I enjoy the buzz of the fluorescent lights. They sit in simple plastic panes above my head, sometimes on and filling the Corridor with light, other times darkened. Sometimes I like to imagine I can hear voices in the buzz, of the same sort that I hear when I dream.
Today the lights seemed to whisper “Good morning,” when I opened my eyes and blinked away sleep. I breathed in deep the smell of wood pulp and glue. My muscles still ached from yesterday’s trek, but it was an ache that I had grown accustomed to over the years. Everything about the Corridor brought me comfort. The Corridor provided.
I have lived in the Corridor for as long as I can remember. If ever there was a time I wasn’t there, I could not recall it. My earliest memory was waking up naked, alone and cold against the far wall of the Corridor. For a long long time I was too afraid to move, too frightened of the unknown to see where the Corridor might lead. But the Corridor doesn’t like stagnation. It encourages change.
The Corridor is always the same no matter how far I walk. Mile after mile I have travelled there is no difference in my surroundings. The floors of the corridor are polished marble tile, alternating black and white squares that stretch onward as far as the eye can see.
Strewn here and there are rugs, some patterned with vines and flowers in endless spirals, others furred with roaring heads and splayed claws of bears at the edges. The ceiling is plain plaster, painted a dull ivy green and set with the fluorescent lights at regular intervals.
There are no windows in the Corridor, but instead two solid walls that box me in and keep me from going anywhere but straight ahead. On my left are lacquered wooden panels; I tried once to kick one in and see what lies outside the Corridor, but the panels are thicker than they look and I collapsed in exhaustion before I was able to even loosen the frame. The Corridor does not tolerate attempts to leave. When I awoke from trying to shift the panel it was with pain all over my body. Bruises and blood from my head to my feet. There was no one else in the Corridor besides me, so far as I knew, so it only made sense that the Corridor itself had punished me for my disloyalty. That was one of the rules of the Corridor.
The right hand wall was books. Books of all shapes and sizes lined the wall down the length of the Corridor, so many that I at first thought there must be trillions upon trillions of volumes packed into the dusty shelves. From dictionaries to novels, romances to horror, the genres and lengths and authors were as varied as the fish in the ocean. It didn’t take long for me to realize that despite how many volumes sat in the shelves, there were only really about three hundred different books in the Corridor with me. Most of them were reprints of the others, and plenty were completely blank, without a single word decorating their pages.
The books are my friends, my teachers and my lovers in this empty hall. When I am bored and my feet ache from walking, I sit with my back to the shelves and lose myself in descriptions of a world outside the Corridor. When I am lonely, curled up beneath one of the rugs during the cold times, they comfort me with poetry or stories of tragedy or brilliant triumph. When I want to learn new words or how to count up to one hundred, they teach me about the world I’ve never seen. Thanks to them do I know what fluorescent lights and Persian rugs are. Thanks to them I’ve seen images of shining cities of towering glass and steel, tranquil woods and crystal clear lakes bursting with multicolored fish. I read, and I imagine, and I walk, and I dream. This is life in the Corridor. This is how I live.
I’ve learned how to measure the time, and how to measure distance in steps. When the fluorescent lights dim I lie down to sleep, and when I wake again the lights greet me. I’ve learned that the light times are “day” and the dark times are “night”. When the Corridor grows frigid, winter as I have learned to call it, I wrap myself in clothes I fashion from the rugs, and huddle beneath them for warmth. In the hot and muggy times, when my sweat leaves misty footprints on the tile, I shed my makeshift clothes and walk bare. Summer, the books tell me it is called.
When I am thirsty, and my lips are dry and cracked, I go to the wood panelling and lick at the water that runs down it. A few hours of lapping the droplets and my thirst is slaked. When I am hungry I chew on torn out pages of empty books or reprints, or scrounge the dusty corners of the shelves for spiders or other crawling things. At first I found them difficult to swallow, but with time I learned to take comfort in the way their little legs wriggle down my throat. The Corridor provides.
Never have I gone a day without the water on the walls, nor bugs and crawling things to eat. Never has the Corridor grown so hot in the summer that I collapse, or so cold that I should freeze solid.
