The White Room

If we could talk, I would probably tell you every conversation I've listened to since the day I was born. Erected. Constructed. I'm the white room and the spiral hallway that leads to it. Shaped like an eardrum, I sit thirty feet underground waiting for the dinging elevator and hollow echo of footsteps off my walls.

Egbert and Dillon speed down my hallway in a vehicle.

"What's the inning?" Asks the taller tech asks his shorter passenger.

"The third," he responds.

A man and his secretary head to the white room. He’s older, with a relaxed tie in a blue suit. His hand is deep in his pocket, and she has a vice grip on her clipboard. Her polka dot mini dress clumps over her with every stressed step she takes.

“If I were a wall, would I need ears, lips, eyes, or all three," he asks her, but he doesn’t ask me, supposing he's piqued her intellect.

“What brings that to mind?” she responds. Their footsteps match each other as they proceed.

"Security. "He responds, “It’s why we’re all here.”

“I’m here ‘cause it gets me out of the office.”

“What’s wrong with the office?”

“The white room.” They stopped in their tracks and faced each other. “This hallway is 430 feet long, by 70 feet high, by sixty feet wide. It’s thirty feet underground, with layers of rock a mile thick. You know what else? Every time I come down here, it means something is wrong up there.”

“And,” said the man, as he flicked gum into his mouth.

“That’s what’s wrong with the office.”

The man buried both his hands in his pockets.

“Ok, so the office is gone. Now what?”

“Now I have to think about the office.”

The man chuckled as he opened the door in the wall.

“My favorite novel was in the top drawer, by the way.” She adds as they walk into the white room together. Inside, another man has been waiting in the room for a half hour sipping tea, waiting on the phone in the desk to ring. His thoughts were oblivious to them. To them, he was a man sitting with his crossed legs.

“Who do we have here?” he asks.

“The secretary,” he says as the man sitting at the desk rises to his feet.

"Don't

"Nice to meet you." The man sitting at the desk says shaking her hand.

"So

"We're just waiting on a phone call, that's all. Please, sit down." He said, extending a hand to the chair across from him on the opposite side of the desk. The phone in the desk rang.

"Do I need to be here?" Asks the secretary.

“It’s fine.” said the man sitting at the desk. He pulled a red phone from the desk drawer and answered the receiver. There was a brief pause as the older man and the secretary waited for him to talk to the person on the other end of the line.

“Ok. Uh-huh. Sure. We’ll wait.”

With that, he hung up the phone, and put it in the desk drawer and closed it.

“We don’t. We wait.” He says.

“Do I need to order takeout?”

“No, that won’t be necessary."

His hands come down softly on the armrests of his chair.

“I don't understand. what are we waiting for?”

The older man sat down in the chair beside here and pulled a pencil out of his pocket.

"What are we waiting for?" She asked again, as though she'd been ignored previously.

"That phone to ring again."

"What happens when that phone rings again?"

"A lot."

"Of?"

The phone again.

"What do you mean you don't have what I ordered?" the man laughed. "Fine, I'll be up there in twenty minutes. Are you y'all headed back upstairs?"