Always Another Door
I.
She was in the process of becoming, on a first and then a second manhattan, slightly drunk. Awareness grew blurred at the edges. Anxiety retreated, apprehended for a short time only. Sitting in the fenced-in yard of the bar at twilight, she laughed. I do not dream, she said, and so I live the dream awake. I must.
Her friend asked her what she meant, and she laughed again and shrugged. It doesn’t mean anything.
Ernestine had been trying to explain her route to the bar that afternoon. The long late-winter walk found her unusually alone; her dog was no longer around to accompany her. A cacophony of sirens, revving cars, and voices raised in isolated shouts or half-realized conversations contrived to make her nearly sick. She was brought to the edge and stopped short somehow. Arms folded over her chest, bag pinned to her side, she looked from side to side and plunged deeper into streets made freshly unfamiliar. A story crossed her mind, which she had read late last night, bleary but unable to sleep. It was the story of a writer who had died a horrible and self-inflicted death. The story appalled and fascinated then, and it had yet to let go. Occasionally she found herself beset with a drive to destruction. The thought crossed her mind: Go ahead and step into traffic. It was an impulse whose content disturbed her, whose requisite mood she knew well, as it took hold now and then. Often it happened after moments of great triumph or success. Now is the time, the voice seemed to say. Let’s go!
But she had at the moment no triumphs to celebrate and no troubling impulses with which to contend. She had nothing to do or to which to look forward, had only a bar to find at which to meet her friend. A crosswalk hampered her forward movement. She put a hand to her forehead, trying to ground herself in this ugly place, this unpleasant time. Here, at this corner, a dog groomer’s shop abutted a trendy-looking restaurant. At the fringes of her sight something strange began to flutter. She waited for the lit orange hand to change its shape. Glancing down at her feet, on the ground she noticed something odd. A line made of some sort of matter—it was white and jelled like gristle—trailed away from her and the crosswalk and down the middle of the sidewalk.
That’s why I was late, she told her friend, Trish, later. I began to follow the line, because I saw that it led me away from the street and toward a certain door.
This door, she said, was set into a wall of stone at the edge of a narrow yard, some blocks away. Wary of trespassing, she stopped at the yard’s near edge. No grass sprouted here; instead, a profusion of plants and flowers shot out of the earth, all blooming and clearly well-cared-for. The colors, pinks and oranges and yellows, delighted her, and she contemplated moving among them, pushing through them to the door in the wall.
Yet she was rooted to the ground. The line shot through the yard, blazing a zigzag path through the plants. The obscure mental operations that sometimes told her to walk into traffic dithered here; propriety or fear or concern for the plants’ well-being took precedent instead. There was no walkway or other means of passage. She would have to traipse her way through.
When she finally did approach the door, taking care to tiptoe toward it and not crush the abundance of flowers, she found it unlocked. In fact, it swung open, and she entered a small, dank chamber.
It was hot in here, humid; the jungle-like atmosphere contrasted sharply with the cool of a dry early March outside. Before her, she saw only a set of stairs leading down, upon which still trailed the line. It had pushed its way across the stairs haphazardly. She followed, wary of stepping on it.
I could not help but go inside the door, she told her friend and took a sip. The injunction sounded in my mind: Go ahead. Trish indulged this endless anecdote but had to admit to herself that she was getting bored.
As Ernestine descended, the air thickened again. It was even more humid in this subterranean room, air so thick it could be spread or sculpted, like buttercream frosting. The day’s waning light encroached through narrow windows near the ceiling. It was a large room like an empty garage. The line led toward one corner of the room, where it was just barely possible to see a figure, far larger than herself, curled up as if in sleep. It took some long moments to discern that it was she herself who lay there, though much larger in size, bent around a form that was the line’s ultimate source. The form rustled and arose as she drew near, and though she could not even say where or what its eyes were, she thought it looked at her.
Later, she retraced her steps upstairs and left the building. As she left—not surprised at all that it would happen this way—it became clear that neither the door nor the yard nor even the building resembled what she had first seen. She traipsed through an unremarkable alleyway in the middle of the city, alongside an utterly unremarkable building: no flowers, no door, no mysterious line.
