the White Room

The White Room

Andrew was supposed to take inspiration from the sterile walls of his self imposed prison. Or at least he tried. When he had designed this room he had imagined the white walls, ceilings, and furniture as being a backdrop his characters would move about on. Like somehow they would be the screen and his mind the projector. But now, after two years of writers block induced unproductivity, the walls merely morphed into unwritable faces that laughed as he struggled with blank pages and an empty head.
“Get out”, his friends and mentors had told him. “Go out and watch the world and find inspiration there.” So he had. He had sat endless hours writing down tidbits of overheard conversation, noting the beauty of a moment, countless sights and sounds and each time thinking, “Jesus, this would make for a fantastic bit of a poem or a story.” But then when he settled to start the greater work, they all stayed disconnected isolated moments. He had done myriads of exercises, written dozens of starts, and never found anything worth continuing. No greater unifying theme emerged other than his growing discontent and frustration.
It was now June of his third year of literary futility, unable to focus or care on anything but finding his story; he drove away everyone who he mattered to. He rarely left his apartment, refusing to let the faces of the white room and the blank pages drive him away from what he loved. He was never any good at anything but writing, it was his passion, his singular focus, and now it was driving him insane.
It had also driven the last in a long line of girlfriends over the edge. That day Jen had stood in the door of his white room. “Andrew,” he didn’t look up from his lap top. “Andrew.” Still nothing.
“ANDREW!”
“Jesus Christ! What the hell was that for?”
“I called your name three times!”
“I would have heard you.”
“Andrew you’ve been in there for 6 hours. Your cell phone has rang three times, it’s like you’re in a whole different world.”
“You know not to bother me when I’m in here.”
“If I didn’t you’d never leave!”
Andrew muttered something non-committal. He honestly did not care. He just wanted to be alone. He just wanted to get something done. Something on the page he could use.
“You need to come out of there. We haven’t spoken in three weeks. You never leave this fucking room! How the hell are we supposed to be together when, even though I live in the same apartment, I never ever see you?”
“I’ll be out in a little while.”
“No, come now.”
“Jen, go away, I need to work. Why don’t you understand I need to get some decent shit, on paper, in the next month?”
“If you don’t come out now, leave that fucking lap top and this creepy room, I will.”
“Fine. Go.”
So she left. Never even came back to the white room to say good bye. And Andrew didn’t really miss her that much. She didn’t get it. She didn’t understand what it meant for him to not be able to write, and he could not forgive her for that.
A few hours later, Jen joined the white crowd in his room. He sat at his desk while her face whispered at him. She told him how he had changed. How he was talentless and was too weak to accept it. How he was obsessed with a lost cause. He couldn’t take it. So he left the white room. The faces of the white room had accomplished what a real person could not.
Unable to face Jen’s visage in the white room, for the next few days he couldn’t spend any extended period of time in the white room. But not trying to write didn’t help his state of mind. He did not like thinking that the faces had beaten him. He needed to try to write. No matter how much the faces bothered him or how frustrated he had become with himself and writing in general, he had to write.
The next week he had gone back to his white room. In a Howard Hughes-esque moment of frustration fueled insanity, he had locked his door and vowed not to come out until he had something. He wouldn’t let them win. They just wanted him to fail. They didn’t want him to write. They knew he could. They just didn’t want him too. So he went in. He wasn’t leaving till he had something.
He had sat at his desk. He had paced. Moaned, ranted, screamed and raved. Still nothing. He typed three pages of worthless crap and then erased it. The faces in the wall grew clearer and more intense as the few hours he had anticipated grew into a day. Much like the composite people of dreams, they were at the same time one person, and many people. Sometimes they were his father, who stopped being so supportive of his son’s creative brilliance after two years of no published work. Other times they took the face of girlfriends passed who, like Jen, had been initially attracted to his dark, intellectual, “tortured artist” chic, but who quickly tired of him and his obsession. But unlike those dream characters, waking never drove them away. Jen still whispered away, slowly wearing down his resolve. After the third day he had stumbled out of the white room, delirious from hunger and thirst. But this time, the faces didn’t stay in the white room.
