The Pink Doors

Hux plants himself on the cafeteria stool beside you, heedless of his own impropriety. Hard to believe he’s fifty-three with pouches under his eyes and silver woven into the neglected terrain of his face. He is still fresh and hairless in your mind. None of you are the faces molded by gravity and time. You’ll never look at him and not see the lanky fledgling, two front teeth busted out from catapulting himself off the third-floor banister. That was the year the Health and Wellness Association put up the floor to ceiling glass in every hallway. You used to be able to stop at any given point on the walkway and peer over the edge to the atrium below, or gaze up all the way to the seventh floor. The nurseries. You thought it odd back then that they moved you down a floor every few years as you got older. It felt counterintuitive in some way. Back then it seemed like surely there was some apex we were all rising towards.

It doesn’t seem like that anymore. Somewhere along the descent we are endowed with common sense, or else relieved of the need to gaze skyward at all. The first floor is as close to the ground as you can get before you are interred in it. Your forefathers sired the Confine into existence amidst the decay of the world outside of it. There are no windows. Nothing is able to get in. This is the way you have preserved yourselves.

Sometimes you think it’s the familiarity that makes you incapable of loving Hux, or any of them, for that matter. You cannot unsee their pubescence, the byways of their trauma, courses by which they became broken. It’s not their corruptibility that spoils it for you. You just cannot help but psychoanalyze them. The lot of you paint a picture of something akin to sadness; call it human susceptibility, and that reminder is not something you could ever hold dearly, or something by which you would wish to be held.

None of that matters much anyway, you think. The Health and Wellness association will test the genes of all men within the Confine to find someone whose DNA is most compatible with yours. You won’t feel any of it, good or bad, the thought of which has already become nestled in the part of your mind, ever expanding, which is primarily phlegmatic. You try to return to those more dismal thoughts; whatever sensation had been there just prior. They are not preferable by any sane means, but they act as some viaduct to something outside of apathy, which you hope might eventually lead to something better.

You find that you tend to organize your world and that of others in terms of passageways, which is not something that surprises you. The Confine is fitted with a maroon track which winds from the first to the seventh floor, the rubbery surface absorbing the shock of the thousands of feet that make love to it day in and day out. You help to power the building this way, all of you. It is a more than fair price to pay for what is provided. Your entire upbringing was arranged in terms of a single route forward: a single path from the top down. This avenue of self-dissection is not one you particularly like to go down, because it reminds you that your mind, too, is fashioned from something outside of your nature alone. You have to remind yourself that this system, the running, has prospered since its genesis, way back when the world fell to shit. Surely linearity breeds something useful.

“You ain’t still on about them doors are you?” Hux snares you, mid-reverie. The pink double doors line the hallways on every floor. They are locked, if they are even doors. It’s been decided amongst the masses that they are just some sort of eccentric wall decor; something beyond white wall to look at while fulfilling your evening run. Their lack of functionality is unsatisfying to you.

Mars wheezes with the raillery of a man whose good humor is all but eroded. “Hell,” he says, peeling back the plastic seal from his pudding cup and scraping the flimsy spoon over the film to collect what he can.

You are used to the others reacting this way. You tell them your preoccupation exists because of a dream you had only a few days ago. You were taking your nightly run, when you reached the fourth floor and saw that one of the doors up ahead was open, an intense light bleeding through. You kept after the lambent haze, but with every stride, the open door seemed to obfuscate further, seemed to move farther away.

You tell them that you don’t think dreams like that just come out of nowhere, materialize out of the one-dimensional narratives you are all spoon-fed in this place.

“I mean, I will say,” Hux pauses. “I saw something with my own eyes once.” He shoves a sporkful of creamed potatoes into his mouth, some strange substitute for biting his tongue after such a pronouncement.

Mars’s face contorts in a way only exasperation can demand. “Ain’t nobody ever been beyond those doors and ain’t nobody that wants to,” he shakes his head. “Everybody thought about it as a child, sure. I remember you and me planning to steal a maintenance key Hux, back when we were on Floor Three, remember? We were going to find out for ourselves.” He elbows his peer, searching for blithe reciprocity, and wipes his nose with the navy sleeve of his work jumper.

Slightly more sobered now, Mars looks at you like you might a child dismissed of their belief in an imaginary friend. “But then you grow up. You could waste a whole life sitting there wondering about stupid shit like that.”

The three of you sit in a momentary silence tinged with the muffled sound of chewing. “And besides,” Mars says, “If they are doors, with whatever is going on out there, we’re a whole lot safer in here.”

