The Door

We got up early in the morning. We brushed our teeth. There was little blood in the basin after we gurgled and spat the water out. We were not sure whether the blood came from our gum or the chicken we had last night. It tasted suspiciously succulent was all what we could remember.

We had to report to the counsellor in five minutes. So there was no time for breakfast. In any case, after last night, we wouldn’t think about food for a long time.

The counsellor was his usual self, grumpy and continuously staring at his secretary’s cleavage. The secretary (actually a fembot) presented us a file. The file had ‘confidential’ written on its cover. We opened it. It had a picture of a beautiful girl standing next to a blue door. The door looked quite normal, but we felt a little uncomfortable. There was something unusual about the door. Perhaps it was the girl. We looked at her face and other body parts closely. She looked like a college kid separated from her friends on an excursion. Now she had discovered this door and was thinking about knocking on it. The friends must be waiting for her on the other side of the door. The thought made us even more uncomfortable. What if there was a wild animal on the other side? Or worse, nothing?

‘Do you find anything out of place in this picture?’ The counsellor patted the secretary on her ass and looked at us with a mischievous smile. We were confused. Should we connect the smile with the question or the pat? We got nervous and remained silent.

The fembot left the room. We tried to imagine what she would have been thinking if it was fifty years ago or if she was an actual woman. The counsellor must have been sued for sexual harassment. Fembots were introduced few years back precisely to avoid the pile of lawsuits that were cumulating after the invention of Viagra. Now with the fembot subordinates, there was no tension or fear. The only frustrating thing was these faux-femmes were given tentacles instead of legs to enhance mobility and speed. Some men, however, were still indomitable.

The counsellor, now fully concentrating on us, repeated the question, this time without the smile. We took a sigh of relief. There was no confusion anymore. He was indeed thinking about the pleasure of molesting a six-legged feminine robot, and neither the girl nor the door, when he was smiling like the gatekeeper of a whorehouse, a man who pretends to know your secret.

We sat straight in our chair and cleared our throat, ‘We think there is something wrong with the picture but we can’t put our finger on it. The door looks normal. So does the girl. But....’

‘Let me tell you what’s wrong. The girl or the door in isolation is perfect. Nothing amiss about them. But when you put them together, it becomes a problem. It’s not the objects themselves, but the relationship between them, which calls for our attention,’ the counsellor tapped his finger on the picture.

‘That sounds interesting,’ we said in a matter-of-fact voice.

‘I have a job for you. I specially recommended your name to the Chairperson and she agreed. We both think you will be perfect for this job.’

‘What kind of job?’

‘It’s not very difficult, to begin with. But it’s a lifelong responsibility. Are you up for that?’ The counsellor seemed a little tense. Perhaps he was aging too quickly.

‘That we can tell you only after hearing about the job in more detail.’

‘Fare enough,’ the counsellor leaned towards me, ‘I knew I could trust you. What I am going to tell you is a secret of supreme order. You have looked at the picture carefully, haven’t you?’

‘Yes, we did.’

‘Look at it once again. Take it home. We want you to locate this girl,’ the counsellor stopped abruptly and swallowed the words that were about to come out of his mouth. We looked at him with curiosity. What wasn’t he telling us?

He continued, ‘Your job doesn’t end there.’ Once again he stopped and looked at his nails. They were carefully trimmed.

‘What should we do next?’ We had to ask.

‘Never let this girl go near this door. By any means. That’s your job.’

‘Where is this door?’ We were getting a faint idea of the importance of this job.

‘You don’t need to know. Just keep the door and the girl separated. Stop her from finding the door.’ The way he spoke, it sounded like a metaphor. But we knew very well that was not the case. There was something horribly unmetaphorical about the whole situation.

Finding the girl was not very difficult. She used to work for a corporation that manufactured human skull. There was a fad once for wearing a second skull over one’s head. The said corporation made a lot of money by producing exact replicas of human skull made out of the bones of African children who died in civil wars. With time, this fad was replaced by the one for an extra asshole. Another corporation got richer, but this time they had to use body parts of a non-human species because of a recently passed judgement on the meaning of the word ‘authenticity’. There was a rumour that they took the judgement too literally and killed a lot of hapless asses.

When we found the girl, she was unemployed and considering changing her career. She was an excellent nosechanger. Her fingers did magic to noses blunter than the documentaries on civil rights movements. The noses she made would never snore or sneeze. They were mostly Romanic but sometimes she added a hint of Asian just for fun. Now that her company was closed and declared bankrupt, she wanted to become a waitress.  

We met her at a cafe on the second street from the library. We were a little absent minded on that day. It was an awkward afternoon, as awkward as the second cousin of a distant relative’s mother-in-law. We were reading a book on toilet practices in early-twentieth century Europe. A useful read, no doubt. Soon we got bored and looked up and saw her entering the cafe with a long face. It felt really strange. It was as if she didn’t enter the room, the room entered her. Everybody noticed that and stopped whatever they were doing. She didn’t care and went inside the kitchen.            

We were unsure whether we should follow her to the kitchen. We had strict instruction: from the moment we discovered her, we couldn’t allow her to go out of sight. Who knew, the door could be right there in the kitchen, behind an old cupboard, ready to be discovered once someone found the cupboard redundant and decided to sell it to an antique dealer. But we were also uncomfortable with the idea of entering the kitchen of a cafe that we really liked. We knew once we entered the kitchen, we could never come back here anymore. The interiors of our loved ones are the most disgusting.