Then next Monday after the faces left the white room, after they took over his home, he left his apartment. Andrew took one of his many notebooks, threw it in a backpack, and shuffled out of his apartment. He had become so accustomed to the harsh, artificial fluorescent lighting of his white room that the natural sunlight momentarily blinded him. He walked slowly down his street towards a park where he used to sit and write, turning and looking everywhere for the faces, only to not find them.
Delirious with joy he thought for a moment that he had banished them from his mind, and a bit of the weight that burdened his stride momentarily lifted. But not five minutes later he heard the mocking laughter he had come to recognize and fear. He glanced around the street, noticing the tattered homelessmen, the overdone soccer moms and the scurrying businessmen. He turned to continue walking and stopped short.
There, not ten yards away, lurking in the shadow of an obscenely obese man, was one of the faces. Today it was his high school English professor, whose encouragement and enthusiasm had been a driving force behind Andrew’s career choice. But now the words of his mentor had been twisted by the visual representation of Andrew’s frustration to mock him.
“The most talented student in my class!” the face shouted at him over the din of the street, reforming the encouraging words in a mocking tone. “Your work is exceptional and original”. The face of Dr. Warsaw smirked, giggling at its own rapier wit. Andrew closed his fist around the backpack straps, focusing solely on the monumental task of putting one foot in front of the other, trying to block out the face and it’s voice. The face moved with him, taunting him all the way to the park, where Andrew sat to try for the millionth time to write something. He took out his notebook, clicked a pen to readiness, and jumped, startled, when he heard his mother’s voice originating from the space next to him.
“What are you doing?!?”
“Jesus Christ!”
“You know, you are such an incredible disappointment. How hard is it to write something? Your father and I never thought you would end up wasting your life and our money like this.”
Andrew couldn’t handle it. He bolted. They had never worn his mothers face before. Out of the bench so fast he nearly lost his shoes, he wildly threw his notebook at the crowd of white faces wearing the expressions of former friends who had suddenly gathered with the appearance of his mother. He took off back the way he came, the faces of his mother and Dr. Warsaw keeping close behind, following him through the city streets.
Down the street, not a block from where Andrew ran, a “homeless” man stood taking money from tourists. He honestly hoped the suckers felt better after they gave him their change. Considering he did nothing strenuous other than the effort he put into looking pathetic, he did very well. Suddenly, a tall, emaciated blonde man ran by him, screaming. The man looked as if he hadn’t sleep in weeks, with dark circles under crazed eyes sunk deep in a skull that showed clearly under the thin, pale skin. He watched the man run, screaming at nothing, batting at invisible pests. “Bad trip,” he thought to himself as the blonde man disappeared around a corner.
Up the street, Andrew fought his waking nightmare. “Shut up! Just shut the fuck up!” he screamed. As he ran, faces of benign strangers morphed into figured from his past. Disoriented, he stumbled into the street setting off a cacophony of car horns and yelled curses. He never heard them or saw how close he was to death as he ran across the busy road. The faces stayed with him, some in front, and some behind forming a complete perimeter around him. They gave him no chance for escape. “You are such a disappointment!” “You talentless idiot!” “Who do you think you are exactly? You can expect to just live off nothing! Get a job you lazy shit!” his father, his mother, his teacher, his ex-girlfriends all screamed at him. They swooped back and forth in front of his face throwing him off balance again. This time he fell.
He lay on the pavement, the faces still vying for his attention, as people moved past. Some stopped or slowed but many just remained at the same pace. He was just another drug addict to them. But unbeknownst to the passerby, Andrew was experiencing much more than a bad batch of the latest hallucinogenic. This was something much, much, worse. The imaginations of Andrew mind had become, to him, more real the people who tripped over him. The faces of the white room and their words overwhelmed Andrew’s consciousness to the point where only the slightest most familiar parts of reality slipped through.
