The Next Door (3/3)

“And what about the next room?” David said, ignoring the man’s last sentence. “What’s in it?”

“Whatever is in the room, it is where people reside permanently after they die. What is in it is their business, not mine. Whatever is there for you is there because that is the order of things. My business is in this room. Is God in any of the other rooms? I don’t know. Maybe He is, maybe He isn’t. But it’s not my place to know. My business is in this room. And as you can see, God’s not here.”

“How do you know all this?”

When David asked this the man reached down and opened up a drawer beside his leg. He pulled out a wad of papers stapled together and set them down on the desk in front of David.

“These are my instructions.” There was no warmth in the man’s voice as he said that. “They were left here on the desk when I first got here.”

“Left by who?”

“I don’t know. No one called me into the room. I simply saw the door and opened it to find this,” he gestured to the room itself, “and this,” he pointed to the instructions.

“Couldn’t that mean there was someone here before you? Someone who created everything and set it up for you?” David asked.

“It’s like I said earlier. Yes it is entirely possible that someone created all of this. But I doubt that.”

“Why?”

“Well there are a couple of ways to look at it. Where you came from, you have these ‘laws of nature,’ as I believe you call them, and they’re considered inherent to your universe. You believe they’ve existed since your universe began, but that doesn’t necessitate a creator. They’re just recognizable patterns found everywhere. It’s just the way things flow.

“Would they still exist whether you were aware of them or not?” the man asked. “How do you know there is a natural order if that’s the only way you see things? Think about it,” the man continued, recognizing the confusion on David’s face, “what if all the laws of nature only exist because you made them? What if there is no inherent order to the universe, and instead we perceive order?”

“But if that’s all we can understand, wouldn’t that make it just as real if the order existed without us creating them?” David asked. “Would that really matter if we can’t look beyond our own perception of the universe?”

“You’re an inquisitive fellow,” the man replied.

“I’ve been told I think too much,” David said, cracking a small smile.

“Nonsense. Thought is the essence of being. In fact, my best guess about what is beyond those doors is a meld of the two. Thought and being as one.”

“I thought that wasn’t your business,” David pointed out.

“There’s a slight difference between what one will find in there, and what it will be like in there. It’s a fine line, I know, but sometimes I have nothing better to do than wonder. But back to the question at hand. You argue that order has to come from somewhere, and that it’s not something that’s just thought up. I can understand your skepticism: how can something come from nothing without a creator?

“What if there never was nothing?” the man countered. “What if there only ever was something? There would be no role for a creator to play; nothing to create. All things exist because they never had the chance not to exist. You can’t create something from nothing. Thus there never was nothing. Existence has been eternal.” At this, the man paused and asked, “Does that make sense?”

“I can tell you’ve had a lot of time to think this over,” David responded.

“True,” the man said, nodding. “I have been here quite a long time and in that time I’ve done a great deal of thinking.”

“Did you ever die, then? You make it sound almost as if that never happened to you. And if that’s the case, how did you end up here with this job?”

“Again with the questions,” the man said quietly, a hint of sadness in his voice.

“You did say you were here to answer them,” David reminded him.

“I know, I know,” the man said slowly, almost to himself. “I never died, to be honest. I also never lived, so I guess you could say I never had the opportunity to die, you see.” David looked utterly perplexed. “I remember only standing in front of the door, opening it, sitting down at this desk and finding my instructions in one of the drawers. I have no any previous memories. No previous existence or anything.”

“Then how do you know there was no one before you?”

“I just know. Nothing came before me.”

“You’ll forgive me if that doesn’t completely convince me,” David said.

“I’m afraid you’ll have to take me at my word,” the man answered. “It’s a feeling I have that I can’t explain. I just know that there was nothing before I came along.”

David then sat silently for a few minutes, trying to gather his thoughts together. “There’s no clock,” he said finally. It was true; the room had no clock. And before David could catch himself he glanced at his watch out of habit. It was still stuck on 2:21am. “How long have you been here?”

“I don’t know how long I’ve been in this room. I wish there was a way I could keep track of how long I’ve been doing this, but so far no dice. It is a bit of a pain.”

“Can’t you count how many people you’ve talked to?”

“Nope. I tried to keep count at one point but it was useless,” the man sighed. “You end up counting so high you can’t go on counting. Or you run out of paper or your pen stops work or something. And you can forget about keeping track of peoples’ files.

“Once their paperwork is done and they’re ready to go through their door it gets shredded,” he pointed to a large machine on the desk to his left and the garbage can on the floor in front of it. “So you definitely can’t retrieve their file after they enter their room.”

“Why is that?”

“Once they go through their door there’s no coming back. What’s done is done and should be left alone. So there’s no point to keeping it around.”

“Then what are the filing cabinets for?”

“I don’t know,” the man answered. “I’ve never bothered to check.”

“That’s odd. Why wouldn’t you check them?”

“I’ve never had to. And besides, I think they’re locked. Do you have any more questions?”

“How do you handle babies? How does abortion work? Or the mentally ill? Or people such as child molesters or murderers?” David was bursting questions, eager to learn everything he could.

“I couldn’t possibly tell you about any of those things,” the man said sadly, sensing David’s disappointment. “I’m afraid such matters are private. Those dealings are between said parties and myself only. But I understand your curiosity. You are not the first to ask these questions, and you will not be the last. Is there anything else?”

“What about you? Will you ever get to leave this room and move on to the next one?” David asked.

“There is no next one for me. I was only given one door,” the man said sadly, looking at the door behind David. “There’s nothing else beyond the door for me.”

“But if you lead people to their doors, who led you to yours? Even if you believe no one made this place, someone did your job before you did by leading you to your door, right?”

“I don’t know.”

And after that the two of them were silent for quite a while. How long exactly? It might have been seconds, minutes, hours, days, weeks, months, years, decades, centuries, millennia, eternity.

A door arrived.

“Is this real?”

“I never said it was.”