The Benign

Introduction

                        

Fred "Freddy" Nelson sat in a corner; though the room was painted a psychologically overwhelming solid white, his corner was darkened by his own aura. It had been three hours that he sat there, starring down at the white tiles that seemed to fade into the walls, which if not for the very sharp corners of the cubed room would give an initial impression that the room was more of a magical sphere, like the white ball of a pool game, spinning perpetually into other balls of other realities, with its lone passenger caught in the chaos of its destruction of all other orders. Fred used to feel sick, even nauseous, but the anxiety has slipped into a quiet despair, one that accepts it's position as a subject in a ball, twirling madly and blindly in a direction unknown to the subject.

He had been there too long for him to keep track since, beyond the solid white emptiness, days would morph into nights without giving him any notice. He remained detached from the outside world. Sometimes when he'd wake up a tray of food, usually consisting of burnt bread and a glass of water, would be presented to him by no one. The next time he'd sleep, the tray would be gone. On one side of the room, there was a doorknob and a slight outline of a door, with a solid-glass window at its top and a bolted-in doggy-door-like opening at its bottom. Though Fred had never seen a change in either, he knew that someone was sliding the food to him while he slept. How else could it appear there? There was some sovereign force keeping him there, helping him to survive but not thrive. God was in the room, God was still there. Fred believed God was keeping him there for some reason beyond him. 

It was at least four months that he lied trapped in there before any true human contact occurred. Fred was shaken awake, fervently in force, by a man he at first couldn't see but instead heard. Heavy panting with a sense of nervousness came from the person shaking him. They were desperate for something that they thought they could get from the tired and weary Fred.

"You're alive! I knew it! Get up, wake up and talk to me!"

One would think the stranger had been, like Fred, shut out from human interaction. Fred knew that wasn't so, at least he knew it wasn't to the same duration that he had gone without, for after a certain amount of time of not seeing or hearing from another human being an individual would only gaze in amazement at seeing another person, unable to remember so quickly and fluently  how to speak.

"Yes! You're awake, I see. Please, tell me how long you've been here? How many days? Or weeks?"

Fred's tongue was dry, he had to pause to be able to comfortably and clearly spout out three simple words:

"I don't know."

"What? What do you mean you don't know?" The man busted out insolently, reviving tension, but Fred knew it was all impersonal. He was more fed up with the situation he was in that with Fred, and a look of empathy encompassed the stranger as he seemed to realize that Fred answered shortly neither out of ignorance or bitterness, but out of exhaustion. Fred saw that-- as his counterpart further scrutinized him-- a dawning fear overcome the man's body. Fred knew that he must've looked in terrible condition, he also knew that the man was likely envisioning all that Fred had gone through in captivity and for how long he's resided here; the stranger realized that there was a decent chance he'd suffer a similar fate and he was fatally curious of what it entailed. The thought of eventually becoming like Fred must've terrified him, and Fred himself was nerved at the thought that he was anything like this man in the beginning of his arrival to the white sphere. It was akin to looking into a mirror of his past, distraught self.

Fred was scrawny; his ribs were caged in by his torso's skin, which acted as a sort of rubbery-elastic covering of his organs. It almost looked transparent. The opaque coloring of his complexion further added to this, though he always was unattractive in that regard. Hair hung down in knotted beads and dense grease. He was unattractive before but now he had a reason to be, which eased the self-grief. However, his bad health was a major annoyance. His back had become oddly-bent from always resting on the floor, and his body felt deprived, as it was so. They hadn't fed him enough nutritious food for him to do anything but sit around. Now the once stout man was reduced to a scrawny, wrinkling midget corpse.

The Stranger was broader than Fred and soldier-like in appearance. He was fit for his age, which was guessed by Fred as being somewhere around the mid-20s, notable by the slight wrinkles around his jaw; "laughing wrinkles". 

"Why are you here?" The man demanded of Fred, as if Fred had invaded his territory. 

"Same reason as you, I'm sure."

The stranger's eyes bulged, annoyance clenched in his fists. "And what reason is that?"

"So you don't know why you're here?"

At that the stranger's aggression switched to despair; uncertainty knocked at his thick head and soon breached through it. He had no recollection of much of anything, all he knew is that he was there, in that white sphere, with this ragged and worn pathetic fellow.

