The Door of Unmade Choices: Chapter 12

 

Chapter 12: Dr. Calico Verde Explains It All (Sort Of)

Dr. Calico Verde’s office is in the part of town where one can find an overpriced cup of coffee and fancy pastry on their way to browse a boutique. No dive bars or greasy spoons like The Perpetual Egg. Here one finds frozen yogurt and fusion food trucks. In other words, I don’t get over to these parts unless I need to see Dr. Calico Verde. And I really needed to see her. Verde is an enigma specializing in metaphysical irregularities. I have no idea what her PhD is in.

*

I sat on the same old couch with the faint sag in the cushion, like it remembers people based on the weight of their burden. Calico let me sit in my silence while she lined up stones on her desk. She had no process it seemed. The stones were smooth, mismatched, deliberately out of order.

“So, you saw a door,” she said, moving a stone from one end of the arrangement to the other like it was a chess piece.

I stared at the wall instead of the window. The window didn’t deserve my attention.

“I’ve seen them before” I said. “Not just Frank’s. Others. Sometimes at the park. Sometimes working a case that has nothing to do with doors. This latest one showed up in my damn office like I owed it money.”

“And?” she prompted. “Do you ever walk through them?

“Not all of them,” I added quickly. “Just the ones that mattered.”

She stopped playing with her stones and wrote that down in her notebook.

“That’s not a reassuring distinction,” she said.

“Wasn’t meant to be.”

She tapped her pen once. “Describe your door.”

I exhaled slowly. “It wasn’t dramatic. No glowing edges. No humming. Just familiar. Like it had always been there and I’d only just noticed.”

“What was on the other side?”

“Things that didn’t happen,” I said. “People who stayed. Conversations that went differently. A version of me that didn’t make certain decisions and didn’t spend the rest of his life pretending those decisions were fine.”

She nodded. “Regret compression.” She turned the notebook toward me and tapped the page. On it was a rough sketch of a human figure with arrows pointing inward.

“Is that supposed to be me?” I asked, dodging the metaphor. “Doesn’t really capture my essence.”

“When regret isn’t acknowledged,” she said, “it condenses. Memory alone can’t hold it. Fantasy can’t burn it off. So, it looks for structure.”

“Like a door.”

I leaned back. “What does that make me? The structure?”

She studied me like I was the subject of her final exam. Her soft,

“A conduit,” she said, folding her hands. “Sometimes people want doors. They chase alternate lives and the allure of what might have been. Sometimes doors want people. They attach themselves like an emotional barnacle. You catalog them. You rationalize. You turn them into cases.”

“Occupational hazard.”

“No,” she countered gently. “Coping mechanism.”

That one landed. I didn’t respond right away, letting the sting of her analysis take effect.

“The danger,” she continued, “isn’t stepping through once. It’s stepping through without acknowledgment. That’s how doors multiply.”

I thought of Frank. His face when the music swelled. The way the door hummed for him.

“Frank—” I began.

“Frank is louder than you,” she said. “That’s why the door answered him faster.”

I look up. “Answered him?”

Calico closed her notebook and said, “These doors don’t exist to help people escapel “They’re not mercy.”

“Then what do they want?”

She hesitated. Dr. Calico Verde rarely hesitated.

“They want to pull people from their reality,” she said finally. “If a person decides to stay beyond the threshold they can suck them into a new loop.”

“What kind of new loop? What does that mean?”

She met my eyes. “Are you familiar with the paradox of choice?”

“Not sure I want to be.” I leaned forward anyway because I knew she was about to give me something golden to use on this case.

She looked out the window behind her that I refused to acknowledge earlier. “Let me tell you about Martin,” she said. “Not his real name. I don’t think that was even his real personality by the end.”

I waited for more.

“He used to go to the same restaurant every Thursday night. One of those places where the menu is so thick you knock someone out cold with it. It contained over 50 different entrée options. Then you add in all the appetizers, soups, salads, and desserts, and you have a binder that could give the New York City phone book a run for its money.”

“I’ve seen those places,” I said. “Gross overindulgence.”

“Martin thought so too,” she replied. “But he also thought the right choice existed. Somewhere between the chicken-fried steak and the grilled salmon and five different versions of piccata. He was convinced that if he ordered the correct meal, something else in his life would click into place.”

I nodded despite myself.

“But every night he chose something, he always left wishing he had eaten something else. One Thursday, he labored between a club sandwich and a Monte Cristo. He chose the club. The next Thursday he decided the Monte Cristo would finally be the right pick. He cried himself to sleep afterward. No choice he made brought satisfaction. He always questioned it. If he ordered the meatloaf, would he feel heavy later? If he ordered the salad, would he wish he had a burger instead? The poor bastard had a breakdown.”

“Jesus,” I said because it was all I could come up with.

“The problem wasn’t the menu,” she said. “It was the belief that one option would retroactively justify all the others he didn’t choose.”

I felt that settle somewhere uncomfortable.

“The doors are like that menu. They create the paradox that there was always a better path forward. But once you start exploring all the options seemingly possible, you’re stuck forever. The doors want people stuck. The more people stuck, the more power they have.”

She let that sentence hang before adding, “The paradox is that more choice doesn’t make us freer. It imprisons us.”

 

“I have to keep Frank from crossing over permanently,” I said.

“And yourself,” she added and that stopped me cold. “I know you, Silas. I know what you keep hidden. You’re tempted, too. Don’t give in.”

I exhaled. “What happened to Martin?”

“He eats frozen meals now,” she says. “Limited selection. Predictable outcomes. Says it helps.”

I stood and headed toward the door.

“Where are you going?” she asked.

“To find Frank some frozen dinners.”

*****

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