Books
Lying on the desk is a rectangular portal. Its size bears no relation to its weight. Open its front doors and you’ll find only more, one after another in a mesmerizing parade until you open the final door and find yourself right back where you started, but not quite.
Each one offers a different journey.
Enter one, and you might realize you are actually a highly trained government assassin with a particularly nasty case of amnesia, running for your life from an unknown entity hell-bent on killing you, slowly picking up the pieces of your past, using everything at your disposal to survive the most dangerous game on a global scale.
In another, you might find yourself tearing down the highway towards Vegas in a red convertible with the top down driven by two maniacs seriously twisted on all manner of drugs an alcohol, babbling incoherently about their search for the American Dream, clearly deranged yet still making some kind of weird sense.
Or maybe you’ll enter one and find you’re a teenage girl detective who solves mysteries both large and small using a stunning combination of observation, logic, and sheer dumb luck.
You don’t have to stay, but if you open the right one you might not want to leave. They are all mazes, but the way is clear. Just keep going forward. Eventually, it will all make sense, though it might not. Some are simpler than others. You may be in there for days, so prepare accordingly.
There are places where you can find thousands of them – travel agencies where the only necessary payment is a card and a promise. They provide a seemingly endless selection of gateways catered to your every need. If you want to learn, to love, to see life through the eyes of someone entirely foreign, or to meet someone you feel like you’ve known for your entire life, you need only ask.
Some smell of age, and pride, like the haughty aristocrats that populate their corridors. Others smell of virginity, something akin to the smell that must have wafted up to Meriwether and William as they stood on the banks of the Mississippi; the smell of opportunity, raw potential, the seductive, savage musk of the untamed wilderness.
They traffic in words that melt in the mind of those with a certain skill, reforming as images, both fantastic and mundane. They are little bits of life and memory, dried, flattened, and bound together. Tattooed with markings whose meaning may be lost in a thousand years, they wait, blind, deaf, and dumb, for the warmth of an inquisitive hand to stroke their spine and tease out their secrets.
When I was a boy, I was forced to take these trips by my mother, who told me that one day I would thank her. I resisted. I preferred the simple spectacle of stories told in light and sound.
However, it was not long before I went off on strange trips and wild fantasies on my own. Where I had once been forced to spend at least twenty minutes, I was now lost for hours. I discovered that bed sheets are not just for warmth. I hoarded flash lights and batteries, afraid that the lights might die out right before I entered the next door. I became a statue on the couch and very good at eating cereal without looking at the spoon.
Friends would tell me about their missing belongings and I would ask them if they had considered calling Encyclopedia Brown. They would tell me about the strange man in their neighborhood and I would tell them I knew two brothers, Frank and Joe, who could certainly look into it – they had experience in these matters. They would tell me about their favorite animal and I would tell them I had Friends who could become those animals, as long as they were able to touch them just once. They would tell me bout their explorations in the woods behind their house and I would tell them about the incredible journey through forests and fields, over rivers and mountains, undertaken in the effort the destroy an evil, magic artifact.
I was lucky enough to live right next to one of those travel agencies. Now, I could navigate its aisles in my sleep, but the card I have still bears the signature of a little boy who did not quite know what he was getting in to. My taste in journeys has changed, but my needs are still well provided for.
Needs. Sometimes I feel like an addict, using in larger and larger quantities. There was a time when five hundred doors seemed like a lifetime. Now I fly through a thousand in a handful of days and emerge sweating and panting and laughing, wanting more. One day, I’ll overdose, perhaps. They’ll find my body crushed under a mountain of my favorite drug, catch a glimpse of a foot or a hand and tug my lifeless form from a sepulcher of leather, cloth and paper, my face locked into an expression of thoughtless bliss.
Now, it is time to go. I can hear them calling me. They are patient, but I am not. I have been stuck in this place for far too long. I need a vacation.
