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.
