Rooms
An experimental piece. I wouldn't recommend reading it :|
Rooms
This is what he had been doing for thirty-two weeks: he had gone from room to room, door through door. When he was tired, he slept on a bed or couch. When he was hungry, he found a pantry to eat from. But when he was in despair, he moved.
It was endless, a never-ending maze of rooms. Rooms with organized desks and plush chairs, with love seats and sectionals and television sets. Rooms with freshly-scrubbed sinks and ovens and fully stocked refrigerators, with immense ceilings and banquet tables. Rooms with rows of empty hutches and cabinetry, cracked walls and rusted faucets. Rooms with little more than a lamp and a mattress. Rooms that were not truly rooms - closets and crawlspaces that functioned only as go-betweens, spaces between two rooms. But all the rooms had this one thing in common: they all had at least two doors, one he would enter by and at least one he could exit through.
This is why he could call it a maze, for he didn’t simply go from room to room with no decision-making in the process. Sometimes he would be faced with two, or three, or four, or more exits to choose from, and he would survey, consider, and take his pick. Though in this he wondered if it was truly a maze; he didn’t retrace his steps to return to a room with multiple doors if he should dislike the path he had chosen. He had done so at the beginning, when the hope of FREEDOM had been foremost in his mind and he knew that some door would lead outside and there would be no more rooms, but now he only moved on forward, without thought of turning back to contemplate the doors not taken -- there would have been no point in it, for no path led to an ending, a dead stop with no more doors. So, in a sense, it was not a maze. In a maze, one could track his own path, recross it, renounce his steps and form others. Here there was no crossing of paths, no familiar scenery, no moment of inability to proceed. There were only rooms and rooms. So he went on.
There were no stairs. There was an occasional sunken floor - one step down, two steps up, but nothing extensive that would run him up to a second story or down to a basement; the rooms seemed to have been constructed on one level. He no longer had fears of being driven underground, to an area he could never find a door out of, but he did wonder if that was where he had been all along.
He was not alone. There were sometimes people in the rooms, though not often. They were uninterested in FREEDOM though, and he had been for the most part unable to interrupt what they were doing for very long. They were watching television or eating or arguing with each other about dividing the area of a room between them. One woman had been incredibly excited to see him because she wanted to discuss a young lady she knew who had recently fallen on hard times, and she had been without anyone to tell this news to. An old man had swiftly jotted a short letter and asked him to deliver it, folding it carefully into an envelope.
Why not deliver it yourself?
Oh no, no, too much trouble.
Weeks later, he had opened the envelope. The letter was cold, vague, and trivial. He let it fall into a trash can beside him. He did not feel guilty about this.
He was lonely, and so he tried to convince some of these people to join him, but they were uninterested.
Don’t you want to be FREE?
It's well enough here.
And so they would go on watching their programs, or putting knife to plate, or complaining about who has more space on their side of the room. And he would move on.
There was no rhythm to the flow of rooms, a large extravagant dining hall could lead on to a dusty cobwebbed hallway. He had once passed consecutively through nineteen bathrooms, two of them large as a house in themselves. One of them had contained a monstrous jacuzzi, in which a fat man in swimming trunks was reclining. He had declined the man’s offer to join him.
This lack of harmony between rooms was just another aspect of the maze that kept him from knowing his path or point of reference. Were the rooms organized in a sensible flow, consequently he could have played with the idea that he was going from house to house rather than room to room. Perhaps if he had gone through a bare wood-floored living room, to a dusty rotting kitchen, to a musty bedroom with a moth-eaten mattress, to a damp and molded bathroom, and then suddenly exited into a foyer with a Persian rug presided over by a sparkling chandelier and snow-white walls, perhaps then he could have thought ah, here is a different house. Maybe he could have even perceived entire neighborhoods of like houses with the occasional like-minded people. He could have formed maps in his mind of where he had been and where he might be going and what to expect there. He might have been able to recognize that one central location would be coming to an end and a new house or neighborhood beginning.
But instead he walked from each room not knowing what he would find in the next. He was apprehensive some days, thinking that he had gone on for so long that surely this door would open on FREEDOM, or this one, or the next. Periodically he would be thrown into a mad fit, and go careening through door after door, not even noticing his surroundings. Other days he would drift lazily through the rooms, emptying his head and taking his time. On some of these days he would find a magazine of celebrity gossip, and flip through it. He would cook a small meal over a stove, humming to fill the silence beyond the sizzling pan, and he would pack it and find a clean dining room to eat it in. He would pick a new shirt from a packed closet he had found, and inspect himself in the mirror, and note that he should shave at the next opportunity that presented itself. He would stand before a row of family photographs and inspect them, trying to figure out which smiling child had grown into which sour-faced adult. And so he had, after thirty-two week, been in such a mild state when the following happened:
He entered a room, and the first thing he noticed in this particular room was that it was cold, with a breeze pushing through the open doorway and ruffling his clothes and hair. He had neither seen nor experienced any evidence of a heating or cooling system in the rooms, though they had all maintained a steady and tepid temperature. He next heard the television, voices too high and excited or tense and restrained for real people. The light from it flickered against the wall and a man splayed across a couch. This man turned his head towards the newcomer, nodded in acknowledgment, and fixed his gaze once more on the screen.
