Chapter 1 - Sunlight
The room was large and not very brightly lit, a feature that had obviously been designed to create a relaxing ambiance and induce a meditative state. Its calming features worked in concert with the soft muzak tunes and the cozy leather chairs, whose generous width and soft cushions cradled the body into a state close to sleep.
On the back wall there was a bar with under-lit glass shelving and strange looking bubbly bottles in unusual shapes and colors. They were all filled with liquids that looked better suited for a chemistry lab than for cocktail ingredients. The dark wood of the bar was topped with a bright white marble slab, streaked with deep green and bluish veins.
Oriental carpets, which looked a little worn but definitely expensive, covered every inch of the floor, overlapping in places, so there was no telling what kind of flooring lay underneath. Here and there, on dark wooden side tables, generic ambient lights, elegant but subdued, cast a gentle glow.
The walls were the only element in the room that seemed designed to draw attention: they were covered in intricate wooden inlay panels, not dark like the furniture, but in a range of warm golden oak hues, no two designs the same and without any discernible theme: exotic blossoms and twirling vines, geometric motifs, circular labyrinths, grids and landscapes, trompe l’oeils, flower garlands and abstract art.
The entire wall was lit from the floor with wall washers, the way important buildings and monuments are illumined at night and with the same eerie effect. High up close to the ceiling, where the light of the floor lights was fading, the motifs seemed to come alive in the flicker of the buzzing bulbs, in an illusory motion so distracting that one would forgo even the slightest curiosity about what lay above.
He couldn’t remember how he got there, he just knew he’d been in this room before, more than once, judging by the familiarity he had with its features. Without hesitating he downed the oily turquoise cocktail in one gulp, ignoring the fact that it gleamed in the low light like it was radioactive, placed the glass on the side table next to his chair, got up and went straight to the wall on his left. He took a few minutes to pick one of the design patterns and pressed his hand against it. A perfectly concealed door in the wood paneling creaked open and a burst of cold air rushed in, carrying with it the scent of barren leaves, mushrooms and rain. He shuddered, displeased by the bone chilling ghostly breath and took his hand off the panel which slammed shut, revealing no trace of where the door used to be.
He sighed, dejected, poured himself another drink, a weird bright pink concoction this time, picked another chair close to the newspaper stand and smiled in anticipation of a half hour of enjoyable reading. He didn’t manage to reach the chair before the light levels in the room dimmed so much that they made reading impossible. He threw the newspaper back in the stand, frowned at the lights that were continuing to dim and walked towards the other wall, irritated. His hand had barely touched one of the patterns, one which he hadn’t had time to actually choose, when the lights dimmed all the way down and the room was engulfed in inky darkness.
The familiar creaking, accompanied by an enticing coffee scent, marked his path through the void quite clearly, even in the dark. He cussed under his breath at the absurd choice in front of him, very much like that of Adam choosing his wife, and walked begrudgingly through the dark opening, a little comforted by the anticipation of coffee.
“Honey,” his wife raised her voice on her way to the door, without turning around, “could you be a dear and pick up a parcel from the delivery locker? I’m so busy today I won’t have time to breathe!”
“What parcel, which locker,” he uttered in her wake, confused but loud enough to be heard.
“I left the note on the kitchen counter. Love you!” she replied, consumed with the anticipation of daily events as she closed the door behind her.
He took a moment to figure out where he was and whether he’d been there before. It only took one quick glance to realize he hadn’t. He went for the ultimate test, trying to guess which one of the many cupboards in the large and fancy kitchen was holding the coffee cups, picked one that seemed to him like the best candidate and found it filled with cloth napkins.
“Darn!” he frowned and gave up on the coffee; he grabbed the note from the counter and his face lit up with relief when he saw the name of the city: Juneau, Alaska. “Earth! Nice!” he thought, walking towards the door eager to take in the sights. It was the middle of spring at the height of the morning but the sunlight hadn’t breached the horizon yet and he walked halfway to the delivery locker under a pastel-color sky filled dotted by the brightest stars. The Northern Lights were putting up quite a show.
Encouraged by the familiar surroundings, even though he’d never been to Juneau before, he charted with ease the simple grid of the streets. It made him feel at home somehow. Random fragments of memories about this place flashed inside his mind for fractions of a second and then dropped back beneath the surface of consciousness before they had had the time to imprint themselves on his brain, like a dream forgotten in the morning.
He took a turn down the main street and the comforting warmth that was still running through his veins compliments of the familiar city and the turquoise and pink libations turned to ice in an instant. Rising above the horizon, glorious in its splendor, a ringed sun glowed aqua blue, bedazzled by an unknown number of visible satellites.
“Not my Earth. Let me guess: the parcel contains fire dragon eggs,” he commented, bitter, dragging his feet to the delivery locker completely drained of hope.
The clerk at the front desk was particularly cheerful, chewing gum and talking up a storm into a phone she held flat, like a plate, over the tips of her fingers, to a person one had to guess was her boyfriend, about deeply personal matters that held absolutely no interest for a stranger. She stopped for a second in the middle of the dialog to acknowledge his presence and greet him with a “wonderful weather we’re having today”, smiled and went back to her conversation.
He gestured a question towards her, in order to figure out the location of the lockers and she pointed decisively to a corner in the back while still engaged in conversation.
The locker was empty.
He stepped outside to wait for the daily drop since he had nothing better to do, and sat on a curb to admire the jewel-tone sun which shone very bright now and cast a cool hue on everything in his current world. His life was built from these little unexpected moments of awe, when the beauty of the universe revealed itself to him like a capricious mistress, these moments that were elusive and ephemeral, and for this very reason so much more worth beholding. What else was one here for if not to see, feel and understand the mysterious songs of creation. As best one could, anyway.
The spring sunshine hadn’t had time to melt all the ice but it carved out deep rivulets criss-crossing each other and creating intricate designs of variable scale endlessly repeating – Mother Nature’s template for all the things that move and all the things that live. The working diagram of being.
A thrashing of careless footsteps smashed his little marvel of ice and left only muddy threads of boot soles in its place. Harmony and will power had clashed right before his eyes and neither of them won. The mail carrier kept walking all the way to the back of the office, where the lockers were, and started dropping parcels in their black boxes, absentminded, with gestures that had become automatic after so many years.
“Oh, look, your parcel is here,” the clerk commented filled with glee as if the parcel contained a wonderful surprise, something special, unexpected and unique.
“Who knows, maybe she’s right” he thought.
“I’m sorry but we have to open it, you know?” she smiled apologetically. He nodded in agreement, kind of embarrassed that he had no idea as of the contents of the package and was saddened to hear her say.
“Ink cartridges, right?”
“Aah, yeah. Yeah.” The glory of a Lilliputian ice world had been trampled under foot and ink cartridges had emerged from its dissolution, like a Phoenix from its own ashes. “What an absurd simile,” he thought, because there was no myth or glory to ink cartridges, was it? On the other hand, who was to say what was more important, or whether anything was important or unimportant, maybe everything just was, without an assigned usefulness value.
“You’re all set,” the clerk dismissed him with the same cheerful attitude and he had to wonder what was it that this woman possessed that fed her zest for being and enticed her to bite into day to day life like one would into a juicy fruit, having it dribble its essence all over her hands and chin in the process.
He took the parcel and went home, not failing to notice that the days in this realm, wherever it was, were unreasonably short, and when he arrived at his residence he found a frazzled message on the answering machine. His wife had a meeting that was going to run long into the evening and she wasn’t going to make it home for dinner. She mentioned the rice casserole in the freezer and accompanied this detail with a simply excessive set of instructions on how to use the microwave.
He dropped the ink cartridges on the kitchen counter, made himself a sandwich instead and crashed on the couch.
He couldn’t tell how long he’d been napping, but he awoke to the soothing sounds of muzak.
Chapter 2 - Continuity
Of course!’ he mumbled and got up from the leather couch he’d been sleeping on, stretching a little to straighten his sore back. ‘What is this place?’ he looked around, somewhat relieved to find himself in a familiar setting.
The light levels in the room were low enough that the spotlights under the glass shelves picked up on the luminescent quality of the liquors inside the odd bottles and made them sparkle with their own inner glow, like they were part of the ambient lighting themselves.
He noticed, to his bewilderment, that his stomach was rumbling; he was starving like he hadn’t eaten in days.
‘I wonder if they keep any food around here,’ he started rummaging through the refrigerators underneath the bar in search of plunder. He emerged victorious from his quest through barkeep underworld, a sandwich in one hand and a plate in the other. He arranged a place setting for himself on the other side of the counter and went back for the beer.
‘This is not so bad, actually,’ he thought, reasonably satisfied as he threw the last bite of the sandwich in his mouth and washed it down with what was left of the bottle. He got up to get himself another cold one and his good mood turned suddenly sullen: the lights in the room had started to dim. He sighed, annoyed, grabbed a candy bar for the road and approached the wall to pick a pattern.
Which pattern to choose? Would it make a difference, one versus another? After all he had no idea what the patterns meant anyway, or whether there was a hierarchy to them, some kind of order that helped one make sense of the collection as a whole, rather than as a mismatched kit of parts.
He tried to make connections between the flourishes and the geometric designs, a wasted effort really, like trying to find the sharp edges of a rushing stream. He shrugged, thinking ‘what’s the point’, and picked a pattern at random.
The dark passage beaconed from behind the open panel, but it wasn’t like the last one, a pitch black hole, it was a shallow space, like the inside of a double wall, whose back was close enough to touch if he stretched out his hand. On this back wall, conveniently placed on a shelf right in front of his face, there was a flashlight. It was lit.
‘You’ve got to be kidding me,’ he hesitated, trying to figure out from the air movements if this shallow interstitial space had another opening somewhere along the way.
He frowned on the verge of deciding to let the door snap back shut, mark the pattern as unusable and try his luck with a better one, but curiosity got the better of him and he stepped in, almost against his will, to the sound of the panel closing behind him. He immediately regretted his decision, but the panel was now shut and he couldn’t see or feel any traces of the opening, so he sighed, grabbed the flashlight and started walking along the wall. The interstitial space was unfinished and the gaps between the studs were filled with dust and cobwebs, and electrical wires that gathered in thick bunches here and there and hung in lazy catenary curves along the girts. Wherever the roof deck was, it was too high up to see in the dim glow of the flashlight, and every ten feet or so the thick bunches of cables took a turn upwards, clambered the double studs like ivy and disappeared into the darkness above.
He had been walking through the narrow space for he didn’t even know how long, having to turn sideways from time to time in order to clear stack vents and vertical mains, when he started to notice that the horizontal framing was morphing, stretching deeper and deeper and turning to shelves and grates on which he could see odd objects, covered with dust – a little tin of mouse-be-gone, a stack of shelf braces, an empty water bottle.
The more he advanced the fuller the shelves became and they were spaced a foot apart now; with the narrow walkway widening to a comfortable four feet, the interstitial space started taking the appearance of a library back room. The weird storage space filled with stacks of books, all protected in archival cellophane bags and bound all the same, without titles or differentiating features ended abruptly in front of a large fire door, as wide as the corridor. One could see the space beyond it through the wire glass lite: a huge reading room wrapped in heavy wood cabinetry and whose gently domed ceiling was adorned with frescoes. Even though the space was barely visible in the soft gleam of the emergency lights, he recognized it immediately.
