Into Once and Back Again

Jimmy has found himself in a liminal space...

Yellow retractable walls spotted with water damage and mold.
A black pillar.
A floor lamp of frosted glass.

If this is your punishment…

No light otherwise in this makeshift conference room. He pressed through the wall, pulling on its handle and guiding it through its shrieks.

What unfolded before him, panel by panel, was identical. Except there was a door next to the black pillar. And there was a white board on the wall:

I have seen the hollow face of God

Scrawled in his own handwriting. There was a red marker uncapped and dried out laying in the pen tray.

Without memory of this time.
Without memory of this space.

It was much warmer and brighter here than the Ohio Winter Night he’d been walking through, although apprehension kept his charcoal-shaded parka on. If he took it off, if he left it on a chair, would he be able to find it again? Fear, a short ton weight behind his navel, kept him moving hot and quick.

He chose not to linger on the details: lamps flickering, the fact that he wrote that message during a fit of dispassionate, waning faith in a journal now burned. He moved right through the open door and into a thin beige hallway full of gateways to elsewhere, an extrapolation of options. Expanding out of view, the numberless doors looked the same and were spaced at equal intervals.

Jimmy, all 28 years of him, lived in the quiet at his parent’s house. It was clear that no true first step had been taken in his life. After dropping out of college, after countless friends abandoned or neglected, after each sparse relationship failed, after he lost interest.

Left foot,
right foot,

Don’t quit, keep going
Don’t quit, keep going

a mimicry of forward motion
in the vastness of this space.

With a mental shrug, the door he chose swung open to reveal a ballroom with a chandelier ablaze with half-height candles. The parquet floor supported old patterned chairs all green and gold which surrounded tables enshrouded in blonde linen.

All wavelengths transmogrified into
Quiet.
Silence.
Motionlessness.
Not a soul in sight.

The size of the room, its emptiness and its shadow and its meant-for-crowds nature made Jimmy uneasy. He awaited the footfall or the rustle that would be his signal to run.

Yet,
still,

nothing.

Rooms upon rooms, a growing malaise and its unexpected consequent: the peace of acceptance.

Every night he would curl up with their calico and poor over the history of lands he knew he would never visit and listen to the same albums on repeat. His father remained holed up in his workshop building birdhouses.

One night, his mother asked him, “Why do you seem so…” but she couldn’t finish it, couldn’t say

so lost…

“Why do I seem so what?”

She hedged and trailed off in the inability to say what she needed to say:

get help

He knew in his dread that he was alone, forward marching through the ballroom and into a den with wood paneled walls and a tattered burgundy couch and Kelly green pillows before a television. He left no trace to track back for he knew no exit.

Only forward motion,
sweaty and stuffy and anxious.

“Hello?” He tried the singled word, shouted into the void. It was swallowed whole and forgotten by the silence that followed—humming, thick, overwhelming.

Peace from fear
fear from peace.

He pressed on by turning back. He moved quick through the ballroom, half-expecting to see the ghosts of flappers and cake-eaters interrupted by an axe murder.

The hallway: endless choice and no semblance of escape. He skewered his memory in the hope of finding out how this happened—

The sidewalk.
The houses.
The Cold.
This well-known walk home from work.

Blink.

A maze of beige walls and rooms.
No known point of entry.
No know purpose for this slip.

He turned the corner. An exit sign glowed red over the door.

At least allow me this.

On the other side, he was greeted by a stairwell: options up and options down with no reference point as to where a ground floor could be. Down felt like basements and boiler rooms so he chose the direction of progres, toward the light undiluted and one day visible.

Doors at every landing as the stairwell spiraled on the toward the sky. He stuck his head into the center shaft around which the steps curled:

north unto darkness
south unto darkness.

Don’t quit, keep going
Don’t quit, keep going

His journey carried him past gateways and options, further and further up as his energy waned. The roof and its hope for lookout-orientation remained beyond the horizon which was a pinpoint of darkness. Step after step, his breath shortened and his legs weakened as his mind turned toward the shortcomings—Katie in college then Julie thereafter then the engineering department of AminCorp then the absolute collapse of his psyche—growing up toward the sense of failure.

Up and up and up with so many corridors and rooms behind him until he could go no further. After false starts and chances had gone askew or missing altogether, He did not know how many flights he’d climbed, but his body had given up.

He tumbled through the first door he reached and laid himself on the short-pile carpet that was ancient grey and patterned with chrysanthemums. Exhausted, he stared at the starfield-in-negative of the acoustic tiles. He hoped for rest but gained only worry.

The solitude of this place overtook him. He thought of throwing himself into the shaft but retreated with the knowledge that he would only fall forever, weary with waiting for the ground that would never arrive to flatten him.

The burnt-orange paint of the walls absorbed the fluorescent humming light. He stood and carried on, trying doors: living rooms of pristine white furniture and mid-workday offices abandoned and messy children’s bedrooms until he found an empty utility closet.

Its mop sink made Jimmy realize his thirst.. He turned it on to see an outpouring of biliary liquid. Jimmy existed on the edge of memory for the people he runs into from high school around town. The water shifts into bioluminescence, glowing phosphoric as it pours and pours and pours. Jimmy waits for another shift, a continued hope for fresh water as the need to be remembered grows within him. He sighed and turned away as the flow continued unabated with a loud splash against the basin, the sound a welcome relief from the silence.

What are the rules?

He focused on the hallway and decided to trudge forth along the path before him.

left foot,
right foot,
endlessly forward

Don’t quit, keep going
Don’t quit, keep going

He understood that he was condemned, that there was nothing but the labyrinth now, that he could twist and turn through countless passages only to wind up without orientation. He tossed off his parka as he thought of rest, of hiding his face, of his parents dismayed, of the Sno Caps he ate for dinner that weren’t holding him over, of the blizzard in his face.

He was forgetting too many things to be remembered ever again—as if the space itself was causing him to doubt his own memory of reality and what once was before the blink and the slip. He is a ghost still alive.

And then.

Double doors, large and steel and alarmed. He saw the small speaker and laughed at the prospect of anyone needing to be alerted by it or the lights ready to flash nearby.

He pushed the bar to open the door. Bells sounded. Lights flashed. Frigid air rushed in. Shock rattled Jimmy along with the cold.

He saw black patent leather shoes, clothes of white, and blue masks that accompanied the ragged sound of several people’s footsteps at a frantic pace. All these hours without a peep and now there were others hellbent on keeping him.

He pushed the door against three feet of snow, cracked it open enough to squeeze through and out into the tundra. They were as silent as their creation, eyes were shielded and unavailable.

Into the snowdrift, the horizon a blank of blinding reflected sun. At the edges of his sight, further on in the snow, he saw someone waiting for him.

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