A Fundibulum

In the moments before it happened, everything was just as it should have been.  Each thing was its place.  Wallet on the dresser, shoes on the floor, same old sheets on the bed, the window slightly open as usual.  I could go on but it would simply be a rather boring list of mundane details.  Not worth thinking about.  Whoever said that history was just one damn thing after another could have been my biographer.

      It was a warm night in the middle of May.  Time, right then; place, right there.  I may have been dreaming but I would not recall that; my dreams were as dull as my waking life.  Predictable and repetitive.  Ennui had become a lifestyle to me and I used to get to bed early just to escape it.  I only woke up that night because I had to pee but even that was probably just to break the monotony of sleep.

      Eyes half closed in the semidark, I got myself into a sitting position on the edge of the bed, put both feet down on the cold floor, then stood up.  Barely able to manage the mechanics of walking, I slid one foot along the floor, shifted my weight onto it, then shoved the other one forward.  You see what I’m saying?  No grand drama, no big themes.  Same old, same old.

      When I got to the bedroom doorway in my little apartment, I reached out with my right hand to grab the right side of the jamb to steady myself.  Reached out, that is, like a thousand times before to the same door.  I could even feel the spot where the paint was chipped.  So familiar.  And then the quick right turn into the narrow hallway, then four steps, five, and six to the bathroom door where dim light coming through the opaque bathroom window cast a vague shadow on the bathtub curtain.  Through the gauze of my stupor I could just make out the white tile of the bathroom floor, the white toilet beyond.  White and clean.  Maybe I was thinking ahead then, about the bed and the pillow and the sheets I would return to in a moment.  About sleep and the hours until dawn. 

      Of course, I never got that far.

      Another moment intervened.  A really big moment.  The momentous moment after I did my business and flushed the toilet.  I had just shifted my weight to the left leg, turned, then bent my right knee, taking one more step through the controlled tumble we call walking.  Pride of the species and so well rehearsed over the millennia.

       No reason to think anything bizarre would happen.  All I had in mind at that instant was bringing my foot down again and moving forward.  But instead, as my knee continued its forward thrust, it came in direct contact with another surface.  Something were dead air should have been.  It was impossible, of course, but it seemed like another knee.  And then there was an extra hand and pretty soon a jumble of body parts.

      It all happened so fast, I did not have time to panic and was instantly mangled in a tangle of arms and legs.  I twisted, rolled and shoved, and found myself bumbling down.  The fall lasted much longer than it should have, an eternity to be exact.  And there was that slight sensation of my brain warping then twanging back into a rubbery ball just as I hit the floor.

      I wound up face down on the floor but not alone.  Someone was under me.  For a second I continued to delude myself into thinking it was just a dreamwalk.  Fuzzy logic in the night and all.  But it was not.  There was a real hipbone there and a pointy chin under mine.  I could feel the breath coming out of another mouth and heat from the body.  Hard stuff like that.  The kind of density no dream has.

      Trying to get the madness over with in one swoop, I popped open my eyes.  It was true!  Another person was lying beneath me, a complete separate individual.  A stranger.  An intruder!  A burglar that I had accidentally nabbed trying to steal my toilet seat.  I tried to scream for help but the air would not pump. 

      When I finally got something out, it was not one of those inane movie yells that actors get paid to make.  It was a real shriek, a whelp of pure terror rocketing from the gut.  It broke the grip of my panic and I scrambled over to a safe spot a few feet away.  All was still for a while.  Except, of course, for the badoom of my heart as it toyed with cardiac arrest.

      In the teetering logic of half-sleep, crouched like a cornered rat and catching my breath, I came up with a second theory.  This was no burglary…I had been abducted by spacemen!  That had to be it.  The thought of almond-eyed creeps sticking needles in scary places did not comfort me so that I could barely look at the creature lying on the floor.  On the other hand, there was no way to fight it without first taking a peek.  So I peeked and – surprise! – it did not look oozy or spiny at all.  In fact, it seemed to be an ordinary person in a while lab coat.  A woman, pale and thin, with short brown hair.  Two large silver earrings were hanging from her ear lobes.  She had brown eyes, two of them.  And the expression on her face was not sinister but sad, as though she was sorry about the kidnap.

