TRAPS AND DOORS

The whiteboard where Crawford had showcased his ideas to us, his team, was there in front of me. The ink was a dull green, the content was just dull. We had finished a meeting in the conference room, and I was back to retrieve my mug which I had forgotten. There was no one else in the room, and when the window started rattling suddenly, it scared me.

I looked over and saw the window shaking like it was shivering. I walked to it and looked outside. The snow which had been there on the ground in the morning was still there, but some of it was rising up in flakes and scuttling about. There were no people down there. I put my hand on the window and quickly pulled it away for the cold. Already the imprint of my hand was dying. The cold was killing it.

I walked out of that conference room. It was past five in the evening, but most people were still there. Your rich senior woman with expensive perfume, the guy who never stops using the printer, the hard-working young man. And more types, but I won’t bother with listing them all. People were on their phones, their desks.

A T.V. (muted, subtitles): “…We request you to stay indoors for your safety, winds of more than…”

A man on the phone: “Yeah, it looks pretty bad, I think I’ll be a while, honey…”

I went to my desk and gathered my things. My house was close-by, a little storm wasn’t going to shackle me. I was tough and hard and hot, and the snow would hit me and turn into steam, and I would be radiating the steam like I was a Rockstar appearing out of dry ice.

I took the elevator to the ground floor and walked towards the gate.

“There is a storm warning, sir…”

“That’s okay, I’ll manage.”

But even as I was walking out, I realized it was futile. Through the glass pane I could see that the snow was too high, the wind was shrieking, and bullets of snow were darting about like heated molecules of air in a piston.

“Oh, never mind…”

The guard looked at me as though I was mad. But I was not. This, on the other hand, was madness. Staying in after work. They were killing us every day anyway. Back pain, forgotten calls to our parents, relationship issues, tax fuck ups, unclean houses, formal pants that squeezed our balls, bad posture, fatty triceps and asses, dark circles.

I went to the cafeteria but immediately walked away. Now that it was cold outside, everybody wanted to be warm from the inside, and they had made a hungry queue. Their stomachs were pumping acid, ready to devour whatever they devoured. Tea, coffee, other things to go with them; I could do without any of that.

I went back to my desk and sat there, thinking. I looked at my phone, but I hated my phone. After sitting there awhile, I thought about finishing the next day’s work. That was it. They had got me. And while I was at it, why didn’t I massage my boss’s legs, clean his house, paint his wife’s nails, walk their dog, chauffer his kids. I was losing hold over my principles.

It really was boring. Ordinarily, I would be able to sit at a spot with nothing, doing nothing, for hours. But with all these people around me, I was stressed. There was a spotlight on me, everyone was paying attention to me and I couldn’t be myself.

They were all in on it. Let us trap Reynold in here and watch him suffer, stagnate, sweat, swear, tap his fingers on the desk, look this way and that way until everything was nothing and nothing was everything. But I knew all of this. They couldn’t hold me there. I’ll show you all.

I sprang up from my desk and went to the elevator again. I got in and pressed a button, I don’t remember which, because as I pressed the button I panicked. The electricity was going to be cut-off any moment now, and I would be stuck. There in the elevator. Just like they had planned! Let him die, die there inside that metal box, and there is no blizzard, but poor Reynold doesn’t know that inside his little box. I was too perceptive to fall for it. I drilled the opening button and got out of the elevator and took the stairway instead. The stairway was through a door. It was dark and very cold in the stairway because there was no heating there. The lights were turned off. That was still okay though, I liked the darkness. “Hah, just like a cockroach!” No, I wasn’t a cockroach! I frantically looked about for a light switch but couldn’t find any. I started running up the stairs. I ran and ran, like I was running up towards heaven, and after I started sweating, I ran even faster. Then my breath burned, and I inhaled and exhaled like a madman dying on the moon.

I got off on some floor, I couldn’t identify which floor. I could feel a sweat rivulet running down my ribcage from the left armpit. Even in this cold, I was too hot for the world.

When I got out of the stairway, I came to a corridor with a blue carpet. I recognized that carpet. Sure enough, after a couple of turns, I reached Blatt Crawford’s room. Crawford the idea man, Crawford the reliable man, Crawford my boss, and the pompous breed of ass that was infesting the earth.

