Gábor was walking up a ream of stairs. One step, then another, a foot upwards and forwards each time, hoping in vain he'd get to the end of the series, while trying to ignore the fact that the "forwards" was just about negated by the spiral formation of the whole affair.
Its shape wasn't the only reason he felt it endless, of course, not the only reason he felt it was best described as a "ream" – a stack, a series where one step further, one metaphorical sheet off the top, might as well be nothing and it would achieve about the same result. No, the other reason was the clatter of it all, the cacophony. A cold cocoon of sound surrounded him, every step on every stair igniting a new vibration in the air that made its way to his ears sooner than he'd like. And they were all unique. Each time a different sound, something new.
And to make matters worse, there was the fact that he couldn't look up. Gábor had been climbing the stairs for about an hour at this stage, and had been exploring the room for ten minutes or so prior; the moment he had stepped on the mahogany floor, its sheen had rippled and suddenly it was impossible to point his head anywhere but left, right, and forward. Ever since, it had been descending on a vertical axis – if he had to guess, at about the rate of a degree a minute. So, our dear Gábor was now staring down at the metal steps, each one brightening as his foot connected with the steel, making a new sound each time, echoing throughout the room, endlessly, monotonously chaotic.
There's a road in California, about a four-hour drive straight west of Gábor's hometown Topock, that has ridges in it. Theoretically, they're arranged just right to play a famous opera song when you run your car's wheels over it, but in reality the people making it got the math wrong, and it sounds all out-of-tune. Gábor thought of that road – he'd always hated it when his mother would drive over the thing on road trips, the sound too cacophonous and misdirected to do anything but drive him out of his mind. But at least there, he could track a visual to a sound, see the ridges and the sounds they make. At least there, he could understand what the pattern is supposed to be. Here, in this room, on these stairs, calling that road cacophonous seemed almost laughable in comparison.
Most of the sounds surrounding him were instruments, that was the one similarity. Up; a sour note from a trombone. Up; a piano's lowest key. Up; a guitar string breaking. Up; a hand slamming down on some poor tambourine. And, of course, each of these accompanied hand-in-hand by Gábor's own steps clanging down on the metal. A percussion line, the closest thing in the room that, in spite of its nature, approached being pitch-perfect.
But it was still the most interesting experience Gábor had had in at least a few hours, and so, he kept on. He kept on for that reason, as well as the reason that he physically could not turn around.
Gábor's mental timer, somehow stable through all the vibrations, reached sixty-seven minutes.[note] It had been thrown off its course several times, maybe countless times, throughout the previous sixty-seven minutes, yet somehow he was certain at this moment. Not sixty-six point six six six and so on – sixty-seven. The number filled his brain, synapses firing off the number, the way it looked on a page, the way it sounded coming off a tongue, the exact significance of its quantity, every time Gábor had ever seen the number sixty-seven, every association, but all that same red-and-yellow number, corporate yet not-quite-right. Sixty-seven.
And the stairs fell, particulates in a series of instants, glowing steel receding into the air like a pill dissolves in liquid dissolves on a sponge. Dust left dancing with the oxygen. For the first time, Gábor was able to look up – not because his neck was any more flexible now, but because he was falling backwards onto that godforsaken mahogany. And now, he saw the thing above him at last, the thing he'd been heading towards. Only a few steps away from it before the fall, it seemed.
A light. LED, not incandescent, never incandescent. Screaming white at him and all the dust the metal dust was in the air now, its sounds no longer waiting for him to step on them to reach out into the world and grasp at his ears and overtake his mind and throw themselves into his thoughts and pile on top of each other in a beautiful maelstrom of one big vibration that sounded as many—
Gábor hit the floor. The lights (had there been multiple?) turned off.
He dusted himself off. Somehow, he was okay. No injuries, his clothes saturated with shiny metal particulates, but nothing that wouldn't come off when he got around to washing it in the basin. The sounds in the air settled, now a rhythm, a melody, a simplified few notes making up the tune of the William Tell Overture – or at least something close enough to it for comfort. And he could move his neck all the way again.
Gábor walked out of the room with the stairs-that-were-no-more and the mahogany floors and the unpowered LED light, and stepped out into the fledgling sunset; his dirt-stained shoe glowed when it hit the exact boundary between mahogany floor and grass. Nestled in that grass, just a few feet away, awaited a sleeping bag, a tarp, and a tent – and there he would wait to be spirited off to the intrigues of tomorrow.