Slowly through the babble of shouted curses and the motion of the faces, Andrew realized he had to get to his apartment. He had to get to the white room. Some part of his frazzled consciousness knew, though how was indistinct, that salvation lay there. So he struggled to his feet, upsetting a few scurrying businessmen, and ran, stumbling, to his apartment.
As he came to his building, a new voice joined the chorus. Andrew stopped cold, then moved with a new initiative. Of all the faces and all their voices, this was the least welcome, the most disconcerting. He ran up his steps. Unable to keep his balance, trying to avoid Jen, his mother, his father, friends, and teachers, he hit the walls and the railing, almost falling entirely over the edge. But every time he heard that new voice, he moved with a new energy.
Fumbling for his keys, he heard, “Andrew!” and then again, “Andrew!” He flung open the door and slammed it shut behind him, against the faces and their words. Breathing heavily, he moved towards the white room. But respite was not to be his. The faces came through the walls, the newest member leading the mob.
Laura’s face came through the door at eye level. Sweet, cherubic, and destroyed like it had been the last time he had seen her. He had watched his little sister die, and here she was, watching his mind leave him, helping the process. He backed away slowly. He had known the little voice yelling his name had been her. But seeing her mangled face before him in the ethereal white the faces manifested in was an entirely different pain. Her face, out of shape, her voice slightly distorted, it was the final nail.
Andrew let lose an animalistic, gut-wrenching scream. He ran to the white room, and fell to his knees, pulling at his hair, his face so twisted in pain and insanity he was unrecognizable. The face of a man burned at the stake, a man tethered by his body to a mind that was no longer functioning in a reality common with the rest of humanity. The faces hovered in the door to the white room, watching and speaking with smug arrogance to man they were destroying.
He got to his feet, trying to drown out the faces he still screamed at the top of his lungs. He threw his laptop against the wall, where it shattered and sparked as it hit the wall. He scattered his notebooks, his hands blindly grabbing and tearing at any paper they came in contact with. The faces slowly advanced as he tore apart his writing sanctuary. He picked up his desk and broke it against the wall. Almost three full years of frustration, failed attempts and abandoned starts broke apart under his hands. Every word he had typed and handwritten for that whole time, he destroyed. All the while, the faces moved closer, grew louder, Laura’s sweet, toddler voice always discernable over the myriad of voices as they yelled about his worthlessness, his lack of talent and initiative.
Eventually his hands fell on a felt tipped marker, and in trying to break it, the cap came off and soared into the wall, leaving a jagged mark. Momentarily, just for the space of a breath, their voices stopped. They then immediately started up again once the tip of the pen left the surface of the wall.
So Andrew picked up the pen and started writing. He wrote on the walls, as high as he could reach, on the floor, on the furniture, any gibberish that came to his mind. He wrote the time of day, the date, places he been, people he’d known. Most of it was total nonsense, but as long as he kept the pen on a surface, as long as he was writing, the faces stayed quiescent, watching him. He wrote and wrote until his hands ached. He would write on the walls, then the floor, then the walls again, and then a piece of furniture, whatever happened to strike his fancy at that particular moment. He wrote until every space on the walls, floor, and furniture was filled up. He emptied every thought he had out onto the white spaces of his white room.
But as the space filled up, the faces grew more agitated. They stayed silent, but they rustled as they moved about, looking at their brethren. Laura’s haunting eyes followed his every move. Andrew started to panic; he only had a square foot of space left. He wrote smaller and smaller as the space on the wall dwindled, until his writing was so tiny he couldn’t read it. The faces grew more and more restless. Staying silent, they moved to and fro in the door way, shuffling themselves into new orders, though Laura stayed solidly at the forefront. Then he ran out of space. There was not a single blank area in all the reachable space of the white room.
