On the Subject of Society

A Short Story.

Part 1: The Mechanism of Wanting

Waves crashed and rolled down the surf, raking across the yellow sand. The water would rush back and curl up, tensing like a lion ready to pounce. Then in a rush and flurry of foam it would crash once more on the Castaway’s little beach.

The Castaway sat there. His dark hair and beard were the definition of scraggly. His skin was tan, and his clothes were tattered, and yet he was still more boy than man. He looked from one end of the beach to the other. It stretched north and south. The sunlight was just beginning to touch its edges, softening them with a warm gold.

Far off to the north there stood the ruins of some mansion. An abandoned palace high atop a bluff. The place stands as a monument to a forgotten memory and the fearsome force of the sea. The Castaway thought of the building’s concrete columns, the piles of shattered glass, and the little white and gray cat that roamed the overgrown grounds.

“If I sit here long enough, will the sea-spray and the sea air, and the sea salt wear me down in the same way?” The boy wondered aloud. Could it be true that the Castaway was just as apart, just as isolated, and just as forgotten as that old estate?

The coldness of the morning stirred the Castaway to move. Sunlight had started to claim a patch of sand to the south. The Castaway picked himself up and walked in that direction. He was hunched over from the cold. He settled into the sand, which was still a little damp from high tide. The boy traced his finger across the ground, absentmindedly etching intricate designs into the Earth.

As the sun began to warm him, the Castaway found that his mind had drifted far away. He could take refuge in his memories. But he never did. He could sit there, comforted by the joyous, the sweet, and the heartwarming moments of his past. But he never did. He barely gave the past a glance, instead he would focus on all the things that never happened. All he thought about was what he hoped would happen.

Faces from the past were morphed and molded into new companions. Some shared the same words and mannerisms as their old selves, but most didn’t. Most just sounded like the Castaway. Were they pretentious? Were they solemn or silly? He was alone, so was there really any way to tell?

These new imaginary organisms would say all the words the Castaway was longing to hear.

“I know you, down to your bones and back,” one face said, framed by brown curls.

“Everything you will ever need is inside of you,” another cheered, beaming like the sun.

“You’re not who you used to be, and that’s okay. I accept who you were and who you will be,” one with wrinkles said.

The newly manufactured memories centered on the Castaway, finally giving him everything he felt he lacked. Sometimes the boy drummed up deep words aimed at healing old wounds. Other times, the Castaway would spend hours constructing conversations about nothing; small talk with no aim other than whittling away time.

“Shadows are strange, they sway back and forth with the wind, pretending to be affected by it.”

“Do you think birds are flying around, dipping and diving for the fun of it? Or to show off for us?”

“Would you want to live forever?”

Sometimes the Castaway would spend hours focusing on nothing more than these fake conversations. He would imagine returning home and just talking about the little things like how he cracked open a coconut with his bare hands, or how he had burnt himself while learning to build a fire.

He imagined it all so often, the fictions had become more like memories. The funny thing was that he had 25 years of home-made movies to play and replay in his head, but he never ever did. The real memories were always outweighed by the artificial ones.

As his rough hands slipped across a surface dotted with tiny pebbles and shattered shells, the Castaway’s brain grasped for an old phrase. It took a moment, and then he found it. “The Grass is always Greener.” Could that explain why he only ever seemed to focus on the things that never actually happened?

The feeling of cold cut through the boy’s musings once more. It was still early in the morning, the sun was barely up, and he had been stationary too long. The Castaway stood up, shaking off the thoughts he had gotten lost in. He started to walk. His bare feet clomped through the wet sand. The sun was on his slightly sore shoulders, and it was on a rocky outcropping just down the beach from him.

The sea had long ago cut its way through a towering cliff on the southern edge of the beach. Nature had carved out a cave for itself. The Castaway could imagine the kind of force required to tear into rock. Every night, when the waves were high, he could hear them hit upon the boulders like thunder; bold, loud, and certainly shattering.

The Castaway had never entered the cave. Every day curiosity would drive him close to its entrance. Every day the waves would crash and water would rush inside, tearing and whirling into the stone chamber with terrifying force. It always seemed too dangerous to enter. One step into that flooded chamber could spell disaster.

