The room was empty, aside from a raised slab that the man slept on. The walls were purely white, as well as the ceiling and floor. They were metallic, but not made of any metal that any man had laid eyes on before him. There were no doors, windows, or any other way to access or see the world outside. He was in complete isolation, in a way that nobody else in history had ever been.
The room was perpetually illuminated by an unseen light. It cast no shadows and never ran dry of electricity; a constant white glow from behind the walls. There was no simulation of day and night; just brightness, always. Its creators made no attempt to craft the room in relation to its inhabitant’s regular existence. It was all artificial, and didn’t hide it.
Within this box, the man had resided for centuries— over 600 years at that point. He did not age, nor thirst, nor hunger. The man in the box was immortal, or at least something close to it. Lifetimes, he spent in confinement inside the cramped little room. Generations lived and died outside as he sat there, powerless to do anything. The memories of his former life had long since faded or warped due to the passage of time, dissolving like salt in a mug of coffee. He was no longer who he used to be— no longer even truly human, but he remained alive.
#
He tracked the years by carving into his own flesh— it was the only way he could do it. Markings on the walls were nearly impossible to create, due in part to the strength of whatever material they were created out of, and also the lack of anything to scratch or write upon them with inside of the room; his skin was the only thing soft enough to leave visible marks in. He would count the days in his head, and when he was confident that a year had passed, he would use a tooth to mark a tally in his arm. Every time he fell unconscious or slept, his wounds would heal— but his flesh still scarred. Six-hundred and thirty-four tally marks blanketed both of his arms, like crosshatching; they looked like they had been put to a meat grinder. Deformed, cracked, and mutilated. The room did everything it could to warp the perception of time; this was the only thing keeping him from completely losing it. Time was the only thing that carried over into the box with him, and he would not let it go.
The human mind was not supposed to exist for as long as his had. Most normal people end up falling victim to dementia, Alzheimer’s, or some other neurological disorder associated with old age after a certain point, assuming they live long enough. He was over 500 years older than the eldest human to ever live before him. His symptoms reflected that.
The most obvious one was his memory loss, but there were others as well. Days where he would wake up not knowing where he was, spontaneous loss of consciousness, hazy vision and hearing, inability to move on occasion, vanishing of thought— and many more. He suspected that the same phenomenon that healed his injuries was the same one keeping him sane. His mind had evidently degraded, but was being kept functioning in partial normality by whatever unseen, bystanding force had control of him and this place. He was like a tortured lab-rat kept alive by stimulants. Just hanging on by the thinnest thread; not being allowed to die, yet not truly permitted to live. Existing in a permanent limbo with no obvious exit or remedy, caged like an animal.
#
There was still some salt— or was it sugar? —remaining at the bottom of the mug that was his mind, failing to vanish with the rest. His remaining memories consisted of vague, blurred recollections of places and concepts: towns visited, fields lain upon, forests hiked through, and skies wondrously gazed into; but nothing concrete or tactile that he could pin down permanently. No names, and no defined image of self.
He knew from these subtle memories that there existed a universe outside of the box, and that he had once been a member of it in the past, but that was about the extent of his knowledge— he didn’t even know what he looked like. No amount of evocation could bring anything else to the surface. All the ‘whys’ and ‘hows’ relating to the box, and the reason he even ended up there in the first place, were completely unknown to him, and had always been. There were times in which he went against his thin memories and doubted if he ever had a life previous to this one at all, but those moments were few and far apart.
He had spent immeasurable amounts of time pondering his situation over the centuries, but was still left with no conclusive answers for why he was in the position that he was in. Theory after theory led to no breakthroughs or realizations; just more questioning. Eventually, he learned to tune out the thoughts relating to the beginning and means of the predicament, as the futile worrying led to nothing productive. With the lack of anything in terms of information, all he had to go off of was faith. Faith in himself, faith in what knowledge remained in his brain, and faith in the existence of something more than just the box. Without that silver, tempting glimmer of hope that one day, he may escape; he would be gone.
#
His days of idle sameness and monotony would end suddenly one morning. For the first time, he awoke to something new inside the room with him. It was a book, sitting on the floor towards the center of the box.
His mind filled with a myriad of thoughts upon noticing the artifact, but none of them had to do with its origin. They were panicked, fearful thoughts— almost territorial and animalistic. As much as he despised the box, it was all he had or could ever have. It was his, and this thing had somehow invaded it. For the first time in centuries, he felt frightened.
He arose from the slab, half assuming that he was still dreaming, despite feeling the distinctive metal floor of the box beneath his feet. The book was large— not that he really had anything to compare its size to. It was bound in leather, with no title or author visible on the front; completely blank on the outside. He approached it lurchingly; making soft, long strides, and keeping his torso protruded back away from the alien object; like a cat in a standoff, preparing to pounce. He tapped the book with his foot, testing it— after a few awkward moments of this, and realizing that it posed no physical threat, he reached down and picked the thing up with both hands.
