Investigations

There are many questions – seeking less for answers than for directions.

Should you obey the note? Is it even meant for you?

Is it a threat or a piece of helpful advice?

How can you be sure that the writer of the note has assessed the situation adequately?

Doesn’t it smell as though someone has been smoking a pipe nearby?

Are you not to leave the property of the house? Or are you not to exit the physical house at all?

Shouldn’t the writer have made all of this more clear?

Is it deliberately vague? Written for no other reason than to see what you do, how you respond?

What will you do next? How do you go about deciding?

You are, after all, in the dark as to what your very own intentions are. But here is this house before you like an open book. You laugh at the thought of looking for your intentions in the rooms of an unfamiliar house! It occurs to you that these delightful convulsions are more than likely a sign of genuine discomfort. Your laughing ceases whilst you imagine discovering your intentions solely by way of contemplation.

Yes, the house, the house . . . it is at least something for you to do now, something to take your mind off of wondering what to do, a direction to begin heading in . . .

Again, you are struck by the rather unremarkable nature of the house. It is as though it had been constructed with the express purpose of making it as inconspicuous as possible. Curiously, this only seems to be making it feel all the more inviting. The house does not impose its will upon you so much as it makes itself open to receive you.

As you make your way room-by-room, you find it to be well-maintained, neat and tidy.

Kitchen

An assortment of objects of mundane necessity: pots, pans, glasses, plates, bowls, silverware, towels, sponges, potholders, soap, etc.
Several empty drawers; one drawer storing a flashlight, batteries, and matches
A small pantry stocked with food and spices
In the refrigerator: milk, eggs, meat, cheese, carrots, broccoli, pickles, maple syrup, and a large, untouched bowl of trifle (all fresh!)
On the wall: a photo-realist painting of a cottage kitchen

Dining area
(while you munch on a carrot stick and wonder whether or not you like carrots—you remember what carrots taste like and the carrot does indeed taste as you recall but you cannot recall liking or disliking them—interestingly, even as you chew it, you cannot come to a definitive conclusion regarding the carrot)

A side door leading outside and separating this space from the kitchen
A table surrounded by four chairs
In the drawer of the table: one cribbage board and two decks of playing cards; a pair of dice (which you roll for fun resulting in a 3 and a 6)
Several windows let in a great amount of light and look out upon a bit of lawn, a bit of a flower garden, a hedge and many trees

Living room

The aforementioned couch, two platform rocking chairs, and a coffee table assembled near a fireplace
A closet containing coats, jackets, shoes, and boots
On the wall above an entryway table: an oil painting of a dark cellar in which a window somehow looks down upon a vast lawn with many gardens

Porch

Double French doors lead to a screened-in porch with a stone floor and a view upon the lawn, gardens, and trees
On the left: a long table with some benches; on the right: a barrel table surrounded by several lawn chairs
A small pile of neatly stacked wood
An old croquet set (the green ball lying at a suspicious distance from its neighbors)

Study

A chair and an old writing desk; the drawers and cubbies of the desk are bare
A desk lamp whose pull string mechanism is employed by turning what is simultaneously the steering wheel of a ship and a depiction of the Sun
A built-in bookshelf: empty

Bathroom

Basic toiletries
A clean toilet, bathtub, sink and mirror

Bedroom

Just as before: a bed, a lamp and a clock on a nightstand, a shattered mirror
On the wall: a black-and-white drawing of a man, in nightshirt and pajama pants, and a woman, in nightgown, walking along the peak of a roof backlit by a hazy moon
In the dresser and inside a closet: clothes that fit you!

As you begin cleaning up the pieces of the sundered mirror, you notice that the wall-side of the pieces have markings on them making it possible for you to put it back together like a puzzle. In short time, you have the object roughly unified again. Only “roughly” because there are 34 shards laid in place. There is one spot in the upper (though not top) left of the mirror and another in the lower right corner whose pieces seem to be missing – and there are two pieces with no markings for which you are unable to find a place. Try as you might, you cannot get either of the two pieces (nor combinations of the two together) to fit into the absent spaces. And search as you might, you are unable to find any other stray pieces in the room.

Furthermore, you had hoped that when the shards were back together again, the markings that had guided you piece by piece would reveal something significant to you in its returned wholeness. But there is nothing more than abstract patterns of yellow, green and red.

You look at the fractured surface of your self in the mirror. The image is you, but that’s all there is. You look for a long time as though you could somehow observe something where you feel emptiness. But there is just you looking, no more.

You feel like you know who you are, but this could just be an indication that you feel as though you should know who you are. You want to be somebody. Somebody particular with a set of interests and an arsenal of activities suited to those interests. You want to feel a sense of purpose, you want your life to have meaning.

For now, you can at least fill the emptiness you feel with the activities of determining where you are and how you arrived here. But what if you do not like what you find? What if the meaningful activities you discover yourself to have engaged in prove to be distasteful to you now? Or uninteresting? Or without value? Well, today is a new day, you suppose, and so your present and future activities needn’t coincide with those of your past.

Far worse than that, what if your pursuit of enjoyable and meaningful activities does not remove the emptiness but merely transforms it from a lack of individuality, identity, and particularity to a lack of possibility?

One could truly fritter away the time with such vexing questions! Besides, you presently not knowing what it is you are doing here not only gives you a great deal to potentially do but it also means that the possibilities are wide open. For now at least.

But how dull your investigation has been thus far! The fresh food and clothes that might be yours are certainly interesting and handy—but you have found nothing to help you to understand your situation! How did you come to be here? Who lives here and keeps it up so nicely? Is this someone’s life? Is this your life? But where have you gone? And where are you going? What are you to do? The written note you found at the front door only compounds this mysterious situation, adding questions without satisfying any. You almost hope to find more instructions to help guide you, to give you something more concrete to do.

But right now you are tired so you are going to go to sleep. The fruitless searching and these dead-end thoughts are wearisome. Perhaps some rest will do your mind some good. You find some appropriate sleepwear and get into bed, no pull string with which to switch off the rays of the tireless Sun always reaching out. And yet, do you not notice them dimming just now?

From outside you hear the familiar whirring of what you assume to be an airplane. Perhaps this location is situated near an airport? As you ponder this, hoping it might stir some sort of memory from its hiding place, you hear an additional, more disturbing noise even though, at first, you do not comprehend just what is disturbing about it. Soon, the sound of the plane – apparently circling round and round and round overhead – puts you to sleep like a lullabye.

Sometime later: you awake from a dream. As you lie in bed hopelessly replaying it in your mind, your eyes find The Sleepwalkers on the wall lit from the front by another Moon. And now you know what you are going to do next.

Investigations

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