Snow Blind | A.J Kirby
Could be I’ve been buried alive, or have made some crossing somewhere back when, when I was unaware of it. Could be fate, this place, made physical. Could be I’ve been here all along, and only now have I properly been made aware of the… dimensions of this cell, this tomb, this womb.
I’m surrounded by an infinity of white which stretches as far as the eye can see or as far as the processors in my brain are allowed to understand. It is sublime and ridiculous. Huge and claustrophobic. Comforting and relentless.
This white. It is too much. Exaggerated. Obvious. Like the image which stands for largeness, for we’re all but specs of dust when set against the wholeness of the world and all that’s in it, on a motivational desk calendar. This white calls to mind arctic plains. Stupendous mountains. Icebergs with a surface area the size of Wales. And underneath, lurking under the millpond-calm surface, Brazil. It visits on my mind great peaks, the likes of which Frankenstein tracked the monster he made in his workshop of filthy creation.
But I can’t pick out the definition of anything here. I can’t see any actual peaks or troughs, or even desks, polar workstations at which some lonely, snow-blind scientist may roughly cross out the days, gripping the pen too firmly in gloves not meant for such fine tooth-work, before he may return home.
I decide to think of the space as a room. Because otherwise, I am too small for it. A microscopic nothing, a dirty smudge on God’s lens. Because otherwise, the ground beneath my feet would melt or the sky would collapse, and my body would begin to consume itself, as certain octopi do, when in the direst need. Here, I am forced to confront the bigness and smallness of myself and who I am and it is all too much. And I can’t grasp any of it, as though I’m just snapping out of an episode of deja-vu, and I can’t be certain whether I’m really here or not.
So it’s a room. Whitewashed. Floor, ceiling, walls. Finite. Constructed by something, someone. Thought-about. Designed. Intelligently. Familiar laws of nature work here. Like gravity. I’m not untethered, floating about with no connection to anything. I am grounded. At least.
More. This place is like a room because no wind whips around it. It’s a pleasant room temperature. And the air feels recycled somehow. As though it’s been through the wringer. Just as I have been.
Even here, which is not quite here, but close enough, I feel my age. Which is old. I am a white-cap. Knobbled at the knee. Crabbed at the hand. Wispy hairs woodworm out my every available cavity. I’m wrinkled like a beach.
My eyes have never been good. Have always balked at offering their twenty-twenty. Paying me back for all those hours I spent curled under blankets, reading into the wee small hours. I’m not sure how far I can trust them, but still, I scan my room. For signs of… life? Geography? History?
I complete a full three-sixty and I can see only one aspect breaks the white. At a central point is an incongruent door, which can only be made out by the black handle. And a handwritten sign above it which reads TRUTH.
The door appears to be freestanding. Is contained by no jamb.
I am unsure whether I can actually see the joins or if I am imagining them. The suggestion of something more. Perhaps the handle is simply floating there. And the sign too. For now, I am not inclined to go investigate.
Gradually, my other senses become attuned. I realise, slowly, that there is sound here. A clock ticks loudly yet uncertainly. Sounds almost like the amplified sound of snow, compressing. If it is a clock, it is nowhere to be seen. Perhaps, it could be in the space which is beyond the door. If it is a door. If any of this matters.
Thinking about what might be beyond the door makes my head hurt. Stabbing pain icepicks through my eyes, spears into my cerebral cortex. Leaving me reeling. Staggering on the white like a newborn foal. All malfunctioning legs and untrained joints. If this is here, then what is there and is this the universe before the Big Bang, or is this some post-apocalyptic region which has been deforested, depopulated, devoured, by something larger than even the white?
I force myself to become my own master once again. Focusing on each particular item in the inventory of me, and forcing it to look sharp. Steeling ankles, knees, hips. Forming a blast-proof wall around my brain so I can’t think as deeply about things, and how they are, and how they will be.
Slowly, I come back into myself and slowly, the fear unfreezes. Drips. Begins to run in rivulets, and then torrential flows from my forehead, armpits, the crevices of me which I’d rather remain hidden even from myself. Crevices I’m suddenly all too aware of again.
