Behind the Red Door

Time and the experience of time were very strange things, Kevin thought to himself. He had been reflecting all day on the events of the night before. He’d slept fitfully, waking up often to go to the bathroom or to just peak outside the window at the courtyard below. As he slept alone, time and his experience of it were things that involved him and him only.

Some nights, he left the drapes half open. He still had lace curtains, faded with age, that provided a modicum of privacy but he’d always taken comfort in being able to look outside even if the only view he had was that of the apartment across from him. There was something about looking outside that gave him comfort, especially when he felt trapped in his own head. Being able to see something, anything, reassured him that the world existed beyond his own apartment and its four walls.

Halloween was past. He was entering that part of the year where darkness reigned for most of the day, that stretch between sunset and sunrise that grew longer and longer and during which there was a constant, unchanging darkness to contend with. Looking outside at 10pm or at 3am, the darkness was still the same. As he tried to get some sleep Kevin tossed fitfully back and forth. He was surprised when he checked the time at how strange it could be. Sometimes, when he felt that a long time had passed, almost no time had passed at all and vice versa. Looking out through his half-opened drapes, the consistent, steady darkness held sway giving Kevin nothing to go by as far as time’s passing was concerned. It was all the same shade of black regardless of what the clock said.

In his half-awake, half-asleep state the shadows took on new meaning. Kevin always played music when he slept, a holdover to a sickly childhood where he was often put to bed with the sound of a humidifier going. Kevin got used to there being noise when he tried to sleep and he’d never been able to sleep well without it ever after. As he drifted in and out of half-sleep, half-wake states, he would hear the beginning of one musical piece and the end of a totally different one as if they had been edited together. He might hear a dog barking one moment and then, in what seemed an almost instant continuation of that moment, silence, as if there had never been a dog barking at all.

Not quite awake, not quite asleep, Kevin found it hard to overthink. Any streams of thought he might try to get going were constantly being interrupted. What time was it now? He’d pop awake to check. It was 9:33 earlier. It was only 9:52 now. It felt like hours had passed though in the brief span of minutes. As he woke over and over again through the night the night’s progress seemed to slow down. Instead of picking up steam and rushing him towards dawn, things seemed to slow down and stretch out. Every time he checked, Kevin anticipated a jump ahead and there wasn’t one, there was just a slow, slower, plodding of time in the constant darkness.

He was in the movie theater with her next to him, she had suggested it and they’d had lunch just before and he had had a hard time taking his eyes off her face and there she was, just to his left in the dark and all he had to do was put his arm around her and pull her to him and it would all be his or, so went his dream logic. Up on the big screen the images flashed by and the theater’s speakers reverberated with sound and he sat frozen, unable to move. His arm didn’t flinch, it didn’t twitch, in the dream, it didn’t move at all.

Time swirled in his dream and he was in a call center, a large warehouse of people and computers and he was on the phone and there she was, a younger her, a different her, the her that was before and he’d glance at her when she wasn’t looking and he’d lose his train of thought and his customer on the line would get frustrated with him, thinking him an idiot and, well, maybe he was.

“You hit on Vanessa?”

“What?”

“Don’t lie, she already told me. She’s one of my best friends, she tells me everything.”

“Oh.”

“Who else have you hit on in this place this week? We women talk, you know. Bathroom. Breakroom. It gets around but, I guess, so do you.”

She shot him a look and he couldn’t read it and wasn’t sure if it was a good thing or a bad thing and she took her Mr. Pibb out of the machine and left him still having to decide between a Milky Way or a Snickers. He saw all of this askew, all of it from an angle above and beyond both him and her, as if he was not only there but out of his own body and was watching from a distance all at the same time.

“You don’t want me like you did before, do you?”

It was after the lunch, after the movie, this thing about ghosts and possessions and a mystery, a horrible secret, something that couldn’t be known without destroying a person’s mind, all of it waiting just beyond a red door.

A mourning dove had been cooing in the pine next to their cars but it stopped when she asked the question. It tilted its head this way and that, looking first at her, then at him, as if waiting for an answer.

He looked at her and her eyes were hidden behind her overly large, overly square sunglasses and all he saw was his sad, surprised face with a glint of sunshine behind him. He opened his mouth to respond and….

It was a get-together, old friends from the call center, gathered together to catch up. It was summer, a patio, a New Mexican restaurant with chile rellenos, carne adovada, green chile enchiladas. They had extra chips and salsa, there were beers and tequila shots and a listless dry wind that blew the heat around but did nothing to make things cooler. Above, on the patio’s ceiling, fans spun to move the air around and make up for the lack of a breeze. Kevin couldn’t help but look at her, her hair up, her shoulders bare, the white tank top with blue polka dots contrasting with the slight red sunburn on her freckled shoulders. He was sure she saw him looking, she never let on though, never looked back at him when he was looking at her.

