FICTION: Try to Open Every Blasted Door Until . . .

Several years ago, without much of a reason, I left my friend’s apartment and wandered Chicago’s streets. I left late in the evening and returned early the next morning. What I was doing, even by my own standards, was weird. I was checking doors to see if they were open. Not the doors to people’s houses. I didn’t actually want to break into anyone’s house. I was just looking to see what I could get into. It was cold out, no surprise there, and as a result of all the warm clothes I was wearing, I felt disguised.

Some of the doors were open and unlocked, usually the ones which led to apartments. Most of these brownstone apartments felt to me to be nearly as cold inside as it was outside – that seemed to be true all across the city. The unlocked entryways that were heated were rare; and besides, once I found myself inside them they immediately felt oppressive and gave me the feeling of being discovered. Doing what, I wasn’t sure. I guess someone could have asked me whether I lived there. Or they could not have. At any rate, they would have known, and I would be given that look, the one you give to a misplaced soul who takes himself for an adventurer.

The feeling I wanted to avoid had something to do with that indoor heat. It felt like a ghost breathing down the back of my skull; the hot fingers of its breath raised prickles down my spine. I didn’t, and don’t, and never will have a psychologist or anyone like that who could supply me with an archetypal answer for this delusional anticipation. Going around like that, intending no harm yet intruding extensively on personal property, the act itself was worthwhile. I felt like I was really paying attention to everything that I could at any given time, and that meant the world to me.

I heard something down a normal street not far from a large graveyard which itself, as I recall, is not far from Lawrence and Broadway. The most pathetic voice of a man arguing with a woman oozed out their second-story window, which was open. Their radiator must have broken. What a waste of energy out the window.

“I don’t want to, no, I don’t want to,” the man kept moaning. His voice belonged to the underworld, the wails of a forgotten tyrant about to cross the river Styx.

The woman was totally unintelligible, screaming at him with rage turned up to ten.

Then he hit her. I could tell because I heard her yelp. He hit her once more, and then he was moaning something all over again. The whole process seemed about to repeat.

I called 911, gave the address and situation. It took the police at least twenty minutes to arrive, and when they did, they just sauntered up. I saw how they looked at me.

The rinse and repeat domestic abuse had long since subsided into strange sounds. They weren’t sexual, you could be sure of that. They were of some sort of gloomy and venomous discussion. Then they closed the window. I had been standing there expecting to hear a gunshot. Nobody on the street but me, disguised like a child pretending to be a spy feels camouflaged. Usually this time of night people often can be seen wearing pajamas and a coat taking their dogs out to defecate, but not tonight. Maybe no one on this street owned dogs.

So I was, and had been, alone. The police probably saw the startled animal look in my eyes of the person who hadn’t spoken to anyone for days. There would have been no way to explain what the hell I had been doing, and what that pointed to in the way of clues as to what kind of life I lived. People with families and jobs and dogs, for example, didn’t take this kind of liberty, ever. They would have at least had a reason.

A reason. I kept beating myself up about that. I felt like I could see those lashings reflected in everyone’s eyes. I wanted the damn police to do something, but since they didn’t see or hear anything firsthand, they didn’t have probable cause to enter the building or do anything. So they stood there looking at me. No one was going to do anything about that domestic abuse, and I understood why. They explained it to me, and I carried their words and demeanor with me the rest of the night. I hopped the stone wall to the graveyard and sat in between two huge dark trees, shaded entirely from any light, from street, moon or stars.

A few months earlier, my friend saw a rabbit in this cemetery. He got loopy. I don’t know if he thought it was an omen or rabid or what. I felt like his parent, listening to him tell the story with a vague inner significance I could only guess at.

As an Animal, Then

Today, years after the escapade in Chicago, I went for another long walk. Striving to perceive everything, I ceased to take myself seriously and put off none of my best impulses. I was never as certain as I was today that the ever-expanding present moment may be the one which contained my death, one absolution of many, at least, and not something I eagerly anticipate.

I saw a turquoise-painted door, and in the day’s diffused light after the hard rain, the door’s color would stand out a mile away. I continued walking, past the adobe fence and turquoise door, and then I lit upon another portal of the same sky-blue intensity – they had painted their backyard shed’s door the same color. I remembered that time again, the one in Chicago when I walked through the city late at night struck upon the idea that I should try each door I came across to see what was inside, if any were unlocked. Few were, and probably for a good purpose. It made a different kind of sense to me today that I found myself locked out of building after building. For example, I could have knocked or rang, but that wasn’t what I had wanted.

Today I had guidance—some sort of deep assurance which was legitimate even if hard to communicate. I think it had everything to do with having nothing in my pockets but a good idea of the path I intended to take. It may very well be perfect nonsense and just a biological event that came from eating a healthy breakfast with a tall glass of beet, celery and carrot juice. Something about the world was hushed, something which normally gives people a great deal of worry. It may have been the fear of death that I had overcome. It wasn’t the first time I felt like I had arrived at this. Probably each time things got a little better.

This was the first long walk I had taken in over a month. Though normally I would have the morning ritual of a good run, ever since my mysterious retinal tears and detachments forcing me into eye surgery and a month of lying on my left side, I had largely stayed indoors. So of course I noticed doors. I was remembering my birth, brought about by at least familiarity with the fact of it having happened. Out-of-doors, I, an animal, had nothing to be concerned with. The world was open before my direction, and it was challenging as hell to take each step, as that meant wading through infinitudes of possibility where any number of motions could be the right one. I walked for a while and returned home.

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