The Waiting Room by T. M. Wright

don't know how accurate that is." He paused. "I've seen , a whole world in these walls—I've seen a whole world behind these windows and doors, Sam. Sometimes I've walked into it, into that world, looking for Phyllis. And sometimes it's come here, parts of it, into this house. Like today." He smiled happily. "Like this morning." He stopped, as if waiting for some comment from me. I started to say again—not really believing it No one's here, Abner, but when I got as far as "No one's," he interrupted: "And this world, Sam, is wherever we aren't looking, wherever we can't see, wherever we choose not to see. It's in the walls. It's behind the doors. It's beyond the windows." He was on a roll now. "Until we break the walls down, or look out the windows or open the doors. And then what we see, and what sees us, depends solely on who we are."
    "Oh? Are you special, Abner?"
    "Yes," he answered at once. "You could say I'm special. On the second of January it was two years since my ... initiation."
    "I'm happy for you."
    He smiled. "You know, Sam, you're holding up pretty well under the circumstances." He glanced at the door that led to the beach. "But do you think you could do me a favor?"
    "A favor?"
    He shrugged. "I'd just like you to go to that door"—he nodded at the door that led to the beach. "Open it. And step out. Could you do that?"
    I glanced at the door, then at Abner. "Why?"
    He smiled once more. "Sam, you're going to have to go out one of these doors sooner or later."
    I looked at the door again. I looked at it a good, long time. Then I stood. "I don't like any of this, Abner. I don't like anything I've seen here. I don't like anything you've said. And I don't like this. I don't like the way it feels."
    He shrugged. "Of course you don't. It's kind of an acquired taste." I said nothing. He grinned and added, "That's a joke, Sam."
    "Oh?" I said. "Ha, ha." I screwed my courage up, strode to the door, pulled it open, and stepped out.
    Abner told me later that I screamed, though I don't recall it. I've screamed only once before, that I remember, and that was in Viet Nam, when a soldier walking a couple of yards to my right through a rice paddy stepped on a Claymore mine. I screamed then, out of desperation, out of the agonizing knowledge that I had to exist in a world where the ground I walked on could blow up beneath my feet.
    And I screamed outside Abner's back door for the same reason that I would have screamed if my skin had been stripped from my flesh. Because what I had known as reality—even after all that had happened earlier in Abner's house—evaporated around me, and I was wrapped in something strange, and cold, and terrifying.
    I saw the beach, the ocean, the dunes, tall grasses here and there, a bright midday sun in a tight blue sky. I heard the screech of gulls, the low grumble of traffic from somewhere far in front of the house. I smelled the salt air,the slight underlay of dead fish.
    But I saw it, heard it, smelled it as if it were at a distance, as if it were removed, the way a caterpillar inside a grimy glass bowl probably experiences the world. And what lay between me and the reality of gulls and dunes and traffic was a place of confusion, a world of stillness and panic where there were a thousand people, ten thousand people, all moving about as if in slow motion, as if their feet were stuck in the earth, as if each of them were playing a part in someone else's nightmare.
    And I knew this, too, watching them: I knew that they were the reality, that the dunes, the gulls, and the traffic were no more than the sugar coating on a sucker that has a steel ball at its center.
    I said, "My God, my God, Abner, this is hell! "
    And Abner, who had come up behind me, said, "Don't be an ass, Sam. What'd you do in Viet Nam—find religion? This is just what is, it's no more than what is. I can't help it if this is the first time you've opened your eyes."

SIXTEEN
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    Imagine being digested.