"Door"

“Door”

By Gerri Bain

    Suddenly, the large metal, industrial-sized door slammed. It was morning and the jolting sound of it caused her to startle reflexively. It happened every time someone came or went, slamming incessantly. It cracked and shuddered in bursts. The floor seemed to quake.

    There was something about that door she couldn’t explain. Someone thing that she knew she couldn’t remember. Candace racked her brain but couldn’t quite grasp it. It was as if she was trying to translate a foreign language for the first time but could never quite understand a word or phrase without studying the book. 

    There was something transitory, fleeting about this place, about that door. Her head hurt as she tried to make sense of a distant thing. What was that far-off insensible piece of information that lay lifeless, comatose in her brain? She felt oblivious in these surroundings. The slamming door seemed to be a symbol of something. But what? There seemed to be an emotional paralysis gripping her where clarity once lived. Why?     

    Candace’s wandering thoughts brought into focus where she was at this moment. She was alone in a corner, perched on a comfortable (but tastefully modern) sofa, she surmised, looking much like a cricket with its overly long thin hind legs pulled up behind it. She had just emerged from the cocoon of a sparse twin-bedded room near the door to the small kitchenette which, by all accounts, was closed this morning, except for coffee runs. Candace had missed breakfast. And coffee.

    Pity the poor fools who ate there. Instant coffee was dreadful anyway. How did she come to know that?

    Candace liked to think she was a master observer of people; some were milling around, wandering aimlessly, while others were sitting and reading or staring off into space at nothing or just plain waiting. Waiting for what? She had no idea. Others were entering or emerging from the many small rooms, doors usually closed, surrounding the central core of the yawning space of an entire, cantilevered floor. 

    She closed her eyes and tried to convince herself that she was in the room but not of the room. Connected but not. She was not a part of the dizzying cinema on the rolling screen in front of her. If she opened her eyes, the kaleidoscope would start again. Remember, she told herself. In it but not of it. There, but not? She’d need laser focus to figure out where she was, how she got where she was, and how all this seemed familiar yet otherworldly at the same time. It was too much for her to process easily.  

    Candace liked to picture herself as an insignificantly small insect, much like a praying mantis perched on a shrub; an omniscient observer waiting for its mantis prey to alight. That was the very definition of an entomological observer. She was in the room but not of the room, she reminded herself. She whispered it aloud. Because if she said it aloud, it made more sense to her and, therefore, less puzzling. She began to analyze this place, trying to make sense of what seemed just out of reach. She was figuratively reaching out, grasping at anything to bring her into the reality of the moment.

    There was, in her mind’s eye, a sort of architectural stringing together of spaces set up with sofas, chairs, and bookcases with books and magazines and a large billiards table flung off in a distant corner taking up clicking space at the other end of the room. Candace could hear the familiar echo of billiard balls. The cue sticks, she thought, could be a hazard. Did anyone ever really think of that possibility?

    She suddenly thought she heard a baby cry. Not possible among what seemed like, the walking dead. Now, why would she use that description of these peripatetic denizens of this place? She closed her eyes again trying to make sense of what she thought she heard. A crying baby HERE? Why was she so mystified by such perfidy?

         Looking out, Candace noticed the floor to ceiling windows which let in lots of brilliant sunlight on good days, and, Candace would later discern, gray shadowy stains of overcast on those inevitably rainy bad days. There could be no bad days if this verdant landscape existed outside. Gray days were inevitable, and the idea of such bleakness made her want to run away. 

But where would she go? What was she running from? And what vital information evaded her grasp about a crying infant?

    A few minutes passed. She began to think more calmly, feeling a sense of contentment just now because the sun suddenly shone brightly today. The outside spring landscape was exquisitely luminous with weeping willows, the new leaves on ancient oaks, the grass the color of pale emeralds with topaz glistening. And the shadows played gently in the spring breezes with leafy, sparkling sunlight. A lawnmower droned in the distance. She hated overcast days because they hung over her like a shroud. Those days would be like trying to walk through maple syrup. The sunbeams were hidden from her on those drizzling days she spent here.

