THE FLIGHT OF ROOM 114

Ancient Path

  THE FLIGHT OF ROOM 114

   
     After many years of hard work, one day you fill the hot air balloons connected to your room and gently lift away from all the other rooms in the city. 

                                                      Find a ladder back down.

Exhilarated by the view, you glide over the valley, a vast quilt of farms with packing sheds and processing plants and towns that develop around each nucleus of malls, fast food restaurants, box stores, and gas stations. 

                                             Open a closet door.

You glide over to the foothills, some regions of which still appear natural. You glimpse a network of trails preserved by cattle, and you amuse yourself by trying to map the paths, realizing that they must form an ancient web connecting Native American village sites all over the range, but the trails keep vanishing in the grass. 

                               Find a different path.

You go higher above the smog and notice all the cultivated and urbanized land where wetlands and lakes used to be, the dams on every river, the clear-cut forests and strip mines. 

                   Open a window.

You go even higher where the oxygen grows thin and see a huge fault and the opening of a volcano, the ocean in the distance. 

        Open a closet door.

Every now and then you hear jets and explosions, and you wonder how high you need to go to escape the wars and ecocides and disasters as, breathing through an oxygen mask, you approach the cold blanket of outer space.

AMUSEMENTS IN ROOM 228

Prison

THE AMUSEMENT PARK IN ROOM 228

     Room 228 contains a model of an amusement park where people watch endless variations of every imaginable entertainment. Crowds of visitors gawk at action heroes who battle with villains while, nearby, gourmet chefs reveal unusual dishes and dinosaurs drink from a pond. Vampires, werewolves and zombies are caught in various stages of descending upon their victims while singers compete with each other, the audience poised to vote. Wrestlers twist and turn into bizarre positions, their muscles straining and rippling while beautiful entertainers nearby have sex in unusual positions. Dead bodies wait for detectives, and the mafia is taking over as aliens and time travelers suddenly appear or disappear. At the edges of the park are battles and mass graves and concentration camps and people starving, which some watch in horror or curiosity or secret amusement. Tired of the murders and corruption, a few wander off alone, perhaps wondering if this is really their life while, here and there, a few people are staring at them.


Room 228 contains four other doors.  Choose one.

Door number one.
Door number two.
Door number three.
Door number four.

A SCALE MODEL OF THE MOUNTAINS IN ROOM 236

Mining Road

ROOM 236

     Room 236 contains a scale model revealing a section of the foothills during a drought, with large rocks and all but the most recently fallen trees--oaks, gray pines, sycamores, buckeyes, red-buds--accurately positioned. The reservoir is so low that the river resembles its former self. The slopes of the canyon, however, are stripped of life, except for a rusty crop of cockle-burs, which flourishes underwater, the seeds brought in by the first herds of cattle. If you examine the terrain carefully with a magnifying glass, you can even see ancient Native American trails stretching from one abandoned village site to another, where moss-covered pestles still protrude from the mortars of a few pounding stones. You can also still see in the floodplain the last crumbling asphalt of a road traveled before the dam was built, as well as old abutments where bridges spanned the river and its tributaries. 

Bottom of a Reservoir

     Buried under water for sixty years, a stone chimney still stands erect near pounding stones. Preserved by the cold water, dead trees still tower, stripped bare, almost black. Overgrown mining roads, sometimes built over ancient trails, wind around the hillsides above the denuded slopes, and in some places the collapsed mines can be still be found, often near Native American village sites. Below the dam are canals and ditches that spurred one of the first water wars in the valley, but no obvious signs of conflict remain. Not far from the river is a creek whose water irrigated the first bumper crop of wheat that attracted the railroad. Around the tracks, the city continues to grow. Not far away from the creek new houses are popping up, the city slowly leapfrogging into the foothills. 


There are four other doors in Room 236.  Choose one:

Door number One.

Door number Two.

Door number Three.

Door number Four.

