The Pink Doors

Hux plants himself on the cafeteria stool beside you, the vocal exasperations of his middle age landing with a familiarity that is almost comforting. At fifty-three, he has begun to collect time in places that still surprise you: silver in the beard he mostly forgets to trim, soft pouches beneath his eyes, a roundness where his jaw used to cut cleanly toward his neck. None of it quite adheres. Sometimes you still expect him to grin and show the two missing front teeth he lost at eleven, the year he launched himself from the third-floor banister because Mars convinced him a bedsheet would slow the fall.

Health and Wellness installed the glass after that.

Before then, you could stop anywhere along the interior walkway and lean over the railing to see the cafeteria six floors below, little white tables arranged around people no larger than pieces on a game board. Looking up was better. If you tilted your head far enough, the balconies stacked one over another until they reached Floor Seven, where the nurseries glowed through frosted panels and infants slept beneath pale blue lights.

As a child, you assumed there was some logic to beginning at the top. Every few years, you moved down a floor. Seven became Six. Adolescence happened mostly on Five. At twenty-eight you were transferred to Three, and at thirty-five, Two. Now there is nowhere left for you but One.

Nobody calls it descending. You are advancing.

Somewhere along the descent you are endowed with common sense, or else relieved of the need to gaze skyward. The first floor is as close to the ground as you can get before you are interred in it. Your forefathers built the Confine while the world outside came apart, ensuring nothing could ever get in. What happened beyond the walls is not discussed in any useful detail. Bad is the word most often used. Unsafe. Nothing worth experiencing. This is the way you have preserved yourselves.

Hux reaches across your tray and steals some of your potatoes.

“You still on about those doors?” he asks, catching you mid-reverie.

Mars peels the clear film from a pudding cup, concentrating as if there might be some dignity in extracting the whole thing intact.

The doors line the walls of every floor at regular intervals, painted the peculiar pink of skin after a wound has closed. They have hinges but no handles, each framed by shallow carvings that curl back into themselves in the same useless pattern. Most people stop noticing them sometime around Floor Five. Children ask what they are. Teenagers make jokes about them. Adults walk past.

You never stopped seeing them.

“They aren’t doors,” Mars says.

“They have hinges.”

“So do the utility panels.”

“They’re six feet tall.”

Mars looks up from his pudding. “So are you.”

Hux laughs into his potatoes.

Above the west wall, the great clock changes from 12:43 to 12:44. Lunch begins at twelve-thirty. At one, work resumes. Dinner at six. Floor One begins its evening run at seven-fifteen, followed upward until the children on Seven are sleeping and the track is quiet again.

You tend to organize your world, and that of everyone else, in terms of passageways. This does not surprise you. The Confine is fitted with a maroon track winding from the first floor to the seventh, its rubber surface absorbing thousands of feet. Your movement feeds the storage cells beneath it and powers some portion of the building—lights, ventilation, water reclamation, depending on which pamphlet you believe.

“Reciprocity,” Health and Wellness calls it.

The Confine keeps you alive. You help keep the Confine alive.

Your entire upbringing was arranged in terms of a single route forward: a one-way path from the top down. You dislike following that thought too far because it suggests your mind might have architecture of its own. Education, work, medicine, companionship—every important thing has arrived by corridor.

Mars drags his spoon across the pudding seal. “There’s nothing behind them.”

“You don’t know that.”

“No,” he says, smiling thinly. “You don’t know there is.”

You wonder when certainty became something to be embarrassed by. Mars once helped Hux steal a maintenance badge because the two of them wanted to explore the waste tunnels beneath Floor Two. By thirty, he had stopped telling that story. By forty, he had started reminding people to attend their annual screenings.

You cannot remember watching the change happen. There was no morning when Mars decided the unknown had become foolish. Curiosity simply accumulated embarrassment until most of it became indistinguishable from childhood.

Hux chews for a while before saying, almost too quietly to hear, “I saw one open once.”

Mars stops scraping.

“When?”

“A long time ago.”

“When, Hux?”

He glances toward the nearest pink door. “Back on Floor Three. During my morning run.”

Mars rolls his eyes. “Oh God, back then? You were having a lot of spells.”

“I was having trouble sleeping.”

“They had you medicated.”

“They have everybody medicated for something.”

Mars wheezes with the raillery of a man whose good humor is all but eroded. Hux shoves a sporkful of creamed potatoes into his mouth, some substitute for biting his tongue.

You lean closer. “What did you see?”

“Not much.”

“What?”

His thumb drifts over the white scar beneath his lower lip, where the banister caught him after taking his teeth.

“Green. I don’t know. Probably a screen of some sort.”

Mars laughs, but not immediately.

Hux ignores him. “It was open maybe this much.” He holds two fingers apart. “Light coming through. Bright enough I saw it from halfway down the hall.”