But whether cold or sweltering, hungry or thirsty, always I have walked. Books and logic tell me that for the Corridor to have a start, it must also have an end, and that if only I could reach that end, maybe I can see in my waking life the things my dreams tempt me with. The warm sun on my back instead of these fluorescent lights. Soft grass instead of rug beneath my toes. I dream that perhaps out there, outside the Corridor, there will be people. People other than myself and the ones I imagine to keep me company. I fantasize when I feel sad about meeting these people, about asking them my questions about the world, about talking for hours and hours on end about anything and nothing. Sometimes I daydream about finding a woman here in the Corridor with me. That I am Adam, and she my Eve, and that in our togetherness we can overcome the Corridor and be happy. It is a pleasant dream.
I have come to believe that it must be human nature, or at least my own nature, to desire what I cannot have. I am safe in the Corridor, there is no predator higher on the food chain than me. I roam the Corridor and the spiders shy away in fear. The water on the wall trembles in terror. I am their king, the master of their fate. The Corridor gives me discomfort. It tests me in how I deal with the cold and the heat, but it does not kill me. It never kills me. It provides for me. Like God providing for the Hebrews in the desert, it gives me manna in the insects that I devour. It gives me water like from the stone that Moses struck with his staff. It gives me friends in the books that I spend my life reading and rereading.
And yet all that I desire is to leave.
Today I woke up, as previously described. I greet my friends the books and the voices I make up in my head to keep my company. {This is a precaution I take to make sure I haven’t gone mad just yet. I’ll know for sure when I have because the voices in my head will speak on their own, without me having to tell them what to say.}
I yawned, stretched, and got to my feet. Today was a pleasant day, somewhere cool and dry between winter and summer. Warm enough that I didn’t need to wrap myself in rugs, but I tied the leopard skin one I had slept on around my waist for the sake of decency. People in books talk a lot about decency. From them I’ve learned what parts of a man’s body should be covered, and what parts can be bare in polite society. Of course there isn’t anyone else in the Corridor except me, but I would want to present myself well in case I ever do meet someone else.
Breakfast that morning was generous, as I discovered a nest of termites had made home in the shelves near where I had slept, and I ate them greedily. It was rare that the Corridor gave me a full stomach, so I said my “thank you” as a polite gentleman should. {I try my best to exemplify what a gentleman should be like in case I ever meet one. I would hate to meet a real gentleman and for him to think me a boor.}
Once I’d finished eating and washed down the last termite with wall water, I set off once again down the Corridor. At some point after I’d figured out my numbers I had begun to count each day of travel, and since that time I had walked a total of five collections of ten collections of ten collections of ten. I know that there are more numbers than ten, but I find my system of counting to be comfortable and easy to understand. I’m still working out mathematics.
This would be the rest of my day, this trek, and at the moment I was in no mood to read, so I decided to have a conversation with one of my head voices. I chose Charles. Charles is one of four voices I keep in my head, and he only ever speaks when I tell him to. He isn’t real, of course, just someone I made up to keep me company, but I find that when you’ve never had any real company made-up friends are just as good.
“Good morning…” Charles began, and I quickly remembered that I hadn’t named myself today. As I couldn’t remember ever having a mother or a father to name me, I got to pick my own name day to day. I often chose names that I liked from books I had read recently, and just yesterday I had finished a book called “Frankenstein” for the third time. I had liked the Monster in that book very much, felt a kind of kindred spirit with him. Both of us were born into our respective worlds lost and without meaning, and like him I’ve had to make my own. The book never names him though, so I chose “Henry” after Victor Frankenstein’s friend.
“Good morning, Henry,” Charles said to me, and I imagined him walking beside me, dressed in a fancy suit and posh top hat, with a dapper cane in his hand and elegant shiny black shoes. Next to him, I probably looked like a right barbarian, but I hoped my bearing was gentlemanly enough to make up for my lack of proper clothes.
“Good morning, Charles, are you well?” I replied.
“I see we’re walking again today, as usual,” Charles observed, looking around at the Corridor around us.