      She seemed as shaken by the collision as I was and only slowly got up from the floor.  Then she straightened her coat and reached out a hand, a human hand, freckled skin with four thin fingers and one thumb.  She even had rosy nail polish. 

      “Ack!” I shouted, pulling back.  “What do you want from me?” 

      The door to the alien john was right next to me and I swiftly got up and raced through it.  No idea what to expect on the other side.  Maybe my hallway, maybe the vast emptiness of outer space.  It was neither; just a room with a table in the center and some chairs around it.  A conference table for Arcturians.  I stumbled against one of the chairs and the screech of the leg sent prickles through my spine.  When I turned around, the woman was standing behind me with her hand still extended.  

      “Sam,” she said quietly.

      That’s when I noticed three others in the room as well.  They also looked human, comically so.  One was short and rotund with a baseball hat.  Another was tall and bald with a tie and jacket.  The third had bad skin and a weak jaw.  They looked like members of a bowling league who had a lousy season.  No fool, I knew that these might be projections to disguise their truly icky appearances.  I kept my distance.

      Besides the table and chairs, the room was empty, light blue in color, and windowless.  One of them, the round one, moved towards me with, I was sure, grotesque plans in mind.  I pushed a chair towards him, slid around the table, slipped on something and hit my head.  Darkness fell like buttered bread, wrong side down.

      In dreams come hope, or so I have read.  Not wish fulfillment, not the whispers of the gods, not responsibilities.  Just hope for simple things like wingless flight, hookless sex, futures that can never be.  Not mine of course, which are usually dull as dirt.  But this time was different.  I dreamed about waking up back in my bathroom, everything as it was, cool and quiet and ordinary.

      But when I opened my eyes again, nothing had changed.  I was still there in the blue room and so was she and so were they.  I was sitting in a chair at that point and the woman I had collided with was holding my wrist in her pinch, feeling my pulse.  I was about to protest, tell them I was an important person on Earth, that I tasted bad, that there were people looking for me right now.  All lies of course but none of it got out in any case.

      “Are you all right?” she asked.  “You have to try to calm down.”

      English?  Yes, good old rolling American, as familiar as Duncan Donuts.  Very clever, these aliens, they had hacked the language center of my brain.

      “Veh,” I managed, meaning something along the lines of okay.

      “Good,” she said, decoding my posture more than my speech.

      Now that I could see here clearly, I realized that she was smaller than I first thought, less menacing.  And her companions seemed rather motley and dismayed.

      “My name is Sam,” she said.  “I know you must be a little confused.”

      “Gav,” I said.  

      No idea what that meant but it is what came out.

      “Questions?”

      Who me?  No, not really.  Well…I do have one little question, if you don’t mind.  A teensy weensy query.  Nothing new, mind you.  It is really an age-old question.  In some ways, the only question mankind has ever asked.  The question we were born to ask.  And somehow now it just seemed relevant all over again.  WHAT THE FUCK IS GOING ON?

      I thought that but did not say it.  Instead, all that emerged from my mouth was:

      “No probes!”

      Sam looked at me dimly and the others, who were now gathered around me like strangers at an accident, looked at each other with even less insight.  Then the bald one stepped in front of her, cleared his throat, and asked:

      “I’m Les.  Do you know where you are?”

      I did.  In fact, it was becoming quite clear to me that  I was trapped in low orbit above the earth with four grotesques pretending to be humans like the ones they had seen on the sitcoms they took to be documentaries.

      “What's the last thing you remember?” the short one, a nebbish of a starman, asked.

      “This is getting us nowhere,” Sam interjected.  “Let's just get to the damn point.”

      The four of them stepped back for a brief confo or a slight argument, it was hard to say which.  They seemed to be debating, not what to do with me but what to ask me.  Something they probably should have worked out ahead of time, given the light-years of travel they took just to nab me.

