The Atrium
Lizzy scraped again and pulled a larger splinter from her depression in the wall. The area she excavated was nearly as wide as a baseball…
Author: Paul DeStefano
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Lizzy scraped again and pulled a larger splinter from her depression in the wall. The area she excavated was nearly as wide as a baseball…
Lizzy scraped again and pulled a larger splinter from her depression in the wall. The area she excavated was nearly as wide as a baseball now. She ran ragged fingertips over it. At the deepest point, it was nearly a half inch that she had dug into the wall.
When she started digging in the corner, it was just a bubble in the paint. A deformity of construction. Knee high and nearly the same distance from the corner of the room. She searched, but found no signs that there were any windows. Ever. The walls were a few paces away from each other, smooth and probably the same material as the floor. The ceiling was different. Ten feet away and some sort of translucent material. She assumed it was plastic. Behind it, a very dim light source. Perhaps a single bulb.
For a while, she had tried digging at the crack around the doorway, picking at the wall where there should have been some sort of molding fit to the door. The edges of the doorway were lined in some sort of metal that resisted her prodding and scraping. The door itself was thick and heavy, the same pale gray as the rest of the room.
They must have found she was picking at the doorframe. She was punished.
Without windows, without a light that went on and off, without anything beyond her cotton smock in the room, she had no way to tell how many days they hadn’t fed her for the peeling of the paint at the doorframe.
The only way to tell time was the knock at the door. When there was a knocking, the door would unlock. She would be able to push it open. The atrium that it opened to was just as featureless as her ten-foot cell, but even smaller. In it, she would find a paper plate with her meal on it, a cup of water, the bucket and a new smock. The first few times there was the knock and she went into the atrium, she screamed, hoping to be heard. She pounded the far wall, which she assumed was the other doorway that the supplies came through.
Rules were learned quickly. There was a knock at the door. If she ignored it, after a few minutes, the door would be relocked. She would get nothing. If she pushed it open, she had several minutes to take advantage of the supplies. Change into the new smock. Eat the food. Drink the water. If the meal had enough liquid in it, like an apple or piece of celery, she would use that to quench her thirst, take a single swallow of the water and then try to wash herself with the rest of the contents of the cup. Sometimes she would pour it over her hair and dry it on her old smock. The use for the bucket became apparent after the first few meals. The bucket was somehow adhered to the floor, but she had never figured out how. It was thoroughly cleaned or replaced for each appearance. Then the lights would blink. She had to leave the atrium at that time. If she stayed, the door to her room would shut and the lights would go out. She would be stuck in the atrium with the stink of her own refuse until the next meal. The door to her room would open. She would have to retreat to her usual cell. When she did, there would be the knock, the atrium cleaned and refreshed and she would be allowed to eat again.
When she had tried picking away at the door frame, somehow they found out. If the feedings were coming daily, they did not feed her for four full days. The knock came. The bucket was there, as was her smock. But no food.
This punishment was enough to keep her from trying again. Not where they might see.
Most of her time was spent in the far corner of the room from the door. Her fingertips had explored every centimeter she could reach. The floor. The join of the floor and wall. The walls. Low. High. Gray infinity and nothing more.
Until she had found the bubble. A nearly imperceptible flaw from the brush of some painter. A bubble had formed and popped, leaving a tiny, tiny ring of paint that had dried as a little circle on the wall.
It was all she had.
She picked at it until her fingers could no longer.
A few meal times later, she had cleared away a patch of gray and bloodied her nails in getting to a layer that was brighter. Primer. She had gotten past the pale gray of the room and reached some underlayment. A different paint, white, not gray.
It was glorious in its nearly blinding difference from the surroundings. She spent her time huddled in the corner, scraping and digging at the wall. When she slept, she curled to the comfort of the difference in shade, hiding her spot. She never knew if they watched, if they came in, if they somehow saw. But it seemed safest to lie curled against her spot.
All of the fingernails of her right hand had broken. She switched to her left. The wall beneath the primer was not an easily torn board, but wood. When she revealed enough to make out an actual grain pattern, she cried. Whether or not it was at the beauty of seeing shapes and a sign of nature still existing outside of the gray room, or if it was at the futility of trying to manually scrape away at an unknown thickness of wood, she was not sure.
