SMALL WHITE ROOM
By Lauren Jefferson
Copyright 2013 Lauren Jefferson
Cover by Christian Frarey
Follow Lauren via Twitter or visit LAURJEFF WRITES for the author's blog!
It had been Daryl’s first time in a small white room with a small white cot draped in sea-foam green blankets, stained with the ghost of a human being who at one time had experienced their own firsts in a room such as this. He sat on the edge of the bed and fingered loose threads, toddling them to feel the rub of hard cotton, the authenticity of a dire situation. Did you know the official color of dire situations is sea-foam?
A door faced him, tall and thick with the weight of scratch marks and dings, pocked with desperation and the flurried smear of red-as-roses blood. The sight of it made him queasy but being queasy in a small white room will get you nothing. Daryl pushed the nausea into his spleen. Or maybe it was his liver – the heavy thud of its resolution felt more of a spleen-y thing. Daryl didn’t claim to know the difference. A spleen is a spleen if it feels like a spleen.
There were no windows. Daryl looked to the ceiling. No vents. One fluorescent light beamed with the hum of a dozen flies trapped inside it, thumping to their own music, their own sun-addicted drummer. Looking down, the floor was spotless the only way an old, tiled floor can be spotless: grime filled the cracks instead of grout. At the corners of the room the tile lifted and curled in a haunted come-hither.
“This,” Daryl said, “is not good.”
Lovely Daryl - what a Sherlock he was. What a bona fide genius.
He hugged his stomach and noticed a hospital gown covering his body, sloping over his gut and tied taut to the back with a thin string. The crook of his arm sported scabbing grooves from possible intravenous insertions, bruised with dusky purples and coppers. Daryl tried to stand and found his legs incredibly weak with a throbbing, pulsing soreness. With an infant’s cry, he fell back onto the cot like a helpless mass.
“Hello?” Daryl shouted. Nothing answered except for the flies and their harried dancing. “Hello, anyone?” Again, nothing. Daryl suddenly paid exorbitant attention to his own breathing: one breath in, one breath out. Inhale, exhale. Inhale. Hiccup. He wondered if he’d forget how to breathe, a bit like when he used to wonder if he’d forget how to walk mid-stride. Even a bit like when he’d hold a knife in the kitchen and wonder if he’d want to use it inappropriately, psychotically, out of some primitive urge, some pull of the universe. A twisted call of the wild. Sometimes a man in his thoughts told him it would be perfectly okay to use a knife inappropriately – for whatever reason – but the man frightened Daryl and so he’d hesitated in heeding the request.
“My name is Daryl Cobb and I seem to be trapped,” he crowed. He looked around for any sort of missed doorway or contraption that could lead to his escape. Only the deformed tile and unfamiliar stains. “Trapped, indeed. Do I get a phone call? Yes?”
A low tapping noise filtered through the door from far away, like shoes on more tile. The tapping became louder and stopped nearby, perhaps behind Daryl’s door.
A thin metal slot on the door jostled and opened with a jarring vibration, the sound piercing Daryl’s ears like the screeching whine of a feral cat. A hand sheathed by a pristine white glove entered the room, reaching for and toying with the empty air.
“Hello?” Daryl said.
The hand retracted almost as quickly as it had entered the room and the thin slot slapped closed. Daryl, startled, forced himself up on gelatinous legs and fell toward the door.
“Wait!” he screamed, pounding fists. “I’m trapped! My name is Daryl Cobb!”
The slot creaked and slowly, very slowly opened again. Something rectangular and heavy pushed at it, laborious in its own birth. Pages? Pages, yes.
A book.
It fell through the slot and hit the floor as the slot clapped to a shut again, the person on the other side tap-tapping away. The taps faded to the dull roll of a rubber sole and nothing more and then it was gone.
Daryl snatched the book.
“Pride & Prejudice, by Jane Austen,” Daryl muttered. The book was brand-new, crisp at the edges and tight at the binding. He flipped open to the middle and slid his nose into the crease to take a long drag of print and page. A beautiful musk.
* * *
When you are trapped in a small white room and have nothing but sea-foam sheets on a cot that rickets when you move in your sleep; when you have nothing but a Jane Austen book, yourself and your thoughts to contend with; when you have nothing but nothing at all, you feel as though you might be dying.
Daryl thought so, anyway. The mornings were not without a quick grasp at his neck, a reflex born from the sickening worry that he might be choking. In the afternoon he gathered strength to walk but couldn't go far, panicked in thinking he'd forgotton how to walk. The nights were spent reading and rereading, soaking in Jane, good ole Jane.
The book, now lying in a particularly dusty corner of the room (thrown when Daryl had become overly emotionally entwined) became worn and torn in the last weeks. Its newness, crispness, and strict geometry had given way to grime and thumbed corners, dog-eared memories. The cover had been half-ripped off because Daryl can sometimes muster a mighty temper, and the ink inside had dribbled to the margins after sweaty digits had rubbed the words.