Because I am not alone here.
Something else has invaded the white. Someone else. He is here, and now, I am unsure as to how long he has actually been here. Perhaps I sensed him even as my body was giving out on me earlier. Sixth sense, that kind of thing.
It doesn’t matter. What matters is I am not alone. A long man dressed in white overalls stands at a particular distance away from me, his head bowed low and to the side, against his shoulder. I cannot see his eyes and I cannot tell whether he is asleep or awake.
There are no tracks on the white which would suggest he walked here. There is no depression in the ground around him which would suggest he’d been dropped. Just him. Pinioned in time and space. Just him.
The long man stands as though he is trying to make himself shorter. He has narrowed himself as though he pays per square inch for the space he inhabits. He has triangled his shoulders and clamped his legs together.
He is holding – and this surprises me, although it shouldn’t - a large pot of red paint. Clutching it to his chest like a poker hand so that it has left a thin red smile on his shirt.
Perhaps the paint is the reason he is holding his head to one side. Certainly its colour is more than red. Too chemical against the stark whiteness. It is not the colour of the ink scrawled across the handwritten sign of TRUTH.
For some reason, I don’t want him to notice me, and so I stand. Still as a cliff. Obdurate as a statue. In fact, we both stand, become bookends in the Spartan surroundings.
This lasts two hundred and seventeen unsteady ticks of the unseen clock, and then, without warning, the man slowly lifts, and turns his head. As though the sound of the clock was actually coming from him, was his inner-mechanisms slowly, surely winding, winding, and then clicking into place, causing the movement. Indeed, I can’t make out the ticking of the clock now so maybe that’s true.
I say hello. My voice doesn’t echo. Comes out as a dull thud. Like a thrown snowball containing a rock. Awkward. Weighty with the tension I feel.
He says nothing. But.
But the ticking starts again, and now he holds the paint away from his body, shaking it a little, so that some of the red bleeds over the lip of the pot. I interpret this to mean he wants me to take the paint.
I ask him why, again my voice not sounding right. Again sounding like something thrown, or being channelled through me. My voice doesn’t speak the words I actually think, but transforms them into something else. Something less…
Confrontational.
Again, the long man doesn’t answer.
Which enrages me. I stalk across the floor. My feet slap like warnings. They do not crunch as they would on snow. No, it’s like the floor’s a gangplank and I am shivering the timbers up it, en route to the long man.
I half expect the long man to flinch, or take a back-step, or to drop the paint. Show me a surrender gesture. But he doesn’t. He doesn’t do much of anything.
The closer I get to him though, the thicker the stench of paint. Part of me loves this smell. It is the same part loved the reek of gas by the pumps or lighter fluid about to be tossed on a barbecue. Meths.
Sharp. Dangerous.
The long man should be sharp and dangerous too. Certainly he looms. Top of my head only approaches the midway point on the pot of paint. I have to lever my head back in order to get a good look at him, and as I do so I hear a sound like cracking nuts inside my head. And strangely, I’m more worried about the noises inside me than I am about him, outside me. The noise may or may not be the equivalent of way that ticking sounds, inside the other man’s head. I am undecided on this matter.
I am undecided as to whether he even can listen.
His face is absent of anything resembling recognition, or intelligence, or even of surprise. By the look of him he has never wondered, never pondered, never asked life’s questions. His skin is waxen and grey-white. He seems whittled, chiselled out of wax. His eyes are all iris. His mouth a horizon. There is not a single wrinkle on him.
I ask him what the problem is, what he wants. With the unlikely hope that he might answer. That there might be some form of recognition in him.
But there is none. Only the way the ticking becomes louder, more fraught.
I raise an eyebrow.
And now, it is as though something inside him has become fully tautened. Elastically, he stretches out his arms to me. Imploringly, he holds out the paint. Groaningly, his head chunts up, then down, then up again. He is nodding at me, I realise.
He’s holding the paint pot out at an awkward angle, so that one dribble of it plunges over the lip and slug-trails down the side and then… wait… plops down to the floor.
