The clock stuck 10:45 when he closed the door, the sound of the clock echoed. Josh was not around as usual. He could not recall seeing Josh last week or the week before, except may be last Wednesday night. The stink of his shirt bothers him, but he realized his laundry has been piling since last week, so he straightened out the shirt before hanging it by the closet, wondering would tomorrow be the second or third day that he wore the same shirt. A shower was more attractive than food and he left the TV on. It was a small flat and he wanted some noise.
He was surrounded by white because Josh liked white. White walls, white dishes, white computer, it was especially white in the bathroom. From ceiling to floor tile, toothbrush to toilet paper, everything was in white, including basin and toilet. He preferred cream yellow but he just rented a room. The full size mirror reflected a frail and weary frame. He stared at himself in the mirror while waiting for the water to heat. He was 27 but he looked older; one might say he was 35, if one would take a good look at him. His skin itched from the first splash of water but it soon adapted to the heat, relaxing its tension and expanding its pores. Closing his eyes and the day began to flash before him; presentations, reports, justification of the decline in the summer season still clogged his system. He sat on the shower floor and let the spraying water rain down on him, hoping to wash the day away. The sound of TV nonsense could be overheard beside the running water and the heat and steam was relaxing him. He was at peace and could finally rest after fourteen hours of work.
He woke up when he bummed against the ceramic wall. He had fallen asleep and his sight was blurred from waking up in a haze of steam. Rubbing his face under the running water and he realized he could not hear anything. The noise of the TV was gone, only the sound of water hitting the shower floor. The heat made him very dizzy to wake up from his nap and he could not believe how much steam his shower had made. The steam was very dense and filled up the whole bathroom. It was a blur on the other side of the plastic door as he climbed up from the floor to turned off the water. A rush of blood from his head made him nauseous and he just wanted to get out of the heated room, but he could not open the slide door as if it was stuck. He slammed at the door to no avail and he realized he could not see anything on the other side of the door, not even an outline of the toilet or the basin, and it was absolute silent, too quiet for an apartment in the city. He was getting nervous but no matter how hard he tried, the slide door remained locked in its place. He began to wonder how long he had slept. He shouted for Josh yet there was no answer and he discovered something different as he began to look around. One of the shower walls seemed to be missing. The wall with the tap and showerhead was intact and he could feel the wall he was leaning on, but the other wall seemed to disappear. Steam kept coming out of the side where it supposed to be a wall. He walked toward the steam and found the wall was completely gone. He reached out his arm and could not feel anything inside the steam, so he took a deep breath and walked into it.
Instead of bumming into a wall, he walked on. He could still feel the wall on his right side continue and it felt like ceramic wall on the left side too. The steam was making the air difficult to breath. He began to panic and charged forward and felt the steam becoming thinner. With a couple of steps, he was out of the steam fog. He panted for air and saw the shower continued. The white walls, the ceiling, the lights and tile floor extended to a great distance, every so often a showerhead would keep pouring out water from the ceiling and a drain could be found on the floor under the shower head. He found himself in a very long shower corridor. Despite the heat, a chill sent down his spine with the mere sight of the corridor. He wanted to go back to his bathroom, so he raced back into the thick steam but he did not return to his shower. In front of him was another shower corridor that seemed to extend far beyond what he could see. He stood naked and listened to his own panting. He did not scream for it seemed pointless to do so when no one was around, he just told himself he must have been dreaming, yet the heat and the need to piss felt genuine. Walking close to a nearby showerhead and touching the running water, he felt the warmth of the fluid and nothing out of the ordinary. He pissed down the drain and the urine slipped in as gravity governed. He ran thorough the steam several times, hoping one of the trip would bring him back to his bathroom, but he just ended up in the same white ceramic corridor. Finally he ran away from the steam fog, passing under several showerheads and kept running until he could not see the steam anymore, but he was still in the shower corridor. The white ceramic walls extended in both directions, the white tilt floor ran as far as he could see, the showerhead and drain kept repeating, it was an endless shower corridor.
He decided that he was merely having a vivid nightmare and he just had to find ways to wake up. He kicked hard against the wall and got a swollen toe. He cursed and screamed till his throat sore. He leaped and hoped to fly until his feet hurt. He rubbed himself until his skin sore and still could not get a erection. He was famish and thirsty from all these exercises, and it relieved him little that the shower water seemed to be drinkable. He was exhausted when he finally sat down on the floor. Listening to the running water, he had a sudden urge to cry but no tears ran down his face. He was crying still and fell asleep without notice.
The pain on his neck woke him. The shower floor was a poor choice for bed and his back and neck were in pain as well as his stomach. He could not know how long he had slept but he found himself still in the shower corridor. Water was his only source of food so he kept drinking and hoped to minimize the ache in his belly. His neck numbed after stretching toward the showerhead for a while. He stared at the white wall that was two feet across from him and looked at the corridor that continued as far as he could see on both side, a sense of disgust overwhelmed him, urging him to start running again. Ran as fast as he could toward one end of the corridor, hoping that he could outran the corridor, hoping that he could at least see a turn at the distanced horizon, but he just kept on running under showerheads until he was tired and the corridor was just as long and endless. He screamed and cursed nonsense and started pleading to shower walls. Pleading them to release him, convincing them that he was too weak for any test, begging them to let him return to his work, to his room, to his life; but echo was his only answer, echo of his own pleads. He cried again without tears, for tears had deserted him a long time ago. He heard his own whimper echoed on the long corridor. Struggling on the floor, showering water as his supplement for tears, he lay under a showerhead and screamed. His own shout scared him initially, but it was all he had left until his voice gave in. The warm water remained, mysteriously splashing on his body, slithering down his skin, pooling up on the floor, dripping down the drain, and running into the unknown. He lay for a long time, hoping he would miraculously return to his room.