She was sure her name was Lizzy. She would tell that to anyone on the other side of the wall as soon as she could be heard. Whether or not the wall led to the outside or just another room, she was never sure. It didn’t matter. The scraping at that wood was all she had.
As little splinters would flake and chip away under the eternal assault of her fingernail, she would try to use the larger and harder bits as tiny splinter tools, giving her bloodied fingertips a rest. When tiny bits would flake off, or a tool had become soft and useless, she would chew it and swallow, afraid to leave any evidence of the deconstructive job she had taken up.
The bowl-shaped depression she had created was large. Deeper than her first knuckle in the center and wide as her fist. She nursed cracked and torn fingernails, sucking on them, staring in the dim gray light to her patch of worn salvation.
There were never utensils. Food was simple. Beans. Lentils. A slice of bread. Sometimes it was toasted and she wondered if that meant it was some sort of holiday. There was no tracking of days. The meal times didn’t seem evenly spaced. Sometimes it would feel like twelve hours or more, sometimes two. It confused the passage of time even further.
She slept, hoping her fingertips would not be screaming in pain the next day and she would be able to continue the digging. The knock woke her. She pushed open the door, ate the meal of unidentified boiled vegetables, used the bucket, wiped herself clean on the old smock and wore the new one. She didn’t scream, speak, ask for a reason, ask for forgiveness, beg for release, thank her captors for her food or anything different from any other day. She turned and left the atrium. The door shut behind her, leaving her back in her room.
Then she heard a sound.
A sound that was not her own breath, not her footsteps, not her heartbeat or the sound of her swallowing, not one of her sobbing fits that would overtake her periodically.
This was a dull and distant scraping. A rubbing of two surfaces against each other. Somehow familiar, but muffled and distant. She moved around the room, searching for a source, a direction, but not moving too quickly, in case they were watching.
She knelt, brushed wet hair from her face that she had used the ration of water to clean, and pressed her ear to the wall. Then she crept, listening, holding her breath to not hear her own lungs drowning out the sound. She inched and moved, higher, lower, her eyes clenched shut to not distract her. She searched the source, using her ear on the wall like a dog sniffing for a hidden treat.
It was scraping.
It was the sound of someone picking at the surface of a wall. The other side of the wall. Her mouth dropped open. It was the same scrabbling sound her own digging made. A scratching, soft and short. It didn’t seem to exactly line up with the depression she was carving away, but it was very difficult to tell. When she pressed her cheek into the depression, it seemed louder, but she knew that it also could have been caused by the fact that the wall was thinner there.
She stared at the depression and fell back, sitting and looking at the only feature of her room. She bit her bottom lip and looked to the door. On hands and knees, she reached to the familiar shredded wooden indent and slowly touched it.
And she tapped. She tapped with the forefinger of her left hand, slightly less raw from the labor. She listened. Still a scraping. She tapped again. No change. She swallowed and looked to the door. Slowly, with pained joints, she clenched a fist and rapped a knuckle to the depression.
The scraping stopped. She clasped her hand over her mouth to contain the excited yelp that almost escaped her.
Her hands shook in frustration at the deafening pounding of her heartbeat, drowning out the possible sound of the scraping on the other side. Breath held in check, she leaned in, nearly touching the wall. And she listened. When she had to take another breath, she gently touched the depression and waited. After several roaringly loud breaths and beats from her heart, she made a fist again and rapped.
It was a long time since the last feeding. She was on her knees, head pressed to the depression and waiting. She did not tap or rap a third time. And the scraping did not continue. Her eyes darted around the room and she bit her knuckle. The knock on the door was terrifyingly loud and sudden. She stood and looked to the depression and then the door. If she went to get food, what if the scraping continued when she was away? What if the moment she couldn’t hear was the moment of bravery from the other side?
And what if she were punished for not getting her meal? She hurried to the door, trying to keep the gentle shushing of her smock to a minimum as she ran. She quickly ate the several pieces of toast and a cucumber, used the bucket and changed her smock. She took the cup of water and dipped her fingers in. She cleaned her dry eyes and rubbed her cheeks with a wet palm. She straightened her hair and continued cleaning her face and neck. She put the cup down, tried not to appear to anxious or different from the thousand prior times she had a meal break and headed back into her room.