The long detour brought her, late, to the bar where her friend sat waiting. In her peripheral vision, something large and indescribable shyly hovered.
When she attempted to tell the story of her day, she described her thoughts, the line, the yard, the room—but not the outsized self she found there, nor the thing she now saw bobbing beside her. She told Trish that the room had been empty. Trish felt that she had been tricked somehow, made foolish. Was there a point that eluded her, or had Ernestine simply wasted her time? Soon, they parted.
II.
It appeared to her like an Old Testament angel—beautiful and terrible, many-winged and -eyed, of a bizarre and fantastical shape that seemed to disregard biology entirely, not to mention aesthetics either human or divine; a shape that could only have been crafted by a god who was fool or child. Certain to make observers awed or mad or both, if only they could see it, it floated, flitted, and could not flee. Though it had wings, or appendages that she did not know how else to name, it did not seem to use them; it rather swam through air, not unlike a whale. It was tethered to her by stringy skeins of thought, both her and not, at once animating her and doing her bidding. The same could be said of it: that she animated it, that it did her bidding. Both she and the beast mutually made the other possible.
On the street it trailed behind her, dodging streetlights and balconies, evading the appalling brush of passersby. It lived for her only, wished for her touch alone. To come into contact with another seemed obscene and degrading. Somehow, it never did, though she could tell that the fear persisted in it. She felt it, too, and of course she similarly found physical contact to be loathsome. And so they moved, she on the ground and it on air, propelled by currents of intellection and dread. At home, it settled in the rafters. Ernestine wondered whether Cheryl might have detected it—perhaps by smell. It would have spooked her.
Only a few days had passed since first she had glimpsed it, though it seemed to her that it had always been there, and it had taken her decades, and the discovery of that strange line, to realize its presence. One could not say which came first, but she began to suspect which would be the first to die. She would watch it fade, its wings no longer shining but dull and drooping, its eyes glazed over with the crust of oblivion. It would go away, and she would be left alone, for a little while, until she got the go-ahead to follow it somewhere else.
It was true: a frightening thing to behold was the consciousness of Ernestine Boggs.
III.
At the bar, her friend Trish mused on the empty room, disbelieving Ernestine yet deeply puzzled. It almost sounds, she said, like someone wanted to kidnap you, like they had set a trap to lead you to their lair. Ernestine nodded with vigor, and they laughed. It does, she agreed, eager to move things away from the truth.
Trish tried to steer the conversation toward regions less turbulent, more easily navigable. At least for her. Or perhaps something in her goaded her toward cruelty. She asked about Ernestine’s sister. Haven’t heard about Cloris in a long time, she said.
Nor have I, Ernestine said, clipped. It was Ernestine’s tendency to lapse into equivocation if not to lie. It would have benefitted neither woman to describe the last, fraught conversation, to broach the subject of her miserable memories. She could have begun to strip her skin off before Trish’s eyes and attained similar social success and felt less vulnerable to boot. When they parted, it was with an obvious stiffness. “We’ll see you later,” Trish said. Ernestine nodded, said no more, and scampered away.
Subsequent encounters required further mendacity. On the one hand, it was easy not to address her—let us say—evolution. On the other hand, it was impossible to nudge it away from the front of her mind. She found herself constantly distracted. At the grocery store, she could scarcely attend to the cashier’s question—probing the identity of an obscure variety of salad greens—as her consciousness bobbed above, silently screaming in agony at the din of the store and the many other people trapped within, enduring cogitations of their own. It might have been the case that they were trailed by forms of their own that brushed against the others, finding every moment equally painful. Ditto at the bank, the bookstore, the coffee shop—all the places it was her habit to go she was forced to regard as newly unbearable.
She did not separate it from herself. It was she who floated near the ceiling in the coffee shop even as she likewise faced the impatient barista, struggling to mouth one word: “cappuccino.” She thought it was like suddenly gaining the faculty of self-consciousness, having never truly had it before; no, it was as though she were now forced to walk around naked, and not only naked but with her skin flayed off. She attempted to maintain her life as normal, not only doing her errands but keeping up with her friends, but at every turn she was befuddled, apprehensive, and weary.
