“How do you feel now?” he asks. “How do you think you would have felt if you had gotten out with Katie at your side? Different than this, I’m sure. Different than if you had Naomi, too. But better or worse? The same?”
Concurrently, Geppetto leads me into the heaviest smoke, where the rubble begins, to show me pieces of a pale-skinned woman with mahogany hair trapped underneath the ruins. Much of her, including her face, is obscured. As my mind sketches in the rest of her parts, she takes on a familiar shape…
I dive down to dig.
The rock rips open my jeans and gashes my knee. I push aside layers of stone. When I uncover her face, I shatter.
The woman is Naomi, but she is completely disfigured. Her right eye is bleeding from the inside and the left side of her face is smashed in and bloodied, as if it were run over by a truck. She is unmoving and silent.
I pull away more and more rock.
She makes a noise. Her lips sputter unintelligibly, like mutterings from a drunken singer whose record is being played backwards. She is incoherent. I want to comfort her. I want to tell her everything will be alright, but I can’t because it won’t. I want to ask her why she left me, why she hid from me, why she stopped loving me – if that’s what she did – and why it has to be like this, but my vocal chords won’t work. My strength gives out. My attempt to do the unfeasible and get all of this awful rock off of her fails in midstream.
I hear her dying.
I wheeze, attempting to recapture my breath so I can speak in between bursts of tears. There is nothing I can do to save her. I’ll have to live with this truth, somehow, unbelievably, if I can make it out of this world alive, if I even want to now. I couldn’t find her in time. I didn’t do the right thing. I fell short. The memory of listening to her die will eat away at my soul in perpetuity. This is the dark cavern at the bottom of the mineshaft after the rope snaps.
The edge of the crater starts to break away. Naomi slides deeper into the wreckage. I reach for her but miss. The mass of concrete and metal I’m standing on slips, putting it centimeters away from absolute collapse. Geppetto grabs me. He pulls me up and shoves me away from the fault. I swing my arms like the blunt blades of a helicopter. Even as I’m backpedaling, he pushes me further away, detaching me from the section of rubble that’s falling and taking Naomi with it.
I charge back, but she’s gone. Naomi is lost.
“Geppetto! You- Why didn’t you just let me fall?!”
“What would be the point of that?” As always, he is impassive. “Besides, I’m an old man. You could have fought me off.”
He rests his hand on my back. I don’t want to look at him. I don’t want to look at anything.
Eventually, his hand leaves me.
When I turn to see where he’s headed, I find myself looking at the entrance to Olive Garden.
The other world has bled away.
MY WORLD IS THE ONLY WORLD AND IT TOO IS BREAKING APART
In the lobby of the restaurant, a group of older couples pauses their discussion of the 7-day forecast to stare at me. I glance over to the host stand. The woman working behind it is exceedingly regular looking, nothing at all like Katie. As I walk by, her once seemingly permanent smile flatlines. A glimpse of my hands explains why. My skin is coated in dirt and ash. My hands – and probably my face – are scraped and cut. My clothes, however, have been refreshed, but a bloodstain is forming on my jeans near the knee, from when I slammed it into the rubble to dig for Naomi.
I ask the hostess if she’s seen Katie. Disturbed, she tells me she doesn’t know anyone by that name.
I trudge into the dining room. I know I should go to the bathroom and clean up, but I don’t care enough about anything anymore to bother.
“Mike.”
Kirsten is seated at our table.
“Mike. Come here.”
I go to her and sit. I have no idea what to say.
“Where have you been?” She wants to know why I look the way I do.
“Where did you go?” I ask. “You disappeared first.”
“I’ve been waiting for you here ever since you went to the restroom. Mike. What’s going on?”
I weave a lie, beginning with my memories of 9/11, mentioning Katie and then referencing Naomi, never explicitly describing the incident.
“Where’s the Door?”
Kirsten is not easily fooled.
“It’s here, in the restaurant isn’t it…”
“No, no. It’s in East Cleveland-“
“Then how- How did this happen here?”
She sees through me. She knows something happened.
“I… Left the Door open,” I say. “The other world is-”
“Why would you do that? Why would you let it come after you whenever it wanted?”
I tell her about finding the lighter and wanting to make sure Naomi wasn’t trapped inside the other world. She denounces my logic, too angered to listen. I’ve never had a migraine, but I feel one coming on. I try convincing her she doesn’t need to be concerned. Everything that’s wrong is wrong with me. I tell her Naomi is dead. The Door will leave me alone now. She responds with silence. I ask her to say something.
“I’m sorry, I can’t do this. I’m sorry.”
She gets up too quickly and bangs her knee on the bottom of the table. She flits away. I start after her. I don’t want her to leave me.
“If something was going to happen to you,” I say, “it would’ve happened when it came for me. But it didn’t. You’re safe.”
She speaks without looking at me. “I’ll walk somewhere. I’ll call a cab or something. It’s not safe. I have to leave anyway. Don’t call me, okay? Don’t try to find me. I’m sorry. Maybe once it’s over. If it’s ever over.”
And then she runs.
