The Door of Unmade Choices: Chapter 11

 

CHAPTER 11: Cheap Whiskey From A Plastic Bottle

 

When one door closes, another one opens. People love saying that to someone who has lost a job or received a rejection. While I appreciate that sentiment, it’s fraught with irony. Being a metaphysical detective involves dealing with what happens when a person opens that other door. What they don’t realize at the time is that door should never have been opened. It never leads to what they think it will.

*

By noon, the town had developed a tone.

You could hear it in the pauses between sentences and in the way people answered questions they hadn’t been asked yet. Regret carries a frequency, and once you’ve tuned into it, it’s hard to miss.

Like any regular detective, if you want answers, you have to knock on some doors. So, I spent the morning talking to people who’d found doors. Or rather, people the doors had found.

Mrs. Calder from Maple Street went first. Seventy-two. Widow. Smelled faintly of lilacs and lemon cleaner. She spoke in one of those sweet old lady voices about the door that appeared in her laundry room sometime after midnight.

“Right where the old freezer used to be,” she said. “I thought I was having a stroke. But, at my age, I always feel like I’m having a stroke.”

The door showed her a kitchen she didn’t recognize at first. She was new cabinets and a man at the table reading the paper, grumbling about coffee. It was a younger version of her late husband. Kinder. Less tired.

“I only watched,” she said. “I didn’t touch the handle.”

“Smart lady,” I told her.

“It felt like it was waiting,” she added. “Like it knew my name. I didn’t like that. I could tell it wanted me to go through, but I’m far too cautious for that. I’ve always been cautious.”

Mr. Alvarez should’ve been so cautious.

He was a former auto mechanic who now fixed lawnmowers out of his garage and drank too much beer that pretended to be craft. His door had appeared behind the soda machine at the VFW. On the other side was a version of his life where he’d taken the job in Denver. The one his wife had begged him to consider before she got sick. Before she died wondering if they’d chosen wrong.

“I just wanted to see,” he told me, voice shaking. “That’s all.”

He said he crossed the threshold because he wanted to see what life would’ve been like had everything turned out better. The door tried to close while he was still looking. He barely made it back to reality. Mr. Alvarez hadn’t slept since.

By mid-afternoon, the stories started to overlap. Different doors. Different lives. Same emotional architecture. The life where they stayed. The life where they left. The life where they spoke up. The life where they didn’t. Doors catalog regrets and store them in a warehouse of your subconscious. When you go searching for them, the door is all too eager to help you find what you’re looking for. I’m far too familiar with the experience of the doors regret opens.

Every conversation with those who encountered doors echoed Frank. The smile that comes too fast. The way people lean forward when they talk about what almost was. As if proximity alone could make it real again.

By the time I got back to my office, my head felt crowded with other people’s stories and unlived experiences. A cigarette I intended to smoke burned in an ashtray in the middle of my desk next to Frank’s case file. The draw of brooding about my own past proved overwhelming as I poured myself a glass of cheap whiskey from a plastic bottle. Metphysical detectives can’t afford glass, you see. I sipped the stuff and felt its aggressive burn down my throat. That shot of awful liquor would be added to my list of bad choices. That’s when I noticed the familiar sound of a low, steady hum. Not coming from the hallway or the walls, but from somewhere closer. The air around my desk felt charged.

A new door had found me. It was drawn by the vibe of my angst. I poured myself another whiskey, despite my esophagus begging me not to, and stared at the door on the other side of my desk. It was going to be a long night. 



*****



My new comedic sci-fi novel, Someone Else's Book Club, is available on my website or through Amazon! 


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