The Absurdium

“Yeah, you look pretty much like I expected.” Sally said, confirming the large, old-man-like being’s point without realizing it.

“So I’m not dead then? Huh, good to know. Where are we?” she asked, looking around at the dingy office.

“People always seem so obsessed with that. Life versus death, dead/alive,” it said, moving its hands up and down like a scale as though weighing one against the other. “Matter remains fundamentally unchanged and energy persists, I do not understand it, the interest in that dichotomy eludes me.”

It paused for a moment, stroking its enormous beard. “Do not get me wrong though, life is quite interesting. The directed application of energy, the active pursuit of matter and energy, the effort for self-preservation; that’s completely unique you know?”

It looked at Sally and then continued. “Of course, ultimately all of life’s actions are completely predictable on paper. It is more of an unforeseen inevitability really, one that results from the rules I put in place, rather than anything out of the ordinary. ”

“Oh,” said Sally.

“But getting back to your question, ‘Where are we?’. We are in a small universe separate from your own, and free of the constraints of its dimensions. Its kind of a caveat really, something I appended to the system code recently so that I could interact with certain aspects of your universe more directly, including people.”

“Uh huh. Annnnd that caveat is a crappy office in the Bergman Tower?” asked Sally with a mocking smile.

“Well, it is for you. Would you like to believe you are somewhere else?”

“No, no, it’s okay,” laughed Sally. “Its just funny, God lives on the eleventh and a half floor in the Bergman Tower.”

“No I meant it, believe you are somewhere else. You know you are somewhere else.”

“Well, according to you I am in a little bubble in the uh, universe… uhhh… space…”

Sally trailed off into silence as the walls around her faded until they were barely visible and transparent like thin glass. All around them the cityscape vanished as blackness set in and then, stars, millions of them, began to appear as though someone was using a dimmer to slowly turn the universe on. Above and to her right, through the glass ceiling, an enormous nebula lit up. It was staggeringly beautiful, massive on a scale that she could not comprehend and made up of great clouds of gases glowing in nearly every colour imaginable. She stared at it for some time, lost in the nebula’s beauty and grandeur. She had seen pictures of this sort of thing before, images captured by satellites orbiting the earth. Now they seemed like a child’s drawing might when hung beside a masterpiece from the Renaissance. She felt like crying for a multitude of reasons.

Abruptly Sally turned away as something caught her eye and looking down she suddenly realized that past her feet and the legs of her chair was a spiral galaxy of titanic proportions. It was like a great pinwheel of light, glowing with the brilliance of a trillion stars and her wide eyes could do nothing but stare at it, as if pulled in by the massive black hole itself, the one at the galaxy’s centre. She was struck dumb by the galaxy’s utter magnificence and nearly fainted from the overwhelming beauty of the universe around her. She steadied herself with a hand on the desk and continued to stare through the floor.

Some time passed.

“That’s better,” it said. “It is much nicer out here. I think this is the best scale at which to observe this universe. I’m rather proud of these works,” it said, gesturing through the glass walls.

“Now, when you are ready Sally, I would like to ask you a few things.”

It was a small, square office with the same bland off-white walls and plain, beige carpeting as the rest of the floor. There was a bookcase in one corner and a black, two-drawer filing cabinet in the other. Both were covered with precarious stacks of papers and binders, and several bound books sat languishing on the one shelf in the book case that wasn’t broken or covered in papers.

Before her was a small desk with an ancient looking computer on one corner and some papers, pens and other stationery scattered about the remainder. It wasn’t nearly as cluttered as the chaos that was the bookcase though. Most interestingly, behind the desk sat a large, older man with great locks of white hair and an enormous beard that looked as soft as cotton and covered a great deal of his chest. He was wearing a white robe that was tied about his girth with a belt and his large sandaled feet were resting on an unoccupied corner of the desk. How he fit in the little reclining desk chair that he was occupying Sally had no idea.

As she walked in the old man’s eyes lit up and he exclaimed, “Sally, Sally! Come in, come in!” Taking his feet from the desk he gestured to a dusty wooden chair she had failed to notice and urged her to sit down.

The chair was surprisingly comfortable and Sally sat before the desk still clutching her file folder. The room did not smell like musty library, old man or recycled air, but rather Sally noticed the faint but pleasant smells of lemons, flowers and sea salt and this struck her as somewhat odd.

Leaning back in his chair the old man put his fingers together and continued, “I’ve been looking forward to meeting you for a little while now. So, you are well I assume? Here, let’s have a look see, what have you brought me?” he asked without waiting for an answer to his first question.

Sally pulled a copy of her resume from the file folder she was carrying and placed it in his outstretched, and quite large, hand.

“Yes, this is a copy of my current resume. I’ve brought along a cover letter as well if you’d like…” she trailed off. It was clear he was not listening as he pulled out pair of old reading glasses, and donning them, held the slip of paper at arm’s length. He slowly scanned the page, quietly mumbling things like, “yes… yes… science? Indeed! hmm… quite, yes.”

“Excuse me, if you don’t mind, I’m a little bit confused by all of this,” said Sally after a minute or so. “IS this the Greenworks office?” she asked hesitantly, not wanting to appear slow if this was in fact the office she had been looking for all along.