Inside the restroom, I pull the handle on the faucet up as far as it will go. Lukewarm at first, the water becomes hotter the longer it runs. I cram as much of my forearms underneath the spigot as I can, rubbing them clean. Cupping my hands, I mix the water with soap and splash it indiscreetly across my face, trying to cleanse away every particle of dirt. The droplets of water become indistinguishable from the tears running down my face. I can hear myself sobbing over the sound of the water pounding the basin of the sink.
I slam down the handle on the faucet. I’m clean enough. Leaving the sink, I refuse to look at myself in the mirror. I could dissolve onto the floor or fade into the corner. The Door has won. I find the hand dryer and punch the button. Hot air blows out so loudly that I can’t hear anything else, and I push the button again and again, perpetuating the heat and the noise. Against the screeching manmade wind, I begin to feel numb.
Eventually, I emerge from the restroom and return to the dining room. The table Kirsten and I were sitting at hasn’t been cleared. The check is lying on the corner. I count all the cash in my wallet. The amount will barely cover the bill. I drop it on the tablecloth and try not to think about my savings.
Exiting the restaurant, I search for Katie one last time. She is nowhere to be found. I have little choice but to assume she was from the other world, a perfect physical creation that didn’t – and couldn’t – really exist.
In the parking lot, I recall Naomi’s disfigured face and break down.
ON TWITTER, I WRITE
“Hopelessness blows through me like a seasonal wind. Despair comes and goes but is never far away. I can feel it watching.”
THE LABYRINTHINE RED LIGHT
The time is 4:54 PM. I’ve been driving through another depressed, emptying section of Cleveland, trying to find my way back to Cedar Road. I intend to close the Door. Since Naomi is dead, that should be enough to bring closure to my experience with the other world and end this tragedy.
Currently, I’m stuck at an abnormally long red light with no indication it’s going to change. The electronic sign at the crosswalk to my left depicts a white stick figure, as it has for what feels like minutes. I turn on the radio. Scanning through the st
ations, I hear DJs talking nonsense, popular songs I’m not sure would be so popular if people weren’t forced to listen to them over and over, and a collection of commercials advertising minor local businesses in acrimonious ways. The light still isn’t changing. I should just run it. I inch my foot off the brake and then stop.
Why did I do that? No one is here. I worry too much. The extended red light can’t be the prelude to another incident. Why would there be any more incidents? Speculating, I head deeper into the labyrinth of my paranoia, where if I stay long enough, I will eventually encounter every imaginable permutation of every imaginable scenario. I envision myself childless, in a nursing home some day, long after I’ve shut the Door, still paranoid about the other world.
Double and triple checking the road to make sure no cars are coming in the opposite direction, I notice I’m idling next to a church that looks like something you’d find in Eastern Europe. It must be a century old. The architecture is Gothic, with a multistoried spire, and the building occupies an entire city block. Clearly the church was built in an age where efficiency was less relevant and whole communities still believed in God and practiced religion.
The sign near the entrance reads “St. Michael the Archangel.”
I was named after St. Michael. Churches are supposed to be safe. Maybe going inside will save me from a panic attack.
I roll away from the light and into the parking lot.
ST. MICHAEL THE ARCHANGEL
The interior of the church, like the exterior, presents itself as from a bygone era. It is cavernous, with ceilings so tall I can’t accurately estimate their height. Iconography is plentiful. The walls and the altar are crowded with large, colorful sculptures of various saints and Biblical figures – Jesus, Mary, Joseph, Cain, Abel – but one resonates with me more than the others: a rendering of St. Michael wielding a spear and slaying the Devil.
Behind the first batch of sculptures on the altar are decorations you would expect to see in December during Advent, Christmas trees, giant wreaths with red ribbons, and white lights so bright they’re fuzzy. Seeing that it’s July, this is peculiar. Unsettled, I decide to stay where I am, near the door to the vestibule. Sweat collects on my skin like condensation on a glass. It is warmer in the church than it is outside. I reason that, with a space as gargantuan as this, in a poor neighborhood in a poor city where the Catholic dioceses are shutting down parishes, air conditioning isn’t an option.
In front of me, two separate banks of pews run parallel to each other. The first is devoid of people, logically, since mass isn’t scheduled. But the other set of pews, the one to my right, hosts a single, old white man with grey hair and large, cumbersome glasses. He’s wearing a black Adidas track jacket and department store blue jeans. The old man is kneeling with his hands folded. He is praying all by himself. It’s not Christmas, not unless the other world has made it so, but the strange presence of the decorations conjures an extra layer of subtext, making me suspect he has no one to spend the holidays with.
The old man is alone.
He is old enough to have lived a full life, the pleasurable dependency of childhood, the pressure of discovery that comes with being a teenager, the transition to adulthood that occurs in your twenties and thirties when you start to understand yourself, marriage, children of your own, then grandchildren… And as your kids and their children grow, your friends begin to die, until eventually the first thing you do when you wake up in the morning is read the obituaries in the newspaper because death has become the most pressing thing in your life.
Not everyone is alone at the end, but this is the part of the old man I see in myself. I imagine being like him at the dénouement of my life, alone and lonely, and when I wonder if I might return to the Catholic faith I was raised on then, I see the real value of the church for the first time, as a community to go to when you have no one else.