Normally, the Castaway would gaze at the dark entrance for a while, and then walk back down the beach in search of food, or to occupy himself with some other survival-oriented task. That’s what would normally happen.

The Castaway blinked. He thought he saw dancing silhouettes. People? In the cave? His ears strained. He thought he caught a song and sweet laughter echoing out of the cold cave. The song sounded like it was coming from a speaker. The laughs sounded like a group was enjoying a beach day, lounging around and cracking up over little things.

Without hesitation, and with very little forethought, the Castaway rushed in. He had never dared enter. Now, it was all he wanted. What if it was people? What if the Cave had an exit on the other side, and he had just never known about it? His old world could be just around the corner.

Part 2: The Mechanism of Drowning

The water was knee high, and as the Castaway splashed through it, he shouted “Hello! Is anyone here? Please is-” his voice failed him.

The rocky interior was dim, yet clearly empty. The only two things inside the cave were the Castaway, and the swirling sea water. It churned and churned. The tide rushed in as waves crashed outside. The water started to deepen dramatically. It whirled around the Castaway’s waist like a vortex, sucking at him with startling strength.

The force was too much. In an instant, the Castaway lost his balance, and then his footing. He toppled. The water, now a whirlpool, slammed him into rough rock walls. Salt stung his lips. The Castaway clung to a stone. He fought the tide with all his might, digging his feet into the sand.

The water sucked at him, the stone was slick, too slick to hold on to. The water was rushing out of the cave, back out to the endless sea. The pull was overwhelming! His legs trembled. As he held on for dear life, the Castaway’s eyes scanned the dim interior of the cave, hoping he had missed something. He really was the only one there. His eyes strained, searching for a second exit, or for some other sign of a world beyond the rocks.

It was a dead end, and it didn’t even matter anymore. The seawater rushing out of the cave was too much to withstand. The Castaway lost his grip on the rocks. In that same moment, a chunk of driftwood collided with his shin! Pain and fear shot through the Castaway as he was swiftly pulled underwater and out of the cave.

The Castaway twisted and tumbled in the undertow. He was raked along the ground. His lungs screamed. He was dizzy and scared, and everything was a blur- then his head collided with a rock. For a moment everything was black and blank, and then he saw a single vision: brown benches, and a big room. Voices were discussing, debating, something obscure. The Castaway saw a boy with his face and his eyes, a dark suit, and soft hands.

Pain exploded in the Castaway’s brain, shattering the memory. His face slammed against something rough and hard. His body scraped against rocks and sand. Water was in his lungs. Everything felt cold. Everything sounded loud and vague. He was choking and completely unable to fight the current. Then, with a series of helpless tumbles, he was back above the waves, back on land. The sea spat him out onto shore like a rag-doll. The Castaway lay on his little beach, coughing, gasping and exhausted. In his mind, he caught another dim glimpse of that faraway room. Parking Tickets. That’s what they had been debating.

He lay there, crumpled and half drowned. The roar of the waves seemed a world away. The boy could taste salt and blood. He clung to the sand for what felt like hours. He was bruised, battered, and bleeding.

His breathing was labored. He was face down in golden sand. It was warm against his cheek. Slowly, that warmth seemed to creep into him. Eventually, the boy glanced up at his surroundings. A crab, squat and ugly, waddled past. There were flecks of purple on the creature’s shell. The Castaway watched the crab pass by with a strange fixation. There was something reassuring about it.

“Life goes on,” he said to himself meekly. With that, the boy rolled over. He lay on his back a while, watching the sun trace a course through an infinite blue canvas.

At some point, the Castaway heard a bird cry. He sat up. His ribs were sore, and his cuts stung. The boy knew that he should tend to his wounds soon, but for the moment, he was still too weak. He was still too broken.

A bird soared out over the ocean, then out of nowhere, it did a backwards flip, and plunged straight down, towards the waves. In the half-second before it hit water, the bird flipped once more, and came to rest lightly, and calmly, upon the rolling sea.

The boy watched the bird for a while. He thought it might be a pelican of some sort, but he couldn’t be sure. Nature had never held much of an interest for him, at least not in his old life.

