The Building

This can't be… He closed his eyelids, squeezed hard, and opened them again, wider and wider as his feet completed a full circle. He was in the narrow corridor of an apartment. Bulky drawers and closets clustered the narrow space, and several doors led right and left. He knew this place. But… No, this is impossible! A nauseating dizziness was overcoming him, and he probed his way down to a black leather armchair behind him, yet he sprang up in terror just as he felt the elasticity of the cushion beneath. He then tried to touch the opposite wall, and immediately recoiled. Suddenly, a key started to revolve in the entrance door. His heart turned weak and feeble, and he plummeted right back into the armchair. The door opened, and a young woman in an old-fashioned summer dress briskly entered, followed by a man in a pale-green golf shirt tucked into his jeans.

“And so, the doctor says that he has sustained severe head injury, and that his life is in danger,” the man concluded some conversation.

They spotted him. For a fraction of a second, they stopped dead, and then the woman rushed towards him, her arms wide open.

“My god… Eddie… my little Eddie, how much we missed you! How much we missed you here! Oh my god, it was so long ago that you were a child, our little child… We rushed in as soon as we heard you arrive.” She was hysterical in her happiness as only a mother can be.

“Eddie, my son!” echoed the man, and joined the woman in hugging him. “My god, it was so long ago…”

Ed’s gaze slowly dropped to the floor to his side, where several wooden children’s building blocks were scattered. This… cannot be happening. He felt how his energy was being drained from his body, and he let his consciousness to slowly recede until it was no more, and he was safely out of reach of anyone. When he opened his eyes, the man and the woman were not with him anymore, but he could discern sounds that were coming from the kitchen.

Dizzy with disbelief, he clambered out of the armchair, and immediately tripped on a toddler’s red sandal. He held it up in his hand to examine, then threw it high in the air as if it were a burning coal with a yelp. He pounced on the front door, flung it open, and started scampering down the stairs. Story, after story, after story he feverishly ran down the vaguely lit staircase which didn’t seem to end, stumbling and missing several stairs at a time, manically clasping the railing to keep himself from falling. Finally, after quite some time, he stopped on a black-and-white floor to regain his breath. He stepped close to the black metal railing, and looked up through the narrow gap. Then he looked down. As much as he tried to strain his vision, there seemed to be no end to the stairs neither at the top nor at the bottom. They just went on and on in ever-narrowing loops until they were no longer discernable.

There were four doors on this floor, and a small window. He went to it, slid it open, and peeked out. No stars, no moon, only sheer blackness. It had no shade or form, and nothing in it reflected or emitted light. In a sudden attack of childish panic, he quickly closed shut the window, as if he didn’t want the darkness to get in. Breathing heavily, he leaned against a wall, and let gravity pull his body down to the tiled floor.

What is this place? How did I get here? The old apartment, Mom is healthy… and they are so young! And the staircase, the window… It’s all like some sort of nightmare. That’s it, it’s just a nightmare!

He sprang to his feet and rushed to the window. Sliding it open again, he stood on his toes and drew his head out. The façade of the outer wall was laid out in red brick, and it was stretching down until the two lines defining it joined together in the blackness of the abyss. He looked from side to side. There was nothing else besides the building, only black void stretching to all directions. Rather, it was stretching nowhere in particular, since nothing else existed there. The tall red building stood alone. Panic enveloped him again, and he drew back quickly, slamming shut the window. A door squeaked open.

“Why don’t you come in?” Came the voice of an old woman.

Ed turned around to look at her. Her white hair was collected in a bun, and she had a worn flowery robe on her. It was Ms. Olaffson from downstairs, and she used to invite him over and treat him with all sorts of sweets until she passed away when he was fourteen. Most of all, he cherished her strawberry tea. She smiled craftily at him.

“I heard you coming down the stairs, so I prepared some of that strawberry tea you really like,” she said like he was still a child.

She disappeared inside, as if she knew he was going to follow, and he did. The musty smell of medicine and old age prevailed in her cramped one-bedroom apartment, and the walls were mostly covered with old reddish framed photographs. In the kitchen, the musty smell mixed with the aroma of freshly brewed strawberry tea. He sat down at the small table where a china teapot was giving out sweet white steam. There were also bread, a sliced cucumber on a plate with some cream cheese on the side, a small plate of butter dotted with bread-crumbs and an almost empty jar with strawberry jam on it. She finished washing two teacups, gently placed them on the table and poured the pink steaming drink into them before she sat down. Ed trusted her.

“Where am I?” He pleaded.

“Why, this is my kitchen!” She said cheerily. She sipped from the tea, and frowned. “Hmm, still too hot.”

“No… please, what is this place, this building? How did I get here? How do I leave?” He pleaded in an almost hysterical voice.

She looked at him, and the expression on her face suddenly became serious and sober.

“The doctor said your life is still in danger,” she said.

“What are you talking about? What doctor? How can I get out?”

She sat quietly and continued to look at him with a constant and unwavering gaze. Then she shrugged. Something inside him snapped and started to boil, and he couldn’t sit there any longer. He jumped up from his chair, knocking it to the ground, and stormed out of the apartment.