It was heavier than he had expected it to be and was evidently quite old. The leather was cracked and faded, and it showed signs of wear from continuous reading or poor storage, but he couldn’t place an age on it. It was bound with coarse brown rope, and the pages were so far yellowed that they were almost orange.
Book in hand, he retreated to the slab and sat upon it. Slowly, he opened it to the first page, lifting the cover gently; out of fear of damaging it, and because of lingering fears about a potential threat that the object still may hold.
He couldn’t read it, he realized immediately. Whether the language was foreign, or if he had simply forgotten it over the years, he didn’t quite know. Nevertheless, it was illegible. Luckily enough, though, the first few pages were the only ones which contained such an intimidating amount of unknown words; the rest was filled with just images. A photo album.
Within the book was the confirmation that he had been dreaming of for so many years: there was an outside world. The object had, somehow, just like him, come from it
It had evidently belonged to a family long ago: the family comprised five people: a mother, a father, and three children. It began with the mother and father alone. A few pages later, two children appeared. The next page, another one. It showed these people’s lives played out through the pages: birthdays, vacations, and celebrations. It showed the children’s growth to adulthood, and the parents’ ascent to old age— and their eventual deaths, as they no longer made any appearances after a certain page. Most of the focus of the images was placed upon the scenery that the people stood in, though, rather than their faces.
Sandy beaches with gargantuan stretches of seething blue ocean. Cities with monumental towers reaching upwards, grasping at the clouds. Mountains with sheer rocky cliffs and snowy peaks. Deserts with wavelike orange dunes, beaten down upon by an unyielding sun. Trips on a plane that took them above the clouds, into a bright blue sky. Sprawls of congruent houses surrounded by white fences, with colorful gardens nestled before them. Forests with towering, vine-laden trees that formed a canopy above their heads. Dark, cramped, abyssal caverns where no light shone except for the flash from the camera. Otherworldly marshlands containing multicolored sedimentary flows of water that would get expelled to the heights of the surrounding trees by ferocious geysers. It was life.
He couldn’t understand why he had been given this. Why reinforce within him now the desire to have something that he could never acquire? Why taunt him with this after so many years of nothing? Just knowing that something more existed out there became torture. His first feelings of excitement morphed into dread and longing. For the next few days, those negative emotions ate away at him.
#
He hopelessly scanned over the album again and again, hoping to find some kind of clue or answer to any of his questions, but nothing appeared, no matter how long he flipped the pages. The family just stood there, smiling at him. The scenes changed, but every photo included the same people, making the same faces. Forced, artificial smiles plastered on the faces of people he knew nothing about. It was maddening.
They existed in places more beautiful than any he could imagine, yet held no joy behind their eyes. They could go anywhere, do anything, but still looked as if something was wrong with them. He didn’t understand that, and it made him furious— another new emotion. How could someone who had been given the gift of true freedom not see the value in it? Everything that those people had, he wanted. He needed. He didn’t even realize that until he saw the pictures.
He couldn’t remember his own family. He couldn’t remember what it was like to smile with friends. He couldn’t remember the feeling of sitting and relaxing on the beach. He couldn’t remember freedom. He would do anything to even experience an hour in one of those photographs. They had everything and didn’t even notice.
#
When he awoke the following day to the sameness of the room with its monochromatic, luminous walls, he could tell that something within him was different. He couldn’t take it anymore— any of it. He stared at the masquerade of smiles in the book. He paced in circles around the box. He pressed his hands over his eyes and ears. He chewed his nails until they bled. When nothing made his feelings go away, he finally snapped.
He dropped the book with a thud, stumbled to the center of the room, and crumbled. On his hands and knees, he screamed at the top of his lungs. He screamed until he silenced his inner voice and kept on screaming long after that. Screaming to be heard by his captor. Screaming to forget these feelings once again. Screaming for catharsis. Screaming just to scream. And when he was finished screaming, he pounded the walls. He slammed the floor, and he scraped his remaining nails upon every surface available to him. He bashed his head into the ground until he was dizzy. He tried to climb up to the ceiling, to no avail. He cried until his cheeks burned. He had forgotten the gods and assumed that they had too forgotten him, but he still pleaded and begged on his knees for either death or freedom to somebody. No answer came.
After taking a few gasping moments to calm himself and catch his breath, he walked to where he had dropped the album. He took it in his arms and shredded it. Page by page, he ripped up the book of remembrances, banishing the people it contained to the unknown void of infinity; condemning them to the silence of forgetfulness. Never again would that ungrateful display of faux happiness display itself to him, or anyone else. He erased it. When he finished tearing the book’s final remaining page, for the first time since his abduction six centuries past, a labored smile carved its way on to his face— although a normal man would not have recognized it as such. It was an unsettling, vile, and sinister looking thing. But it was enough. His soul was a draughted desert, and the dam holding back his humanity had finally broken, flooding its surface.
#
The following years for him were more of the same. He had experienced his breakthrough, but remained trapped. Never again did he have another episode, nor did another item appear. He went back to his usual ways, and there came a time when he scarcely thought of the world outside, or of the album and the family it had once contained. The leather bindings still laid in the room’s corner, but he never so much as looked at them. He forced it, along with the emotions and universe that it presented, into the back recesses of his mind; scared of the scope of everything and scared of his own future in continued solitude. That solitude would end not last forever, though; nineteen years after being presented with the album, he would spend his last day in the box.