    To Candace, the landscape outside the wide windows was spectacular and soothing. She believed Mother Nature always engendered peace.   And, well, springtime in the Olmsteadian tradition. Then, there was that unnatural twitching of her shoulders caused by the slamming of the door. Did no one else hear the tumult? The noise she could not block out.

    Candace felt she was safely not a part of any of it. But the most unnerving thing was the coming and going of all manner of people through that large industrial, slamming door that literally made the floor shake. She hated its constant jarring effect. It sounded like an explosion every single time it slammed closed. It produced an incessant nerve-wracking sense of annoyance, anxiety. The juxtaposition of this volley with the beauty of the outermost landscape today was incoherent. She hated the door’s metaphor – a clarion call to action? Was that it?

    Her thoughts circled back to her now demoralizing lack of inner peace. There was this niggling, wretched feeling of needing to DO something? She couldn’t put her finger on it. But it intermittently created a feeling of discontinuity, discomfort. The coming and the going. Ingress and egress. Fight or flight?

   While trying to make sense of what she thought might be a call to action, Candace’s thoughts were interrupted again. She thought she heard a baby’s cry in the distance. Candace looked up from her reverie. There was a disjointedness to this scene. But what was it that was disjointed? Was the sound she thought she heard coming from a cat and not a baby? She was confused. Why this particular sound? And why here of all places?

    Candace heard a woman’s voice, complaining, in her most stentorian tones. Who was this unknown woman complaining to? That brought her attention to someone suddenly wandering aimlessly by her in her line of sight, muttering something unintelligible. Candace was startled. 

    An obscenely obese man appeared to be plopped in the middle of the room. He was sitting in a wheelchair dressed in a flapping, too-small bathrobe. His dark hair hung over his fleshy face and his head was bent down onto his chest. He appeared to be sleeping. But no one seemed to notice him or mind, for that matter. She tried to avert her gaze.

    There It was again! Candace was sure she heard a baby’s cry. But where was it coming from? She noticed that the front of her blouse was now wet. Why was that? Somehow, she knew something was broken, fractured inside her. The infant crying paralyzed her by opposing impulses.  

    Before she could gather her thoughts and try to make sense of it, she saw the woman. She seemed to be staring in her direction. She was clearly suffering from middle-aged spread wearing an illustrious combo of too small polyester blue pull-on pants (her bare midriff stuck out) and a terrible polyester phantasmagoric print shirt. She hadn’t seen her before this and had no idea who she was. And Candace didn’t want to know. 

    It was the red pocketbook that caught her attention. This woman carried a big patent leather red pocketbook that clicked open and shut. She had been clicking her purse open and shut, constantly. Annoying as hell. Click, click, click. And she was homing in on Candace, like radar, walking towards her with grey hair flying. That pocketbook was her totem, her link to a frazzled world, Candace knew. Was her world frazzled? She tried to look away to dissuade any contact or conversation with her. 

    It was inevitable that someone would try to engage with her; decide that Candace could help them or listen to them or give them advice. She had nothing to give anyone else this morning. Not while she was working hard to make sense of what seemed illogical. Out of place. The baby’s cry was a distortion, she reasoned. 

    Candace suddenly remembered an encounter with an old biker chick who tried to engage with her, asking Candace for advice. This biker chick was no chick. She smelled like stale cigarettes. Her arms were covered with tattoos. Candace patiently listened to her (she had no choice) as the biker told her how she arrived in a wholly unorthodox way on her black Harley. The woman was eating Cheerios in the kitchenette at that time and, she offered to tell Candace where she could find the instant coffee packets.

