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As Socrates said—or was it Plato?—I know that I know nothing. This has certainly proven to be true. One foot in there and your world was shattered—or maybe expanded. All I know is that I know nothing. A series of contradictions and improbabilities blew up in your face. The extradimensional, for one, keeps you up at night, relentless pacing that has your wife muttering with increasing desperation, “Phil, come back to bed.”
So you do, sleepless like a kid the night before a trip to Disneyland. Anxious and excited by the wonders beyond the clip of an invisible doorframe.
The hazmat suit is deceptively comfortable, you’ve learned: a cocoon of yellow, breathable in the right spots. You traipse through the wallpapered labyrinth with those big boots like a hiker in the woods. Leave no trace. Leave things better than you’ve found them. Beyond the spiteful eye of the cameras you helped set up, you run. Careless, like a little kid, you soak in the wonders that exist in the intangible space just past your reality. Here is where the furniture piles become a laundry room. Here are the shallow pools of water Async has warned you against standing in. Here is the ever-repeating antique hutch—stretched like taffy across thirty feet.
Among your colleagues, the rooms are experiments in scientific rigor. That is, until they see themselves in the rooms. Meredith quit when she saw her mother, her eyes deadened and replicated to a half-dozen, her body merged with a sofa. Charles maintained his role as project coordinator, but new hires are warned not to speak to him about the physical manifestation of his childhood fear: a diving board perched nearly twelve stories high above a murky Olympic-sized pool.
But for you, you’ve lovingly tended to your memories. Turn left and you’ll see the street you grew up on. Turn right and you see the hospital room your child was born in. To revisit these moments, replicated and split, is a comfort—a garden you foster. Past Async’s surveillance, you slip your hand from the glove and study the siding of the houses and the repeated tiling of the floors. Even if some of the details come out strange, objects defying the logic of the physical, it feels right.
Everything you remember is here. Everything you know has been obliterated. You trail the weighty paisley curtains of your grandma’s room. Maybe you’re mistaken, but it smells the way you remember, like perfume violet. A colleague finds you there, knees on the carpet, and reprimands you for taking your gloves off. “We don’t know what’s in the air,” he says. “Next room.” Silently, you wrap your cables and follow.
Tossing and turning keeps your wife irritated. She takes your face in her hands in bed, her fingers running over your greying stubble, and asks what could possibly be wrong. If you told her, you’d be locked up, never to return.
“We’ve discovered something,” you tell her as she removes your wire-rimmed glasses. “It’s far too dense to explain. I—I… I wish I could show you…”
She relaxes, snuggling you closer. “I thought you were working on MRI machines.”
“What we’re doing is… it’s beautiful. It’s…” You blink a few times, shake your head rapidly. Hard reset. Softly, you reason, “Have you ever wanted to revisit your old memories?”
Yawns. “Tell me in the morning, Phil.”
***
Desk duty days should be the worst, but you have a good attitude about them. Sifting through tapes, feeling the gentle thud of plastic-on-plastic, you create your maps and in turn, design a route for the next excursion. This is your job now, as the director of this specific Async Research project. Your territory mostly consists of what your team calls the “furniture store.” Alexi has everything past 14D, what he calls “the cubicles,” and Broderick’s laid claim to the cottages and the auditorium. Your skin crawls when you remember the breathing over there.
You shuffle in a tape and wrap your hands around the hot ceramic coffee mug. Business as usual. To your left, the TV. To your right, the monitor where you digitally map the rooms, scrap paper, and a mechanical pencil.
Flickering through the security cam footage, you fast forward the caveman garbling his 55 greetings (not your idea, it was Leo’s, handsome bastard). Then you see movement.
It’s not the jagged lifeform, its towering, twist of limbs. Not a humanoid-type entity either—they move funny, jerky and uncanny. It’s a man. Not one of yours—he’s dressed irresponsibly, in a button down and slacks. Dark skin, big eyes. Despite the video’s compression, he has a visibly furrowed expression, both horror and curiosity.
Next tape. He climbs through a narrow passageway, high up on the wall.
Next tape. He follows the snaking wires to Async’s surveillance setup.
Next tape. He knocks on the stop sign.
Next tape. He gets closer to the camera and rolls up his sleeves. Big smile. Bewildered, you smile too, touching your face. As if he could see you.
You work late, come home to a reheated meal. Your wife asks, “What were you trying to explain to me, last night?”
