Chapter 5 - The Third Degree

‘There is no method to this madness,’ he thought dejected.

He couldn’t help notice that the room had looked a little beat up in the aftermath of his dutiful documentation of his journeys. The weird wayfinding scribbles and symbols he had marked up on the paneled walls for later looked basic and childish and made no sense, and he started questioning the usefulness of this endeavor. What if, just what if he made himself at home in this whatever it was and stopped getting lost in every crazy that was waiting for him outside?

It occurred to him it was possible, at least in theory, that during his normal, underwhelming daily life he accidentally opened one of these doors through reality and ended up trapped in an endless loop that always brought him back to the lounge room.

He got up from the chair to evaluate his findings, which covered most of the walls right now: random clusters of unrelated things, at least to a rational mind. No patterns, no rules.

‘Looks like I defaced perfectly beautiful marquetry paneling for nothing.’

He sighed and poured himself another drink.

‘I can’t even get drunk in here,’ he looked at the fancy tumbler, then at the almost empty bottle, with a cold still lucidity as hard as glass.

‘Maybe it’s non alcoholic,’ reason came to offer help, completely out of context but still welcome because it brought with it the soft breeze of hope. ‘Like a raindrop in the desert,’ he thought. ‘Doesn’t solve your problem, but it points you to the promise that an answer exists until too much time has passed for it to matter.’

Maybe looking for connections was the wrong approach, maybe the solution to his problem was something completely different, something so banal that it wouldn’t cross his mind to notice.

‘I must be really getting desperate. No, seriously, what if I just set up camp in here and never go back out? At least for a while. Can’t be worse than getting lost in the forest at night or ending up in a locked storage room.’

Somebody had changed the muzak to sounds he hadn’t heard before and his mindset shifted, drawn to the beautiful marquetry patterns now covered in scribbles. Just like his scribbles, no two of the former were alike. He felt as if he had been parroting those patterns all this time, translating them into a different language, one made of scribbles and symbols as opposed to wood veneer, without understanding them at all.

He looked around the room trying to figure out how to organize it so it would feel more like home and less like the waiting room at a train station, scratching his head in frustration that the room didn’t seem to lend itself to privacy and comfort.

One of the panels opened all by itself.

He looked at it, focusing his attention on its details to remember them later: the design comprised swirling and winding stems with tulips at the ends, so entangled it was impossible to tell them apart.

‘I’m not going,’ he decided, calm, then turned his back to the gaping hole in the wall and went to the bar to fix himself lunch.

A blood-curdling scream emerged from the depths, the sound of a person facing mortal danger. 

He hesitated, faithful to his original intent, arguing with himself that this was not his problem and that being stuck in here in this alternate reality hub was punishment enough. 

Meanwhile, a second scream pierced his ears, and then a third, accompanied by desperate cries for help.

His protective instincts got the better of him and he walked through the opening, already furious because he knew ahead of time he’d have plenty of opportunities to regret this later, kicking himself for being such an idiot and hating that person, whoever they were, for calling out his guilt.

He barely had time to adjust his eyes to the bright sunlight when he got engulfed in a sea of flashes, camera clicks and loudly shouted questions.

It felt very much like a nightmare, too surreal to be happening and engendering the same vague feeling that things didn’t fit, but in ways one couldn’t clearly state even to oneself, because that part of one’s brain that made the logical connections had somehow been disabled.

‘Did someone put drugs in my drink?’ he went to the next logical possibility, which his sharp mind dismissed as unlikely. What was wrong wasn’t with him, it was with everything else.

‘But that’s insane! That is literally the textbook definition of madness.’

“Why did you do it, coward?” a vicious voice from the crowd attacked him, bringing him back to reality, or whatever this was, with enough time to notice that he was barefoot and wearing lounge pants and a tee-shirt, as if someone had grabbed him straight out of bed.

‘Where is here and where is the victim?’ he reasoned that the screamer probably didn’t end up well and they thought him the perpetrator.

Waves of rage swept over him and he swore on everything he held dear that if he ever got out of this, which was the likely outcome if past experiences were any reference, he could see a person being slowly disemboweled right in front of his face, ignore them and go right back to reading his newspaper. 