    The biker chick was obviously a Lesbian, a dyke, and she said she was waiting for her partner to come pick her up. Not a bad sort if you like to engage in biker parlance which Candace did not understand. The biker’s hair was grey, falling in greasy, stringy clumps to her broad shoulders. She wore black leather boots with a matching zippered jacket. Candace thought a good shower would have done wonders but who was she to make waves with Hell’s Angels?

    But the woman said she was LEAVING. That her partner was coming to pick her up. Candace thought that logically, she would be leaving through that big clanging door. The door would swing open and then close with a bang as she left.

    Candace always looked like someone they knew. Every time. For some reason, she stood out as someone who looked intelligent and knew shit. She couldn’t figure out why. What she wanted was peace. She wanted to calm her racing thoughts. Candace wanted to be left alone, invisible to the naked eye. But apparently, hope springs eternal in this strange place. Candace tried to bring her thoughts back to the mystery, the equation she was trying, but failing to solve about a baby...

    She suddenly grabbed a magazine, put it in front of her face, pretending to be engrossed in Field and Stream. She folded her legs underneath her making sure her back was to the red pocketbook lady, always carefully studious not to make eye contact. But Candace knew from experience it was a lost cause. This woman was approaching and standing at attention like Hitler in front of her.

    "Who are you?" she demanded.  

    "Who are you, I said!" her voice louder, demanding.

    "I won't be ignored, you know!"

    Candace remembered the phrase she had just heard was familiar. It came from dialogue in a movie, she recalled, spoken by a famous actress in a well-known movie at that. Glenn Close! Yes, that’s it. But she couldn’t remember the name of the movie...and the Glenn Close character was pregnant, she recalled.

    “I won’t be IGNORED!”

    Finally, after several minutes, she knew she had to answer this beastly woman. There was no telling what this bitch had up her sleeve.  Why did Candace feel such animosity towards this poor woman?

    "Well, who are YOU?", Candace responded, looking up over her magazine.

    "I'm Anna and I'm 75 years old!”

    "Congratulations", Candace deadpanned, raising her eyebrows.

   "Hey, I'm talking to you!" she shrilled, her now red face too close and her spittle was flying in Candace’s face.

    “Yes, I see you and hear you. “

     Go away. Please go away. Candace wanted to scream. Such impudence, she thought, anger stirring in her belly.

    "They say I'm the tenth wonder of the world, you know. Or maybe it’s the eighth. I'm pregnant and having a baby. I'm eight months pregnant you know. And they say it’s a miracle baby."

    "Congratulations.  Good talk, Anna. Call the FBI. Now go away.”

    And the large, industrial-sized door banged shut for the hundredth time, exploding. Candace jumped. The woman seemed to disappear as fast as she appeared. It was then that an odd familiarity washed over her. What WAS it? Pregnancy, birth, baby?

    She heard a baby’s cry again. Where was the baby? Now she remembered why the cry seemed so real. Why every time she heard the cry, the front of her blouse seemed wetter. 

    Where was her newborn?

    “Where is she?” Where was her baby daughter? She suddenly convulsed, screaming her baby’s name. 

    “She’s crying!” she sobbed uncontrollably. Where was her child? She had just given birth. Yes! That was what distorted her thinking. Why was she here? Her baby needed her.  

    They said she was “postpartum”. Who were “they”? Postpartum meant just after having a baby right through the first year of a woman’s pregnancy.

    She struggled to her feet gasping for air trying to grasp reality. 

    “Someone, anyone, please help me find my baby!”

    It all came flooding back like a tidal wave washing over her. She was flushing hot and having a full-on panic attack, continuing to gasp for air. She HAD given birth. The infant cries she heard caused her milk to let down each time she heard her baby’s cry. She did not have her baby with her. Her child was lost to her, removed from her.

    Why was she here and not with her baby? Why wasn’t anyone helping her find her baby? She now remembered holding her right after giving birth…and hearing something about severe postpartum psychosis and depression.    

    And the metallic door banged shut signaling Candace’s appalling realization.