She and Trish had long made a habit of meeting in the bar’s open yard. Though she could have feigned illness or preoccupation and canceled their subsequent appointment, two weeks later, she decided to go and bear the discomfort.
On her walk this time to the bar, she kept one eye out for trails of strange substances, bewildering pathways, and found none. It was an uneventful walk, so much so that that itself disconcerted her. Always, though she loathed the flux of crowds and their noises, cursed the burden of others and their interminable demands, she found that whenever streets appeared too empty, or her postbox or email inbox unusually quiet, a sense of disquiet came in. Had everyone else disappeared, been raptured perhaps, and left her behind?
Thus relieved and alarmed, she walked the quiet streets, trailed by her companion, which felt the same as she. And when they arrived to find Trish deep into a gin and tonic, Ernestine smiled and lifted one hand in a muted wave.
The encounter was not a success. Nearly everything she said was a lie. She rarely spoke of her own accord, mainly responded to Trish’s musings and anecdotes, attempted at every turn to tergiversate. When Trish pointed out her paleness, she said she was sick. When Trish asked why she seemed distracted, she maintained the same. When Trish asked her to explain what ailed her, she rambled aimlessly, naming a couple of unrelated symptoms before ending in a sigh. When Trish, exasperated, pointed out that she was being awfully quiet, she responded with an irrelevant remark about Trish’s shoes. Details of the conversation were lost almost as soon as they entered Ernestine’s head; she would never remember them later. Concentration proved absolutely impossible, and anyway the words sprouted by dry lips and heavy tongue and rustling vocal cords derived not from the wretched brain that rattled around in her skull but from that entity whose relation to herself she was still puzzling out. She began to divulge some facts about her dreams, all of which were to a one exceedingly dull, plain recountings of things she had done on that or previous days. Sometimes, she dreamed about gazing at her face in the mirror or else about inspecting a manikin that resembled her child-self. No whimsy, surreality, or bizarrerie invaded her dreamlife, not ever, as she had said many times before. Trish looked restless but attentive; Ernestine at some point trailed off. She could not be bothered to commit herself further. She told Trish she had to go and thus abruptly left.
IV.
There were many Ernestines. Just how many? At times she felt she shed selves as steadily as aphids give birth. She could feel the new one growing within her until out it burst, with that one already ready, too, to grow and make an egress of its own. Perhaps this great thing that trailed behind a viviparous Ernestine formed the only constant, and she had until now failed to grasp it. Or perhaps she was now facing the death of the self, stuck in a haze until the new one could step in and take her place. The thought occurred to her as well that her consciousness was but a phantom—a hallucination in the midst of, or just prior to, the throes of death.
If it appeared that her thoughts clashed madly, that they swung in far-flung directions and threatened to crash, then imagine the turmoil within her, within the body that quivered, whose heart raced and whose fingers trembled in the face of its derangement.
V.
Having fled Trish, at home she was listless. She wished her dog were still here to play with and wondered again what her canine faculties might have told her.
Home offered her no comfort, and truthfully it never had. From the ticky-tacky house in which she grew up to the numerous apartments, in various states of disrepair, she had endured until she managed to purchase this house, they had always been graceless, tawdry, disquieting, and insufficient. Well, no: her life was so, and her homes reflected this constant state. On a fundamental level, her life, her being, lacked syntony. She should have been an anchorite, born in a different time and place, consigned to a closet whose door was shut tight against the forsaken things of this world, which she anyway disliked. Utterly out of touch with, disconnected with the world around her, she believed that her encounter with her own consciousness had comprised her first and only glimpse of something else, of a deep resonance that startled her.
And thus home could offer little comfort.
Some people are ill-suited to living. This is simply if regrettably true; and it must have been true of Ernestine. Always such dis-ease had throttled her. It was the shame of having skin, the shame of others’ seeing it. When she was a child who wandered through the world unseeing, inattentive—a presage of the long life that stretched ahead—she once infuriated her sister, Cloris, with a particularly egregious lie. The lie related to a certain door that Ernestine insisted existed at the back of the house. In the back of the house was located a room, quite small, in which the girl slept alone. She insisted that the room’s still smaller closet, from whose door depended a large, old mirror—a closet like the cell in which, in that other time, she might have lived out her days as anchorite—had revealed to her another door. It must have been a white line, then, too, that beckoned. She would look at the mirror and see a door, and she swore that the door was truly there.
