• Everything I am and was,
    My fate, my destiny,
    My hopes and thoughts, all I have wrought,
    Is buried here with me.
    Although I fight, I know inside
    No one will hear my scream.
    I’m fading fast to die at last
    Unless it’s all a dream...


    I don't know who I am, why I am in this clean white room or how long I’ve been here. Every so often a faceless man in a long white coat brings me a tray of spherical white cubes that taste both bitter and sweet. I do not speak to him, and he does not speak to me. He thinks I am insane. They all think I’m insane, all the other white-coated men and women with straight white hair, empty white faces and shiny black shoes. I hear them, tapping by in the cool white hall—tip-tap, tip-tap—efficiently clacking off past my beautiful room into the empty vortex that is their existence.
    I have resolved to keep my special room quiet and peaceful, so I don't shriek or cry or throw myself against the walls no matter how infuriating the blinding whiteness becomes. The Others make that difficult. They don't care if I want to think or rest: if they want to fight each other, or sing, or catch the dripping silver butterflies that occasionally fly through the wall, they do so. The Others live with me here and talk to me. I sit in a corner by myself and watch their shiny smiling faces float around above their formless rainbow bodies. I love the Others, even though they talk too much and try to destroy my lovely little white room. Have I mentioned my room yet? I love it so. The low ceiling stretches upwards into a colorless white eternity and the clean white walls both cage me forever and set me free.
    Someone unlocks the door, and at first I think it is the faceless food man, but a skinny man with empty hollows for eyes clicks into my room instead. He has a wide mouth full of sharp teeth, and I decide that I do not like him. Propelling myself across the slick waxed floor I slide under my small white bed and press myself against the wall where he can’t see me.
    “Jonathan Wentworth,” the man without eyes says. He sounds exasperated. “Jonathan Wentworth, it is time to sleep.”
    Feeling safe under my bed I cackle at him, and the Others join in, their lovely oval faces spinning, spinning, spinning, faster, faster, faster, above the cloud-like spheres that their bodies have morphed into while I wasn’t paying attention.
    I watch the man walk towards me—tip-tap, tip-tap. He has his very own pair of shiny black shoes, just like I have my very own bright white room where the lights are always on and my very own faceless food man. My visitor bends down and stares at me, with his eyebrows so far up on his forehead that it looks like they crawled there without his knowledge.
    “Go...to...sleep,” he says in a drawn-out drone, and then he’s reaching for me with long bony fingers, reaching, reaching, reaching. “Sweet, silent sleep...”
    I dream that I am in a box, a small box, barely big enough for me to fit inside. The stench of stale earth surrounds me and the humidity is so intense I have difficulty breathing. Splinters dig into my skin all over and sweat pours off of me into the wounds. When I open my eyes, the darkness remains unchanged. An overbearing weight that I can't feel presses down upon me from above but the box holds me in place so that I am completely immobilized. This place seems strangely familiar— so familiar, in fact, that I feel as if throughout my entire existence I have been here, in this torturous box, with the hot, damp air that closes my throat and the unknown weight that crushes me without touching me and the ringing silence in my ears and the bright lights and the clean white room...
    I abruptly sit up, letting the crisp sheets slip off of the bed and fall to the floor. The man without eyes stands in the middle of the room, smiling and showing all his pointy teeth. He holds out a tray of food for me—cylindrical rectangles—and steps forward slowly. I like my spherical cubes from my friend the faceless food man better, so I talk to the Others until the eyeless man shrugs and leaves.
    The Others begin to sing to me, swaying back and forth, back and forth, crooning words that only I can understand. Their sweet voices fill my head with gentle notes that rapidly crescendo into deafening chaos as the coolness of my white room melts into suffocating heat.
    I’m trapped in the box again. This time I don't lie still; I push against the lid of my prison, groaning with the effort. I am quite strong, but the weight above the box is too great. In despair I scream, hearing my own broken voice echo back unheard by anyone but me. It is nigh impossible to breathe and I hyperventilate, trying desperately to fill my lungs with one good breath.
    The darkness begins to spin and close in on itself.
    The sight of my white room fills me with such relief that my panic quickly dissolves. The Others have stopped singing and are walking on the ceiling instead, sipping at steaming cups of tea. I want to join them, but someone is coming into my room again.
    It’s a woman this time, a white-haired woman with a flat white face. She walks towards me and I recognize that walk—steady and balanced but with a slight spring. As I watch, her face changes shape and delicate hues fade into its pallid void. She has rosy cheeks now, with laughing blue eyes and lustrous ebony-colored curls that fall past her shoulders. She smiles at me, and in that smile I see all truth, all hope, all love. I feel as though I have known her all my life but her name escapes my wandering mind.
    Behind her enter a crowd of more people, and I recognize all of them. Ghostly children run and play, laughing for no reason at all. Several older, aloof-looking men and women hold serious discussions in low voices as they patrol the perimeter of my room. A very elderly man dodders neatly into a wall. A cluster of young girls excitedly exchange news in a corner and periodically burst into fits of giggles.
    I struggle to my feet and throw my arms around the first woman, desperate to find something I can depend on in this hell of insanity.
    Her delicate body hardens and widens until I am pushing against the lid of the box—the coffin. For a moment the fog clears from my head and I truly understand. This is real. This is where I really am.
    Another memory surfaces. I was ill, horribly ill, long before I was trapped in here and my mind became so unpredictable. Everyone had been expecting me to die. The last memory I can salvage from the burning wreckage of what was once my intellect is of my wife’s beautiful cerulean eyes filling with tears as I slipped into unconsciousness.
    My friends, my family, could not have done this on purpose. They must think I am dead.
    How long have I been here? I must have had a life before this but madness has stolen my memories.
    There’s nothing here in this coffin, nothing. No sound, no light, no air. The vast nothingness is so overbearing that I wish death would come soon just to take me away from my grave. The only noise is that of my heart; I try to listen to its thudding to calm my whirlwind of thoughts but my pulse is so irregular that I can't anticipate the next beat. Th-thud...th-thud, th-thud...th-thud.... In each pause I pray that the silence would last forever and my soul would finally be free of this worthless corpse it is chained to.
    Maybe, just maybe, someone will realize the fatal mistake that has been made and come to rescue me.
    What is this? How can there be any trace of optimism in such a situation as mine? Somehow the faint light of hope has managed to break down everything in its way and gently illuminate the very bowels of the earth.
    I cough, a great wracking cough, as I breath in yet inhale nothing. My head both throbs with pain and spins with weightlessness. A strange tingling sensation washes over my eyes and I close them, slipping back into my shadowless white room one last time as I wait for death to consume me.