Then the faces broke their silence. As soon as he ran out of space, the faces came streaming through the door way into the white room like a tidal wave breaking, and as soon as he took the pen from the wall they started screaming. He tried writing on himself, but they still advanced. As Andrew tried to get out of the room, looking for more space to write, they flew about Andrews head, screaming and cursing, driving him again to his knees and slowly towards the floor. His mother screamed at him, while his father spouted his disappointment, while Jen told him over and over again he just needed to get over himself already, and all the while Laura called to him with the expression on her face saying, “why didn’t you save me?” as she said his name over and over again.
They screamed and flew about his head till he was curled up in the fetal position in the corner of his white room, facing the door. The faces continued to scream, and scream, and scream. Andrew began to cry. Pulling at his hair and sobbing uncontrollably, Andrew staggered to his feet. The faces moved with him, jostling for position in front of his face, but completely surrounding him on all sides. He moved slowly through the remains of his writing sanctuary, shuffling through three years of filled notebooks, past the remains of his laptop, which still smoked a little bit. All the while never stopping to read what he had left on the walls and floor.
On his way across the room he tripped over the remains of his desk, which lay crumpled where it had fallen. He lay for a moment, consolidating what was left of his logical thought. If someone had seen him in that moment, surrounded by such destruction and chaos, the sudden peace that came over his face would be at the same time, beautiful in its purity and startling in its contrast to his surroundings. Andrew had made a choice. So he got up. His face no longer reflecting the chaos of his mind, rather the serenity knowing he had a solution. The nebulous idea that originated as he lay in the street had solidified like diamond. The faces continued to shadow him, but he no longer cared. They redoubled their attempts to catch his attention, but the new Zen calm he had reached was untouchable. They swooped in and out in front of his face, and screamed and taunted at an unprecedented new level of intensity. But Andrew was unflappable. He continued to walk, slowly, but surely through the remains of his white room, kicking shreds of paper and bits of wood aside as he moved, and out into the rest of his apartment. He walked through the kitchen, into the larger living area. There he started to pick up speed, and after a few steps had broken into a full sprint. Still, his face retained its strange, empty calm. The sprint ended near a window, where Andrew leapt with all his might, into his window.
The window broke with a shattering of glass and wood, and as Andrew’s form went sailing out into the afternoon light and disappeared, the shattered glass fell with a musical tinkle as it hit the ground four stories below.
***
Suicides were rare. Mostly he got called in for burglaries he knew he wouldn’t solve, or murders that already happened. But today was a suicide. Some crazy artist had thrown himself out a window. He adjusted his belt with his cuffs, gun, and other crap he had to carry around on his uniform. Damn thing was so uncomfortable. He watched as the landlord went through key after key after key, looking for the one that would let him into the dead man’s apartment. The hours he worked were terrible. He understood his job was not of the nine to five variety, but this was getting ridiculous.
Finally the sweaty bald little man found the right one, and let him into the apartment. The place surprised him. It was clean, neat, everything in order. Not what one would think to find in the home of a man who was, by all accounts, very unstable? The officer moved towards the window where the man had met his end, noting the blood on what glass remained in the frame, noting that there was no sign of a struggle. The man hadn’t been thrown, this was a suicide.
The officer turned back in towards the rest of the apartment and continued looking for a reason for the resident’s dramatic end. He looked in the bedroom. Similar to the rest of the apartment, it looked like it hadn’t been used in weeks. The bed was made, but dust covered its entirety. Obviously it had not been used for a restful night’s sleep for some time. For a moment he wondered if the man actually had lived here, considering its condition. The officer backed out of the room. It gave him the creeps. But that was nothing compared to how he felt about the white room.
Here was where all the evidence of insanity had accumulated. The floor was coated with scattered and torn notebooks. The remains of what looked like a laptop lay crushed under the mark it had made when it was thrown into the wall, the screen separated from the casing. The furniture was pushed over and thrown about the room. What looked like it might have been a writing desk was crumpled in the middle of the room. But more unnerving than the general disarray of the room, and the ubiquitous shade of iridescent white, was that the entire room was covered in writing. In what looked like black marker, someone, presumably the suicide, had written on every surface in the room.