Something in the long man’s eyes shifts, almost imperceptibly. And I think for a moment, for the first time, that I’m about to see him do something instinctively. That he’ll jerk out a foot and catch the drop on the toe of his boot. Stop it from bloodying the floor.
He doesn’t.
The drop lands. Splashes. Pools. It looks untidy.
Oh dear, I tell him. Oh dear.
He does not respond.
And I want to shake him. Speaking as though to a child, I ask him what he wants me to do with the paint. My throat loosening some, the tension in my shoulders relaxing. Because if there is a balance of power here, it’s weighted in my favour. Even though I am asking him what he wants me to do.
Well hmmm.
More clockwork clicking, and then he nods creakily at the door. Then down at the paint.
Well in for a pound, I think, and so I take the paint from him. At one point our hands touch, and his feel soft, as though there’s no bone in them. Mine are the polar opposite. I don’t believe I want to investigate any farther because I feel a bristle of something pass between us in the beat immediately after the touch, and so I take the paint and I mutter something like alley-oops as I swing it by the handle, hearing it slop and gloop inside.
Then, because I’ve nothing else planned, nothing else with which to fill my time, and because this is the way the narrative is guiding me, I walk towards the door. I’m expecting the door to play some sneering visual trick on me as I go, shuffling with distances and perspectives as though it is a Dali painting, but it doesn’t.
The door is very real. Closer in, I can make out the panels on it and I can almost hear the wood breathe. I can sense the charge in the black handle and the fact that it functions. This is a working door. There is something beyond it.
I can’t remember very much about my life before here, but what I do know is this. Set me a mindless task, any mindless task, and I will perform it mechanically, unthinkingly. As though there is clockwork inside me. First thing I do is I paint over the TRUTH sign. And soon it can’t be seen behind the red.
After I’ve finished, I set back, arms crossing my chest, and I admire my handiwork. But even as I am doing so, the paint begins to dry. And as it does, I can read the writing underneath once more. I turn to the long man and shrug. For some reason I’ve grown as mute as him.
He responds by nodding, jerkily, at the door. And I interpret this to mean I should paint it again.
So I do. Sloshing the brush into the pot and getting it all thick with red, and then slobbering it right over the sign. Daubing thick redness over it which is not even red any more, but darker, like a bloodstain. Black, almost.
Then I set back again, and, almost imperceptively at first, the TRUTH starts to shine through all over again.
I turn to the long man, preparing a shrug, but as I turn, I note that he is now no longer holding the position which has been his ever since his (our) arrival here. Instead, he is walking forward. To meet me. To appraise my efforts.
Is he the foreman here? Have I read him wrong?
He walks in a jerky-style. I see – though he doesn’t, I don’t believe – that he’s stepped in the dropped paint from earlier. Only, for some reason that instance of the paint is not as quick-drying as the paint on the door. So that when he steps in it, and then drags his boots forward, like a dead man walking across the endless whiteness, he leaves behind him a streak, a skidmark of red, which resembles… Which resembles the long mark left behind a dead seal which is being pulled along from the back of a sled.
Before he arrives at the door, I scoop up more paint on the brush. Using the brush as a spade now. Digging the paint out and then shovelling it onto the sign like I’m burying it. For some reason, it feels more important than anything here that the TRUTH is covered-up before the long man reaches me.
But the paint is now drying so quickly I can barely earth-mover enough of it out the pot before it is drying and those letters continue to shine through the layers like a palimpsest.
The long man halts at a particular distance from the door, and from me. He says nothing as he watches me paint, and then repaint the sign. And I’m starting to feel panicked now, because the paint is running out. Now when I dip my brush in the pot and stir, I can see the yellowish metal at the bottom.
And now I have to drag the brush around the edges, like bread around a soup-bowl, to claim the last drops of it.
And now, I can’t lay it on thick enough to cover the letters even when the paint is wet.
And the TRUTH shines through brighter. The letters appearing to burn now, like they’ve been tattooed into the wood of the door, or branded.
