No More Waiting

No More Waiting

Ray woke up on a folding chair. That was the first thing he knew. The chair had a metal frame and a canvas seat that was warm where his body had been. The second thing he knew was that he was not in his truck. The third thing he knew was that he had not been drinking. This last fact surprised him more than the chair.

The room had no windows. The walls were painted a color that existed nowhere in nature—something between grey and the feeling you get when you walk into a room where someone has just had an argument. The floor was concrete, and it was cold through the soles of his shoes, which was fortunate because Ray would have noticed his shoes were untied otherwise.

There were seven other people in the room. They were sitting on similar chairs arranged in a rough circle. None of them spoke. Ray counted them: one, two, three, four, five, six, seven. Plus him made eight. He would later learn that eight was the number that made the system work, but he would not learn this from anyone. He would learn it from the骰子.

The骰子 was on a table in the center of the circle. It was large—about the size of a cantaloupe—and white with black dots. It looked like the kind of thing you buy at a toy store for five dollars and then lose in the couch within a week.

There were eight doors around the perimeter of the room. Each was numbered: 1 through 8. They were plain metal doors with plain metal handles and no locks on the inside. Ray checked each one by trying the handle. They were all locked from the outside. He was not surprised. He had expected this. He had also expected to be somewhere else.

Old man in the corner. He was old. That was what Ray would call him. The man had a VA patch on a jacket that had been fashionable in a decade Ray tried to forget. His eyes were open but not looking at anything anyone else could see.

Woman in the second chair. She looked like she worked at a grocery store or maybe a gas station. She had the particular kind of tired that comes from standing for eight hours a day and being told to smile about it. She had three children. Ray could tell. Her hands had the shape of someone who had held a lot of small things.

Young man with the cut on his cheek. He was looking at the骰子 the way a man looks at a gun he does not know how to hold. He was maybe twenty-six. Maybe less. The cut was fresh.

Woman with the silver hair. She was sitting perfectly still. Not the stillness of someone meditating. The stillness of someone who has learned that moving makes other things move and some of those things are worse than stillness.

Man in the pharmacy apron. He looked like a doctor who had lost his license but not his habit of diagnosing everyone. Ray had met a dozen like him. They always talk too much about anatomy and too little about the people who have it.

Kid. Nineteen, maybe. He looked like he should be in high school and was in a room with people twice his age and would not be able to explain to his mother why.

And the woman next to Ray. She was Korean, or at least she looked it. Middle-aged. Hands that worked with soap and hot water and other people's sick bodies. She looked at Ray and Ray looked at her and neither of them said anything because sometimes silence is the only sentence that fits.

"How long have we been here?" Ray said.

Nobody answered. He asked again. Still nothing. He asked a third time and the old man said: "Does it matter?"

Ray thought about this. The old man was right. It did not matter. The question implied an answer existed and the answer did not.

He stood up. He walked to door number 1. He turned the handle. It opened.

The room behind door 1 was small. A chair. A lamp. A screen on the wall. The screen was on. It showed a man eating noodles from a Styrofoam cup in front of a television in a room that was very similar to the one Ray was standing in, except this room had a window and through the window you could see a truck parked in a parking lot and the truck was Ray's truck and the room was his room at the motel and the man was Ray.

He was watching himself eat noodles.

The screen flickered and the image changed: Ray walking to the mailbox. Ray standing in line at the unemployment office. Ray sitting on the edge of his bed and putting on his socks one at a time because one at a time is how you do it when you do not have the energy to do both at once.

He closed the door.

He sat back down.

The woman next to him spoke. "What did you see?"

"Me," Ray said. "Eating."

"Was it good?"

"No. It was instant. The kind with the powder."

She nodded. "I saw my husband."

Ray looked at her. "Your husband?"

"In a factory. He was standing by a machine. He looked happy. He had not looked like that in a long time."

"How long have you been married?"

"Twelve years. He worked at a chemical plant. Three years ago the safety report said the air was bad. His boss said not to tell the workers. He told me. I told no one. He died six months later."

Ray said nothing. He knew what it was to carry something that other people had put in your mouth and told you to swallow.

The young man with the cut stood up. He walked to door number 3. He opened it. He closed it after about ten seconds. His hands were shaking.

"What did you see?" the grocery store woman asked.

"Someone chasing me," he said. "In a parking lot. I do not know who. I think I know who. I do not know."

The silver-haired woman went to door number 5. When she came back, she sat down and said: "A supermarket. I was a cashier for twenty years. I saw myself ringing up groceries. Simple. Clean. No one asking me anything."

