THE DOOR

[This story is from the journal of Tav, whom I’ve written about before (#140, #305). For obvious reasons I couldn’t get his permission to share this, but I think he would have been okay with it.]

THE DOOR

“There is a door, and beyond that door lies nothing. Now, let’s be clear what we’re NOT talking about, silly girl, foolish boy. You might open a door to an empty room, and say there is nothing, but that is a lie, a short cut, and while it is fine for the homo-sapien speech, it isn’t quite accurate, is it?

“There are things in that room. There is the room itself. There might be a carpet, a light switch, a fixture, a bulb, electrical outlets. There are walls, little girl, tiny boy. Maybe they have paint on them.

“But even if there was none of that, there would be space. Microscopic worlds, what your “so called” Scientists would name atoms and molecules, bouncing around off of each other. In other words, when you say there is nothing, you don’t really mean that.

“Pay attention, you little chit!”

[I guess he decided it was easier to move from continually calling me both male and female to just attacking me a gender-neutral sort of way.]

“Now,” he said. “Go back to that door. Imagine that door. See it! Feel the heavy oak, the smooth texture, the faint glow from the cracks. Now, imagine that door opening. Beyond it is nothing. Would you like to go through that door?”

[Another time he sat me down and started in on the paths.]

“The road comes to a fork, with three paths,” he said. “One path will make you wise. One path will make you whole. And one path, one path will kill you. Which path do you take?”

I started to answer, but he shushed me with a glare. He no longer called me girl and boy. (I don’t think he paid attention long enough to find out. I think he just didn’t care.)

He said, “Don’t answer right away. Think about it a spell, and then think about it again. Just when you think you know, think it about it some more. The answer is not what it appears.”

I started to mull that over, but before I got very far, he added a wrinkle. “Now,” he cackled, “you don’t know which path is which, let’s say, and I can only tell you one path, but you can’t choose and say, ‘Tell me the path that will make me wise.’ You have to say it like, ‘Show me the path on the right.’ Could you live with that? Knowing just one path?”

Suddenly I got an attack of the clevers. “What if,” I began excitedly, “I didn’t take any of the paths, but turned around and went back from whence I came?”

He didn’t speak to me for three days.

When he did finally speak to me I was in the garden, weeding. He was a great believer in chores building character.

“Tav,” he said. “Come with me.”

I don’t know what shocked me more: that he was finally talking to me, or that he knew my name. Hastily I brushed myself off and followed him into the house. We went down into the cellar. I didn’t go there often. It creeped me out. He lit a lantern and we traveled on downward. The air got cold, damp, and musty. I shivered involuntarily.

He lit a pipe (for nothing else I think to chase away the musty smell), and with the pipe in his teeth said, “During the war they built hundreds of these tunnels, for miles around. So did the Germans. S’like they were building new cities. A couple of times, the tunnels even met with each other. Would loved to been there!”

He laughed heavily, but I didn’t share the humor. We came to—and I’m not making this up, a fork with three paths. He looked at me expectantly, I guess waiting for me to ask which path would make me wise…or whole…or dead. I wouldn’t give him the satisfaction.

“Let’s go left.” I said. He just grunted and continued on.

We walked for another ten minutes and then he stopped, peering around a bit with the lantern. We must have been a mile from the house, and at least half that much below the surface. He found what he was looking for and ambled over to the wall.

There, flush against the dirt and rock, was a door. It looked heavy, made of oak, or I miss my guess, and smooth. In the cracks I could detect a faint glow.

He looked at me, and I gulped.

“It’s time to make the hypothetical real.” He said.

Then he opened up the glass and blew out the lantern. The room plunged into blackness, but before I could say anything, he opened the Door.