Stories

The Room In Between - Projections

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. 

The Room In Between - Commitment

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 could feel human emotions. He lived a story, good or bad, where things happened because 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?

The Room in Between - Duplicate

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.

The Room In Between - Strategy

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, imagine we know what we could live with and what we could not, and 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 instinctual 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.

The Room In Between - The Third Degree

He looked at it, focusing his attention on its details to remember them later: the design comprised 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.

The Room In Between - Wildlife

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 granted 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 treetops, like drawing a curtain, to reveal the night sky filled with stars. It was only a moment, no 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 glimpse 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 Room In Between - Framework

See, when one faces 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. 

The Room In Between - Continuity

In a panic, he jumped and started jiggling the handle in an irrational attempt that actually panned out: the door opened with no 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 jibe with our mental model of what it is supposed to be. 

The Room In Between - Sunlight

The room was large and not 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.