Cast Away 2

I'm not waking up in libraries or laundromats or the backs of strange cars. I'm not scraping change for small bags of whatever-you've-got stashed away under the sinks of small restaurants. I'm not known or present or anything at all. Not anymore. And it's nice.

Boring, 

but nice.

The call of the abyss still rings out. The heat of the flame. The death and the romance of it all. Of course. I'm sure there's a name for the phenomena, the return to the normal world and the alienation of it all despite best attempts to assimilate. Former addicts. Veterans. Prisoners. I'm sure there's a term. I don't know what it is. Whenever I think about it, I tend to think about a script I wanted to write years ago for a sequel to the Tom Hanks film "Cast Away".

"Cast Away", if you don't know, is a film about a FedEx delivery guy who ends up stranded on an uninhabited island in the Pacific Ocean, living four years (I think) alone and surviving by any means available. The images of volley ball war paint and ice skate dental surgery usually pop up for most people. At the end of the film (spoilers, for a 24 year old film), Tom Hanks' character is rescued and brought back to the United States. People celebrate, but his former wife has remarried and now has a daughter. The film essentially ends here, which I think is a real shame and missed opportunity. And that's where my script outline comes in.

"Cast Away 2" or  maybe "Cast Aside"?

Read about vets coming home from Vietnam, or any conflict. Read about prisoners leaving long sentences. Talk to former addicts. You don't return to a normal world. You return to an alien world. 

Nothing seems real. Nothing makes sense. No one relates. Your skillset and state of mind no longer translate to survival or success. For a lot of the people in these situations their lives often head down darker paths, primarily because those are the only paths which allow them to operate in the way they have been forced to for years of their lives. 

Tom Hanks returns to the real world. His wife has remarried. She has a daughter. This bothers the character but he moves on. At first I never understood why he was able to do that so easily, but after everything, I do now. He has become detached. Though he yearned for that normalcy, that love, that life, it no longer fit a reality that he could, or even actually wanted to, inhabit.  It was fantasy. A dream, and just as we wake in the morning and remove ourselves from our dreams, faced with the reality of his situation, his character is forced to do the same.

And this is where we pick up.

Tom Hanks' character (I refuse to look up the name) lives in a new town, somewhere out in the Midwest. Let's say Salina, Kansas. A year has passed. He worked for FedEx again for a bit, but was let go in a cold display of corporate brutality after a few months after suffering a back injury and while suffering from the effects of insomnia and PTSD. He had attempted to see a woman (from the very end of the first film) for a bit, but it hadn't worked out. He sometimes speaks to his ex-wife, but it is distant. She is barely a voice on the phone, always patient and kind to Tom, tries her best to listen, but feels like she owes it to him.

Tom drinks, but not a lot. He tries to keep himself. He has a barren apartment in a lower income part of town. Tough to get a decent job or decent housing when you've been declared dead. Even now that it has been getting cleared up, there are always questions. Always hiccups. Bureaucracy takes a long time. He sits alone most nights. He has taken to writing. Sometimes letters he will never send. Sometimes journal entries about his days. Mostly though, he writes about the island. The serenity of it. The spark of life he had discovered. Wilson. 

He sees a therapist, but he can't afford the payments. She's been letting it slide, but he isn't sure how much longer she will be able to. 

Eventually he begins to sit at bus stops. He thinks about going to the airport. Riding planes and hoping... hoping... He doesn't buy any tickets. He sits at bus stops and he watches the people. The people suffering and lonely and struggling and it all reminds him of how free he was on the island. How every moment meant something. How every action was important. He watches the people and he knows the brutality of society. The cruelty of the the modern world. 

He has been unable to see a doctor about the back injury and meets a tenant in his building who has pain medication. You can see where this goes, I imagine. We've heard the story a thousand times. Because it's real. Because it happens.

And so... does Tom find redemption? Does Tom make peace? Does Tom set out to right the wrongs of the modern world?

No.

Tom ages and dies. Struggling and increasingly alone. From small apartment to small apartment, he is eventually forgotten as both the Man who Survived and as a person at all. He hasn't spoken to his wife in over a decade. He quit drinking for a few years. He kicked the pain meds. He wrote, and wrote, and wrote. 

And died. 

Eventually an ambulance took his body. The landlord cleaned the apartment and disposed of his things. 

The world moved on.

Without Tom.

Just like it always had.

You don't come back to the normal world. You don't ever really assimilate back into society. You can never see as you saw before. You are changed fundamentally, and because of that the world is also. The veneer has worn off. The importance. The hope. Sun bleached and dried, brittle and hollow, the world as you left it is long dead.

Sometimes the call of the abyss rings out to me. The heat of the flame. The death and the romance. Sometimes all I see around me are ghosts and facades and futility. No purpose. No life. No hope. I do my best to ignore it all. To look away, or try to. To pretend. To force the smile and keep waking up.

But I can feel it gazing. Watching. Calling. From the cubicle across from mine. From the second bedroom I turned into an office. From the back seat of my SUV. Curling and creeping out from the dark spaces, filling the gaps like smoke and I can feel it.

The abyss. The chaos. The island.