Golly, what a way to introduce my own story... Moving on!
A man begins in a room; the man is alone in that room. There
is a solid-oak table, a sturdy wooden chair, and a single hanging lamp shining
on it. There are no windows, no doors—nothing to visually explain how he got
there, nor why he has any reason to be there. He stands, waiting for a sign, or
a noise, something to give him reason to do anything beyond what he is doing
right now, but none comes. There is just the man, the floor, four walls that
reach up to some dark ceiling beyond human comprehension, the table, the chair,
and the lamp.
But
wait, there is more! Upon closer
inspection, the man discovers a hairline crack barely visible in the surface of
the table. He reasons that a hairline crack must mean a secret compartment of
some sort. And a secret compartment means some hidden switch or protrusion that
must be twisted, pulled, removed, or pushed to release the lid of the
compartment. The man begins to inspect every inch of the table. As he
investigates, the man muses to himself the possible reason for this scenario.
Perhaps he had dropped into a coma staring at an M. C. Escher painting, and
this was his subconscious trying to make sense of it all. Perhaps he is part of
some government conspiracy, and this whole room was the extent of his inner
mind. Perhaps there are one million different metaphors for the significance of
the room, the chair, the lamp, and the table, and the utter absence of any
other object or person in the whole of the cloister.
But wait, there is more! From underneath the table, the man sees that the back
of the chair has two upright posts, and four slats. He realizes that it almost
looks like a ladder. He ponders what it could mean; perhaps the escape route
was somewhere near the invisible ceiling of the room, and he must use the chair
as a ladder (or use the chair to find the ladder) to reach the top and climb
out to freedom and fresh air. The man crawls out from under the table and turns
his inspection to the chair. Pensively, he tries moving the chair from its spot
on the table. It makes the same sort of noise you would expect from a chair
scooting across a cement floor, but other than that, nothing happens. The man
picks up the chair and carries it to the wall. He sets the chair against the
wall, stands upon it, and looks around.
But wait, there is more! There is no ladder, but he is surprised to see
another chair exactly like the one upon which he now stood, still behind the
table in the exact same spot from which he had removed this one! Curious, the
man steps off the first chair; it feels solid enough to be real. He stalks over
to the new chair. It, too, feels solid and real. The man leaves the second
chair where it is at, and there at the table, he stands upon the seat. It bears
his weight like a real chair. Where did it come from, then? The man, intent on
uncovering the mystery of the chair, picks up this second chair in his hands
(it even weighed the same as the first chair), and walks backwards, slowly,
staring at that spot behind the table. The minute he measures out five paces,
exactly on the fifth step back from the table, a third chair appears! The man
stops and takes stock of his surroundings. There are indeed three chairs: one
against the wall, one in his hands, and one at the table.
What could this mean? Would the
chairs multiply as he removed them? Did they need to be aligned in a specific
pattern in order for him to realize his escape? Was there a specific number of
times they must be multiplied before something else would happen? Could he
possibly exhaust his supply of chairs? The man decides to ignore that fact for
the time being, and instead the man tries to re-focus on his original goal:
finding the ceiling. He had established that the back of the chair resembled a
ladder; how could he use this to his advantage?
The man looks at the chair standing
against the wall; he could use that one as an anchor. He removes two of the
four slats on the back, so that they are far enough apart to get his feet on;
now he has the first two rungs of his ladder. But with no tools, how does he
expect to be able to remove the back of the second chair from its base, to use
that as the next piece of his ladder? And what can he use to attach the two
pieces, should he succeed in taking them apart?
But wait, there is more! The man inspects the second chair and discovers for
the second time a hairline crack at the base of the posts at the back of the
chair. The man pushes against the back while resting his weight on the seat,
and the back breaks off cleanly at the crack, leaving him with a short ladder
in his hand. Feeling the success coursing through his body like an electric
current, the man breaks off two slats just as he had done the first time, and
turns back to the first chair. There, he returns to the second dilemma: what to
do about attaching the pieces of ladder?