Every nerve wanted to jump, to dash across the room and return to the depression. The ten-foot walk was interminable, a herculean effort of self-control to not seem determined to reach that spot. She straightened her hair from her face, slowly turned to the depression and curled up next to it as she had countless times before. Measured and paced. She leaned her head to the wall, pressing her cheek to it so her ear could get to the deepest point.
Her breath roared louder than any storm she could remember. She whimpered, trying to keep her own sounds of existence stilled.
If it would have been considered night, she didn’t sleep. She didn’t excavate, working at the depression. She didn’t move. She let her breath become very still and she listened. Surely, when the scraping on the other side stopped, it was in response to her knocking on the wall. It wasn’t a coincidence. It couldn’t be. And she actually heard the sound. An external noise, not made by her own body moving in the room. There was another sound, she was sure. Not imagined. And it reacted.
The next meal came. Again, she moved deliberately, as if thick iron chains held her, rather than betray any sense of excitement that she had actually had a moment of communication. She ate and changed, cleaned up and headed back to the depression in the wall.
Someone had responded. She had frightened someone. Tears ran down her cheeks. What if it was a rat in the walls? A dog having supper? A squirrel pulling a loose piece of wood? All of these things would have responded by retreating from a tap. Whether the communicator on the other side of the wall was animal or human did not matter. It could not stop the excavation. There was something there. Maybe another room. Maybe the outside.
The third meal came and went. Whether this was three or four days or ten hours since she had heard the foreign scraping, she couldn’t be sure. She also couldn’t care. She had gone three full meal periods without working on the project, which was too long. She stood and stretched. Lizzy looked down at the depression and then the door. She crouched in her usual position and started scraping, her fingers long rested from the last work.
After the third scrape, in which she had freed a thin fibrous fragment of wood nearly as long as her finger, there was a rap.
She gasped and fell away from the wall, sprawled on the floor. She looked around the room, making sure there was nothing else that could have caused the sound. The next sound was even louder and more startling.
Her own laughter.
She covered her grin, sucked in her lips and scrambled back to the depression. She made a fist, her forefinger knuckle out further than the rest, and gently knocked twice into the depression.
Two knocks replied.
This was no dog or squirrel, no rat in the wall.
“Hello,” she whispered into the depression.
Her lips were cracked and raw and the sound of her voice was alien and frightening, but she could not be any louder. She shook her head.
Three raps came from the wall. Measured and metronomic.
She tapped back three times. She waited a few moments and knocked four times. Four knocks replied.
Unable to care about being seen, she leapt to her feet and spun, jumping in the room. When she regained control, she stopped herself, looked to the door and the flat featureless ceiling. She would learn if there was punishment if the door opened next and there was no meal in the atrium.
The scraping continued from both sides, far more furiously than it had since the start. Her nails bled. When one finger became too sore to continue picking at the raw wood, she switched to the next. For hours, she scraped. She spit at the wood to soften it and tried getting into the depression with her teeth, but there was no purchase.
The knock at the door.
A meal. An apple and toast. They either didn’t know what she was doing or didn’t care. She washed up, ate quickly and returned to the depression. She mouthed words, not speaking.
“Hi. My name is Lizzy.”
Saying that would make her a person again. Having someone know her. Know she was still alive. Know she was here. Know her. That would change everything. Lizzy would no longer be a cypher in an unknown windowless room. She would be a person once again. If someone could hear her name.
She did not sleep for four meal cycles. Every now and then, one of them would rap a gentle pattern and the other would reply. Pauses and rhythms, accents and beats exchanged through fingertips and knuckles on either side of the barrier that kept them from each other. She would giggle, cry and gasp at each tapping and rapping exchange. She could fight no longer, and collapsed to sleep, hoping she didn’t scare her neighbor, praying every internal prayer she could pull that when she awoke, things would not be different.
Five meals later, a new miracle occurred.
