Two Rooms - A short story by Hai Hoang

THE TWO ROOMS

a short story by Hai Hoang

Drawing by Franz Kafka

MISTER K.

If walls could talk, it would be a voice of a woman.

This room, my room is simply a copy of a copy, of a copy. This hardwood floor, these four white walls and this ceiling, down below my feet there is another room exactly like this one, and so there is another up above my head. And of course, beyond the walls are also the other rooms, with all the other strange little noisy people who all fell into the same silence as I am. There must have been no voice and I should have come to the conclusion that I am probably paranoid.

I could have sworn that I heard a voice, somewhere beyond the walls. From a distance, from the past, from somewhere silent, where the music stops and my life begins. And now I wait for Death, but it is such a selfish thing to believe that Death also waits for you, as if one’s fleeting existence has a pinch of significance or a grandiose purpose. Death waits for none except Life, when Life ends Death begins, and we are simply the mundane passengers passing right through. So that cannot be the voice of Death.

Is it the voice of the stars?

Sometimes I tell myself that beyond the walls are a million stars, burning themselves in their own lights, only for us to casually glimpse at it for a mere split second, then return to our idle, humdrum isolation, and the stars return to theirs. Yes, what the voice said just came back to me! It was a she. I assumed that it was a she because of the feminine tone.

‘Death is when a person turns into a star in the sky.’ She said.

But this is life. In life, there is no death. It is either to live or to exist. It would be such a marvellous miracle if the walls could indeed talk to me. If it could talk, I would imagine it says something along the line of the beauty of this life, of the solemn sunset, the falling leaves, how a human heart is capable of breaking itself into a thousand pieces yet also can heal itself as if all the pain is so much tinier than the smallest grain of salt. Only if the walls could talk. There are four walls in every room! Imagine what a wonderful party that would be. Wall number one would shotgun a whole can of beer as his usual bravado, hyper-masculine self, wall number two would sigh heavily and whisper quietly to wall number three that what a pretentious jock wall number one is, while wall number four just sits in silence, contemplating about nothing and finishes his cigarette. How much better it would be, than this dreadful loneliness, this silence that screams like a dissonant jazz cymbal crashing in my eardrums.

The thoughts are now slowly going away to a strange place, somewhere I am unfamiliar and uncomfortable, so before I surrender myself to the great silence, to the great four walls, I sighed:

‘Please salvage me from this happiness.’

MISS K.

If the walls could talk, would it be his voice? For if I am brave enough to say a simple and cordial greeting, I still fear that the silence that follows would echo longer than the fading of my slippery words, disappearing into the realm that even the silence would cease. I ask the walls:

‘Am I alone?’

The walls did not answer.

‘Will the sorrow end?’

The walls did not answer.

‘To love, or not to love?’

The walls did not answer.

Perhaps there will never be an answer. Perhaps those questions were never meant to have an answer. The inventors of those questions must be so cruel, so malicious, so vile, it is such a wicked game to come up with such transcendent questions to provide not a single answer but gives humanity the endless cry of despair that is drowned away by this silence. If there is High Heaven, I imagine he would be grinning his Machiavellian smile while sipping his iced whiskey, laughing pitifully for the sorrow of mankind, the sorrow of existence. What a dirty trick!

Am I alone?

It cannot be! We cannot come to the conclusion that this life is a constant struggle against despair only to fall back into that very despair. That is not the meaning of life. What about the beauty of this life, of the solemn sunset, the falling leaves, how a human heart is capable of breaking itself into a thousand pieces yet also can heal itself as if all the pain is so much tinier than the smallest grain of salt? One can never be truly alone. If one is in isolation, she has her own thoughts as her company, and when the day her thoughts choose to perish away like all other things in life, there is still the essence. One’s essence can never perish, as it does not belong to one, it entangles, it interacts, it dances with all the other little particles one’s eyes shall never be able to perceive, it does not belong to one because it belongs to all, like all the other strange little noisy people in here and to the end of time. There is a room above me, there is one below. On the right, there is another, and of course, on the left! How can I be alone?

Will the sorrow end?

But then if the sorrow ends, that does not mean what is left behind is happiness. What is happiness anyways? I don’t think I have ever felt happy. I felt joy, yes, such immense, such visceral joy! I remembered the feeling of being held by my mother, the exciting sensation of my first kiss under the night sky, the late-night beers and cigarettes with friends. Mother died when I was 17. My love ceased to love back. And friends drifted apart. It is as if all the little things in life that we cherish so much, that give our heart the taste of passion, our soul the taste of bliss, are all hung and tied together by a stretched-out ball of yarn that is slowly but surely eating itself away, letting time do its cruel trick. Last night I dreamt about a wandering traveller in a lonesome desert, he was looking for the place where there is no pain, no doubts, no worries. The land was called Absolute Happiness, he named it himself, and indeed there was only absolute happiness, where the sun never stops shining and the sky never starts raining. He finally found it! What a miracle! But the sun killed all the flowers, the dirt is so dry because there was no rain. He was in so much despair, he even said: ‘Please salvage me from this happiness.’ He was whispering to himself, but I could have sworn I heard him, from somewhere beyond these walls, as if he is spending his last few breaths reaching out to the nearest soul for comfort, for empathy. He craves empathy. I can tell, who wouldn’t, inside these infinite four walls with such four-walled-ness? Then I woke up unwearily, my sweat flooded the floor. That was the dream last night, I think that is the only time I have ever dreamt about happiness. The world for the awaken is sorrow, I am awake, so I am sorrowful.

