I sank into despair, ended up on a floor deeper than the Mariana Trench. How long I lay dying down there, I don’t remember. A long time. Unbearably long. Wrecked my mind, cried out everything my tear ducts had to give.
I got up, looked around.
A cell, four meters by two. Low ceiling, three walls with no windows, and in place of the fourth, a steel gate with bars like a train axle.
I scratched at the floor with a finger, hard as wood, and sighed: «No tunneling out of here.» Pressed myself to the bars and peered down the corridor, looking for rescue from outside. I couldn’t save myself.
Naive and foolish to count on help from outside, but what else could I do? No more desperate a situation could be dreamed up. I was locked in an empty basement, beneath a sphere towering over the desert. And I wasn’t the Count of Monte Cristo.
When I wandered the sands, despair had visited me too, but there was an illusion of freedom back then. I could go this way, that way, I could lie down and not give a damn about anything. I could move, or not move. I had a choice. Though, in truth, even out there I’d been trapped, in a cage, a big one, with no walls or bars, but a cage all the same.
Yes, the mad world I’d ended up in was a cage in itself. But wandering through it, I hadn’t suffered. I’d been surrounded by incidents, adventures, visions, and, I have to admit, at any moment there was the option to get up and walk away. There was an illusion of choice out there. There’s no such illusion in a cell. Everything’s unambiguous here: sit on the floor and die of thirst, hunger, and misery, and before dying, come to understand that freedom is nothing, a puff of air, a self-deception. An illusion of choice, nothing more. The more options you can imagine, the freer you feel. There are no illusions in a cage. However wild the imagination, it’s doomed to stare at prison walls. My whole previous life, in the grand scheme of things, had been exactly that kind of staring. Only there, the prison walls had cheerful pictures of the outside world pinned to them. Here, the meaning of existence has laid itself bare, and something has to be done about it. End it once and for all?
Blow myself up with the grenade? There it is, in my pocket. But God, how tacky, killing yourself in a damp basement.
Sand crunched, a lock clanked, a door swung open.
— No one speaks the name of God here, and suicide is forbidden. Here, you suffer without a word, — the words came, quiet and ominous, out of nowhere. The voice sounded like a baritone I’d heard many times before. Its owner had a habit of explaining the absurdities happening all around me.
I stepped out of the cell. A narrow passage, rows of cells on either side, low vaulted ceilings.
— Follow me, — something said, and started shuffling away. Chasing off the thought of «how do you follow something you can’t see?», I walked after the sound. We went to the end of the corridor. An open elevator waited there. Following the footsteps, I stepped inside. The elevator doors slid shut.
I looked around and, in four enormous mirrors running floor to ceiling, found my own gaze looking back. Behind that gaze, I was reflected again, full-length, multiplied a million times over from all four sides. There was no one else in the elevator besides me.
The ascent stopped, and a voice sounded in the air:
— Here is the place of your suffering.
The elevator doors flew open. I walked into a large room, filled with bluish light, and stopped. The door closed behind me.