“Another time.”
You volunteer desk duty again to see where you could find him. Written in front of you are timecodes for each tape—here’s where he climbs the slanted room. Here’s where he finds the Christmas tree. Here’s where he trails his hand along the branch of hallways, looking for an illogical entrance or exit. Sometimes his dialogue echoes: “Get it right, get it right, Clark.” Talking to himself like a child playing pretend.
Next tape. Clark begins to sleep there, curled like a cat into a tangled pile of clothing. Because he thinks he’s alone, Clark takes his pants off in that one. It makes your stomach flip-flop, the familiar rush to your head. You are not alone. There are cameras watching you. You cannot take your pants off for this. Bask in the glow of the monitor.
Next tape. He’s been there for at least three days. He bathes in one of the pools. Clark sings. An oldie, a ballad, a crooner. Voice resonant, melody echoing off the tile. Singing in the shower. Losing his mind. At this point, Clark could be doing this to torture you, your hands shaking the grey mouse to replay his song.
At home: “Honey, what’s that song that goes like…?” You trail off into a melody, humming where the lyrics weren’t distinct to you.
“Sinatra?”
“No… I don’t think so.”
You jerk off in the shower and feel shameful immediately after.
Running her hands through your greying hair, your wife asks you: “What is going on in that head?” On a stuttering breath, you mutter you don’t know. Your fascination has turned sour, bile in your stomach. All I know is that I know nothing.
Some family time will do you good. Your kid doesn’t want to go out, so he ropes you into watching The NeverEnding Story on TV. You’ve seen the movie before, but reruns of movies like this are never how you remember them to be. You make the popcorn. Watch as the bag sputters and expands, bigger on the inside than it seems on the outside. The split bag pours buttery hued kernels into the family’s mixing bowls.
Focus, Phil.
Inhale, then exhale twice as long.
“Dad?”
“Popcorn is ready!” Pasting on a smile, you turn back toward your family.
And you see Clark on your TV.
It’s unmistakably your Clark. He’s dressed like a pirate—a shitty one—in an ad for a furniture store. Cap’n Clark’s Ottoman Empire. Who let this air? From your lips escapes, “Oh my god.”
You blink rapidly. Wake up in 1, 2, 3. You’re still here. You’re still you. You’re not dreaming.
“That’s pretty lame,” your kid comments.
“Commercials try to be funny sometimes,” you cover. You walk back to the kitchen to jot down the phone number. When you call it later, no one answers.
***
Async’s maps are piling up, thanks to Clark alone. Your colleagues get sent to the cratering abyss or to observe the light fixtures for hours, and they leave you alone on the keys. In a passing thought, you worry that you’ve gotten yourself in trouble somehow—that the complex has granted your team the superphysical ability to see how Clark inhabits your mind. Rotate the dapper man, see how his beard grows, his eyes light up.
Your colleagues come back one day defeated. They dump the tapes on your desk and drag their feet.
“What happened?” you ask. They shake their heads. Tell you to go home for the day.
Among the tapes on your desk is a gruesome video of junior project manager Robinson’s death. Robinson, with his slight lisp and his good spirits, is mauled to death by long arms, a giant’s body trailing offscreen. It’s not the byzantine monster you’ve all grown to recognize. Something different. The videographer—Donnelly, perhaps?—runs to get the wide shot, for science. In the broader landscape you see clearly:
Captain Clark.
Or something like him. A nearly ten-foot tall grotesque, exaggerated features in a way that makes you think Clark must be thinking unkindly about himself. Captain Clark’s eyes are lopsided and constantly quizzical. You count five nostrils on an exaggeration of a nose you thought to be regal.
Captain Clark limps quickly with his peg leg, as if daring your team to edge closer to him. The marionette-like hands tear Robinson’s spine in half. Viscera splatters on the sea of yellow hazmat visors. Someone yells “RUN!”
In a meeting about this particular tape, you wonder if your Clark knows about his deranged twin. Zoned out, you plot. The team uses your diligent work to map a route. Excavate four or five cavemen from storage, set them in the newly-discovered mirror of the Ottoman Empire.
And if you could just camp out in Cap’n Clark’s Ottoman Empire, if you could just wait for Clark—the real one—and warn him—
Nothing in your lifetime means more than this.