      “Apologies,” Sam said, returning.  “Please try to stay calm and just tell me…do you know where you are?”

“Low orbit?” I suggested.

      I was counting on the idea that, due to some snafu, they had not yet engaged their hyperdrive to another galaxy and were still in the gravitational pull of Earth.  But of course all of that was just sci-fi dribble; I had no idea what any of it meant.  On the other hand, for all their technology, they seemed rather pathetic, with no plan or strategy, and as confused by the situation as I was.  That was the moment that a third and more plausible explanation hit me. 

      “An asylum,” I said plainly, correcting myself

      Of course!  That had to be it.  They were inmates at some kind of institution that I had stumbled into. 

      A large brick building somewhere with manicured grounds, clean counters where kindly nurses dispensed happy pills in fluted white paper cups, visiting hours on Tuesday, and “safe” rooms on the fourth floor.  The Palace of Lost Marbles.  I decided to play along with the loonies rather than risk their ire.

      “And have we all taken our meds today?” I said through a psychiatric smile.

      “Is that a joke?” the tall one asked.

      “Of course it’s a joke,” Sam insisted.  “He’s being funny.”

      “Well, it’s a stupid joke.”

      “Like you would know!” the short one jabbed.

      “Better than you!”

      “Enough!” Sam shouted.

      She dismissed them with a flap of her hand, which they obediently followed by going to the far side of the table but grousing all the way.  She pulled up a chair and looked at me kindly.  Perhaps, I thought, she was a good crazy.  Like me.  Sentenced to the loony bin for some minor infraction like writing cuss words in a public space.  Nothing truly psycho.

      “Carter,” I said.  “My name is Carter.”

      “Good,” she said.  “What probes are you talking about?”

      “A discarded theory,” I offered, not wanting to give her any ideas.

      “I don’t understand.”

      “Me either.  Do you mind very much if I ask you a question?”

      “Go ahead.”

      The moment finally seemed right.

      “What the FUCK?”

      “Actually Carter, we were hoping you could tell us.”

      “Tell you what?”

      “Let’s start at the start.  What happened just before you bumped into me?”

      “I was at the toilet taking a…”

      A sudden sense of dread filled me.  At that moment, it did not seem so amusingly absurd anymore.  That memory, so basic, seemed to have drifted to another quadrant of the cosmos.  It was gone now, out of reach and touch.  My world, with all its doors and dreams, all swept away in an instant.  I wanted so much to be back there, sleeping on those flat sheets, even tossing and turning if I had to.

      “You had just flushed your toilet?” she asked.

      When I nodded my head, she turned to the others who were now seated at the table and nodded at them.

      “Where is the toilet?”

      “My apartment.”

      “Which is where exactly?”

      “New York?”

      Who did she think she was kidding?  I knew what game she was playing….the old sanity test.  What year is it?  Who is the President of the United States?  How much are six and three?  Are you Napoleon?  As though that would convince me that she had a medical degree.

      “2002.  Bush.  Nine.  No,” I said conclusively.

      “You see?” she said, again looking at her fellow inmates.  “Same story.”

      They rolled their chairs around to face me.  

      “Listen to me Carter,” she said very slowly.  “Listen carefully.  What I have to tell you is going to be hard for you to accept.”

      “No weekend pass?  Did I get something wrong?  You did say six and three, didn’t you?”

      “Try and stay focused, pal,” Les said.  “You’ve stepped through a fun….”

      He stammered there and turned to Sam for help.  But the whole shebang did not seem like any fun to me.

      “Fundibulum,” Sam said, completing his thought.

      I looked down to see if there was any stuck to my shoe and only then realized that I was still wearing my pajamas.  I thought at that moment of running to the door but something held me back.  The truth perhaps or at least an entertaining fiction.

      “We can't explain it because we don’t understand it,” she added.  

      “But it's the best theory we’ve got,” concluded the nerdy one.

      Sam stood up and made a large V in the air with her hands:  “It’s a kind of funnel through the web of spacetime.”