“Well?” Your voice comes out thinner than you intended. “Did you go over to the door?”

Words feel like blocks in your mouth, inadequate.

“No. By the time I rubbed my eyes and made sure I was really seeing it, it was closed again.”

Mars shakes his head slightly in disappointment, the act of which makes him appear rather geriatric for his middle age. “There’s nothing out there. At least nothing worth experiencing.” Mars reaches for Hux’s abandoned pudding.

Hux watches him take it. “Maybe that’s better.”

“What is?”

“Not knowing.”

Mars snorts.

Hux looks toward you. “I spent a long time thinking about what I saw. Longer than I should’ve. Eventually you start wondering whether the wondering is the thing that’s wrong with you.”

His voice sounds played out, like he wishes he still had it in him to believe his own stories. There is something almost enviable in the completeness of his disappointment, the way people slowly slough off every embarrassing excess of wanting until a single-serve pudding cup becomes enough to fill the space.

The clock changes to 12:48.

You want to tell them you have dreamed about the doors for six nights.

It is always Floor Four, although you have not lived there in almost thirty years. You wonder if some vestige of belief has stayed suspended there, at fifteen or twenty-one. In the dream, you are running alone beneath the white panels when you notice an opening far along the track. Warmer light spills through it. You run toward it and the door recedes, remaining exactly as far away until exertion becomes panic and you wake with your jaw aching from having clenched it through the night.

Health and Wellness says repetitive dreams often indicate magnesium deficiency.

You have increased your magnesium.

The door remains.

“Sometimes I think about a story I heard once,” Hux says.

Mars closes his eyes. “Here we go.”

“A pair of twins are inside their mother’s womb. One asks the other, ‘What do you think happens after birth?’”

The cafeteria empties around you. Trays knock against bins. Shoes squeak against tile.

“The other twin says nothing happens,” Hux continues. “Says birth is the end. Says there can’t be anything afterward because nobody’s ever come back and told them.”

Mars lifts his eyebrows. “That’s it?”

Hux shrugs. “Well, see, the first one thinks maybe there’s another world. A whole beginning after this one.” He moves his hand in a circular gesture that presumes you already know what he means.

“And the other?” 

Hux takes his time swallowing.

“He just laughs.”

At one, the alarm sounds, and everyone stands.

The door on Floor Four opens when you push it. That is the first thing you cannot reconcile.

It is 4:13 in the morning. The hall lights have dimmed to their overnight blue, and the Confine is quiet enough that the ventilation hum has taken on the intimacy of breathing. Thousands of people sleep behind the walls around you. Floor Seven will smell faintly of formula and powdered soap. Somewhere on One, Mars is likely snoring with one hand hanging from the side of his bed. Hux sleeps three corridors from your own room, assuming he sleeps at all.

You glide your fingers over the delicately carved frame. Such intricate work for something everyone has agreed is meaningless. There is no lock beneath your hand. Still, the weight of some invisible eye presses against the back of your neck.

You remember touching one of these doors as a child. Your mother pulled your hand away, but she did not scold you. She merely looked embarrassed.

You push.

The door opens with so little resistance that for a moment you think you have imagined it.

Cold air slips through the seam and over your wrist. You recoil. It returns against your face, damp and irregular and carrying too many smells at once. Something sweet hides among them, already beginning to spoil. Behind you is a hallway whose dimensions you know, air that circulates without touching you, a floor that does not move. The urge to close the door is almost overwhelming.

You open it wider instead.

The darkness beyond refuses every expectation your body has of space. Your eyes search upward for a surface and find none, only points of light scattered through the blackness like punctures in something that should have been solid. Looking at them gives you the sickening sensation of falling. You clutch the frame with both hands.

There should be an end to the room. There should always be an end to the room.

Your stomach drops. You lower yourself against the metal, afraid your legs will fail. Rationally, you know that you are standing on something. Your body does not care. Your body has spent fifty-three years learning that safety has dimensions.

You almost shut the door.

The thought arrives with such relief that your hand moves toward it. You could return to your room. In the morning you could decide exhaustion had made the door seem to move. You could have breakfast beneath the red clock and listen to Hux complain about his back and Mars scrape pudding from a plastic lid. You could spend the rest of your life knowing exactly how high the ceiling is.

Something moves beyond the threshold.

Thousands of thin greenish-black forms rise from a dark, uneven surface and bend together, then separately, though nothing visible touches them. Some shine with moisture. Some are already yellowing. Others have collapsed into the black matter beneath them. The whole surface appears simultaneously to be growing and rotting, as if decay here is not the opposite of life but one of its methods.

You put your foot down. The ground gives beneath you with the softness of flesh. You jerk backward so violently that your shoulder strikes the door.

Then something passes overhead.

