Have a Seat draft 6.3

When Ben opened his eyes that morning, he was surprised to find that the increasingly familiar plasterboard sheets of the hospital ceiling were replaced by a single uniform white mass.

The last thing he remembered was lying on the table with a mask on and counting backwards from a hundred. The doctors were busying themselves with their surgery preparations and paid Ben minimal attention. He looked over at the huge window on the side of the room and saw his wife Lily and their children Logan and Madelyne. The world around him faded to black and Lily’s face was the last thing he saw.

Ben had been in the hospital for months now, but no one had ever told him that he was being moved.  He reached for the big red call nurse button on the bedside table, but Ben’s hand found only air. Forcing himself not to panic, Ben prepped himself for the painful task of rolling over. After a minute of deep calming breaths and hyping himself up, Ben lurched onto his side.  Ben expected the usual horrible pain to rip its way through his body, but as he drew in a sharp breath he noticed that the pain never came. In fact, upon reflecting upon this startling revelation, Ben realized that he felt better now than he had in years.  No weary numbing pain in his limbs. No sense of being oh-so-very tired. It was as if Ben was in his twenties again.  Ben sat up, loving the nearly forgotten sensation, and surveyed his surroundings.

The Hospital was gone. From what Ben could see the whole city seemed to have disappeared without a trace. No rubble, no smoking crater, no anything. Instead, everything was replaced with a uniform empty whiteness, as if the whole world was replaced with a fresh clean canvas, and Ben was just a stray speck of ink. Ben turned in a slow circle hoping to see anything besides the omnipresent blankness. After a full turn, Ben saw a door a few hundred meters in front of him that he would have sworn hadn’t been there a moment before.  He jogged to the door while enjoying the ability to move under his own power and taking in the surreal atmosphere around him. Everything beside the door was the same blank shade of white including the “ground” and the “sky”, if those words even applied.  If it wasn’t for the door Ben would have sworn that he was running in place.

After a few minutes, Ben stood in front of a perfectly ordinary looking wooden door standing perfectly straight in the middle of a perfectly empty white field. Ben walked around the door, wondering if he was having a dream inspired by watching too many cartoons when he was younger.  He tried to turn the knob on either side of the door and he wasn’t surprised that both were locked. However, he was surprised, and even jumped a little, when a woman’s voice piped up from behind him.  Until now, Ben hadn’t even noticed just how deathly quiet this weird place had been.

“Greetings, Ben. We’ve been expecting you.”  The woman said. There was no sign of joy or malice in her voice, just the simple declaration of a fact. Ben turned to her, and when he saw she was completely nude he felt a flash of … he wasn’t sure what. He knew that he was supposed to be feeling something here, but nothing came to him. He surveyed her body, hoping to find a clue as to what was wrong. She was without a doubt the most beautiful woman he could remember seeing, and seemed to remind him of his wife, although he wasn’t sure why.  Ben noticed that he too was naked, and he knew that this too should cause him to react somehow, but he could not figure it out.

Ben remembered his manners after a moment of contemplation and started to speak.  “Oh, um, excuse me ma’am, but…”  Ben started to stammer, but by now the woman had already produced a key and was unlocking the door. The door opened into a seemingly infinite hallway.

“I’m sorry ma’am but could you tell me where I am?” Ben asked the woman.  She seemed to ignore him.

“This way, please. Room number eleven” The woman started down the hallway, and with seemingly nowhere else to go, Ben followed. The hallway was nearly as blank as “outside”, with only the vague suggestion of edges to define the walls and ceiling. On either side of the hall, countless wooden doors stretched off into the distance, each with a simple black numeral on its surface.  

As they walked down the corridor, Ben couldn’t help but to listen at some of the other doors. From door three came the muffled sounds of a party,  door six yielded nothing but a series of soft squeaks,  and behind door eight, Ben could swear he heard elevator music  on the other side.

 “So what’s behind these other doors?” Ben started to ask, but by the time he turned around, he saw that the woman had already opened door eleven. He trotted down the hall to join her, feeling a little sheepish.

