Inside, I saw a dimly lit room with a yellow rug and an orange couch with a reddish quilt pattern, inhabited by a lonely brown haired shaggy dog whose eyes leered up at the stairway with knowing worry. Ryan went to the fridge and retrieved a beer. "This timeline has way better Coors Light than yours, you should try it." I didn't feel like drinking, and quite honestly, I didn't understand...how he was drinking—you know—did he have...hands? What would it mean to drink? If I drink seven dimensional beer, would that have lasting effects on my health? He handed me one anyway. I stared at it, not comprehending. Ryan massaged the back of his neck and took a long sip of his beer. [long sigh of relief] Ryan spread his arm over the side of the couch and rested his legs, angling so that I was backed somewhat into a corner. The two of us looked into the TV, seeing nothing but a blank screen. Deciding to let myself imagine we were now just two bros hanging out drinking beer, I opened the can and took a slow drink. None of the food I'd eaten for the last eternity had had any taste whatsoever., and this had a taste, so I sucked it down, rapidly.
"Yeah, I remember my first time figuring that out. I just about drank every beer in this stupid house. Doesn't really have too much of an effect, since you're basically just pouring it onto the couch right now. Every time the timeline resets, the beers respawn, and I've probably drank like...well. I don't know. The house is...probably flooded. I mean. Not just with alcohol. Blood probably too."
I glared up at him, warily. I had thousands of questions, but no way to put them to words. Ryan had anticipated this. "We just watch here. We're fixed in space, but our minds aren't bound by time. That clock up there--", he pointed, "Has ticked once. I saw it tick. I just about pissed myself."
"How did this happen to you?"
"I was being a dumbass. You ever heard of Datura? Jimsonweed? My friend told me it could get you high so I tried it out in our backyard, and while I was out there, I saw this big flash of light. I started freaking out, I thought I was being followed by all these people and everything seemed like it was moving slower, so I went upstairs, and—thats when it really hit. The pain. I realized that I took too much, so I started dying. I felt my soul start leaving my body, my life flashed before my eyes and then—bloop. I come out of my body, and I just float away. I went back in time, through years and years of history until I was watching dinosaurs crawl backwards into salamanders crawling backwards into plankton crawling back into alien terraforming pods. Just kidding about that last one. Not in this timeline at least. That’s why the Coors Light here is so good."
"How many of you are there now?"
He looked off at the clock, and his eyes glassed over with terror. Counting, and counting, he eventually could only collapse into hysteric laughter. After all, there were new people every moment. There was no end to them. Pieces of his mind might brush up against each other as they dissolved across time, but they never knew one another completely. It was a stupid question for me to ask.
"As many as there are of you now. Maybe more. Your friend, Meagan, the cute one from the Walmart, she's fighting me right now. Is she single now, by the way?--Don't give me that look, I mean, she's cute, right?--I mean obviously I'm not gonna like...make a move on her. Whatever. She's fighting me, and it's paralyzing me. Well, its paralyzing part of me. One of me. Douchebag me; aka the fisherman, which may or may not be the name of his emo band, who knows. He's like three trillion years old or something like that. Typical young asshole. Popped up in this universe a little bit ago and now he's getting...dangerous.", he sipped some of the beer, or, rather, poured it onto the couch, "You're the only thing that can get him out of his mind, and into other minds. That's why he found you. Meagan's throwing a bit of a wrench in that.", his face went blank, staying still for a few seconds. He looked back and forth, trying to remember the last thing he said, "That's why he found you. Meagan's throwing a bit of a wrench in that. A wrench?...oh yeah. A...wrench. Hmmm."
"What is she doing?"
"There's not enough time to explain. I mean there is.", he became gravely serious as he repeated himself, almost horrified at his own words, "There's plenty of time. There's literally nothing but time. But, I mean, we're cutting it close to the order I have to do this in. I need to get you out."
"How?"
He sipped the last of his imaginary beer, which at this point, had become completely invisible, and tilted the unseen can towards the stairway. "Stand up." Not quite understanding, but not wanting to disobey, I stood and unconsciously raised the beer to my lips—as its cold, non-existent aluminum touched my mouth, I felt the alcohol within come to life and transmute into white hot energy between my teeth, running in between my cells and washing over the cracks in my eyes with a shimmering vibration. What looked like graph paper—endless, blue gridlines over a blank white page, rolled out like fresh carpet over every surface in the home, except for myself and the stairway, which now stretched miles into the sky. A single door repeated on the stairway every ten or twenty feet.
“I didn't want to let you in on this until I'd explained a little bit. I had to get you here first.”