The man looks down; he is wearing a
collared shirt that tears easily, but holds firmly. He could use his shirt,
possibly some of his pants, also the laces from his shoes, to tie as many
ladders as he could together. He sets about taking off his shirt and unlacing
his shoes, but leaves off tearing his pants when he discovers that he cannot do
it with his bare hands, and he really has nothing else to use. Between his
shirt and his laces, though, he has enough strips to tie together enough
ladders to enable him to climb beyond the thick black shadows. By the time he
is finished, he has split more than twenty chairs, he has splinters in his
fingers, he is dripping with sweat, he is hungry, thirsty, and tired of being
in the same room for who knows how long, but the thought of freedom quenches
his thirst and fills his belly. The man climbs his ladder, leaving the room
that could have been his prison far behind him. He looks around as he climbs,
eagerly awaiting the top of the wall, or the sight of the rafters, or even so
much as a gaping hole or crack in the wall behind his ladder. He reaches the
top and finds none of these things.
But wait, there is more! As the man climbs down from the great height, he
imagines that he saw the glint of a light on the table. This distracts him from
maintaining his balance, and he falls the remaining ten feet to the floor—more
specifically, to the seat of the first chair, and from there, the floor. The
man lays prostrate for several minutes, holding his eyes closed, willing the
situation to be over, but when he opens his eyes, he is still in the room. Only
one thing has changed: the chairs have disappeared. The chairs, and also his
shirt and shoelaces, the man notices.
A sense of dread descends upon the
man; he slowly works himself up to a sitting position, crosses his legs, and
attempts to rationalize his experiences. He found himself in the room; he had
assumed there was some purpose for it. He had seen the hairline crack in the
table; he had figured there was some sort of device that would open it. He had
observed the resemblance of the chair to a ladder; he had attached significance
to this fact and had destroyed his shirt and shoes acting upon the
significance. Furthermore, any sort of hope he had that there might be more
than this room, that an escape was even logical or feasible, had come crashing
down as he fell from the ladder, which now did not exist. What other possible
recourse did he have? The man devotes what little energy he has left to deep,
intense thought.
But wait, there is more! The more he thinks, the more the man realizes that
it is very possible that the walls, or even the light could hold some key to
his escape. He leaps upon the table with renewed vigor; standing at the center,
he can see the top of the lamp, all the way up to the cord that seems to
stretch into eternity. He finds nothing of significance on the lampshade, but
he discovers that if he pulls on the cord, a winch somewhere in the great, dark
beyond releases more cord. The man continues to pull, and soon, he has enough
cord to use the lamp as a flashlight, to inspect the walls of the room. He
probes every crack, he scans even the slightest shadow, but in the end, the man
collapses to the floor as he realizes that there is not even the slightest
vestige of hope left in those walls.
But
wait, there is more! Wearily, the man turns
back to the table. What other way out could there possibly be? Covered in
bruises, sore, exhausted, shirtless, and thoroughly at his wits’ end, the man
fairly drags his shattered body back to the table. He returns to the original
spot in the floor where the whole adventure began. He stares at the table, and
for really the first time since the very first moment he began in that room,
the man at last sees what he saw. A sharp click makes him flinch, and a metal
blade appears out of the secret compartment on the table. The blade is serrated
with razor-sharp teeth at the top, and one end holds a large handle for easy
gripping. Ready now to act upon the occurrences rather than sit and rationalize
them, the man marches forward and grabs the saw to use it. Working steadily,
sweat pouring from his brow, the man cuts that solid oak table in half, since
there was nothing else in the room on which to use the saw.
When
he finishes, he steps back to admire his work. The rational side of his brain
(not quite worn out from the ordeal) recognizes that he now has two halves to
the table (plus a mound of sawdust). Two halves, mathematically speaking, are
equal to one whole. Another flash of light, and the man finds himself staring
at a wide, open hole where the table once stood. The hole is wide enough for
him to crawl in, and the slope of the path is not overly steep. The man muses
to himself as he makes his escape: is that really all there was to it? Look at
the table, see what he saw, use the saw to cut the table in half, put the two halves
together to make a whole, and
crawl out the hole to freedom?
And
for once, there was no more.
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