The Town With No Doors

By Martin Rayburn

 

In my town, none of the buildings have doors, or windows, or emergency escapes of any kind. I have tried doggedly to discern places of entry and exit, but, finding no gaps in the brick and steel facades, and no underground passage ways or portals or secret rooftop hatches, I have been left out in the cold with my mystery for many years now.

I am all alone, more over, being the only person in the town for whom getting in and out of buildings is an issue. As in any town,the community members stroll along the streets to go shopping or pick up medicine or take their dogs for a walk, but I’ve never seen one enter or exit a building. I’ve staked out every possible vantage point from which one might witness such an entrance or exit, but the people seem to duck around a corner with such inconspicuous movement and then find themselves in the desired place, as though the townsfolk and the infrastructure were designed by some demiurge especially so that coming in and going out would never be an issue. Even an automatic door would be far too great a burden for the town, which assumes the state of being inside or out as its metaphysical prerogative, not deigning to step on some rubber pad and wait an instant for glass panes to separate.

I have gathered no evidence of magic or wizardry. I have never seen anything resembling teleportation or any technologically advanced mode of travel. The townsfolk just find their way in and out without going in and out. Or rather see how I struggle to speak precisely! They don’t even need to find a way in and out, but simply are in or out as if by a mental act of fiat so subtle they are not even aware of performing it. They occupy exactly the spaces they wish to without the necessity of transition or mediation. (Their indoor environments must be perfectly regulated without ventilation systems, for I’ve never seen so much as a grate or air conditioning unit affixed to the buildings, which are zones of absolute enclosure, although they don’t shut anyone out except for me. There is no paranoia or xenophobia underlying this enclosure, if I can call it such. The townsfolk are basically tolerant by disposition.)

In my early years, I was ashamed to ask folks about the mystery, feeling almost subhuman in my ineptitude. But in my desperation, I overcame my shyness and started to query various friendly-looking people about the space of the town—namely, about the nature of the demarcation between inside and out. But the question is so alien to them that it’s as if I’m speaking a foreign language when I ask, and while they are well-meaning and even charitable, no amount of frenetic gesturing or repeated phrases and words can elicit a clue. The town, of course, lacks all words related to threshold points, compounding the communication problem.

As I said, the town is not uncharitable, and they seem to regard me as a kind of curious stray they have decided by unspoken consensus to half-adopt. It’s unclear whether they think me mad or stupid or severely disabled. They bring me food and clothes and other living supplies. I discretely empty my bladder and bowels in a wooded area bordering the town; the denizens have never bothered me about it, probably pitying me and not wishing to make me feel ashamed. Even so, no one has ever invited me in, whether to one of their homes or to a place of business.

 

I’m not sure whether they even regard me entering as a possibility, or whether they would know how to facilitate greetings and farewells. As kind as they are in certain ways, hospitality appears to be an entirely unfamiliar idea, introducing the possibility of a slight discomfort in the occupation of an indoor residence. Such problems of guest-and-host etiquette seem like metaphysical impossibilities for them.

You might be wondering why I don’t simply pack up and leave the place, but there is nowhere left to go, as far as I can tell. My travels—and I have searched fervently for a passageway out—have brought me to various invisible walls that repel me back to the town. Or perhaps walls is not the right term; the barriers don’t seem physical, but rather, they dump me through some warp in space back to where I started. On a cosmological level, I’m trapped inside the outside, and I’ll never get out or in.

Sometimes I think I’m the last human in the world, but then a child will skin a knee and break into a fit of sobbing, or an elderly woman will drop her purse and struggle to pick it up, and I am reminded that they are not superhuman. They are born and they die.They are just people for whom access is not a concept, much less a problem. I try not to be bitter.

I still retain a stubborn hope that one day I’ll find a door—or something resembling a door, or something that could be converted into a door. A crack in space to pry open. In a world of wandering on the inside of the outside as if you’re on some infinite conveyor belt, you miss crossing boundaries, for whatever purpose. The simple novelty of traversing spaces, the qualitative differentiation that makes a place a place. Now, if I find my door, it may drop me off the edge of the world, but plummeting through the void doesn’t seem so bad.

 

To cross over into a state of infinite falling, and to encounter no impenetrable matter, would at least introduce anew twist in space, and I’m sick to my bones of the same old walls. I would die for an entry to nothing.

 

Martin Rayburn is a poet and short fiction writer based in Northern California. Since receiving his PhD in English in 2018, he has been teaching, reading, and writing literature, hoping to inspire both students and a wider public.