Culture . 02/29/2008 02:22 PM . Tim Raveling

Click here to read the first part of “Getting Away.”

Section 2

Damian left the girl and hurried toward the door, set into the side of a stucco building in a stand of palm trees. The door—early morning light, the scent of jasmine and fresh rain, India—blurred and opened onto the dim interior of his apartment. He stepped inside, closed the door, and pulled a suit out of his closet.

You’ll grow out of it, his own voice said in his mind. He wondered that meant. Thinking. Dangerous, Eva’s voice said, and he shook his head and buttoned up a clean white dress shirt.

He’d grown out of it. Sure, he told himself, and drew his tie tight around his neck. He was sensible now. He looked at himself in the mirror. Forties. Single. Good job. Well-off. His apartment was reflected in the mirror. It was gray.

He sighed, rubbed his temples, and walked through the door into his office in Seattle, where the second work shift of the day was just beginning.

The schedule was packed, and Damian tried to lose himself in his work. He did a routine walkthrough exam of one of the company’s microchip processing plants in Indonesia, had lunch at a small bistro in Paris at around eight in the evening, local time, and had an hour-long business meeting with some associates in an oak-lined office in Tokyo. He had dinner on a veranda overlooking the moonlit Savannah in Kenya, and was not hungry enough to finish his meal.

It had to be the girl, he thought. He was dissatisfied in his soul, spiritually malcontent. Malaise was what the arty types called it. Go to sleep, he told himself. It’d be better in the morning.

It wasn’t. Nor was it the next morning, or the next. It felt like something sour was calcifying in the pit of his stomach, growing another layer every time he walked through a door to see the another identical jumble of people in another homogenized city somewhere on a too-small planet. One day, on his lunch break, he saw the seven wonders of the world—there was a special tour, direct connecting doors in a single path past each. The Great Pyramid, the Taj Mahal, the Dome of the Rock, Petra, the Great Wall of China, the Japanese Arcology, and Machu Picchu, each with its own brochure and five minute presentation. Back before the break ended.

They were worthless, like postcards of the Mona Lisa. They were sights. They were backdrops for family photos. They were as easy to get to as the fast food restaurant across the street from his office. Easier, since the restaurant didn’t have its own door.

Three weeks later he reported himself to the office shrink. For those ailments the mind couldn’t escape, there was the miracle of modern pharmaceutics.

“Sit down,” the shrink said. She was a half-Caucasian of indeterminable age and professional in an extremely precise manner Damian admired but had no wish to emulate. “How are you feeling?”
Damian considered. Had this woman asked this question in the hallway in passing, it would have required a formulated response along the lines of “fine,” or “well, thank you for asking;” now he was in her office, and his company was paying her exorbitant fees to ask that question. He felt it his duty to answer more deeply.

His shoulders sagged. “Trapped.”

She nodded, fingers folded carefully on one leg, which was crossed over the other. “By your job? Your home life?”

“Just …” he shook his head. “In general. By life.”

“Have you considered taking a vacation?” She checked the clipboard she was holding.

“Looks like you haven’t done anything for a couple years now. Why don’t you take some time off?”

“And go where?”

“Anywhere. You can.”

“I know.”

“So, go somewhere! Relax on a beach, take a walk through the Louvre. Get away from it all for a while.”

You can’t even run away anymore, Eva’s voice said in his mind.

“After all,” the shrink said, with a professional smile, “whenever you’re ready to come back, all you have to do is step through a door.”

Damian grimaced. “Kind of defeats the point of getting away, doesn’t it?”

“Does it?”

“You tell me.”

“Is there anyone in your life right now, Damian?”

“No.”

“I have a list of excellent singles bars around the world.” One precise eyebrow raised. “

“Either orientation, of course, your preference.”

“I don’t need another person. I need less people.”
“I can also refer you to a number of solitary retreats. Would that help?”

“No.”

“No?”

“I don’t know.”

“Maybe you should. Feel free to take the day off, Mr. Porter. Your record is outstanding—you’ve earned some time for yourself.”

It wouldn’t help, he wanted to say. But looking at her, her professional sympathetic mask of a face, he knew that she was only here to fix it, whatever ‘it’ was. All of that training, and she didn’t have a clue what was wrong.

He rubbed the sides of his face and sighed. “Can you just give me something?”

“I’d like to get closer to the root of your difficulty first, if we can.”

“Look,” he said, “I can go anywhere. Do you realize what that means?”

“Well, not anywhere,” she said. “There are a few Amish communities, for instance, or parts of the Himalayas that still have no door access, for religious reasons.”

Damian blinked. “Really?”

“Mr. Porter,” the shrink said abruptly. “You’re experiencing a mid-life crisis. It will pass.”

You’ll grow out of it.

She glanced back down at her clipboard. “I’ll write you a prescription that should take care of it for the present. Schedule a meeting with me …” she checked her watch, “next week at this time?”

He nodded mutely, took the prescription, and left.

On a whim, he walked past the door to the pharmacy. On something more than a whim, he took three flights of stairs to the ground level and pushed the door—a real door, not a magical one that led halfway around the world—open, paused to breath the air, and stepped onto the street.

to be continued…

Tim Raveling is a freelance writer.


<