IN THE MIDDLE OF THE ROOM

The 21st Century Apartments

Room 200

     You wake up in the middle of a room next to a telescope.  After blinking several times, you notice that the floor is larger than the base of the most massive pyramid, and as you stand up inside this huge room, you lose your balance a little.  When you step to your right to regain your balance, the entire floor tilts, just the slightest bit, accompanied by a loud whirring, as if many cogwheels had suddenly begun rapidly turning.  When you return to the exact center of the room, the floor returns to its original flatness. Ridges in the floor extend in each cardinal direction, at first appearing merely decorative. After you grow tired of standing in the middle, you take several steps, and the reason for the ridges becomes immediately clear. The floor tilts no matter which way you step, and the ridges are stairs that enable you to proceed upward or downward.
     Then you notice a large, red button in the middle of each stair step.  When you stamp down on one, the floor locks into position, enabling you to proceed either upward or downward. You find that it is easier and feels more natural to go downward, but the farther down you go, the more you experience the primal instincts and desires of the flesh, and after awhile, as you continue downward, you discover that you are attracting strange, unbalanced forces that become more and more demonic, so you return to the middle of the room.
     You decide to climb upward and discover that you keep heading into brighter light toward ethereal beings that are so highly advanced that you feel like a bug in comparison.  Even so, when you are in their proximity, you take on some of their higher energies, becoming more and more god-like. You find that no matter which way you head, up or down, you enter a different vibration of energies, a different order of existence, the knowledge of which separates you a little more from the rest of humanity, so you again head back to the middle of the room, where, finally, you discover the reason for the telescope:  When you peer out of the massive windows into other rooms, you find that you can't locate any other people who are standing in the middle.

Room 200 has four other doors.  Choose one. 

Door number one.

Door number two.

Door number three.

Door number four.

A ROOM WITH A VIEW

Decoration

ROOM 222

   A fly hovers above your food as you sit at the kitchen table. Instead of swatting it away, you let it land on your plate. Suddenly, your sight is fragmented into numerous facets, all containing the same image of the kitchen as you buzz around the head of a man sitting at a kitchen table. Shaking your head, you gaze at the flower in the pot on the windowsill, suddenly thirsty, rooted as deeply as possible in the moment, struggling toward light and swaying slightly in the currents of breath. You gaze, unseeing, at the petals, licking your fur, basking in the sunshine, ignoring a cockroach that emerges from the cabinet and the man at the kitchen table, who is breathing as quietly as possible and staring blankly at a cockroach that stares back at him, its antennas flailing. 

Room 222 has four other doors.  Choose one. 

Door number one.

Door number two.

Door number three.

Door number four.

A ROOM WITH A SCREEN

Yard Sale in front of Apartment Complex

ROOM 206

   This dark room on the second story above the parking garage looks out on a series of windows where you can finally see the street in a tiny square of distant glass. In one room, a ring is slipped on a finger; in another, a hand reaches up from the floor to touch the dress of a woman ironing a shirt; in the most distant room, a hand is lifted from a coffin and grasped for a long time. Beyond the last room, someone in the street is being chased by a man with a knife, and you struggle to escape, dashing up an escalator that creaks and teeters and takes you toward the clouds; you enter a bathroom and realize there are no stalls and you are surrounded by people; you gallop away and fall into water and can't move--you suddenly realize that each experience is actually projected onto a screen from different places in the walls. Some sensations and words keep reappearing like beliefs, layered with associations and feelings; others disappear, perhaps forever. Occasionally you search for the source of the projections, finding nothing except a light under the door (which is probably also a projection)--and you finally turn back to the screen.

Room 206 has four other doors.  Choose one. 

Door number one.

Door number two.

Door number three.

Door number four.

A ROOM REVEALING THE INVISIBLE

The Crack in the Street

ROOM 101

     When you enter the room, you see what does not exist:  a ghost stares at you from a corner, headless black spiders scurry across the walls, a dragon-like eel swims through the floor,  Even though you have no money and the room is almost bare, when you squint you can see a golden, equal-armed cross near your heart, a golden crown floating over your head, and a golden chalice and plate on a table covered by a pure, white tablecloth.  When you gaze out the window, you see demons hovering next to hookers by the gas station, a lonely young ghost near a fence, a black cloud floating in and out of the stores near the street.  You suspect that angels also exist, so you attempt to invoke one, and suddenly you are immersed in a thought-bubble of such mind-boggling complexity that you feel like an amoeba.  That night something shakes you so hard that every atom in your body vibrates, but you can’t see what is shaking you, and you don’t know if you were touched by angel or demon or ghost, or whether it was attempting to scare you or shake you back to reality.

Room 101 has four other doors.  Choose one. 

Door number one.

Door number two.

Door number three.

Door number four.

FREEZING TIME IN ROOM 109

Pestle in a Mortar

ROOM 109

     In this room, you can freeze a moment in your life and examine each aspect, even down to the molecular level. Even as someone is about to slug you, his fist raised, you can observe the fly by your ear, the dust mites under the chair, the body ash all over the furniture, the atoms floating in empty space. You can examine the facial expressions of your loved ones revealing fear, disapproval, anger, amusement. You can go into other rooms to observe things before they are used up, suggesting or corresponding to or reflecting what you perceive as the meaning of your life at that moment, slightly puzzling in retrospect, all the molecules moving together as though conscious of how the patterns fit together, as if all possibilities were known.