‘What on earth am I doing here?’ he thought as he tried the door, just to cover his bases. As expected, it was locked.
He turned around to find his way back and gazed, bewildered, at a square room, large enough not to feel claustrophobic, but completely surrounded by shelves. There was no corridor.
‘Well,’ he thought, ‘I guess I’ll just have to make myself comfortable and wait for the place to open.’ Somebody was bound to be in that large public reading room during library hours and they were sure to hear him pound on the door. While he tried to compose a plausible explanation for how he managed to end up locked in an archive room during off hours a trickle of thought, cold as liquid nitrogen, made its way through his mind and spilled into his whole nervous system, making his hands tingle and his chin go numb: he had been in that public reading area so many times he lost count and he was absolutely sure he had never noticed a wide metal door in it.
There was no doubt in his mind about that. He tried to comfort himself with the fact that maybe the public side of the door had been cosmetically altered to match the decor, a thought he dismissed because it didn’t make any sense. All the staff doors he remembered seeing in that room were barely two and a half foot wide at most.
In a panic, he jumped and started jiggling the handle in an irrational attempt that actually panned out: the door opened without any effort. He looked at the other side of it, while still standing in the doorway and he wasn’t even surprised to confirm that it was indeed one of the narrow staff doors leading to the restricted section. A golden cursive marked the door JC. He looked inside again and found it transformed into a closet barely two by three, with an old mop sink in one corner and cleaning supplies stacked neatly in the other. An ironic grin upturned the corners of his lips.
‘The broom closet? Really?’
The problem with understanding reality is not that we can’t see it for what it is, it’s that we do see it, but explain it away because the findings don’t jive with our mental model of what it is supposed to be.
“Excuse me, sir?” a voice sounded from behind. He turned around to see a woman whose face betrayed internal conflict; she was still assessing whether she should be nice to the lost library patron or stern towards the perpetrator who was trying to breach into a restricted area. “What are you doing? Those doors are for staff only.”
He smiled his most charming smile but didn’t have time to concoct an answer before the lady became belligerent.
“And how did you get in here? The library opened only two minutes ago!”
He fretted in search for an answer while she stopped him with a decisive hand gesture.
“Stay right here, please! I’m going to call my manager.”
“What is this about?” a distinguished older gentleman in a three piece suit approached the two.
“This person was trying to gain access to a non-public area,” the lady explained.
“I wasn’t, actually,” he played for time. “I have misplaced my glasses, oh, there they are,” he smiled and pointed cheerfully at a pair that was sitting on top of the partition between the printers. “Long night, you know?” He smiled apologetically, grabbed the glasses and placed them on his nose, struggling to fit their narrow frame around his face. They were too small.
The older librarian frowned in disapproval at the disheveled appearance of the man before him. His clothes were dusty, like he’d been sleeping on the floor, and one could see pieces of cobwebs hanging from one of his sleeves. He shook his head in dismay and left without a word, thinking how much the mores of polite society had declined for a patron to show up to request materials from the reference desk nursing a hangover at eight in the morning. His stride broadened as he approached his office, which he entered, relieved, and locked behind him. His morning research time, respected by all.
‘What am I to do now?’ the lost wanderer looked around, found himself unrestricted and used the lucky opportunity to leave. He could hear the woman librarian call out from behind as he negotiated his way down the monumental marble stairs amid the sea of people walking up and down it.
“Hey! Those are my glasses! Stop him! Stop him immediately! Security!” He abandoned the glasses on the flat cap of a stair post and got lost in the crowd to make his way out into the park. ‘Who am I?’ he groaned, anguished. ‘Who am I? Why do I know this place? How am I ever going to get back home when I don’t know where that is?’
He reached into his pocket and pulled out the candy bar and a bunch of dollar bills all crumpled up and slightly humid. The morning air was humid too and a cutting wind reached him to the bone as if to punish him for walking outside without a coat so early in spring. Biting into the candy he smiled at the dollar bills, swerved left abruptly and headed towards a tiny coffee shop in the basement of the building across the street. It took his eyes a few seconds to adjust to the dark after he’d been out in the bright light of the morning, and only realized where he was when he heard the soft muzak tones, after the door had already closed shut behind him.
Chapter 3 - Framework
For a moment he forgot that he was cold and wet and really could have used that cup of coffee he was anticipating and went straight to the panel from the day before, to check if it led to the same place. In all honesty he held no hope for consistency and expected to be faced with an unfamiliar sight, so the image of the interstitial wall space with the lit flashlight on the shelf right in front of him caught him by surprise.
See, when one is faced with chaotic patterns it’s not their strange and aberrant behavior that throws one for a loop. That is to be expected and bows to logic. It is the consistency of behavior inside the chaos that can drive a person insane, more precisely, the local, provisional consistency, for one must understand that chaos plays by rules too, just rules we can never postulate, because doing so would inherently contradict their very principles, and which only apply for as long as we expect them not to. The second we’re locked into a pattern of behavior and committed it to mind, it will change.
The fact that the unfortunate subject is always caught on the wrong foot by the unpredictable substance of disorder, a characteristic he should learn to expect after a certain number of experiments, is due to the intrinsic limitations of the human mind. We can’t function in a world with no organizing principles. The mind is structured, language is structured, the fabric of space is structured, time is structured and directional. One just can not conceive of the absence of causality.
Worried that he might forget which pattern that was, he propped the panel door open with a chair and ran to the bar to see if he could find anything, a pencil, a marker, something to write with. He wrestled up a piece of chalk and wrote LIBRARY on the panel, let the door close and opened it again to check. The double wall was still there.
He figured that was probably not going to last, but left the label on the panel anyway, because it was the only clue he had so far. He checked the panel he had opened the day before, which still led into a pitch black void, but he couldn’t tell if it was the same pitch black void from two days ago or a completely different one, so he shrugged, marked the panel with an x to remind himself that he went through it before and went back to the bar.
He was tired, he was hungry, his body was aching, his clothes were still damp and he noticed with displeasure that he was in very bad need of a bath.
‘This is going to be a problem,’ he thought, deciding to eliminate at least the one variable of the equation for which he hoped he had a solution. A quick search through the bar area yielded a tub of frozen soup, whose sight made his mouth water with anticipation and made his body feel warm and comfortable already. There was a wall mounted microwave on the back of the bar to heat it up in.
‘At least I won’t have to subsist on cold cuts for the rest of my…whatever the heck this is,’ he mused, waiting for the soup. He remembered the rice casserole from the day before and had an irrational urge to go back through that panel and see if there was any of it left, but thought that it would probably be gone by now, even if the panel led to the same place. Besides, there was no reason to believe that time kept the same schedule in the world of the blue ringed sun and he’d probably have to spend time with the ‘wife’, which felt most awkward, so he resigned himself to the microwaved delicacy that was now ready to eat.
He must have arrived back early, he thought as he gulped down the soup, too hungry to worry about it being too hot. The lights gave no warning of dying down, so he figured he might have some time to rest and make himself comfortable as best he could under the circumstances. He finished his soup, washed the plate and placed it on the drying rack, wiped the bar clean and went to explore the back room, inside which he found a few surprises. Even though the establishment didn’t look like it would have a need for it, the back room revealed a full commercial kitchen, complete with lockers and showers and a large washer and drier for the chefs’ outfits, which he could see hanging on a rack not too far from where he was standing. Some of the locker doors were open and he noticed that someone had left a track suit in one of the lockers. He hesitated for a moment, reluctant to borrow a complete stranger’s clothes, but exhaustion and physical discomfort got the better of him; he showered, changed, grateful to feel clean, warm and dry again, dumped his clothes in the washer for a quick spin and went back into the lounge to read a magazine before it was time to move them to the dryer.
This little domestic routine put him in such a good mood that he forgot about his travels and the fact that the lights could start to dim at any moment, without any schedule or warning. He made himself comfortable on one of the couches with an old Country Living magazine and his head had barely touched the soft cushions before he went out like a light himself.
He woke up disoriented and stared in disbelief at the weird outfit he was wearing, slowly starting to remember the events of the day before and surprised the lights were still on.
‘Maybe they come on and off automatically,’ he figured. ‘Maybe I don’t have to leave here for a while, I could definitely use some rest.’
With that thought he turned over and went back to sleep. He woke up again a few hours later to an insane racket of pots and pans and raised voices in the kitchen, so loud it could raise the dead. He jumped off the couch in a panic, not knowing what to do, worried that the people in the kitchen, whoever they were, were going to put him to the question for squatting in their work space. He threw himself at the panel closest to him and emerged on the other side of it inside a space that was a chiral replica of the one he just left, only without the benefit of company.
His legs still shaking from the shock he tried to compose himself and walked into the back room to make sure there was nobody there and noticed that the washer had just finished its cycle: it contained his clothes. Without giving it a second thought he grabbed them and put them in the dryer and then went straight to the bar to fix himself a stiff drink.
How many copies of this room were there? It hadn’t occurred to him that this room he thought of as the only constant in the game was in fact a collection of identical, and in this case, not exactly identical copies of itself. Did it matter at all whether the space he was in was the same as long as it looked and felt the same to him?
He rushed to the panel he’d just emerged from and marked it MUZAK LOUNGE, opened it barely ajar to verify whether it led back to the room with the noisy kitchen and was met with absolute silence. The rules at chaos hard at work. His head dropped to his chest in a dejected, helpless gesture. He wanted to erase the label from the door and stopped himself right before he had the epiphany that the labels were not identifiers of unique instances, they were identifier lists for instances, and that charting the lists themselves could possibly yield some useful answers. He also pondered on the fact that having those lists build up to a usable sample was going to take a lot more days than he wanted to consider, and that even if those lists were populated enough for a proper analysis, the analysis itself still could, and probably would yield bubkes.
Still, when you’re tasked with sorting out a mountain of beans into shapes and colors there is no practical benefit in waxing philosophical over the magnitude and futility of the enterprise when you have no alternative to it.
On a whim, he checked the door that said LIBRARY, and which was now on the opposite side of the room, to see if that was still staying consistent for now and breathed a sigh of relief when he caught a glimpse of the flashlight through the door he’d cracked open just an inch.
Satisfied with the progress he checked to see if his clothes were dry, changed back into them and put the track suit in the wash, to have it clean if future needs arose, poured himself another drink, which he doubled this time, and settled down into a chair to finally read his magazine. It wasn’t Country Living. It was the daily newspaper. And it couldn’t possibly have been from today, because even if he’d lost track of time with all this nonsense he was pretty sure that history had advanced far ahead of 1947 because he could remember mobile phones, and space shuttles. Maybe somebody abandoned this newspaper in the lounge a long time ago and nobody bothered to throw it away. He got up to check the rest of the periodicals but there wasn’t a single one with a date more recent than 1947.
‘Time slices!’ he had a revelation. ‘They are not copies, they’re time slices of the same continuum.’ He almost congratulated himself to discovering the unifying law that governed his universe when reason called him back. ‘But then why would this room be a mirror image of itself?’
The rules of chaos had struck again.
Chapter 4 - Wildlife
Oh, what’s the difference!’, he uttered morose and headed for the panels on the wall, weighing his chances of ending up somewhere nice for a change. He could use a change of decor from the soothing atmosphere of the lounge, which at the time made him feel like he was recovering in a convalescent home.