When Lizzy put her palm to the wall, she could actually feel the knuckle rap from the other side. A sensation that was not her own tears, a cough or raspy breath. An actual physical sensation of someone else’s organic existence. She cried and collapsed to the wall, shuddering and sobbing, unable to hide herself from anyone that might be watching.
A tiny protrusion had formed in the depression. A vein of wood that seemed tougher than the surrounding area. Ran her fingernails up and down the sides, creating grooves around the toothpick sized timber that blocked her mining. She moved to the top of the shape and by the time the next meal came, she had found a tiny indent where the wood was soft again. After eating, she returned to that spot, finding which of her nails was the longest and the strongest. She reached it into the groove at the top of the tiny timber and worked it over and over, until she felt her fingernail had a decent lever at the top that she could pull.
She pulled a shard of wood even larger than a toothpick. A tremendous yield. A thin splinter, half the width of a pencil and almost as long as her forefinger. Lizzy held it in her palm and marveled at one of the largest splinters she had ever been able to work from the depression since she started.
The scraping and picking on the other side of the wall stopped. There was a sudden rapid series of taps. Lizzy looked.
A slot. A tiny slot. Toothpick sized. Nothing more. But the color. The color was not the pale brown of the wood in the depression.
It was gray.
Another room. Another place. The same color. But not the same place. The light that she could see was then blocked. She put her face up to the slot. Something was in the way. Something had been placed in the opening. She reached in, but the slot was too deep. She tried poking through the slot with the splinter she had pulled.
It was something soft and there was a startled yelp.
“Ouch,” came the whisper from the other side of the slot, although she could tell… She could still tell after all of that time of not hearing another voice, that the speaker on the other side was smiling.
“Oh my God,” Lizzy whispered, putting her mouth to the slot. “I’m sorry.”
“It’s okay,” the whisper came back. It wasn’t clear if it was a male or female voice or even the age.
Then she saw the fingers on the other side working furiously to open the tiny slot further. She started scraping on her side, marking the wood dark with blood.
“You’re bleeding,” the voice on the other side said. “Here.”
Three apple seeds were pushed through the tiny slot. Lizzy picked them up. Tools. Her neighbor had saved apple seeds to scratch and scrape at the wall. They were tiny and hard to hold in swollen tender fingers, but for the moment, it supplied a relief to the stinging sensation of the constant scraping.
She had worn all three seeds to pieces and was working her fingernails again when the unimaginable happened.
A finger width chunk fell away to the other side. It was toward the side of the depression, slightly off center. She got on her hands and knees and looked through.
An eye looked back at her. They both laughed and she choked on tears, hoarsely wheezing.
“Hi,” she said, barely a noise noticeable if you were five steps away. “I’m-”
She stopped her whisper when the door knocked. She stood and hurried to the door. She pushed it open, hoping that she did it the same speed as usual and looked no different than ever before. She stepped in, changed, ate and washed the blood from her hands. The door to her room closed.
While she was still in the atrium. She had taken no longer than usual, she was sure of it.
“What?” she asked. “I’m still in here. I’m in the food room. Let me back.”
A door opened in the wall immediately to her left. She looked. It was not her room. She knew the direction she had come from, which was always the wall opposite the bucket. This was another direction. Out the way further from the depression in her wall. Another room. Gray and featureless.
“That’s not my room,” she said. “You opened the wrong door.”
She looked to the ceiling and shouted.
“That’s the wrong door.”
The lights blinked, signaling time to leave the atrium.
“No,” she screamed. “No, that’s the wrong door. That’s not my room.”
The lights in the atrium began to dim.
A voice she had never heard came from overhead. “We have to move you. Step out now, or there will be consequences.”
She turned to the door to her room and pounded on it. “Let me back in. Let me back in.”
“You have a new room now.”
“No,” she screamed into the blank gray of her closed door. “No. No. No.”
“There will be consequences.”
She took a deep breath as the lights in the atrium went out. With all the force she had, more effort than she had exerted since she could remember, she screamed to her door, hoping the words would carry, hoping the neighbor listened. The door to the new room was slowly closnig. She started to head from the atrium.
“My name,” she wailed to the bloody marks she left on the closed door to her room before going to her new home, knowing she would not be heard. “Is Lizzy.”
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