The room turned out to be big, about six by eight meters, with a ceiling close to three meters high. Light streamed from ten fixtures set around the perimeter. A bluish haze, something like dust but not quite dust, drifted through the air. It scattered the glow and created the feeling of being inside a night dream. Yes, that exact sense of space, those exact luminous visions, are what come right before you drift off to sleep. The ephemeral particles caressed my body, flooded me with serotonin, plunged me into oblivion… It had been a long time since anything felt this good.
I turned around and… what was this? Behind me, a wall with no hint of an elevator or a door. I ran my palm over the surface — no seams, no rough patches. A smooth texture that hid every trace of how I’d gotten here.
Fine, so be it! I headed for the far end of the room. There stood a couch covered in a blue sheet. Two pillows lay at the head of it. «I’ll sleep myself sick,» nagged in my head.
I was about to collapse onto it, but felt a tremor through the soles of my feet. Looked around and froze. By the opposite wall, an ornate little table with curved legs had appeared, its surface — it couldn’t be! — groaning under a mountain of food. I blinked, shook my head… a chair grew up out of the floor, thin-legged, with a back and seat trimmed in blue satin. A little later, a bathtub rose out of the floor too, gleaming, sparkling in the light, with foam bubbling over its edge. I didn’t believe it, squeezed my eyes shut… opened them again. Saw a small blue sofa next to the table.
«Well, would you look at that,» I remembered my Grandma Nyura’s saying from way back in childhood, though only the saying itself and her kind look over the rims of her glasses had stuck with me.
I didn’t bother figuring out what, from where, or why. Set aside my childhood memories along with any urge to sleep. Decided to fill my stomach with food first, wash up, freshen up, and then flop down for real.
Reaching the table, I rubbed my grimy palms on my pants and started shoveling fruits and vegetables into my mouth. Didn’t know the names of half the produce, but that didn’t slow me down.
Like a piglet who’d finally reached a trough of slop, I stuffed myself in a couple of minutes until my stomach was drum-tight. Then I washed it all down with the juice of some exotic fruit and sobered up, chased off the buzz of overeating. About time, too. My stomach had ballooned.
Gritting my teeth against the cramping pain, I collapsed onto the sofa and, tossed from side to side by stabbing pains in my gut, finally settled down. My circadian rhythm forced my brain to shut off, and my body went dark along with it.