To love, or not to love?

I asked the walls again, hoping they would talk back. I desire nothing more in life than the answer to this question, but I have stopped asking it. But of course, the walls did not answer. I asked my mother too. She said that I would understand when I grow up. Mother promised that she would tell me when I grow up. That was an afternoon like the infinite afternoons in this existence. They say love is infinite. Perhaps that is what love is like. To feel infinity. I am grown now, mother is dead, and still, I do not understand. Mother said to me ‘Death is when a person turns into a star in the sky’. Tonight there are no stars. Just the cold, empty ceiling that stares back at me as soon as I stare at it. I asked it the second time to my lover. He told me ‘Don’t be silly dear, asking that question would not make any of us love any better.’ That was my only good memory of him. Months, and then years, the scars in my heart somehow appear on my body: my thighs, my wrist, even my tits. He said he was only joking. My friends told me the same thing too. ‘Boys will always be boys,’ they said. ‘Don’t be so serious’, they said. He demanded submission like how he demanded sympathy when his pride is hurt. Scars on top of scars, and once in a while there were also cigarette burns, sometimes they all together oozes out blood, pus, and other bodily liquids I do not know, they all dripped down from me and my skin looks like a Jackson Pollock painting. I felt like a stranger in my own body, not even my own shadow looks like me anymore. After that, I never asked about love. But today something struck me. A call from the absurd. I had a desire, an instinct to ask the question, an involuntary response.

Is it because I am all alone? Or the fact that beyond these four walls I am completely not alone, and that notion frightens me and makes every cell in my body trembles?

‘Am I alone?’

I asked again, hoping the walls could talk. There were no answers.

MISTER K.

‘Am I alone?’ Her voice speaks softly.

I wake up after an uneasy, dreamless sleep, or perhaps I did dream of a dream yet due to my incapability of understanding my unconsciousness that I failed to remember that dream. But when I woke up, there is a revelation that cheered me up: that I am indeed not paranoid, and there was a voice of a woman from somewhere beyond the walls. From where I do not know. I have been in this room for so long, the only directions I can tell are either up or down, left, right, front, and back, it all means the same now. It must be beyond the walls, but I do not precisely where to be exact. Because beyond these four walls are the other four walls, exactly the same, existing in a sort of infinity cycle of suffering.

It has always been the same four walls, the same infinity, the same people, the quiet neighbours up, down, left, right. I wonder why nobody has committed suicide yet.

The easiest path to escape from one’s own suffering is usually death. A voice calling from the absurd. But the call from the absurd leads one to nowhere, and so does the call of Death. One thought about death all the time, but where does that lead to? Nowhere. For in a meaningless world, Death itself bears no meaning, and the act of dying became so pointless, that it would be such an inconvenience to end our sufferings. Everybody is too deaf to hear the sound of their unhappiness. Too content, too hopeless, too desperate. In this meaningless world, Death is meaningless, Death is no longer solemn, to the point that ending one’s suffering would simply be an inconvenience to the world. What good does Death do? This world is too busy. Then what is Death?

Death is the people’s opinions. Death is the people’s controversies. Finally, Death is nothing. It succumbs and perishes to the totality of nothingness. Death has a lifespan of a few days on the front pages of newspapers that commercialize attention and monetizes grief. Lonesomeness has always been the most natural state of human existence. We come into this world alone, and would quickly leave it alone too. Well, in this room, in the middle of these silent walls, there is nothing but lonesomeness. But I can endure it. It is better than all the busy people out there. I would rather be in the most agonizing suffering rather than have the most ignorant happiness.

I imagined that is what most people in the other rooms think too. Life is to live or to exist, there is no Death. Why is it that out of the infinite people within the infinite set of four walls, nobody bothers to think why their room does not have a door? Is it because the idea of the door itself is too troublesome to even think of? Or is just the idea that one could even possibly escape from this prison too absurd to even graze their mind?

