The other side

The other side of the wall was there in his dream. The hallway went on, ducking down, then stopping to reveal another door. Through the door the cobwebs cleared. A little room sat there. A bed. A table, a chair, a red braided rug. A toy dog, plush and white.

Sunlight playing through the window as the breeze lifted the sheer white and blue curtains and fluttered them. He turned back and saw the wall behind him. And the door. The door back to his room.

He felt the control slipping just a little, found himself back in the tunnel between rooms. He saw that the first door was open and he was now on the other side. The door was closed again. The handle gleamed bronze and golden in the light of the small fire. The flames leapt to him. His face glowed. The bed was next to him and he was in it.

*

He rolled over and sighed. Mumbling words no one would hear. He put his thumb back in his mouth, clutched his ragged Winnie the Poo blanket, and fell deeper asleep. When he woke it was 8 am or later. The air coming through the window was gray and dingy. And cool.

His bedroom was a small, two window, angled room. The ceiling came down so low at an angle that he could touch where it and the wall met, about head height. Walls that had been white and were less so now. Cracks in the white, bubbles in the paint. There was a multicolored shag carpet, with colors on a dark blue background.

His dresser was brown wood with bronze handles that looked like golden eaves against the wood. Clothes came out of the dresser. They wouldn’t fit all bundled up and stuffed in like that.

He saw a shirt that was red and striped and pulled it out. Collared and short sleeved. A pair of pants lay inside out by the foot of the little twin bed. He put them right side out and pulled them up. The button was a little tight but he finally managed to stick it in the button hole.

His door was very thin and he could hear voices outside. His mother likely making breakfast. He looked around his room. Stuffed animals and posters. His microscope with the broken base. Books in piles. Something was missing though. The tiny room seemed wrong and out of order. He felt a loss he couldn’t pinpoint.

He shook his head and rubbed his eyes.

“Ehhh,” he said. He stood at the door to the living room, facing his bed. He looked at the wall to the right. There were cracks in that wall too. It took only 5 medium steps to walk from one side of his room to the other. His bedside table and bed fit against one wall, with the feet of the bed toward the door to the living room. The dresser was to the left on the adjoining wall. The wall to the right was empty.

The wall with the door to the living room faced the bed as you sat on it. It also had a bookshelf with a general disarray of toys both broken and whole. The space to actually walk in the room was about the space there was to lie on the floor and roll over one and a half times. Yes, he had tried that.

He turned and looked at the empty wall with the crack. He looked closer. There was a small hole he hasn’t noticed before. It was about the size of a button. He probed it with his index finger. The plaster came away a little. He looked in. It was dark. He knew there was nothing back there. On the other side of that wall was his mother’s bedroom, only slightly bigger than his, with the only bathroom in the house. You had to sneak through her bedroom to pee in the middle of the night. It was a bad design.

He went to sleep that night having an idea in mind that he would like to get back to….something. It wasn’t in his mind like a picture would be. More like a thumb print or as a blot would stain. There was something there just out of reach, just out of the corner of his eye. And perhaps he would find it.

*

He stared at the wall. It was shorter than he remembered and it was covered in a brown and blue wall paper. Close crowded small blue and brown daisies dotting the space so close that no background color could be seen. There was no way to squeeze into the door that was left there. And then it was the right size and he opened it. The hallways was dark again, with the light from the adjoining room showing just the shadows and the shapes of the angles. He walked slowly through, feeling the urge and the need to be in this place.

The fulfillment that he was back.

The sun was warm on the carpet and there was blue behind the thin curtains. He wanted to sit on the bed and then to go out the door of that bedroom to the sunny world beyond. He started to pull himself onto the bed and then was once again in his own room, looking at a door. He tried the shiny handle. It wouldn’t open. He tried again. It was sticky and heavy. He tried to pry it open bracing with his feet.

*

His feet kicked under his sheets and he shifted heavily from the left to right sides. His eyes fluttered open and took in the dark, and then closed to deeply sleep again.

He woke and sat up abruptly. There was sun this morning, shy the way the winter sun is, as if looking at you sideways and coquetishly from across the room. He didn’t do more than notice the sun before he slid off his bed and stumbled over to the bare wall. He knew there was something there, something behind this wall. He had a dim memory why. He banged on it.

“What are you doing? Knock it off!” came his mother from behind the wall. Just a wall then. He looked for the small hole from the day before. To his surprise he saw the hole was quite a bit larger, but it didn’t go very deep. It was maybe the size of one of the sand dollars that sat proudly on his dresser, trophies of days at the beach with his father. He pushed in at the hole, his fingers fitting in but not his whole hand. There seemed to be something dark and sticky in the hole. He pulled out his hand expecting to see dirt or some kind of crustiness, perhaps mold or rot. His hand was clean.

“Breakfast!” his mother called.

That night there was a storm. The wind howled around their little house. The windows were open still because his mother thought that closed windows in a house were a detriment to health, especially for growing young boys. It was now open only an inch or so because he had closed it more after his mother had left. He hoped the power wouldn’t go out. That always scared him a little. Not the dark. But the lack of having it there to help if he needed it.

It took a certain sense of autonomy away. No light. No alarm. No phone charger. No TV. Needing to get help from his mother. He preferred power.

