Static
What scenes do you want today
The hero should move away from comfort zones
Walking cars, the Jupiter jack
Story journey for truth
What does this say about society
Setting: Forest
Mars Rocks
By Jacob Malewitz
1st draft
2nd draft Saturn spec, 1st lion score
10 10 1,000
John Bartlet 50 Perry Ellis 1,000
Cass loved being a madman. Here, we
begin at the rocks, in between the two cities, on a slope that a few have
jumped off to their planned doom.
The rocks were the chaos of many
scientists lives. Cass, ever the student, thought he could become famous by
doing what no man did before. This included me.
The problem was the family, the
doctors, the boss—they all worked on building up the pain inside Cass. So he
ran away, like so many of us do. And they told me, his best friend, the man who
supposedly knew him, to find him. I knew more about him than his carefree
father—the dreams of being a scientist, the second guessing when he became a
teacher, the anger at being a poor man on a planet with such potential … it all
became too much for the man to handle. In my experience, man puts too much on
his shoulders, forgets the roots, and sometimes falls.
Hours before, he had been sitting
at his office in the second district of Planning City. There the madness began.
A student had made an attempt on his life;
not just a regular day at the job. The boy had a pleama blade, said to
be of Japanese origin, and Cass said he saw little evidence of humanity within
him. He had stopped the blade for a second, fallen, and the blade had reached his
neck. No one knows what the boy said to him, a moment when he had a choice to
make. For ten minutes he had been in a hospital. Then he walked out. He left
the city. He went to the hills where the Mars Rocks are, a forbidden zone, and
did so without anyone ever noticing. Thirty minutes ago, his wife told me she
had a dream. Ten minutes ago, I was on his tail, finding myself lucky he wasn’t
the fastest sprinter on Mars.
I followed him down the slope. He
was mumbling. Saying something about ending angels and ending time.
“Life, right.” He hadn’t quite lost
it yet; give the Mars Rocks time.
The two cities situated on opposite
ends of the Mars second plain. He called it second hell, but Cass was like
that. Everything was hell—a river styx, a woman Eve, a maniac merely acting upon
what society said when he cut throats, all those stories you just don’t want to
believe.
I thought he was an ego-maniac. I
heard a famous man say, once, “You really have to be an egomaniac in this biz.”
Perhaps he intended to change the world all by himself, to teach his classes
the truth about life, and tell them how to make a choice. In my experience,
students should and shouldn’t be given choices. Deciding whether or not to give
them is as painful as putting a blade to a teacher’s neck.
“Styx,”
I heard Cass say. I wanted to catch him before he fell, but how would I do
that?
“Styx,”
he repeated.
I wanted to walk up to him, tell
him who I was, see if he remembered, but I would fall. I would not even come
close to him.
I watched him move around the Mars
Rocks. They stood ten feet in the air, spears, they looked like spears. He never
actually touched them, never showing a sign he knew I watched him, and
forgetting of the two towers that recorded his every move.
He kicked a stone towards the
rocks, but nothing happened—there was no sound of impact, in other words no
sign something was there. This made me curious, but let’s move forward anyways.
I sensed, within Cass, a drive to
improve. I had this way with people; I could capture them in my mind. In him I
sensed fear too, and this fear was becoming of a school teacher whose live had
been threatened. A man can only take so much chaos. Eventually he starts
fighting back. I so wanted to walk to him, reveal myself, but as a detective I
could do little but watch him in his final acts, before he was lost to a
mystery.
Finally, he went towards the rocks.
He entered. Entered and my heart leapt. This man was not a hero, nor was he a
villain, but occupied the space in between, that troublesome gray area angels
stood in. He would not be prepared for this, and he would only find an ending
in that place. I so hoped he would find his way out before the madness spread,
took hold of this red planet, and worst of all entered me.
“Don’t worry,” I said to myself, “someone will
catch him.”
I advanced upon the rocks. The
problem was the race to find information, the late hours of study, none of it
mattered now that I had to act. I moved in, stopped, waited for him to leave
the rocks again, but he never did.
“Call it what you will,” a voice
behind me said, “just avoid calling it nothing.” I turned back, to the voice,
but standing there was air, a few pebbles on the ground, no signs of movement,
only signs of madness.
I recall a conversation with Cass.