The space behind the panel was completely dark, but the rest of his senses made it very clear he’d found his way to an evergreen forest. There was a strong scent of pine in the night air, and he could feel, even though he couldn’t see, the movements of the branches above his head, synchronized with the sound of the wind and the swaying of the vegetation around him, ferns, he guessed, by the lacy texture that touched his fingers.
There was so much peace in this state, in this spirit filled darkness, that he checked himself to make sure he wasn’t dead, because what person feels safe in the forest at night, with no knowledge of what lays beyond the reach of his arms and no protection from the elements?
It seemed, though, that the elements themselves had decided to grant him asylum, him, the unfit human with no knowledge of their workings, the human who nevertheless decided to venture, sight unseen, into their world, and who for some bewildering reason was not afraid of it.
A gentle breeze pushed aside the tree tops, like drawing a curtain, to reveal the night sky, filled with stars. It was only a moment, not more, but long enough to catch the dark contours of a giant creature, not ten feet away from him. He panicked and all the air got knocked out of his lungs like from a popped balloon. He desperately tried to quiet his heart, which refused to cooperate, while he strained his eyes to catch a glimpse of that creature in the darkness, trying to anticipate its movements. Hours passed in this state of terrified awareness, during which his body followed its own rules, independent of his reason and will, impervious to hunger or cold, a live wire ready to react to the slightest sign of attack.
The darkness of the woods turned even deeper, even though that didn’t seem possible, right before dawn, and then started fading slowly into lighter and lighter shades of gray and violet. In the muddled softening of the dark he watched the figure turn around with the slow motions of a bear, and vanish into the shadows of the under-story before he could make out what it was.
The light grew thick after that, revealing the beautiful scenery he had felt but not seen a few hours before, the soft black of the slate he was sitting on, the fronds of the ferns. The birds had awoken and were frolicking in the branches above, noisy and unseen.
He felt exhausted by the emotional turmoil of the night before, wanting for nothing than to lay back down on the flat slate and actually get some sleep, but he worried that the edge of the forest was far away from there and he won’t be able to make his way out into the clear before nightfall. He willed himself to get up and looked around for any signs that would help him orient himself: moss, anything that looked like a trail, changes in vegetation, but he had to admit that his life had never been about communing with nature, which he’d always found threatening and alien, the place civilization saves you from. Discouraged, he picked a direction at random and started walking through a scenery that seemed to move with him but whose general outlines stayed the same, like the revolving decor of an improvised theater. Hours into this, just when he started seriously worrying that he was running in circles and he would never find his way out, he felt the familiar wet touch of a dog’s snout probe his hand.
The dog’s owner approached, walking a forest trail that suddenly came into focus in the undifferentiated brush, a stocky old man with bright white hair and a slight limp, who in that moment looked to the wary hiker like the most beautiful being in the universe.
The old man quickened his stride to meet the stranger, who looked lost, and addressed him when he got within close enough range, still huffing and puffing from the effort:
“Enjoying nature, sir?”
A small and slightly ironic smile lifted a corner of his mouth while he stopped to listen to the answer.
‘I kind of was, actually,’ the traveler had to admit to himself, ‘right up to the point where I had to sleep within ten feet of a bear.’ He didn’t say it, though, he smiled politely, and with all the energy he could muster after the stress of the night and the journey through the woods, responded.
“I’m afraid I am very lost, I’ve been walking for hours and I started wondering whether I should ever be able to get out of these woods.”
“Ah, no one is lost in these woods, dear sir. The forest is very protective of its charges, it wouldn’t let you come to harm.”
‘To each his own,’ he thought, too tired from the journey and too relieved to have human company, to judge the subject of the conversation, no matter how loony.
“The Guardian keeps watch.”
“The Guardian?” he asked, exhausted.
“Of course. The Guardian of the Forest,” the old guy replied, smiling blissfully from ear to ear, like he was talking about a beloved family member. “Not everybody can see him, though. He’s shy.”
“So,” the traveler interjected, becoming impatient, “is there any way you could point me in the right direction? Maybe I could walk with you when you go back” he suggested, thinking that wherever the old man was going was bound to be around other people.
“I could use some company, nobody comes here anymore, just me and Jasper,” he continued, smiling and whistling to the dog to call him back.
“Is it far, the edge of the forest?” the traveler sought reassurance, but the old man ignored him and started talking his ears off, naming every plant they passed by and drawing his attention to little critters and rock formations and streams and bird calls.
‘What in the world am I doing here? Why am I here?’ the traveler got caught in a circular wave of tiredness and absurdity, reinforced by the unlikely object lesson and the expansive enthusiasm of his companion, which manifested in heavy pats on his shoulder at times and, at one point, an affectionate bear hug. He breathed a giant sigh of relief when he noticed that the vegetation was thinning and he could discern the lines of a freshly plowed field behind it.
He instinctively picked up the pace to reach the edge of the forest and noticed that the old man was falling behind. His puzzled expression prompted a response from the latter.
“Well, you be on your merry way now, there’s a tavern half a mile down the road, right at the edge of the town.”
“You aren’t coming?” he couldn’t help his curiosity, slightly embarrassed to question a complete stranger’s choices.
“Not my kind of place, I’m afraid,” he said, smiling and patting the dog on the head. “We belong here, don’t we, Jasper?”
The dog stared at him with tearful eyes and let out a dull woof in response. The old man turned around, still talking to his pet, like a man who had finished his work and deserved a little respite.
‘What on earth am I doing here,’ the traveler continued running along his mental groove, at the same time probing the direction the old man had pointed towards for any proof of human habitation. There wasn’t any, but at least he was out of the woods, and he owed that to the odd stranger. He turned around to thank him again, but the man and his dog were already out of sight.
He reached the tavern at sunset, dead tired, hungry and emotionally spent, and parked himself on a stool at the bar, staring at the beer the barkeep was pouring like it was his last hope for salvation.
“You’re not from around here,” the barkeep mumbled under his breath.
“No. Say, where is here?”
“Black Hawk, North Dakota,” he looked at the traveler reproachfully. He’d seen his fair share of lost souls and drifters in his life, but very few who looked so much like city folk.
“Is there a bus that runs through here?” the lost traveler insisted, despite the quiet disapproval.
“There’ll be one in an hour. Take you to Rapid City. You can find your own way from there.”
A straggly stranger had made himself at home on the bar stool next to his. He was already two beers ahead and in a great mood for chatting.
“Leave the man alone, Tanner! Don’t you see he’s tired?” He turned to face him directly, uncomfortably close. “Been to the forest, have you?”
“Yes,” he strained his mind to find something agreeable to say. “Very scenic.”
“Have you met the Guardian?” the stranger leaned in, propping himself on his third pint, half consumed.
‘What is it with this Guardian, everybody here is simply obsessed with him?’ He decided to ask out loud. “The Guardian? Who is that?”
“It’s not a who, it’s a what,” the stranger’s eyes gleamed, a little glossy from the alcohol. “The spirit of the forest,” he whispered, “it keeps travelers safe when they get lost in the woods at night.”
‘Get out of here!’ the traveler suppressed a bout of laughter with great difficulty. ‘And here I worried about sleeping with a bear. This takes the cake.’
“Folks around here say it’s boding good luck to meet the Guardian, especially for a traveling feller such as yourself.”
He tried to think of an excuse that would get him away, at least for a short time, from the stranger’s animated geniality, so he got up to head for the restroom, which had become a necessity anyway after the second pint of beer.
“Jasper liked you, I can tell,” the stranger yelled in his wake. “He always likes the visited.”
The weary traveler shrugged, eager to escape this awkward conversation, and upon opening the bathroom door he was welcomed by the familiar muzak sounds.
Chapter 5 - The Third Degree
There is no method to this
madness,’ he thought dejected.
He couldn’t help notice that the room had started to look a little beat up in the aftermath of his dutiful documentation of his journeys. The weird way finding scribbles and symbols he had marked up on the paneled walls for later looked basic and childish and made no sense, and he started questioning the usefulness of this endeavor. What if, just what if he made himself at home in this whatever it was and stopped getting lost in every crazy that was waiting for him outside?
It occurred to him it was possible, at least in theory, that during his normal, underwhelming daily life he accidentally opened one of these doors through reality and ended up trapped in an endless loop that always brought him back to the lounge room.
He got up from the chair to evaluate his findings, which covered most of the walls right now: random clusters of unrelated things, at least to a rational mind, no patterns, no rules.
‘Looks like I defaced perfectly beautiful marquetry paneling for nothing.’
He sighed and poured himself another drink.
‘I can’t even get drunk in here,’ he looked at the fancy tumbler, then at the almost empty bottle, with a cold still lucidity as hard as glass.
‘Maybe it’s non alcoholic,’ reason came to offer help, completely out of context but still welcome because it brought with it the soft breeze of hope. ‘Like a raindrop in the desert,’ he thought. ‘Doesn’t solve your problem, but it points you to the promise that an answer exists until too much time has passed for it to matter.’
Maybe looking for connections was the wrong approach, maybe the solution to his problem was something completely different, something so banal that it wouldn’t cross his mind to notice.
‘I must be really getting desperate. No, seriously, what if I just set up camp in here and never go back out? At least for a while. Can’t be worse than getting lost in the forest at night or ending up in a locked storage room.’
Somebody had changed the muzak to sounds he hadn’t heard before and his mindset shifted, drawn to the beautiful marquetry patterns now covered in scribbles. Just like his scribbles, no two of the former were alike. He felt as if he had been parroting those patterns all this time, translating them into a different language, one made of scribbles and symbols as opposed to wood veneer, without understanding them at all.
He looked around the room trying to figure out how to organize it so it would feel more like home and less like the waiting room at a train station, scratching his head in frustration that the room didn’t seem to lend itself to privacy and comfort.
One of the panels opened all by itself.
He looked at it, focusing his attention on its details to remember them later: the design consisted of swirling and winding stems with tulips at the ends, so entangled it was impossible to tell them apart.
‘I’m not going,’ he decided, calm, then turned his back to the gaping hole in the wall and went to the bar to fix himself lunch.
A blood curdling scream emerged from the depths, the sound of a person facing mortal danger. He hesitated, faithful to his original intent, arguing with himself that this was not his problem and that being stuck in here in this alternate reality hub was punishment enough. Meanwhile, a second scream pierced his ears, and then a third, accompanied by desperate cries for help.
His protective instincts got the better of him and he walked through the opening, already furious because he knew ahead of time he’d have plenty of opportunities to regret this later, kicking himself for being such an idiot and hating that person, whoever they were, for calling out his guilt.
He barely had time to adjust his eyes to the bright sunlight when he got engulfed in a sea of flashes, camera clicks and loudly shouted questions.
It felt very much like a nightmare, too surreal to be happening and engendering the same vague feeling that things didn’t fit, but in ways one couldn’t clearly state even to oneself, because that part of one’s brain that made the logical connections had somehow been disabled.
‘Did someone put drugs in my drink?’ he went to the next logical possibility, which his sharp mind dismissed as unlikely. What was wrong wasn’t with him, it was with everything else.
‘But that’s insane! That is literally the textbook definition of madness.’