It takes a week, maybe more, to plot. You make another pot of coffee at the lab. You brief the juniors on a late meeting, tell them you’re going to be with them yourself. “You’ve nothing to fear,” you tell them, adjusting your glasses. Half of a lie.
The first excursion. No sign of Clark. In the furniture store's doppelgänger, your team spends an hour assembling the cavemen, the wires, gas canisters. You check entrances and exits. Pull on the glass doors and find they’re locked. Peel back the cardboard and, ephemeral, it decomposes in gloved hands. Smashing your faceplate against the glass, you see outside an empty parking lot, the suggestion of a strip mall at your periphery.
Pull again. Maybe next time. Maybe later, the team can break it. Some instinct tells you to run—to explore the strip mall parking lot. Ask your mom to visit stores you’ve never noticed before. Feel the discount polyester blends as you hide in racks of women’s clothing. Take a mint wrapped in thin plastic from the bank. You wonder: what do mints taste like here?
When you return to the offices, Dustin tells you that you look disappointed. You wipe the ambiguity off your face.
“Not at all, that was a great excursion.”
Once everyone has left for the night, you don your suit and slip back into the complex.
Retrace your steps. Follow printed dot-matrix maps. You know you are being watched. You know you can lose your job at Async. As you traverse the yellowed labyrinth you make up a story: you dropped something. You lost your wedding ring. You forgot the cardboard sample. You are careful not to trip the wires, to trigger the smoke.
You camp out on one of the beds in the facsimile of the Ottoman Empire—and, as you remember, all empires must fall. The mattress is cheap foam; your hands indent the shape. Remove your gloves and you nearly sink through, fingernails scraping inward. Withdrawing, you wipe the residue off your fingers.
No action. An hour passes on your watch, but you’re not sure if you can even trust time here.
Plan B: You haul the biggest chair you can carry and smash it against the glass entrance. One crack. Two. Shatter. Childish laughter escapes your mouth, fogs your visor. It was that easy.
Headlights. Jolted, you flinch before you realize the cars are stationary, merged with the ground. Inside them, no drivers, but a plethora of stereo systems. What song would you hear if you tuned in? Maybe something from your youth. Don't talk, put your head on my shoulder. Maybe the same one Clark sang—with lyrics slowed down, misremembered mondegreens.
Squinting, your eyes trail upwards. There is a ceiling, tiled like all the rest. Below you, beige concrete. Reaching up to adjust your glasses, you forget the helmet on your face and your fingers collide with plastic. Deep breath and…
Helmet off. You wait to choke on the atmosphere. You don’t.
Pulling a pen from your hazmat pocket, you mark up the map, listing the locations in the strip mall. From left to right: A dentist’s office, bright reception area inside with desk chairs in triplicate. A boarded-up clothing store and some shopping carts sinking into concrete. You tug on them: nothing. Plasticine leaves on the trees, California evergreen as they plunge into the ground, bordering the Ottoman Empire. And the bank. The one unlocked door. Wooden, glitched-out desks and buzzing lights. You take a mint. It disintegrates in your mouth, tasting like a memory.
In the corner of your eye:
Movement.
You freeze, just outside the bank’s door. Sound coming from the furniture store. A distinctive deep voice: “It’s broken. For goodness’ sake, can’t a man maintain his dignity?”
Pause.
“I know, but I’m not sure I’m going back there. What’s out there for me? No wife, no home. Even Mary thinks I’m a quack—and! Look at her bestseller, a quack herself.” Then, theatrically, “The Windows Within only go deeper!”
Tentative shuffle of your boots on concrete. The furniture store glimmers in the frame of a broken window, grids of metal like braces. The men inside, Clark and his Captain, squabble in some telekinetic way. The lovely and the abstract.
Clark mourns, “It’s hopeless…” His words taper as he turns his head toward the source of his lament. “Excuse me.”
Leaving the Captain behind, Clark takes one step, then two, into the parking lot. In the headlights, he is radiant. Shielding his eyes as they adjust. His shirt unbuttoned to the top of his undershirt, his beard somehow shorn short. Eyebrows, drawn downward as he strides forward in disbelief. And in his fist, hand-drawn maps. Possibly more detailed than yours.
You can barely contain your excitement. Exhale a shaky breath. The stale air of the shopping center and the mint subsume your mouth and nose. 3, 2, 1. Wake up, Phil.
“It’s you.”
Everywhere, doors are opening.