“No way to go but forward, my good fellow!” I laughed. I liked to pattern my speech with Charles after the way fancy gentlemen in books talked. “Who knows, maybe we’ll reach the end today…”
“Do you think there is and end?” Charles stroked his nattily trimmed beard with a hand, musing.
“Of course,” I was perplexed by the question. “The Corridor has a beginning, as you well know. Everything with a beginning must have an end, mustn’t it?”
“What if it’s all a big circle?”
“Impossible, there is no curve along the walls or floor.”
“A big enough circle would be so large you’d never notice it was curved,” Charles gestured to the walls around us, “And without any point of reference how can we know?”
I considered this. Charles and I debated often, and every time I gave myself the stronger position than he. Sometimes I had Charles win our debates, but other times I beat him soundly. He was my sparring partner, my affectionate nemesis. But he was only one of my friends that I kept up in my head.
“I maintain what I said before,” I finally told him, and Charles nodded sagely.
“It’s not a bad point at all,” he agreed, “When something begins, it only makes sense that it should also end. But even if it does end, Henry, what is our plan should we never reach that ending?”
“We will,” I set my jaw at this. Charles liked to bring up this query often when we argued about the Corridor’s seeming infinity. It was one of the few questions of his that I never had an answer for.
“But hypothetically,” he insisted, “Assume that we do not. What becomes of us then? Do we walk this hall until we collapse and die of age in another twenty years?”
“It has to end,” I told him, and believed it too. Charles seemed to sense my unease, which only made sense, as he lived in my brain.
“Let’s change the subject then,” he said placatingly, “How are things between you and Julia?”
I wasn’t in much of a mood to discuss Julia either. She was cross with me after our last lovers’ quarrel, and Charles knew it.
“I think I’d prefer not to talk to you right now,” I said to him, and stopped pretending he was walking beside me.
Now it was just me in the Corridor. Just Henry.
Charles and Julia were two of my four friends that I kept with me always, but there were two others as well. Malcolm and Gwendolyn. If Charles was my gentleman friend, then Malcolm was my wilder side. He was a free spirit, more animal than man, dressed in fur pelts when he bothered to wear anything at all. Through him, I liked to express some of my more violent and angry emotions. Anger at the Corridor for not ending, frustration at being so alone, caged hunger and lust that bubbled below the surface. Malcolm crouched on my shoulder and giggled when I cried alone at night, and he kept me company when I flew into a rage, tearing books off of the shelves and ripping them to shreds, banging my arms and legs against the shelves until I had left bruises up and down my limbs.
Gwendolyn was a more calming influence. I’d read of doting grandparents and wanted one for my own. Gwendolyn was father, mother, grandfather and grandmother. She patted my back when I was sick and vomited up wriggling bugs and shreds of chewed pages. She whispered words of encouragement into my ear when I was exhausted and hurting and didn’t feel like my journey was even worth continuing. Through Gwendolyn I expressed as well my desire to have my own children one day. To find someone to be my Julia in reality with whom maybe I could raise a family, should I escape the Corridor.
Julia was my lover, the presence that huddled in my rug beds with me and held me tight when I was at my loneliest and most depressed. I pretended to be familiar with the taste of her lips, with the pleasures of her flesh, though of course I was pathetically, miserably alone in reality. Recently, though, Julia and I had gotten into something of a quarrel. I made her argumentative when I needed to vent sometimes, and we had fought bitterly a few nights ago. Julia said she wasn’t ready for children, but I wanted a family more than anything. We’d made point and counterpoint for over an hour, until I made the mistake of mentioning that since I had made her up she should do what I say.
That had upset her, and I’d wisely avoided speaking with Julia for a few days while she cooled off. I was looking forward to settling our differences and putting this unpleasant business behind us, but I’d never angered her like this before, and in the back of my mind I worried that perhaps she wouldn’t forgive me this time. I had to admit, what I’d said was beyond hurtful, even if it was true. Since our fight she had been avoiding me, even inside my own brain, which did nothing if not stoke the fires of my anxiety.
