Door 10: In the room next door….

There is always a door we don’t want to open, how many fairytales tell us that, a door behind which something sits and waits for us, sits and waits to be revealed. The very thing we’ve hidden from ourselves, but cannot forget, the symptom we ignore that kills us.

That’s the door Xie stands in front of now, a white door of painted aluminum, numberless, scratches around the lock where a key jabbed and missed repeatedly in the dark of numberless nights, a featureless white door otherwise, silence, cold to the touch, anonymous, did we say aluminum?

She stands outside this door, the last door, behind which all the mysteries are resolved, all questions answered, the door that has drawn ((and repelled)) her from the start, and, yes, its locked, and yes, she has a key, a key he’s probably forgotten she still has, or maybe not, but she doesn’t enter. The exit from this nightmare right in front of her, but she doesn’t enter, doesn’t open this final door, but waits, and waits….for what?

Is it like delaying an orgasm, an orgasm that will shatter you, render you defenseless, in other words, to the annihilation of love?

((Much later, this delay will haunt her with ‘what-ifs.’ What-if, for instance, she had opened the door at the moment just described? Would things have worked out differently? Would she have been in time, would she be laughing on the Cape right now, the sea wind in her hair, etc? But we jump-cut ahead of ourselves…))

Let us say, and say it simply, that she delays the inevitable, slipping surreptitiously into the room next door, a dingy room of yellow walls, small, cramped, as in old rooming houses of the 1950s, newspapers stacked and tied with rough hemp in bundles on the floor, a small writer’s desk pushed beneath the only window, the view, over an adjacent tarred rooftop, of a trapezoid of street approximately the length of her thumb and forefinger stretched to their limit.

A stained coffee mug, discarded pens, several pages of someone else’s manuscript tuned over to the blank side, the topmost sheet no longer blank, but covered with lines that seem to be sliding rightward off the very paper. A letter it seems, a letter begun and abandoned and begun again, aborted and reconceived so many times it doesn’t carry a salutation or any preamble, but begins, as they say, in medias res, like a Greek tragedy.

Xie doesn’t need to read it to now the text, indeed, she can’t read it, written as it is in some antediluvian language, a pre-Edenic text that is basically the fossilized imprint of some strange winged creature crashed to earth, not an angel exactly, but not a pterodactyl either, something fallen in the mud, unable to rise, and suffocated: a hieroglyph that died in her heart ((if, perchance, you were to autopsy her post-mortem, remove her heart, and bisect it lengthwise, you would find this archetypal symbol on the chambered cave-walls therein)).

So it is in this room that Xie sits, night after night, a cheap pen in her hand, poised, the tip long dried-out, no words left, a fugitive, writing an apologia for those who accept no apologies, a confession for those who do not forgive, and explanation for those who cannot help but misunderstand.

Her text submitted to translators and censors, given to actors and interpreters and psychologists and linguists, to policemen and critics, submitted to a jury of her peers…what is left but to acknowledge a confession no longer bearing any resemblance to our actual crimes? What is left but to sign our names, our names that will adorn our tombs and tell nothing of ourselves, nothing but that we were born, we died, and can deny our guilt no longer?

We admit, in other words, everything.

There is no sound from the room next door. Is he out? Asleep? Can she put off breaking the silence any longer, answering the question, following the trail of blood? Can she put off answering the door? What door?

The door she hid behind, but behind which they’ve found her all the same, as she knew they must.

“Open up, I know you’re in there!” they shout with authority.

It’s here.

The pounding on the door, the destiny that must be met, the lover you’ve been awaiting to with held breath.

The one who you know beforehand will rend you limb from limb.