These walls are designed to not let us escape. And what means of escape is more famous than Death itself? As a species, we somehow found a way to minimize our desire to end our lives by detaching ourselves from each other, replacing despair, sorrow and sadness with envy, hatred and ignorance. Within these walls are millions, billions of equally lonely, suffering people, yet nobody bothers to make a sound! ‘It would simply bother the rest’, they probably would think. Is that why when I screamed off the top of my lungs, when I cried myself to sleep, or when I banged my head against the thick walls, there is only silence that replies? How apathetic! I asked myself whether the walls could talk, but all this time I have been asking the wrong question. Walls can never speak, walls are just blocks of bricks, glued together with cement and painted over with the most depressing white colour. The question is not what happens if the walls could talk, one should ask if the people out there could actually talk!

‘What is wrong with you people!’ I shouted as I felt my larynx tear itself into two and feel the blood running down my throat. I shouted with rage as though all my life I have been incapable of feeling anger and at this moment all things fell apart and all the unspoken thoughts splurted out. At that moment I cried. I have been wishing to cry like this forever. I have never been able to cry for the past few years. So I let it all out. My tears soaked up my eyelids and fell down to my cheeks, all the tears blurred my eyes, so I can no longer see the world, and can no longer see that the rest of the world is looking at me. Is it misanthropy if one cried for help yet all he gets in return is apathetic silence?

No, it is not silence. There is also the voice! I have to remember the voice. I heard it, no, I heard her, I could have sworn that I heard a voice of a woman. If I could be saved, if I can still be saved, then it must be the voice that will save me. It is the voice of a fellow sufferer. A companion of misery. If there is a way out, the voice must lead the way.

Only sadness can save the world.

Suddenly I feel inside me a burning sensation. Hope! Yes, there is still hope. That this life is a constant struggle against despair only to fall back into that very despair. That is not the meaning of life! A little hope is fine. Enough to keep me alive, just on the dangerous verge before it can kill me. And even if it kills me I am willing to sacrifice myself for it. Not hope for me, but hope for humanity. If there is still a soul that desires to express himself, to speak proudly, and honourably his true thoughts in this aloof, quiet world, there is still hope. Then maybe the rest of us will speak up too. Maybe humans are not just these little figures filled with apathy, it is better to hope that in us all there is still a glimpse of compassion. All good things one day shall perish like the ash of the greatest fire. But if it keeps us warm even for a split second, an insignificant moment in this sorrowful life, that is enough motivation to keep the hope alive.

‘Death is when a person turns into a star in the sky.’ I remember what the voice said before.

Yes, this life cannot be purely meaningless. We do not need to compare ourselves to the stars only to see our pitiful insignificance, we can just look underneath our boots and see that the little grain of sand we stepped on will be our fate when Death is finally granted to us. But if we are just a little grain of sand in the multitude of existence, we are all so the billion stars that are shining above the night sky, the same ones that made philosophers ponder human existence in the first place.

As my tears dried, I knocked my knuckles on the wall three times, knock, knock, knock, waiting and hoping stupidly that the walls could talk.

MISS K.

Today, one plus one is equal to three. The day after that, one plus one is five. And sooner or later, there comes the day that one plus one makes a zero. That is the way of life, so the answer to every question is an astounding yet stoic zero.

I remember sitting with my friend on the top of an abandoned skyscraper told me that it was the year 1984. In 2084, she told me she would meet me again in a town where there is no darkness. There, it would be the place where one plus one finally makes a two, not because it is the truth, but because she chose to believe so, and it became the truth. She paused for a second. I remembered her eyes at that very moment when she suddenly stopped all movements, but not in a sudden manner by any means, it was rather tranquil, peaceful, like an old record player slowly becoming out of use. Her eyes were like the thousand stars in the sky, it was reflecting the quiet night that juxtaposes itself with the cacophony of traffic and tired, angry people from below. ‘The world has too much negativity,’ she said. ‘Looking down from here I wonder how all those people down below manage to live like that. To wake up one morning, go to where they need to go, and then get stuck in this traffic, go back home, sleep, and wake up again, and they still can say what a day to be alive!’ She got quiet again. The wind blows right below our feet like an ominous chord at the beginning of an ambient song. ‘I think that one plus one should be one.’ My friend said. ‘One you, one me, one us, that way one plus one will always be one. It cannot be a zero. That is too depressing. That is to say that all of our sufferings, all of our joys, and all the dichotomies of the emotions we feel have meant nothing. One is such a beautiful number. It is the first whole number after the set of infinite numbers with a decimal point, isn’t it? Regardless, I don’t really care what the answer to one plus one is. We’ll meet again.’