As he stepped into the room, he swept his own gaze across it to glace at the television, maybe so that he could make some starting point of conversation - “Who’s winning” or “They catch the bad guy yet?” but there was a movement inbetween that caught his eye. There was a flipping of cloth, a darting of ends, and it took a moment for him to make sense of what was behind that cloth, for it had been so very long since he had seen anything like it, and it was not exactly what he had been looking for, not in this form.
This was a window, and it was open. All was dark beyond the window, and a chill night wind had been what was tossing the curtains about and disturbing his hair. He had often thought he would storm the open space he sought, no second thought, no look back, but the shock and strangeness of it held him there in the room. Not a door, but a window, and this strange man sitting not ten feet from it, having been here all along, while he had searched in his raving dashes through the doors and rooms. He wanted to shake him, slap him, make him realize just how close he was.
What are you doing?
A lazily turned head, a blink, a confused stare.
You’ve had that window this whole time?
Another blink. I suppose so.
And you just sit there? Don’t you want to know what’s out there?
A shrug. It’s well enough here.
He walked to the window. It was a small room to cross, but the distance seemed immeasurable. It was as if he expected the window to recede or disappear, but in fact only a few steps had brought him to it and he stopped in shock again before it, surprised at how close it had actually been. It was a large window, and he saw that he could pull his whole body through it by crouching over. He placed one foot on the sill, staring out into the blackness beyond it, sprinkled with tiny lights, from the sky above and the city below. He was taken momentarily with the stars, winking at him from far off. It had been so very long.
Another light winked on and off in the city, lightning-fast. The wind was tossed up again, a cold breath from heaven against his face, and with it flew a sharp cracking sound. He pitched forward, and fell. This was freedom greeting him.
There was a concrete balcony not far below, and he did a slow somersault as he fell, landing on it flat on his back. The stars were now fully in his view, disturbed now and again by a flutter of white cloth that danced just outside the window he had left. There was a ringing in his ears and his chest was burning with something hard and foreign now resting in it, now a part of him. He accepted this, and was content, and the stars slowly dissolved into a further blackness that ran beyond all rooms and spaces.
Rooms
This is what he had been doing for thirty-two weeks: he had gone from room to room, door through door. When he was tired, he slept on a bed or couch. When he was hungry, he found a pantry to eat from. But when he was in despair, he moved.
It was endless, a never-ending maze of rooms. Rooms with organized desks and plush chairs, with love seats and sectionals and television sets. Rooms with freshly-scrubbed sinks and ovens and fully stocked refrigerators, with immense ceilings and banquet tables. Rooms with rows of empty hutches and cabinetry, cracked walls and rusted faucets. Rooms with little more than a lamp and a mattress. Rooms that were not truly rooms - closets and crawlspaces that functioned only as go-betweens, spaces between two rooms. But all the rooms had this one thing in common: they all had at least two doors, one he would enter by and at least one he could exit through.
This is why he could call it a maze, for he didn’t simply go from room to room with no decision-making in the process. Sometimes he would be faced with two, or three, or four, or more exits to choose from, and he would survey, consider, and take his pick. Though in this he wondered if it was truly a maze; he didn’t retrace his steps to return to a room with multiple doors if he should dislike the path he had chosen. He had done so at the beginning, when the hope of FREEDOM had been foremost in his mind and he knew that some door would lead outside and there would be no more rooms, but now he only moved on forward, without thought of turning back to contemplate the doors not taken -- there would have been no point in it, for no path led to an ending, a dead stop with no more doors. So, in a sense, it was not a maze. In a maze, one could track his own path, recross it, renounce his steps and form others. Here there was no crossing of paths, no familiar scenery, no moment of inability to proceed. There were only rooms and rooms. So he went on.
There were no stairs. There was an occasional sunken floor - one step down, two steps up, but nothing extensive that would run him up to a second story or down to a basement; the rooms seemed to have been constructed on one level. He no longer had fears of being driven underground, to an area he could never find a door out of, but he did wonder if that was where he had been all along.
He was not alone. There were sometimes people in the rooms, though not often. They were uninterested in FREEDOM though, and he had been for the most part unable to interrupt what they were doing for very long. They were watching television or eating or arguing with each other about dividing the area of a room between them. One woman had been incredibly excited to see him because she wanted to discuss a young lady she knew who had recently fallen on hard times, and she had been without anyone to tell this news to. An old man had swiftly jotted a short letter and asked him to deliver it, folding it carefully into an envelope.
Why not deliver it yourself?
Oh no, no, too much trouble.
