The White Room, Part I

I was walking outside through a receding summer thunderstorm around midnight, dodging pellets of hail and humid guilt, guilt at living so placidly redundantly, full of vim and vigor for video games and viable business plans and absolutely nothing for living for. I was walking because I didn't have the spirit to run, youthful legs or not. Maudlin steps, one by one, I trudged toward my parents' house--their mortgaged pride and joy, but their house, not mine; their home, not mine.

Flash of lightning. No thunder.

Each heavy step was heavy not for liquor's sake; each step fell as Jesus' heart must have fell for Judas, as Joan's ashses for her people, but nowhere in my miles of veins and capillaries could I find a dutiful drop of blood, a single strand of loyalty or purpose or righteous dignity.

Maybe, I thought, it was time for a transfusion.

Flash of lightning. No thunder.

There weren't tears in my eyes or blood on my hands; the rain had already washed all traces of humanity and from my hands and face. Something they don't teach you in college--never bite a victim. Your teeth are like your ungloved hands. Blood dribbling down your chin, that's usually a giveaway.

Flash of lightning. No thunder.

I was still holding my unopened umbrella. Go figure--I like the rain. There's something about regressing to a pre-industrial stage that makes me happy. Technology sucks.

Flash of lightning. No thunder.

I keep walking. Step, step, step.

Flash of lightning. No thunder.

If only I could remember how to smile.

Flash of lightning. No thunder.

Flash of lightning. No feeling.

And then, in mid-step, the rain stopped. The darkness stopped, the wind stopped, the lightning flashed and froze. I was in one end of a classroom-sized, blindingly white room with a single black lever on the wall opposite from me. I reached up with bloodless hands, and found my hair was still slick with rainwater. Heaven's tears.

There was no source of light in that room, just blatant whiteness. A seamless, white tiled floor stretched across the entire room. The ceiling and walls seemed covered of the same material, cool to the touch and resembling cheap vinyl siding. There was no door, no windows, no cracks, no openings in the wall--just an empty room, white as a flash and eerily silent except for a tiny, whirring noise.

Flash of lightning. No thunder.

I'm on the corner of my street, four houses away from my parents' home. The patter of rain sounds like it hasn't ever stopped. I reach out to catch raindrops, but they just jump into my skin and dance. I catch on, and dance a little, right on the sidewalk corner. There are no cars around, and there are no streetlights.

Flash of lightning. No thunder.

I shut my eyes, waiting for something to happen. The first thing I notice when I open them isn't the blinding whiteness--it's the whirring. I'm back in the white room, hair now dripping wet, and I hear a mechanical, gutteral whirring. It stands out like a lone refrigerator stands out against a backdrop of ambient noise in the middle of the night. The sound, I realize, is coming from the switch.

Seeing the room is still empty, I walk toward the switch. At this point, I wonder if this is a hallucination. Interestingly, I cannot approach the switch. In fact, I cannot move my feet. My shoes are stuck to the floor, so I removed my feet from them. They have served me well! My socks are mostly dry.

I do not know why my shoes are stuck to the floor. Perhaps it is some silly practical joke, but I do not remember arriving in this white room. The walls and ceiling don't have any visible light source, but they could easy be thin sheets of some white material with a uniform light source behind them. What a silly practical joke!

I take a few steps across the room, and soon I am by the black switch. It is large and matte-colored, the kind of switch you see in mad scientist movies where the protagonist always has to pull the switch up to save some damsel in distress.

Oh, Chauvinism.

But right before I touch the switch, there's a flash.

Flash of lightning. No thunder.

I'm back on the street corner. Apparently, I was standing in a puddle, because my socks are now soaked.

I don't like wet socks.