Rewind Park

A Door To The Doors

I turned to peer down the hallway again, the words of the sign clanging like church bells against the inside of my skull. 

What could it mean? Why did it refer to Portland as a 'simulation park?' I didn't even know what that was...

And the Satyricon didn't have a VIP entrance. No one important enough to need a special entrance came to see shows at the Satyricon; that was ridiculous. Yet, here I stood. 

The black-carpeted hall made a series of turns and descended three flights of stairs to end at another door, larger than the first and made of metal. I tried the push-handle and heard the click of the latch. 

I took a deep lungful of air and pushed the door open. 

The room beyond was almost completely dark. A faint fluorescent glow came from somewhere out of sight to my right, but the weak light wasn't powerful enough to give shape to anything in the room, just hint at its enormous size. 

Stella and the band would be wondering where I was. I only had a few minutes to look around. 

The air in the room felt cool and damp, like a cave or an indoor swimming pool, and the floor, at least the small part I could see, was covered in grey hexagonal tile. 

A step further into the room and I tripped a motion sensor. A cascade of light poured down from above and revealed that I stood in some kind of subway station.

I knew that Portland was supposed to have old, semi-collapsed shanghai tunnels running underneath the downtown streets, but those were from the 19th century and nothing like what I was looking at. The walls reached high above me, supported by a rows of thick pillars made of a green grey metal. The platform, painted in yellow and black stripes, stretched along the track about twenty yards away. 

The track itself consisted of one grey metallic rail that continued into the darkness of the tunnels on the far ends of the room. I listened for a while but couldn't hear any distant rumblings of a train. 

I jumped from the platform to stand next to the rail. I put my hand on it. No vibration. Everything seemed quiet. Where could these tunnels go?

I thought about Stella and the band upstairs. They would be looking for me by now. Strange that they hadn't found the door yet. I kept half-expecting Stella's voice to come from the black-carpeted hallway behind me at any minute. But it didn't come.

Why couldn't they see the door like I had? Maybe everything upstairs in Portland was a simulation. The idea had the icy hollowness of truth as I played around with it in my head. 

Could it be that everything I had ever known, everyone I had ever met, were part of some illusion. Stella, Jigs, even my parents: all of them caught up in it? Was I the only one to wake up, realizing that the this simulation, whatever it was, was repeating itself? Could that be why it felt like I was remembering the future? 

My mind jumped back to Stella. I knew she was freaking out about my vanishing and our gig that started in an hour- but I forced myself to stop. If everything upstairs was a simulation, none of that was real. And, even though it hurt, I had to consider that maybe even Stella wasn't real. I hated thinking that, but it was a possibility. 

I needed to figure out what was going on. Nothing was more important than that- not the show, not the suits from Mtv, and not even Stella. 

Both directions the track went in looked the same. There weren't any signs. I could go either left or right. The track had to go somewhere, I told myself, somewhere with answers. 

I chose right and followed the track into the mouth of the tunnel. 

Tiny lights along the track kept the entire tunnel bathed in a murky twilight. My shadow played in strange ways on the walls as I walked. I walked several miles without coming to an intersection or station before it occurred to me that I had no idea how far these tunnels went on. 

But, when I thought of the prospect of going back to Stella and Jigs at this point, dying of exhaustion in a mysterious tunnel didn't seem that bad. 

Even if I ran, I would barely make our last song. Horse Brass had played their first gig without me, their most important gig ever. And, whether Jigs, the new drummer, and Stella were 'real' or not, they were going to be furious- as in kick-me-out-of-my-own-band furious. 

And, I suppose, on some level, I deserved it. 

I had almost convinced myself to turn around and face the consequences with Stella, when the tunnel opened out into another station like the first. I climbed up on the platform as lights clicked on around me. This station was identical to the first. 

I found the door leading upstairs and pulled it open to see another black-carpeted hallway. I hurried up the passage, climbing several flights of stairs until I located yet another door. 

The thump of the music from the other side of the door rustled through the floor and nestled in the thick carpet, tickling my pant leg. This door also had writing:

L.A. SIMULATION PARK 3 - VIP/EMERGENCY ACCESS - WHISKY A-GO-GO 1966 

My hand shook as I reached for the handle. 

The door opened into a dark alcove near the kitchens at the back of the club. The smell of grease and cigarette smoke filled the air. I pushed my way through the mop tops and bouffant hairdos and looked around, my eyes wide with wonder. Street hippies and large-eyed women in mini-dresses bounced and jived on the dance floor, their bead necklaces loosely orbiting their necks.   

I recognized the band behind the raucous circus-blues immediately. Then, as if to confirm my suspicious, I heard a familiar voice blast over the crowd. 

"WELLLLLLLLLALLLLLLLLRIIIGHT!!!" It roared. 

If this was a simulation of 1966, which it certainly appeared to be, and, if this was the Whisky A Go-Go, that meant that the band was...

I winced. 

The Doors.