“Why did you do it, coward?” a vicious voice from the crowd attacked him, bringing him back to reality, or whatever this was, with enough time to notice that he was barefoot and wearing lounge pants and a tee-shirt, as if someone had grabbed him straight out of bed.
‘Where is here and where is the victim?’ he reasoned that the screamer probably didn’t end up well and they thought him the perpetrator.
Waves of rage swept over him and he swore on everything he held dear that if he ever got out of this, which was the likely outcome if past experiences were any reference, he could see a person being slowly disemboweled right in front of his face and go right back to reading his newspaper. His newspaper had never tried to shove a microphone in his face and insult him for no reason, thus his newspaper was better company.
He felt guilty for worrying about himself instead of putting the tragedy of the unfortunate victim first, and then he felt angry for getting dragged into yet another circus he didn’t belong to, and asked to tend its monkeys.
“Degenerate!” another scream emerged, followed by a shoe which barely missed his head.
“Pervert!” another scream followed, drowned in a sea of cheers and protests from a crowd that was approaching menacingly, barely held back by the cordon of police.
The officers were giving him dirty glances too, to let him know that the disgust was definitely shared, but they were obligated by their duty.
‘What the hell did the perpetrator do?’ he wrecked his mind to imagine as a tiny helpless smile curled his lips in a silent call for help from anyone who would dare show him kindness.
“Look at that monster smile!” a grunt pushed through the cordon to get in his face, and he read so much hatred in that person’s eyes he knew that if it weren’t for the police, he’d already be dead. An endlessly creative series of curses and profanity accompanied the death stare, getting louder as a couple of officers dragged the attacker away from the crowd.
“I hope you rot in hell for what you did, you depraved demon spawn!” a crying woman’s grief pierced him like a rusty knife, with an intensity designed to inflict maximum immediate and long-term damage.
“Why did you do it, sir?” the press kept pushing through, louder than the crowd so their questions could be heard over the screams of the protesters.
“Was it for the money? Did you hope to get her money?”
“Did you two have an affair?”
“Did you push her?” an interviewer managed to get so close to him he could feel his hot breath in his face. “Did you push her?”
‘So it was a she and she must have fallen from somewhere high up,’ he tried to put the story together in his head, knowing full well that these stories never congealed into something halfway coherent. Like an orchestra rehearsal before the performance where every instrument practices its own difficult piece to perfect it. Perfected chaos.
He tried to turn his head to see if the scene everybody was raging about was behind him, but an outraged policeman grabbed him by the scruff of his neck and forced his head forward.
“Time to go, sir,” he said harshly, and guided him forward with a controlled but stern grab of his arm.
The pavement felt very cold under his feet; he assumed by the looks of the landscape that it was February. He was definitely not dressed for it and, despite his best efforts to put a good face on this whole situation, he started shivering uncontrollably.
He couldn’t help thinking how pitiful it was for a land creature to have gotten so soft that it had to limp to avoid the sharp pokes of the occasional pebbles to protect its sensitive soles. A land creature whose feet were too soft for the land it walked on. It would have been comical if it weren’t so sad.
‘It was a mistake!’ a revelation hit his confused mind with the glaring light of the obvious, but he couldn’t tell exactly what the mistake was, the fact that he had become incompatible with his own environment, the fact that he got stuck in a reality loop or this particular instance of his torment, which didn’t even register as the first priority in the larger scheme of things.
‘It was a mistake!’ he kept shouting inside his head, and even there his shouts kept getting gruff and muffled, until they ended up sounding more like a forceful whisper.
The crowd kept pushing against him and the group of policemen who were holding their bodies against it to protect him. Somebody still managed to reach his body and grabbed the collar of his tee-shirt. It choked him before it ripped, exposing even more of his skin to the humid chill.
‘The station must be close, otherwise they would have put me in a car,’ he tried to pep himself up, but they kept on walking and after a while he couldn’t feel his body anymore, or the rough pavement under his feet.
“Right this way, sir!” the officer in command pushed him up the stairs and towards the door of the police station, and more than anything in his life he prayed to God he would hear muzak thesecond that door popped ajar, but sadly that didn’t happen.
The officer led him to an office, instead of an interviewing room, sat him down in a chair and left.
He waited there for hours while busy people swarmed around ignoring him, very involved in what seemed to be a breakthrough in an important case, the one he had gotten himself entangled with he assumed.
He tried to gather from fragments of their conversations what were the details of his ‘guilt’, but the information he got was too sparse and disjointed to make sense.
He stared intently at his surroundings, trying to take in every detail of the room, unable to chase away the thought one of those many doors that kept yapping open and closed like angry mouths was his path to freedom.
Chapter 6 - Stragegy
When he opened his eyes he was welcomed by the familiar sight of the lounge room and his first thought was how lucky he was to be back home.
The mind is a strange thing that can twist and stretch to no end and accommodate almost anything, no matter how logically unsound, when caught in the push and pull of human rationalizations.
Who would have thought only a few short months ago that this room, which he could not escape, would become the only place in existence where he could find some peace?
We all imagine we have all our ducks in a row, we imagine we know what we would be able to live with and what we would not; we think we’re in control. It only takes one minor adjustment, the slightest thing, a ridiculous detail, to wake us up to the fact that we’re barely one rung above an eating and breeding machine, programmed to stay alive at any cost.
Some people find a savage nobility in accepting this thought, in embracing their instinctive nature, they consider it a mark of courage in the struggle for survival they perceive life to be.
It clarifies their purpose, removes their internal conflicts and sets them free from the agony of moral choices and from the obligation to uphold one’s own standards of behavior in the face of insurmountable odds.
Tragically for him, he was not one of those people. Even more tragically, he didn’t have a martyr bone in his body and this controlled maze in which he found himself trapped didn’t look like the hill he wanted to die on.
There was no point to it, really, just random iterations of chaos, which seemed both intentional and spontaneously generated, and which would have been interesting enough to entice him to take a closer look if only they weren’t peppered with death threats, absurd details and pointless interruptions.
Of course, that was the very nature of chaos, and if one decided to study it its guiding principles oughtn’t surprise one.
But chaos doesn’t have guiding principles, that is a contradiction in terms, which makes sense once you remember that chaos thrives on the denial of logic.
One characteristic of the human spirit, which people only find in their darkest moments, is that it suddenly becomes clear when it finds itself inside danger, uncertainty and sorrow, and then one can see the real reality through its shell.
One can not deny its real nature going further, no matter how shockingly it presents itself.
‘I’m a lab rat,’ his rational mind announced proudly, as if it was some scientific breakthrough worth sharing, some cathartic watershed moment that solved all of his problems and precluded further research.
His soul bounced, embarrassed, between relief and defeat, violently contorted by his over-thinking mind, until his weak flesh, still reeling from its recent traumatic experience in ways a strong spirit can’t fix, won the fight and set his priorities straight: he had to find something that would help him stay warm.
Still shivering, he walked barefoot to the bar, trying to figure out where he was going to find clothes, since the ones he had on were ripped to rags and not weather appropriate.
Whenever he needed something, the lounge always seemed to provide, so he went to the kitchen, his heart filled with trust, expecting to find a change of clothes in the dryer, or in one of the open lockers. There weren’t any.
‘Idiot!’ he mumbled to himself.
Talking to himself seemed like the reasonable thing to do under the circumstances, his only weapon against his total dissolution as a person.
Like Robinson Crusoe on a deserted island he was beginning to understand that he would have to learn to live in a world with only one inhabitant. How does one adapt to being the only person in their universe? Does one forget to speak after a while? Or stop thinking altogether? To him it seemed quite the opposite, the more the world fractured itself away from his strange boxed existence the more questions it seemed to rise, deep philosophical questions he never pondered before.
Before what, that was the question, because he couldn’t remember his previous life at all, if he ever had one; it was as if he’d been born to this room, fully grown, with no preexisting thoughts or emotions.
‘Maybe I’m a clone,’ he thought, not the most ridiculous hypothesis under the circumstances. And if so, what of it? Did that make him less of a person?
He shrugged. Nobody gets answers to these questions just for the asking, otherwise the world would have become a much better place a long time ago.
There he was, alone, raggedy and cold, holding a drink that didn’t yield the expected effect of getting his blood moving.
‘Is it me or it just got unpleasantly cold in here?’
Goose bumps on his arms confirmed that the sensation was real and that alarmed him, because he had figured out by now some of the patterns of this giant lab experiment.
If he couldn’t find clothes and the brandy gave him chills, there was no reason to expect that there would be any blankets anywhere, or hot soup, or anything that would help him keep himself warm if the temperatures kept dropping. He also understood that the temperatures will keep dropping.
The obvious solution presented itself, so depressing in light of recent events that he contemplated death by hypothermia as the better option, but the survival instinct is more powerful than one believes when one’s life is not being threatened.
He sighed, hating himself more than he ever thought possible, and chose the lesser of evils, the door to the mirror lounge, in the hope that at least that room would be predictable and warm.
“Happy birthday to you, happy birthday to you!” a choir of male voices, endearingly off pitch for the extra touch of authenticity, urged him to join in mid-song.
“Happy birthday, dear Helmuth!”
‘Which one of us is Helmuth?’ he wondered, not taking himself out of consideration for obvious reasons.
“Here he is! Always late! Always late!” one of the guests wrapped his arm around his shoulder in an affectionate gesture, but instantly recoiled at the soil on his rags. “Good God, what did you get yourself into! Helmuth!” he raised his voice to draw the attention of a tall man who was in a very good mood, compliments of the three glasses of champaign he’d already imbibed.
‘So I’m not Helmuth.’
“Get this guy some clothes, would you? He looks a fright!”
He turned around to face him.
“Also, a shower wouldn’t hurt you. You smell like you spent the night in the cooler.”
‘I probably did,’ he thought. ‘The only question is why?’
“Did you study that plan I sent you?” his new friend asked him when he returned from the kitchen with a clean shave and a well-pressed suit. It felt good to be clean, and the champaign was starting to get to his head, blending the sounds into a soothing background noise.
“I’m sorry, what? Aah, yeah. Yeah. Needs more research, though.”
“How much more research do you need, we’ve been running models for six months! I think we covered all the bases!” the friend jumped, suddenly offended. “I don’t know what to say about this, it feels to me like you’re not committed to this project!”
Not knowing how to answer, he stood there in silence, his head bowed so low it touched his chest. Would his answer make any difference? When he inevitably left here, wherever here was, will his decision affect something critical that had been going on in the life of his alter ego, and if so, was he morally obligated to care? Was it reprehensible in principle to make any decisions about something he knew nothing about? He could be agreeing to sinking a continent for all he knew. He could be agreeing to save hundreds of people from certain death. There was no way of knowing which and no end to the moral agony of figuring out the right thing to do in the absence of this knowledge.
“Well?” his friend refused to let him off the hook.
“Could you flesh out the details for me a bit? I only skimmed over the proposal. I’ve been busy, you know how it is!”
“Oh, so you never read it. That’s what I thought.” The friend got up with a hurt expression on his face. “I thought you were serious about this and I’m sorry I was wrong.”
He sat there and watched his friend leave, noticing how his shoulders stretched back in an elastic, quick and subtle motion which reminded him of tension wire – his only visible reaction to a painful betrayal of trust.