I get this weird sensation in the back of my brain, as though someone is whispering to me. Mouthing words such as THE TRUTH WILL OUT so that the hairs on the back of my neck stand on end. Only, when I swing around, startled, I see that the whisperer is not the long man because the long man remains at his particular distance.
I ask the long man whether there is any more paint. We desperately need some more paint, I tell him.
But he does not respond.
In a fit of pique, I upturn the pot so that the last of the red splotches down across the sign, but across the door too, in the manner of arterial spray.
And then, finally, he speaks. His voice is calm, methodical. Jars with the bubbling frustration I feel. “Each man is allowed but one pot of paint,” he says.
I ask him what he means by each man. I ask him whether there are more of us here, and if so, where they might be.
It is his turn to shrug. And he does so mechanically. Like it is a learned act. Like he is aping my earlier shrug.
Then he turns, stiffly, and walks away.
Perspective turns him cat-sized, rat-sized, ant-sized. Into nothing but a memory.
And I’m alone again. With the door. With the TRUTH.
I narrow my eyes, try to blind them to it, but the TRUTH remains. I jab my fists against the door hoping to beat the TRUTH out of it, but the letters won’t budge.
I sigh, turn the paint pot over, and sit down on it, resting my head on my hands and my elbows on my knees. I want to go home now, I think.
I stare at the door. And after a while, my eyes start to blur, and I can’t be sure I’m still looking at a door or whether I’m now looking through it. I can see the red sign, and its letters, but now it seems like nothing more than a scar on my retina. Like I’ve looked at the sun too long and now see its afterimage burning on whatever I now look at.
I see white, mostly. As though beyond the door is a virgin, blank sheet of paper. Occasionally, I believe I can see the vague outline of aspects of my life silhouetted against the white of the back wall. Who I am, who I was, who I could have been… An infinity of whiteness beyond that, stretching away into nothing.
After a while, the TRUTH starts to hurt my eyes, and so I draw my lids resolutely closed and I continue to sit. And I hope that when I lever them open again, something will have changed. That the world will be more beautiful, and I won’t be on my own.
Could be I’ve been buried alive, or have made some crossing somewhere back when, when I was unaware of it. Could be fate, this place, made physical. Could be I’ve been here all along, and only now have I properly been made aware of the… dimensions of this cell, this tomb, this womb.
I’m surrounded by an infinity of white which stretches as far as the eye can see or as far as the processors in my brain are allowed to understand. It is sublime and ridiculous. Huge and claustrophobic. Comforting and relentless.
This white. It is too much. Exaggerated. Obvious. Like the image which stands for largeness, for we’re all but specs of dust when set against the wholeness of the world and all that’s in it, on a motivational desk calendar. This white calls to mind arctic plains. Stupendous mountains. Icebergs with a surface area the size of Wales. And underneath, lurking under the millpond-calm surface, Brazil. It visits on my mind great peaks, the likes of which Frankenstein tracked the monster he made in his workshop of filthy creation.
But I can’t pick out the definition of anything here. I can’t see any actual peaks or troughs, or even desks, polar workstations at which some lonely, snow-blind scientist may roughly cross out the days, gripping the pen too firmly in gloves not meant for such fine tooth-work, before he may return home.
I decide to think of the space as a room. Because otherwise, I am too small for it. A microscopic nothing, a dirty smudge on God’s lens. Because otherwise, the ground beneath my feet would melt or the sky would collapse, and my body would begin to consume itself, as certain octopi do, when in the direst need. Here, I am forced to confront the bigness and smallness of myself and who I am and it is all too much. And I can’t grasp any of it, as though I’m just snapping out of an episode of deja-vu, and I can’t be certain whether I’m really here or not.
So it’s a room. Whitewashed. Floor, ceiling, walls. Finite. Constructed by something, someone. Thought-about. Designed. Intelligently. Familiar laws of nature work here. Like gravity. I’m not untethered, floating about with no connection to anything. I am grounded. At least.
More. This place is like a room because no wind whips around it. It’s a pleasant room temperature. And the air feels recycled somehow. As though it’s been through the wringer. Just as I have been.
