UMLÄUT 2020 - THE PANDEMIC ISSUE
ISOLATION
Benny Leuty
The Outside World
It is Thursday when Jacob realizes that a hand is God; God or something just as mysterious. Jacob knows very little about The Hand, certainly not as much as he knows about his own hands, but he has cataloged within his thoughts all that he does know. The Hand operates according to a plan. A plan that Jacob is not privy to. The Hand has delivered to him everything he currently owns through the hatch in the door: his blanket, his toothbrush and toothpaste, his food, water, and books. On one occasion, The Hand even delivered to Jacob a letter from his mother. Most importantly, Jacob believes the Hand might have the ability to send him back to space.
Jacob had been an astronaut once. That isn’t too impressive because as Jacob recalls, most people are astronauts. Nearly everyone was born in space, Jacob included. He struggles to remember the faces of the men who’d taken him from space and back down to the tiny world he now calls home. He mostly remembers their clothes, uniformly blue; not blue like a baby boy’s blanket but darker than that and heavier too and they wore badges. Jacob had been unable to move his hands, the men had seen to that. As he remembers it, he had been in a great deal of distress. Jacob had wanted to run but he couldn’t. Jacob, flanked by the two blue men, had been led down a hallway where he’d been wheeled to a stop outside the door with the hatch he now knows so well. One of the blue men began to unlock the door. Jacob looked to the end of the hallway where there was a window. A tree was growing outside. The door swung open like the lid of a casket. The world it reveals is Hell’s waiting room, bathroom, and kitchen all in one. A naked toilet bowl and a bed, stiff like a changing board, all packed into an area the size of a walk-in closet.
Jacob looked back out the window at the tree, the grooves in the bark swirling dry and dusty like ancient river beds, and heard himself asking, “how long will it be?” the men in blue said nothing.
Jacob’s room is small enough for him to stand in the middle and brush each end with his fingertips. And Jacob does just that after each sleep and is pleased to note that each day he can stop whenever he likes. Sometimes that whenever is after a few seconds, sometimes it’s after a few hours. Jacob is in control.
After each meal he inspects the walls and the floor and ceiling panels for cracks and peeling paint. His inspections reveal nothing and this pleases him. His world is spotless, he runs a tight ship. Then he’ll do some pushups but only when he feels like it. Jacob is in control.
His five-fingered deity might be the most powerful thing in the universe, but Jacob is the most powerful in his world. He recalls a story of men who grew so great they built a tower so tall it could reach heaven and they could claim their place at God’s table. Well as Jacob recalls, God didn’t like that much and he knocked their tower down and split them amongst themselves by giving them each a new language. Jacob says he’s learned from their mistakes. Jacob says he’ll settle for his room. That he wouldn’t know how he'd carry on if his world spoke a different language; What he’d do if his walls cracked and his paint peeled in ways he could not see.
Jacob often recalls one of his few memories leftover from his time in space. A movie in which a man in prison marks his days in captivity through tallies on a wall. Since his forced landing in his world, Jacob always wanted his own wall of tallies. But as days and nights are determined by the movements of celestial bodies and seeing as Jacob’s world has no windows or skies, Jacob has no way of knowing when one tally should end and the next should start. Ever original, Jacob decided to mark tallies for each of the times the hand brings him food, for each of the times Jacob uses the bathroom, or for each of the times a cockroach crawls out from the sink drain. But all those were too exhausting and irregular to keep track of. Now Jacob makes one mark. One long tally that drags from one end of the room to the next, across walls, the ceiling, and the floor. One long day.
When Jacob’s stay on his tiny world began, he often talked to the door. Asked it questions about when he’d be returning to space. About when he’d get his next meal. About if he might have another blanket or another book. In truth, Jacob thought he was talking to the blue men who’d put him in this world, behind the door. But after what might have been years of no response, Jacob realized that he might as well have been talking to the door. Jacob realized that as far as he knows, outside there are many people, that outside there is no one, that outside the world is ice, that outside the world is on fire, that trees, all duplicates of the one outside the hallway, the only one he remembers, have overrun the galaxy, that the tree he remembers is a dinner table. Each morning he rises in his world and rises in the face of infinite universes all equally valid, all right through the door that separates his world from the endless vacuum of space.