The following is derived from Faust’s journals, which were discovered in his apartment long after the fall of the city of Castle:
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APRIL 15th
I am sorry Castle, but I have been far from perfect for a long time. In fact, I am completely defective. The past few months, great anxieties have suddenly overtaken me. It appears, my Self, has reached out and taken hold of me. I fear it. I do not want it.
I have never been afraid of my own thoughts until recently. It’s hard to say when exactly they began. There was that one morning, something about the mirror. I had woken up late and stumbled into my bathroom, only to stare blankly at my reflection for what felt like hours. Despite the need to hurry my routine along, the looming responsibilities and places to be, I did not move, I stared, and I cried. I cried over my blinding white clothes, and my perfectly shaped hair. My straight and painfully clean teeth. Clear and unmarked skin. Wanting and hopeless eye sockets. I cried because I was not Faust, I was only Castle.
There is little chance I am the first of us to feel this way, but who really knows? The mindless faces I pass on the street are blissful and unbothered. The tight crowds of identical white garments and neat hairstyles, pass through and intersect with one another, never colliding or causing disarray in their formations, like some perfectly programmed machine of many moving parts. Who knows how this all began? Castle is productivity. Perhaps they found one extremely productive human, with clean white clothes, controlled hair, and a positive attitude. He worked perfectly, so they passed a law where everyone must be him. And now we are nothing but him. Maybe that’s how it went.
I often imagine looking down at the city of Castle from above. I see it as a large slab of honey resting on a forest floor. We are all bees scurrying about it, with identical stripes, all working towards some single ultimate end like a lone organism. We are all perfect little cells, making up the ideal, safe, unchanging creature that is Castle.
APRIL 22nd
After a full week of wrestling these thoughts, I am thankful to have a friend like Isaac. I made him aware of the way I’ve been feeling lately, and he told me to visit him tonight. I’m sure I know how he plans to alleviate my mind. We are quite close to begin with, but I must admit I latched onto him when I heard more of his occupation. Isaac works in medicine, he is not allowed to share what he studies and I never pushed him to. However, my friend is not shy when it comes to breaking the rules.
In the lab in which he studies, Isaac has a close connection to a man in the Experimental Substance Development Wing, where a man can find seemingly any drug he imagines. Isaac would often bring home samples, and we would have experiments of our own within his locked apartment. They were always pills, as that is the standard form of ingestion. He gave me pills that made me laugh, dance, fall asleep instantly. This was our game, our escape from the painfully normal world around us. Tonight, I needed it the most.
When I approached Isaac’s apartment, he greeted me at the door with a look I knew well. When he was up to no good, Isaac’s eyes would widen and a devilish smile would come across his face. He was exactly my height, as were most people, if not an inch taller or shorter. He had the required male hairstyle, parted from the left, brown, wet and combed. I stepped into Isaac’s apartment and he immediately whipped around to face me, with a small white bottle of pills in his hand.
“So what’s this one?” I asked, listening to the rattling of the capsules inside.
“Something very different!” Isaac peeked into the wall of the bottle like a child at the zoo. He continued, “The government pulled this one out of production completely, even though its not dangerous at all, poses no health risks either. I don’t know why they had it in the lab, but I didn’t ask!”
“Well then,” I said, opening my palm to him, “shall we?”
I did not bother asking what the drug’s purpose was, or how it would make me feel. I knew whatever it did to me, anything, would be better than what was going on in my skull already. I dropped the small pill onto my tongue and swallowed it whole, just as Isaac did. We gave one another a nervous salute like two rookie soldiers. I do not fear the drug though, if it affects everyone else one way, it will affect me in that way as well. I am everyone else.
We wandered about the apartment for quite some time, waiting for some unknown effect to kick in and amaze us both. Isaac sat on the couch patiently, while I was anxious to begin the trip. I needed this, but this was relaxing fun for him. Eventually, I had to use the bathroom and helped myself into the small simple washroom. I washed my hands slowly with warm water, and it felt quite different than usual. I was staring quite deeply at the intricacies of the skin on my hands. When I looked up into the mirror, and met my own eyes, my heart leaped in my chest. An overwhelming desire overcame me. I cannot describe it any other way. I could not stop my hand, it moved on its own. I reached up to my head, and completely disheveled my combed hair. Strands of it hung on my forehead, I felt them against my eyelashes. I did not understand, but I felt a strange comfort in the destruction of my hairstyle.