How life has ended up for the old man is how it may end up for me. For the moment, at least, this is how I see my future. My parents will eventually die. Tim will start his own family. I will be in solitude, unable to love again because of the pain the Door leveled upon me, and the fear that it will punish me if I try again. When I found Naomi I changed the trajectory I had been on ever since I was a teenager. But now she is gone. And what I’m left with is the weight of her loss and the burden of a life that has been irrevocably derailed by the other world.
A cliché stomps on my heart: is it better to have loved and lost than to have never loved at all?
I’ve heard these words uttered limitless times, never accompanied by an answer, as if the question is rhetorical. But it’s a cliché. It’s been asked enough by now that some consensus, if one exists, should have emerged. Yet, that hasn’t happened. Why?
Both scenarios hurt terribly. I’ve lived through them both. I spent a long time not loving or being loved. I have now loved and lost.
There is no answer.
I walk closer to the old man. I detect a great sadness in his posture. When we make eye contact, I believe he sees the same thing in me. He had someone he loved, someone who loved him. He had what I wanted. And still, at the end of it all, he is alone.
I sit down in an adjacent pew and lower the kneeler. I consider praying. I should talk to someone. I could call my parents. I could talk to Tim. But I wouldn’t know what to tell them.
I kneel. Doing so in a church provides a sense of communion, especially with the lonely old man nearby. But before I can close my eyes and search through my mind for something, anything that resembles a prayer, the doors to the entrance boom open.
A priest walks in.
He heads down the aisle, carrying a Bible above his head as if he’s opening mass, except he’s not wearing a frock, and there is no procession behind him. He bows in front of the altar and migrates up its three steps to a podium, where he proceeds to give a sermon, the content and delivery of which are unremarkable. Its message, however, is notable: joy is the purpose of life.
The priest makes the sign of the cross. He closes the Bible, abandons the podium and shuffles back down the aisle. Passing me and the old man, he says, “Sorry men. Just giving a trial run. Christmas in July.” Then he exits the church.
I lean over the pew in front of me and try to pray, but I don’t know to whom I’m praying or how I can expect to find answers when I’m this confounded. Joy can’t be created endlessly. It isn’t everlasting. I don’t understand how it can be the purpose of life.
I don’t make it through the prayer. I sit back and lift the kneeler. Getting ready to exit the pew, I notice a prayer card stuck in the bin that holds the hymnals. I take it. After glancing at the old man one final time, I leave St. Michael’s church, reading the prayer card as I go.
PRAYER TO ST. MICHAEL
“St. Michael the Archangel, defend us in battle; Be our protection against the wickedness and snares of the Devil. May God rebuke him, we humbly pray, and do thou, O Prince of the Heavenly Host, by the power of God, thrust into hell Satan and all other evil spirits who wander through the world seeking the ruin of souls.
Amen.”
THE LINGERING IMAGE OF NAOMI
On the steps outside the church, I re-read the prayer to St. Michael. With repetition comes meaning and definition. Memories of my struggles with the other world inject themselves between stanzas. The image of the disfigured, dying Naomi punctuates the final line of the prayer each time I finish, as if I need to confront this fact before I can move on. In my head, she starts to move, like someone just hit play on a frame of video that was previously paused. Through memory, I experience the event all over again but process it differently. Not being there in the moment, obviously, has an effect, but so do the old man, the sermon, and the prayer, as well as my own reflections. Everything that took place after Naomi disappeared came with strife. But every incident was pivotal. I lost Naomi. I found the Door. The other world challenged me. It tried to devour me. It killed Naomi. I’ve suffered. But I am still alive, and I am not th
e same.
Starting at the beginning, I whisper the prayer out loud – this will be the last time – and my memory leaps to the point in The World Trade Center Incident before the rubble fell and took Naomi with it. I watch my hand reach for her. I almost touch her side, but I come up short, and Geppetto snatches me as she begins to slip away.
And then I realize something. Her side. If the woman actually was Naomi, she would have had a tattoo above her left hip – a bullet with her name on it.
Behind me, the doors to the church open. I turn around, expecting to see the lonely old man on his way out. Instead, I see a different old man, one who is always alone but perhaps never lonely.
GEPPETTO WALKS INTO THE WORLD
“Don’t worry,” says Geppetto. “I’m only using my world to co-opt a very small part of yours, just for a moment, so I can personally deliver a message.”
Rather than wait to hear what else he has to say, I blurt out that Naomi is still alive. I look directly into his eyes. If his expression was ever going to change, it would have to be now. This would be when he smiled, if he did that sort of thing. But Geppetto interprets everything the same, so there isn’t a smile, there are a few ticks of the clock and then a response.
“You realized about the tattoo. I noticed that earlier. I wanted to tell you, but it would’ve been against the rules. This job can be difficult at times. Then again, sometimes that’s the point. I figured it would come to you when you were prepared to deal with it. And now, you look like you’ve gained some resolve. Good. I knew you would.” He adds, “I emailed my counterpart, the woman who’s been guiding Naomi – her name’s Toni – to check on things.”
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