He waited.
And he waited.
And he waited.
The corridor remained its white, the water remained its warmth, and he remained in his place. He climbed up and walked again. He wanted to get back to the thick steam for it might be his only chance for escape, so he began to backtrack his way. He walked on, getting sick of repetitive white tiles, getting tired of constantly being wet, but he kept on walking. He could not know how far he had backtracked, but the thick steam was nowhere in sight. He walked on for a long time. Ten miles or five hundred miles, he never knew, he just stopped when he was too tired. He knew he did not walk that far away before the sleep, the corridor was playing tricks on him, and he was staving and exhausted. Before he got mad, he dozed off.
He hated getting up at 7:15 everyday. He hated stuffing oily bacon and flavorless egg from Rebecca’s Deli every morning. He hated sitting next to Philippo’s cubicle, he could do nothing but listen to his phone conversation everyday. He hated to project sales in Bombay next season and the season after. He hated to be caged in a 70 ft2 white cubicle. He hated dinning on microwave Swedish meatball and spaghetti dinner and watching the blinking TV screen. He hated staring at the white ceiling in the middle of the night. He hated to lie coldly in bed and heard Josh coming back at 3:30 in the morning. He hated listening to the radio on a Saturday night and he hated watching sunset in his room on a Sunday afternoon. Nothing changed, nothing ever changed.
The pain in his back woke him again. He felt the coolness of the tile floor and silence. The sound of running water was gone. He struggled to awake from his slumber and all the water had stopped, none of the showerheads in his sight were pouring water anymore. Except for occasion drips hitting on the drain below, the corridor was in absolute silence. The echo of his voice was louder than ever. He wanted to run away but each side of the corridor was as long and unreachable as the other. He tried to scream but only to be reminded how weak he was. He crouched on the floor and cried without tears and without waters. He clenched his fists and growled, the silence was numbing his ears and his stomachache was keeping him from moving. He stared at the dry drain, looking deep into the darkness between the grooves, he wondered where had all the water gone. He looked up and the showerheads were dry but the ceiling lights were still on. He reached franticly toward the light but the heat of the glass burned his fingers and the light was installed in a way that gave no leverage for him to remove, so he started to pull hard on a showerhead. It was firmly in place with the ceiling, but with a slip of hand, he heard a loosening sound. He turned the head counter clockwise three times and it popped out of its fixing. He looked up to the empty tube on the ceiling but saw only darkness. With a firm hold of the detached showerhead, he jabbed it madly against the drain, stabbing at the groove, wanting to lift it open. The drain was chipped but remained intact. He panted form his action but soon began to crack at the tile floor. The white tile was splitting immediately, and he hit the floor harder, driving his frustration to the floor until it cracked wide opened.
A forearm’s diameter hole was formed. He heard nothing when the tile dropped below the floor. He ventured to look down the hole and it was dark. He could not see or hear anything from below, it was darkness without dimension, and he could not guess how deep the darkness reached. He supported himself on the floor and lowered his head to the hole. Faint light from drainage grooves aligned themselves straight at the bottom of the shower corridor, extending beyond his sight on both sides and the rest was darkness. He shouted but there was no echo, his voice left and never came back. There was no draft from any direction, no light from any distance; it was an engulfing silent darkness.
Sitting beside the hole, he waited. The pain in his stomach kept him from sitting straight, his throat was dry and grainy, his ears were compressed by silence, and his limps were weak. He thought he heard something beside the numbing sound of silence but he could not identify anything, it was here and gone a second later. The corridor was as impossible to comprehend as he first saw it. He stared at the white ceiling for a long while and started to cry, hoping the tears might moist his throat, but he could not even hear his own whimper through the silence and he forgot tears have deserted a long time ago. With one deep breath, he crawled into the hole.
He fell into the darkness, looking back to the light from the hole until the light was just a dot and gone. Surrounded by darkness, he kept on falling. He thought he would crash at some point but it did not happen. He heard his breath, felt his heartbeat and remembered something else. A shadow seemed to appear at the corner of his eye when he fell through the hole. A shape down the corridor, a towering black tripod smudged in yellow polka dot, its height reached the ceiling and a swarm of bugs was lifting it forward. A stark contrast to the white corridor, the last thing he saw before he lost in the swallowing darkness.
解說：
這是幾年前寫下的故事。
一直都滿意它的氣氛與細節，但卻總不喜歡原本的結局。為著與朋友彼此分享舊作，不得不重讀故事一遍，修正文法與表達，卻意外地浮現新結局的影像。
三色人版
無頭東宮揾麻鷹
路直路彎
無題
暗角
圖騰
8mm
無題
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