He studied evil, saying we must acknowledge it, but within him I saw a living question. Nothing
made sense to him. That day, when the conversation occurred, he had given up
drinking, so I did the same. Then Cass said he had witnessed an angel falling
into the soil of Mars. A deep boom lifted, the angel spreads it wings, and he
saw the Mars Rocks. He didn’t understand why, but he told me that one day he
would go there and find all those answers to life. I laughed. He did too. We
almost ordered a couple shots.
The angels were the true story years back,
when people started seeing them and calling them Sepher’s after a popular
angelic story. Sepher World, to me, was just a way to sell magazines and net
works—money was everything. He wrote a study for nothing, did case-by-case
interviews, tried to sell a book too, but money was not his goal. He wanted
truth.
The rocks broke under me as I
looked for any sign of movement. The two towers beamed at me from either side,
and I wondered why the madman had built them in the first place. Some say God
made them, others said Billionaires retired there to spend there lives watching
the skies. Yes, two towers, and Mars Rocks, and mysterious voices.
“Don’t fall just yet,” the voice
said again.
“Who the hell are you!” I gathered
myself; there was no one there, the Rocks were said to have energy, and that
was what I heard. Voices entered the Rocks, they left different, a tangle of
languages that sometimes turned into clear sentences. Some people said the
angels of Mars were to blame. Others said man had pushed to hard to make the
world their own.
“I hate life.” And I did, then, but
it came out the wrong way. It entered the rocks, came back sounding like a wish
instead of something clear.
I walked towards the rocks. Walked
and waited to fall, or see Cass step out and find, or even an angel to appear.
It made me think—a bad proposition—of how I was chasing down a madman. I had no
proof of this: I loved the man, his wife who he hated loved him, his students
thought he gave out too much homework but still respected him. He had been
unable to find his dream.
I waited. Expecting the voices to
return, I just stood a few feet away. There was nothing special to these rocks,
a school trip to a museum would find things that appealed to the eyes more, but
it did nothing to take the absolute of it. I didn’t want this. I loved my wife;
Cass didn’t. I loved teaching; Cass didn’t know what he loved. You plant seeds
with every action you take, and something always grows from them.
I made no decision at that moment.
I waited. And when I grew sick of that, I sounded off of all the things of
order in my life. The Mars Rocks worked on my mind, I wanted to scream, but
when I tried nothing came out except Cass. He left the void that was these
rocks, entered a new dreamworld, walking immediately out of this field of
nothing. I stepped in his way. He walked into me.
For a moment I did not know what to
do. I saw the madman, what some would call the inner child, deep within his
body. The Rocks had the answers. “Cass,” I said, “we can work something out.
You’ve done nothing wrong.”
“The angels will fall.”
I went into the rocks, hoping to
save a friend. I saw things there which entered my mind to fast. A chaotic
place, madness was here, and I could not work the thought of how it seemed so
much like the way Cass’s mind worked. I could almost see the boy who tried to
kill him and the wife who slept around on him. These things were life changing,
and they were life.
“Tell me the truth,” I said,
stepping away from the rocks.
“When the angels fall.”
“What?”
“Truth is when angels fall.”
I stepped into his eyes, saw it,
and I think he saw something in mine as well. He began to run, laughing like he
had injected himself with something fierce, and I knew I couldn’t let Cass move
away. But what had the Mars Rocks done? What did he mean by angels falling?
I lost him after ten minutes of
chasing him. I cursed the man who created cigarettes. Coughing, coughing and
hacking for miles. I followed his tracks across the lands of Mars. The two
cities would not be his destination. He found something within the rocks, they
mapped out his mind, and it was my duty to step out of the gray area, to think
rationally, and stop him.
I caught up with him a mile later,
sitting on a rock, his eyes wide, his mouth open. And amidst it all, I found a
gun in his hand, a cut on his chin. There was still life there.
“Tell me everything.”
“I cannot tell a lie.”
I touched the gun, waited for him
to end me, but Cass did nothing. I looked into his eyes.
“Just tell me what you saw.”
“I saw what we all see.”
I caught him when I put the bullet
in his head. He fell back, his eyes still wide, his mouth still open, and for a
brief moment I understood what he had seen at the Mars Rocks. No angels fell
when I closed his eyes. Cass always loved playing the madman.