Weeks later, he had opened the envelope. The letter was cold, vague, and trivial. He let it fall into a trash can beside him. He did not feel guilty about this.
He was lonely, and so he tried to convince some of these people to join him, but they were uninterested.
Don’t you want to be FREE?
It's well enough here.
And so they would go on watching their programs, or putting knife to plate, or complaining about who has more space on their side of the room. And he would move on.
There was no rhythm to the flow of rooms, a large extravagant dining hall could lead on to a dusty cobwebbed hallway. He had once passed consecutively through nineteen bathrooms, two of them large as a house in themselves. One of them had contained a monstrous jacuzzi, in which a fat man in swimming trunks was reclining. He had declined the man’s offer to join him.
This lack of harmony between rooms was just another aspect of the maze that kept him from knowing his path or point of reference. Were the rooms organized in a sensible flow, consequently he could have played with the idea that he was going from house to house rather than room to room. Perhaps if he had gone through a bare wood-floored living room, to a dusty rotting kitchen, to a musty bedroom with a moth-eaten mattress, to a damp and molded bathroom, and then suddenly exited into a foyer with a Persian rug presided over by a sparkling chandelier and snow-white walls, perhaps then he could have thought ah, here is a different house. Maybe he could have even perceived entire neighborhoods of like houses with the occasional like-minded people. He could have formed maps in his mind of where he had been and where he might be going and what to expect there. He might have been able to recognize that one central location would be coming to an end and a new house or neighborhood beginning.
But instead he walked from each room not knowing what he would find in the next. He was apprehensive some days, thinking that he had gone on for so long that surely this door would open on FREEDOM, or this one, or the next. Periodically he would be thrown into a mad fit, and go careening through door after door, not even noticing his surroundings. Other days he would drift lazily through the rooms, emptying his head and taking his time. On some of these days he would find a magazine of celebrity gossip, and flip through it. He would cook a small meal over a stove, humming to fill the silence beyond the sizzling pan, and he would pack it and find a clean dining room to eat it in. He would pick a new shirt from a packed closet he had found, and inspect himself in the mirror, and note that he should shave at the next opportunity that presented itself. He would stand before a row of family photographs and inspect them, trying to figure out which smiling child had grown into which sour-faced adult. And so he had, after thirty-two week, been in such a mild state when the following happened:
He entered a room, and the first thing he noticed in this particular room was that it was cold, with a breeze pushing through the open doorway and ruffling his clothes and hair. He had neither seen nor experienced any evidence of a heating or cooling system in the rooms, though they had all maintained a steady and tepid temperature. He next heard the television, voices too high and excited or tense and restrained for real people. The light from it flickered against the wall and a man splayed across a couch. This man turned his head towards the newcomer, nodded in acknowledgment, and fixed his gaze once more on the screen.
As he stepped into the room, he swept his own gaze across it to glace at the television, maybe so that he could make some starting point of conversation - “Who’s winning” or “They catch the bad guy yet?” but there was a movement inbetween that caught his eye. There was a flipping of cloth, a darting of ends, and it took a moment for him to make sense of what was behind that cloth, for it had been so very long since he had seen anything like it, and it was not exactly what he had been looking for, not in this form.
This was a window, and it was open. All was dark beyond the window, and a chill night wind had been what was tossing the curtains about and disturbing his hair. He had often thought he would storm the open space he sought, no second thought, no look back, but the shock and strangeness of it held him there in the room. Not a door, but a window, and this strange man sitting not ten feet from it, having been here all along, while he had searched in his raving dashes through the doors and rooms. He wanted to shake him, slap him, make him realize just how close he was.
What are you doing?
A lazily turned head, a blink, a confused stare.
You’ve had that window this whole time?
Another blink. I suppose so.
And you just sit there? Don’t you want to know what’s out there?
A shrug. It’s well enough here.
He walked to the window. It was a small room to cross, but the distance seemed immeasurable. It was as if he expected the window to recede or disappear, but in fact only a few steps had brought him to it and he stopped in shock again before it, surprised at how close it had actually been. It was a large window, and he saw that he could pull his whole body through it by crouching over. He placed one foot on the sill, staring out into the blackness beyond it, sprinkled with tiny lights, from the sky above and the city below. He was taken momentarily with the stars, winking at him from far off. It had been so very long.
Another light winked on and off in the city, lightning-fast. The wind was tossed up again, a cold breath from heaven against his face, and with it flew a sharp cracking sound. He pitched forward, and fell. This was freedom greeting him.
There was a concrete balcony not far below, and he did a slow somersault as he fell, landing on it flat on his back. The stars were now fully in his view, disturbed now and again by a flutter of white cloth that danced just outside the window he had left. There was a ringing in his ears and his chest was burning with something hard and foreign now resting in it, now a part of him. He accepted this, and was content, and the stars slowly dissolved into a further blackness that ran beyond all rooms and spaces.