Story / It's Just a Room - Part 3
Warning: This story gets dark. To read from the beginning, click here.
3:36
I’m tired, I’m so ungodly tired. I can feel the air getting thinner, and I find myself stretching for each breath. I scoured the entire room for nearly an hour, and I couldn’t find a key anywhere. I checked the floor, right up to the four dark and dusty corners of this room; I looked inside all six of the desk drawers, three on either side. I looked behind the reams of paper, behind that one pile of unearthly pages that you could only call a ‘book’ if you were on the edge of the abyss yourself, and I found nothing; I searched behind the painting, hell I looked in the canvas folds of the painting, but there was no key;
I even unscrewed the lightbulb, bearing the complete blackness for longer than I care to admit, I thought maybe someone could have hidden a key inside the light socket. My hands felt around the socket, but besides a small shock, I found nothing.
Nothing, nothing, nothing! There is no key here! And you know what, Oliver? I checked the door again, it’s still locked, and there’s no key hole.
I took the painting off the easel when I was checking it, and as I put it back I noticed something odd; the painting seemed to be about three or four inches taller and wider than when I took it off of the easel. It’s the same painting, but it’s definitely larger, and even a bit heavier.
God, I’m losing my mind.
3:45
I’ve practiced honing my memory for several years, almost a decade actually, and I’ve trained myself to be able to retain minute sensory information; size, weight, color of objects I focus on. This room has almost nothing else, and this painting seems to be the focal point of my torture. I’ve memorized this painting, and I’m telling you it’s changed!
Of course, I am familiar with the consequences of isolation, the price one pays for being alone. The ‘cabin fever,’ the itching to just get out, the craaaaawling inside my head, I want to get out!
I know I’m not alone, I know there has to be someone else, maybe they’re watching, maybe they’re traversing those empty halls outside this singular door. I can’t be alone, someone put me here.
3:54
What do you call a snarky inmate going down the stairs? A condescending con, descending. Ha, get it?
A man walks into a bar holding a chunk of asphalt and says, “I’ll take a pint please, and one for the road!” God I crack myself up.
I don’t know what to do with myself, my legs won’t stop shaking, but I’m still so tired. I guess my 4 hours are almost up, the whole room feels hot, like someone stuck it under a heat lamp… The greenhouse effect? There’s no windows or glass walls, not even a skylight, must just be my own lungs eating up all the air they can get. Doesn’t help there’s no AC. I keep glancing back at that book sitting on the desk, that labyrinth of ink and pulp. I’ve opened it up a few times, and I’ve tried to read a bit of it, but I can’t stop peeking back over at that painting. The streaks of green across the front, they almost strike me as eyes, two soothing jade eyes, staring back at me, and I feel so helpless.
The eyes remind me of my mother’s eyes, soft and innocent. Neither Chester nor I knew her very long, she passed away when I was only three years old.
Passed away, yeah right. That’s what they all said. Thirty-two years old, she had the most beautiful jade eyes, that’s what they all said.
My mother, Brenda, had hung herself when she was thirty-two years old, six weeks before her thirty-third. Sometimes it feels like just yesterday, but that was ten thousand days ago.
I remember something about the day we found out. My father, Ches, and I were coming home from staying the weekend at the cabin while my mother was resting. While she was resting. I didn’t know then that my dad would regret that decision for the rest of his life. How we could have listened to her, when she asked to be alone. How we didn’t even know. We should have stayed, I suppose; but what’s done is done, no matter how shitty it is.
I went inside first, followed by Chester, and then my father, who had bumped into Ches as he bumped into me, because I had frozen in the middle of the entryway, and dropped my sketchbook.
I couldn’t see anything above the waist, because the hallway opened into a large kitchen. All I saw was a pair of well dressed legs, wearing a shiny black sundress, and bright green heels.
The next thing I knew, my father was rushing past me, and I had heard him start to cry. Suddenly I was on the ground, and my eyes were closing. My dad told me later that I passed out from shock. When I woke up, he was hugging me tightly, and everything came flooding back to me at once; my mom’s gone.
What do you do when something like this comes crashing into your three year old life? You cry. You cry until you can’t cry anymore, until that moment when you still want to cry but you know it’s over, and that’s exactly what I did. My dad rocked me back and forth, and I could see Ches in the background, his curly mess of dark hair gripped firmly in both hands, head down, back against the wall, knees pulled up to his chest. God, the kid looked so helpless, so sad, he wasn’t even crying, just rocking back and forth gently, damn near broke my heart, more so than it had just been broken.
But life goes on, as a kid you don’t really remember those things as well as you would if it happened when you were say… 14 or 15. No, when you’re only three, there’s something that just doesn’t stick too well, and we don’t really remember those things, right?
Studying memory for so long has its perks, and its drawbacks. You can access almost everything in the deep, deep recesses of your mind through hypnosis, and guess what? You can self-hypnotize. Practice this, along with several other recall techniques, and soon you realize that every single thing that has ever happened to you is carved in your nerves, just waiting to come back and haunt you. You just have to remember, the past is the past.
I’m no necromancer, or Voodoo specialist, I’m not Jesus, hell I’m not even really religious. She was dead, and that’s that.
That is that is that.