“Oh heaven’s no!” said the man, not looking up from her resume. “Surely you know that its not.”

“That’s what I thought. Which brings me to my next question, and no offence mister, but who the hell are you, where am I, and what’s all this crap with the signs and stuff?” her face flushed as the words spilled from her mouth louder than she intended, but she was beginning to grow both frightened and angry and she would rather show her anger than reveal her fear.

The man chuckled softly and shifted forward in his chair to lean his elbows on the desk. Putting down her resume, he looked her directly in the eye, and suddenly she felt powerless and insignificant and yet also immense, free and elated. The abruptness of her realization was as though someone had whispered an answer in her ear that had been on the tip of her tongue all along.

She was sitting opposite God and having a conversation with Him!

Her revelation was neither terrifying nor humbling, but rather she felt immensely curious and also strangely satisfied, as though finally verifying some long held suspicion.

She knew it was so pathetically human, but immediately Sally could not resist asking, “So, am I dead? Did I just die in the elevator?” She had asked many bizarre yet legitimate questions in her life, but those were probably her best yet.

“Would you be talking to me if you were dead?” He asked in return.

“Well, hopefully.” At this, God looked puzzled.

“Look,” He said after a moment, articulating very clearly. “I find it clumsy and difficult to communicate effectively in human languages, so bear with me. I am what you would identify as God, although I am much different from what I understand people often believe God to be. I am not human, not male nor female, big nor small. I have appeared in this manner before you solely because that is what you have as an image in your mind.”

With a ‘ding’ the elevator doors slid shut. Sally’s stomach was doing it’s best impression of a Cirque du Soleil contortionist and her nervousness was manifesting itself as sweat on the palms of her hands. She loosened her grip on the file folder she was carrying. Her unease and general sense of impending doom had little to do with the fact that she was being carried up hundreds of feet above the nice, safe ground in a steel box suspended by cables.

The guy next to her in the elevator was talking but Sally was not paying him any attention. In her mind she was running over the numerous details of her upcoming interview and the mental notes she had made in preparation, all the witty little comments and nice adjectives she had come up with to describe her past work experience and her future career ambitions. Except that she was running over them like an out-of-control dumptruck might flatten the flower beds and fences of the conveniently aligned front yards of suburbia. Her thoughts were becoming more and more disorganized the harder she tried to concentrate.

The numbers lit up closer and closer to 12 as Sally tried to clear her mind and relax. She wiped her hands on the dark slacks she had picked out to wear. They went well with her jacket and blouse, and with her strawberry hair clipped up in a bun and glasses instead of contacts, she thought she looked rather professional.

…10…

…11…

*ding*
“Okay here we go,” she said to herself as the elevator came to a stop. The doors parted before her like the Red Sea before the Exodus and she stepped out onto the twelfth floor with her chin up, a bounce in her step and a smile in her big green eyes. Her mind rushed ahead of her, already clearing its throat and awkwardly introducing itself at the receptionist’s desk, and so the elevator doors had already shut before Sally even realized that this was in fact not the twelfth floor at all. With a surge in her stomach she rushed back to call the elevator before it moved on. However there was no button with which to call the elevator, and Sally stared at the blank wall between the two elevators for a moment before realizing this. Mildly alarmed that she might be late and that the shoddy building design might be partially to blame, Sally looked for the door to the stairwell. In her distraction she must have gotten off on the eleventh floor and needed to go up a flight of stairs!

Sally’s mild alarm grew considerably when it became apparent that there was in fact no access to the stairwell from the landing she was in. There was just one unmarked wooden door opposite the elevator doors. The rest of the walls were boring and blank. Shoddy building design indeed!

Sally hurried through the door and turned to the desk at the immediate right of the entrance. It was a beautiful, wide, darkly stained desk, and the only thing sitting upon the smooth hardwood surface was a card with “Sally Button” written on it in beautiful blue pen strokes and an arrow that pointed down the hall.
Stunned, Sally stood staring at the sign. She was still unsure as to which floor she was on, and this definitely did not look at all like how the Greenworks office had been described to her. She was beginning to feel less professional and more like a confused and intimidated university student once again.

There did not appear to be anybody around to talk to, so Sally opened her file folder and skimmed over the sheet of notes she made for her interview. She had double checked the address and name of the building before coming in off the sidewalk just minutes ago, and the office was definitely supposed to be on the 12th floor, to the left off the elevator.

Anxiously Sally checked her watch. 12:26. She still had four minutes to get there, but she had hoped to arrive at least ten minuets early, not breathless and sweating at 12:30 on the nose. After a second or two passed, or didn’t pass rather, Sally realized her watch had stopped working and that she might in fact be late already. Swearing to herself she hurried down the hallway. There seemed little else to do but follow the arrow on the card.

Sally passed a few closed wooden doors and then as the hallway turned left she saw another card, much like the first, only this one was tacked to the wall and told her to go left. She encountered and followed three more signs as the narrow corridor turned right, left and then right again. Finally she came face to face with a wooden door that looked just like all the rest, except this one had a sign on it that read: “Sally Button – 12:26 – Please Come In.” Reflexively, she checked her watch, which was of course still dead and still reading 12:26.

Exasperated with whatever this game was that she was being forced to play, Sally opened the door abruptly and walked into the room.