Daryl rocked against a wall, folded in on himself. He scratched at his face. “Chapter Five. ‘Vanity and pride are different things, though the words are often used synonymously. A person may be proud without being vain. Pride relates more to our opinion of ourselves, vanity to what we would have others think of us.’”
The words hung in the air and drifted with a pocket of flying dust up into the panel of light on the ceiling.
Tapping. Tap-tapping. The man with the glove was lurking, perhaps with another gift, another serving of dried fruit shavings. Daryl’s favorite was apple, which arrived in a vacuum-sealed container - a foil tray wrapped in a film. The shavings had a stale, bland sweetness about them, which Daryl secretly enjoyed with a certain salivating lust. Like Pavlov’s dog, Daryl drooled as the thin slot cracked open.
The gloved hand grabbed at the air and escaped again. Daryl slid toward the opening, anticipating his next meal.
The slot opened and out fell a single sock, dirty neon chartreuse – the color of new bananas and unfortunate furniture. Daryl grabbed it and tested it on his foot. Too small. Much too small.
“Precisely three sizes too small,” he mumbled. He flung the sock onto the bed and found the sea-foam and chartreuse combination to be disgusting, so he got up to throw the sock back onto the floor near the door.
Later he tried it on again, this time stretching it to fit half of his foot, then almost three-quarters. He had quite the pair of feet, you know, just huge. He fumbled with the sock for a bit and then fit it over his hand. He pretended it were the man in his thoughts, suddenly nervous.
“Hello?” Daryl ventured.
“How do you do?” the sock responded, quiet with Daryl’s hand miming a functioning mouth.
“I’m doing.”
“Good, good, tell me--” the sock said, “Tell me why you’re here, poor Daryl?”
“I’m not sure,” Daryl responded. “It’s been a long time since I’ve seen the sun. Do you know what it looks like out there? Who the man with the glove is?”
“I can’t say. I don’t have eyes, Daryl.”
“Right, right.” Daryl slumped and his eyes glazed over the room until they found his book on the floor. “You know, I read Pride & Prejudice. I can quote some of it by heart.”
The sock nodded. “It’s a fine book.”
Daryl forced the sock to look at the book. A fly bounced on and off the ripped c
over. “See? All torn-up because I couldn’t get enough. I was never much of a reader till I found myself here. The glove gave me the book and I devoured it and I swear I became a believer.”
“A believer?”
Daryl smiled to himself, dreamy. “Yes, I suppose that’s the right word. A believer. Maybe in books. Maybe in words. I wasn’t much of a reader or a believer before this room.”
The sock frowned. “What will you do if you never get out of here?”
Daryl turned away. “I hadn’t thought much about it. I guess I accepted I’d always stay here. Will you keep me company?”
Sock became solemn. “Of course.”
“Thank you. It really means a lot.”
Sock tried to smile. “Of course.”
* * *
Sock slept at the end of the bed on a swath of white mattress uncovered by the sea-foam blanket so as to not mix unmixable colors; Daryl would shiver under the blanket until his eyes jumped and rolled beneath heavy lids with the onslaught of REM sleep, and this became their nightly ritual. Sock slept very well and Daryl was a bit of a toss-and-turner, but they were excellent bedmates and did not mind each other all that much. Sometimes Daryl would poke Sock with his big toe and ask if he were still alive and Sock would mutter some indecipherable thing and it would be enough to conclude everything was alright, just fine and dandy.
Daryl awoke to the sound of a new gift sitting pretty at the foot of the door. The glove must’ve arrived earlier and silently so as to not disturb its guests.
Daryl grumbled in half-sleep and put Sock over his hand.
“What’s going on?” Sock asked.
“Glove has another surprise for us.” Daryl scampered to the container, a plastic thing with a blue lid. A slice of thick meat sat inside it, patiently absorbing its own fumes and a puddle of juices beneath it. “Dinner, looks like. You’re not a vegetarian, are you?”
“Never had a reason to be, no,” Sock replied. “Is it chicken? It looks like raw chicken, Daryl.”
Daryl picked up the container with his other hand. “It’s…”
“Oh my God, Daryl, it’s a tongue.”
“No, can’t be.”
“Look at it. It’s a goddamn tongue.”
Daryl squinted and saw that it was, indeed, a tongue. He promptly threw the container against the opposite wall and watched as it exploded, the pink slab falling out and flopping to the ground, juices splashing the drywall in a wet abstraction.
Daryl used his other hand to feel inside his mouth. His own tongue was still there. He chomped on it to make sure - blood squirted against his cheeks and coated his molars in a thick bitterness. “It’s not mine.”
Sock nodded. “Glove is an oddball, it seems. What’s he trying to say, huh? What’s this for?”
Daryl tiptoed to the tongue, now on its side and slobbering against the wall. “This all seems a little… tongue in cheek? Eh?”
Silence.
