THE LADDER

There is a boy who lives in a plain white room. He doesn’t understand how it works, but the room provides him with everything he needs to grow up strong. There is no furniture, only a set of blocks printed with letters. He plays with the blocks in between meals and sleep.

Now he is a teenager. He is bored of the room. He resents it for meeting his needs to the bare minimum while providing him with nothing else—only letter-blocks to play with. He hates the room.

His play turns to building. He wonders if he can do something with the blocks to get out of here. There must be somewhere else.

He looks up, and it occurs to him how little time he spends looking up. He examines the ceiling—side to side, then front to back—and notices a single panel in the corner that looks out of place.

He starts building a ladder out of the blocks, which stick to each other as if they have minds of their own. He builds and builds, tries and tries to climb up to the panel, but he can’t reach it. The ladder is never strong enough, never tall enough.

Eventually, he figures it out. Now the ladder is finally strong enough, tall enough for him to reach the out-of-place panel in the ceiling.

He climbs the ladder and gives the panel a tentative push. It gives way slightly. He pushes it harder. It gives way completely.

The ladder isn’t tall enough for him to see past the hole in the ceiling where the panel was, so he gropes around through it and feels a solid floor.

He hoists himself up through the hole, breaking a sweat. He finally stands and looks around. He finds himself in a new room.

“I did it! I fucking did it! Fuck you, stupid ladder!” he exclaims, kicking the ladder away.

The ladder collapses, its structure shattering into the blocks that had composed it.

Feeling satisfied, he takes stock of the new room. It has the same white walls as the last one, but it’s a little bigger. It has a chair for him to sit in and a TV set up in front of the chair. Oh, and a beer, a tobacco pipe, and a matchbook sitting on a table.

“Fuck yes!” he says aloud.

He sits down, takes a swig of beer, lights the pipe, and turns on the TV.

Now he’s a bit older. He’s bored by the TV, and he’s run out of beer and tobacco. He lets his mind wander, imagining the “good old days” when he just played with blocks all the time, the room providing him with everything he needed to survive. He recalls feeling like he would never need anything more.

He wonders if this is all there is to life: watching TV and thinking about the good old days.

He looks up again, but this room’s ceiling is far too high to see clearly. If there were another out-of-place panel in the ceiling, he’d never know, because the ceiling is too high. And there are no blocks up here, or any other materials for building a ladder.

Well, come to think of it, he supposes that he could try to build something from the chair, the table, and the TV. Maybe he can even find a use for the beer glass.

So he puts the chair on top of the table and climbs atop the table-chair mountain. He bends his neck to look as high as he can and sees nothing. After a while, his neck begins to ache, so he decides to rest. Might as well sit and watch some TV.

He begins to get bored of the TV and decides there must be another room to find. He decides to take the looking more seriously. For some time, this is his routine: climb the table-chair mountain, check the ceiling, come back down to watch TV, sleep.

Now it occurs to him how much time he spends looking up, never finding anything. He starts to feel a little freaked out at the thought that he might never find anything. But he keeps going up the mountain anyway, even when his neck hurts. This helps with the guilt that creeps in when he watches too much TV.

One day, he goes up the table-chair mountain in a bad mood: his neck hurts, and he’d rather stay on the floor and watch TV. He knows he’s not feeling good, so he decides he will end the looking early and allow himself some extra TV time.

So he climbs onto the table, then onto the chair, and does his typical visual sweep of the walls and ceiling—side to side, then front to back—his eyes darting a bit more quickly than usual. Just as he’s about to excuse himself for the day, something catches his eye.

High up on the wall—far higher than the panel that led him to this room—there’s a door, seemingly impossible to reach. He feels all of a sudden like he is full of air.

Now he’s a little older. The looking turns to escaping. He dedicates himself to assembling everything in the room—the chair, the table, the TV, even the beer glass and pipe—in different combinations, trying to build a ladder.

He tries and tries, but none of his makeshift ladders work. Nothing sticks together like the blocks did in the other room. He’s going to need a new strategy.

He retreats back to the TV, feeling hopeless. He watches it for a while, feeling sorry for himself.

Suddenly and without warning, the TV screen catches the light in such a way that he sees the TV for what it is: a sheet of glass supported by a plastic exoskeleton.

He gets up from the floor—he’d converted the chair into ladder rungs—walks over to the TV, and inspects it closely. He notices that the picture is made up of lots and lots of tiny pixels. He looks more closely and watches a single pixel as it oscillates between three colors. Is this what he’d been watching all along?

Without thinking, he slams his fist against the TV screen, and shards of glass scatter everywhere. It reminds him of the ladder shattering on the floor of the previous room, but it feels different this time.

He sweeps the glass away from the broken TV and sits in front of it, staring at the shattered screen as if in a trance. The broken pieces of glass catch the light and create a kaleidoscope more beautiful, more colorful, than anything he’d seen on the screen.

He imagines what he might do with the glass, including some violent possibilities that frighten him. Mostly, he wonders if he can use it constructively—maybe with the plastic exoskeleton—to climb to that door so high above. But none of the ideas seem workable; there just isn’t enough raw material for a ladder.

He recalls something he once saw on TV: maybe he could use shards of glass to sort of stab-crawl his way up the wall.

Slowly, he picks up one of the bigger shards and runs his finger along its edge. A single, shining bead of blood materializes at his fingertip. He stares at it for a moment.