He felt suddenly guilty and ashamed, despite having absolutely no control over this situation, and realized he had just become a jerk without doing anything.
‘There really is no way I could be ok in this environment. No way at all. It is not possible.’
No matter what he did, it would be wrong. How can one be expected to function in a world in which one is parachuted without being asked, unprepared and with no time to learn anything about it? If the definition of intelligence is an individual’s ability to adapt to new circumstances, he wasn’t faring very well right now. He got instantly aggravated by this unfair game, only to collapse in a bout of laughter. Of course it wasn’t fair! Fair chaos! That would be the day!
His friend threw him a quick glance, startled by the inappropriate laughter; he looked really hurt.
‘I’m a monster’, he thought, for no reason. ‘I should have said yes to that proposal, whatever it was. What difference does it make, anyway?’
He searched for solace at the bottom of his champaign bottle, found it empty and wobbled to the kitchen to get another.
'This stuff packs a punch!’ he muttered, in disbelief that he could get so hammered from one glass of bubbly, and he wasn’t even surprised when the familiar sound of muzak welcomed him on the other side of the door.
Chapter 7 - Duplicate
He wobbled to the nearest chair and
sat down, or rather fell in it, if one wanted a more accurate description. He was still holding the champaign bottle in his hand and did his best to focus on the label in an attempt to figure out why it had gotten to his head so fast. Focus seemed beyond his current capabilities, so he just noticed the bottle was empty and let it drop to the floor with a hollow noise which reassured him the fall didn’t break it.
He leaned back in the chair, trying to make himself as comfortable as possible, and fell asleep immediately, helped by the slowly dimming light. He had no idea how long he’d been sleeping when he woke up, his head pounding and his mouth feeling like cotton balls. There was a blanket on the chair next to his, neatly folded so the edges aligned to form a perfect square.
Startled by the discovery, he jumped to his feet, in a fight-or-flight response that bypassed his brain.
There was nobody else in the room, and after he checked inside every cupboard and behind every door, he had the uncomfortable feeling of his privacy having been violated, even as he had no expectation of privacy living in this space.
He didn’t even know how much time had passed since he first woke up in this lounge, there was no accounting for day or night in this place with no doors, no windows and no clocks, a place he had started to suspect was outside time itself somehow, like some sort of hub where different realities and timelines intersected.
His eyes rested on the paneling in an absentminded gaze, trying to admire the patterns for their own sake, rather than look for signs of what they could mean or where they could lead. He was drawn to one of them, far back into a corner, an Art Nouveau pastiche with intricate flower motifs and long winding stems.
He drew near to see it up close, careful not to touch anything, still waiting for whoever brought the blanket to show up unexpectedly from the kitchen and question his presence there. There was no logic to his concern since his return to this room didn’t seem to be anymore within his control than his leaving it. Besides, he had gotten used to considering this room his home base, and that made the other person the intruder.
Still unstable from his hangover, he accidentally leaned on the panel, fell through the opening and didn’t have a chance to get up before the door snapped closed behind him.
“Where on earth have you been?” his wife from before stood there watching him with a crease between her eyebrows, in clear disapproval of his disheveled state and his lack of sobriety. He was still dressed in the tuxedo, but his shirt collar was unbuttoned and the bow tie hung undone, like a limp butterfly wrapped around his neck.
What did one answer to a question like that? What if he told her the truth? The worst that could happen was to get himself some well-deserved rest in a padded room, which promised solitude and quiet until he walked through a door at random and ended up back into the muzak lounge. Still hostage to his reason, he decided against it.
“I’m sorry,” he played for time, “the boys didn’t want to take no for an answer, they said it would not be more than two hours.”
“Helmuth, are you all right?” his wife looked worried. “You’ve been out for five minutes, at most. In fact, I can’t understand how you got dressed in such a short time, not to mention end up looking like this,” she pointed to his state of undress appalled.
‘Helmuth,’ he thought. ‘I’m Helmuth now? The Helmuth? I look nothing like Helmuth, do I?’
Suddenly he needed to find a mirror, to see if his face was the same, and while walking to the bathroom, to his wife’s increasing distress, he realized he didn’t know what he actually looked like, or what his name was, or anything from his real life, if he ever had one. Whatever face he saw in the mirror, it probably looked like Helmuth.
Curiosity got the better of him, defying logic, and he locked himself in the bathroom to experience this seminal moment privately, for what it was worth.
The face in the mirror didn’t tell him anything. No inkling of recognition, no subtle knowledge, but he didn’t reject it either, this outer self he was bound to for now.
“Helmuth!” he heard his wife pound on the door, agitated. “Open this door right now!”
He would have liked to spend a little more time alone, to get his bearings, but the insistent pounding on the door intensified.
“Have you been in a fight?” the question welcomed him painfully loud as he opened the door to the sight of his wife’s face uncomfortably close to his own.
“No,” he hesitated.
“You look it,” his wife evaluated his state to see if she needed to call for help.
“It was nothing,” he had the spontaneous desire to make something up, just to see how far he could stretch the truth before the story collapsed onto itself for lack of detail and consistency. “This thug bounced into me on the street and I had the unfortunate inspiration to hold him accountable.”
“But you’ve been drinking, yes?” his wife tested his sincerity.
“Just a glass, dear,” he admitted sheepishly.
“A glass of what? You smell like a distillery!” his wife protested, unconvinced.
‘The one time I tell the truth,’ he sighed, defeated. The fake story sounded more believable, so he went back to it. “I wish I knew! One of the guys asked me to try this concoction. He said he brought it from somewhere exotic. Worst idea of my life, I feel like I’ve been hit by a train!”
“You should be more careful,” his wife immediately started doting over his righteous indignation, of which she approved. “You don’t know how it was made, what if it’s toxic? You’re lucky to get away so easy, you know?”
“I’m sorry,” he uttered the universal get out of jail sentence. It seemed to work, and while his wife was still torn between upset and worry, he noticed she was wearing an evening gown. He didn’t ask why, but she noticed his gaze and extrapolated on its meaning.
“Do you like it?” she turned around so he could see the garment from all angles.
“Such a beautiful garment,” he returned an open-ended comment hoping to draw out more detail. Not that they mattered, anyway. Any moment now he’d walk through that front door on his way to wherever they were supposed to be going and end up back in the lounge.>
“Yes, and so expensive too!” she looked guilty about it for a moment, and then her eyes stopped on his clothes and she went on the offensive instead. “You know that tuxedo was rented, right? I can’t imagine how we will get it to a state acceptable enough to return it. You certainly can’t wear it to the wedding, you look a fright!”
‘A wedding,’ he smiled vaguely, like he was watching a movie with an unexpected twist. “I guess I’ll just have to find something else to wear then,” he started to get up from the chair, wondering which one of the five doors in the hallway led to the bedroom.
“Don’t even joke about that!” his wife stopped him with a decisive gesture. “I can’t imagine Mrs. Davenport’s reaction if you show up in business formal to a black tie event! I’d never be able to show my face at the club again! You have to rent another tuxedo. We will be late, but between two evils, you know?” she looked at him, pleased she had found a solution to the problem.
“If you think so,” he acquiesced.
“Really?” she replied, surprised. “That easy? No protests?”
“I just want you to be happy,” he uttered get out of jail sentence number two.
“Of course you do, dear!” she kissed him on the cheek, purring with contentment. “That’s why I love you.”
He got up, without encountering resistance this time, and walked to the front door, while his wife shouted from behind.
“Since you’re going out anyway, can you get bread too? We ran out.”
He wanted to ask what kind, but then reconsidered, because it sounded like a detail he was supposed to know, and sighed with relief when the door opened to muzak sounds.
He marked the panel with the same sign as the other door leading to that particular reality and questioned the rationality of trying to make a function out of random associations that seemed to sprout spontaneously from a chaotic set of alternate realities constantly in flow, shifting to make his markings irrelevant even as he was making them.
‘There is no such thing as perfect chaos,’ he thought, but had to concede that even if he found patterns in this amorphous blob of goo, they would be too few and far between to inform him about its nature.
Chapter 8 - Commitment
Helmuth!” a voice resonated from behind with the stark intensity of a bullet. He turned around, not being able to remember how he got to this giant and ornate ball room with gleaming crystal chandeliers and chamber music, filled with ladies and gentlemen dressed for the evening and an army of staff carrying champaign glasses on silver trays.
"Have you given any thought to my proposal?”
“Damn! Of all the random strands of continuity in this meaningless, chaotic pulp! How did I merge into the club party scenario again?”
“What was that proposal?” he wondered, realizing with dismay they never actually talked about it.
He sketched a non-committal smile and gestured to a waiter who approached immediately with drinks.
When you’re thrown into chaos, you soon discover it doesn’t have much to offer: it’s all different and all the same simultaneously, and the human mind tires quickly of the various iterations of things not making sense. We pride ourselves in our reason; we developed our minds by climbing the stepping stones of logic, one truth at a time. What good is a sound mind in a place bereft of consequence?
“How do you live like this?” he asked himself. “How do you even survive in a place like this? What is the point of tomorrow in a reality that makes no sense?”
“Yes, I think it’s a splendid idea. Have the papers ready, we should sign the agreement as soon as feasible.”
“Why not now?” his hopeful business associate countered, beaming from the excitement of such an easy victory and eager to close the deal.
“Excellent!” the person currently known as Helmuth reaffirmed his commitment. “I have no idea what I’m signing,” he smiled to himself. He couldn’t remember having a life before the muzak lounge, but if he did, he had to assume this kind of venture would have caused him great trepidation and at least a few sleepless nights. “Let’s just hope whatever this is doesn’t kill anybody.”
“You know,” his conversation partner interjected, still reeling from the emotional weight of placing his signature on a document of great significance, “I never thought you would allow Inclusion 35B in the contract. I mean you, of all people…”
'Inclusion 35B, of course! I don’t know what Inclusion 35B is, but Helmuth is going to have a bear of a case explaining himself,' he thought, and then decided to play along, just to see how far this conversation would go before it inevitably returned him to that lounge, that reality crossroads, before whatever this was had time to consummate.
“Oh, yeah?” he teased. “Why did you put it in the contract then?”
“You know me,” the partner smiled. “I don’t give up that easily. Besides, Dagmar was hell-bent on it, I couldn’t change his mind.” He smiled again, happy and relieved, with the expression of a man who had been shouldering a heavy burden for a long time, a burden which was now lifted.
“And I made somebody happy today!” Helmuth congratulated himself, a little saddened by the fact he didn’t remember his true name, if he ever had one. Who was this man he was impersonating so well, it seemed, nobody was the wiser?
“This is worth celebrating, don’t you think?” his partner replied. Helmuth raised his hand for another round of bubbly, but the man held down his arm and whispered something in his ear, so close he could feel the bristle of his mustache and his breath tickle his earlobe; he let out an involuntary giggle. The room was too loud and he couldn’t understand what his partner had said.
“Yes?” the latter inquired, eyes glossy from the champaign while he touched his arm in a familiar gesture.
“Are we an item or have I had too much to drink?” Helmuth sobered up instantly.
“But what about my wife?” he thought, right before he realized the limitations of continuity in a chaotic environment: they only work locally and temporarily.
Logic trips you again and again in a place with no rules.
