A Room With No Door

“Why am I here?” I wonder, not for the first time. The plaster is more glaring than I can remember, and the way the neon reflects off the tiles gives the impression of a thousand black eyes staring at me, curious and disinterested.

I’ve been here a while, I think. It reminds me of a nightclub bathroom, absent the gun-metal trough which passed for a toilet and the attendant smell of piss and urinal cakes.

This place smells of nothing and I see no stalls and no door. There is a mirror but I haven’t looked at it yet. I don’t want whatever is in it to see me.

I’m cold but there is no air in here at all. I’m breathing by reflex, but nothing is passing into me. I can see well enough, however, so I am alive, I think. I hope. It doesn’t feel any different.

After a while, five minutes perhaps, or an eternity, it occurs to me to reflect. What was it like, not being here? It was confusing and numb. There was a listless sense of continuity. Things kept happening without my say so. I try to remember how that made me feel and I fail.

Had I been cold? No. I don’t remember how I had been meant to feel. He was dead and I didn’t know why. The cancer, they said. He had never told me. Had cancer been his excuse not to see me? It is a good excuse, no lie. But it would have been good nonetheless to meet him, man to man.

I had been numb before that as well. Unfulfilled promise doesn’t sting, it aches. It’s an unused muscle you didn’t know you had. And then, by the time you try to exercise it, it’s too late. It’s a resentful pain, made all the worse by the proof of neglect.

No I hadn’t been cold before.

He was dead and I didn’t know why. He must have been cold. You don’t go into the water in winter without being cold. But he never told anyone if he cared. He certainly didn’t tell me. I’ll never know if he wanted to come back out.

I am cold now. In this place.

The same room is in the mirror. I see it on the edge of my vision. If I am alive, then I must be curious. Thinking about it hard enough, I am. I work up the courage to nose the mirror slightly further into my view. There, in the corner. There is something new!

It is a door. The mirror has a door in it. But there’s no such thing behind me.

The Mirror has answers. But that is how it gets you. It will trick you into letting it see you.

I turn away and look frantically for a door that I know isn’t there. The room is spacious. The room is empty. The room is closing in.

I can feel a smile behind me. It has seen me. It knows I want to leave.

I place my hands against the wall, arrested, defeated and tired. It is good, at least, to know that I am alive.

I breathe out, pointlessly, and turn.

It stares out of the mirror, directly into my eyes. The door is behind it. My way out.

And in between me and my way out, my reflection stands, smiling at me.

I am not smiling back.