Even here, which is not quite here, but close enough, I feel my age. Which is old. I am a white-cap. Knobbled at the knee. Crabbed at the hand. Wispy hairs woodworm out my every available cavity. I’m wrinkled like a beach.
My eyes have never been good. Have always balked at offering their twenty-twenty. Paying me back for all those hours I spent curled under blankets, reading into the wee small hours. I’m not sure how far I can trust them, but still, I scan my room. For signs of… life? Geography? History?
I complete a full three-sixty and I can see only one aspect breaks the white. At a central point is an incongruent door, which can only be made out by the black handle. And a handwritten sign above it which reads TRUTH.
The door appears to be freestanding. Is contained by no jamb.
I am unsure whether I can actually see the joins or if I am imagining them. The suggestion of something more. Perhaps the handle is simply floating there. And the sign too. For now, I am not inclined to go investigate.
Gradually, my other senses become attuned. I realise, slowly, that there is sound here. A clock ticks loudly yet uncertainly. Sounds almost like the amplified sound of snow, compressing. If it is a clock, it is nowhere to be seen. Perhaps, it could be in the space which is beyond the door. If it is a door. If any of this matters.
Thinking about what might be beyond the door makes my head hurt. Stabbing pain icepicks through my eyes, spears into my cerebral cortex. Leaving me reeling. Staggering on the white like a newborn foal. All malfunctioning legs and untrained joints. If this is here, then what is there and is this the universe before the Big Bang, or is this some post-apocalyptic region which has been deforested, depopulated, devoured, by something larger than even the white?
I force myself to become my own master once again. Focusing on each particular item in the inventory of me, and forcing it to look sharp. Steeling ankles, knees, hips. Forming a blast-proof wall around my brain so I can’t think as deeply about things, and how they are, and how they will be.
Slowly, I come back into myself and slowly, the fear unfreezes. Drips. Begins to run in rivulets, and then torrential flows from my forehead, armpits, the crevices of me which I’d rather remain hidden even from myself. Crevices I’m suddenly all too aware of again.
Because I am not alone here.
Something else has invaded the white. Someone else. He is here, and now, I am unsure as to how long he has actually been here. Perhaps I sensed him even as my body was giving out on me earlier. Sixth sense, that kind of thing.
It doesn’t matter. What matters is I am not alone. A long man dressed in white overalls stands at a particular distance away from me, his head bowed low and to the side, against his shoulder. I cannot see his eyes and I cannot tell whether he is asleep or awake.
There are no tracks on the white which would suggest he walked here. There is no depression in the ground around him which would suggest he’d been dropped. Just him. Pinioned in time and space. Just him.
The long man stands as though he is trying to make himself shorter. He has narrowed himself as though he pays per square inch for the space he inhabits. He has triangled his shoulders and clamped his legs together.
He is holding – and this surprises me, although it shouldn’t - a large pot of red paint. Clutching it to his chest like a poker hand so that it has left a thin red smile on his shirt.
Perhaps the paint is the reason he is holding his head to one side. Certainly its colour is more than red. Too chemical against the stark whiteness. It is not the colour of the ink scrawled across the handwritten sign of TRUTH.
For some reason, I don’t want him to notice me, and so I stand. Still as a cliff. Obdurate as a statue. In fact, we both stand, become bookends in the Spartan surroundings.
This lasts two hundred and seventeen unsteady ticks of the unseen clock, and then, without warning, the man slowly lifts, and turns his head. As though the sound of the clock was actually coming from him, was his inner-mechanisms slowly, surely winding, winding, and then clicking into place, causing the movement. Indeed, I can’t make out the ticking of the clock now so maybe that’s true.
I say hello. My voice doesn’t echo. Comes out as a dull thud. Like a thrown snowball containing a rock. Awkward. Weighty with the tension I feel.
He says nothing. But.
But the ticking starts again, and now he holds the paint away from his body, shaking it a little, so that some of the red bleeds over the lip of the pot. I interpret this to mean he wants me to take the paint.