Just because two reality options bear significant similarities, that doesn’t mean the same parameters are present in both.
Helmuth looked down at his hand, as inconspicuously as possible, filled with the anxiety of anticipation: his wedding ring was still there, so he let out a sigh of relief, which didn’t escape his conversation partner.
“Your husband keeps you on a short leash, doesn’t he?” the latter replied, slighted by the anticipated rejection, but not enough to overshadow the victory he’d just scored.
“You know, Helmuth? I never thought of you as the marrying type. That’s too bad!” he looked at him with a nostalgic smile.
“Everybody settles down eventually… dear sir,” Helmuth continued to play along, realizing too late he didn’t know his partner’s name. He cursed himself for not looking at the signature. How does one sign a contract and not once even look at the names on the paper? Instinct at least should have kicked in! After all, he was a grown man, he must have lived somewhere normal before the muzak lounge, he surely must have. His business partner removed his hand from his arm, offended.
“You may have settled down, Helmuth, but you haven’t changed a bit. Serves me right to trust you.”
“How the devil does this keep happening to me?” Helmuth gasped, aghast. “Shouldn’t he be at least a bit happy I signed his darn contract? It looked important enough to discuss for months! One can’t put a foot right in this madness!”
“Here you are,” his husband intervened at just the right time to break the awkwardness of the situation. “I hate to interrupt your pleasant reunion, but the cab is here.”
The crease between the eyebrows of the latter did not bode a pleasant evening.
He closed his eyes, relieved he wasn’t really Helmuth, from either reality, and Helmuth’s problems, commitments and romantic dramas didn’t affect him in the least. He was one door away from never being in this environment again, so he decided to enjoy it for as long as he was there. He grabbed another champaign flute on his way to the door.
“You seemed a little cozy there, with James,” his husband commented, with a hint of reproach. “Are we having second thoughts?”
“What do you mean?” he looked the picture of innocence.
“Maybe I don’t appreciate you rekindling a relationship with your former boyfriend, did you ever think of that?” his husband spoke in a low throaty voice, choked with emotion and embarrassment.
“What?! No! Really?” Helmuth mumbled, disoriented by the sudden situational ambush. “Oh, man, this is not good, not good at all! I’m starting to think if there is a hell, I’m going for sure!”
But what if this was hell? What else would hell look like, if not as an absence of all meaning? He suddenly felt like a condemned man, sentenced to live his disjointed life outside the bonds of family, purpose and love.
However much his now husband might hurt from his jealousy and insecurity, at least he was capable to feel human emotions. He lived a story, good or bad, where things happened as a result of other things. He instantly resented this man, who was a complete stranger, for loving him and having his happiness tied to his whims. They weren’t even his whims, he mused, whose whims were they, really? Who decided, when a random door opened, whether it was just another door or it led back to the muzak lounge?
They kept silent in the cab, that resentful silence long time partners display when they’re having the same tired argument for the hundredth time.
The cab driver threw a glance in their direction, used as he was to the entire array of human relationships and emotions, and he asked them if it was ok to turn the radio on.
Helmuth nodded, throwing a furtive, guilty glance toward his husband, uncomfortable to acknowledge he didn’t even know the name of the man who loved him enough to make a lifetime commitment to him, and then his mind veered off, curious about what was in that contract he signed.
The cab stopped in front of an apartment building, and he wondered how he would explain the fact he didn’t know which door he was supposed to walk towards, but his husband saved the situation by walking ahead, visibly upset. He followed him to the door, unsure, and when it opened the familiar soft muzak sounds welcomed him.
Chapter 9 - Projections
He took a few minutes to get settled, grabbed a sandwich from the refrigerator under the bar and poured himself a drink. He was exhausted after the party he’d just left and grateful to have a quiet moment to himself.
Absentminded he admired the pattern on the wall next to him, the one with the elaborate vine motifs, and he felt a little guilty for defacing the gorgeous inlay work with his annotations.
The pattern already listed three unrelated destinations, which would have made any rational person wonder why they bothered to write them down.
He looked for any connections between the locations, but there weren’t any, just like there were no similarities between the destinations of the other panels.
"Such beautiful artwork!” he couldn’t help admiring the woodwork.
The inlay was intricate and expertly crafted, in beechwood and walnut veneer, and the edges of the stylized flowers were trimmed in ivory.
A tinge of guilt gnawed at his conscience when his eyes met his own careless scribbles, but he read the destinations again anyway, even though they were too vague to provide a frame of reference.
He laid back in the chair to contemplate the fact that, at least for as far as his memories took him, which was not that far, he had been Helmuth in his various incarnations more than he’d been himself. Maybe he really was Helmuth, who was to tell, but which one?
The familiar warmth of the brandy had relaxed his stomach, and he felt comfortable in that chair, the cozy feeling of a person who’s gotten home after a long day and finally got to put his feet up. He heard voices from the kitchen and got suddenly upset, deciding on the spot he would not get up from that chair no matter who came through the door.
The noise in the kitchen amplified, and the smell of fried onions wafted through the lounge. He tried to ignore both of them, closed his eyes and finished his brandy, determined to sleep. A few pots dropped with a chaotic racket that got him instantly aggravated. He jumped from the chair, determined to go to the kitchen and give those people a piece of his mind, but he couldn’t think of anything to say to them that made any sense at all.
He turned on his feet and made for the panel covered in vines, mad at himself and at the world he didn’t have the guts to stand his ground.
The moment the panel opened he was bathed in sunshine, so strong he had to squint before his eyes could adjust: he was standing in a flower meadow.
He couldn’t tell the plant species apart, but they reached up to his hips, and they parted as he waded through their yielding mass like waves around a ship.
“So peaceful!” he noticed, his tiredness instantly gone, surrounded by sunshine, the soft breath of the afternoon breeze and the gentle buzzing of bees.
The flower meadow stretched out as far as the eyes could see in all directions, and he got a little disoriented under the zenith sun, which didn’t allow him any sense of direction. He shrugged and was just about to walk forward, when a subtle instinct guided him to look across the field, and, to his bewilderment, noticed a door handle hanging in thin air three feet above ground. It was a common knob type, in brushed aluminum, casting no shadow on the ground, like it belonged to a different painting. He stretched his hand out to feel around it and hit a wall. He grabbed the door handle, annoyed, and a door opened in the lovely landscape, revealing the production booth behind the wall.
“Helmuth! Come in, come in! Come to check on your investment, have you?” a personable fellow got up from behind his console and came to welcome him. His enthusiasm was deflated by his companion’s confused appearance. “Did you like it?”
“The…” Helmuth tested the waters, unsure.
“… holographic environment, of course,” his conversation partner clarified.
“It’s… lifelike!” he said the first thing that came to his mind.
“You mean to tell me you couldn’t tell the difference?” the chief technician drew closer, visibly pleased.
“Aah… no,” he mumbled, still trying to get his bearings. “I’m Helmuth again,” he thought, wishing he could remember being this person, if for nothing else, to make his own life easier. “No, it was very realistic.”
“So, we can proceed to phase two, then?” the partner offered, hopeful.
“Might as well,” he mumbled under his breath.
He quietly wondered how many times does one have to embrace a persona before that persona becomes him, before one has the moral obligation to take responsibility for the actions and plans of the latter, before one should start caring about the consequences of one’s careless decisions?
“Am I becoming Helmuth?” he asked himself, not sure he wanted to, not sure he even liked this person, or was anything like him. None of Helmuth’s life events resonated with him, he couldn’t feel this man’s true emotions, he didn’t even know how he liked his coffee, or if he even drank coffee at all.
“Come, I’m starving! We’ll talk over lunch!” his partner guided him towards the door.
The thought of fine dining was appealing, a welcome change from the cold sandwich and soup diet, and was eagerly anticipating his gourmet meal when their car pulled up in front of the restaurant.
“They’ll never let me in dressed like this,” he blurted out loud without even realizing it.
“Are you kidding?” his partner patted him on the back, genuinely amused.
“You’re Helmuth! They’d be happy to have you anywhere, no matter how you’re dressed!”
“Is Helmuth my surname?” he lost his footing at the unexpected logical shift. He crossed the threshold, half expecting to hear muzak, but was welcomed instead by the clinking of plates and silverware. Strange how a change of context can turn a vastly irritating sound into an enjoyable one. For a moment he wondered if the sounds of pots and pans he could hear from behind the staff doors were in fact coming from the same kitchen, and if he could actually use said kitchen as a shortcut to get back to the muzak lounge. Without even thinking, he walked into the kitchen, almost tripping over a waiter whose arms were loaded with plates and who happened to be just behind the door.
“You can’t be in here, sir!” a tense voice admonished him as his business partner gently pulled on his arm, dragging him out of the kitchen.
“You are a strange man, you know that?” the latter looked puzzled.
“Is there another exit out of that kitchen?” Helmuth asked him in a daze.
“Of course there is, it’s a kitchen! Why do you ask?”
“No reason…”, he kept eying the door, still distracted.
His partner tried to bring him back to the here and now by making small talk and asked a polite, non-committal question.
“How is Jennifer?”
“It’s a Jennifer now,” he took notice, drowned in the sudden understanding that in this reality game he was playing, there was no way he could ever be the Helmuth character, because there wasn’t a Helmuth, there were Helmuths, as different from each other as any perfect strangers.
A random game of Helmuth roulette, where he didn’t even know what color he’d land on next.
He didn’t ask himself who Jennifer was to him, it wouldn’t have made any difference anyway, it could be a Roger or a Taylor next for all he knew.
His appetite now gone, he excused himself for a moment, pretending he had to take a phone call and promising to delve into the subject of phase two when he returned, and made his way out the door, relieved to hear the muzak chiming softly in the background.
He wrote the new destination on the panel under the other three and gaped incredulously when he read the composite:
inside the wall
the blue world
duplicates
phase two holographic game
“It’s a language?” he laughed out loud. “Does it read top to bottom or bottom to top?”
Strange, the assumptions we make about unfamiliar things, we automatically dump them in the closest category that seems to fit, without ever looking at what they really are.
He rushed to look at the other destinations he’d marked down on the panels, whose descriptions kind of made sense taken together, if only in a poetic sense.
“At least now I have an incentive to keep opening these doors,” he thought.
He contemplated the hope of compiling an actual story for himself out of random Helmuth fragment variants, an authentic life story, written in travels on the walls of this strange lounge he had gotten used to considering his home.
Chapter 10 - Reality Check
The rules of chaos, a contradiction in terms, express themselves in poetry, express themselves in art, but they don’t waste their time trying to refashion the human mind, they sneakily bend around it, hiding behind truths, behind half-organized concepts, behind the things we take for granted. They make you see exactly what you expect to see; when you change your mind, you see something else and know things have always been that way. Whatever you think you see has never been there: it was always in your mind.
You make meaning for things that don’t need it: nothing in the universe requires justification outside the human mind.
We are slaves to our need for rules, for reality to make sense, and define that sense based only on our familiar turf, and we endlessly churn faulty models of the world and get very pleased with ourselves.
How did the human mind get burdened with the crushing effort, mostly wasted, of bending reality out of shape into whatever we believe it should be like?
Naturally, he discovered a language, because it was familiar, because it wasn’t scary, because that’s what humans used to communicate.