She came out of the kitchen before we could come to a decision and stood in front of us. ‘Would you like to order anything else? More coffee?’ Her voice was not as elegant as was her distractively white apron. It was a bit nasal like she had a permanent cold. Most probably it was intentional. Though she was waitressing now (and she was liking the job, it seemed), she wanted to retain something from her old job, her original passion, her actual craft.

‘We are fine, thank you,’ we said finally and pretended to read the book. The chapter we had open before our eyes was on how the sound of flushing irked a lot of gentlemen after the first world war. It made them aware of the temporariness of life and existence. ‘However,’ we closed the book and looked past her at a clock on the wall, ‘we would like to have your number. It’s pretty urgent.’ ‘No,’ she replied, nasally, and walked away.   

We got out of the cafe and sat ourselves on a nearby bench. We had no plan as to how to keep watch on her all the time. She could come across this door anytime, anywhere. To think of it, how many times do we have to pass through doors? The answer would be, all the time. We wake up, we go to the bathroom, and bam, we get out the bathroom, and bam, go to have breakfast, and bam, go to wash hands, and bam, and we haven’t even got out the house yet, bam, now we have. The point is there are umpteenth possibilities. And that scared us.     

She came out at around eight and started walking immediately, without even noticing that we were following her from a meter’s distance. We crossed a bridge, a tunnel, few beggars and musicians, a couple of restaurants, took the tube, saw a film (it was horrible), and reached her home. On our way, she picked up her dinner from a shady Chinese joint which anybody could mistake for a laundry. We picked up nothing.

The door to her house, we noticed, was not blue. We were hiding behind a bush when she unlocked the door and went inside. The same hesitation clouded our mind. To enter or not to enter? We reasoned if the door was already in her house, we wouldn’t have been asked to keep her away from it. We found out another bench in a nearby park and spent the rest of the night lounging on it. We even had a dream: the girl appeared almost naked in it, now working as a secretary to the counsellor, surviving endless moments of molestation, finally suing him for good. The dream felt so real that we decided to become a witness for her when we woke up in the next morning nudged by an angry policeman.

We rented a flat in the same building and bought a telescope to spy on her. She lived meagrely with minimum furniture and no TV. We felt the urge to talk to her many times but couldn’t gather up the courage. After a couple of weeks, we realized that we were in love. Rather than complicating the situation, for the first time since we were assigned the job, we felt our life would be simpler and happier from now on.

By the end of September, she quit her job at the cafe and picked up a new hobby. She started colouring utensils for a local retailer. We saw this as an opportunity to meet her without having to disclose our real intention. We opened a shop which sold paints and brushes and asked the authorities to close down all the other shops which sold similar items. We started talking to her eventually, first about the weather, then our families, and finally about starting a family together. 

We got married on the last day of the year. The counsellor came to our wedding and gifted us a copy of the same book we were reading at the cafe. A quick suspicion crossed our mind: was everything staged from the beginning? The meet cute, the following, the shop and the conversations? We couldn’t linger on this thought. Someone called us up for the customary photo shoot.

Her flat was too small for both of us, so we decided to move to our flat. It took her five minutes to pack her whole life in a couple of suitcases. ‘What about the furniture? Don’t you need them?’ We asked cautiously. ‘It’s not like I am giving up the flat. If I need something, I’ll just come here and get it,’ she replied. 

We entered our apartment in a slow, sombre afternoon. While we moved our belongings, everybody else was planning to leave work and go home for a nap. We slipped into the flat, switched on the lights, put the suitcases on the floor, and froze. There was a blue door right across the living room, just like the one in the picture.

We looked at the girl and she looked back, smiling. She was not amazed or confused. How could she be, she was visiting the apartment for the first time. But we were befuddled and more. Was this a hallucination or were we simply being forgetful? Perhaps the door was always there. Sometimes these little-big things escape our attention. We become aware of their existence only seconds before our planes crash into the stillness of oblivion.        

Our wife was very happy. She was prancing around and tweaking everything and straightening the frames on the walls. She was surveying all the details of her household. We were still standing at the centre of the room, undecided and untouched by her energy.

‘Is something wrong? What’s happened to you?’ She stopped and asked with genuine concern.

We babbled something incomprehensible and approached the door to guard it from her.

‘What does that door lead to? The bedroom?’ Now she smiled coyly, as she was supposed to, probably consumed by the thought of imminent sex.

‘Y-yes,’ we mumbled like a virgin that we were, ‘we think so,’ and tried to expand our body to cover the whole door.

We had no choice. We couldn’t allow her to get to the door. When she came on to us and kissed us on the lips and beyond, we had to undermine our engorged dick and slit her throat with a knife that came free with the book on toilet practices in early-twentieth century Europe. Her body, lifeless, fell on the floor and we, to avoid falling with her, leaned on the door, resting a hand on the frame, and fresh blue paint came off, making all the blood in our hand look like a sick joke. 

‘It was sick,’ the judge said, ‘to kill a newly wed wife in front of a freshly painted door.’ Nobody believed our story. The forensic tests revealed that the paint was taken from our own store. The counsellor came everyday during the trials. He looked really shaken. She and him used to date once, we were told. His impressive nose was her creation.

‘One thing is still not clear,’ the judge said on the last day of our trial, ‘why do you refer to yourself in plural? Is there any psychological explanation?’ 
‘We are just being modest, sir. We are a modest man,’ we said and laughed out loud.