Thomas and Benjamin clink their glasses together and sip their sazeracs. Benjamin coughs and splutters. They get quite drunk together. Thomas confesses that his wife (Benjamin’s mother of course) died in childbirth some years ago. They clink their glasses together again, Thomas saying “to children” and Benjamin saying “to mothers”. Mr. button reveals his line of work is Buttons. He has a company? (store?) called Button’s Buttons that makes every kind of button. Their biggest competition is a zipper company called BF Goodrich.

Thomas drops Benjamin back off at the nursing home. He asks if he could come see Benjamin every once in a while. Benjamin says any time. Queenie has been worried sick. She asks where Benjamin has been. He says he was listening to music and then pukes on the floor.

Time passes. Benjamin grows up (or down?) and so does Daisy. She isn’t “all elbows and knees anymore”. Benjamin wakes her up in the middle of the night, tells her to get dressed, and they leave the house and run to Poverty Point. Mike Clark is asleep on his tugboat and it turns out he has short underpants too. Benjamin wakes him up and asks him to take them out on the boat. Even though Mike Clark is hungover and sleepy, he takes them out on a “joyride”.

It’s very foggy. They pass by a much larger ship. Captain Mike Clark says it’s “pulled in for repair like a wounded duck. She’s flying now, eh?” Daisy waves to them and says she wishes she could go with them. The ship blows its horn.

Back in the hospital, Caroline seems to hear the horn– she asks her mom if she said something. Her mom did not say anything and she is lying there like a disgusting reptile. The storm is getting really bad. Daisy says “Time just seeped out of me.” Caroline continues to read.

Time is passing. Benjamin is growing more hair. He reveals to Mrs. Lawson/Hartford/Maple that he is not getting older but younger. She says she feels sorry for him because he’ll have to see everyone he loves die before he does. She clearly does not understand the mechanics of the situation. Nevertheless, Benjamin is shaken to his core. She tells him “we’re meant to lose the people we love. How else would we know how important they were to us?” Then she dies. Benjamin is sad. Her old blind dog outlived her.

In 1936, as Benjamin is about to turn 18, he packs his bags and sets out into the world, leaving the nursing home. He says a tearful goodbye to Queenie and Tizzy. Daisy runs after him and makes him promise to “write her a postcard from everywhere”. He walks down the street holding a sack and a briefCASE.

Back in the hospital, Caroline opens up a wooden box filled with postcards, tied with a ribbon. He really did send her a postcard from everywhere, from Newfoundland to Baffin Bay.

We jump back into Benjamin’s life. He’s out on the open sea with a crew of seven. Himself, Captain Mike, Prentiss Mayes the Cookie. The Brody twins, Rick and Vic, who got along okay at sea but always fought each other on dry land. John Grimm who is a pessimist. And Pleasant Curtis who only spoke to himself.

Daisy says she wrote letters to Benjamin constantly. She wrote him a letter saying she’d been asked to audition in NYC at the school of American ballet. She was relegated to the corps, quote another dancing gypsy.

As the tugboat sails through a snowy part of the ocean, Captain Mike begins to notice that Benjamin is getting bigger and more spry than he used to be. Benjamin is officially no longer CGI.

They stayed at a hotel in Russia called the Winter Palace. Captain Mike, through a translator, argues with a group of Russians about whether or not hummingbirds are ordinary birds. He said that hummingbirds make infinity signs with their wings if you slow down the footage. The Brody twins immediately begin to fight each other.

In the hotel elevator, Benjamin meets Elizabeth Abbot, Tilda Swinton. “She was not beautiful. She was plain as paper. But she was pretty as any picture to me.” She is riding the elevator barefoot and she is married to Walter Abbot, the Chief Minister of the British Trade Mission in Murmansk, and a spy.

One night Benjamin can’t sleep and goes downstairs where Tilda Swinton is sitting on the couch. I think it must be the hotel lobby but it really seems like for some reason Benjamin is living in their hotel room. Benjamin makes a cup of tea and offers Tilda one. She declines but then changes her mind. She seems captivated by him and can’t even quite speak. Benjamin asks if she wants honey in her tea and she says yes and then he says “Hope you like flies in your honey” and shows her a honeypot full of flies. So she doesn’t get honey.

Benjamin wants to rush and pour the tea right away but she says to let it steep. Tilda Swinton is completely and utterly disarmed by Benjamin. Benjamin says he usually sleeps like a baby but something’s been keeping him up. They have a conversation about death. She is stuck here with her husband for 14 months so far.

They talk about places and things until the morning time, then go back to their rooms. Every night, they meet again in the lobby. Benjamin says “a hotel in the middle of the night can be a magical place”. We zoom into a bell at the front desk. End curio.