You have unwittingly entered a circular room of doors via a stairway that has faded into nothing. Beyond where the stairway used to lead is an open door to a place with an idyllic landscape of rolling grassy knolls and pleasant breezes, blue skies. But that door is unreachable, hovering above you. As for the doors in the room, they have lead you only towards either dark and bright nothingness or war, sloth, and lust. The floor upon which you stand has gradually begun to fade from the center outwards, and you now stand on a ledge with perhaps just enough time to explore one more door. You go to that door and open it.

The door opens to a rather small basement office. The walls are of cinderblock, and there are no windows. A balding middle-aged man sits at a large desk. He taps his thick fingers on an oversized adding machine that clunkers and clinks, then writes down some figures. The balding man looks up, and his head turns in your direction.

He says, “the death rate has increased quite a bit, but not only that, the number of people taking their own lives has favored us because we need not pay out the premiums to the remaining spouse in those cases. Take that down and forward it to Mr. White. Tell him also, that his calculations for next year are off, he has no understanding of human behavior at all. He should have taken the coefficient of x squared and divided it by the derivative of the inverse sine, then multiplied that by man’s capacity for lying. He would have clearly seen then that next year’s pestilence will be of great value to us, but only if we increase our premiums by a coefficient of y taken three times plus the inverse of man’s ability to falsely hope for positive outcomes. Why are you looking at me like that?”

He gets up and comes over to you. He looks you up and down. “Who in hell’s name are you? You’re not the messenger.” He looks beyond you into the room that fades into nothingness. “Oh, good God.” He sighs and shakes his head. “You don’t belong here, go on! Shoo! Get out!” He brushes you away with the back of his hand and shuts the door himself. You try the door again, but it is locked.

The ledge is so small now, that just turning around to face it nearly sends you careening into the wide abyss now below you. You grimly move your feet sideways and manage to go back towards the other doors, past the door of the intertwined bodies that pleasure themselves, and past the door of the worm eating family, and back to the door where the children screamed. You’ll open the door and slip in. You’ll help the children. You place your hand on the knob, but you don’t open the door. For the life of you, you cannot open it, you’re just too scared. The bombs, the fires … after that what? Go back to sloth … lust … you can’t make any choice. Despair overwhelms you.

You watch as the nothingness nears your toes. Then you hear a voice calling you from above. You look up to see the clowns from the field of hay looking in at the door. One of them stands right in it, while others are peering in from the side. It’s a comical sight. “Hey, ho!” shouts the one at the doorway. “You’re not suppose to be down there!” He then shouts, “quickly now, there’s little time,” to his comrades and before you know it, the acrobatic clowns are making a human ladder using legs and arms. They then swing themselves towards you. “Hurry now, grab hold. There’s no time left.”

You grab hold of the human ladder and scurry your way to the door above, the door through which you entered. You climb outside where the air is warm and pleasant, a breeze blows. The sky is a soft blue, and the hills around you are a soothing shade of green. The acrobatic clowns decompose their ladder, scurrying back up and out of the disintegrating room. Once they are all out, the last one shuts the door to the old farm house. That is that. He comes over to you.

“You’re not suppose to go in there. Please be more careful from now on.” He says.

You have a million questions at the tip of your tongue, but none emerge fully enough for you to ask them. You only stare at the clown dumbfounded. You notice that for the first time he is a sad clown. They all are. Before you can think of anything to ask, they all head back to their field to practice their acrobatics. Eventually, after you’ve pulled yourself together, you’ll go back to the cobblestone path and move onwards again.

You entered a circular room of doors by going down a stairway that has faded into nothingness. The door above the stairway hovers above and opens to a soft blue sky and an idyllic landscape, the place you came from. But that door is beyond reach. As far as the doors in the circular room, you’ve tried three. One leads to cold blackness, another pure sky, and the third a city under siege from above — where the screams of the children still haunt you. Your plight has been made all the worse in that the floor of the room has begun to fade into nothingness. The center is already gone. You now approach the next door adjacent to the others you have already tried.

You turn the knob and open the door. It is a living room with a large bay window, beyond which you see a pleasant yard with green trees and a blue sky. Almost directly in front of you is an old, beat up, comfortable sofa. A father and mother sit on either side of their son watching a man on tv shoot people who don’t bleed, but die with almost humorous cries of agony. They cheer. The boy holds a large pot of worms, and he shuffles these gleefully into his mouth. The mother and father occasionally take handfuls themselves, munching contentedly. They are all plump, plain, and happy.

There could be worse things … like nothingness. Then you realize that what you had thought were designs on the wallpaper in the living room are not designs at all, in fact they are cockroaches. They are moving not just over the walls in random and confused patterns, but over the floor and ceiling as well. You see them now, even moving over the couple. They don’t seem to care; they just brush them aside and continue watching the man on tv shoot people who never really die, but just fall down and stay down. The cockroaches even climb into the bowl of their worms. These they just shake off before eating.

