The White Wall

Cast away in an artificial world of regularities, a man is forced to ponder about the meaning of his life while walking endlessly alongside a white wall just to earn a meager ration of nutrients. In passive desperation, he witnesses how his life is wasted in that immense laboratory designed for the sole purpose of testing him, or maybe to drive him crazy, whatever happens first.

The wall divides the world in two: on one side a single prisoner is kept alive, while on its other side awaits the true meaning of this cruel experiment.

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“To all who have ever wondered what lies on the other side.”

“In all this there was a menace and a portent … a hint of evil, an intimation of doom. Bird, beast, or insect there were none. The wind signed in the bare branches of the dead trees and the gray grass bent to whisper its dread secret to the earth, but no other sound or motion broke the awful repose of that dismal place.”

“An Inhabitant of Carcosa” by Ambrose Bierce

The next morning, the man woke up under an open blue sky, gently caressed by a warm breeze despite it being late November. The air had the fragrance of wild country air, clean and fresh. The warm light on his face made him believe he was still in the twilight of a dream. Then he realized that the mere realization of being in a dream would break the spell of being in a dream, and this illusion seemed to be stubbornly permanent.

“What is going on?” he said aloud using a rasping voice that was not his voice while squinting to protect his eyes from the blazing sun. Where am I? That was his first thought.

He was lying on the perfectly groomed turf of a golf course. When he tried to stand up, he quickly realized it was a mistake, and fell on his knees. A migraine was drilling a hole in his skull without anesthetics.

Cleaning the drool trickling out of his mouth, he stared at what he was wearing, perplexed. All his muscles were stubbornly numb, as if he had just woken up from a long slumber.

He rubbed his sweaty forehead to relieve the pulsating headache that was hammering his temple, and then nausea took hold of him. Attempting to rub his neck, he slid one hand over his scalp, just to discover in horror that all his hair was gone.

Panic took hold of him.

A flux of adrenaline rushed in, followed by arrhythmic heartbeats. His body gave out warning signs of an imminent cardiac arrest; he stumbled again on the grass and vomited bile, his sole stomach content.

After a lapse of intermittent coughing and irregular breathing, his panic attack and arrhythmia eased to controllable levels. Just in case, he stayed there for a moment, lying on his back with legs folded, knees pointing to heaven and eyes wide shut while controlling his breathing.

Once he felt better, despite being weak, shaking and light-headed, he struggled to sit on the grass and began to search for visual cues of where he was. The first thing he noticed was a tree line in the distance. Then, his hand grabbed a sample of the grass, he smelled and realized that he was sitting on a prairie.

Turning his head to the opposite direction, he saw the white wall for the first time.