Nervously, Ben peeked into the room. He wasn’t surprised to find another blank white plain stretched out before him, but he was surprised to find other people. Hundreds, probably thousands, of people, all of them sitting on endless rows of plain wooden chairs.  As he was trying to come to grips with the scene, the two people seated closest to the door, a young man and girl that looked like siblings, turned their heads towards him, both of them wearing small comfortable smirks. In unison, they gave him a small nod of welcome, and then returned their attention to the middle distance in front of them.

“Are… are they drugged?” Ben asked the woman, more than a little fear in his voice.

*“Do not worry child, they are all perfectly fine. In this place, all of their needs and wants are met. They will never again feel pain, or hunger, or thirst, or desire, and they know it. They can do anything they want, they could know everything and anything, but there would be no point in such gestures. There is nothing left for them to do, and so they sit here, content. Their entire lives was little more than the attempt to reach this state. Without that constant nagging drive, they are now free to enjoy themselves as they truly are.  Once you are fully in tune with this place, you too will gain the knowledge, and through it, contentment. “ 

The Woman turned and stalked out of the room, apparently in a hurry to return to her post, and left the room before Ben could think of how to respond to this statement, leaving him alone with the countless content people. If it wasn’t for the gentle rise and fall of their chests, there would be no way to tell them from perfectly carved statues. Ben realized that the woman hadn’t answered most of his questions, and he still wasn’t even sure where he was. Ben voiced his concerns to the young man near him, but he just kept staring off into the distance. After a few minutes of fruitless questioning, Ben decided that he’d just wait for the woman to come back. It couldn’t take that long right? Ben was sure she would be back in a little while with another person that belonged here, wherever “here” really was. Ben had never heard of a place like this before. It reminded him a little of the dentist’s office, but the atmosphere here was far more serene and wasn’t punctuated by an air of dread.

And so, Ben waited.  At first, he stayed right by the door, examining the room and looking for any variation in the blank white space. He couldn’t find any. He could only estimate where the floor met the walls, if there were any, and where those became a ceiling. He thought that maybe he was in some kind of massive sphere, but as he stared off into the distance, it seemed the plain that the chairs sat on stretched endlessly, never reaching any kind of wall. He soon abandoned this train of thought, and took to examining the people seated in the chairs.

Ben started to walk down the nearest aisle, casually studying the seated people. All but a few of them ignored him, and even then he just got a glance as he walked by. They were all transfixed by something that remained invisible to Ben.  “Or maybe they’re all just stoned out of their minds” Ben thought cynically, remembering the woman’s strange explanation. After several minutes Ben reached a break in the row and started back down the line. On his way back, Ben noticed that the closer to the door he got, the more the seated people seemed to look alike. More and more, the people looked like they were in their 20’s with nearly flawless bodies. The part that unsettled Ben was that even their faces were starting to look similar. Right before he reached the end of the row, He walked past a half-dozen people that could have all been twins if their hair had been the same color. Ben shook it off, figuring it was just this weird situation getting to him. Besides, he never was any good at recognizing faces.

Ben made it back to the door and there was no sign of the woman. Where was she anyways? It must have been at least an hour already. Ben guessed that maybe not a lot of people got sent to room eleven, and if that was the case what was it supposed to mean when he was sent here?

Ben started down the next row, and soon enough his suspicions were confirmed. At the end closest to the door, everyone looked strangely similar, but as he walked away from the door, Ben saw more variety in the seated people.  Children and elderly alike started to appear, at first only occasionally, but soon they were pretty evenly mixed with the more middling folks.  Ben also started to see marks appear on the people. They were nearly invisible at first, like some long forgotten memory, but as he walked down the row, they became more frequent. Some were long lines, some had rough circles, and after a while, Ben even started to see cuts and small holes on the people. Ben took a close look at what appeared to be a knife wound on the arm of an oblivious young man, one of several such marks on his body. Whatever happened to him was brutal, yet not only was the man smiling, but he didn’t even twitch as Ben examined his injuries. The wound was deep enough, but there was no sign of any exposed muscle or bone, just a dip in his skin like “skin valleys” were a perfectly natural part of life.   Ben felt his side where a foot- long scar had been left there from when he … he… damn it, why couldn’t he remember? It still tingled with phantom pain when he touched it, but he couldn’t even remember how he got it. It was from a surgery…right? Or was it from a fight? Heck, it could have been from a skiing trip for all he knew right now. If she ever came back, Ben had to ask the strange woman about this. And if she didn’t come back soon; Ben decided that he would break the door down if he had to. Ben continued down the line, noting that all of them, every single seated person, had the same contented smile on their faces as they stared into the distance.