Daryl shrugged and slipped off Sock so they could return to bed. His stomach churned with the growl of starvation. “Excuse me, Sock,” he whispered. Daryl climbed off the bed and found the book still in the corner, fat fly still bouncing off it. With a surprising quickness, Daryl smashed the fly dead in an instant and sucked it down before he had a chance to reconsider. His stomach growled again and he hopped into bed, cheeks burning and forehead sweating. Sock seemed to pretend nothing had happened.
“Quote me something, Daryl,” Sock whispered from the end of the bed.
Daryl stared at the ceiling and cleared his throat, pounding his chest as if the fly had not gone down completely. “Chapter twenty. ‘Nobody can tell what I suffer! But it is always so. Those who do not complain are never pitied.’”
Daryl let the words linger before he drifted into a dreamscape.
* * *
“Daryl, wake up, we’ve got another surprise.”
Daryl rubbed the sleepy stupor away from his eyes and shot up in bed. He slipped Sock on and squinted, momentarily forgetting the door’s exact location.
A small object had been haphazardly thrown into the room. Glove was not comfortable showing himself these days. He was also hastier in his gifting.
Upon closer inspection, Daryl saw the object was an ugly teddy bear, matted fuzz and missing an eyeball; a stained bow choking its neck. He picked it up and hugged it close and –
BAM!
Gunshot straight into the ceiling, white dust pluming to the ground and sifting into Daryl’s hair and oh my god there’s a gun –
Sock became limp at Daryl’s side. Daryl dropped the bear and heard tap-tapping outside the door and flew to the slot, shaking and sweating. He waited for the slot to open and looked up at the ceiling, into the crater he’d made. Utter blackness, a void filled with more voids.
The tapping stopped and someone giggled. Daryl clawed at the slot but it didn’t budge. His fingernails, now long and ragged, bent down and caught inside the thin outline of the slot, each one tearing into delicate shards. Daryl sucked in a long breath and whistled an exhale. Sock became bloodied with the frenzy, mouth now lipsticked with red.
“Please, I don’t know what you want, please let me out,” Daryl sobbed. He planted his cheek against the door and listened for anything, anything at all.
The slot pressed up against Daryl’s face, trying to open. He grappled with it and reached out for the glove with Sock and felt a sudden swish of air as something landed with a thud against his wrist, then an impossible lightness to his arm. Something punched into his flesh. Daryl screamed out and writhed backward into the bear, which shot again into one of the walls. The gunshot exploded into spider-webbed cracks, thin capillaries, up the length of the wall.
Looking down, Daryl observed that Sock was now only a red stump, blood licking his arm and drooling onto his hospital gown.
He screamed.
Above the stump, a small device with a timer on it had been nudged into his swelling flesh.
Five minutes and fifty-nine seconds. The timer started counting down. Daryl, being our bona fide genius, concluded that this timer probably led to something not so pleasant and so he screamed again, trailing off into a whine.
The pain was simply unbearable.
Five minutes.
Daryl cried into his other arm and tried his very best not to think of the warm dampness staining his body and the floor beneath him. Pride & Prejudice stared at him from across the room and Daryl leaped for it, stump stamping the ground with bloodied circles, dust bunnies grooving into the pulsing muscle and dirtying the white nub of an exposed bone.
Four minutes.
Daryl snatched the book and skimmed over the text, a fine distraction in any other circumstance. You wouldn’t have blamed him, though. He didn’t have much besides the book and the light full of flies.
His eyes wobbled back and forth, following sentences and paragraphs, and they delighted in some things, narrowed at others. He turned a page with his mouth and the edge of the paper sliced the corner of his lips up into his cheek. He screeched but continued reading because Daryl was a determined sort of brute.
Three minutes and thirteen seconds.
Three minutes.
You see, Daryl had suddenly decided that in his last moments, he would make the best of it by honoring his status as a believer, a believer in words, a believer in something tactile and tangible, given to him when previously he had only a cot, a sea-foam blanket, and a slot from which to receive dried apple slices. He had decided to show the glove in a bizarre rebellion that you could cut off Daryl Cobb’s hand and take away his only friend and he would still be a believer in that one thing, that one believable thing.
One minute and ten seconds.
And really, that’s all you can do.
Fifty seconds.
Honestly.
Forty-five.
Daryl dropped the book and scrambled to pick it up again. He noticed he now had a mere thirty seconds left until the supposed Bad
Thing would happen and so he picked a chunk of text and read it aloud for no reason other than to possibly die with the beauty of Jane’s words sitting on his lips:
“Page two-hundred and fifty-seven. ‘I have faults enough but they are not, I hope, of understanding. My temper I dare not vouch for.’” Daryl swallowed. Twenty seconds. “’I cannot forget the follies and vices of others as soon as I ought, nor their offenses against myself. My feelings are not puffed about with every attempt to move them. My temper would perhaps be called resentful. My good opinion, once lost, is lost forever.’”
The timer beeped at zero and Daryl held his breath and felt the weight of the entire universe pressing against his chest and noticed his stump tinged with the fresh blue of decay and that the bear – half exploded - sat upright in the center of the room, the light overhead flickering.
Daryl exhaled and looked at the device and nothing happened at all.
END