The nature of her revelation was not clear: if the room revealed it, what (one such as Cloris might have wondered) was the nature of the room’s apparent agency? How could the room have revealed a door? Did it call out Ernestine’s name, beckon her with a nonexistent finger, and gesture grandly to the door that was not there? In reply to such impertinent questions, Ernestine demurred and mumbled words indistinct. She mentioned no line but repeated that there had been a door. When opened, it permitted her a vision of the other world, the one where her thoughts roamed free, outside her head, in their proper attitudes. Ernestine remembered how Cloris taunted her and called her a fool; later, she wondered about this first glimpse of abstruse forms. Vaguely, for her whole life long, she believed that she had lied, having forgotten the incidental details, but with recent events came some doubts. Young Ernestine knew what she saw.
She, old Ernestine, rambled through her home’s small rooms, wracked with the thought of her foolish little self; annoyed with her consciousness—its existence, its presence. Then she left, promising herself that she would soon return.
VI.
I didn’t know what I was looking for. I pointed my finger at myself. I looked in the mirror and said, Oh, surprised to see my same old peculiar reflection. Oh. There it is again. It was a reflection I did not want to see. It was a person I did not want to be. Why, why, why has it always felt like a burden: to be a person, to feel, to endure, the too-heavy weight of a mind that drifts about in a sheath of uncomfortable flesh. It was this that I did not want. It was this that I did not ask for. It was this that I was and would continue to be until it stopped, it being life, and it would stop, it would have to do so, but how. How was a question that plagued and intrigued me. How would it unfold, and could I hasten the process, would I want to, would I bother when I could do something else, perhaps read a book, or eat a good meal, watch a movie, whatever, and really the potential to do something fun such as read another novel has been the primary thing to forestall the thinking about the potential to hasten the process of the inevitable, the ending, the stoppage of the thing I do not want and do not like: the being-alive. Oh, that new translation’s coming out in April . . . OK, let’s wait until then. And then that other new book, by that writer I used to like and now for some reason feel some suspicion toward, but whom I read anyway, will come out in June, and so I will wait until June for that one too. Or whenever I get around to it. And I should go to that restaurant one more time. It’s always better in the mind than in the flesh, never as good as I want it to be, but, OK, yes, we’ll wait another week or two more and try it again. I’m strung out on fantasy, strung along by the desire for more of it. Because I do not want it—living—I have to find something else with which to be preoccupied. And mostly I do. To preoccupy myself until time runs out is what I’m doing here. And that’s all. I didn’t know what I was looking for when I looked in the mirror, but why did it seem surprising to see my face, a face I didn’t want. It’s funny how the skin sets in, and I have these eyes that look the way they do, a certain color we call, by convention, hazel—a color that doesn’t really exist, I don’t think, except in eyes, just an ugly admixture with which we must contend through the name, the having named it: hazel—and not another color, and this nose that turned out to be a little big rather than small, with some veins that have chosen, or been chosen, to burst here and there, and there are the ears and there is the mouth, too, and so on, the hair, the lips. I am not vain and do not spend much time thinking about my looks. Truth be told I do not think of myself in terms of beauty or of ugliness, ever; it’s just that I find myself surprised by the face that happened to coalesce, to set, in one particular way and not another. I keep surprising myself by the possession of such a face as this. Or any face at all. It is strange to have a body, I always think, as one who has a body and wants to forget it but cannot, ever, manage to do so. Why this one in this way? It was this that I did not want, no, not at all, no. The shame of having skin; the shame of others’ seeing it. Fleshly forms please sometimes, some fleshly forms turn out to look quite nice, and it is difficult not to be drawn to them. We recognize beauty as we recognize light, colors, shapes: a form in the world that simply is what it is, not another. But though fleshly forms sometimes propel my pleasure, I do not wish to linger in mine. The way my body is or the fact that it is has no meaning at all. It is all just trivia, facts without significance. And this is just a temporary home, not to mention a shabby one. It is the dimly lit tunnel through which I wander until the wandering stops. And what then, and what happened before? I see myself in different forms sometimes, and an ephemeral excitement thrills me. I see changing shapes as if the shapes could change; but why then do I feel that they can’t. My fate and everyone’s, to be one way, one thing, and not another while the tunnel proceeds until it stops. Yet so many questions would follow from there. I never asked for it and want only, ask for only, the strange little door, off to one side and barely visible at all, that leads out of the tunnel and toward something else—something not more interesting but, in fact, less remarkable and more forgettable. I wish to be led away from here and wish to forget what here is and ever was. And so I look for the door, the exit. Yes, that’s it, yes. Go on, go along now, now’s the time, let’s move.
