"It's all in your mind."
Those are the last words the woman that looks like a nurse said to me before she walks out the door and disappears, literally.
I had intended to watch her leave but she went through the front door and was gone, as if she had never even existed.
It's everlasting summer outside the windows and beyond the door but I couldn't go out in it. It has nothing to do with a skin condition or a noxious environment. I just...can't go out into the world.
I walk around my house, I think it's my house, as if I'm seeing it for the first time. It feels very much like I'm in a dream, taking in the scenery, trying to make mental notes so I can recount them next time I speak with someone.
I make a note of the oak staircase, covered by a red carpet, regal in appearance, as if I'm a king. I don't think I'm a king. Don't feel like it anyway.
The arched doorway that opens at one end of a spacious foyer and leads to another room is adorned with mirrored glass, casting rainbow prisms onto the walls behind and to the side of where I'm walking. I step through that doorway.
The room I'm standing in now appears to be a lodge, a roaring fire in the fireplace. It's quite warm in here but oddly, I'm not sweating. It strikes me as crazy that there should be a fire when it is probably seventy or eighty degrees outside.
"Do you like it?" a naked blonde woman asks me from her place on a brown sofa. She's on her back but she's clearly talking about the fire and not her body.
I just nod. And then the blonde woman returns to what she was doing before I got here. And what she was doing was fingering herself. I watch her as she dips one finger and then another into her pussy, framed by dark hair, proving that the carpet and drapes do not match.
I move on through the lodge and head for the staircase the other end. Not the oak staircase before the foyer but another. This one is carpet-less and I look down as I climb the stairs. The wood fazes in and out, becoming transparent liquid and then solid wood again. Again and again, the stairs do this until, finally, I reach the top. I turn to look back down the staircase and see that they are wood again. I wait a couple minutes to see if they will coalesce but they remain forever wood.
I hear the nurse woman's voice in my head again. "It's all in your mind." This starts to sink in but I'm still exploring.
Up here, on what I assume to be the second level of the house, there is only one window and it is down at the end of the long hall that I seem to be in the center of. Along the walls, a number of closed doors with numbers, like in a hotel. Framed photos rest between the intervals.
I start toward the window, toward the end of the hall, when I hear locks being cast to my sides, as if the residents of the rooms are looking out their peepholes and do not wish to be disturbed.
I walk at a more brisk pace than I started at and then I feel like I'm running, though the walls and doors are passing by at the exact same speed they were just seconds before. The window at the end of the hall seems to be within reach when the door at the end opens and another woman stands in my way, just feet from reaching the window.
I have no idea what the significance of the window is, as I can't open it, and wouldn't even if I could. This thought passes through my mind as I gaze at the brunette before me, the woman blocking my path.
"Excuse me," we both say, simultaneously. My "excuse me" is meant to convey that I want to get around her. Her's sounds more like she's trying to get my attention, as if she wants to ask a question.
"Excuse me," she says again and I don't interrupt her. "Could you help me get this off?" She appears to be indicating the purple tunic that she's wearing.
I lay a hand on her shoulder and start to unbutton the cloth but the buttons seem not to be working properly. I've slipped one through the hole but it's back in place immediately.
"No, silly," the brunette says. "I meant me. Can you get this off?"
I still don't quite understand her and pick her up to carry her.
"Fuck me," she says, indicating that she wants out of my arms. At least in the way I'm holding her. She grabs my shirt front and pulls me into her room, shutting the door behind me.
The room is pink, the carpet, too. There is a vanity and I can see myself in the mirror. I don't recall having a beard and moustache. I study my face for a moment and run my hand along my face. I don't feel a beard or a moustache and yet, I watch as the hair ripples in my mirror image.