Flashback 2019

Fred Fitzell and his wife Karen visit Fred’s mother in a hospital where she is slipping into a deep, difficult decline. Fred works at a regular office job, but his days start to unravel as vivid flashbacks pull him back to high school. He recalls a girl named Cindy Williams and, driven by curiosity, he travels to the old high school and asks a librarian about her disappearance. The librarian’s answer hints at a drug that circulated through the school, and Fred’s mind begins to stitch together more fragmented memories. A menacing, scarred homeless man reappears in his life, appearing in his car while he’s parked in a shadowy alley, and the encounter leaves him shaken.

As the memories sharpen, Fred recalls a distinct childhood figure—a boy who seemed to pass by in high school and who bears a striking resemblance to the homeless man. The two form a strange pairing of recollections, each muttering a single word that, when finally assembled, points toward a chilling message: “I’m/in/your/lobby.” This leads Fred to the apartment lobby where he confronts the unknown man with a baseball bat, only to be drawn into a cascade of visions—visions of a mouth, and of being on a floor under others’ gaze. The moment ends with a brutal wake-up call: Fred collapses, his mind splintering from the stress of what he’s witnessed.

The thread of memory refuses to stay tied. Fred reconnects with friends from his high school days, and the flashes return with increased intensity. He remembers the drug, merc ( mercury ), and how it was sought out at a club with friends, a place where the idea of release from confinement—of breaking free from a seemingly fixed timeline—gets discussed. Back in the present, his work performance suffers, and he finds himself scrambling to deliver a crucial presentation. With his high school crew, he returns to the now-abandoned club to uncover what really happened. Inside, Fred’s memories collide with the present as he relives taking uncut merc and encounters homeless squatters and the scarred man again. Cindy returns, insisting that he never truly left the world they shared. The lines blur between the man haunted by the homeless figure and the boy who once lived through merc, as visions of mouths and watchful eyes chase him through each moment.

From these overlapping memories, Fred pieces together a startling story. An invasive lifeform, he discovers, manipulates people to perceive time in a linear fashion, a control mechanism that makes outcomes appear inescapable. The merc drug, he learns, temporarily unlocks the ability to see all possible temporal paths. He grapples with the revelation that, in high school, a violent reaction to merc led him to strike a lamp into the face of the boy, leaving a lasting scar on the past. Awake in his own bed, Fred realizes he has little time to finish the presentation at work, intensifying the pressure of crucial choices he must face in the moment.

As the present and past collide, Fred experiences a fusion of timelines. He slips back to Cindy at the abandoned club, where the two fall in love again and begin to inhabit multiple lifetimes together, roaming from the Middle East to a sunlit Mediterranean villa. They awaken back at the club in the present, still tethered to the possibility of endless routes, yet Fred comes to understand that their journey cannot continue in the same way. He returns to the day of the final exam, where his focus sharpens and he performs well, then meets his wife afterward and delivers a strong presentation, ultimately helping them secure a new home together.

The narrative then threads Fred’s emotional arc into a bittersweet conclusion. He seeks a moment of reconciliation with his mother during a hospital visit, and the recurring vision of a mouth turns out to be the memory of his mother’s voice as she cried out during a frightening moment from his infancy. There, in a rare flash of lucidity, she recognizes him, and they share a fleeting, meaningful connection. But the moment fades as she dies not long after, leaving Fred with a sense of closure tempered by loss. The journey leaves him with a profound awareness of the past’s hold on the present, the power of choice, and the enduring human longing to love across time.