He descended flight after flight, story after story. At first he was running frantically, then after a while he slowed down to a paced jog, and finally he just walked down the stairs, step after step after step. He would walk until his head spun from going in circles, then he would sit down and put it between his knees until the nausea stopped, and then he would get up and start walking down the stairs again. He dared not look out the window nor down the narrow gap between the flights, for fear that it would be just the same as had been beforehand. He didn’t count for how long he was walking, nor how many hundreds of flights had he descended already. His only wish was that at some point he would reach the ground, whatever it might look like. Finally, exhausted, he stopped and sat down on the stairs. If I look out of the window now, and it would still be the same, then there is no point of me going down the stairs any further. He got up to his sore feet with some painful effort, and slowly paced towards the small window. He opened it and peeked down.
The red slender building went down for as far as he could see, and there was only blackness beneath it and around it. He was defeated, and it no longer scared him. He thought of jumping, but he had a feeling that if he was to jump out the window, then he would just continue falling alongside the building indefinitely. I want to wake up! Please, somebody, I want do wake up!

“I want to wake up!” He yelled from the top of his lungs. “Is anybody there? I want to wake up!!!”

Nobody answered. He hoped that at least somebody would hear him and open the door like it happened last time, but the doors remained shut. He sat down on the floor. Lets see, where was I before I found myself here? I… I can't recall. This is so odd; I have no memory of anything that happened beforehand, yet all these people were somehow taken from my memory… Ms. Olaffson, my parents young. Maybe I’ve lost my mind. Is this how it feels to be insane? Oh my God!! He darted up, Annie, I must find her!. He started pounding on the closest door mindlessly.

“Let me in! I want to talk to Annie! I want to see Annie! Let me in!”

The door opened, and there she stood, in a yellow sleeveless blouse and black pants. Her face was calm but radiant, her bright-green eyes were framed by shoulder-long mahogany hair. Just as he remembered her. She looked at him and didn’t utter a word. He smiled at her, she smiled back, and then he stepped closer and they were holding each other. He felt like the mountain on his shoulders was melting, melting into hot liquid chocolate that slowly flowed through his veins and arteries, filling his entire body with warmth and liveliness.

“I missed you so much,” he barely spoke it.

She didn’t say a word. Instead, she moved aside, and he saw the figure of a man behind her. The liquid chocolate flowing in his body momentarily froze, and then started to boil and bubble out of the pores in his skin. How could I have forgotten? It was Alex. He spotted them together about a week after she told him she wanted to end the relationship. He started to back away from the door. No, this is too much. It was so long ago! He wanted to storm back there, push her aside, and drive his fist through Alex’s nose, but instead he turned around and saw the window, which was still open. Anything is better than staying here. He briskly walked towards it, put both hands on the ledge, and jumped as high as he could, simultaneously pushing himself out the window. Yet the momentum wasn’t sufficient, and he landed halfway out on top of the windowsill. The abyss was silent and fathomless. He looked down along the infinitely tall red brick wall, with its small rectangular windows arranged in evenly spaced intervals, and nausea started to twist and pull on his stomach. It was the nothingness sucking him out into the open. For another second or so his body held the balance on the window ledge, until it slipped out of the building and into the void.

He was falling head first along the brick wall. He passed a window, then another one and another one. As he continued his plummet, the dimly lit windows were going by quicker and quicker on the background of the red wall, until they formed a unified dashed line. There seemed to be no air resistance, and he kept his eyes open without experiencing any discomfort. After a while, the sensation of falling was lost completely, and it appeared to him that he was gliding above a red highway that had a thick meshed yellow separation line, and darkness around him.

He didn’t think of Annie anymore, and had by that time almost forgotten that he was indeed falling along a building. His gaze was directed forward, and all he could see was the straight red highway underneath him, disappearing into an all-encompassing blackness. The sight was soothingly hypnotic. It became colder and colder, and he was calm and serene.

Suddenly, a jolt. The void erupted with electric whiteness, and his body stiffened and locked into a terrible seizure. Then, a release. He tried to breathe but his lungs contracted in seizure. A second later, another jolt. His entire body locked and strained, to the point where he felt his muscles were going to tear into little shreds of meat and every nerve ending in his body sharply pulsated with self-awareness. His ears rang, and he saw blinding bright whiteness although his eyes were tightly shut. As the seizure gave way, the ringing in his ears began to subside. He started to hear voices around him.

“Pulse stabilizing. Eighty-six-by-fifty-three”

“Injecting twenty adrenaline.”

A fire started to spread through his arteries, igniting his chest and forehead in a fever. He still saw the bright whiteness around him, yet it has already lost some of its intensity.

“Pulse ninety-two-by-sixty-five and rising.”

The voices were becoming less and less discernable, and Ed passively listened to the blurred string of sounds around him until he fell asleep from exhaustion.

“I bet you this guy got a good glimpse of heaven,” observed one of the intensive-care nurses as they were wheeling him to the rehabilitation unit.

The trauma ward nurse shook her head.

“Damn crazy drivers,” she said quietly to herself.

The man in the pale-green golf shirt and the woman in the summer dress were silently sitting in front of the small round dining table, three dishes of mashed potatoes and meat cutlets and some vegetables for the side already cold on it.

“He’ll be back,” the man finally uttered and swallowed hard, although his mouth was completely dry.