I decided I’d had enough conversatio0n for now. Charles had touched a nerve and I wasn’t in the mood for Malcolm’s wanton nature or Gwendolyn’s comfort. Right now, I decided, I was in the mood to escape.
I skimmed along the spines of the books as I walked past, eyes flicking over title after title, deciding which I was going to go over again today. In the years that I’d spent in the Corridor, I’d read every book at least twice already, all 300 of them, but there was something pleasantly nostalgic about going back over the old familiar words and stories. I could read them and remember how I was feeling when I’d first discovered them. I could recall how the temperature in the Corridor had been that day. What I had said to my head-friends, or how many tens of days it had been since then.
I decided to read The Divine Comedy again. The last time I had read it had been a very long time ago, so the details were hazy, but something about the heroic poet’s journey through life after death had resonated with me. If the Corridor was my Inferno, then eventually I would reach Purgatorio myself, right? Just like Alighieri had done? Each day in this eternal hallway was one more circle of the Inferno. My head-friends were my Virgil’s, my guides.
Plucking the book from the shelf as I passed, I settled onto the floor, taking the time to rest my aching feet and lean back against the dusty bookshelf. It would be lunchtime soon, but I wanted to get a start on this book before I foraged for food or water. Absentmindedly I scratched at the beard that furred my cheeks and chin. I would need a shave again soon, I thought, but that could wait until later.
Canto one…
I lost myself in quiet reverie for a while, blissfully delving into the pages, forgetting for a while where I was trapped and what my prospects were for ever getting out of here. This was what passed for a good time in the Corridor. Like a gentleman should, I thanked the Corridor for providing me with the books that it had. Imagining what it would be like living here without my books to keep me company… I should have lost my mind years ago.
When my stomach rumbled I decided to end things for now. I was hungry and thirsty and needed to relieve myself. I did my business a few meters back the way I had come down the Corridor, figuring I’d never be back that way again. I cleaned myself off with torn out pages of blank books {I didn’t like to deface the ones with words in them} and washed as best I could with the water that ran down the halls.
Lunch was scarce, which was to be expected after the windfall of breakfast. I found a single, fat spider hiding away behind a copy of A Tale of Two Cities and swallowed it quick without chewing. The big ones tended to try and fight when you had them in your mouth, and I didn’t want any more spider bites on my tongue or palate. The juices in my stomach would kill it quick, I reasoned.
I washed down the spider and scavenged a bit more for other bugs, but aside from a handful of maggots nesting in a mouldy book binding, I found very little. That was alright. These would keep me going up until suppertime, I decided. The fluorescent lights flickered; it was later than I had thought. Night would fall within a few hours, and when it did I would be plunged entirely in darkness. I would need a razor now if I was going to shave tomorrow…
The Corridor offers a number of solutions to every menial problem that arises day to day living there, and it hadn’t taken me long to figure out that the plastic casing over the lighting fixtures could be used to make primitive tools.
I swept an arm along the row of bookshelves nearest to me, scattering its contents over the tiled floor. I repeated the gesture over the next few shelves that I could reach, clearing space until I had plenty of spots to hold onto and to stand. The ceiling wasn’t all that high, maybe twice my height, but a fall could still leave me with broken bones or a cracked skull if I landed wrong. I didn’t want to damage my skull; it had tenants besides just me after all, so I would be extra careful.
I stepped up onto the shelf, clambering up step by step until I was as close as I could get to the gently buzzing electric lamp. Reaching onto the shelf beside me, I grasped a thick, heavy book and swung it upwards as hard as I could. It bounced off the plastic with a deafening clatter. In the Corridor, since it was just me, silence was what I was used to. Loud noises spooked me, even ones I had made myself. I tried again, swinging the book upwards even harder and nearly losing my grip on the bookshelf as I did so. A splintering sound as a hairline crack spread across the plastic. That was progress. I swung a third time at a different spot, and then a fourth, and a fifth and a sixth. It was tiring work, honestly, and I could feel sweat beading on my forehead as I worked, slamming the book into the cracked light until finally the plastic cracked in just the right way, and a shower of large splinters clattered down to the tile below me.
