Works/The Visitation Room

Why, this is Hell, nor am I out of it.   -- Mephistopheles

It was the longest elevator ride in the universe.

He thought this twice a month, once throughout the trip down and once throughout the trip up. Nowhere else had he ever actually sat down on the floor of an elevator. He'd never even contemplated it. He wasn't allowed to bring a book; he'd tried once and the bored ethereal at the desk had looked him over, no search except by eye, and had told him tonelessly to remove it from his coat pocket. On the desk, please, and you can claim it when you get back. The elevator doors opened noiselessly and there was never anyone else in the elevator and so he sat. And told himself it was the longest elevator ride in the universe, as if by telling himself this he would shorten the trip.

He'd decided long ago that nothing in the complex was accidental; that the guards never explicitly checked his pass simply to reinforce the idea that they had no need to do so; that the broad halls, doors, desks, cabinets and chairs were painted one or another shade of gray to remind him at every step that these twisting corridors were a place that it was not supposed to be desirable to be; that none of the staff ever showed the slightest facial or vocal expression to make sure he remembered that he was utterly beneath their contempt.

He had never, in ten years, seen another visitor besides himself.

The visitation room was (of course) gray. It contained a gray bed with gray sheets on a gray mattress and gray pillowcases over gray pillows, two uncomfortable gray chairs, and an additional gray door on the opposite wall from the gray door he entered by. He was fairly certain he went to a different room every time. They were all exactly the same, the placement of the furniture precise to the fraction of a millimeter, the top sheet turned down and tucked in at exactly the same length, the pillows fluffed to exactly the same shape.

She did not wear gray. She always wore the same dress, a light red cotton sundress with big unabashed yellow flowers. It was the last dress she had been alive in.

He wondered if she was able to choose to wear it or not wear it, and if so, whether it was a choice she made for him, and if not, whether it was a penalty meant for him or for her. He'd gone from being ecstatically joyful, the first time, when she'd come through her door wearing it, to being a little upset by the sight of it; then hating it; then coming back to loving the sight of it again. Of her, of course. Of her in it.

She would always look hesitant, even a little frightened, when she first came in, as if making a mental adjustment. He would walk across the room and embrace her, hold her gently until she seemed to relax a little. Then they would sit - at least at first, back in the time when it seemed like there was some reason, some unspoken impropriety in heading directly to the bed. But over the years, the time they spent sitting on the uncomfortable chairs, oddly at a perpetual loss for words, grew shorter. Now, after that initial embrace, more often than not he would let go of her and she would move to the bed and slip out of the dress noiselessly and pull away the top sheet and lie down, all in the space of seconds, then look at him from where she lay with an expression which very clearly was well, what are you waiting for? on the surface, but contained something else below that. Pain. Sadness.

He told her as much once, afterward. "If it hurts you to do this - to be reminded - we can stop."

"No," she said, "We can't."

He knew what she meant, he knew that the unexpressed thought was as hard as this can be, it would be worse if we stopped, so he never discussed the possibility again.

Nor did he ever try to discuss what her existence was like on the other side of the door, although sometimes he very badly wanted to. Once he did allow himself to say "This place isn't at all what I thought Hell would be like."

She had looked at him then, a dark look, and blinked, and after she blinked her eyes were far away and she had said, "The rest of it isn't like this."

When he got back to his cubicle the morning after the visitation, Fairlyn was around the corner and perched on the edge of his desk so fast that she had to have been listening, waiting for him to arrive.

"I thought you told me," she said, "that last month was going to be the last time."

Fairlyn had a way of sounding absolutely cheerful, without a care in the world, while simultaneously showing with her face and especially her eyes that she was nothing of the sort. When she was genuinely happy her eyes were happy even if her mouth was not; but her mouth was perfectly capable of acting happy even at times when her eyes clearly showed that the rest of her was having none of it.

He'd met her the day he'd started at this office; she'd been the first person - practically the only person - who had come to say hello to him. It was that sort of office, a horrible beige place where functionaries spent their days shuffling and stamping and filing papers that meant nothing to anyone, least of all to them, and most of the creatures in it were not social. He hadn't been very social either, but she'd worn him down, and one night he'd gone to have a drink with her, and then another night it had been dinner, and then they had spent several evenings just talking the night away. Now she was a good friend - his only good friend, he had to concede when he was being honest with himself.

Fairlyn was the only other person who knew about the visitations. She knew because he had told her on the night he'd had to explain why he wasn't going to bed with her.

"You have to stop," Fairlyn said to him. "You know you have to stop. We've talked about this."

"It's all she has," he said.

Neither her eyes nor her voice smiled now. "Listen to me. You may be making it worse. Have you considered that? How do you know you're not keeping her from moving on? Isn't Hell supposed to be about penitence? How can she repent if you keep coming back every month to remind her -"

"But - I can't," he said. "What the rest of her existence must be - you're asking me to just let her suffer - I'm not even sure what she's supposed to be doing penitence for. She wasn't a bad person."

"No, to hear you tell it, she was a saint." Fairlyn stood up and left his cubicle without giving him the chance to reply.

