To Be Trapped (Short Story)

A man sits cross-legged alone in a white room. There is no identifiable source of light—it seems to come from every direction, placing the man in a sheet-white void. He doesn't know how he wound up in this space, or why he's been placed here, or even who he is, existing as a personification of the emptiness that surrounds him. He's a complementary prop, left to discover his environment for what it is.

He stands and walks forward one step, two steps, three, then four, until his foot hits a barrier he can't see. It's one of four walls, the corners of which the man can't make out. He feels the wall with his hands, a cold, sleek surface with no visible paint streaks or shine, an invisible boundary that keeps him from moving forward.

He looks up to the ceiling, what appears to be a blank sky but is simply a rectangular top meant to cover this space. He walks to his left, one step, two, three, four, five, reaching out with his legs to feel another wall. His leg eventually meets it. He explores once again with his hands.

The silence begins to affect him, a vacuum of sound that allows the man only to hear himself and the machinations within. He notices his heartbeat, steady but growing in frequency. He hears the blood pumping in his ears. A vague curiosity is quickly overcome by fear, which gains speed through his heart. He hears his breathing, out of sync with his heart, the lack of synchronicity enough to cause distress.

The voice inside tells him to keep moving, so he does. He walks to find the next wall, one step, two, three, the maddening internal sounds picking up with even more intensity. The blankness of everything around him becomes more disorienting. He loses his balance. He falls, his hands meeting the cold floor. His heartbeat grows. His breathing speeds up into hyperventilation, more closely resembling his pounding heart.

He crawls toward the wall until he reaches it. He scans along its surface with his sweat-glazed palms, searching for cracks, for a means to escape what is rapidly changing from a canvas to hell. He looks in every direction. What is a room of the simplest variety becomes a maze. Directly to his right, along this third wall, he sees a shadow that calls to him, intensified by the contrast of the blindness in everything else. He crawls, struggling more, the white beginning to reveal a pulsing shade of pink, and then red, and then blue. What look like veins begin to stretch across the increasingly hued walls, projections of the pounding vessels behind his eyes.

The man finds the perfectly round hole with his finger, a centimeter in diameter, and lowers himself to look through, desperately hoping to find a way out instead of a mere peephole. Instead of an exit, he sees another room about a hundred feet away, one containing a group of people who don't know this man's suffering. They sit in a dimly lit room that's somehow shadowed in transparent walls that isolate them from the empty whiteness, two hanging incandescent bulbs producing nuances of soothing light that help remove the man from the purity around him. The silence is still there, and the man imagines voices as the group of people in the other room speak and laugh, sitting around a circular table and facing other faces.

The man pounds on the wall with his fists, producing no audible sound as he only hears the same biological functions that are trapping him in this life. He wants to experience those smiles, those laughs, to hear those voices with their comforting variations and soothing intonations. He needs to find a way out of this deceptive box that promises a world of freedom but only keeps him contained within his own senses.

If only he could find some doorway or abstract portal to that other room, to be able to hear his voice intermingle with others' and to volley expressions with something familiar, something human other than himself. Still, the insanity continues to evolve, causing him to retreat further into his reptilian state of mind with its impulsive resistance to logic.

Hopelessness consumes him as he stares at the ceiling and sees a being that projects his agony, hovering in the air with large, gray webbed wings and an eyeless black beak for a face, absent of any of the recognizable features of a man, with a face solely designed to stab. The man lies down, immobile and disoriented beyond any ability to coordinate his limbs.

The torturer descends to the man and the beak moves up, and then brings itself down into the man, whose vision goes entirely black to merge with the impending pain as the two faces collide. The man wants to believe this is death, but it isn't, as the beak retracts, and comes back down for another jab that causes another wave of pain, this time lingering as a sharp piercing that leaves no inch of his skin untouched.

The man convulses, wishing for the next attack to be the last, ending this brief window of torment so he can become a thoughtless entity like the apathetic space that has enclosed him. In lieu of relief, the third stab brings a pain so intense that it renders him entirely catatonic, as one motion causes a surge of agony that would cause most to slip into unconsciousness. His current hell is that he can't sleep, as much as he would like the ability.

When the torturer moves back to prepare for its fourth strike, it moves at a slower pace, slow enough for the man to gather the strength necessary to move himself back with his mostly limp arms. While death may bring the ultimate release from this pain, it seems death isn't to come, and the man knows this well enough to attempt to escape the grips of his tormentor, and the creature strikes the floor. The beak is the first thing to slip through the floor, followed by the rest of the charcoal feathered head, and the wrinkled wings that become petrified as if in shock at its defeat, and it begins a permanent descent into the whiteness below.

Watching as the creature turns from a fear-inducing beast into a harmless speck in the infinite distance below, the man finds his heart has calmed, his eyes free of the veins that pulsed, and his breathing is now set at an easy tempo. Tears flow down his face, a sensation of warm wetness that allows him to remember that he has skin on his cheeks. He feels his skin, wiping the tears into his cheeks, reminded that he's as human and material as the group of people beyond the walls, perhaps even more so.

He looks up at the ceiling again, the feeling of confinement failing to leave him entirely, as he begins to see the veins return across the white, like translucent snakes that attempt to wrap around his eyes. Before he can let these snakes constrict and devour him, a bright blue light begins to pierce through the white, circular and the embodiment of universal calm. It isn't human, but it doesn't need to be.

The light expands in circumference, until it has wiped out the veins that haunted the man's vision. The light remains steady, and a feeling of gravity turns to weightlessness, as the man begins to drift upward, no longer held down by any tormentor or desire for people. He evaporates into nothingness, or everything, any lasting feelings of loneliness or desperation slipping out through his fingertips in yellow syrup that falls behind him. He only hopes he doesn't see his torturer on the way to wherever he's going, but his fear slips out behind him with the rest of his pain.

The white space turns to a black where nothing can be felt, and the two dangling lights in the other room switch off to join the night.