimenters tighten their control
and send him back on the trail.
Time rolls back again. The moment returns.
This time he's close to her and speaks to her.
She greets him without surprise.
They have no memories, no plans.
Time takes shape painlessly around them.
Their sole landmarks are the taste of the moment
and the markings on the walls.
Later they're in a garden.
He remembers that there were gardens.
She asks him about his necklace,
the combat necklace he wore at the start of the war that is to break out someday.
He makes up an explanation.
They stop before a redwood trunk marked with historical dates.
She mentions a foreign name he doesn't understand.
As in a dream, he points beyond the tree trunk and hears himself say,
"That's where I come from"...
and falls back, exhausted.
Then another wave of time lifts him up.
They probably give him another shot.
Now she lies sleeping in the sun.
He thinks that, in the time it took him
to return to her world, she died.
She wakes up. He speaks to her again.
The truth being too fantastic to be believed,
he mentions only the essentials: A distant land,
a long way to travel.
She listens and doesn't laugh.
Is it the same day?
He no longer knows.
They'll take countless walks like this one,
and an unspoken trust will grow between them,
trust in its purest form.
No memories, no plans, until the moment he senses
a barrier ahead.
Thus the first set of experiments came to an end.
It was the starting point for a series of tests
in which he'd meet her at different times.
He meets her a few times before their markings on the walls.
She welcomes him simply.
She calls him her ghost.
One day she seems frightened.
One day she leans over him.
He never knows whether he moves toward her
or is pushed,
whether he's made it all up or is only dreaming.
Around the 50th day,
they meet in a museum filled with ageless animals.
Now their aim is perfect.
They can aim him at a given moment,
and he can stay there and move around at ease.
She too seems to have adjusted.
She accepts the ways of this visitor as a natural phenomenon,
how he comes and goes, exists, talks,
laughs with her, falls silent, listens to her,
and then vanishes.
Once back in the laboratory,
he sensed that something had changed.
The camp director was there.
From what was said around him,
he gathered that after the success of the experiments in the past,
they now meant to launch him into the future.
His excitement made him forget for a moment
that the meeting in the museum was their last.
The future was better armored than the past.
After several even more grueling attempts,
he eventually caught some waves of the world to come.
He crossed a planet transformed...
with Paris rebuilt...
10,000 incomprehensible streets.
Others were waiting for him.
It was a brief encounter.
They clearly refused this slag from another time.
He recited his lesson:
Since humanity had survived,
it couldn't refuse to its own past the means of its own survival.
This sophism was taken for fate in disguise.
They gave him a power unit
strong enough to set all human industry in motion again.
Then the gates of the future closed once again.
Shortly after his return,
he was transferred to another part of the camp.
He knew his jailers would not spare him.
He'd been a tool in their hands.
His childhood image had served as bait to train him.
He'd lived up to their expectations and played his part.
Now he only waited to be executed,
with the memory of a twice-lived moment in time somewhere inside him.
Deep in this limbo, he received word from the people of the future.
They too could travel through time,
and more easily.
There they were,
ready to accept him as one of their own.
But he had a different request.
Rather than that pacified future,
he asked to be returned to the world of his childhood
and that woman who might be waiting for him.
Once again on the observation deck at Orly...
on this warm Sunday before the war where he could now stay,
he thought confusedly how the child he'd been
must be there too, watching the planes.
But first he sought out a woman's face
at the end of the deck.
He ran toward her.
And when he recognized the man who'd trailed him from the camp,
he realized there was no escape from time,
and that that moment he'd been granted to see as a child,
and that had obsessed him forever after...
was the moment of his own death.