A few other pelicans arrived at the scene. They executed the same maneuvers as the first. The Castaway stared at the aeronautics display. His attention then shifted to how blue the horizon was. The sea and sky just seemed to stretch on forever, and the two great planes contained a hundred shades of blue. There was a distinct beauty to it.

A crab waddled by a second time, and the Castaway cracked a smile. Finally, he got up, ready to live again.

That night, the Castaway lay down to sleep. His fire was glowing warm, red, and low. He lay on his bruised back and looked up at the sky. It was funny how familiar the stars had become. In all the sleepless nights he had once spent wandering the streets of his concrete jungle, he had rarely ever looked up to see the stars. Now the twinkling lights were his most dependable, most constant companions. The night’s face had become familiar.

The boys back in the billiards hall on 29th knew nothing about the stars. They had all spent their nights smoking and drinking, dreading Monday morning. None of them knew how to build a fire, or make medicine out of herbs and leaves, or gut a fish. Now the Castaway had become Captain Ahab, and Prometheus, and Tarzan, and he had learned to love those stars.

As his fire died down that night, the Castaway finished a chapter of his newly started novel. A battered notebook and pen were some of the only possessions he had successfully scavenged from his wreck. The novel was really more of an auto-biographical diary. The boy figured that if he was going to sit here, with his heart and brain ticking away, he might as well mark the time. He might as well use the time to create something.

The latest chapter had been all about his fears. He had been terrified earlier that day while tumbling around underwater. That was a different breed of fear than the kind he was familiar with. It came and it went, just like the tide. After the waves slammed the boy back on the shore, the danger had quickly receded, and so had the fear.

A life time ago, the Castaway used to curl up on the floor of his bedroom. He would be physically fine, with no scrapes or scratches to treat on the surface, but on the inside, the boy was filled with turmoil.

He always did his best. He would work hard, he would strive to carry his responsibilities with excellence, but no matter how hard he tried, anxiety would still gnaw away at him.

Most days he was okay, he could bounce from worry to worry, tackling each with a cool confidence. He would rush around his life paying bills, running errands, and putting out fires. He would stay up late, ironing his shirts for court, working long into the night, and pushing sleep away so that he could breathe for just a little while longer.

Sometimes though, the weight of his worries would get to be just a little too much.

In his novel, the Castaway wrote: “I used to call in sick. I’d pick some excuse that they can’t really disprove, like a bad headache or a nauseous stomach. The lie and the idea of missing work would make me anxious, but in those moments, I was already feeling the weight of a thousand tiny anxieties. What’s 1 or 2 more? On those days, I’d wake up with plenty of time to get ready and go to work, but I wouldn’t be able to bring myself to. I’d lie down on my floor from 7 am to around Noon, doing absolutely nothing other than letting the fear wash over me. That kind of fear was infectious, it got in and it never seemed to leave. I would usually fall asleep around 12 pm, just lying there. I’d drift off, and then wake up at 1 or 2 in the afternoon. Unravel. I’d haul myself back up, out of the depths, and go off to get some fresh air.”

Those moments seemed unpredictable yet inevitable. Surprisingly, the Castaway could not recall a single incident like that in the 212 days he had spent on the little beach.

As he lay down to sleep, the Castaway tucked his manuscript and his ball point pen into a rough-hewn bag woven together from plant fibers. The pen was drying up, but the Castaway was unbothered. He’d started a method of crushing berries into ink. It stained his fingers, but the fragrance was sweet and comforting.

His eyes closed. He rubbed his sore, toned arms. He drifted off to sleep.

All of a sudden, the Castaway heard a great boom cut through the night. The Castaway’s eyes snapped open, he jumped and whirled about. It wasn’t just a large wave. The noise had seemed louder, and larger. It practically shook the world. The Castaway wondered for a moment if he had washed up on Bikini Atoll and a wave of radiation was about to wipe him out. His eyes scanned the dark beach before him.

There was a massive, hulking shape on the shore. The Castaway felt drawn toward the monolith. As he approached, he glanced up at the stars. They started to swirl. The Castaway was shocked to discover the shape on the beach was an impossibly huge tortoise. The creature was larger than a car. It was beached and bleeding. Blood poured from a gash in its over-sized neck.