His newspaper had never tried to shove a microphone in his face and insult him for no reason, thus his newspaper was better company.

He felt guilty for worrying about himself instead of putting the tragedy of the unfortunate victim first, and then he felt angry about getting dragged into yet another circus he didn’t belong to, and asked to tend its monkeys.

“Degenerate!” another scream emerged, followed by a shoe which barely missed his head.

“Pervert!” another scream followed, drowned in a sea of cheers and protests from a crowd that was approaching menacingly, barely held back by the cordon of police.

The officers were giving him dirty glances too, to let him know that the disgust was definitely shared, but they were obligated by their duty.

‘What the hell did the perpetrator do?’ he wrecked his mind to imagine as a tiny helpless smile curled his lips in a silent call for help from anyone who would dare show him kindness.

“Look at that monster smile!” a grunt pushed through the cordon to get in his face, and he read so much hatred in that person’s eyes he knew that if it weren’t for the police, he’d already be dead. 

An endlessly creative series of curses and profanity accompanied the death stare, getting louder as a couple of officers dragged the attacker away from the crowd.

“I hope you rot in hell for what you did, you depraved demon spawn!” a crying woman’s grief pierced him like a rusty knife, with an intensity designed to inflict maximum immediate and long-term damage.

“Why did you do it, sir?” the press kept pushing through, louder than the crowd so their questions could be heard over the screams of the protesters.

“Was it for the money? Did you hope to get her money?”

“Did you two have an affair?”

“Did you push her?” an interviewer got so close to him he could feel his hot breath in his face. “Did you push her?”

‘So it was a she and she must have fallen from somewhere high up,’ he tried to put the story together in his head, knowing full well that these stories never congealed into something halfway coherent. It was like an orchestra rehearsal before the performance, where every instrument practices its own tough piece to perfect it. Perfected chaos.

He tried to turn his head to see if the scene everybody was raging about was behind him, but an outraged policeman grabbed him by the scruff of his neck and forced his head forward.

“Time to go, sir,” he said harshly, and guided him forward with a controlled but stern grab of his arm.

The pavement felt very cold under his feet; he assumed by the looks of the landscape that it was February. He was definitely not dressed for it and, despite his best efforts to put a good face on this whole situation, he started shivering uncontrollably.

He couldn’t help thinking how pitiful it was for a land creature to have gotten so soft that it had to limp to avoid the sharp pokes of the occasional pebbles to protect its sensitive soles. A land creature whose feet were too soft for the land it walked on. It would have been comical if it weren’t so sad.

‘It was a mistake!’ a revelation hit his confused mind with the glaring light of the obvious, but he couldn’t tell exactly what the mistake was, that he had become incompatible with his own environment, that he got stuck in a reality loop or this instance of his torment, which didn’t even register as a priority in the larger scheme of things.

‘It was a mistake!’ he kept shouting inside his head, and even there his shouts kept getting gruff and muffled, until they ended up sounding more like a forceful whisper.

The crowd kept pushing against him and the group of police officers who were holding their bodies against it to protect him. Somebody still managed to reach his body and grabbed the collar of his tee-shirt. It choked him before it ripped, exposing even more of his skin to the humid chill.

‘The station must be close, otherwise they would have put me in a car,’ he tried to pep himself up, but they kept on walking and after a while he couldn’t feel his body anymore, or the rough pavement under his feet.

“Right this way, sir!” the officer in command pushed him up the stairs and towards the door of the police station, and more than anything in his life he prayed to God he would hear muzak the second that door popped ajar, but sadly that didn’t happen.

The officer led him to an office, instead of an interviewing room, sat him down in a chair and left.

He waited there for hours while busy people swarmed around, ignoring him, very involved in what seemed to be a breakthrough in an important case, the one he had gotten himself entangled with, he assumed.

He tried to gather from fragments of their conversations what were the details of his ‘guilt’, but the information he got was too sparse and disjointed to make sense.

He stared intently at his surroundings, trying to take in every detail of the room, unable to chase away the thought one of those many doors that kept yapping open and closed like angry mouths was his path to freedom.