The fifth staircase was an ascent into nothingness. The blackness that awaited me above was no longer a threat, but a promise of stillness. The man who had been weighed down by his grudges no longer existed. The one who had drowned in sadness over a consumed love was also gone. The one ascending now was a specter, a vessel cleansed of the scars of the past, a blank canvas. My mind, once a whirlwind of noise, was now in near-absolute silence.
I climbed with a rhythmic, effortless gait, as if my body no longer had weight. There were no thoughts, no voluntary memories. Only movement, the cold of the stone beneath my hands, and the persistent sensation of descent. I was aware of myself as a camera is aware it's recording: registering information without processing it, without adding the filter of feeling. I knew, with a quiet certainty, that this canvas would not remain blank for long. The system had emptied me so it could fill me with a new lesson, a new truth. I accepted my role. I was a student in the most terrible school in the universe, and the bell was about to ring for the next class.
I crossed the archway and entered a perpetual twilight.
The air was warm, humid, and dense, and smelled of a strange mix of fertile earth, hospital ozone, and a faint, almost imperceptible, metallic aroma that reminded me of the smell of blood. I was in a kind of garden or forest, but it resembled nothing I had ever seen on Earth. The ground was not dirt, but a soft, pale substance, like cartilage, that yielded slightly under my feet. From the ground grew not trees, but organic structures. They resembled giant sea anemones or deep-sea corals, with bulbous shapes and fleshy tentacles that moved with a lazy slowness. These "plants" pulsed with a soft, milky inner light, illuminating the landscape in shades of pale pink, blue, and violet.
But the strangest things were floating in the air. There were hundreds, perhaps thousands, of small nebulous forms. They were blurry, like an image seen through a frosted pane of glass or like heat rising from asphalt in summer. They moved aimlessly through the warm air, drifting on invisible currents, emitting a faint, diffused glow. My mind, in its tabula rasa state, tried to categorize them. Were they spores from these fleshy plants? Were they some kind of bioluminescent insect? They evoked no emotion, only a clinical curiosity.
I began to walk through this otherworldly garden. The silence was absolute, broken only by the soft sound of my feet sinking into the organic ground. The blurry forms glided around me. Sometimes, one passed through me. The sensation was strange: a sudden, hollow coldness that lasted only an instant, a fleeting sense of emptiness, before the warm, humid garden air returned.
I traversed the pulsating landscape for what felt like an eternity. There was no path, no reference point, only the endless repetition of the fleshy plants and the blurry drifters. The atmosphere was not overtly hostile like the storm, nor melancholic like the landfill. It was alien. Incomprehensible. And its silence, combined with the slow, constant pulsation of the lights, had a hypnotic and deeply unsettling effect. It was the silence of an incubator room. The silence of a place where life is created or ended.
I reached what appeared to be the center of the garden. Here, one "plant" was larger than the others, its luminous tentacles hanging like the branches of a weeping willow, creating a cave of soft light. As I approached, one of the blurry forms paused in its drift and floated directly in front of my face.
It was only inches away. For an instant, the haze surrounding it seemed to thin, and through the veil, I saw something. It wasn't a face, or a body. It was a fleeting image, so quick my brain barely registered it: a tiny hand, fingers perfectly formed, no larger than my thumbnail.
And with that image, the universe tore open.
The pull was the most violent I had ever experienced. I was ripped from my body and thrust into Valeria's consciousness once more.
The first scene was her bathroom. The smell of toothpaste and the dampness of the hung towel. I was looking down, through her eyes. In her trembling hands, she held a white plastic pregnancy test. The fluorescent light of the bathroom was harsh and unforgiving. And in the test's small window, there were two lines. Two pink lines, unmistakable and devastating.
I felt the blood drain from her face. I felt the vertigo, the way the tiled floor seemed to tilt beneath her feet. I felt a whirlwind of thoughts that weren't my own, but that flooded me with the force of a tsunami. No. It can't be. When? That time...? We were careless. My God. No. What am I going to do?
And then, the thought that overshadowed everything, a thought that felt like a punch to my own soul: Kenji.
I felt her love for me, a constant undercurrent. But on top of it, I felt a surge of panic and an absolute, heartbreaking certainty. He can't handle this. He can barely handle himself. If I tell him, he'll break. He'll fall apart, and I'll have to take care of him, on top of all this. It will destroy us.
The scene shifted. Now we were in her living room. I was there, my past self, sitting on her sofa, complaining about some new university drama. I felt Valeria looking at me, the pregnancy test hidden in her sweatshirt pocket, her secret like a heavy stone in her stomach. I felt her open her mouth to speak, how the words formed in her mind: Kenji, we need to talk.
But then, my past self let out a bitter laugh and said, "Sometimes I feel like I can't even handle my own life, you know? How is anyone supposed to be a real adult?"
And I felt her words die in her throat. I felt her resolve crumble. She looked at me, and she didn't see a partner, a future parent, a man who could face a crisis by her side. She saw a scared boy in a man's body, and she knew, with a loneliness so profound and vast it choked me, that she was alone in this. The decision she made in that instant was an act of love and self-preservation. To protect me from a burden I couldn't bear, and to protect herself from my inevitable failure.
The scene tore open again. The change was brutal. The smell of dampness and old books was replaced by the clinical smell of antiseptic. The same smell as the garden.
She was sitting on a gurney covered in crinkly paper. The room was small, an impersonal beige. On the wall, there was a poster of a lavender field in Provence. I felt the cold of the air conditioning on her bare arms. She was staring at her own hands, clasped so tightly in her lap that her knuckles were white.
She was alone.
The understanding hit me with the force of a physical object. I wasn't in the waiting room. I hadn't driven her. I didn't even know where she was. While she sat in this sterile room, facing the most difficult and lonely decision of her life, I was probably in her apartment, on her sofa, using her internet to play video games. I was living my life of self-pity, completely oblivious to the fact that a part of my future was being debated and decided a few kilometers away, without my knowledge or participation. She had protected me from the truth, and that act of protection was the most absolute condemnation of my character I could ever receive.
The memory spat me back out.
I was kneeling on the fleshy ground of the garden. The haze around the floating forms had dissipated. They were no longer blurry smudges. They were what they were. Hundreds of tiny fetuses, translucent and luminous, floating in the air like jellyfish in a silent ocean. They were asleep, peaceful, each a future that never came to be, a secret that was never told.
The one in front of me, the one that had triggered the memory, was now perfectly clear. I could see its closed eyelids, the curve of its tiny spine, the minuscule hands I had glimpsed before. It was real. And its existence and non-existence were my fault.
The blank canvas of my mind was splattered with a paint of horror and grief that could never be erased. This transcended regret for indifference, selfishness, or anger. This was an abyss. A loss of a magnitude my broken mind could barely begin to comprehend. It was grief for a child I didn't know I had conceived. It was the agony of knowing that the woman I loved went through hell alone because I was a man too weak to walk by her side.
My body convulsed, but no screams escaped. There were no tears. The shock was so profound, so seismic, that it short-circuited all my emotional responses. It was a pain beyond tears.
I fell forward, resting my forehead on the soft, strange ground. The silent forms floated around me, each a silent reproach, each a reminder of my fundamental failure, not as a boyfriend, but as a human being. I extended a trembling hand, not to touch the translucent ghost floating in front of me, but into the empty space it occupied, a gesture of longing for a past I couldn't change and an apology that could never be heard. I was kneeling in the garden of unspoken futures, and the silence of what might have been was the most deafening sound I had ever heard.