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.