That was the last time I talked to her. That night she went home and slashed her wrist. The blood spilt all over the floor, the walls, and the bedsheet. Her mother to this day still refuses to wash that sheet. But that was how the friendship drifted apart. Abruptly. The funeral was not peaceful. She took the peace with her, that night when we sat next to each other on that skyscraper. The funeral, on the other hand, was full of people sobbing, looking pitiful, or just completely zoned out. It was all over the news too. ‘High school girl committed suicide due to homework.’ What a headline! The mass of course gobbles up the news blindly and becomes these self-appointed judges that speak without an ounce of empathy. Those people knew nothing about her. They do not see her as a person, with real dreams, real thoughts, real ambitions, or real pain, they see her as an object, a profitable opportunity. Nobody actually cares. They are the faceless men that take such an event and turn it into a cheap product, craving for different opinions, for controversy, they commercialized attention and monetized grief. And after exactly three days, nobody talks about it anymore. The dead is finally dead. Death is the people’s opinions. Death is the people’s controversies.

One plus one makes a one, she said. But in this room in the midst of the infinite number of other rooms, I felt like I could never make it to number one. I am just a meaningless number with a decimal place, lying in between, waiting for nothing, for no purpose. My mother is gone. My lover is gone. My friend is gone. Life gives one all the greatest treasures it can offer, only for time to cruelly take it away, leaving one behind all lonesome, all quiet.

‘What is wrong with you people!’ It was a loud voice from a man beyond the walls.

It is that voice again! I am not crazy. Is he speaking to me? Now that is definitely not an illusion. Only a soul in despair can scream like that as if his heart is breaking into a thousand smaller pieces all beating at the same time. There is still someone in this world that refuses to be quiet. That must be the place where one plus one is one, it is where when all is quiet, one speaks up her mind. I am one, she was one, the man next door is one, and hope unites us all together. I might be in reverie but the walls finally do know how to talk. It screams ‘what is wrong with you people’ with ferocity and anger, but deep beneath there is a passion for life, not this life within these rooms, but to truly live, to experience the world, all its joys and all its sorrow, to meet friends, lovers and foes, to feel the sun tanning one skin and to feel the rain wetting it at the same time. Knock, knock, knock. He knocked. Nobody has done that before. There was a brief silence. But this silence is different that the sound of despair. It is the silence that shows two suffering hearts that have found each other, waiting for the other to beat the first beat, so they both can synchronize.

There was an explosion! The wall between the two rooms has blown up. After the debris and the dirt rests quietly on the floors, scattering everywhere in a sort of Brownian motion, there stand two helpless souls that have found each other. I stood there, motionless, stunned like the last memory I have of my friend before Death took her away.

MISTER K. AND MISS K.

Mister K. stood in astonishment at the phenomenon that just happened to him and Miss K., who have not yet introduced herself. There was some dust that lays on their hair, their faces, and their clothes, but that does not matter at all. What matter is right now, there is a hole that has been punctured either by pure chances with a hint of good luck (which is very unlikely), or it is the fact that the sheer will and desire of both Mister K. and Miss K. to revolt against the absoluteness of suffering in their isolated existence is what made the walls crumbled. But what they both saw was not an illusion. The walls in front of them exploded and shattered into pieces and for the first time and who knows a long time, perhaps in eternity, that two people share a same space together, breathing the same air.

Mister K. stepped over the debris, with caution but unhidden pride as he entered the territory of Miss K.’s room, or more accurately, what was once Miss K.’s room. His eyes were filled with excitement, like a young toddler on Christmas Eve, marvelling at every inches of the room that is an exact replica of his room, but it is the idea that he is no longer confined in his room that is truly the source of his joy. Miss K. on the other hand shows less excitement and more amazed, yet one can tell by her expression that she is slightly overwhelmed. They did it. In the midst of silence, they had the courage to speak up and they got what they wanted. What then?

‘What then?’ asked Mister K.

‘This is what we get.’ answered Miss K.

They stepped a bit closer together. Mister K. slightly trembles at the sight of another living human being right in front of him, and he can feel Miss K.'s presence, the sound of her breath, the noise of her foot slightly tapping on the hardwood floor. All the other rooms and the infinite people living in them of course still remained silent. But right now both Mister K. and Miss K. feel something that is stronger that that silence, even than the totality of nothingness, even more than Death.

‘I love you.’ said Mister K.

At that moment, Miss K. felt love and knew she was loved. The sound of the words ‘I’, ‘love’, ‘you’, suddenly nourished her soul with such an intensity, that all the love she has ever felt from her mother, her lover, and her friend seems to find their way back to her heart and filled every cell in her body with a desire to live this life. As if all the sufferings, all the lonesomeness, all the agony are no longer significant, Miss K. grasps Mister K. by the hand and clasps them tightly together.

It is only sadness that can save the world. And from there, love speaks the loudest noise.

Of course, to this day, Mister K. and Miss K. are still trapped in their rooms together with all the debris and dust swept away to the corner. They did not escape. They probably will die in that room together, that is if one of them does not die first. But that does not matter, because nothing matters at all, nothing matters anymore. All the other rooms were so quiet, and remained to be quiet, that one can imagine the walls could actually talk.

THE END.

March 2023

Hai Hoang