Hux cuts him off. “I don't know, Mars. Back in my twenties I went through… a spell, you remember?” He motions vaguely into the air as if the rest of you know what he’s on about. “I was making my morning run and I swore for a minute there that I saw one of the doors cracked open, like someone had just gone out and forgot to pull it shut behind them. I didn’t see much, but it looked colorful, whatever I saw. Green.”

“God, Hux…” Mars is relentless. “You expect us to believe something you hallucinated when you were on some trip? I don’t know man, you might want to stop by the Wellness center after lunch. I think someone’s been screwing with your dosages.” He laughs in a way that men laugh when they don’t quite believe their own words. On the West wall the great digital clock is counting.

“Well?” Your voice quivers a bit. “Did you go over to the door?” Words feel like blocks in your mouth, inadequate.

“No. No I didn’t.” Hux has finished his plate now and shoves it forward a couple inches. “By the time I’d rubbed my eyes, trying to make sure I was really seeing what I thought I had, the doors were shut again. Same old flesh-colored wall art.”

“There’s nothing out there. At least nothing worth experiencing.” Mars shakes his head slightly in disappointment, the act of which makes him appear rather geriatric for his middle age. He lurches towards Hux’s abandoned Styrofoam tray. “Why are we still talking about this? Are you going to eat that?”

“Mars is right,” Hux says, turning towards you. “There ain’t nothing out there. I could’ve gone down a dark path if I’d stayed believing in that kind of thing. You can drive yourself mad when you start making up stories. At some point you start believing in them.” His voice sounds played out, like he wishes he still had it in him to believe his own stories. You are in awe of the richness of dejection; the way in which we slough off the innocent exoskeletons of joy, fear, what have you, and cease having hope in something beyond single-serve pudding cups.

“Sometimes I do think about a story I heard once,” Hux chimes in again. Behind the lassitude, there is some form of hope, or perhaps desperation in his eyes, some small light bent on not diminishing.

“A pair of twins is inside their mother’s womb,” he begins. “One twin says to the other, ‘what do you think happens after birth?’” The silence marinates amongst you. Mars is already smirking. “And the other twin says back, ‘what do you mean? Nothing comes after this. You’re born and then that’s the end. Oblivion.’”

You and Mars watch the parched lips for something revelatory. The 1 PM alarm buzzes, and you delay in standing to dust off your coveralls and head back to whatever it is you were working on before.

“So the first twin says back to his brother, ‘I don’t know, I mean, what if there’s this whole world beyond this? A whole new beginning?’ And the cynical twin just laughs.”

***

This is the way you found yourself down the dark path.

This is the way you drove yourself mad believing your own stories.

This is the way you wound up breathless one late night, pausing mid-run in front of one of the doors on the fourth floor of the Confine.

You glide your fingers over the delicately carved frame. Such intricate design for something believed to be meaningless, you think. You notice now there is no lock on the door. Around you, the hallways are steeped in silence. Every one of you, sleeping. Every child, dreaming. Each of them confined to their different floors; each of them where they are fated to be. And you, no less.

You raise your hand to your neck, where the burnished keepsake of a world before yours hangs in restful potential. You’ve never been able to get it open. It was your grandmother’s locket, and someone’s before hers. You’re fixed on believing that something lies within its heart-shaped panels; that it, too, has taken a path so seemingly out of its command, to wind up here. Your mother had never been able to open it either. Strangely, you feel that you owe such a triumph to her, as if the simple action alone might undo generations of wondering, and whatever epigenetic wound it inflicted upon you.

You pull the pendant from its resting place and press the heart to the seam of the doors. For the first time, you do not wonder if it is capable of opening.

***

From out here, the only reference to the Confine is a meager metal door in the side of a grassy knoll. There are no windows. Nothing is able to get in. There is no returning to that place. The hills here roll like an ocean paused in a single frame of time. Every moment is a mere transition into the next, and splayed out across the vastness, all the sweet notions of inequity which we dreamed up while walking melt into a greater morass. It is colorful. Green. That great untamed element of what it means to be at all reaches down into the decadence of the soil and births roots for branches to sprout from, for fruit to cling to.

From a short distance beyond the Confine, you can hear the feet pounding on the synthetic asphalt. Running into the early morning, into the buzzing of the incandescent lights and the endless ticking of the great clock. If one didn’t know any better, she might confuse the endless drumming for fists banging at the doors, merciless.

What a relief the cynical twin must feel, you imagine, upon seeing the first pinprick of daylight.