#
When he awoke, he discovered that, similar to when the album had appeared, something about the box was altered during his slumber. There was no foreign item this time, but something far more bizarre happened; the entire wall opposite the slab disappeared. Inexplicably, somehow, the immovable, everlasting barrier that had stood for centuries was no more. Nothing he had ever done to it had any effect upon it, but now it opened into air— true, fresh air.
The vibrant light that the sun projected into the box burned his eyes momentarily; but upon his vision’s recovery, he beheld a sight that he had once thought not possible. An image that had been lost to time; burned from his mind by the countless solemn, mind-breaking years of isolation. The true beauty of the world had been lost to him, but he now gazed upon it with eyes glassed from tears. He felt like one who had just completed a lifelong pilgrimage, eying his destination for the first time.
Golden evening sunlight shined from beyond a lonely, massive, jagged mountain miles away in the distance, bordering it in a brilliant, angelic light. Before it stretched a vast field of pink, red, and blue flowers, placed atop soft, rolling hills and mounds. The hills descended into dark blue ponds and streams, where white swans and gray geese swam together. They often were topped by blossom trees that had soft pink petals. Carried by the breeze, some of the petals blew into the box’s newly opened wall and landed at his feet, merging the two realms into one, and proving that what he saw was not some kind of mirage caused by his unstable mind.
The wind was comfortingly warm with yet-to-disperse summer heat, and along with the blossoms, carried a sweet smell of nectar that temped him forward. Rabbits, squirrels, sparrows, and other small creatures fed upon the boons that this landscape provided; hopping around, grazing. The sky was cloudless, and dyed with a gradient that creeped from a deep orange to an almost fluorescent, teal-blue the farther his eyes wandered from the setting sun. The wind whipped his long hair into his eyes; he swiped it away, and bounded into the wide world before him jubilant, without another moment of hesitation or thought.
#
He ran to the nearest hill, scuttling up its surface on all fours like a beast. After reaching the summit, he glanced back at the box where he had spent such an immeasurable amount of time. The discovery he made when he did made him wish to be back in the safety that the box provided, and to never have seen the world outside. Though he was free, the emotion he felt then was worse than any felt previously in his lifetime. A grief strong enough to kill a weaker man paraded through his chest.
His was not the only box. There were more— countless uniform boxes, just like his. Some, maybe ten or eleven of them, were opened. But the remaining thousands remained sealed. They continued as far in their direction as the hills did in his; he couldn’t see the end of them. One after the other, they repeated until they faded into the blue of the sky that sat on the horizon; a living cemetery of entrapped peoples innocent of any crime filled his eyesight to its peripheries. He didn’t see anybody else despite the previously opened boxes, and he quickly realized what that meant. His immortality was gone.
The other boxes wouldn’t open during his lifetime, he presumed. His suffering had been great, but these people’s would be unfathomably, soul-crushingly worse. His 600 years seemed minuscule in comparison and paled against the onslaught of eons that the hapless inmates of the farthest cubes would surely have to endure. One could only imagine the effects it would have on their minds and bodies. If he had learned anything from his time in the box, though, it was this; time could not be defeated or staved off by any man, no matter his mental or physical fortitude— however, time can certainly defeat you.
It was a strange feeling that he felt as he was gazing off into the field of cubes. As selfish as it was, just knowing that other people besides himself were going through this ordeal left him feeling almost relieved. Even though they would suffer, they too would have this moment of bliss upon their exit. At least they were granted that.
He walked down the opposite side of the hill, towards one of the ponds. It was a very small one— almost a puddle. The water was still and reflective, defended from the otherwise forceful winds by its own size, along with the surrounding rises. Looking down into the pool, bland eyes were mirrored back at him. He saw his own face for the first time with the fresh eyes of a stranger. He seemed youthful and energetic; the opposite of how he felt. No sign of his toils was shown on his face, and he seemed like any other man that one may pass without another glance on the street, never to be thought of again. He looked startlingly standard. It was then, as he was looking into the water, that he remembered everything.
#
The next 40 years that he would live were spent in a form of happiness. He stayed in a small house built by a previous box survivor for the rest of his days, only occasionally thinking about the boxes and their makers. He chose that fragile contentedness over the existential fear that presented itself to him following his escape. The ever-silent and motionless boxes haunted the otherwise picturesque skyline until his death, but like the album, he learned in time to ignore them. He grieved somewhere deep inside himself for their inhabitants, but above all, he was thankful to have a quaint life to himself.
He lounged beneath the trees. He swam in the rivers. He climbed to the peak of the mountain. He could eat, drink, and even die should he one day feel the desire to. He could even enclose himself in his room for a while, and be alone with the memories of his two previous lives: the ones from the box, and the reclaimed ones of from the time before. He was still alone, but he had become used to that long ago. This was all he had ever wanted— he was living and free.