I ask him why, again my voice not sounding right. Again sounding like something thrown, or being channelled through me. My voice doesn’t speak the words I actually think, but transforms them into something else. Something less…
Confrontational.
Again, the long man doesn’t answer.
Which enrages me. I stalk across the floor. My feet slap like warnings. They do not crunch as they would on snow. No, it’s like the floor’s a gangplank and I am shivering the timbers up it, en route to the long man.
I half expect the long man to flinch, or take a back-step, or to drop the paint. Show me a surrender gesture. But he doesn’t. He doesn’t do much of anything.
The closer I get to him though, the thicker the stench of paint. Part of me loves this smell. It is the same part loved the reek of gas by the pumps or lighter fluid about to be tossed on a barbecue. Meths.
Sharp. Dangerous.
The long man should be sharp and dangerous too. Certainly he looms. Top of my head only approaches the midway point on the pot of paint. I have to lever my head back in order to get a good look at him, and as I do so I hear a sound like cracking nuts inside my head. And strangely, I’m more worried about the noises inside me than I am about him, outside me. The noise may or may not be the equivalent of way that ticking sounds, inside the other man’s head. I am undecided on this matter.
I am undecided as to whether he even can listen.
His face is absent of anything resembling recognition, or intelligence, or even of surprise. By the look of him he has never wondered, never pondered, never asked life’s questions. His skin is waxen and grey-white. He seems whittled, chiselled out of wax. His eyes are all iris. His mouth a horizon. There is not a single wrinkle on him.
I ask him what the problem is, what he wants. With the unlikely hope that he might answer. That there might be some form of recognition in him.
But there is none. Only the way the ticking becomes louder, more fraught.
I raise an eyebrow.
And now, it is as though something inside him has become fully tautened. Elastically, he stretches out his arms to me. Imploringly, he holds out the paint. Groaningly, his head chunts up, then down, then up again. He is nodding at me, I realise.
He’s holding the paint pot out at an awkward angle, so that one dribble of it plunges over the lip and slug-trails down the side and then… wait… plops down to the floor.
Something in the long man’s eyes shifts, almost imperceptibly. And I think for a moment, for the first time, that I’m about to see him do something instinctively. That he’ll jerk out a foot and catch the drop on the toe of his boot. Stop it from bloodying the floor.
He doesn’t.
The drop lands. Splashes. Pools. It looks untidy.
Oh dear, I tell him. Oh dear.
He does not respond.
And I want to shake him. Speaking as though to a child, I ask him what he wants me to do with the paint. My throat loosening some, the tension in my shoulders relaxing. Because if there is a balance of power here, it’s weighted in my favour. Even though I am asking him what he wants me to do.
Well hmmm.
More clockwork clicking, and then he nods creakily at the door. Then down at the paint.
Well in for a pound, I think, and so I take the paint from him. At one point our hands touch, and his feel soft, as though there’s no bone in them. Mine are the polar opposite. I don’t believe I want to investigate any farther because I feel a bristle of something pass between us in the beat immediately after the touch, and so I take the paint and I mutter something like alley-oops as I swing it by the handle, hearing it slop and gloop inside.
Then, because I’ve nothing else planned, nothing else with which to fill my time, and because this is the way the narrative is guiding me, I walk towards the door. I’m expecting the door to play some sneering visual trick on me as I go, shuffling with distances and perspectives as though it is a Dali painting, but it doesn’t.
The door is very real. Closer in, I can make out the panels on it and I can almost hear the wood breathe. I can sense the charge in the black handle and the fact that it functions. This is a working door. There is something beyond it.
I can’t remember very much about my life before here, but what I do know is this. Set me a mindless task, any mindless task, and I will perform it mechanically, unthinkingly. As though there is clockwork inside me. First thing I do is I paint over the TRUTH sign. And soon it can’t be seen behind the red.
After I’ve finished, I set back, arms crossing my chest, and I admire my handiwork. But even as I am doing so, the paint begins to dry. And as it does, I can read the writing underneath once more. I turn to the long man and shrug. For some reason I’ve grown as mute as him.
