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.