[ 03-16-05 ] [ 4:45 p.m.]
[ The Dead Room ]

The number was five, and he stared at it for a long moment. There was always something significant about that glowing red number number, and it bothered him because he hadn�t once been able to figure out what was important about it. It was different every time, for every person who came to the room, and even though their minds were laid out on the table in front of him, he still never could figure out what was so important about that number.

It was a secret, he surmised. Something so deep and so secret that even the person who that number represented didn�t know or remember why it was so important.

He�d been feeling like dying for a long time. He wouldn�t ever be able to pinpoint the exact time in his life it started, but he knew it had a lot to do with spending all of his time in the dead room. His friends and family didn�t even know where he went, but he was gone all the time. If he wasn�t working, wasn�t being famous, he was gone. He went from the man that could be counted on in any situation to nothing more than a mere shadow in the lives of only a few.

He hoped that no one who ever knew him found the dead room. The sterile, white room with the huge clanging machienery and brown pleather padded table had become an obsession to him, and it controlled him. He honestly didn�t even know where the dead room was located. It called to him out of his sleep or in his mind and he would stumble mindlessly over miles of hilly ground and dark forest. He would never recall the miles of terrain he crossed � only the white room remained in his memory, burned there, never to be cleansed from his troubled mind.

The dead room only let him go when it had to, when it grudgingly admitted that he was a famous face and had other duties to attend to, but for every second left unoccupied, the dead room increased its hold. It called him back just for long hours of solace sitting unmoving in a plastic chair and watching.

He was beginning to lose his mind. He could feel it. Outside the dead room, he was not the man he once was. He could barely even remember the man he once was. When he spoke, his voice was nearing monotone and when he walked, it was in straight form with no hint of slouch. His eyes, once young and vibrant, were flat and lifeless. He thought constantly of the dead room. His vision was filled with red numbers, ever changing. Forty-nine. Eleven. One hundred and fifty six. Their meanings escaped him and yet consumed his mind all at once.

He was slowly, laboriously, dying.

�You look like hell, man.� The words seemed real and poignant, and though he knew the voice, he couldn�t place the speaker. Instead, his overworked and exhausted mind turned the words over in his head again and again, dissecting their meanings one by one and murmuring the phrase aloud. Every so often, a sentence, a phrase, a word would jump out at him and for one little instant, the dead room flashed across his vision. Every time it happened, his obsession with the dead room would increase.

Those little words and phrases that struck him had something to do with his obsession with the room. They were clues, clues to why he was constantly finding himself alone in a chair in a white room reading what was on the mind of others, watching lives that were not his own through clouds of blackness in his vision. Those phrases came to him in many forms � he read them and his brain highlighted them in yellow; he heard them and they were amplified by a thousand in his mind. The room was sending him clues. Urging him to figure out why he was captive of a tiny white room where he did nothing but sit and watch.

The number was thirteen. His mouth fell open slightly as the huge red number was displayed on all of the walls. There was always a number in the dead room, always a different one. Never the same number twice. Always a whole number. Nine, or fifteen, or ninety. Seven, or thirty-six, or a hundred and two. The number seemed to almost stab at his brain, and he held his head in his hands for a long moment as he thought. He had seen everything about the life laid out on the table, every flaw, every achievement � everything � yet still the number made no sense.

His obsession with the dead room was beginning to become more about the numbers than about the room itself. He would dream about the dead room, about the crisp white walls and the powder-blue plastic chair, but during his wakefulness his thoughts were always on those huge, red numbers. Always different, never the same. He hadn�t even been able to pick out a pattern in the numbers, to see if he could determine what kind of person would be the next one in the room with him. All he could determine about the numbers was that they were somehow related to the other person in the room with him.

When he had first come to the dead room, he had been a bit horror-struck at what exactly the dead room was. But now he had come to accept the occurrances in the dead room as natural. What exactly he thought was natural about the deserted room, he would never understand, but reading the lives of others and coming to know so many stories about people he�d never met had become a part of his disintegrating life.

He would never admit it, either, but it enthralled him to sit in his plastic chair and read those lives, and then watch those lives vanish before his eyes. When he was a child, the thought of death scared him beyond anything else. Now, he felt at ease with death. Now, he watched all different sort of people enter the dead room, and in his plastic chair he watched them die. He watched them die and knew that the last thing they saw was that number. And he knew they understood, even though he did not.

