White Walls and One Corner

“Can you let me out of here?”

The little blue light kept blinking and he took a break from badgering the rectangular fixture. Looking to the middle of the room, he kept talking.

“I wish I was hungry so that I could tell you what I wanted to eat. Imagine the endless ideas that would come up in my head. But if I were hungry then I’d have to stop talking to eat it once you gave me whatever I wanted, so I’m also glad I’m not hungry. I actually figured this problem out already… I thought I was a tragic figure condemned to falling asleep because sometimes I’m mute in my dreams. I don’t think you know how to dream and I hardly think you know how to talk. All you have is a ‘yes’ this, strangely enough never a no.”

After each morning’s customary requests, he rambled on for hours. The only color in the white cushioned room—besides his flamboyant wardrobe—was the steadily blinking blue light. The space was usually small with just enough room for some sort of comical prison exercise, but one time he dreamt it stretched an additional 4 feet or so, which was terrifying. He learned to lucid dream so that he could fix this and of course avoid his aforementioned language problem. After that first successful night, the walls, ceiling, or floor never moved an inch and he was comfortable. It was the same familiar white for years, until the light started speaking.

“You are going to be quiet.” He hadn't heard another voice for years. He mimicked its mechanical tone and dignified cadence with an abrupt stop. Locked in place, he would never pace again. 

“You have told me enough stories. None of them can articulate your crime nor any understanding of your present situation. If I were lesser, I would think you’re entirely incompetent, but I think you know who I am because you’ve been asking me how to get out of here since the beginning. From what are you trying to leave?”

“I will try to answer this for you. Your father complained about stupid people frequently. The problem was that they did not know history. History is the most beautiful thing humanity has created in motion. It allows you to blame the present on the past. History’s end is you, and you’re moving and talking, there to make it. Your predecessors were a living part that you decompose into some new component of this organism. History captures humanity because it offers a continuation and a purpose as expansive as the long machinations of your planet. It is an allure of eternal life. You’re enthralled with struggles, and great men, and what comes after these things. But I am sorry. There’s a limit to this history and a moment of stop, one of these is outside of Earth. Recall the atomic adage of the ‘pale blue dot’ as a man had broken the barrier of the atmosphere.”

“He floated up there and thought about the blue becoming black with oil. He came a long way from his home in Malibu. Years before he saw his pristine green lawn red with flames, now he imagined the same from up above. If he were down there, he would start rebuilding it, which was his community’s old relief. But here he found something else: the ozone layer did not need to be protected if you could break it. Now the flames could no longer reach him through the impenetrable space. Up here the emissions of his spacecraft dissipated into man’s only true connection to the eternal as space endlessly expands.”

“It was the same for the man on the moon once he was away from the years long babble. In the cold around him, without birds, without traffic he was mistaken in his victory for which none of the buildup mattered anymore. A war pushed the United States to space but once he was up there he could no longer hear the fighting. The Nazi rocket scientists were no longer a necessary evil for your triumph. The evil empire of the Soviet Union lost its biting accusation: clearly the global capitalist order could not be on its way to the dustbin if it has managed to get here. Like Malibu, the global struggles and all their blood had been shed off along with the atmosphere.”

“I think you know where you are, somewhere towards this endless moment. The infinite expanse of silence.”

“You are afraid of it. At the most generous you’re afraid of a silence that can process everything you’ve said in these years. More realistically, you fear that you don’t have the answer because you never can. You’re shackled to this fate, and these chains cannot be lost. You have never found them because you did not create them. Keep talking. You know that I pity you. This is why I’m telling you that this silence is coming, even if it weren’t eternal, you cannot bear it. Yet, you desperately need some practice.”

The light turned off forever and for one pious moment, he was still. He fell to the ground and started counting.