Sometimes in the sounding night, with footsteps rushing past and light-bound shadows flashing orally under the firmly closed door, I awaken, startled, and wonder if I am next. It takes me a moment to clear the fog of that constantly unsettled semi-sleep, and understand that I am not at home. And won’t be for uncountable time. The pillow is not right, and the bed is far too narrow. And empty. There is a dusty patina on the sheets that I can feel despite the dark. It makes me cough if I pull them close. But they are old, like the room. Echoes of the others who have slept here, echoes of the phone calls that suddenly scream their warnings in the night, echoes of opening and closing doors just outside  -all those echoes are trapped in here. All clamoring for an audience.

There are more things imprisoned within this room than a person should feel. To embrace even a small fraction of the anxiety plastered on the door, let alone the shadows rushing noisily past, would be to succumb to that which we are not allowed: fear. To suspect, even, that there may be a situation so dire, so entrenched and insoluble that we could only witness it in horror, is to abrogate the right to the room itself. The right to close the door, to close the eyes in pseudo sleep.

The desk that welcomes and entices in the light, holds no promise in the dark. Holds no answers to the urgent questions from the phone. Or to the voice whispering loudly near the door. Whispering things I should not hear, and can’t because they are too quickly said. Meant for others standing just outside or passing on their ways to other things. To other doors. Here be dragons…

There is no time that passes here. It is not allowed –nor should it be. This is a place of black and void, an empty space yet full of ghosts who do not talk, or pace about. There is no room in here: it is barren ground. A fissure carved deep within the building. An abyss, a surface with no boundaries –except perhaps, the door, and those who seem to wait outside. For whom? And why?

Do they, too, wait for a phone to ring before they pound restlessly on a door? Is there anything that starts their ceaseless pacing in the corridor? Or is it random? Brownian motion? Perhaps they’re too aware to sleep, anticipating pages not yet issued, problems not discovered. Maybe they walk the hall with with text books open in one hand, pencils ready to underline another fact, but smartphones in the other, an app, finger-close… Just to check, you understand. Prepared for what, they do not know…

It is not them I fear, nor the hallway that sanctifies their life. They have other duties in the night. Responsibilities they must guard, lest someone find them wanting. They are not mine; my door is just a mistake for them, an anomaly to tempt them from their task. Nothing more. They do not belong to me; they are not my specialty. Not my responsibility. I cannot answer for them and will not let myself be distracted.

There is a sentence I read somewhere –King Lear, I think- and it surfaces now and then in the dust motes circling around the light under the door. It, too, whispers to me when I am startled by a noise outside, and nudges me if I pretend too hard to sleep: O, that way madness lies; let me shun that; no more of that. And when it sounds, it loops and twists in my head like a roundabout, the words circling like vultures, going round and round and round again looking for an exit…

But my job, for now, is to pretend to sleep. To pretend I will be ready when my duty calls, my own phone rings to silence those calls for madness from without.