He took a few steps forward, being careful in the pacing. The whole room startled him. When nothing demanded to be seen, to be singled out and broken down, everything was waiting to get into him, and he could feel the weight, the expectations, bearing down on him. The click of his heels echoed along the walls and seemed to taper into a cone of silence ahead. Still, he wasn't curious. He was only startled. He told himself that if he could get himself to calm down, to feel comfortable, he might actually like waiting here. No disturbances, no windows to constantly irk him, to remind him that a world awaited outside, no faces, no eyes looking down upon on... or up at him. However, there still was the room itself—the room that, eventually, contained the means to his peace, the room that he still had to make his peace with first.
He turned to look behind him. The same whiteness. How he'd gotten here, he didn't know. At the back of his mind, this side of the world was dark. There were no lights, nothing to look back to to know that fleeting passage of thought within which he'd have an anchoring memory. Somehow, Fechner also knew that he didn't want to look back, as if he'd thrust himself into this clean space because he might have known something good would come out of this. He turned back to face the emptiness. How could it be so empty? He began to walk, slowly, this way and that, all the while moving his focus from one patch of colourlessness to another, soon discerning a faint gray edge along the floor along which he understood there was a wall. He looked up.
Infinite wall. He looked back down again. The wall had started somewhere, how could it not end somewhere? Perhaps, he thought, it ended somewhere where his sight couldn't go, but even so, something must show, a speck of black discretion. The surface of it was smooth—very smooth—and the gentle touching soon grew to a splayed embrace. The cold texture drew him to flatten his body against it, and he could feel the heat flow out of him, the cold flow into him, the exchange bringing to life a welcome comfort he wanted to languish in for as long as he could. It soon vanished when the equilibrium set in—then, the wall only irritated his fingers. Was it made of metal? Couldn't be. A metal wall wouldn't behave like this. For one, it would ring at the faintest knock, solid or no. This one was clearly satisfied with a "slap" sound.
What about the rest of the room? What was this place? Fechner looked up, against expecting to see an amazing whiteness, perhaps with three faint traces of intersection bordering it like a rectangle. What he saw couldn't be the ceiling, he told himself. Something was wrong with it, like when something is wrong but you can't tell because you're looking at too much of it. It was not the span of whiteness he'd have liked to see, Fechner knew; it was a blend—a seamless blend—of his expectations and his dreams. Maybe if he looked at it from the corner of his eye, the difference would show itself. He pretended to be looking elsewhere. But that wouldn't work, would it? The ceiling still knew it was looking him. More specifically, he knew that the ceiling knew that he was still looking at it.
A kettle!
A water kettle! Somewhere, there was a water kettle, and it was not whistling. In fact, the stove had just been lit, and Fechner knew it had been lit even though he wasn't there. At least, he wasn't in the same room. He was somewhere nearby, behind a (finite) wall. He was waiting for it to whistle... waiting, waiting. After a minute, he suddenly peaked around the corner and looked at it. It was right there, sitting silently. He grumbled something and went for the newspaper instead. Six minutes into the crossword and it began to chime! When he'd known that the kettle had known that he was looking at it, it had done nothing. The moment he stopped pretending and had really not noticed, it was singing!
And just like that, he saw what was wrong with the ceiling: it had a faint tinge of blue in it, as if someone had mixed a small tube of blue pigment in a massive gallon of white and then painted it. The blue was disconcerting. It didn't stay in one place, it darted from one patch to another as he tried to pin it down, to arrest it. Try as he might, it eluded him. It disturbed his field of vision, made him feel as though he was waking slowly out of a lifelong blindness, the blue was sometimes orange, sometimes green, and when he finally thought he trapped it, it flew away like a burning comet. He tried to think of the kettle again, maybe there was something there. He closed his eyes. Or he thought he did.
A kettle was already whistling. Was this the same as that one?
It didn't matter: it was the only kettle he could think of and it was already whistling. He opened his eyes and looked at one small section of the ceiling. Or he thought he did. The dance of the blueness was still there. He couldn't say for sure what happened next, but Fechner knew the moment it happened that it was not the room playing tricks on him but himself... his eyes—his ears—the thousands of questions inside his head? He didn't know, and he'd never find out. His vision clouded over without any warning as a sea of brown brine swept into his head; it was so vivid he could almost feel his tongue burn with the sting. There were small circles of bright orange latched to each other on an invisible string, moving up and down in the fluid, leaving behind some waves...
Of spectral radiation... Flowing like the wombats on the walls, black triangles folded into each other slowly crusting the vertices of his dusted prison, and crease lines began to appear. Where could they come from? Was there an opening somewhere, a whispered permission that his strained-with-silence ears could never have hoped to catch? There must have been! Fechner began to see a sinew of concrete pulsate along the grayed edges of the room, as if an unseen architect was chiseling away at her masterpiece, and the lines soon began to join each other. Something told him that he had been closing his eyes right then. He opened them.
The room reappeared in its droll majesty, like it had been before the horror had descended upon him. Fechner looked around. What was that?! What had caused that madness? Was something sprayed in through a ventilator? He couldn't smell anything. Was it his confusion, had his sensory nerves gone haywire under the tension that had seemed to build up between him and the ceiling. Should he look up again? Was that the right question? He had nothing to lose, anyway. He looked up once more, this time holding his head tightly between his palms, as if he could gate whatever might happen again. This time, he finally understood the mischievous blue.
It was the beach outside his house. The golden sands couldn't be seen anywhere—it was just an expanse of blue water that had, under the gaze of a scorching summer sun, paled in submission. Here and there, its true form showed itself; everywhere else, the million reflected suns blinded the unprepared eye. Fechner remembered the day, too. It was the day he had pushed his sister into the water, the day he had stolen her sweetness and charm away from her, the day she had threatened to tell his father about what he had done. He was so close, he had almost touched her, but the knife slipped just then and scratched her finger. She was bleeding, she was bleeding red first, and then the rust from the knife showed. It was brown, and it tasted salty. It tasted good.
Water! It was water all the time he was looking at, beautiful, magnanimous ocean of love he had sought to imprison, now calling out to him. His legs were suddenly in the water, and the tides were coming in quickly now, engulfing him around his knees, his waist, his torso, his neck, his eyes... he was falling. He fell for hours, for days, he fell. One day, one fine evening, he touched the water, its cold surface doing no harm as it crashed with the surprising bitterness of his touch, the bubbles springing up around him, out of their hiding place behind his head, behind his arms and legs, surrounded him, taunted him, wanted him to come after them, after the pockets of air he would need. Did he need it? He didn't know. Better yet, he didn't care. He liked falling, slower and slower, but he fell still. A minute passed, and the white room turned fully black, the wombats flying out of the corners and into his eyes.
He saw no more.
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