Ah. That was that taken care of, then. I climbed back down slowly, careful not to miss a step, and made sure to step off the shelf and onto one of the nearby rugs so I wouldn’t cut my bare feet on any stray shards of plastic. I sifted through the debris until I found a shard I liked, a jagged shiv of sharp-edged plastic that terminated in a wicked point. It was like a proper knife, I thought, and I was reminded of the adventures of the brave Robinson Crusoe. This would be my razor tomorrow morning, I decided, and the lights flickered again as if to punctuate my point. I tucked the shard into one of the folds of my waistcloth, and headed another few meters down the Corridor to find somewhere to sleep. Supper was a few dead wasps I found behind a copy of The Odyssey, before I curled up under the buzz of the electric lights and fell asleep. My feet ached familiarly and my head-friends muttered to me as I slipped into dreams.
This was my favourite part of the day, incidentally; night. Dreaming was my most vivid and colourful means of escape from the Corridor, and I looked forward to it every time I shut my eyes. If not for my ongoing mission to leave the Corridor, I would happily remain asleep forever.
This night I dreamed that I was walking in a forest at sunset. The sensations were so real I could swear I was really there. The dappled sunlight shining through the leaves was warm on my face. The rustling of little creatures in the underbrush tickled my ears, and the earthy smell of woodblood was so potent I could taste it on the back of my tongue. All these sensations that I’d never actually experienced before, but my mind could simulate what it imagined they would be like. Books taught me what to expect, and here I was, living as men lived outside the Corridor.
Julia was walking beside me, not imaginary like in real life, but physical and present. Not an apparition of a lonely, depraved brain, but a woman of flesh and blood, with her own mind and her own feelings. She grasped my hand in hers tightly, and when I looked at her I felt my heart swell with joy. I never wanted to wake up again.
We walked together through the woods until they ended and the wooded path led to a spiralling staircase of white marble, railed with wrought gold. When I stepped up onto the lip of the first stair, the earth fell away below us, and we stood in a void of endless sky and sea, the spray of waves mixing with fluffy white clouds to create a feeling of climbing through the ocean itself. Julia climbed ahead of me, faster and faster, while I took in the view around me. Far above, at the top of the staircase, I saw a gilded portal of purest white light, spewing forth hymns and laughter, and smelling like how I imagined all the good foods I’d never eaten smelled. Julia was running towards it, flying up the steps. I smiled and made to follow her, only to feel something grasping my ankle. I looked down to see a hand wrapped around my leg. The bones were splintered shards of dark wood, and the skin printed pages of a book with no words.
I screamed, but no sound came out, instead a swarm of spiders erupted from my mouth, all the spiders I’d eaten since I arrived in the Corridor. Above me, Julia disappeared through the door to Paradise, and I thrashed and struggled to escape the hand. The portal was closing, beneath me the blue sea had turned to sluggish black tar, and the clouds had been replaced with an endless pattern of hideously buzzing fluorescent lights.
The Corridor would not let me go, even here in my dreams it chased me down and ripped me away from even thinking of leaving. Spiders and crawling insects streamed from my mouth, my nose. I couldn’t breathe, and more hands of sharp wooden splinters tore at my skin, gouging deep furrows that bled ink and dust.
The buzz of the lights had turned into a blaring roar, a sound that was everything and nothing all at once, and the thing that had gripped me turned me around to face it. It was man-shaped, with countless arms cobbled together from the shelves and dark wood panelling of the Corridor. Its skin was pages and book binding, and it reeked of rancid glue. In place of a face a single fluorescent bulb leered at me, stabbing my eyes with an artificial light so cruel and over bright that it lanced into my skull like a blade.
A blade.
I groped at my waist, searching for the shard of plastic I’d made before I fell asleep, forgetting for just a moment that I was dreaming, and this couldn’t possibly be real. I wouldn’t let the Corridor drag me back; I wouldn’t let it shackle me anymore!
My hand closed around the shard, gripping so tightly I felt it slice into my palm…
I woke up, drenched in a chilly sweat on the floor of the Corridor. I had been too late. The monster had devoured me.