"No, I don't."

"Well, now that I think about it, neither do I."

"What? How is that possible?" The stranger realized the folly of his own question, then quickly tried to regain his confident demeanor.

"Ask yourself."

For a moment the two looked away from each other, focusing their eyes on anything but, however, both were irritated by the pure whiteness of the room, especially Fred who somewhat yearned for a bit of conversation, even if it was unpleasant.

"I'm sorry I can't help."

"And I'm sorry I'm here."

"You're a selfish man; you're lucky I don't care."

"Oh? And why don't you care?"

"I guess I have nothing to worry about."

The stranger chuckled, at first genuinely but it soon transgressed into a mocking kind of laughter. Though it reverberated all around the room, Fred was unfazed and his demeanor didn't alter at all.

Through Fred's inaction, the stranger himself felt mocked. He opened his mouth as if he were going to say something, but then changed his mind and covered it with a sigh, hoping that it would be taken as some sort of passive-aggressive gesture. "I need to get out of here. What's your name?"

It was almost crushing, but it began to dawn on Fred that couldn't seem to remember the answer. All he could calmly say was: "I don't know."

"Christ, man! How old are you?"

The same dawning came up, nauseating Fred. He felt as if he were going to pass out.

"I don't know that, either."

"No, that can't be good at all... Where are you from? What nationality are you?"

"I don't--"

"God d****t! You're like a zombie! What have they done to you?"

Fred almost wanted to curl up into his own arms and weep. Without anyone to communicate with, to compare himself to, stimulate his sense of self, he had forgotten himself. His identity and past was as unknown to him and empty as the situation he found himself in. He wondered: was it the amount of time he'd been in that room which stripped him of his identity? Was it "they" who had done something to take it away, or more likely enforce it's eradication? Or maybe it was he himself who forced his past to become even less than a blurb, possibly because of Trauma? Freud would be helpful here... However, Fred kept it together and took a breath. He hadn't lost any information that was absolutely essential to his existence and, more practically, his current situation.

"Can you remember any of the questions you've just asked me?"

"Most. You don't need to know my name, I'm 26, I'm from Austria but live elsewhere, but I have no idea what they've done to me nor what they'll do." He was quick, precise; like a salesman or banker. 

Fred noticed the Stranger had said not “him” but “they”. He himself then started to wonder if either multiple individuals had put the two in the room, or an organization of some sort. Fred hadn't worried much about exactly who it was that put him in his current situation, rather, he was preoccupied with dealing with it. The Stranger seemingly ignored the aforementioned, obvious question as well; however, the Stranger was notably more focused on escaping from, rather than dealing with, the white sphere.

The Stranger stomped to and fro around the sphere, searching for cracks, openings, anything of the sort. The equally-white porcelain throne was the only abnormality he could initially spot. He peered down it, almost humorously, with an awe-struck gaze, as if contemplating the possibility of escaping through it. Fred would've laughed if he had the strength to. The Stranger quickly turned, then his eyes lit up once more. He ran towards the door and shouted with joy "There's a door! There's a door! God almighty, there's a f*****g door!." He picked at it with his fingers, still ecstatic, but his ecstasy degraded into frustration and despair as he couldn't find any use of it.

"I've tried. You can’t breach it."

"No! You must have not been doing it right."

Tinkering turned into beating, as the Stranger's frustration turned into a much deeper angst. He eventually pounded his forehead on the door, then slumped down in front of it, tears staining his confidence. He had lost the battle he waged, or--from Fred's eyes--was already automatically waged against the moment he had spotted the door.

All Fred could do was offer sympathy, a gesture the Stranger swiftly refuted and swatted away, as if it were a cold meal.

The two sat in opposite ends, neither really catching the other's gaze, keeping to themselves. This went on for a while, finally Fred gave in to the silence. 

"Won't you tell me anything about yourself? This is the first time I've met another human being for God knows how long. It's like showing but not giving a starving man a fish."

The Stranger stayed still, seeming to ignore Fred's plea, but after a pause he sighed.

"I don't believe in him."

"Who? Who’s 'him'?"

"The man, woman, thing, king, deity you just spoke of."

"The Lord?"

"Yes, though he's not my Lord. He may be yours, but certainly not mine."

Another pause.