You shut the door. You are sick. Somewhere in your mind the children behind the third door are still screaming, you try to turn off the sound. You cannot. Nor can you stop the floor from continuing to fade into nothingness. You are on a circular ledge now with little time left. You go to the next door and open it.

A dry overpowering heated air blast tinged with the scent of cinnamon and musk hits you, leaving you dazed at first, then pleasantly dull. You look into a large, cavelike chamber of debauchery. The figures in the room are like men and woman. They wear no clothes, and their skin is like that of a reptile or a snake. Their dark reddish eyes are dreary or drugged, smoldering. Their bodies wrap around each other regardless of sex or position. They are so intertwined that you find it difficult to distinguish one of them from the other. They heave together as a mass, expanding and contracting with mutual breaths. They pleasure each other.

A hand reaches out towards you knowingly. Strangely there is an attraction. The cinnamon, musky scent must be a drug because you are sure you are floating. And you realize how easy it would be to just take that hand and float over to the mass, stripping down and joining it, losing one’s self in it, forgetting the screaming of the children …

You shut the door.

You open the door, and it lets in a large gust of wind that nearly blows you off your feet. You hold on tightly to the knob of the door, and peer beyond the door way. As far as you can see it is only bright blue skies. There is no ground, only sky — up, down, sideways or anyways, all just sky as far as you can see. The wind suddenly changes directions and you nearly find yourself knocked off your feet and sucked into this world of sky. However, you manage to shut the door.

You take in a few deep breaths, and relax for a moment. You now understand that these are no normal doors, and this is no normal room. With trepidation and caution you approach the next door. You take in a deep breath and open it.

You look down a wide street at a near modern city. It is sunset and the sky is a scarlet so bright, it hurts you eyes. You see black spots that must be planes flying in the sky. In fact, you can hear the roaring of the planes as they grow nearer. Here and there buildings burn. Also, the sound of large explosions rips through the air not infrequently. There is a rank smell in the air of something burning, and you dare not guess what that smell must be.

Then you hear it. Screams. Not just ordinary screams, but pleas for help. It’s children. You can’t see the source of the screams, but it can’t be far. They are screaming for help, even as the planes sweep in for some more bombing. More than the bursting of the bombs, this screaming rips through you, turning you to jelly so that you wobble. A bomb lands not so far from the door, and you feel the heat and wind and debris flying into you. You shut the door.

Everything stops. Silence. No, not silence. You can still hear the screams of the children. It pierces through you, like a razor traveling down your spine, maiming you. Those horrible screams. You consider, you could go back. You could open the door and go back. You could enter that place, that world, and try to find those children and help them. You can find absolutely no reason you should not do this, except for one. You are too scared.

You don’t want to open any more doors, you just want to go to the center of the room and sit. However, when you turn away from the door and begin to approach the center of the room, you notice something. It’s not there anymore. The center of the room has melted into nothingness, and even now continues to melt. A widening black circle in the room reveals a broadening abyss. Soon this whole room will have melted into nothingness, and either you will fall into the black abyss or you to will fade into nothingness.

You are a traveler. You know nothing, and it is as if you were born today. But you are a grown up, not a baby or a child. And you know things, like how to walk and how to talk, but you lack knowledge of the world. You even lack knowledge of your name.

You walk across an idyllic landscape of green pastures and hills that swell like gentle ocean waves. The sky is blue with a few soft clouds, a gentle, almost warm breeze blows. You walk on an old road of cobblestone.

You come across a recently harvested field of yellow hay, where a large group of clowns are all practicing stunts. They practice cartwheels and somersaults and all kinds of silly acrobatics. You go off the road and go near them and try to talk to them. But they continue on as before ignoring you. You let them alone and go back to the road.

Not much farther along you come to an old country house. By all rights you feel a farm should be around that house, but there isn’t one. It’s just that house, all by itself. It’s an old, rustic comfortable looking house. You go to the door and knock. No one answers, so you knock again. No answer.

Just out of curiosity, or so you tell yourself, you test the knob on the door and you see that it turns. The door is open. Very slowly you open the door and peer inside the house. You are surprised to see that beyond the door is a stairway going down, and nothing else. The walls of the stairway are seamless and perfect, made out of some material you can’t identify. The same goes for the stairs and the ceiling. Everything is dark gray, and the way is illuminated by light that comes from no particular source but is just all around.

What could it hurt? You take a few cautious steps down. You wait. When nothing bad happen you continue down and find yourself in a small circular room with many doors. It’s very curious, but more than you bargained for. You turn to leave, but you realize that the stairway has melted into nothingness. You look up above and you can see the door leading outside above you, but you can’t reach it.

So there’s nothing for you to do but to try a few doors. You open the first door, and all you can see is a blackness so deep that it frightens you. It lets in nothing and is so substantial at first you almost think it’s a wall. You put your hand into that blackness and its cold, very, very cold. You attempt to test the floor on the other side of the blackness, but you can’t find it. As best you can determine, nothing but cold blackness exists behind that door. You shut the door.