I was abducted on May 16, 2022.
When the world opened up, and we all started peeking out of our shells, I personally embarked on a quest to gorge myself on all nature I could. I spent all of my weekends camping at a national park with a narrow crescent of the beach hugging the belly of the lake, some two hours away from my town. Something about the quiet of that place muffled the buzz of anxiety in my head and serenity would slowly pool up in the freed up space until it was time to go back.
Except one of these times I didn’t go back.
I was laying in the back of my pickup, light trickling down through the blue nylon tented above me. I was engrossed in the fiction about some sort of pandemic — the Pink Pox — which obviously had been influenced by the recent events. The main character was a woman of what they call a mature age, and she was part annoying and part cool, and I couldn’t for the love of me decide which side I was on. Preoccupied with my internal conflict, I noticed the wind gusts only when they were already strong enough to blow the top of my tent off and up. I had no recollection of whether they were slowly building up over time or got strong in an instant.
I say gusts but really it was one large swoosh, right in front of me, and I had a split moment to think: “It’s a jericho” before it swallowed me.
I came to on a bed, in a room I didn’t recognize. The entire room seemed off and I couldn’t quite put my finger on why until I realized it was not geometrically sound. Some corners were more or less right, some were round, and some were not exactly corners. It reminded me of a concept generated by an AI who thought it understood the premise of a human dwelling but not confidently.
Apart from the bed, there was also something akin to a table and a bench, both seemingly growing out of the floor, and of the same uniform beige color as everything else in the room. And a door. I rushed to it, noticing I was still wearing my clothes, and pried it open with my fingers — it didn’t have a handle.
The door opened into a corridor of the same nature — same unknown material, same bevelling, same unassuming color. The long and wide corridor was randomly punctured with doors similar to the one I just came from. I turned back and saw that the hall was extending for a while and disappearing around the corner.
I took off my belt, put it on the floor to mark the starting point, and stepped forward.
In about an hour of tempered strolling, I started to feel dizzy from the unending array of identical doors. The corridor did occasionally curve to the left or right slightly, but nothing else changed. I walked another dozen of meters by inertia and finally stopped at the closest door.
I stood before it for a few seconds, trying to hear something — any sound coming from behind it. Finally, I mustered some courage to touch the door. It had a familiar parchment-like texture, like that thin paper from the packs of frozen pastry.
The door opened soundlessly, revealing a room roughly the same size as the room I came from. Except this room was different. It was full of waste. Like someone had dumped a couple truckloads of trash inside.
For a minute I just stood there, unable to comprehend what I was seeing. This trash was messing with my head. I couldn’t even recognize most of it. Sometimes I thought I was looking at a piece of clothing but it would end abruptly, not tracing human anatomy. There were objects which I was on the precipice of understanding or remembering the purpose of, but I couldn’t. It all felt surreal like I was on drugs.
In disbelief, I picked up what seemed like a broken Rubik’s cube but turned out to be rounded on one side, held onto it, and threw it against the hall wall in a bout of fury.
The cube has disappeared. I was not sure what happened, I thought that perhaps the wall had swallowed it. Without thinking, I threw myself against the wall, fully expecting to be transported somewhere, and as I realized how dangerous of an idea that was — what if the wall sent the trash into space vacuum — I bounced back, almost hitting the opposite wall. My shoulder was throbbing from the impact. Clearly, I was not to be discarded. Or maybe I was already discarded. I could not see any reason or logic in any of this. In what was happening to me.
Over the next few days, I discovered three important things. I no longer got hungry, I made no waste, myself (I suppose this place had enough waste as it were). And every Structure room that I checked was full of trash. Every room but mine.
My apparent ability to not die from hunger made me happy at first but seriously depressed me on second thought. I quickly forgot all about it, though. I thought of a task. One could say, I found my calling. I have decided I wanted to clean out the rooms.
It’s been two years and three months. I’ve been tracking the time by collecting stick-like objects in one of the rooms which I named The Calendar room.
I spent my days driven by my internal clock. I would wake up, go to the closest trashed room and methodically throw the objects one by one. Then I would get tired and would return back to “my” room to sleep. Over time, I have collected a set of objects I used as tools — a large fork-like thing to use like a rake, and another wide pane was my improvised shovel.
Sometimes I would get bored of cleaning and so I would turn to arranging trash by color or building elaborate sculptures (resulting in something that my late father would call “a fine fart”,) but I would always return to cleaning eventually. I would immediately fall into the zone as soon as I stepped into the door. Something about clearing out the rooms was soothing to my soul.
At some point, it started taking me hours to get to “work” and return to my initial room and to the Calendar room back. I didn’t know it back then but my days in the Structure were counted.
One of the days I woke up in a blindingly bright and noisy outside environment filled with sunlight and the sound of waves to the brim. I was back at the beach, in the national park, at the same place I was taken from. Based on how covered by sand I was, I spent the whole night there.
It took me four hours of walking to get to the nearest house. I was starving.
While the police were confirming my identity and my banks were sorting out whether they could bring up my accounts back online (unlikely), I was offered an assistance program that included temporary minimum-wage employment. At the interview, I told the social worker I was quite comfortable with a cleaning sort of job. Hoarder houses and such.