When I stepped out of the bathroom, Isaac instantly looked at my hair. He seemed to laugh at first, before a face of genuine confusion sweeped his smile away. “Faust…you okay? Why did you do that?” I could tell he was trying to hide his nerves.
I finally asked him “What is this drug supposed to do?”
He immediately replied, “Well I don’t know this for sure, I’ve never met anyone who took it. But, apparently, it can make you feel like you can do…pretty much anything you want…and you’re very motivated to do so.”
APRIL 24th
Two nights ago I took this drug for the first time. Isaac reluctantly left the bottle of pills in my care, and said he would come check on me soon when work lightens up. He doesn’t know I haven’t left my apartment since I got home that night. Since I took the drug, I have been undeniably myself. My hair will permanently remain uncombed, I feel no desire to return it to it’s original perfect state. I have been walking around my apartment naked recently, as my white clothes are extremely unappealing to my eyes.
Tonight I took my second pill. I noticed no difference in the effects, I still felt an intense need to abandon my schedule and responsibilities. After wandering about my apartment for a bit, I felt slightly hungry. Here, I experienced the true nature of these pills. I opened my refrigerator to see a beautiful array of colorful food tablets scattered about its shelves.
They were red, blue and yellow, the only colors that exist, other than white.
My eyes locked into the hues. I began to step outside of my body and dance in the blue oceans, the yellow sunlight, and the red flames. The colors were shouting my name in a begging child’s voice, they wanted to be freed. I let them onto my skin and they glided across my body like three massive snakes.
When I returned from this vision, I was kneeling before my refrigerator, tears streaming down my face. I had never experienced color like this before. I’ve been eating these food tablets my entire life. They have never looked like that. Has anyone else experienced this terrifying beauty? Our buildings and clothes lack any of these colors. In fact, they are only used to divide groups, such as blue food tablets being carbohydrates, and yellow being vitamins. What an absolute waste! My heart and hands are vibrating at the ignorance of this world! I need another pill. I will take many more. If the world will not change, tomorrow I will make my own!
APRIL 25th
My apartment is locked, and it will be for good. By now, they will notice what I have taken. This morning, I broke into a Maintenance Department building, and I stole three large buckets of paint and a brush. It would have been used to make small signs for different trains, and other boring uses.
After
taking my sixth eighth pill, I opened the paint
buckets. I began twirling my brush within the goopy mounds of color. Before I
knew it, I had been unleashing vibrant colors upon my bland white apartment. I
put some blue on the floor, red on my cabinets, yellow on my ceiling. Once I
finished, I did it all again but changed the order. Yellow on my blue floor,
blue on my red cabinets, red on my yellow ceiling.
I began shaking with terror and delight as I realized I had created entirely new colors. My eyes devoured them, my brain catalogued them, and my heart fell in love. As a New God of Color, I knelt before the paint. Dipping both my arms into the buckets, I began covering my skin and clothes in the paint. The colors mixed with each other, which mixed with my skin. I was a new being, perhaps no longer man. Certainly not Castle.
Soon enough, my body and my apartment, were adorned with fantastic patterns of colors I have never seen or heard named. Now free to enjoy my creations, I sit on the floor, with many pills left to take.
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Here is where Faust’s journal ends. Two days later, the authorities ripped his door off. They found him alive, smiling and laughing, lying on the floor. The lawmen were so terrified by the colors which coated him and his apartment, that they began to fire at him, and he was killed in his home. Faust’s death was one that shook the city of Castle and sparked it’s demise. After Faust’s story was told, riots broke out across the city. People were abandoning their jobs and demanding to see these new colors. Young people were disheveling their hair, some even shaved their heads. Castle’s government eventually began destroying as much colored paint as they could, but people were using bits of food, even their own blood, to purposely stain their white clothes.
The Government was quickly overthrown, and some of its own members partook. Countless shades of paint were produced, and the entire City of Castle was turned into the undeniably beautiful painting it is today. Here, in the heart of his city, Faust is buried within his original, hand-painted apartment. Honored, as the first and greatest artist to ever exist.
THOMAS MAZZAFERRO 