Honking interrupted him. He looked to his left, at the full-length mirror. He reflected in it poorly, naked, hairy, his erect hard-on trying to poke out from underneath his sagging gut. The shag carpet was orange, the air conditioning cycled on and blew stale air that stirred the curtains and there were matching orange drapes and a woman, a different woman, a different woman, petite, brunette, pale skin and large breasts. She smiled at him from the queen-sized bed and spread her legs and bid him welcome.

“Hmm. Bring that over here! Let me see that thing!”

Kevin interrupted his stare into the mirror to look at her. Her eyes were sincere even if they seemed tiny below her obscenely large eyelashes. Her body was pretty, her nipples were hard but, still, he felt his hard-on starting to recede. He wanted her in his mind, he wanted to fuck, he wanted to get off, he wanted to feel connected to somebody somehow and all he could think about was how hairy he looked and how fat he was and how she wasn’t the her he wanted.

The red door was quiet, in the movie, there was a light above it, a porch light, and the walls around it were all black brick. Darkness was all around and the door was the only spot around of light that could be seen. Screams and muffled sobbing could be heard from behind as the camera moved closer and closer to the door.

Washing his hands after his obligatory morning piss, Kevin avoided looking into the mirror. He didn’t want to see his face, he’d seen his face before, he knew well enough what it looked like. He could trace every line, he could see every mole, he could recognize the crazy eyebrow hairs that poked out and did their own thing. He didn’t want to see any of that.

“Weak ass, chickenshit, bowlegged, balding, hunchback, hypochondriac motherfucka’,” he said and Kevin didn’t respond but looked the guy in staring back at him in the mirror square in the face as he snickered and rolled his left shoulder as if it were tense. The guy looking back at him had a tick in his face and it made it look like he was winking back at you when it was all working up and it was all working up today, wink, wink, wink.

Kevin instinctively stood up at the sink and looked up at the ceiling, trying to straighten his posture as much as he could, trying to minimize his neck hump, trying as hard as he could to look less fat but, all the time, still not wanting to look in the mirror. He washed his hands. He wet his green toothbrush put some toothpaste on it and he walked out of the bathroom to brush his teeth. He’d only go back in to spit unless he was closer to the kitchen, then he’d go spit it there.

He walked around the apartment, avoiding a pile of dirty clothes here, a collection of groceries still in their bags there. Music came blaring in from the apartment across the way, “I Get Lonely” by Drake. He got dressed: khakis, button up dress shirt, dress shoes in need of a shine, belt that was well worn and would need to be replaced soon. Kevin’s hair had started thinning years ago but, like the Korean War, there was an armistice and the losses had stopped for years. Still, nothing had replaced them, the bare spots remained. He didn’t seek to combover anything though, he just resigned himself to things being the way they were.

The ER nurse had a thick German accent, almost as thick as her glasses and she stared at him with contempt.

“You’re not going to die, just breathe. It’s not a problem.”

Panic attacks were always there, in the back, waiting for a chance to pop up, like some chronic disease kept in check by medicine just waiting for a chance to come roaring back if the medicine was stopped. Kevin looked around the triage room, eyes darting from one thing to another, trying to find something to focus on. His heart was pounding and he was sure it was going to burst out of his chest like a Xenomorph chest burster any second. He would have checked his breathing if he had thought about it but his mind was full of thoughts, worries and impending doom, sure as he was that death was imminent.

“You just need to breathe. If you breathe, you’ll be okay.”

His therapist looked at him from across the room. Kevin was seated on the couch.

“What?”

“If you breath, you’ll be okay.”

“Yeah.”

“Yeah? You don’t sound like you believe it.”

Kevin looked out the office’s large picture window into a courtyard filled with summer green and sunlight. “I don’t believe a great many things.”

He was walking to the door, the red door and it was getting closer and the closer he got to it, the quieter the screaming and the hushed sobbing became. He felt eyes on him but he was cloaked in darkness and no matter where he looked, he saw nothing.

Then, he was at the door. All was silent except the humming of the porch light above him. He reached out his hand to grab the brass doorknob and for just a second, he thought he heard giggling from somewhere. He didn’t want to open the door. He wasn’t sure what was behind it but we was sure that whatever it was, it wasn’t good.

“You don’t want me like you did before, do you?” He heard her say.