      “Like a time tunnel,” I suggested.  “A black hole connecting one star system to another.”

      Movie talk of course, but what was I supposed to do?  I had to play along.  I was trapped in a room with four nutcases, biding my time until the nurses returned.

      “More like a collision between two branes that creates a vortex,” said the nerd.

      “From my toilet….to here,” I said calmly.

      “Apparently.”

      “All of ours,” Sam said.  “That’s how we all got here.”

      “It’s got something to do with the flush,” the tall one said.   “You see?”

      “Absolutely,” I said.  “What I see is that either you are all totally loco or I am.  I guess it doesn’t really matter which.  So if you will excuse me...RESTRAINT!”

      I saw that in some movie too and jumped up to shout it as loud as I could.  It was supposed to signal the staff to burst in but no one came.  That is when I realized that there was only one door in the room, the one to the toilet, the one I came in through.  I raced to it, eluding them all and proud of my evasive maneuvers.  But when I turned to look back, I saw that none of them made a move to stop me.  Instead they were standing there looking worn and sad.  

      There was a prayer trapped inside my lips, but I did not have time to utter it.  I raised my left foot, pushed it forward, shifted my weight.  Then I took another big step in the desperate effort to undo what I had done.  Farewell my bingo-bongo friends!  So long to the asylum and the inmates!  Adios to loons on the march!  The twang of freedom shot up my spine like an electric chill.  My bathroom, bedroom, apartment building, sidewalks, pizza joints, subways were all there on the other side of that toilet, I just knew it.  I pushed the door open and barged through, ran to the toilet, and flushed like a madman over and over again.

      I have no clue how long I was in there; time seemed to be absent from the place.  All I know is that when I finally stopped and walked back out, like someone depleted from the runs, they were all still standing there around that same table in the same room as before.

      “It’s a fundibulum,” Sam said softly.  “A funnel.  You fall in the open end and can't squeeze back in the narrow end.  We’ve been trying for some time.”

      “How long have you all been here?” I asked.

      But there was no answer.  In fact, I could not have answered the question about myself.  We may all have flushed ourselves down the funnel but time had not come along on the journey.

      “LeKoi says that the best explanation is the one that explains nothing,” the chubby one replied. 

      “Shut up about LeKoi already,” Sam snapped.  “I'm sick of Lekoi and I'm damn sick of you!”

      “The feeling’s mutual, sister.”

      “Stop behaving like fools,” Les said.

      “So you're telling me,” I interrupted, with as much sanity as I could muster, “that we all flushed our toilets and then somehow ended up here?  And where exactly is here?”

      “Your guess is as good as ours,” Les said.  “As you can see, there is only one door and it leads to that bathroom which leads nowhere.  So here we all are.”

      “To do what?  What’s the point of all this?”

      “We thought you would know.”

      “Why would I know?”

      “The chairs.”

      “What about them?”

      “There are five of them.”

      “So what?”

      “So you're the fifth person to arrive here.  We figured that you must be the last.  The one to complete the set, so to speak.”

      “What set?”

      “He means,” Sam explained, “why would there be five chairs – rather than three or nine – unless the room was made for five people.  And now that we’re all here, we were hoping the point of all this would become clear.”

      “Made?  Made by who?”

      No one answered that for the simple reason that there was no answer.  Nor a clear purpose or point or any idea at all about what to do next.  We took our seats around the table but nothing changed.  We changed positions and still nothing changed.  The weird timeless time of that place passed, uncountable and immeasurable, and we sat and talked and argued and were silent for long periods.  We tried everything we could think of to solve the problem: shouted to the heavens; banged on the walls; posed and rejected endless theories, some brilliant, some dumb.

      And that is the way it went.  For how long?  Impossible to say.  Not like a short story with its snappy ending but like real life, which drags on and on until you think you cannot stand it any more and still it goes on.

      So that by we heard the toilet flush, the others stood up and went to the door.  But not me.  I just sat there waiting and not caring.  Knowing exactly what it was going to turn out to be…just one more damn thing.