I had ended up, unconsciously, exiting the stairway on the floor where my boss’s cabin was. So, he was controlling me even now. I started to knock on his door but had an inkling that he wouldn’t be inside. I opened the door, it wasn’t locked. I got in. Dark. I switched on a light. There it was. The room reeked of him, his hair, his eyes, his skin, his squalid substance. The times I had been here. Always dismissed once I had been dealt with. He couldn’t dismiss me if he weren’t there. I sauntered over to the fish tank that he kept.

The fishes were there, their mouths open, bubbling, in their miniature ocean controlled by Crawford. Exactly like how he controlled us. The man was a dominance freak, an unsatisfied boy, a Freudian illustration, a Jungian archetype.

There was fish food by the tank, and I decided to feed the fishes. I sprinkled food into the water. The fishes didn’t seem to care anyhow.

Next, I looked into Crawford’s desk. This was out of my principles, too. But I did, because this man was intruding into our personal lives with his tentacles every day, and tit for tat was there in my principles.

Your usual files in there. Tenders. Operational slips of various divisions. I closed the drawer. I checked another drawer, then another. This was not a good man, there had to be a secret somewhere. Something dark, vile, hellish, that would expose his controlling nature. Nothing. The man was clean.

In the silence of the room and performing an act that might be construed as larceny, I was acutely aware of my hands, and my thoughts were running quickly. The stimulation was unique. In fact, I started to enjoy it. Perhaps being trapped in the office was doing me good. What was I going to do at home, anyway? But wasn’t I thinking how unfair this was a moment ago? My god. What was this, how deep inside were the forces, twisting my thoughts, giving me pleasure in this obviously meaningless adventure?

Once again, I started panicking. I turned my head in one direction. Nothing. Another. Something. There was a door on the right-hand side wall as you entered, what the hell? I had not noticed the door before. I slithered out of Crawford’s room to check if there was a room to the right of his, but there was not. That meant that the door lead to a room only accessible to Crawford.

I went back in and opened the door. Well, I tried. The door was locked. So, that was that. I started to walk away, but I wanted to see what was inside the door. I walked back to it and tried it again. It opened, and before I had the time to wonder how that happened, I was inside, and saw a computer hanging by four threads from the ceiling.

Live footage of my house on the screen. All the rooms. The house empty at the moment for I was in this room and not in my house. I registered this within five seconds and was unable to think about anything else for about a minute.

What was going on? What is this? I stepped out of the inner room. The office was Crawford’s alright, the things seemed too real to be unreal. I went back into the room with the big computer. And as I looked at the computer, I started losing my breath, my legs started shaking. Crawford was keeping tabs on me with some type of device, which, even though I call it a computer, really was something else. It didn’t seem to have any connections, electrical, nor real. It was just there, there to record my life for his taste, so that he can hover above me, impregnate my leisure, have a good lick at the things I did when I was alone. A 24x7 colonoscopy of my life.

It was disgusting, and I was afraid and angry, but most of all I was delighted. I had found my material.

I looked around in my pockets for my phone to take a picture and was about to take it out when I heard running footsteps. I looked about the room finally, tearing my eyes away from the recording device, and I saw another door inside that room.

Having no time to process things, I saw the door as a means of escape. I opened the door and got inside.

There in the corner, a stove filled with water, boiling, fire underneath, and pages inside the boiling water, disintegrating. I walked closer to the stove, disoriented, and peeked at the pages. Reports that I submitted. Reviews that I had written. My offer letter, that they had so lovingly typed up when I had joined three years ago, now a paper rag. I clutched my hair. Insanity in the cold nation of office spaces. Something had happened to me, or the world.

Now, as I had taken in the fact of the stove’s existence, and of all my hours being amounted to boiling papyrus, I looked up and saw the rest of the room. On the wall to my left, a painting. Crawford, naked, standing over me as I was rubbing his foot with a washcloth, also naked. Snow painted using white all around us, stranded in some deserted hinterland. The canvas was signed Blatt Crawford.

A moment later I felt pain in my throat and realized that I had been screaming, and the inner lining was burning and tingling. I could feel snot in my throat as well, so perhaps I was crying, too. Never had a man experienced such derision, such focused torment as I had. I had proof right there in front me, ready to burst out. 

Then I heard the footsteps again. I looked in the direction of the noise, but I couldn’t see anything. I felt a chill and turned around, in the direction away from the noise. There was another door. This, the door through the door through the door through the door. I opened it and got in.