One by one, they went. The pharmacist saw himself in a courtroom, standing in front of a judge who was reading from a paper that said MALPRACTICE. The kid saw a beach. He did not talk about the beach. The VA man saw nothing—he went to door number 7, stood in the doorway for a full minute, and came back saying: "Just a room. Empty. No screen. Nothing."

That was the most frightening thing any of them had seen.

They sat in the circle for a while. Or what passed for time. There was no clock. There was no light that changed. The lamp in each room was the same brightness it had been when they arrived. The screen in each room showed the same loop. Ray's noodles played on a loop. His wife's husband stood by the machine and looked happy over and over and over.

"What do we do?" the grocery store woman asked.

"We wait," Ray said.

"For what?"

"I do not know."

"For the game to end?"

Ray looked at the骰子 on the table. It was just sitting there. Not rolling. Not doing anything. Just existing. Like a paperweight. Like a decoration. Like something that had been placed on a table by someone who wanted a骰子 on their table and had bought the cheapest one available.

"I don't think there's a game," he said.

The kid looked at him. "Then why are we here?"

"I don't know."

"Who put us here?"

"I don't know."

The silver-haired woman spoke: "Maybe no one put us here. Maybe we just ended up here. Like we end up everywhere."

They did not speak for a long time. The old man's breathing was shallow. The pharmacist was rubbing his hands together the way doctors do when they are thinking about a diagnosis they do not want to say out loud. The kid was staring at his shoes. The VA man was staring at nothing. The grocery store woman was staring at Ray.

"Why are you looking at me?" he said.

"Because you're the only one who seems okay with not knowing."

"I am not okay with it. I just stopped pretending that knowing would help."

She considered this. "Do you think it's real? The screens?"

"The screens are real. What's on them is real. The question is whether real matters if it doesn't change anything."

She did not answer.

On the second day—or what might have been the second day, though it could have been the second hour, or the second week—the young man with the cut stood up and walked to door number 6 and did not come back. They heard something through the wall. A door closing. A sound like a body falling onto a mattress. Then silence.

Nobody went to look.

Days passed. Or moments. Time in the room was like the water in a cup you forget to drink—still there, still the same temperature, but no longer interesting.

The woman who saw her husband went to door number 3. When she came back, she sat next to Ray and said: "He was there. My husband. On the screen. He looked at me. He smiled. I think he knew I was watching."

Ray said: "Maybe he did."

"Maybe he didn't. Maybe it's just a recording."

"Maybe. Or maybe the screen shows what you need, not what is."

She was quiet for a while. "Do you believe in that kind of thing?"

"I believe in screens that show you your own life and make you feel less alone for about thirty seconds and then leave you with the same instant noodles you had before."

She almost smiled. "I am Helen."

"Ray."

"I am still here, Ray."

"I know."

"I am not leaving. Not yet."

"I know."

She reached across the space between their chairs and put her hand on his. Her hand was rough from soap and hot water and other people's sickness. It was the warmest thing he had felt in three years.

They sat like that for a while. The kid cried quietly. The VA man opened his eyes and closed them again. The pharmacist stopped rubbing his hands. The silver-haired woman closed hers.

Ray did not let go of Helen's hand.

They did not open any more doors. They did not roll the骰子. They did not demand answers from the walls or the ceiling or whatever force had placed them here, if there was a force. They just sat. In a room with no windows. With seven other people who were not strangers anymore and would never be friends. With a骰子 on a table that nobody touched.

Outside, the wind moved through the parking lot of a building that had no name and no history and no future that anyone would write down. A car passed on the road. The driver was going somewhere. The driver had a destination. The driver believed, with the particular confidence of people who do not know they are lost, that the destination existed and was worth reaching and that the road between here and there was the kind of road that led somewhere meaningful.

Inside the room, Ray let go of Helen's hand and stood up and walked to the wall and pressed his palm against it. It was cold. It was concrete. It was real.

He pressed harder.

Nothing happened.

He pressed harder.

Nothing happened.

He pressed until his palm hurt and then he stopped and went back to his chair and sat down and Helen nodded and the kid stopped crying and the old man kept dreaming and the骰子 stayed on the table and the doors stayed closed and the screens kept looping and the room stayed exactly as it had been since Ray woke up on the folding chair and nothing had changed and nothing would change and maybe that was the point.

Maybe the game was not the doors or the骰子 or the screens or the people. Maybe the game was sitting in a room and not leaving and not knowing why and not caring anymore.

Maybe that was all any of them had ever been doing.

Maybe this was not a game at all.

Maybe it was just a room.

Maybe it was just Tuesday.

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Author Note & Copyright: