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The Corridor

Part I

by Egbert Wikitiki

September 2011

The seemingly eternal blackness gradually shifted to charcoal gray, which eventually faded to an ashy hue, which, following an indeterminate time lightened to a misty, blurry fog-colored gray and stayed that way.  He perceived no colors, no variations such as shading or even shapes for that matter: just the infinity of gray in which he seemed to float. 

Years passed, or perhaps just seconds.  Time, it seemed, had become as meaningless as color and texture.  The only sound he heard was his own steady heartbeat.

The fog enveloping him did not billow or swirl; he detected no eddies or currents.  When he blinked, the nothingness darkened appreciably, so he decided that he wasn’t blind.  It felt like coming out of anesthesia.

That’s what’s going on, he thought with a small measure of relief.  I just had surgery and the anesthesiologist snowed me with too much gas.

So… what was the problem?  People did not undergo surgery without reason.  There had to be something terribly wrong with him, but he couldn’t remember what it could be.

That’s something you’d think I’d remember, he thought with what he thought might be a frown but he couldn’t be sure because his face felt numb, which only reinforced his anesthesia theory.  Maybe I was in a car accident.  Maybe I suffered a concussion with associated memory loss.  That would explain a lot.

He decided to try his voice, so he flexed and contracted what he believed were the appropriate muscles in his face, neck and abdomen and gave it a try, but produced no sound.

Am I lying on a bed or a gurney? he wondered.  He couldn’t feel anything beneath him, nor could he decide which way was down.  He seemed to float without any support in the unbounded fog. 

The faint sound of his steady, strangely rhythmic heartbeat failed to sooth him.  There was something strange about the sound.  What he heard was not the typical lub-dub of a mammalian heartbeat, but an unvarying slow drumming sound.

If that’s my heart that I hear, I’m in deep shit.

The unwavering atmosphere of fog had no odor, no color other than gray, no textures as had the miasmas of his previous experience; it was a featureless nothingness, and it was beginning to bore the hell out of him.

The unceasing rhythmic thudding seemed to grow gradually if barely louder.  Now he recognized the sounds and knew it was no heartbeat.  What he heard were footsteps.  But if they had been steadily approaching him, how could they have gone on for so long without growing significantly in volume?  It made no sense, unless the walker was treading circles around him.

He was sure that things would clarify once he figured out where he was.  The situation would certainly be more manageable once he remembered who he was, too.

The sounds of footsteps suddenly grew in volume and for the first time since regaining consciousness, he saw a form begin to materialize out of the mists before him.  A shady but decidedly human figure loomed out of the fog and stopped about twenty feet from him.  He could not see the man’s face, but judging from the fedora the man wore, he could guess at the figure’s gender.

Then, in a flash, everything resolved around him.  He felt the tug of gravity and felt his bare feet in firm contact with a smooth, slightly yielding surface.  The man before him stood at a slight angle to him and, apparently unaware of his presence, lit a cigarette from a paper match and dropped the rest of the book of matches into the pocket of his beige overcoat.  If not for the fact that he could see the man’s face clearly, he might have guessed that it was Humphrey Bogart returned from the grave, but this guy looked more like Gary Busey transported back in time to the Thirties.

He decided to try his voice again.  He started by clearing his throat, which worked: he not only heard the sound, but also brought up a wad of phlegm that he didn’t know how to dispose of, so he swallowed it and said, “Excuse me….”

The man smoked his butt and stared at apparently nothing.

Clearing his throat again, he tried a different tack: “I wonder if I can ask you a question.”

The man continued to stare off at a nearby wall that had until then gone unnoticed.

He didn’t want to lose his cool while in search of answers.  After all, it became increasingly clear that he was not coming out of anesthesia, for this was nothing like any recovery room he’d ever seen.  And it occurred to him that he had seen a number of recovery rooms in his lifetime.

Well, that’s one puzzle piece recovered, he thought with little relief.

Not wanting to antagonize the stranger, he kept a civil tone and said, “Look, I don’t want to be a bother, but I have no idea where I am.”  He took a few steps toward the man, but some freak of perception seemed to draw the man away from him an equal distance without the man having moved an inch.  He tried it again and moved another five or six feet toward the man, but the man seemed to fade equally into the distance as he did so.

“Whoa…” he said quietly to himself.  “I’m either in the Twilight Zone, or I’m having the wildest hallucination of my life.”

As he spoke the words, he realized that he had experienced hallucinations before, as well.  Yes, in his youth, he had done more than a little experimenting with drugs—but he’d never had any hallucination as vivid and strange as this before.

The man either continued to ignore him or refused to acknowledge him.  For a moment, he considered addressing what he saw standing behind the stranger, then decided that was a bad idea and kept his eyes focused on the man.  The situation was weird enough already without adding that.

“Listen, buddy,” he said, now with agitation leaking into his voice, “maybe you can’t hear me, or maybe you’re ignoring me, but I need some answers or I’m going to lose it.”

The man took another drag off his cigarette and flicked the butt into the air before him.  The smoldering end of the cigarette seemed to tumble through its ark for an unreasonably long time before it finally hit the floor.  A moment later, the floor ate it.

Rage fueled by mounting terror and frustration forced the words out far louder than he intended: “Hey, fuck-face!”

The man finally turned toward him and muttered, “Are you talking to me?”

“No, I was talkin’ to the pink and purple polka dotted elephant next to you!” he snapped loudly. “What’d you think?”

Openly relieved, the other man walked away.  This is when it became obvious that they occupied a circular room with a ceiling of indeterminate height.  He guessed that the room’s diameter was around a hundred feet.  He saw no doors or connecting hallways.  It reminded him of a bullfighting arena, and that thought did nothing to calm him because, if the parallel held, he was either the matador or the bull, and neither option appealed to him.

The man walked directly into the wall, which opened up to envelope him, just as the floor had swallowed the cigarette butt.

Great, who am I going to talk to, now? 

As he saw it, he had no other options, so he walked over to the pink and purple polka dotted elephant.

The beast was smaller than he had expected.  What’s more, it didn’t fall away into the distance as he advanced, as the man had.  The creature was about seven feet high at the shoulder, much smaller than the African elephants he had seen while in Kenya.

Whatta ya know, he thought.  I’ve been to Kenya.

He had seen Asian elephants on TV, of course, and judging from the shape of the ear he saw—which resembled the shape of the country of India—that was what stood before him.  From what he heard, they were gentler than their African cousins were.  He might even be able to coax the animal into allowing him to ride upon it.  Now all he needed was someplace to go.

Up close, the polka dot pattern looked even stranger.  First, the dots were all of different sizes, making the design somewhat dizzying.  Secondly, they were not painted onto the beast as he had previously thought, but appeared to be a natural coloration.  Weirdest of all, the markings had a strange depth to them.  It was like looking at a 3-D poster under black light, psychedelic in a way. 

“Jimmy, Jim and Janis would have loved you back in the day, even if you do symbolize the wrong political party, as far as they’re concerned,” he said quietly, maybe even to the animal.  And he suddenly knew that he had seen all three—Hendrix, Morrison and Joplin—perform live, back in the Sixties, which gave him some idea of his age.  “Damn… I’m old,” he muttered unhappily.

The elephant seemed to look down at him sympathetically, as if disagreeing with a measure of woe.

Not one to anthropomorphize animals, he rolled his eyes at himself and snorted with only a trace of humor.

The sudden sound startled the elephant.  It backed one step away from him, trumpeted loudly and swung at his head with its trunk.

He didn’t have time to back away or duck and the trunk struck squarely against his left ear, dislodging his head from the rest of him.

Consciousness never left him, and as his head rolled along the floor he could now see the high ceiling partially concealed in shadows, then the all-too-near, cold, strangely yielding floor, the high ceiling, the unpleasant floor, ceiling, floor, spinning around—at first at an alarming rate, then more slowly, until his head thudded against the wall where it came to rest.

Amazingly, he felt no pain. 

Shock.  That must be the explanation.

And, by the way, why am I still alive?

Another fledgling memory sprouted like a sick blossom in his mind, opening its diseased petals and dripping stomach-turning images of the French Revolution into his thoughts.  No, he was not old enough to have experienced it first hand, but he suddenly knew that he had read books on the subject, and one of the more disgusting things he suddenly recalled was that, following a stint at the dreaded guillotine, some if not many of the dismembered heads remained alive long enough for the headsman to lift them out of the basket and let them have a good look at their still twitching bodies, just to crystallize reality for the victim.

The position in which his head came to rest was such that he could clearly see his body and the polka-dotted elephant, though at a bizarre angle that gave him a headache, which was pretty much the only kind of pain he could appreciate.  He saw no trail of blood linking his head to the abandoned body and wondered if that was a good thing.

He watched as the elephant slowly ambled about the room with no obvious destination.  The animal seemed to be looking at the single curved wall, as if to avoid eye contact with the man it had killed.

And by the way, why am I still alive?

That was a good question.  Several minutes had to have passed, and he didn’t feel any deader.

And, oddly enough, he felt perfectly calm and relaxed—except for his headache and the fact that he still didn’t know who he was, or where he was.  He should have been at least frightened.  But, with the exception of the headache, he’d never felt better.  Perhaps it was the fact that the body suffers most of the injuries or diseases that life throws at you.  At present, he was not in union with his body, so maybe that explained it.