"Of course, an atheist. You fit the general profile. I don't mean that to be rude! Please don't eye me so sickly. I'm all you've got."

"Blah! I refuse to accept that; I have my wits, and my ambitions. Don't label me an atheist, or anything for that matter, it leads you to assumptions about me; assumptions you shouldn't make."

Once again, a pause between the men. The Stranger spoke with his face peering down between his knees, as if searching for something in the floor's blankness. Fred looked on at this, and felt a bit of sympathy-- or more like empathy-- for his cell mate. The man still had hope to depart, for he refuses to believe he has the same chance as ending up like poor Fred, who's been shackled and held in the White Room for so long he's forgotten himself. 

"I'm sorry for judging you, but it's impossible not to. You won't tell me certain essential information, so I have to make a guess to have things be easier for me."

"No, you don't have to assume a thing of me. Just leave the space blank in your mind! I have no name, nor career, not family, nor identity! Leave it at that."

"But I really can't. What if you're a threat? Then I need to assume you are! I can't just wait for you to tell me wether you really are or not, I have to assume based off your actions. I judge you not only for efficiency, but for security."

Fred had spoken overly-polite, indulging his emotion into his words. However, it only had caused The Stranger to be even more indignant in his reply, his words acting as foil to Fred's: "Threat indeed! I am a threat because I have demolished your security! You had a wall of assumptions built up over the last month, year, decade or so have you and, right before your eyes, I have taken and devoured them! I am your devil right now because I've ruined the reality you previously constructed. You thought you'd be alone until the end, so you made peace with yourself-- you were more than ready to die like this!-- then I come along and now someone else exists in this tiny white-Hell! Presently you believe that I've saved you from solitude, but soon you'll realize that you're just stuck with another inmate, another consciousness to come to peace with. Well, I won't let you come to peace with me. I simply don't want to."

Silence comes between the men in long, dragged out intervals that are separated by the tapping of one of the men's feet or fingers, the Stranger's pacing to and fro, and minuscule shifts in movement of all sorts that you'd ordinarily miss. Here, in the blandness of the white room, everything is seen. Not a muscle which moves on one man escapes the glance of the other. Throughout the time, both refuse to look at one another, each doing as they had done before. They keep away, avoiding the other's influence. It has been roughly half a day since The Stranger's appearance, from Fred's estimation, and a full 24 hours in The Stranger's own. Both men feel drowsy, yet, though they've ignored each other's existence, neither is willing to sleep whilst the other is awake. It isn't so much fear as it is curiosity that irks them. Fred sees it as them being two agitated piranhas, faced against one another with nothing to eat but their brooding thoughts. It's outrageously absurd, their situation, that is, but neither cares to complain at this point. They see it's futileness. Why bang against a locked door for so long? It's ludicrous to have hope, it's the enemy of reality. The two shall remain there for an unspecified amount of time, and that is that. Both men accept this, yet neither relinquishes their faith. Fred remains compact in his corner, afraid to move and disturb the stillness, while the Stranger disregards all there is but his situation. He passes the time by thumping on the door in certain, messy beats, his ear pressed up against the coolness of the door so he can capture the vibrations of his symphonies. He chuckles at nothing noticeable, and mumbles poems and melodies. He does not sleep, even when Fred falls over from exhaustion the Stranger stays sturdy. His eyes are wide and malicious, his face straight, giving a poker look. He paces more. This goes on until Fred wakes to catch sight of the Stranger's dread.

Fred watches in dismay, counting the amount of sanity left in both of them. It's shrinking, with no doubt. But as his mind wonders he begins to question is own definition of sanity; if he himself were insane, then his standards would be that of a maniac, which would be, perhaps, unreliable. There's no one here to rationally identify the discrepancies of the two's sanity, as both have adjusted to their own social definitions of just about everything. "Is this what it feels like to lose humanity, or to gain it? I can't tell what or who I am, I have no one to reassure me but a man who won't even tell me is name."

He struggles, then beats it off by trying to sleep. His lashes grow heavy and he imagines it to be nighttime. Slowly he drifts, pushing away all the useless inquiries of himself. All the prior knowledge of the prior world, all the opinions and social norms are scratched over with the nothingness of the room he resides in. A blank slate emerges, and he is truly tranquil for the first time since he arrived.