Reality graciously realigned itself to give him what he needed, the patterns and meanings that only existed in his mind.
So a language it became, one he developed doing the same thing over and over, for how many days, years, or decades, he didn’t even know. Us humans measure time by how much things change. The secret of eternity resides in repetition and congruence.
He assumed language to be human language, so reality conceded, and sent him tomes of poetry, and catalogs of patterns, which he studied devotedly and with unmovable focus.
It sent him structure to satisfy his need for connections and adventures to quell his curiosity; it sent him down the rabbit hole of every human emotion, experienced more or less in the abstract, in the absence of memory. It sent him everything it had to offer, but couldn’t answer the question that plagued him: the why. There is no why in reality. Reality just is.
For him it was a language, but it could have been anything else he might have deemed important: religion, wisdom, the affirmation of will.
Reality opened a doorway for him to pass through, and then self-healed behind him, gently cocooning him in his personal bubble of understanding, one that behaved according to his thoughts.
A womb of potentiality that protected him from the uncertainty of outcome, but limited him to a rather small range of possibilities, as not to overwhelm his biological machinery, limited in its processing speed by the electrical resistance of its wiring.
When the beautiful panels became so crowded with this multi-verse poetry there was no space left to edge in another word, he started cultivating the realities that afforded him the means to document his journeys, and started filling up the muzak lounge with catalogs of panel destinations and annotated journals of his travels.
In the realities with friends and families, he became Helmuth, and took upon the obligations that came with his persona, but for the most part being just kept churning new contexts and new worlds every day, an endless array of possibilities in every combination of details.
Some worlds were so beautiful and so bizarre he spent days, sometimes weeks, going through the same panel again and again, trying to get back to them, and the quantum probabilities translated as refrains, turning the corresponding lyrics into old-fashioned French poems, strewn with repeating lines.
The largest archive of poetry in existence, which had all written itself, was carefully collected and organized by the only being ever to need order and reason – the human it carried in its womb.
Sometimes he sat on top of a mountain somewhere, eyes closed, trying to sink beneath his thoughts, hoping to find a lost memory, any inkling of who he used to be, but if there were any there, he never found them.
He made friends; he had lovers; he created projects; he made himself lives in these realities, all the way knowing that every one of his journeys would end at a door leading to the only place that seemed permanent – the muzak lounge.
He’d started wondering who were the strangers who occasionally got stranded ‘at his place’, as he got used to calling this eerie room. He attempted no contact with them, and if they happened to be there he made himself scarce before anybody had a chance to interact.
He fantasized these odd encounters were some overlapping of realities, an accident of superposition where the worlds involved passed through each other, out of phase, in ways that didn’t touch.
He often daydreamed of what would happen if he dragged somebody from his endless reality iterations through that fateful door that marked the end of his journeys.
Would they be able to return to their respective worlds eventually, or would they become trapped with him in Neverland?
He resigned himself to bringing back news, social events, fragments of situations that only applied locally, according to the customs of the world they belonged to, and which rarely showed any commonality of principles or meaning.
He brought back with him the world according to each school of thought and moral system, none of which applied to life as whole, but most of which sort of made sense in context. Their collective body of wisdom was no more coherent than the random poems that wrote themselves.
‘Who are you?’ he stared at himself in the mirror every day, and a person named Helmuth stared back. He didn’t know this man at all, this man whose life he’d lived in almost any configuration possible. He’d been gay and straight, rich and poor, he even went to jail for murder once. He collected prizes and degrees. He took to the wilderness. He acquired wisdom.
Helmuth acquired wisdom, not him, because he wasn’t Helmuth. Helmuth was his wardrobe, the collection of garments he attired himself with each morning to meet his many worlds.
He learned to lie so well he surprised himself sometimes, and his life became so much easier and more pleasant as a result. Conscience becomes a useless burden when one sheds the consequences of life at the end of each day.
He often asked himself if he’d always been this callous, but there was no way of knowing, with no baseline personality to compare his present self to. He didn’t want to compare himself to other people either, since he didn’t share their lives. He just glided over their surface, like a dragonfly barely leaving traces, before he disappeared.
‘Who are you?’ his reflection haunted him, and he could feel, when he looked in the mirror, that from behind the Helmuth mask a witness watched him intently, studying his every gesture, assessing his every mood.
‘Answer me!’ he lost his temper and slammed his fist on the sink, in a childish gesture both painful and embarrassing.
‘I’m Helmuth,’ the witness behind the stranger’s gaze quietly answered, very matter of fact, as if he’d been waiting for the question for a long time. ‘The real Helmuth.’
Chapter 11 - Roles
The soft lounge music penetrated his consciousness, seeping through the dream he was having, a strangely coherent story, filled with people and activities, strange mostly because its prosaic content was a dull person’s recounting of the trivial details of his life.
Through this uninspiring story the music reverberated, faint and very far away, and then started growing louder, like an approaching train, until its brashness startled him awake.
In the first confused moments, he couldn’t orient himself as he looked past the contours of the black leather chairs for the source of the noise.
‘Someone turned the music up,‘ he reasoned, annoyed the unwelcome change in his current environment, which he hadn’t chosen either, was not up to him.
The racket seemed to emerge from the kitchen, towards which he headed, determined to give the offending party a piece of his mind.
Inconsiderate bastards!
There was nobody there, just a ridiculously large boom box, straight out of the seventies, blaring away, its sounds amplified by the metallic resonance of the pots and pans hanging around it.
He turned the music off, irked, and grabbed a beer from the closest refrigerator.
He returned to the bar to drink it at leisure, wondering when the lounge was going to force him through one of those panels again, tired of this rat maze and exasperated by the lack of personal space, privacy and choice.
His dream replayed itself with great clarity, or maybe it was his real life, and this here the dream, there was no way of knowing, of course, in a true Buddhist mindset, which was which. What depressed him, really, was those interactive dreams were equally pathetic. Who dreams of processing office paperwork?
How boring was he, the real Helmuth who asserted himself from behind his gaze? Stupid Helmuth. Dull Helmuth. Helmuth who apparently couldn’t be free even in his dreams.
He hit himself over the head, hard, in the hope it would help him awaken, and all he accomplished was to augment his beer induced headache.
‘I need something stronger,‘ he mumbled, staggering around the bar to pick a bottle of liquor. ‘I didn’t drink that much, did I?‘ he pondered, surprised by his shaky balance.
He felt spacey and numb, and he had to make an effort to turn his hands upwards and look at them. Had he been drugged? And if so, by whom, and why? He remembered his business partner, Inclusion 35B, and the fact he’d never bothered to learn what it was about. Nobody signs papers without reading them, no competent grown-up, anyway. Not even one whose days were dealt discretely.
His confusion deepened as he stumbled towards the closest chair in which he fell at the same time his legs gave way. He panicked, wondering if he was experiencing a medical emergency, and then a mild euphoria took over, followed by a deep sleep.
He woke up with a monster hangover and his business partner staring at him. The surroundings had changed too. He was still in the lounge, but the room was now littered with ashtrays, glasses and empty bottles, and its furniture was in disarray.
“You’re growing old,” his partner laughed. “You used to hold your liquor.”
“Who the hell are you?” he asked, possessed by the will to stop playing out this ridiculous charade. What was the guy going to do, take him to the psych ward? By the end of the day, any broom closet door there would probably take him back to this fated lounge.
“Ok,” the guy sighed, resigned, “Come on, get up, we’re going to walk this off. Come on, up! Here! Drink this!” he pushed a sour and bitter liquid to his lips.
“What is this?” he spit it out, disgusted. The vile liquid must have been coffee at some point, but now it tasted sour and salty and it made his stomach turn. He barely had time to make it to the bathroom before his body returned the unwanted substance.
“Best hangover remedy I know,” his partner retorted, scrutinizing him. “Are you feeling better?”
He was surprised to notice that he was.
“Good. I need to get you looking respectable, we’re having a construction review, the inspectors are going to be here any moment now.”
“You set up a meeting in here?” he couldn’t help his reaction as he glanced over the tossed room and wondered who would pick a party house as an appropriate venue for business interactions.
He remembered his dream and reviled getting dragged into fake reality again, and acting towards it as if it was real. And even if it was real, he wasn’t Helmuth, and he didn’t know what Inclusion 35B was about. He didn’t choose any of this. Why was he playing along?
“I’m not Helmuth,” he declared.
“Aah, yeah…” his partner assessed him with a critical eye. “Maybe you should sit this one out, my friend. You don’t look so hot.”
“Aren’t you going to take me to the hospital?” he asked, with a shrewd gleam in his eye.
“Not on your life!” his partner didn’t miss a beat. “I don’t know what you took, but I hope it doesn’t kill you. This is too important to muck up. I trust you’ll get your act together soon and start behaving like a grown-up, I can’t keep making excuses for you, you’re fifty years old, for God’s sake!”
‘Finally, some information that’s not useless! So, I’m fifty then! That would make my birth year…‘
Of course he didn’t know what year they were in. Not what year, not what place, not even what reality. Back to start.
‘This is hopeless,‘ he wobbled out of his chair; the inspectors walked through the kitchen door just as his partner was trying to get him out of their sight. His unsteady balance met a beautifully ornate inlay panel and made it swing open.
“Might as well,” his partner made an instant decision to push him through it and the panel snapped closed behind him.
A series of expressions not worth mentioning graced Helmuth’s lips, followed by copious applause.
“That was great,” a diminutive man with glasses and a clipboard pursed his lips, thinking. “Maybe you can add hand gestures, the scene is too static.”
“What?”
“Hand gestures,”, the director replied. “You know…” he demonstrated, with profane gestures that could make a sailor blush. “Can somebody adjust that light?” he pointed. “It’s too bright and too cold. Who’s the set manager? I said warm light, not daylight. Daylight is always too cold!”
“That would be Jason,” one of the AV techs replied.
“Jason!” the director raised his voice, stirring a shuffling of feet and dropped objects from the adjacent room.
The Helmuth who wasn’t just stared in disbelief and voided of emotions at this theater of the absurd, and decided, just for kicks, to mix things up.
“What about Inclusion 35B?” he grabbed the arm of the technician who had rushed to the scene and now fussed about, changing light bulbs and trying to make himself invisible.
“We taped it last week,” the youth mumbled, confused. “Why? Was there something wrong with it? Please tell me we don’t have to do it over, my girlfriend is going to kill me if I postpone our date again!”
“Your girlfriend, huh?” Helmuth’s blood pressure rose instantly at the thought everybody in this nightmarish farce had a life, a name, and a home. Everybody but him. “Give me your phone, I’ll explain it to her!”
The tech glared at him sideways and made himself scarce, resentful of this and all the other entitled primadonnas who behaved as if they owned reality.
“Today, if possible?” the director snapped. The lights flared back on, warmer indeed, and more intense than the sun’s core. He squinted instinctively, feeling as if he was being cooked alive, and realized he didn’t know his lines.
“Just improvise!” the director replied, visibly displeased. “We’re already over budget.”
Helmuth stood there, intimidated by the sea of lights, cameras and microphones pointed at him, unable, despite this prolific imagination, to put together the harmonious mix of profane words and obscene gestures the scene demanded.