He had once tried to speak to one of the dying as he watched, tried to ask the dying young woman what her number meant, but his voice was soundless inside the confines of the dead room. The only sounds meant to be heard were the ones of the life of the dying, the memories from times long disappeared and dreams never to be fulfilled. And that number had something � everything � to do with the life that was dying. He knew he would never rest until he knew what the number meant, until he understood the last element of the dead room that evaded him.

He was steadily, gradually, dying.

�You should get some rest. You look exhausted. Are you sure you�re alright?� The words were spoken softly, but to him they blared like trumpets. His overworked mind sprang to attention as the words played over and over again in his mind. He could not even force himself to acknowledge the speaker, for the information that the words held within them was so very important to him, more important than anything else in the world. Those words were the key to figuring out the secrets of the dead room.

He was looming ever closer to unlocking the secret. In a moment of rare clarity, he had realized that the words could be tied not only to the dead room, but to the red numbers displayed on the walls when someone was about to die. He turned the words over in his mind, wondering if there was some secret math hidden in the words, if he was supposed to take to solving number riddles to understand the red number. All he could fully understand was that the room was urging him on, pointing him in the right direction, pulling him toward the destination that awaited at the end of his continual journeys to the barren white room.

The number was ten. He narrowed his eyebrows and stared without blinking at the huge figure staring back at him. He watched the dying, watched the life spread out on the table, memorized the most miniscule of details, but still the number just did not seem to fit. Why was ten so important? Why were the other numbers so important to the ones that had died before. He felt further away from the answer than he ever had. His frustration was boundless.

A part of him somewhere knew that his mind had finally gone, was now fully devoted to the constant thought of the dead room and its numbers. He knew he did not speak anymore, did not move unless he had to, did not eat or sleep. His body was entirely devoted to sustaining his mind, his thought processes. His numberical Rubix Cube. Yet still, no clarity came to him.

He knew that once his task of solving the mystery of the numbers was complete, he would be free from the dead room, free from the lives of the dying and free, indeed, from his slow, arduous study of the numbers. He began to see numbers all around him when he was not in the dead room, began to hate their existence because he simply could not understand what was so important about a number plastered on four white walls as someone laid on a brown pleather table and died.

He tried to fight the dead room�s hold, but the more he struggled, the firmer the grip became. He eventually lost all control of his mind, except for the tiny part that remained active, running constantly, scrambling desperately for the answers that his entire being seemed to seek.

He was relentlessly, painlessly, dying.

�You�re worrying me. I wish you would talk to me.� The words filled his mind with sound, and with a sudden burst of clarity, he understood. His eyes cleared for the first time in months and he finally saw all that was around him. The secret of those numbers finally fell into his mind, and he knew that the dead room�s hold on him was nearing its end. He smiled, a real, genuine smile. He was going back to the dead room, going back to procclaim at the top of his lungs that he had figured out the secret of the huge red numbers.

More words pealed through his mind, as clear as the ones that came before them. His eyes narrowed in thought and he knew without having to guess, without even having to be told, what the next number would be in the dead room. The dead room knew he�d figured out the secret, and wanted him to reveal that secret with the next number. He was going back to the dead room to procclaim at the top of his lungs the words that would free him. �I love you.�

�The number is three!� He gasped the sentence over and over again, but his voice would not come. The only sounds meant to be heard in the dead room were the ones of the life of the dying, the memories from times long disappeared and dreams never to be fulfilled. He was watching from his back, watching the blindingly white ceiling, and trying to cry the number three as loud as he could. He wanted to see the dying, wanted to watch them die, wanted to free himself from the mental prison that had been the dead room.

Suddenly the number flashed onto the ceiling, onto all the walls. It was huge and red and looked almost bloodthirsty as it loomed above his head, and like so many times before, he did not understand. Staring up at the number, watching it stare back at him, he did not understand why he could not move. �The number is three�� He tried to speak again, and the huge red number three burned itself into his vision. And finally, he understood.

He was dying.

When the next morning came, he was found in his room, motionless on his bed. He had died in his sleep.

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