But sometimes it hurts to remember those things, the memories that make your spine shiver, because you know that they happened, but you know that you never wanted them to happen in the first place, and suddenly there’s nothing you can do to reverse those memories, to make it all go back to zero, to rewind time and tell your dad not to leave for the weekend like she asked, because she needed help.
But it still doesn’t help, because those memories are still just memories, and there ain’t shit you can do about it. But it gets you nervous, you know? Nervous about choosing. Nervous that this might not be the right choice. And you start to break it down, over and over again, into every facet of your life. Every single thing you do is a choice. Every key stroke, every time I scratch my nose, every time I kick my foot. Our lives are comprised of choices. And what if we had chosen the other?
If we had left the house five minutes later, could we have been the victim of that car accident on the highway? What if we hadn’t gotten on the train? Well we might find that our lives would be entirely different, and yet we still realize that every single permutation has just as much meaning. Every possible path holds virtue of Humanity. No matter what you do, even if you have choices you can’t take back--memories you don’t want--you’ll still be just as much of a person. That’s what counts, right?
I remember my dad telling me stories about her, all throughout my childhood. Every once in a while, at dinner, or before bed, he would tell me something new. The first time he started doing this, he told Ches and I how they met.
My dad was trying to meet up with his friend James for a cold beer at O’Malley’s. He was flagging down a cab, when all of a sudden it pulled past him and picked up a lovely lady with beautiful green eyes.
“The nerve of some guys,” he said, explaining to me that some men go out of their way to do favors for women they think are pretty, women they wanna fuck. And this cabby must have had his eyes on the doe in the cocktail dress. “So you know what I did?” he asked me, and I shook my head quickly. “As she was getting into the cab, I got in the other side.”
“Can you do that?” I asked, trying to understand how taxis work.
“Well, sometimes people share cabs, it doesn’t happen too often, but it does happen all the same,” he took a sip of his gin. “So I got in the cab, and the guy behind the wheel gives me the dirtiest look, I told him, hey, I need a ride, and I’m willing to pay for it.” Pay for it, he said, he couldn’t have known how much he’d be paying for it years later.
“My name’s Will,” he said, extending a hand to the woman next to him. She had been smiling after the interaction with the cabby, who was now glancing back at them from the rear view.
“I’m Brenda,” she said, half giggling. When the cabby finally asked where they were going, they had both answered “O’Malley’s” in unison, and then glanced at each other, smiling. They hit it off immediately, talking the dark night sky down until the taxi pulled up to the curb and the guy basically kicked them out.
“Jimmy, my boy,” my dad said, as the two of them approached a stout man with large blue rimmed glasses, who was sitting at the bar, already going to town on his second beer.
“Thought you’d never get here,” James said, and then turned his attention to Brenda, “And who’s this?”
“Hey, I’m Brenda, we were both heading here, and split a cab,” she took a seat at the bar and my dad followed suit.
“Are you meeting anyone here?” My dad asked.
Brenda looked down at the bar, and then said, “Well, I guess I’ve met two people here.” They laughed, and rambled on through the night, telling drunken stories, and eventually stumbling out to find another cab. James went back to his apartment in Boston, and my soon-to-be-parents headed back to Brenda’s place.
“And then we fell in love,” My dad said, and kissed us goodnight, before turning out the lights.
Another night, he told me about her poetry, how she would spend an hour every night writing a new poem. He even read some to me. My favorite was a poem she titled “Something.”
"There is something horrible about this night,
The way the moon shown as but a sliver,
Like the clipped finger nail of some god forgotten.
As that hideous waning thing hung in the night sky,
Their side, the dark side, now growing brighter,
Whilst those daemons dance and mock,
As our side grows ever darker.
Or the way those leaves tumbled past,
Having no earthly business on this road tonight.
This road, so fast,
The leaves falling like a monsoon,
And so far from any trees.
There is something horrible about this night
Which is why I fell in love with it."
Other nights, he would tell us about her life before they had met, her life as a kid, as a teenager, and as a college student. He would tell us about her adventures, hopping trains and riding them across the state line, sitting out under the summer moon, and writing stories about fantastic worlds. She was an avid dreamer, and she always wrote down her dreams when she woke up. My dad said she’d been doing this since she was 12 years old, and she kept every journal, saved up in a cardboard box for decades. After she died, I saw him reading some of those journals. Granted, at the time I didn’t know what they were, but years later when he explained it, everything clicked.
I remember before she died, there was something a little bit off. When I asked my dad about it, he told me that she didn’t used to act that way.
He said she didn’t used to get up late at night, walk out of their room, and stare out the window, watching for something. I noticed this when I was very young, I’m not quite sure how young, but I found out later that my dad noticed too. A couple of times he even got out of bed to see what she was doing. Just standing, staring out the window.
Most days, while Ches and I were at school, my dad would be watching TV or listening to the radio, and my mom would be writing in her study. Every once in a while, he said he would hear her get up and walk out of the room. She would walk from room to room, checking all of the windows, making sure they were shut, and locked.
Shut and locked, with no keys; windows don’t have keys anyway. Sometimes I wonder if she was trying to lock herself in, or trying to keep something else out.
After Chester and I left for college, my dad had told me that she was suffering from some kind of illness, but he never told me what it was. He said that it was probably why she was acting so strange near the end.