A shape vanishes into a much larger shape nearby, something you had mistaken in the darkness for a wall until it begins moving. Hundreds of delicate pieces tremble from limbs that divide again and again above you. The sound they make is almost beautiful beneath the wrongness of it.

Other sounds begin separating themselves from the dark: a scrape, a click, a thin cry that repeats until you listen for it and then stops. Nothing announces itself before moving. Nothing keeps a proper interval. The green growth shivers whenever the invisible air moves across your skin, and suddenly the whole world seems infected with motion.

For one terrible minute you understand why nobody opens the doors. There is simply too much of everything—space, movement, life proceeding without instruction.

The blue floor behind you has never looked so beautiful. The white walls, the clean right angles, the seam where floor meets baseboard. You want the clock. You want Hux stealing potatoes. You want Health and Wellness to tell you what is happening inside your body and whether the appropriate treatment is sleep or magnesium or an adjusted dosage.

More than anything, you want somebody to tell you what you are looking at.

Nothing does.

Inside, experience has always arrived already interpreted. A room has a name before you enter it, a schedule exists before you wake, even feelings appear on Health and Wellness assessments before you decide whether you are suffering. Out here, sensation comes first. Meaning staggers after it.

You stay crouched in the doorway until your breathing slows. When you finally look again, the world has continued without you. The grotesque abundance of it has not noticed your terror.

You step outside. The surface compresses beneath your shoe but holds. The green growth folds beneath your weight, wetting the fabric near your ankle, then begins lifting again after you pass. Nothing here has been arranged for you, and there is an insurmountable fear in that. Yet underneath the fear is something else—not pleasure exactly, certainly not peace, but an awareness so sharp that your ordinary life suddenly seems half asleep by comparison.

When you turn back, the sight of the Confine nearly undoes you again. There is no building. Only a low rise in the land covered in the same restless growth, with one meager metal door set into its side.

For several seconds your mind refuses to connect that mound with the place you have lived all your life. Then the dimensions begin arranging themselves beneath it: Floor Seven and the nurseries, the cafeteria, your sleeping room, the maroon track spiraling downward through fifty-three years. Hux at eleven with blood in his mouth. Your mother brushing your hair on Floor Five. Your first work assignment. The genetic consultation scheduled for next spring, yet again, when Health and Wellness will select which woman inside the Confine carries the best complement to whatever they have decided is deficient in you.

Your entire life fits beneath a patch of earth. The enormity above you suddenly seems less frightening than that.

You move farther from the entrance, though your body continues objecting. There is no painted line beneath your feet. The surface rises and falls without explanation, and each arbitrary change of direction feels almost illicit. Inside, every corridor leads somewhere named. Every route eventually bends you back toward the same original route.

Here, your eyes continue looking for walls even after you understand there are none. Perhaps after enough years the wall continues without needing to be built.

Far below, a small amber square appears between the dark forms. Another glows farther away. One disappears, then another brightens somewhere else. You stare until something in you recognizes intention.

Someone made that light.

The thought weakens your knees more effectively than the impossible space overhead. There are people out here. Health and Wellness never told you there weren’t. You can only hear the same few words, repeated: Bad. Unsafe. Nothing worth experiencing. You begin going back through the statements you remember and discover how much was never actually said. The missing pieces had not seemed missing because everyone supplied them together.

You think of Hux saying “green.” He had stood close enough to this world to glimpse one impossible color through a crack, then carried the memory for thirty years like an illness he was expected eventually to recover from.

You think of Mars at thirteen, planning to steal keys. Hux before he learned to laugh at himself. Your own hand reaching toward the pink paint before your mother quietly pulled it away. She had not looked frightened. She had looked embarrassed.

Nobody had taken curiosity from any of you. That would have required an act you might have noticed. Instead, it had been made slightly ridiculous, then slightly childish, then increasingly difficult to indulge without doing it alone.

A vibration rises through the soft ground beneath your feet. For once, recognition precedes fear.

Running.

Hundreds of feet strike the maroon track below, their separate impacts softened by layers of earth into one enormous pulse. The Confine is waking. Bodies are already feeding power into the lights and ventilation and breakfast machinery, everyone advancing along the same route from the top down.

From out here, it sounds like a heart buried too deep underground.

The darkness overhead begins to change. At first you think your eyes are failing you, but slowly the enormous forms around you separate from one another. Black gives way to gray, then to colors you have no names for, appearing not by the flip of a switch but by degrees too subtle to divide. The widening light reveals more of the world with each passing minute, and for a while this is almost unbearable too. Darkness had concealed just how far everything went.

Beneath you, the pounding continues into some version of tomorrow, into the buzzing of fluorescent lights and the endless ticking of the great clock. If you didn’t know any better, you might confuse the drumming for fists banging against the doors, merciless.

At the farthest edge of everything you can see, brightness begins to gather. You almost look away. Instead, you let it come.

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