Past Lives

The door opens in a dark room, and a man dressed as a janitor walks in and turns on the light. In stages beginning at the door, panels of beautiful golden light turn on, revealing a massive dome structure with ceilings and walls so vast they are impossible to make out. To his left he finds a two-wheel dolly cart that he moves toward a mountain of paperwork. He walks past the pile and finds stacks of millions of flattened boxes, which he then carries over to the pile. He has been assigned his task, and he will not falter. The Janitor is a proud, but tired man of sixty four years; nearly bald, with long gray whiskers for a beard. His sharp cheekbones stretch the skin of his face, past his bright blue eyes that contradict the sullen expression he wears. His chin sags more with age, and his orbital bags puff like blisters, but his wife still maintains that he is very handsome. He smokes cigarettes constantly, does not eat as often as he should, and though he is tired, he refuses to sleep until his daily task is complete. He puts on a dusty old pair of reading glasses and begins sifting through the paper, searching for anything that is of use to him. When he finds something relevant, he places it neatly in a pile based on what it concerns, and when it took place. He searches through readings, and files them immaculately, never once stopping. When he has a sufficient amount of paper in a stack, he places them into a file, labels it, and then places it into a cardboard box, which is dated itself. Satisfied with what he has collected, he leaves the boxes and walks toward a pallet of supplies for constructing shelves. On the way, his gaze catches a pile of what looks like DVDs. The Janitor curiously walks toward the pile and begins to look through them. They have titles: 'Cottage Life', 'Sushi Date', 'Smoking on the Bench', 'Sex in the Bathroom', 'The Cabin'. These all seem to be movies; there are no descriptions on the back, but there are pictures to indicate plot and setting. They seem to all be shot from a first-person camera perspective, as if the viewer is the main character. Dismissing this for the matter-at-hand, he walks to the shelving supplies to begin their construction. They are simple snap-together shelves, but when he connects the boards together, the cheap plywood mysteriously changes composition and colour, revealing elegant mahogany masterpieces. The Janitor walks back to the boxes of files and begins to stack them onto the dolly cart and move them toward the shelves. He places each box chronologically and thematically on the shelves, and when they make contact with the wood, they turn to maple wood crates, sanded and inscribed, with the files now written in calligraphy font on rich fibred wood-pulp paper. He flicks open his pocket watch - constantly forgetting that time is no longer a factor here. He always hated that; he never felt a part of this new world when he could not even check the time. He was much happier before, when the library was fully operational and everything was on schedule. The place was bustling with analytical thought and creativity, then all of a sudden - nothing. The shelves were pulled down, and all of the paperwork was thrown into a pile and mixed up. Perhaps becoming nostalgic, he decides that it is the right time to furnish the place a bit, so he walks toward a section of the hangar containing sets of elaborate furniture. He looks over the selection, choosing a small, dark-stained table, an aged brass reading lamp, and a straight-backed wooden chair; positioning them directly in line with the center of the shelves, about three meters from the door. He has been assigned his task, but he feels that the current tenant will be pleased with this arrangement. When his work is finished, The Janitor walks back to the pile of DVDs, choosing one entitled 'The Room'. He inserts the DVD into the player and presses play. The movie begins, and he sees a hand pushed against the wall, close enough to be his own. He immediately receives a strong sense of empathy for the character involved. He feels as though the character is in pain, and he wants to reach out and help him but he cannot. The Janitor knows that the character is male because he is thinking in a male voice. Why can he hear his thoughts? No sound is coming from the speakers; instead it is as if the sound is happening around him. The sound amplifies, and the empathy intensifies. The film takes hold of his mind, making him watch. The man does not know what to do, he seems to be cursed with a decision he either has made or has to make very soon. It is hard to fathom what could weigh so heavily on the conscience, and the conflict itself is so rapid that it is impossible to determine what the choices are. This man sits alone in this dark, dreary room for months, and for what? To escape something. To escape the decision that has already been made. He rarely moves; occasionally making exceptions to smoke cigarettes, and to eat food and drink water when his body can take no more. He does not accept the pain as anything but necessary for his fate, and he encourages it at every opportunity. This is a cursed man that will never know another moment of peace until the day he dies. And even then, who knows? If there is life after death, it is a terrifying thought for those damned, wicked souls that are hopelessly clinging to their last moments of life. He shudders at the thought, and inhales the nicotine deep into his lungs, exhaling it through his nostrils like an angry bull in winter. He looks down at his arms, which are covered in both scarred and freshly scabbed lacerations that resemble numbered ticks. One through five; four vertical lines, with a diagonal line through the middle. His arms are covered in sets of five. Every time he tries to think about what happened he becomes paralyzed with guilt and shuts down, adding a tick to his arm. He has tried a few hundred times already, all attempts proving unsuccessful. What is so bad that someone would rather cut their own arm than see? When a tragedy first occurs, that is when you are free from the pain. You know how and why it happened, but the pain is something that comes after. Sometimes, something happens that is so terrible that you flood your system with so much pain that it is forced to feel and you begin to forget what really happened. Details become blurry and tuned to your preference, excuses become reality, and you are suddenly the victim. By the time one goes from culprit to victim, the story has been pressed and manipulated into something other than the truth. This must be the final stage of the transformation, when the villain forsakes everything and chooses to live a life apart from this one. He has been sitting in this room for so long that he has trouble recognizing anything else. His arms are red and swollen, pulsing with pain and possible infection. The pain is good, that means that the transformation has already begun. Can we be reborn? Can we truly wipe the slate clean of something that we cannot hide from any longer? After a few minutes of deep thought, he looks up to see a wall that he does not recognize. Surely, this is the wall that he has been staring at for the last six months, but everything about it is foreign to him. He walks out of the dark room, down the hallway, and out into the street into a display of utter majesty; a rising sun that he has not seen in so long that it floods into him, refreshing his soul. He cannot remember why he was in that house, or why his arm is covered in painful wounds, all he knows is that he needs to get out of this town as soon as possible. He gets into a gray Buick LeSabre with a dented hood and starts the engine, driving aimlessly along with a new sun. After the movie is finished, The Janitor sits in the wooden chair for a while, contemplating what he just saw. Not just saw. What he felt.