Chapter 9 - Projections

He took a few minutes to get settled, grabbed a sandwich from the refrigerator under the bar, and poured himself a drink. He was exhausted after the party he’d just left and grateful to have a quiet moment to himself. 

Absentminded he admired the pattern on the wall next to him, the one with the elaborate vine motifs, and he felt a little guilty for defacing the gorgeous inlay work with his annotations. 

The pattern already listed three unrelated destinations, which would have made any rational person wonder why they bothered to write them down. 

He looked for any connections between the locations, but there weren’t any, just like there were no similarities between the destinations of the other panels.

“Such beautiful artwork!” he couldn’t help admiring the woodwork. 

The inlay was intricate and expertly crafted, in beechwood and walnut veneer, and the edges of the stylized flowers were trimmed in ivory. 

A tinge of guilt gnawed at his conscience when his eyes met his own careless scribbles, but he read the destinations again anyway, even though they were too vague to provide a frame of reference.

He laid back in the chair to contemplate the fact that, at least for as far as his memories took him, which was not that far, he had been Helmuth in his various incarnations more than he’d been himself. Maybe he really was Helmuth, who was to tell, but which one? 

The familiar warmth of the brandy had relaxed his stomach, and he felt comfortable in that chair, the cozy feeling of a person who’s gotten home after a long day and finally got to put his feet up. He heard voices from the kitchen and got suddenly upset, deciding on the spot he would not get up from that chair no matter who came through the door.

The noise in the kitchen amplified, and the smell of fried onions wafted through the lounge. He tried to ignore both of them, closed his eyes and finished his brandy, determined to sleep. A few pots dropped with a chaotic racket that got him instantly aggravated. He jumped from the chair, determined to go to the kitchen and give those people a piece of his mind, but he couldn’t think of anything to say to them that made any sense at all.

He turned on his feet and made for the panel covered in vines, mad at himself and at the world he didn’t have the guts to stand his ground.

The moment the panel opened he was bathed in sunshine, so strong he had to squint before his eyes could adjust: he was standing in a flower meadow. He couldn’t tell the plant species apart, but they reached up to his hips, and they parted as he waded through their yielding mass like waves around a ship. 

“So peaceful!” he noticed, his tiredness instantly gone, surrounded by sunshine, the soft breath of the afternoon breeze and the gentle buzzing of bees. 

The flower meadow stretched out as far as the eyes could see in all directions, and he got a little disoriented under the zenith sun, which didn’t allow him any sense of direction. He shrugged and was just about to walk forward, when a subtle instinct guided him to look across the field, and, to his bewilderment, noticed a door handle hanging in thin air three feet above ground. It was a common knob type, in brushed aluminum, casting no shadow on the ground, like it belonged to a different painting. He stretched his hand out to feel around it and hit a wall. He grabbed the door handle, annoyed, and a door opened in the lovely landscape, revealing the production booth behind the wall.

“Helmuth! Come in, come in! Come to check on your investment, have you?” a personable fellow got up from behind his console and came to welcome him. His enthusiasm was deflated by his companion’s confused appearance. “Did you like it?”

“The…” Helmuth tested the waters, unsure.

“… holographic environment, of course,” his conversation partner clarified.

“It’s… lifelike!” he said the first thing that came to his mind.

“You mean to tell me you couldn’t tell the difference?” the chief technician drew closer, visibly pleased.

“Aah… no,” he mumbled, still trying to get his bearings. “I’m Helmuth again,” he thought, wishing he could remember being this person, if for nothing else, to make his own life easier. “No, it was very realistic.”

“So, we can proceed to phase two, then?” the partner offered, hopeful. 

“Might as well,” he mumbled under his breath. 

He quietly wondered how many times does one have to embrace a persona before that persona becomes him, before one has the moral obligation to take responsibility for the actions and plans of the latter, before one should start caring about the consequences of one’s careless decisions? 

“Am I becoming Helmuth?” he asked himself, not sure he wanted to, not sure he even liked this person, or was anything like him. None of Helmuth’s life events resonated with him. He couldn’t feel this man’s authentic emotions. He didn’t even know how he liked his coffee, or if he even drank coffee at all.

“Come, I’m starving! We’ll talk over lunch!” his partner guided him towards the door.

The thought of fine dining was appealing, a welcome change from the cold sandwiches and soup diet, and was eagerly anticipating his gourmet meal when their car pulled up in front of the restaurant.

“They’ll never let me in dressed like this,” he blurted out loud without even realizing it.

“Are you kidding?” his partner patted him on the back, genuinely amused. “You’re Helmuth! They’d be happy to have you anywhere, no matter how you’re dressed!”

“Is Helmuth my surname?” he lost his footing at the unexpected logical shift. He crossed the threshold, half expecting to hear muzak, but was welcomed instead by the clinking of plates and silverware. Strange how a change of context can turn a vastly irritating sound into an enjoyable one. For a moment, he wondered if the sounds of pots and pans he could hear from behind the staff doors were in fact coming from the same kitchen, and if he could actually use said kitchen as a shortcut to get back to the muzak lounge. Without even thinking, he walked into the kitchen, almost tripping over a server whose arms were loaded with plates and who happened to be just behind the door.

“You can’t be in here, sir!” a tense voice admonished him as his business partner gently pulled on his arm, dragging him out of the kitchen.

“You are a strange man, you know that?” the latter looked puzzled.

“Is there another exit out of that kitchen?” Helmuth asked him in a daze.

“Of course there is. It’s a kitchen! Why do you ask?”

“No reason…”, he kept eying the door, still distracted.

His partner tried to bring him back to the here and now by making small talk and asked a polite, non-committal question.

“How is Jennifer?”

“It’s a Jennifer now,” he took notice, drowned in the sudden understanding that in this reality game he was playing, there was no way he could ever be the Helmuth character, because there wasn’t a Helmuth, there were Helmuths, as different from each other as any perfect strangers. 

A random game of Helmuth roulette, where he didn’t even know what color he’d land on next. 

He didn’t ask himself who Jennifer was to him. It wouldn’t have made any difference anyway, it could be a Roger or a Taylor next for all he knew. 

His appetite now gone, he excused himself for a moment, pretending he had to take a phone call and promising to delve into the subject of phase two when he returned, and made his way out the door, relieved to hear the muzak chiming softly in the background.

He wrote the new destination on the panel under the other three and gaped incredulously when he read the composite: 

inside the wall

the blue world

duplicates

phase two holographic game

“It’s a language?” he laughed out loud. “Does it read top to bottom or bottom to top?”

Strange, the assumptions we make about unfamiliar things, we automatically dump them in the closest category that seems to fit, without ever looking at what they really are. 

He rushed to look at the other destinations he’d marked down on the panels, whose descriptions kind of made sense taken together, if only in a poetic sense. 

“At least now I have an incentive to keep opening these doors,” he thought. 

He contemplated the hope of compiling an actual story for himself out of random Helmuth fragment variants, an authentic life story, written in travels on the walls of this strange lounge he had gotten used to considering his home.