Travels Through An Imaginary Landscape

In Freud We Trust, Part One

          I recalled Sid’s advice about the propensity of the Explorer’s Club to suddenly appear and disappear in various locations and the significance of the effect immediately struck me. “Fuck, the office is going!” I cried out.

          I launched myself at once down the road. All I could think was that I had to get through the doorway before the writing above it had disappeared entirely from view. The distance to the door was not all that great but the way was littered with obstacles in the form of traffic hurrying to and fro. I scarcely noticed the honking of horns or the cries of pedestrians as I ducked and weaved across pavement and road. Skidding off the bonnet of a car, I bounced off one unsuspecting pedestrian and then literally flung myself the last few feet, up the steps and through the dark heavy door of the building.

          Too late.

          I stood, breathless and exhausted at the end of an echoing empty corridor. Ahead of me stretched bare plaster walls and stark dusty floorboards. The corridor was dotted with doors all along its length but instinct told me I couldn’t hope to find anything within any of the rooms. I had never stood inside a building that felt so utterly stripped of any remnant of human contact.

          The door behind me swung open and Michael, still slowed somewhat by his injured ankle, hobbled in and stood beside me. He gazed down the barren corridor with an expression of dismay.

          “They’ve gone then, have they?” he finally said.

          “They’ve gone.”

          A pause.

          “Bugger.”

          We stood dejectedly side by side for a while, completely at a loss for what to do next.

          “I suppose we still ought to take a look around,” Michael eventually suggested. “You never know, they may have left some sort of clue behind.” There was a vaguely optimistic inflection to his voice but it sounded painfully forced.

          I shrugged a weary acquiescence. I was quite certain they, whoever they were, would not have left anything behind. But lacking any alternative suggestions I fell in with the plan.

          We set off down the corridor, with Michael investigating the doors on the left while I looked into the ones on the right.

          It was a dispiriting procession. We peered into room after empty room, each exactly alike. Not a stick of furniture, not a scrap of paper, not so much as a fragment of wallpaper was left hanging on the walls. It was not so much that the place felt abandoned, it was more that it became difficult to imagine it had ever held any sign of human habitation in the first place.

          Michael trod cautiously, peering conscientiously into every corner and paying particularly wary attention to the stark, unpolished floorboards. I, on the other hand, kicked sullenly around in the dust, feeling an urge to leave some kind of human trace within. As we progressed from room to room the emotion that began to well up was an overwhelming feeling of having somehow been cheated.

          The corridor coiled around the interior of the building and we had almost completed a full circuit when our seemingly fruitless search finally turned up one tiny nugget of interest. It must have been one of the very last rooms that remained for us to look into. In most respects it was exactly identical to the dozen or so other rooms I had already peered around. My eyes took in the single plain light bulb dangling from the centre of the low grey ceiling. I noted the four plaster walls, entirely unencumbered with any form of decoration that enveloped the bare, unvarnished floorboards.