Fairlyn didn't speak to him for a week. At first he wasn't interested in speaking to her either. After two or three days, he began looking for an opportunity to talk to her, but whenever he went around the corner to her cubicle she wasn't there, even when he had heard her voice coming from it seconds before.

One day she reappeared and tossed a small red rectangle of cardboard onto his desk.

"What's this?" he said.

"Special entry privilege," she replied. "Undated. Open pass for one use only."

"Wait, a pass for - how in hell did you get this?"

"Good choice of words," she said. "I know somebody who knows somebody who knows somebody."

"Why -?"

"You keep wondering what the rest of her existence is like. Go find out."

"I see what this is," he said slowly. "You want me to see her being punished. You want to ruin my image of her. You're jealous, is what."

Fairlyn smiled with just her mouth. "Don't be ridiculous. I think you have a point, that's all. You can't decide whether the visitations are a bad idea unless you see the rest of it. So, go see. You're welcome." Again she left abruptly, before he could even collect himself enough to stammer.

He couldn't find her for the rest of the day, although he checked several times.

He called in sick the next day, not that anyone would notice, and stayed the entire day in his apartment, almost all of it spent staring at the red card that seemed to have grown so fiercely vivid that it drained all the other colors from the room.

He went back to the office the day after that, but couldn't concentrate even on his idiotically easy job. When he got home, it was only long enough to pick up the card and head back out again.

For once, a guard actually took the trouble to look at his pass. He felt a perverse pride; he had finally managed to make some sort of impression.

He was led down a gray hall to a gray desk with an ethereal who checked his pass again (mirabile dictu!) and did not gesture to a silently opening pair of elevator doors just behind and to the right of the desk, but instead pressed a button and another room opened and another ethereal came out on cue and said to him, "Follow me, please."

The door closed, shutting the two of them together in a room which was an absolutely featureless gray cube, precisely equal on all sides and faces save for the one door. There was no other exit. The ethereal held out a hand; so unexpected was the gesture that it took him several seconds to realize he was supposed to clasp it. The ethereal gripped his hand tightly, said, "There will be some disorientation," and the room suddenly left them, or they left it.

It was a place and it was also no place and it was also all places and it was not gray. They whirled through and between bubbles of existence, passing through random experiences. One moment they were in the middle of a grassy, sunlit hill with someone lying serenely on it, oblivious to their transit; then they were in what seemed to be a place with music and discotheque lights; then on, or perhaps in, or perhaps intersecting, a train to some unknown place, with a car full of people; then there was a place with snow, or it felt like snow even though there was no sensation of cold; and a hundred others as they twisted away down their rambling path. Between the bubbles of existence there seemed, as far as he could tell, to be light, and light alone, or if there were things in the light, they were impossible for him to see in the brilliance.

And then, just as they had begun their ride with no sensation of acceleration, he became aware they had stopped without any feeling of having slowed to a halt.

It was a dark room with some large piece of furniture and someone in it. It was a bedroom. The edges of the room were deep in shadow, or possibly that was because the objects in the bed were so bright.

He thought, initially, the two people in the bed were asleep, until one of them turned and said something lazily - something he couldn't make out - to the other. It was very difficult for him to focus on them; their luminescence made their edges indistinct. But it was clear even without focus that it was her, the person talking was her, it really was actually her and - the other person rolled over and looked at her and they moved closer together - an embrace, a kiss? impossible to tell. Then they both separated a little so they were two distinct forms again, and they laughed, the quiet, contented laugh of two people who are utterly comfortable in one another's company.

She brushed her hair back from her eyes, and in that small gesture he was taken back far beyond the last decade, to a day long before then. And her remembered voice was suddenly in his ears: The rest of it isn't like this.

He had squeezed his eyes shut tightly, but he was unaware of it until his eyelids began to sting, and then he opened them and they were in the gray cube again and the ethereal was waiting for him by the open door, to make sure he left in the proper and orderly fashion.

He didn't go to work and he didn't call. They didn't call him. He sat in a chair, barely moving, barely breathing, and let time wash over him.

Some eternity later, he opened his eyes, stood up, walked to the table, took his visitation pass and his access papers and tore them into confetti, all shades of off-white and beige and tan. He tossed the fragments into the air wildly, and then returned to his chair and was motionless again.

The telephone rang, and some sensation obliged him to answer it. Report to such-and-such desk the next morning without fail. Well, he knew they'd start to wonder sooner or later.

It was yet another beige building with beige offices. He didn't think he'd been in this particular one before, but who could tell for sure? He found the right floor and asked for the right desk and was directed to a door with no nameplate, which he opened.

There, behind an immense and lovely oak desk with a polished stainless steel lamp, sat Fairlyn. She was smiling with her eyes only.

"Do you think you're ready to proceed now?" she asked him.

It was the key to a lock. He almost thought he could feel the springs and pins coming to exactly the right position, sense the cylinder turning. He nodded.

"Very good," she said, and she smiled with her entire face.

Copyright © August 2010. Do not distribute or reproduce.