My heart started pounding—but what could I do? I gave in with resignation to the inevitability. Tiny grey dots circled around my feet, leaving faint, ever disappearing pinpricks of light grey. They danced away from me, tracing paths across the floor that looked like veins of silver being passed over by a flashlight. Sliding past the edge of the stairway, they seemed to go through the monotonous graph paper wall, and, right in front of my eyes, the silver dots sketched out another copy of myself, and then the stairway, working like tiny graphite ants—they duplicated the scene again and again, until I could not see the end of it—I looked back and realized that I was only one of thousands of sketches drawn onto a graph paper reality, that bled into itself and encompassed me from every side—a world with no definite shape, only blank blue lines of indeterminate distance over a blank white expanse. A voice pressed in against every side of every one of my psyches. “Chill.”, it said, “I know it seems like you're hallucinating and shit, but this is like...the first time you haven't been hallucinating in a long ass time. Except those stairs. Those are total bullshit, but I mean, the metaphor's helpful so...I don't know. Time travel is hard to understand, and I like visual aids. So, just bear with me, I guess. Here's what you gotta do...dammit. Sorry. My memory is blanking again. Gotta retrace my steps. Monarch butterfly...Atlantis sinks...Hitler lost World War II. Okay! That's right. Okay. I remember. You gotta go up those stairs. Go into the third door on the left. Do not look to the right. And...oh! Do not look up the stairs. That would be really bad. Just...yeah. Don't look up. Just look at your feet, and count to 33. Eleven steps to each door. I really am not good with counting, so that's pretty much up to you. Like, just count. 1, 2, 3, you know, 33 steps. Do not look up. Do not look to the right. Third door. The third door ON THE LEFT. Ok?”
I tried to walk—instead of moving, they seemed to draw the stairs closer to me, like I'd zoomed in with a camera. My muscles croaked with an inexplicable agony, shot with pain and exhausted like I'd run an entire mile. 33 steps. I moved closer to the stairs, so that the rail was almost close enough to touch. I wanted to look up, to see what lay at the end of the infinite stairway, to see if it was a trap, but I did not. Nervously, Imoved closer to the stairs, and felt the cold wooden railing touch my hand. The nerves in my body seemed to connect with it, a feeling like electricty pulsing through the seams between my flesh and my bone. The stairway shivered, and the world, almost magically, reverted to the living room, where Ryan still sat crosslegged on the couch, finishing a beer that did not exist in the periphery of my vision. Before I could look at him, I heard the same voice in my head as before. “Do not look to the right.” My heart filled with dread, and I looked down at my feet, taking the first steps up the stairway. 1. 2. 3. I winced, a sharp pain shooting through my legs. Only thirty steps like this left to go. 4. 5. 6.
Suddenly, I caught a glimpse of something I remembered—my heart filled with an ecstasy—a memory, a real memory—pure, untouched, like new. Like a long lost photograph, it dangled about my mind, teasing me—I reached into it, I tried to hold onto it, to cherish it... 7. 8. 9. It fluttered away. The memory, it—couldn't—I couldn't bring it back. I couldn't even remember what I'd forgotten. I gritted my teeth with unspeakable loathing, and took the next step. 10, 11--”You don't really trust him, do you John?”, a voice whispered to me from behind the first door. A palpable heat came from behind it; a light became visible from under a door to the left. I looked towards it. “Don't you see what he's trying to do?”, it asked, almost grinning with amusement. I trembled. I did not. Of course I did not trust him. “He wants you to keep looking down. He doesn't want you to see what's at the top of the stairs.” My eyes twitched, paranoid and disturbed.
“Shut the fuck up.”, I spat at the voice under my breath. “Shut the fuck up.”
12. 13. 14. I could feel something driving its way down my backbone, I could feel the presence of some invisible steel wedge piercing through the center of my body, not quite numb, but somehow without pain all the same—an anti-numbness—the presence of feeling. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. My skin seered with a heat, an energy tried to lurch its way out of my body—my skin felt on the verge of bursting, 20. 21. The world seemed impossibly bright. I'd forgotten all that had happened to me before—I felt almost like I was falling backwards, but I did not know how I could be—I was standing still on the stairs—a number was in my head, emblazoned, almost branded onto my mind. The next number I had to count. I knew what it was—I knew it—22.
An avalanche of gravity peeled itself off of me, and I sank down towards the ground—my body felt light, my skin tore away and burst with fiery flares and arches that soared over my newly exposed, star-like flesh. I was rising, and rising—suddenly, rather than shrinking I convinced myself I was growing to incredible size. I did not remember who I was, but I did not need to remember. I'd been counting, but I didn't understand why—I was a smoldering piece of fire at the base of an immense door, alone on an endless, flat wooden plain underneath a white sky crisscrossed with blue lines. Do I keep walking? Do I keep counting? Ahead of me rose a high wall, striped red and yellow and brown, and tinged with spots of the deepest black I could comprehend. I wondered at the world around me, feeling a supreme, nearly divine peace; I had always been, and I always would be. As I glowed brighter, I poured my light into the darkness of the great, incredible wall that stretched beyond my vision. I held up my hands so that the light grew brighter still, flames shooting from my body into the heavens. The earth shook. I became an infinite light.