“Alright!” the director jumped out of the chair, outraged. “We’re done for today. When you’re ready to give a damn about your work, let me know.”
As he said that he walked out the doors of the set, followed by a small army of technicians carrying various pieces of equipment and furniture, and Helmuth was left alone in their abandoned chaos, standing like an idiot in the middle of an empty room. He shrugged and followed them out the door, welcomed by the soft sounds of lounge music.
“That’s it! I’m done!” he grabbed the closest glass off a side table and threw it at the wall. The tumbler was half filled with brandy, which splattered all over the wall, creating its own free-form motifs.
“You are done!? YOU!?” his partner rushed towards him, enraged. “You negotiated Inclusion 35B without me, you deceitful scoundrel?”
“What’s Inclusion 35B?” he asked, unfazed.
His partner blasted out the kitchen door, articulating a symphony of curses that would have earned him unequivocal appreciation from the director.
Helmuth watched him leave, wondering how did people get in and out of here. There must have been a passageway in the kitchen, the one through which the inspectors came through. He followed his partner into the kitchen and spent the next four hours feeling the walls for drafts.
Chapter 12 - Routine
People see life as a logical sequence of actions and consequences, inside which one makes plans for the foreseeable future, maybe the following year, or decade, but how do you plan a life that’s dealt in days which have no connection with each other?
He lived for a day, and when the day ended, so did his current self. He lived for a day, that was it, but oh so many times! As time passed he stopped keeping track of how many times he had returned to the lounge, and whether those repetitions spanned days or centuries.
The wall paneling and the language scribbled upon it had started to look worn, like abandoned artifacts from ancient times.
There is no planning life if it lasts just one day, and that’s what his life really was, he was just too cowardly to admit it, so he borrowed time from the future and put things in it, time that didn’t belong to him yet, and for all he knew, he might not get at all.
Planning that borrowed time was just as absurd as venturing into a virgin territory with maps of some place else and relying on them for guidance.
The debt of these variances accrued, and he got more and more lost while dutifully following his useless map and desperately trying to bend reality out of shape to make it match his expectations.
Reality didn’t take kindly to that.
At some point he looked back at the road traveled and accurately mapped that uncharted territory, puzzled to notice, in retrospect, he’d have gone farther if it weren’t for his reliance on the wrong map, and as for the direction of his travel, it had never been up to him, or subject to change.
The reason we still insist on building rigid frameworks in the thicket of possibilities we call life is we’re driven into a wretched panic by its untamed chaos.
He felt that panic intensely, bouncing from scenario to scenario with no end in sight. The more he ventured into his forest of Helmuths, the more pieces of himself he lost, and felt like a substitute in his own life for the real him who was away.
In all the time he’d been there, and, honestly, he didn’t know if ‘there’ was always the same place, or a set of almost identical lounges reflecting each other, he had documented more travels than one could experience in a lifetime, and seen places people can’t dream of, but none of the destinations had ever been of his choice.
He was a tourist through reality, vaguely plotting an itinerary, while the details of the journey were not his responsibility, and during which he only had to account for himself.
We fail to recognize our glut of traditions, laws and social norms is meaningless in the absence of context and consistency. Anyone who got stranded unexpectedly in a foreign country whose customs and language one didn’t understand can attest to that.
Everything looks unreal, the places, the people, the happenings, like a dream, just like a dream.
A dream where all your actions are disconnected from their meaning.
During his unusually long life he wished for a companion; the chance presented itself more than once, and he begged the potentials to stay with him, however briefly, in the only place where he knew he could be himself, but then he had to bow his head in shame because he had nothing to offer them there, other than the tangled web of alternate realities he kept falling through.
The few who really cared about him hated him for leaving, as he always had to, against his will, and resigned themselves to living their lives without him, while he was left alone to repeat endless versions of the same day in the muzak room.
He wished he could remember something, anything, from the time before he woke up in this room, but there was no before, a strange concept for people to accept in a universe based on duality, an after without a before. For him time itself started in the lounge, and there was nothing more to say about that.
People don’t pay attention to life while involved in its minutia, but for an external observer who only drops in every few years, life seems to run in circles. It’s as if the memories of the protagonists get wiped clean at the end of a cycle, allowing them to start the same story from the top, oblivious and excited to continue their journey.
His life ran in circles too, only in different ways.
He was the tree falling in the forest when nobody was there to hear it, living in a perpetual present which followed him around rather than him it, and which bent time around him to keep him in sync with all his Helmuths as he shifted through realities. He wondered sometimes how many more of them were there he hadn’t yet have the chance to be.
The unfinished stories bothered him the most, especially the ones whose details had plagued him while involved in a particular life, like, for instance, what was Inclusion 35B and what had come of it.
He wished someone would come over with Cliff Notes for all his abandoned story lines, and was even willing to hear the unpleasant scenarios, just so he wouldn’t have to feel like an unfinished embroidery with all the threads left hanging.
Of all the searing discomforts his situation engendered, the worst was the gut realization this untamed chaos, this mixed bag of loose threads, all too short to serve any purpose, was life.
That’s what life looked like in the absence of well-intentioned but completely useless maps.
"Have you seen my keys?” his wife asked, rushing as always because she was running late for one of those important events he never stuck around long enough to learn anything about.
He couldn’t remember when he got there, but was relieved at least he had landed in a familiar place this time, and one with good food. A man could only subsist on sandwiches and beer for so long.
“On the counter,” he replied, absentminded.
“Honey,” she said, walking fast towards the door, “can you go to the corner store and grab a bottle of wine? The Kellars invited us to dinner.”
He mumbled something that sounded like acquiescence and resented her deeply for being able to walk through that front door and end up anywhere other than the muzak lounge.
He was determined to avoid returning to his fated realm for as long as he could manage, planted himself on a sofa in the family room and flipped through the channels in search of news, eager to learn something that might inform this life story. He made the mistake to lean back and put his feet up, dozed off and woke up a few hours later in the lounge.
Chapter 13 - Freedom
He didn’t even see it at first, used as he was to every detail of this lounge, and when he finally noticed it, he thought it yet another one of the pranks this room so generously provided, but it was really there, wide open in the middle of the back wall.
He ignored it, of course, as he would another one of those panels that snapped open and shot now and then for no reason, but someone barged in through it, in a hurry, rushed to the bar and asked for change for a ten-spot.
He obliged, too stunned to react, and watched the unlikely visitor walk back out, agitated and waiving his hand to hail a cab.
He remembered having heard this, he couldn’t remember where, that life always yields to your most cherished desire when you stop caring about it, and was surprised at himself that he felt no need to hurry, no existential angst at the thought the door could slam shot and disappear, taking with it his maybe only chance for freedom.
Was it freedom he really wanted? A freedom with a pointless and cruelly short life span? One where Inclusion 35B was paramount and where he got to be that Helmuth in the mirror, whom he disliked on principle and out of self-preservation instinct?
Did he really want to go out there, whence the agitated fellow came, in that world of artifice and fake urgency where he risked never being able to return to this place that had been his only home?
If life here had taught him just one thing, was the intractable outcome of walking through a one-way door.
What would he do out there, really? Get stuffed into the skin of that Helmuth character and live the latter’s life for a few decades, a borrowed life he knew would bore him to tears before the week was out? Was he gay or straight? He really didn’t know, he’d never lived enough of each to figure it out, and his nomadic soul had grown used to caring very little about men and women alike.
He kept staring at that door, gaping like a wound, and hated it with a passion! He hated it for putting him in the position to make a choice he didn’t want to make. Who decided what the right choice was, anyway? Some society he never got to live in as himself, a place where he would most likely be afraid of saying or doing the wrong thing and giving himself away as a fraud? That’s all he’d ever been for the good people of the many worlds he traveled, at least that’s what he would have been if he ever confessed to them his true nature.
If at least he could remember something, anything from a previous life, that might inform his choices, but he had to admit that even if his body wasn’t born in this room, his mind certainly was: he had no memories, no emotions, no yearning, nothing to hint at anything other than what he was now.
He froze in terror when he remembered the lounge never gave him a choice, and this situation was no different. There would be no way for him to resist walking out that door if he was fated to do so, just like he couldn’t escape ending up here after every adventure, here, to the only place he’d known as home.
But if this wasn’t his choice, then he didn’t have to make it, did he?
He got up, in no hurry, walked to the door and stood in the doorway, gazing upon the free world outside, which looked exactly like every version of reality he already experienced, yawned, sensed clouds on the horizon and retreated back into the lounge before the storm started.
He was going to find a cozy chair and catch up on his reading when fate revealed its cruel intent: by one and by two, people started walking in, sizing him up with great interest, and relieved at the sight of liquor.
They thought him the bartender and gave him their drink orders, but none of them seemed to know him. What a blessed relief from pretending to fit in some stranger’s premasticated life! He poured, and they drank, and told him stories, or brooded in silence, with nary an Inclusion 35B contract or intimate confrontation in sight.
How was he going to live in here now with all these people barging in? His home had become a public space from one minute to the next, and quite a popular one, judging by the current occupancy.
When you get used to the thought of being endless, a life that spans a few decades feels like a cruel and senseless death sentence, the proof the universe really doesn’t care about you. It is the ultimate banishment from Eden, to live your fated lot as a frail, naked, scared and inescapably impermanent creature.
If he couldn’t find the ultimate meaning in all the centuries he’d spent wandering through the many splendored versions of reality, what could he possibly hope for in however long of a human life was now laid before him?
It was his punishment, really, to wrap up his epic adventure with the fate of a fruit fly! At least the latter enjoyed the mercy of being unaware its inevitable demise was waiting for it not far into the future.
What could possibly be so damn important they had to reach out and grab him out of his sheltered haven into whatever reality was awaiting out there, a reality he instinctively knew he would not like?
He retreated, trying to hide behind the bar, but a couple of well-intentioned chaps grabbed him by the shoulders and pushed him gently out the door, against his will.
They dropped him on a bench nearby and rushed to join the commotion of a lot of people fussing about, tense, tending to a lady who seemed to be in some sort of distress. Things settled down, eventually, to the relief of everyone present, and after that the two chaps came to get him, so the lady could see his face.
“Congratulations, Ms. Muller! You have a healthy baby boy! Ten fingers, ten toes. Everything seems to be in working order.” They started making silly faces at him, in a way that was simply embarrassing. “Have you given any thought to the name?”
Ms. Muller was weak and sore, and traumatized by the ordeal of the forceps delivery. Her little bundle of joy really didn’t seem to want to join the human race just yet. She quietly resented the well-meaning advice of the midwife who had pressured her into delivering the baby one week early.
Everybody thought they knew better! If she had a pfennig for every piece of well-intentioned advice she got since she’d found out she was pregnant, she would be a very wealthy woman by now.
She looked at him with the new born love first-time mothers are shocked to discover was always there, in the depths of their psyche, overcome with the awe of her new responsibility and too exhausted to notice the distressed look on her son’s face.
“Helmuth,” she uttered, choked with emotion. “After my father.”
The doctor hesitated for a second before he asked.
“Speaking of, hmm… Is there…”
“A father? Oh, dear, yes!” she laughed, a little embarrassed, to the relief of the inquirer. “Yes, yes, of course! He travels a lot, for business, and got called up on an emergency. We really didn’t plan on our little Helmuth arriving so early!”