“Julia?” I asked aloud, wondering if she was willing to talk to me now.
“Bad dream?” she asked, wrapping me in a tight hug. I needed that. Returning the embrace, I nodded quietly.
“I never usually have bad ones…” I confessed. “You were there.”
“Sounds like a real nightmare,” she replied drily.
“It was nice when you were with me,” I reassured her. “It got scary when you left. When the Corridor caught up to me.”
“Well you don’t ever have to worry about me leaving,” Julia gave me a quick peck on the cheek, “I live in your brain, silly.”
I got up shortly afterwards; I didn’t feel like sleeping anymore. The Corridor was still very dark, the lights hadn’t come on just yet, but I started walking regardless. In the pitch darkness I ran into the walls time after time, but it didn’t take me too long to realize that I could steady myself by feeling out the pattern of the tile beneath my bare feet.
Julia wanted to talk more, but I shoved her away in the back of my head with the others. I needed to be by myself right now. It had been a very long time since I’d had a nightmare. So long I couldn’t even remember what it had been. Sleep was so often my sanctuary, my refuge from the endless journey that was the Corridor, that to have it robbed from me unsettled me greatly.
Dreams had meaning, I knew from books, and I had always taken my visions of a place beyond the Corridor to mean that one day I would reach that place, and be free of all this. But this dream told me otherwise. It told me that I would never escape. That even if my head-friends did, I would stay here alone forever, until I wheezed out my last breath.
I wrapped my fingers around the shard of plastic casing in my pocket. There was… another option…
I shunted the thought aside. I had determined a while back that killing myself to escape wasn’t a valid option. I didn’t know if I believed in some sort of afterlife, but I didn’t want to take the chance that there would be nothing at all, or just another Corridor waiting for me on the other side.
I sighed, and as if on cue the fluorescent lights flickered on. I looked behind me to see if I could make out the same rumpled up rug where I had fallen asleep. I couldn’t tell.
The next day was the same as the one that came before it. And so was the one after that. And the one after that. I walked on, familiar aching feet, familiar scuttling legs down my throat, familiar trickle of cool water drop by drop down the wall. I dreamed, no more nightmares since that night. I spoke to my head-friends. I argued with Charles, confided in Gwendolyn, laughed bawdily with Malcolm and comforted myself at night with sweet, tender lovemaking to Julia.
This was life in the Corridor. Monotonous but peaceful. I read books, I ate bugs, I walked. Nothing changed, save that I kept ahold of that single shard of plastic casing. I had finished my shave some time back, but for whatever reason I hadn’t discarded it like I usually did with my tools.
Since my nightmare I felt different. There seemed to be a change in the air, as if I was coming to the end of something and the beginning of something else. Perhaps the end of my journey was close at hand.
Days passed, step by step, light after dark. New blisters formed on my feet over the calluses of the old ones. The Corridor warmed, and I shed my clothes to walk bare. It grew cold again, and I hunched in a cloak of thick bearskin to stave off the chill.
Always the shard stayed by my side. It was important, for reasons I didn’t understand. Maybe it was some primal urge to carry any sort of tool or weapon, but I wasn’t ready to let it go just yet.
I read books, over and over, word by word, step by step, night after day, light after dark, word by step, night by cold, day by bite, summer by drink, word by shave, step by sleep by waking by eating and drinking and running and walking and living and dying and dreaming and walking.
I reached it.
The end of the Corridor stood in front of me. The goal I had dedicated my life to reaching. I had run the race and now stood at the finish line. The victory ran hollow.
A wall stood in front of me. Solid, dark wood panelling, like the wall to my left. No windows. No doors. A wall. Nothing.
I stood in front of it, the Corridor dead silent aside from the buzz of the lights. This was the end. This was what I had fought for. More than ever I felt the ache of my tired feet. I felt the itchiness of my new beard. I felt the unwashed grimy filth that was my whole body. I breathed deep. Wood pulp and glue. The same things I smelled every day. The same thing I would always smell. Charles was wrong. And I was too. The Corridor did have an end, but it was not what I had hoped. It was nothing. My quest was pointless.