The Castaway’s green eyes widened, trying to make sense of what was before him. The tortoise lay there, eyes closed, fins spread out, crimson blood dripping onto stark white sand. As he examined the Tortoise’s neck wound, the Castaway shuddered to think what could have killed such a large creature.

Then, the Tortoise opened its eyes and stared at the boy. “Who were you before your parents were born?” the Tortoise asked calmly, in a voice as deep as the blue.

The next moment the Castaway awoke. He was on his makeshift bedroll, beside his burnt-out fire. The sun was just starting to rise.

Part 3: The Mechanism of Searching

The Castaway was filled with questions, but if there was ever anyone to ask, they were long gone. He was exploring the ruins once more. That old palace to the north had caught his eye the first day he washed up on his little beach.

He had scoured the abandoned grounds so many times, searching for a hint of a connection to the outside world. To his old world. Today, he was just curious about who once lived there.

Whoever built the place liked painted murals of fruit and plants. An abandoned kitchen, one of two, was decorated with images of glass bowls filled with yellow mangoes, pink pomegranates, and dark purple grapes. It was the kind of still-life art you make in the 2nd grade, as an art teacher with a permanent scowl and frizzy hair peers over your shoulder and analyzes your work through half-moon spectacles.

The Castaway searched the abandoned mansion for hours. There was an old dial-up telephone, cream colored, with a cord that went nowhere. Every time he visited, the boy would pick it up with his dirty, calloused hands, dial numbers and ask for pizza deliveries. He'd make prank calls. He remembered making those same prank calls a very long time ago with a group of friends. The pimple-clad teens would laugh and laugh. A woman with a severe tone, and no doubt, an even more severe look than that old art teacher called them “impolite” and “rude”. There isn’t much use for words like that when the only person you have talked to in a long while is a dreamt-up talking tortoise.

The Castaway continued his exploration, but his thoughts lingered on the old telephone and those silly jokes. As he wandered through the forgotten rubble and worn-down opulence he thought about how truly empty jokes can be when you have no one to share them with. The boy could not remember laughing once in all the time he had been marooned here. There isn’t anything to laugh about when you are alone, he figured.

The boy moved on to another room. The mansion was a collection of five buildings, connected by gardens and paths. His favorite spot to visit was a tower, painted white and blue, and perched on top of a spacious living room. The tower had an outdoor staircase; A series of stone beams, stabbed horizontally into the wall. The stairs spiraled up and around the tower. Gaps of empty air separated each step.

When the Castaway reached the top this time, he was surprised to see the little gray-white cat curled up and looking like the definition of tranquility. The boy couldn’t imagine that tiny cat could ever be big enough to jump its way up the stairs. Nonetheless, here it was, at the top of the tower, overlooking a rolling ocean.

“Nature finds a way, I guess.” The Castaway mused. He sat down beside the soft creature. It jumped into his lap. He began talking to it tenderly. “Do you, have any special messages for me?”

The cat yawned, and a part of the Castaway thought that the tortoise’s same deep, calm voice might roll out of the cat’s mouth. He had been pondering that dream all day. Something about the tortoise’s words had struck a chord deep inside the boy.

Living alone on his Little Beach, the boy often felt like he was still adrift out on the ocean. With each day he would drift farther and farther from that bar on 29th, and from his cramped apartment. His parent’s modest suburban home might as well have been on another planet at this point. The hulking creature’s questions had reminded the Castaway of how far away he really was. Not just from his old home, but from his old self.

“Am I who used to be?” The Castaway asked the cat, staring deeply into its almond-shaped eyes. About 2 weeks after the Castaway washed ashore, he had begun to feel as though the isolation was scraping off chunks of his identity. He felt like he was forgetting who he used to be and how his mind used to work. His old priorities had been wiped away. The little things like his Social Security number and his bosses’s birthday had fallen out of his head. He had even started thinking about things differently.

For the first few months, the boy would still have the occasional dream about being late to work, or discovering that he was still in college and that it was time for finals. At a certain point, those dreams just fell away. The boy didn’t even notice it. However, he had noticed that he had begun to treat somethings differently. His father had always hated hunting and fishing. The Castaway used to feel the same way, but now he would gut a fish and feel a sense of pride in himself.