The officer moved carefully through the mess of the room to one wall to try and decipher the unruly scrawl. Strangely, the words weren’t the ravings of a mad man, or the scattered thoughts of a schizophrenic. Though the penmenship was terrible, it was a clear narrative. A story about a man looking for something he had lost. It was captivating. The officer soon realized he had started in the middle of the story so he searched around the room until he found its start, which lay under a long jagged black mark in the corner of the room. Reading the story was difficult, as the author had moved about the room as he wrote, occasionally the words jumped from the wall to the floor, then to a piece of furniture, but the thoughts represented were always complete. And heartbreaking.
The story was emotive, the characters reached out and took the officers heart and broke it. By the end of the story the stern, hard, and experienced police officer was crying quietly into his hand. He had never been much of a reader, he had never enjoyed it, but this was different. This story had touched him.
The officer walked slowly out of the apartment and motioned for the lab techs to do their thing. “But don’t rub anything off the walls in the white room.” he said to them as they walked by. They nodded, having no idea what he was talking about, but his expression warned them into silence.
The story was still on his mind as he finished up the report back at the station. His impatience with the mountain of paperwork he needed to finish increased exponentially over the course of an hour, and he remained unable to think about anything other than the story for an extended period of time. His attempts to distract himself from the memory of it never succeeded for more than a few minutes, and as time wore slowly on with the intrusive ticking of the clock, he realized he was not going to get his work done. So he left for the day, the story still in his thoughts.
Over the course of the next few weeks the officer slowly began to realize that he needed to get the story out. He had spoken to the other people who had gone into the white room and read the story and their reaction was universal; none of them could stop thinking about it. The story in itself had been nothing really groundbreaking. The story was as cliché as any of them, and the characters, while vibrant and fully three dimensional, were not revolutionary. But the story itself was written in such a hauntingly beautiful tone, it turned the ordinary words into something extraordinary. Also, the characters were written they were so easily to identify with that willing suspension of disbelief was almost unnecessary. As long as it stayed written on the walls of the white room, the officer knew he’d never be free of it.
He made a return trip to the scene of the suicide, back to the man’s apartment, back to the white room. As he tore through the yellow tape the stark cleanliness of the apartment struck him again, but in a slightly different way this time. Something seemed off, even more so than the first time he had been here. He rushed to the white room, eager to read the story again. It was easy to find the white room; the layout of the apartment was seared into his mind. But when he got to the doorway to the room, he stopped short.
The story had been painted over. The crime scene clean-up people or maybe that repulsive little landlord had had the room repainted. The white was gone, replaced by a generic off white beige, the torn paper and destroyed furniture removed. The white carpet which before had black stains from the broken pens that had laid everywhere, had been torn up and replaced with a dark hardwood. All that remained of that extraordinary story had been erased. The officer let his body sag in the doorway, against the new paint that covered where the story had been.
It was gone. The beautiful last work of an insane writer never immortalized. No one would ever know about it. No one would understand. He had to try and remember it, to write it down, if nothing else just to get it out of his head. He had to share it with the world.
The next day he sat at his desk in his den, with a white notebook he had bought especially for this, trying in vain to remember the exact wording of what he remembered of the story. He saw in his peripheral vision, something moving in the corner of the room. He thought for a moment that he must have imagined it, so he went back to writing. But not five minutes later he saw it again. This time he looked hard at the motion in the corner. For the moment when he could see it, it looked like a face, but then it disappeared. A little unnerved, he went back to his notebook, but the persistent motion in the corner was too distracting for him to work.
He looked at the notebook for a moment, and then looked quickly into the corner; there was a face in the corner. It looked like his brother. It smirked at him, and then disappeared.