I laughed. It started low in my chest, a barely audible sound. It grew from a chuckle to a guffaw as I placed a hand on the wall, ran my fingers over the smooth, uncaring wood.
Chortling, I bowed my head until my forehead rested against the cool wood. I raised my head, then pushed it harder against the wall. Again. And again. And again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again! I could feel blood on my face, my laughs had become wheezes.
I screamed. I roared. I slammed my fists against the wall in rage and despair, hating myself, hating the wall, hating every facet of my accursed existence in this FUCKING Corridor!!!
I tore into the shelves, shredding books in my fury, smashing the brittle shelves they sat upon into rubble, hurling them up at the fluorescent lights until the plastic casing cracked. It wasn’t fair! None of this was fair! I had come so far, I had sacrificed so much! There had to be an ending, there HAD TO BE!!! This wasn’t how it was supposed to be…
“How was it supposed to be?” Charles asked me once my rage was spent. I knelt, stripped to the waist, my breaths coming in ragged gasps, tears and snot streaking my dirty face.
“Not this,” I told him.
“We knew this might happen,” he replied, leaning forward on his cane and eyeing me quizzically, “Is this tantrum really how an intellectual would act?”
“I’m not a goddamned intellectual!” I snarled at him. “I’m NOTHING! Do you hear me? NOTHING!!”
Charles gave me a disappointed, condescending look. “I thought better of you, Henry.”
“That isn’t my name. THAT ISN’T MY NAME BECAUSE I DON’T HAVE A FUCKING NAME. I DON’T HAVE ANYTHING!!!”
“You have us,” Gwendolyn stroked my hair reassuringly. “You’ve always had us, dearie.”
“And you always will,” Julia placed her fingers gently under my chin, raised my face to look at her. “We’ll always be here for you.”
“Whether you like it or not,” Malcolm cackled, viewing the mess I’d made with glee.
My eyes filled with tears. I looked at each of them in turn. My head-friends, my only companions in the living Hell. I’d imagined them from books, based them off of the characters I had read about but would never meet. They were all I had.
“But you aren’t real.”
All four of them bowed their heads when I spoke. I stood up, walked to Charles, and placed a hand on his chest, gently shoving. He disappeared. The same went for Gwendolyn and Malcolm, gone.
“What will you do?” Julia asked me quietly when I stood in front of her. “You’ll be alone.”
“I’ve always been alone,” I said, wishing that when I touched her I could feel that something was really there.
“Will I see you again? Will you think about me? About any of us?”
“No,” I shook my head. “No I don’t think I will.”
“I love you, you know,” she looked into my eyes. All I saw in them was a reflection of my own desperation, my own bitter longing for affection. Out of some foolish sense of obligation, I decided not to contest her.
“I know you do,” I told her, cupping her face in my hand, pretending that there was flesh and blood before me. “I love you too.”
With that, she was gone. I stood alone, more alone than I had ever been before. The Corridor waited to see what I would do next.
“You win,” I spoke aloud to it, reaching into my pocket for the shard of plastic casing. “I won’t fight anymore.”
I knelt again, tilting my head. I knew which arteries ran where in my neck, which ones bled the fastest. Books taught me that. Brushing my stringy, matted hair aside, I placed the jagged edge of the shard against my softly beating carotid.
“You win,” I said again, bitterness lacing every syllable.
I waited there for what felt like an hour, working up the nerve to just do it. This life was Hell. It was torment; without the journey to comfort me, without the belief that there could be anything better in front of me there was no point in staying alive. The Corridor had beaten me. It had always beaten me. To kill myself now was the only way I could fight back. The only way I could possibly spite it.
But I was afraid. Afraid to choose.
Poised, I waited, for what I didn’t know. A sign, maybe? A message not to give up, to try harder, to smash and slam my body against that wall until either it shattered or I did. To die fighting the Corridor instead of submitting to it. One final stand to see of a world really did exist outside these accursed walls!
I waited for that voice to come to me, for the Corridor to provide as it always had before. For someone to choose for me between death or torment.
But nobody came.