His mother had conditioned him to avoid the ocean. Yesterday, when the Castaway was laying on that beach, bleeding and half-drowned, he thought that his mother couldn’t have been more correct, and that she should have warned him about caves too. But in truth, the Castaway had reached a certain level of confidence with the water. He would go for morning and mid-afternoon swims. Sometimes he would even go out in the wild dark and feel wholly at home. The feeling of cool water had become so familiar, it was like a second skin.

He could balance atop the waves with a certain grace, and when they would get violent, his heart would leap with anticipation more often than fear.

The ways in which the Castaway used to identify himself had fallen away.

“I don’t… well, I think I’m quieter than I used to be,” The Castaway confided in his little friend. The cat just meowed lazily in response.

“I don’t know, maybe I was. I mean, I certainly didn’t use to talk to animals so much.” The boy joked. “It’s becoming a habit.” The cat got up, stretched, and began walking off. The Castaway barely noticed.

“I wonder, if I live here for 30 years and then go home… I wonder, will it feel like home? I just mean… well, take my parents for example,” the boy started to monologue, like he was back in court building an argument. “They raised me, knew me, and influenced me for 25 years. If I spend 30 years out here, alone, with just nature and this little beach for parents, then which set raised me? If I spend the next 50 years out here, and everything from before is a distant memory, then would any of it matter as much as the life I had here?”

Something inside the Castaway cracked after saying that. A wave of sadness hit him in the chest. The sadness was quickly replaced with frustration. He shot to his feet.

“Is this my life? Is this my life!” He shouted. “What… who am I supposed to be?” his voice softened for a moment. Then, another wave of frustration hit. He swung his arms about, gesturing to the world around him, and his voice took on an edge. “Is this who I am!” he demanded to know from the empty estate.

The Castaway might as well have been shouting out into the void, demanding to know if there was anyone out there. All he wanted was someone to be out there, to see him.

He slumped back down to a sitting position. His face felt hot. A sob swelled up in his chest, an emotional bubble was expanding inside of him. Just as his eyes started to warm, the bubble burst and the boy tilted his head back like he was trying to keep it above water. The Castaway stared up at the sky. It was turning from a brilliant yet pale blue to a deeper azure.

A few jungle birds, big black shapes with curved wings, soared high overhead. The sound of the waves was still there. It was always there. A rhythm that never failed. On the harder, lonelier, days, the Castaway would often turn to that rhythm for comfort. He could use it to steady his jagged breathing. That’s just what he did this time.

Sitting in that estate, the Castaway found refuge in that sky, and in the birds, and in the little cat, where it had wandered off to. He lay on his back, his hair spread out all around him. The concrete was cool against his skin. A few ants marched past. The world buzzed all around him, and the boy just lay back and watched it for a while.

As he lay there, the Castaway let the breeze enter his lungs; slow and calm. The boy took a moment, looked around, and marveled at how beautiful it all could be.

Part 4: Closing Arguments

The sunset was beautiful. A solitary, slowly sinking ball of radiance framed by sky and sea. The clouds, golden and pink, stretched out above the horizon line. The sea, shining and shimmering, rolled back and forth beneath that bright disk. It all took on an orange fire.

The Castaway, lost in the kind of isolation that frees or cuts you from all you used to know, was unbothered by the light fading from the sky.

Eventually, long after night had settled in, the boy decided it was time to go home.

The dark didn’t bother him. He calmly descended from the tower. He found the path with ease. It led out of the estate, down to the shore, and then southward along the water, across big black boulders that rolling waves would break against without a hint of hesitation or regret.

He leapt from rock to rock. There wasn’t much of a moon, so it was dark, almost too dark to see the craggy cliffs, and the waves crashing against them. It was certainly too dark to see the dead tortoise, this one average-sized, bobbing and bumping against the boulders. A harpoon, slender and silver and artificial, was sticking out of the creature's neck.

He might as well have seen it though, because his brain was already building a detailed case against the crimes of his old world. While sitting in that cracked open estate, two separate realizations had settled into the Castaway’s bones, and he was confident that once he put them into words, the boy would be gone, and the man would feel an unparalleled freedom.