When he reached the end of the row, Ben turned down the next row and headed back to the door.  He kept glancing at the people as he walked past, looking for any other clues about what was going on in this place, but everyone followed the patterns he saw in the last two rows.  However, about halfway back to the door, Ben came across a familiar old man and stopped in his tracks and stared at the man.

“Where do I know you from?” Ben absent mindedly said out loud, which seemed to catch the old man’s attention.

The elder turned his head to Ben, smiling all the while, and stared at Ben expectantly.

“So we do know each other?”

The old man nodded slowly in agreement.

Ben studied the aged face, thinking hard. “I saw you… in a picture! In some old army fatigues!”

The old man nodded again.

“Gra… Grandpa? Is that you?”

A third nod.

“Oh my God! I haven’t seen you since I was a little kid! How’ve you been? Wait… never mind. Dumb question.  I don’t know to say!”

Grandpa just watched Ben sputter for another minute or so.

When Ben composed himself, he said “Hey, you seem to have this figured out. Could you tell me what everyone is looking at that’s so damn interesting?”

Grandpa looked at Ben a moment more and then turned his attention back to the space in front of him. Ben followed the old man’s gaze, and this time, he saw something, just for an instant. An impression of grace and beauty. Ben gasped, and tried to look into the haze harder. Another glimpse of whatever it was, something flowing and majestic. Ben looked around, found an empty chair, and settled in right next to his grandfather. Ben again stared ahead, right where his grandfather’s gaze fell. And there it was again, and this time it stayed.

It was mesmerizing. Ben feebly tried to think of a way to describe it, and failed. It seemed to be made of everything right and beautiful in the world. Its form was appeared to continuously shift and flow, each tiny alteration making it more attractive than before.  The longer Ben looked at it, the easier it became to watch. Its motions were soothing, and Ben felt a smile creep across his face. Ben felt like this figure held some kind of secret that could only be discovered by watching its ongoing transformation. He glanced at the still-closed door a few rows back, and figured that he would hear it if the woman came back. It wasn’t like there was much else to do here, and the figure was definitely the most interesting thing in the room. He just wanted to watch the figure before him continue its dance towards perfection. Now he understood why everyone was smiling. He couldn’t frown if he tried.  He remembered that he owed the man next to him for introducing him to this beauty. Ben turned to his grandfather, and gave him an appreciative nod, and grandpa returned the nod before they both turned back to the figure.

After some time, Ben heard a faraway click and creak of a door opening, and a brief interchange between two muffled voices.  He felt something tug at the back of his mind, but he spared only the smallest attention for it. The lithe figure still held most of his attention as he tried to take in every detail of it at once.  A few minutes later, a girl with bright pink hair and long, red marks down the length of her wrists walked up and looked at him. She looked him over, and seemed to have some interest in something on his side. She ran a finger down the length of his side

“Poor thing,” Ben thought, “she looks so confused. Don’t worry child, you will be happy soon.”

He looked back at her with a comforting smile on his face, and it looked to him like she eased a little. She continued on, and Ben returned his attention to the figure and continued watching it strive towards perfection. The figured danced its strange dance, and as long as he watched it, Ben felt at peace, and everything else just seemed to be part of a distant dream; hazy, fading, and ultimately, unimportant.  Ben knew that if he just kept watching the figure, then everything would all right.