He grasps the shard of glass and winces in pain. His hand begins to bleed. He walks over to the wall beneath the door and presses the sharp edge of the shard into it. The wall gives way in a strangely perfect manner: not so hard that it breaks the glass, nor so soft that the glass cuts uselessly through. He wiggles the shard back out and looks down at his bloody hand. Is reaching the door worth this?

He weighs his options. He’s already destroyed the TV and disassembled the furniture, so he can either suck it up and stab-crawl or jump back down to the first room and go back to his blocks, back to the good old days.

He decides that the stab-crawling will likely hurt less than falling back down, and the thought of what might lie beyond that door motivates him to act. This room had a TV and a place to sit, and at one point beer and tobacco, which kept him happy for a long time. Surely the next place will be even better.

So he begins the stab-crawl to the third room. He shouts in agony with every thrust of the glass, cutting his palms deeper with every move. He grunts, hoisting himself higher, swinging his body upward, stabbing higher and higher.

Eventually, he reaches the door, which is slightly ajar. With one final swing of his body, he hurls himself through the doorway, landing on a floor that crinkles and crunches under him.

The room is dark—completely dark—and he can’t see a thing.

“Hello?” he says, his voice amplifying into a cavernous echo, as though the room extends into infinity. He’s a bloody mess, exhausted from the climb, and was hoping to find food or water or comfort at the top. Nevertheless, he’s relieved to be in a new place.

He begins feeling his way around, relying on touch and sound. He encounters textures he can’t explain, surfaces he never imagined possible, things that give way with the lightest touch, and things that seem to make him give way. He wonders if his slippery, blood-soaked hands are deceiving him, but he can’t shake the feeling that he’s in a different world altogether. Even the echoing sounds of his movement feel alien.

He recalls the strange texture of the wall in the previous room, how it was so perfectly just-right that he managed to stab-crawl up it. He recalls the way the letter-blocks stuck to each other as if by design, allowing him to build a ladder.

After some crawling, he finds a texture he does recognize, even with his bloodied hands. The familiarity jolts him out of his childlike fascination. He is struck for the first time by the novelty of his surroundings. This is a book of matches, his hands tell him. All those uncanny textures were real; it wasn’t just his hands playing tricks on him.

“I can light a match and see what the fuck is going on,” he whispers, his words echoing faintly. He is terrified. The dark had felt so permanent that he wasn’t expecting to be given the means to see his surroundings. Now that light is an option, he fears it more than the dark. But he can’t crawl around blindly forever.

Unable to resist, he lights a match, squinting as his eyes search for anything comprehensible. His nostrils twitch at the smell of burning. He can see, but nothing looks familiar or even decipherable. It doesn’t look like a room at all. It’s impossible.

Before he found the matches, when his hands were his primary source of information, this new world wasn’t so alarming. But his eyes, being closer to his brain, can’t handle the novelty.

He drops the match, which keeps burning on the floor. The fire catches and spreads, but it doesn’t illuminate the space as the match had. Fire without light. The flames are the only thing he can see in a sea of darkness, dismembered from their apparent fuel source.

Soon, flames take up his entire field of vision, stretching for what looks like miles in every direction.

It occurs to him that there’s no escape from this one. This is it. He stands for the first time since entering the room, trying to avoid the flames, but they circle around him, slowly closing in.

In the ring of flames, he bumps into something. He gropes around in the paradoxical darkness, and his hands tell him that this is the very door that brought him here. It stands in the middle of the room, attached to nothing.

The matches were right next to the door all along. He’d crawled a big circle and ended up back where he started. He looks through the door and sees—far below him (how did he ever climb this high?)—a familiar world: disassembled furniture and a smashed TV in an otherwise empty room.

The decision is simple. He hurls himself through the door.

When he hits the floor, he feels his bones shatter. The pain is indescribable, but he is safe from the fire. He lies there for a moment, assessing the damage, and decides he will survive the fall. He feels relief. Relief?

It is in this moment that he realizes he’s been trapped by his mind all along. His mind made him believe the room with the blocks wasn’t enough. His mind told him it was okay to spend days oscillating like a pixel on a screen: one moment looking up, then watching TV, then sleeping. And his mind convinced him to stab-climb up a wall to nowhere.

And now, it is his mind that forces him to feel relieved to be lying on the floor of the TV room, even though his reality is shattered like the TV screen and the ladder. He’s injured, and his sense of reality is crumpled up on the floor next to him. But he isn’t on fire.

A quieter part of his mind protests but cannot find its voice.

Before he can think further, he looks up to see fire spreading down the stab-crawl wall. Flames fill the holes he’d once dug with shards of glass. Embers fall rhythmically to the floor, tracing the path he climbed.

He does the math in his head: it’s over. These three rooms are all he’s ever known, and if there’s another one, some other door in the sky, he has no time left to find it.

He knows what he must do. It sucks the air out of him.

For a moment he lies on the floor next to the broken TV, watching the room where he’d spent most of his life be enveloped by flames.

When the flames begin to lick at his ears, he summons all his remaining energy and drags himself toward the hole in the floor—formerly the hole in the ceiling—where he’d once placed the ladder.

He looks down into the original room, the one where everything started, and dives through the hole without a second thought.

His body cuts through the air like a knife. He careens down, down, down, dissolving into the space around him, which is itself dissolving into nothing.