This was awkward. Ishmael had not arrived very much earlier than the scheduled time of the initiation ceremony, and so when he entered the waiting room he expected at first a very short wait, and had stood with as much poise as he could muster, unclothed and uncertain in the dark room which direction he should face to meet the door which would open when he was to be summoned.
The room was round and featureless, no corners to give it dimension or direction, no furniture save a low bench which circled the room adjacent to the wall. The light was very dim, but even when Ishmael's eyes adjusted to the dark, all that could be seen was a scuffed tile floor and plaster walls and ceiling sloppily painted a dark burgundy.
After some time standing in the center of the room, with his hands at his sides or clasped behind his back, waiting expectantly to turn toward whichever direction he heard a door open, he at once decided to sit, reasoning that the bench had been built into the room for just that purpose, and it could hardly be considered disrespectful for him to rest his legs during this unexpected delay in starting the proceedings.
He decided to spend some time practicing some yogic breathing techniques that he had learned in an extended education class on relaxation. This might fortify his mental strength, and would probably help to chase away the butterflies in his stomach and the apprehension in his mind. But after some time of this (how much time he could not tell, but it was probably shorter than he imagined), the irritation of the boredom of the process outweighed any stress-relieving benefits is might have had, and he stopped suddenly, and looked around the room again.
Somewhere in the building pipes rattled as a hot tap was turned on or a toilet was flushed, breaking the monotony of a broken ventilation fan which had been whirring in hums of oscillating tone since he first entered, noticeably at first, then blending into the background, but finally reemerging into a headache-provoking annoyance.
He thought maybe he should return to the office and ask the receptionist about the reasons for the delay and how much longer he would be expected to wait. It occurred to him that in his disorientation he had forgotten where the door was through which he had entered. He thought it was somewhere on the left, and began to walk along the wall in that direction, hoping to recognize the outlines of the door, but although he walked along until he was certain he had walked the complete circumference of the room, he saw no sign of it.
He began to walk more slowly, analyzing every defect in the paint and plaster until he recognized one set of irregular drips that he was sure he remembered. He began to wonder if maybe this had been some sort of trick room in which the floor and ceiling had been dropping at an imperceptibly slow rate since he had entered, until the door was above the ceiling and, until another door came alongside the room, he was left with no exit.
This intuition of confinement caused a sting of claustrophobia to rise in a streak of adrenaline just forward of his spine. He choked it back, and decided to put his fear aside and walk along the wall again, pausing to knock at door-spaced intervals in the belief that in this way, if the door still existed in spite of his fantasy, he would have to eventually come across it, even if he couldn't tell by sight, or by the uniform sound of his knocking.
After he knocked at his easily-identifiable paint drip a second time he stopped and returned for a while to the center of the room, but his knocks were not answered by any sounds or by any door, and so he returned to a space on the bench.
"So that's how it is," he said out loud. He was alone and without an exit. What should he do if he had to go to the bathroom? What if he had some sort of medical emergency -- a heart attack or something? He suddenly suspected that there must be a camera on him somewhere so that he could be rescued in just such a circumstance, but in the darkness of the room he could not see anything camera-like near the ceiling. He wondered if, should he become especially fearful or lonely, he could summon someone to the room by simulating a seizure, although, of course, this sort of childish trickery could not even be considered, not here at his initiation.
But the claustrophobic panic started to rise once again, and could not be stopped, until it was all Ishmael could do to sit, feeling his heart pound and his knuckles grip the bench, hoping that his fit was not noticeable on the screen of whomever had been assigned to watch him.
He closed his eyes and tried to slow his breathing, but the more he concentrated on it the more it seemed to come in irregular fits and gasps and the less oxygen he seemed to be getting.
When he opened his eyes again after rethinking the wisdom of trying to gain conscious control of his respiration he was shocked to find that the room seemed smaller than before, the ceiling closer. The difference was subtle enough that he was unsure whether it was sophisticated engineering which had made the room actually shrink, or just a hallucination prompted by his panic attack, but the room certainly appeared to be shorter in height -- he noticed details in the ceiling he had not noticed before -- and in diameter.
He looked closely, his panic for the moment overcome by the clarity of shocked apprehension, but he could detect no movement in the ceiling, floor, or walls, and he noticed no new sounds over the whir of the ventilator motor and the rattling of pipes somewhere in the building.
But although his eyes could detect no movement directly, when he moved his gaze from the ceiling to the wall, the wall seemed closer than before, and when he looked again back at the ceiling, it appeared to have moved down.
But as the clarity of shocked apprehension grew deeper it was again overcome by panic, as Ishmael came to believe that he had been lured here to be killed. The trash compactor scene from Star Wars came to mind, but he had no strong detritus with which to brace the walls, no droids to call and no way to call them if he had. He stood up and reached for the ceiling, and it stopped his fingers before his arms were fully extended. It was no hallucination. The room was collapsing. "Stop!" Ishmael said, very loudly but without yelling. "There'’s a man in here!"
It dawned on him suddenly that maybe this was the initiation, or perhaps even a part of The Game itself, and that he would be judged on his performance, and should certainly make every attempt to keep his wits about him. But there was no reply.
He sat down again and tried to think, but the thoughts were chased out of his head. All he could remember was the format of those infuriating logic puzzles. A man is trapped in a cylindrical room, naked with only a bench at his disposal. The room is shrinking. How does he get out?
Then he remembered that most of those logic puzzles started with a dead body and the goal of finding out how the body had died, and he panicked again, imagining himself pulverized by the very walls, or asphyxiated as the air gave out. He stood up abruptly and knocked his head on the ceiling, then sat down just as abruptly and started to cry.
The blurring of his vision by the tears seemed to give the walls permission to rush in faster, because when he cleared his eyes with his hand and wiped his nose on his arm, the ceiling had moved down to within a few inches of the top of his head, and the wall opposite him was almost close enough to touch. "No!" he screamed and fell to the floor, curling up into a ball so that none of the walls were touching him. There he sobbed without stop, the anguish over his confinement and likely death increased by the memory of his promised honor.
He tried to stand up again, but this only sent his shoulder sharply against the side of the bench, which had moved closer. He felt the sharpness of the scrape, and then cool on the perimeter of the pain where the blood was pooling, but saw nothing through his tears in the shadows under the benches. He was trying to get his knees under himself again when abruptly the room flooded with light and he felt himself grabbed from above by strong arms and pulled upwards.
He wasn't sure what to think. He was blinded by the brightness of the lamps, and was uncertain of where he was -- it felt as though he had been pulled further up than the ceiling would allow. His sight wasn't the only sense overwhelmed with excess sensation; the scents seemed powerful and nauseating, he felt an unearthly chill on his skin, the monotonous white noise of the waiting room had changed to an unfamiliar chaos of tone and gibbering, and he felt his own whimpering and sobbing rise in volume involuntarily in competition until he was wailing.
It was like what he'd heard about near-death experiences -- rising toward the
light, and he wondered if maybe he'd died after all, without hearing the final
crushing blow. But he felt the pain in his shoulder still, and could smell
and even taste the blood and the pain reminded him that he was human, not a
soul released, unless maybe a soul damned. He inhaled with a choke and let
out another scream, looking around vainly to try to find out where he was,
when one of the arms let go of his own and he felt a quick, shocking slap
spreading numbness across his face. One more matching slap and he was quiet
and stood still, most of his weight being held by the other arm.
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