“What?!”
I stare. In the shadow of the twisting current, someone is pushing the door. Trying to close it. Long hair. A tall frame. A beautiful face, like it was cut right out of the sky.
“It’s him!”
The man I passed on the road this morning is urgently trying to shut the door. His strong arms steadily push it back into place; the gush narrows. The dark, rushing current is dammed.
“What are you doing?!” he yells when he sees me. I jump. “Get away from here.”
Just then, the current surges explosively. The door flies open, flinging the man backward into a brick wall, and he collapses into the water along with rubble from the impact.
“No!”
I fly down the stone steps and across the shallow pool covering the courtyard to his side. He is lying limp on the ground, his back in the water.
“Are you all right?!” I ask, bending over him. He groans and tries to sit up. When I wrap my arm around his shoulders to help, I notice something.
“…!”
The water is shining. No sooner does the thought cross my mind than something resembling a golden thread rises silently from the water’s surface and stretches toward the sky as if grasped by invisible fingers.
“This is…,” the man mumbles.
Golden threads are rising from all over the water’s surface into the sky. I look up. The river that erupted from the door has split into streams that are now winding across the sky. It’s like a stem has grown from the door and blossomed into an enormous reddish-bronze flower. The golden threads look like rain falling upside down onto it. Slowly, the flower begins to collapse.
“…bad!” he finishes, wringing the word from his despair.
I imagine it. Unfortunately, I can imagine it. Outside the windows of my listless afternoon classroom, the enormous flower collapses slowly to the ground. But no one sees its grotesque form; no one smells the rot; no one notices the disaster pressing in from the underbelly of the world. Unbeknownst to the fishermen in their boats, or the old people casting their lines out from the shore, or the children walking around town, the flower accelerates toward the ground. Soon it will crash, along with all its ponderous weight.
At almost the same moment, my phone starts its strident wailing in my skirt pocket, and the ground beneath my feet begins to heave. A scream leaps from my mouth.
“This is an earthquake. This is an earthquake. This is an—”
I’m screaming at the robotic voice of the earthquake warning, at the violent shaking, and at the creaking and grating of the abandoned building. I cover my ears and squat where I am. The earthquake is intense. It’s nearly impossible to stay standing.
“Watch out!” the man says, knocking me over. Half my face is submerged in water. A second later, there’s a heavy thud, and red splatters the water in front of me. Blood?! Above my head, the man lets out a short, stifled groan. He stands up. Glancing at me, he screams “Get out of here!” and runs toward the door. Pieces of the dome’s steel frame are breaking off and splashing into the water.
With a powerful roar, the man throws his whole body against the door, trying to push the muddy river back inside. I stare at him from behind in a daze and notice that the left arm of his shirt is stained red. He presses the wound with his right hand like he can’t stand the pain. He’s trying to push the door with his right shoulder alone. But he and the door are thrown back by the force of the river.
He hurt himself shielding me from the falling steel.
It finally dawns on me, as my phone continues to shriek “This is an earthquake.” The ground is still shaking violently. My right hand has been gripping the ribbon on my uniform this whole time, and I can’t feel my fingers anymore. The man’s left arm is hanging limply by his side, but he’s still desperately pushing against the door. This guy— Suddenly, I want to cry. I don’t know why the thought occurs to me. Nobody’s noticed, but this guy is doing something important that has to be done. Something in my mind starts to move. Seeing him changes something in me. The earth is still shaking. I try to open my stiffened right hand. I try to let go of what it’s gripping.
I start running, water flying everywhere.
I’m getting closer to him. As I run, I thrust out both hands and crash into the door full force.
“You again?!” the man shouts, looking at me in surprise. “Why?!”
“We have to close this, right?!” I scream, standing next to him and pushing. An exceptionally sinister sensation reaches me through the thin planks. I concentrate my strength, trying to crush the horrible thing. I can sense through my palms that the man is pushing harder, too. The door begins to creak closed.
Is that a song? Suddenly, I notice that the man is singing under his breath as he strains. I look up at him. His eyes are closed, and he’s intently singing a series of strange words with an odd intonation, like the ritual prayers you’d hear at a shrine, or a song from a long, long time ago. Eventually, something layers onto his voice.
“Wait…what?!”
I hear more voices—the excited laughter of children, the hum of conversation between adults. “Daddy, hurry! It’s been forever since we went to a hot spring!” I can hear the happy chatter of a family like it’s being directly injected into my brain.
“I’ll go get Granddad!”
“Mom, let’s go in the bath again!”
“What, you’re having another beer?”
“Let’s come back next year for our family vacation.”
The distant voices play like a faded movie. I can hear the hustle and bustle. The crowds of excited young people. This place, in an era when everyone believed unquestioningly in a bright future, before I was born—
Bang! The door finally shuts.
“It’s closed!” I yell. Without missing a beat, the man raises what looks like a key and inserts it into the door. For a second, I think I see a keyhole appear on what should have been its blank surface.
“We respectfully return them to you!” the man shouts as he turns the key.
With a sound like a giant bubble popping, the current dissipates. A dizzying sensation washes over me, like morning has cleared away the night in an instant. Colorful rain begins to fall, beating down on the pool in the courtyard. But soon, the wind has swept it away, too.
The distant voices are gone.
The sky is clear blue again, and the earth has stopped quaking. The door stands silently, like everything that just happened was a mirage.