Tiny white squares with blue edges began falling from the sky, covered in flames. I looked up. A fire began to spread across the white, seamless sky, carving open what looked like an ever expanding set of parted lips that concealed an endless and eternal black. Thousands of white flowers streaked with barely perceptible blue grids hung in the sky like dancing bells, descending upon me. I stared upwards at them, transfixed by their gentle and seductive forms. The sky above engulfed my senses, my own light felt incredibly dim as I faced the infinite and collosal nothingness of something even more eternal than myself.
A sheet of graph paper slid from over the edges of the night sky, taking up the whole horizon for uncountable miles with a hissing sound that seemed to blanket the entire universe. “Run!” I did not know how. I looked back at my feet—they were hardly feet at all—they looked like faded pencil marks—oh God—I was—it had made me—and now it had begun to erase me. I ran and ran towards the distant wall in the horizon—the white flowers merged into one great rectangle high above our heads, and the burnt night sky crumpled itself into a ball some distance to the side. The ruined sky, which I knew somehow to be friendly, folded inwards and rotated like a freshformed planet, contorting into a fractal vortex, a never ending, swirling snail's shell surrounded by a growing disk—paper rippled away from this perplexing, anti-geometric figure in crisscrossing waves shaped like diamonds to form a saw blade that tore against the edges of the invading sky.
The invaders, meanwhile, regrouped to the side—the colossal white flowers lined their mouths against one another, and swallowed each other up, with an effect that looked like a finger passing underneath a mirror. The reflections then reappeared about half a mile away from each other and hurtled back together to repeat this process of collision, dissolution, and remanifestation. As this pattern repeated and repeated in front of my helpless eyes, the flowers arranged themselves into two immense rectangles that around one another in perfectly executed yet seemingly impossible orbits. The diamond sawteeth at the edge of the end of the friendly friendly sky extended into the invading sky, driving it back, as the two collosal rectangles swung towards the massive sawblades—this took place over what seemed like eons, a movie taking place outside of my sunlike sky—eventually, I was removed from the scene entirely, only watching myself watch the sky; watching myself see the two immense rectangles coalesce into strips and coil around each other like two pythons trying to swallow themselves. A pyramid, rotating, and peeling out from itself to attack the rectangles with endless rows of neat white squares, cast brilliant, parasol shaped circles across the sky like a confusion of monochromatic umbrellas. The two skies grew larger, and larger until they collided—I watched myself, watching a stranger crouched underneath a massive step in a staircase, staring at a flickering graph paper chaos—I walked away from him, towards another stairway, much like the one I'd just left, which waited for me at the far side of a blank void.
I opened my eyes. Fuck, dude. This was a crazy party. I shook my head. My stomach trembled. What was I seeing? I heard music. I smelled beer. I heard food. I mean I...wait. Fuck man I must be really fucking high right now. I opened my eyes again. Was I tripping? I was lying on the stairs, looking down. Fuck dude, this was a crazy party. I shook my stomach. My head trembled. I opened my eyes. My head shook. My trembled stomach—became—I opened my eyes. All at once I remembered I was a prisoner. The lights from the party became grey. The door at the base of the stairs rattled with the furious wind and pounding rain. The river had started to rise up into the city and cover the floor. I remembered what I had to do. I had to keep going.
23. I looked down at my feet—or where I knew that my feet should be should be. With no light, after all, I couldn't quite see myself very clearly. As I moved towards the shadow, my atoms lost their form, my essence lost its being, there was no more sight, no more to be seen. I remembered what I had to do. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33.
The door. The stairway and the house peeled back and I saw the door, alone in the center of a thousand pointed star, printed like never ending graph paper that flowed out of itself, and only outward, so wide that I could not see the ends of its of its points. I could only know that they were there, that they flowed towards an unseen and distant, four dimensional pyramid of indeterminate size; the deep inevitably of these unseen formations was instinctive, unquestionable. From here, everything looked as though I sat in the base of an valley—though tempted to look up, to look away from myself, this body I knew to be mine, this self I knew to be imperfect, I focused my attention away from the unknowable shape and curvature of that which was—and instead, I focused everything, all my senses, on the door—the door. The Old Door. The Weathered Door. The Door with Keyholes Rusted and Hinges Peeling From Their Arches. The Door That Smells of Sanitized air and Wet earth, the Door That Masks Unspeakable and Unknowable Fears. I touched the handle. The nerves in some distant, massive form lined up with my own—all across the endless, spherical body, the thousand pointed star that stretched so far around the horizon that it swallowed the horizon whole—I saw that I existed only as one tiny cell of something massive—I was one of 9,999,999 points in a network that existed here at this door across all times, all universes, all existences—I could see myself there at the door, my hand around it, turning it slowly with my wrist. And then--
Light.
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