A short while later, Paul turned another corner and saw a door that resembled the office doors he had seen earlier at the end of the stone corridor. “Thank GOD!” He said as he reached the door and found he could manipulate it.

The door swung open and slammed closed behind him, disappearing and becoming just another nondescript wall matching all the others. This time, though, he found himself not in an endless hallway but in a small office.

A man was sitting behind a desk, wearing a black suit, a black tie, and the whitest white shirt that Paul had ever seen. The man’s face was blank, featureless, and slightly gray.

“Where am I?” Paul asked. “What is this place? And who are you?”

“You are on Earth, high on a mountaintop. You are here to find something that you have lost.”

Paul remembered the box of books, which now seemed irrelevant and from a distant past.

“Yes, I came in looking for some books I bought, but then I got turned around, and I’ve been lost for… a couple of hours, I guess. It seems like forever, though.”

“Yes, your books are here.” The agent gestured beside his desk, where the box sat, although Paul hadn’t noticed when he entered. A few of the books were scattered on the floor.

“Oh, okay. These were books that I bought at the fair earlier, they belong to me. I didn’t take them without permission,” Paul explained as if to justify himself and, in so doing, felt foolish for trying after what he had endured.

The man sat motionless, unblinking as if judging Paul’s sincerity.

He seemed to accept this explanation. Paul reached over to pack up the books that had fallen out, and the man stood up and left the office. As he did, he and the office vanished.

Paul stood in a different office, with a different agent behind the desk, interviewing another person. Paul looked down, and the books on the floor had also disappeared, along with the ones he had added to the box. Utterly disoriented, Paul turned and hastily left the office to find the first agent.

Of course, no one was in the corridor, and the door he had come through was now sealed.

An incapacitating feeling of dread swept over Paul, and he thought, “This must be what hell feels like.”

The thought that Anne and the kids were still in this endless vague labyrinth somewhere brought him to tears. He prayed out loud. “Please! Please tell me she left without me and just went home!”

His prayer was answered, in a way, a short time later.

As he meandered through the shifting corridors with endless locked doors, he occasionally found an open door leading to a false hope.

The door would be open for him to enter, only to find them completely bare, with inexplicable echoes given their size.

Paul thought despairingly tongue-in-cheek, “If this is my hell, my eternal prison, then thank God for small graces that I have something to read at least!”

He quickly dismissed the ridiculous notion.

He found an office furnished tastefully with an L-shaped desk and a soft bright light from the window.

It occurred to him that it was the first “natural” light he had seen in what seemed like a lifetime. The office reminded him of his accountant.

A French press, full of coffee and still steaming, sat on the desk. A computer monitor with a blank background and a solitary icon read “DO NOT DELETE.” Paul sat down and clicked the icon.

A video began to play on the screen.

The video felt like a corporate promotion, professionally done, showing clips of people commuting – travelling, working – just living through day-to-day tasks.

The voiceover said, “People ask to be shown what it would be like to live without the hustle and bustle of life. They ask to be shown what it would be like to live in perfect peace. You have asked for peace and to be delivered from your struggles.”

These words hit Paul hard. He knew why he was here.

He had gotten his wishes. He wished to escape the rat race of life and thought of the festival in the valley with the majestic mountains as a backdrop.

He realized he had been given exactly what he thought he wanted  —  a life of quietude with no distractions .

Now his wish had been granted, and there was no escape from the prison he had created for himself.

With whom could he share these innermost horrors, that he was living someone else’s life and that his dreams had become a nightmare?

His friends would think he was an ungrateful jerk, and he certainly couldn’t share these feelings with Anne.

He felt he had been duped by an evil wish-granting genie that took his fantasy of a happy life and trapped him in some endless maze of boring sameness.

The shininess of the illusion of love and happiness had worn off and left him with a feeling of dread at the seeming meaninglessness of his existence and guilt for feeling this way about his life.

After all, he couldn’t just walk away from a wife and children who loved him, could he?

He awoke the following day feeling hardly more rested than when he had gone to sleep. He went to the washroom and then staggered into the kitchen to start a pot of coffee.

“One of the few joys I have left,” Paul said to himself.

He walked past the kids’ rooms and peeked at them sleeping.

He felt like a fortunate man, and he was. A beautiful “millionaire’s family”  —  a son and a daughter both at an age still cute and hopeful before adolescence.

He sincerely loved his children  and wife —, but couldn’t help feeling a tinge of resentment. As well as he was doing in life, he couldn’t help but wonder “what if” his life had taken a different direction.

These were the things that haunted Paul.

He boiled water and ground the beans fresh for his preferred method of caffeine ingestion: the French press.

“Good coffee should be drunk black, and if you don’t like black coffee, you don’t like coffee. Either that or it’s shit coffee,” he’d often muse, usually more for his entertainment than for others.

As he stood and waited for the coffee grounds to cook, he thought, “So she wants to drag me to yoga camp  —  fine. At least the day looks nice to take in some bald monks in saffron robes.”

These were his favourite moments, being by himself in perfect peace.

No phone ringing or time commitments, no kids bickering or wife chattering. Just an understimulated caffeine junkie, his boiled beans, and the dismal anticipation that his day would be downhill after that first glorious sip.

He was at an age where most of his friends were just like him, fully committed to their families and careers.

Most of his friends now were friends because of this, he had realized.

This was also an age where he still had some single friends, which gave him a depth gauge to plumb just how far their respective lives had diverged.

On the one hand, it was fun to live vicariously through their exploits and dream of his wild days. On the contrary, most single ones wished for what he had. Or, at the very least, used him to gauge what they were hoping to avoid.

The “what if” game was fun but ultimately dissatisfying.

Paul was here now and trying his damnedest to make it work.

Sometimes, he wished for quiet and secretly hoped for a freer, less responsible life. A life where he could be creative instead of productive. To live off the artistic expression he knew he had buried deep within himself but forsaken in pursuing more material reality.

He had planned to get into real estate sales because he thought it would be a way to make a good income while leaving free time for him to work on his passion  —  writing novels. That became a joke that he found increasingly unfunny.

While the intention was good, he liked to muse that “the road to hell is paved” with just such intentions.

The reality of raising a family and the financial merry-go-round left little to no time for him to do anything of his “true calling.” He loved his children and wouldn’t trade them for the world, but deep down, he wished his life was different.

For all that he had, he felt as though something was missing.