VII.
Ernestine lived the dream awake; she must, she must.
Always another door opened to her bewilderment and interest; always another, promising something strange and true. And other doors opened in her mind, and perhaps it was the strange appendages of consciousness that reached out to pull them open, not her own grasping, scrabbling fingers, and only now she knew who and how—if not why.
VIII.
There was always another door. Here was another: the secret door that would lead her out of her body and let her be free—perhaps. Tethered to this unsightly lump that was swiftly decaying, she wished for egress. She, the real one, was the diffident ghost of a child tethered to that trap of skin but also to the consciousness that she knew now had followed her for ever.
She walked downtown again, determined to retrace her steps, to find her way back to the yard in which she saw the door that led her underground. Her consciousness trailed behind her, as ever, and she thought it seemed forlorn, as much as she. Wanly it moved, and disquieting thoughts pulsed from it to her of the room and what she’d find there.
Down the streets she lurched, trying to find that corner that had led her astray. It was the chalkboard that caught her eye, belonging to the trendy restaurant, announcing some overpriced specials that sounded appalling: grilled flesh, charred and salted skin. Nonetheless, the chalkboard nudged her in the right direction, and she followed the sidewalk toward the alleyway that was capable of who knows what or how many transformations. For here it was again as she had seen it the first time, not the second; she saw the skinny door, the narrow yard, the flowers that seemed to scream at her in their riotous color and urge her to enter. Meanwhile her consciousness trailed along, its anxiety rising as they approached the site of their initial encounter. She could feel its silent screams, its bucking. It did not wish to go, and nor did she; yet she felt they must. She imagined telling the story to somebody else, to Trish or even Cloris—how she might explain the thrashing behind her. She could plead tinnitus, perhaps, and nerves of a garden variety. But none could believe or even grasp what she expected to see as she approached the door and pulled it open and descended into the humid subterranean chamber.
There she lay, about twelve feet long. For a moment, more lay alongside her, each a little smaller in size. If her many selves formed a chain of matryoshka, then she was the core and she the endpoint. As though in response to her nearness, the smaller and phantasmatic selves telescoped into the large one. She heard her consciousness wailing. Its wings flapped. It writhed in the air. It refused to stay still. It, not Ernestine, held the reins, and it bucked at the sight of the other selves. Yet whatever it felt occurred to her like a hole in her memory: something she knew she should know, yet all there was was a hollow, inaccessible to her.
The large form shifted on the ground and lay, now, prone on the floor. Ernestine watched this face, which was hers, look up from the ground; their eyes met. This other self’s mouth opened, stretching wider, and wider still, until it formed an arch, and the teeth grew long and wide as they settled into a yellowish door. She walked toward it, pulled it open, and stepped within.
The doorway led her deeper down, to another set of stairs, and here the dark led so far down that she believed she would never reach the other side. This passage may have linked the room to some hideous eternity where she would wander forever. Or she may meet other thought-forms out there.
But the door did end and deposited her into a street that resembled—that was—the one she left behind, except it was utterly empty. Its mundane familiarity and barrenness shocked her. And as she continued to stand there and watch, the buildings and the streets and even the sky began to retreat. They just melted away. There was nothing, nothing, nothing at all. To see this was apocalyptic in the truest sense. It was gratifying or else glorious.