Still, regardless of his present semi-comfort and state of mind, he knew he had to get his head back onto his body somehow.

Is that possible?

Is a pink-and-purple-polka-dotted elephant possible?

Well… yes.  It can be done.

But a decapitated head returned to its body?  He didn’t think that twentieth century medicine was up to the task.

The whole situation had a feeling of unreality to it, which was easy to understand.  After all, his head and shoulders were separated by twenty feet and he was still alive—after what, three to five minutes?  Furthermore, the room in which his head rested looked completely unfamiliar to him.  Okay, he admitted silently, everything was—for the moment—unfamiliar to him, even his own identity.  He knew for a fact that either a few short minutes or eons ago, he’d been somewhere else, though he hadn’t a clue where that somewhere was.  He was equally certain that he’d known himself intimately in that somewhere, yet now most of those memories were currently lost to him.  But he was absolutely sure that he’d never stepped foot in this room, or any like it, before.  Perhaps “chamber” was a better name for the enclosure. 

Looking across the chamber, he again noted a lack of blood trailing from his current position back to his body.  In fact, the stump where his head used to be did not seem raggedly torn and mutilated, as one might expect.  Even more surprising, the stump was not spurting even a drizzle of blood, nor had it when he first spotted it.  With the head knocked forcefully away, the stump should have spewed torrents of sanguineous fluid all over the room in line with the top of what remained of his body, but the white wall and floor remained unstained.  Not that he wasn’t grateful; although he had had considerable exposure to spilled blood, the sight of it had always sickened him a bit.

Now why would I have so much experience with spilled blood? he thought.  He didn’t feel like an axe murderer, but then again, with his memory—or lack thereof—he had no idea just what it felt like to be an axe murderer.  Because this train of thought led down disturbing rails, he returned his concentration on his surroundings.

Perspectives were all wrong, still or again.  As the psychedelic pachyderm moved away from him, its size seemed to swell somewhat—then it seemed to deflate to about the size of a lab rat.  At times, the ceiling appeared no more than twenty feet up, and then the next time he looked it seemed to have soared into the stratosphere.  The singular wall, floor and ceiling of the chamber were unadorned by decorations or coverings of any kind.  The only thing he saw—other than the curved wall, the polka-dotted elephant and his beheaded body—was a small corridor leading out of the room that he was sure hadn’t been there a few minutes before.

God is my head pounding! he thought.  He closed his eyes and tried to meditate his headache away as he now knew he had done in the past.

By the time his headache dwindled to a tolerable level, the oddball malevolent elephant had made a complete if irregular circuit of the chamber.  Now it was approaching the head.

The man felt no fear.  What was the point?  If not actually dead, a head alone was as good as dead.  If the pachyderm either purposely or accidentally squashed his head in passing, it would undoubtedly be doing him a favor.

The elephant stopped two feet from the head and apologized.

The man wasn’t sure if he’d just had another hallucination, or an acid flashback or something of the like, but he knew that elephants—polka-dotted or not—did not talk.

Still, curious, he strained his eyes upward to watch the elephant’s face and said, “Beg-pardon?”

The massive head of the elephant bowed pitifully.  In a pathetic, tear-choked, decidedly feminine voice, it said, “I’m sorry.  That sound you made scared me and I lost control of myself… again.  I just hate it when that happens.  I didn’t mean to… well… do what I did.”

“Well,” he said, “these things happen.”  He knew it might be the most ludicrous thing he had ever said, considering the circumstances and the fact that, as his head was not attached to the rest of him and he therefore had no lungs with which to force air through his vocal cords, he should not be able to speak at all.  It occurred to him that, as absurd as the situation was, the elephant’s regret might serve as an opportunity for him, so he added, “You can make it up to me by putting my head back onto my body, if you wouldn’t mind.”

 “Why didn’t I think of that?” said the seemingly sentient animal.  With its trunk, the elephant gingerly picked up the head, walked over to the body, and lined it up with the torso.

Feeling the elephant’s prehensile trunk writhe and squeeze against his head was the most peculiar sensation he had ever endured… he thought.  Of course, as he had no clear memories of his past, the experience might not even rate in the top ten bizarre things he had lived through in his long life, but what could possibly feel weirder than having your dismembered head carried around by an elephant?

A few seconds later, Bob was standing up, rubbing his neck.  It wasn’t sore, and he could feel no points of re-attachment: no scars, rough areas or scabs. Raising a hand to his face, he easily flexed all the right fingers—then stopped cold suddenly.

Bob. 

That was him.

Bob.