WAITING ROOM

Jeffrey Pine

ROOM 104 

     The door opens on tules bordering a lake, and you remember dragonflies and red-winged blackbirds, which suddenly appear--the memory, you surmise, surfacing because of the faintest rustling of transparent wings and a burbling call far off in the distance. You hear an echo from a large rock outcropping, but instead of someone emerging from the grove, a woodpecker glides to a nearby tree and forages in the bark, knocking again without any rhythm you can follow. The woodpecker flies away, and suddenly the knocking sound resembles footsteps, and you are suddenly waiting again for people who brought you here to appear at the edge of the woods. Off in the distance, the sound, more and more indistinct, continues. Sitting quietly in the breeze as dragonfly wings rustle in the tules, you gaze beyond the deep blue water to the mountains covered in snow.

Room 104 has ten other doors.  Choose one.

Door number one.

Door number two.

Door number three.

Door number four.
Door number five.

Door number six.

Door number seven.

Door number eight.

Door number nine.

Door number ten.

A ROOM WITH ONE MEMORY

Buckeye Trees

ROOM 119

     In Room 119 there is only one memory: the day you climbed over the barbed wire, careful not to hook your clothes, following a trail to the creek, wading through a turpentine scent exhaled from blue curl--tough stalks with tiny purple steer's skulls--the silence heightened by squirrels and lizards scurrying over cinnamon-colored leaves that have curled into boat shapes, and you touched the silver puzzle of the bark, knowing you could never fit it back together as you pulled it apart, noting the bones like huge drum-sticks scattered on the slope just before you turned to discover the pounding stone for the first time--all this keeps replaying to the exclusion of everything else, as if something were about to fit together, thousands of years flooding the hillsides, yet there was no time, the far-off howl of a coyote joined by another howl, children in the distance or the faint cries and laughter of some tribe, somehow near and yet far away, reaching you in the stillness.
   
     Room 119 has ten other doors.  Choose one.

Door number one.

Door number two.

Door number three.

Door number four.
Door number five.

Door number six.

Door number seven.

Door number eight.

Door number nine.

Door number ten.

A PATH THAT LEADS TO MANY DOORS

Doors

     A path, leading under the bed, has been worn in the carpet.  You move the bed and follow the path to the closet.  Behind a stack of boxes is a door you have never noticed before.  After prying the door open, you follow the trail as it meanders under sofas and tables, into other bedrooms and closets.  The trail leads through endless rooms; occasionally a door will open onto a trail that leads you through ruins and then back to rooms where people still appear to dwell, but the trail goes on and on through all the stuff of the tribe, and you realize you might never find the ideal rooms you had halfheartedly hoped to find--or your way back to those first rooms that you now recall with nostalgia.

Door number one.

Door number two.

Door number three.

Door number four.
Door number five.

Door number six.

Door number seven.

Door number eight.

Door number nine.

Door number ten.

Door number eleven.

     Finally, a path leads you into the woods where you follow another network of trails, all connecting creeks and the pounding stones of a tribe extinct for over a century.  Pestles still remain in the mortars of some of the grinding stones.  Occasionally you hear a sound like laughter or feel someone staring at you, but looking around, you find no one.   As night approaches you sit down on a ridge in a galaxy of flowers, which slopes down towards the lights of the city--a thin galaxy which spreads out towards a faint galaxy of stars.

THE UNIVERSE WITHIN FOUR WALLS

Constellations of Flowers, Deep Creek

LIGHTS

     Only when you first turn off the lamp do you notice the tiny lights floating in the room.  On closer inspection, you notice the lights have different shapes, some spiral, some with spiral arms extending from a bar across the center, some spherical, and some almost disc-like.  Touching the lights causes an unpleasant shock, and since each shape is hopelessly altered by the impression made by your finger, you decide to avoid troubling the lights in any way.  Creating an azimuthal chart, you plot the coordinates of each light and then tack the chart to the wall since you cannot see the lights in the daytime.  One night, as you lay awake glimpsing the lights slowly whirling, you look out the window.  It is a clear night, unusual in this polluted city, and you notice the stars for the first time in years.  Only then does the thought occur to you that your room contains a universe.  It also occurs to you that each galaxy contains constellations and solar systems that are too small to see, each potentially with life forms as significant and complex as your own species, all forms, no matter the size, held together in complex systems by inscrutable forces.  For days you cannot move from the bed.  Cockroaches and ants scurry over the counters, spiderwebs stretch from ceiling to wall.