The stones were sharp, and slick with sea-spray. The Castaway darted across them gracefully.

“We, the people, are thrown into the same mechanisms over and over and over. We aren’t satisfied by them because we don’t understand what drives them, and we don’t understand what drives us to them.” That was the first realization. He continued thinking, bounding from boulder to boulder as he did.

At one point, his foot slipped, but he kept his calm and his balance, and he kept going. He was unafraid of the ceaselessly slamming sea. He was completely free from parking tickets, and all the other trappings of his former existence.

“I’m still falling back on the mechanisms, but I can see them now, and I can see the world around me.” He announced as he hurtled through the night. “Curved birds, yellow sand, shadow-draped stones, roaring waves, I can see it all, and because of that I can see where I’m going.” The man stopped and felt the full weight of that second realization.

“I… I see a man, standing on a boulder, among all those other things. I see him there. He is just there, and maybe…. maybe that’s all he needs.”

Thanks to the life he had been thrust into, thanks to the little beach he had landed on, he could see his place, and that meant he could see himself. He looked so undeniably different.

He used to be a boy who would rush to the office, killing himself for his bosses approval. He used to spend hours worrying about the wrinkles in his suits, and about the best way to get the client cleared of all fees & fines. Five nights a week he would chase sleep. Then, he and his friends would spend the other two nights pushing sleep away, trying to shut it out as completely as possible.

The waves crashed against the rocks every few seconds. They sounded like thunder. The splashing sea-spray carried a taste of salt. He listened to the sea roar for a moment, and then began to giggle. Here he was, climbing across slippery rocks in the dark, completely isolated. He used to fear wrinkles and failure and a thousand other things that forced him down to his knees. The fears, the anxieties, pushed him down to the floor and twisted him into a half moon shape time and time again.

As a wave crashed, the giggle exploded into an unrestrained laugh. The Castaway threw his head back and laughed until his stomach was sore, and all he was had been peeled back. That’s what the Tortoise was trying to tell him, the man could see it now. His silly fears and his dark suit had been peeled away. Now he saw wild hair, shining eyes, and the strength that you only find at the edge of the unknown.

Part 5: In Conclusion

That night, the man had another strange dream. He was in a mahogany colored courtroom. The marble floor was covered in a layer of yellow sand, the ceiling was an inky black studded with stars that burned blue, yellow, red, and white.

The giant tortoise was back, and this time it was wearing dark colored judges robes. It sat there, right where the judge’s bench would have been.

“You have been called as a witness” The tortoise boomed.

For a moment, the Castaway couldn’t move. His feet felt frozen. Then he was suddenly at the witness stand. The tortoise was looking at him expectantly.

“I have seen the world around me.” The man said simply.

The tortoise did not move its head, but its green eyes seemed to nod in affirmation and acceptance.

“The verdict is guilty. They are guilty of wanting. They are guilty of drowning. They are guilty of searching.” The Tortoise announced. “And you too are guilty.”

A wave of relief washed over the man.

In the 16 nights that followed his moment on the rocks, the Castaway would take a dip in the ocean each and every time. He would take off all his clothes, and walk toward the dark water. On the 17th night, the ocean was cold, despite the warm night air. The man did not mind though. He dove into the black waves, a bronze body cutting its way through the dark.

Sometimes he would fall into old habits. He would sit on the beach and start drowning in his own head. He would begin to craft more fake conversations, and he would begin to fixate on all the things he lacked.

The fresh air and the constant sound of the waves would always bring him back to the present though. Bit by bit, the habits were slipping away, and when he really needed to be shaken back to reality, there was always the cold dark sea.

When he touched the cold water, and saw the fierce waves rush up to meet him, a twinge of fear would rocket through the man’s nervous system. However, he would quickly push past the fear, tense up like a lion, and then shoot forward into the dark ocean. The frigid water would rush up to the man greeting him like an old friend.

That feeling of hitting the water, rocketing through the cold, and getting swept up in the dark current, was both exhilarating and tranquil.

After just a few minutes, he would emerge from the sea, soaking wet, shivering, and feeling thoroughly, intensely, alive.