He responds by nodding, jerkily, at the door. And I interpret this to mean I should paint it again.
So I do. Sloshing the brush into the pot and getting it all thick with red, and then slobbering it right over the sign. Daubing thick redness over it which is not even red any more, but darker, like a bloodstain. Black, almost.
Then I set back again, and, almost imperceptively at first, the TRUTH starts to shine through all over again.
I turn to the long man, preparing a shrug, but as I turn, I note that he is now no longer holding the position which has been his ever since his (our) arrival here. Instead, he is walking forward. To meet me. To appraise my efforts.
Is he the foreman here? Have I read him wrong?
He walks in a jerky-style. I see – though he doesn’t, I don’t believe – that he’s stepped in the dropped paint from earlier. Only, for some reason that instance of the paint is not as quick-drying as the paint on the door. So that when he steps in it, and then drags his boots forward, like a dead man walking across the endless whiteness, he leaves behind him a streak, a skidmark of red, which resembles… Which resembles the long mark left behind a dead seal which is being pulled along from the back of a sled.
Before he arrives at the door, I scoop up more paint on the brush. Using the brush as a spade now. Digging the paint out and then shovelling it onto the sign like I’m burying it. For some reason, it feels more important than anything here that the TRUTH is covered-up before the long man reaches me.
But the paint is now drying so quickly I can barely earth-mover enough of it out the pot before it is drying and those letters continue to shine through the layers like a palimpsest.
The long man halts at a particular distance from the door, and from me. He says nothing as he watches me paint, and then repaint the sign. And I’m starting to feel panicked now, because the paint is running out. Now when I dip my brush in the pot and stir, I can see the yellowish metal at the bottom.
And now I have to drag the brush around the edges, like bread around a soup-bowl, to claim the last drops of it.
And now, I can’t lay it on thick enough to cover the letters even when the paint is wet.
And the TRUTH shines through brighter. The letters appearing to burn now, like they’ve been tattooed into the wood of the door, or branded.
I get this weird sensation in the back of my brain, as though someone is whispering to me. Mouthing words such as THE TRUTH WILL OUT so that the hairs on the back of my neck stand on end. Only, when I swing around, startled, I see that the whisperer is not the long man because the long man remains at his particular distance.
I ask the long man whether there is any more paint. We desperately need some more paint, I tell him.
But he does not respond.
In a fit of pique, I upturn the pot so that the last of the red splotches down across the sign, but across the door too, in the manner of arterial spray.
And then, finally, he speaks. His voice is calm, methodical. Jars with the bubbling frustration I feel. “Each man is allowed but one pot of paint,” he says.
I ask him what he means by each man. I ask him whether there are more of us here, and if so, where they might be.
It is his turn to shrug. And he does so mechanically. Like it is a learned act. Like he is aping my earlier shrug.
Then he turns, stiffly, and walks away.
Perspective turns him cat-sized, rat-sized, ant-sized. Into nothing but a memory.
And I’m alone again. With the door. With the TRUTH.
I narrow my eyes, try to blind them to it, but the TRUTH remains. I jab my fists against the door hoping to beat the TRUTH out of it, but the letters won’t budge.
I sigh, turn the paint pot over, and sit down on it, resting my head on my hands and my elbows on my knees. I want to go home now, I think.
I stare at the door. And after a while, my eyes start to blur, and I can’t be sure I’m still looking at a door or whether I’m now looking through it. I can see the red sign, and its letters, but now it seems like nothing more than a scar on my retina. Like I’ve looked at the sun too long and now see its afterimage burning on whatever I now look at.
I see white, mostly. As though beyond the door is a virgin, blank sheet of paper. Occasionally, I believe I can see the vague outline of aspects of my life silhouetted against the white of the back wall. Who I am, who I was, who I could have been… An infinity of whiteness beyond that, stretching away into nothing.
After a while, the TRUTH starts to hurt my eyes, and so I draw my lids resolutely closed and I continue to sit. And I hope that when I lever them open again, something will have changed. That the world will be more beautiful, and I won’t be on my own.