He stared at the blank wall before he lay down for sleep. It did not seem to be anything but his wall, regardless of his imagination before. The hole was still there but it seemed to be smaller than it had been that morning. He wondered if an insect or something was burrowing there, causing it to be dug open like that. Maybe he would find spider eggs inside.

*

It was night. The door in the wall was open. The wall was made of wood paneling. Thin lines and then thick boards interchanged. Reminded him of an old man’s library. He saw them in movies his grandmother made him watch. The door started to close - slowly.

His feet were stuck to the floor. He couldn’t’ move forward. The door was open barely a crack now. He lurched forward, hands outstretched to the door, that small crack. His hands touched the edge of the door.

He was in the hallway. It stretched further this time. He seemed to walk a long time before he saw light on the other end. He heard a soft voice, like a mother hushing a child. He stepped into the room. Sunlight on the bed. Bedposts now, white and spindled. He looked at the wall where he had come from. It was wood paneled as well. The door in this wall was the same as on his side.

He walked toward the window and reached to pull at the drapes. The thin wispy cotton melted in his fingers. He pulled at something slippery, and the window was now covered by a dark blind.

The room was dark. It was the afternoon in an old woman’s parlor: crocheted blankets and brass paper weights and doilies and Chinese Checkers. Dog hair and dog smell. Orange light and mustiness. He choked and ran back to the door leading to the hallway.

He kept walking down the hallway, but could not reach his room. He became frantic. He reached up above the dream to wake. He was a swimmer trying to breathe above the rip tide.

*

It was morning. He had no memory of the dream the night before. But his sheets were soaking wet and his hair was sweaty. His pajamas were damp and he threw them in the laundry basket.

When he was called for breakfast he did not look at the wall.

The day was a long one. He had baseball practice and math homework. Long division was not his favorite thing. He completed the math sitting at the desk in his room.

It had been a cloudy day and not much light was left. The sun was almost gone. He was very tired and let his head fall on the arm laying on his homework sheet.

*

His room was bright. Sunlight streamed from the window. He looked expectantly at the wall. There was the door. This was the familiar door, wood and the bronze doorknob. He opened it and light streamed in. The amber air was warm and the smell was a piece that fit, a craving: New carpet. Fresh cut wood. His father’s beard. Wet earth.

*

“Dinner time!” his mother yelled. He heard the hum of the television outside his room in the long galley of living room/dining room the bled into the kitchen. He walked to the door of his room and looked left at the wall. He stopped and walked back. There was a crack from the top to the bottom and a hole, as if made by a punch, was chest height on the wall, splitting the crack in two.

He approached the wall with wariness and excitement. He traced the crack with his fingers and then stuck his hand into the hole. It went in all the way to his armpit. It was warm in the wall. But there was no movement, no air. No stickiness or dirt, just warmth. He wondered about telling his mother but chose against it. She would blame him for the hole.

There was no storm this night. The rain had chased away the clouds and there was a finger nail moon looking down. He examined it before going to bed, out of the window by his bed. He could see stars around the moon. He thought of sitting out and star gazing, but he was tired, and he felt eager for sleep this night.

*

His room was faded. All the colors were leached out, as in an old photo buried in a album in the basement. The browns and oranges prominent, and the contrasting colors dimmed.

The door was large. Man-sized. The edges around the door gleamed with a blue light. The handle was cold and pained him to open. the cold burned his hand. He walked into a hallway, now illuminated. Deep lights as if from skylights far above shone down placing small, sharp, then soft shadows along the edges of the brilliance.

The hallway was short today. He walked into the small room. Bed. Table. Chair. Braided rug. Shimmering window coverings. He looked at the door to his right, that led out from this room to the world outside. He heard music then, from that door, a familiar beat. He smelled spicy chicken, as if from a barbecue. The smell came to permeate the room. For the first time he touched the silver doorknob that would lead from this room and out. He stood there, holding the knob, and then turned it.

*

He started awake to a dark room and moonlight hitting the bedroom floor. He sat up and turned on his bedside light.

He went hot and cold.

It was the wall. But it wasn’t the wall anymore.

In what had been the wall was a cavernous entrance. A deeply dark and ragged hole. The plaster had been pulled away in chunks as by something angry. Powder was everywhere on the floor. The hole was bigger than any door would have been, at least the small type that would actually fit that wall. Because of where the ceiling came down in an angle to meet the wall, a real door could only be about his height. Maybe smaller. This hole filled that space and above, into the ceiling.

He backed against the opposite wall and stared into the hole, expecting to see nothingness. Instead, to his surprise about two feet inside the torn opening was a rock wall.

Imbedded in the rough stone was a door, wooden and about four feet tall. The handle was a dark silver metal, blackened with age. The wood was scarred as from a fire and covered with a sticky residue.

The door looked…. OLD.

He heard a song, no words, just music. A lullaby perhaps. He smelled spices. Maybe chili. Maybe rice.

He rubbed his eyes and reached towards the door handle. Shaking slightly, his hand twisted the handle and the door creaked open.

There was light at the other end and a silhouette of a person. A large person. The shape grew larger as it proceeded toward him.

The light from his bedside table illuminated the shape as it got near.

Tall and big in the shoulders. Wrinkled and sunburnt skin. A tall black hat on his head. Shiny and very regular teeth. Eyes that shimmered. His hands were to his sides, palms open, empty hands.

“Good evening, Oscar,” came the voice. “Glad you could join me.”

*

He was in the hallway. He looked back. The door closed behind him.