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There’s a whole world that exists within the walls of Duncan’s room.
Trees with tangled vines loop around each other majestically. He can see it there, the way the light scatters across the floor. Wild ferns and shrubbery grow between the fibers of the carpet; a stream runs where a shower once stood.
There’s freedom in finally being alone, and Duncan’s never had control over his own life before. He skips orientation, just because he can.
A few days pass. Move-in week has almost ended. The rolling of suitcases and the voices of the students in the hallway sound like distant thunder. There are no storms in Duncan’s room, only the flowing waterfall he bathes in every night. Of course it isn’t real, but it’s nice to imagine, and Duncan’s room embraces the thought. He can do everything from his room.
It’s when Duncan runs out of food that he finally ventures out.
There’s a girl standing in the hall. Duncan hasn’t spoken to another human in nearly a week. Her name is Kelly, she says.
Kelly doesn’t know what she wants to do, but she’s eager to become herself and make new friends. Duncan is, by nature, scared. He tells her all the things he can do in his room. It’s not a normal thing to talk about, but he doesn’t have anything else. Everything is too bright and too loud, and he’s starting to get overwhelmed.
When he returns to his room, it looks more like a dorm than usual. He wonders if that means the forest is dying.
He’s not alone, anyway. There’s a muffled song that plays just beyond the trees. In a clearing dotted with wildflowers, he finds them. His three friends. They play music sometimes—piano, guitar, drums. They don’t talk much, but something about the music they play makes Duncan feel comfortable. He spends hours sitting in front of them cross-legged, listening to them play.
On Sundays, the room becomes a cathedral. A stained glass portrait of a child sends ghostly streams of light across a marble floor. His sink becomes a pipe organ; his dresser becomes a choir. The priest wears a familiar face, though the image of him is blurry, like he’s hidden beyond a pool of water Duncan can’t quite see. College is when many young men fall from God’s grace, he warns.
Duncan writes a letter to his mother to tell her he’s still attending mass. He can’t remember if he ever got around to sending it.
On the first day of classes, Duncan tries to make the trek across the forest to the door. The trees grow tightly-packed together the closer he gets. He pushes through, until he finds the ground beneath him rapidly becoming dry, cracked earth as the trees wither and die. Colors from a stained glass window light the dirt. Cracks in the earth splinter and grow until they become deep gashes, bubbling with hot mud hundreds of feet below the surface.
It’s not real, of course. Duncan can just walk right over it. All his feet will touch is carpet.
But there’s no need for that, not really. He can go to class in his room. He can do everything in his room.
The classroom is like something out of a movie. Hundreds of chairs with tiny folding desks are arranged in a semicircle around the lectern. A staircase leads gently down to the floor. The professor stands at the door with her T.A., turning half the students away.
“Hello,” Professor Lamarck says. “Welcome to Sculpture: Or Is It?”
“Is it?” Duncan asks. When he turns around, the trees have formed a thick canopy that blocks the ceiling lights, leaving everything dark. He can’t even see the door.
“Is it?” She responds.
But Duncan doesn’t know. He’s in class now, so he must have left his room, but what if he hasn’t? He can’t remember how he got here or where he’s been. He doesn’t know how to tell if something’s real.
“Is it?” he asks, desperate.
“Is it?”
“Oh god,” Duncan says. “I don’t know, this is stressing me out.” If he could just go back to his room, maybe everything would be okay. He doesn’t know what he’ll do if he’s already there.
“Why is it so scary?” Professor Lamarck asks. “Why are you so scared?”
“Because—how are we supposed to know what a sculpture is?” Duncan says. “We have to ask ourselves, is anything a sculpture? And even then, we can never be sure.”
There is a thing in the center of the room. It could be a sculpture. He thinks he saw it breathing, or maybe that was just his reflection in the mirror. The thing twists and contorts in ugly ways. But art is supposed to make you uncomfortable. It whispers catechisms in the voice of the priest, for doubt is the greatest sin of all.
Duncan’s three friends play a haunting melody.
There was a window across the room once, but its curtains were shut long ago. There is no classroom, no forest, no sink, no bathroom, no dresser, no bed. There is only nothing. Nothing and Art.
“He is the one I’ve been waiting for,” the echoey voice of Professor Lamarck vaguely reverberates. “I can’t believe he came through the door. But did I come through the door, or did you? Are you in a class or are we all in your room?”
Duncan looks around, and it all comes crashing down. There’s the window he’s been so afraid to look through. It’s sunny outside; people are walking to and from the dorms or sitting at benches staring at textbooks. And Duncan’s just in his room. Here’s the bathroom, with its cold tile he had imagined as a boulder, smooth and damp from the waterfall’s stream. There’s the bed and an awful smelling pile of laundry and a TV he’s never used and a dresser and the door.
It’s just across the room. It’s not even a particularly large room, even if it is an en suite.
“It’s happening again,” Duncan says to himself. There is, after all, no one else here. “I thought I was in a sculpture class… This is all inside my mind!”
“Everything in your room…” Calls the voice, or taunts, perhaps. If it isn’t Professor Lamarck, who is that? Is there something so cruel trapped within his mind?
Duncan doesn’t know how long he stays inside his room. It is sometimes a forest, sometimes a cathedral, sometimes a classroom. He doesn’t sleep very much anymore. When he teaches sculpture class, he shows the shrinking, writhing mass to his fellow students, and they ask in hushed voices if it’s really alive. Duncan shrugs. How would he know?
He eats sometimes, when food gets delivered to his door. He talks to his three friends and listens to the music they play in response. He sits under the waterfall for hours, long after the sun has sunk and the water cools, cleaning himself. He might have spent days just lying on that smooth boulder in the stream, but he doesn’t really remember. On Sundays, he goes to mass and confesses that he might be going crazy.
“Mental illness is not a sin, but disbelief is,” Father replies through the screen.
Duncan thinks the horrible sculpture in the classroom might be him. He thinks God might not really exist. He thinks he’d like to leave his room.
He doesn’t believe it at first when he hears a knock on the door. Did he order something? No, he still has leftovers of something rotting in the mini fridge. He drank water directly from the sink the other day. He doesn’t remember when he last ate.
There’s a slight hesitation, and then the door opens. Duncan is crouched on the carpet like a caveman, wearing basketball shorts and a sweat-stained T-shirt. It’s not his best look. If he saw himself right now, he’d turn around and go right back to his room to wipe the vision from his thoughts.
Instead, Kelly hovers just at the threshold of reality and everything and bites her lip awkwardly.
“Hey,” she says, shifting from one foot to the other. “Hey. Uh. Did you—“
Duncan should probably say something, he realizes. “Hey.”
“Me and my friend Chelsea are gonna go to the hot cookie bar night at Allison,” Kelly says. “Do you wanna come?”
Kelly looks alive and healthy and real. She smiles as she holds the door tantalizingly open.
“Oh, that sounds cool and fun,” Duncan replies. His voice is scratchy from disuse.
“Hey, 213?” Kelly asks. What a cruel irony, that Duncan has, in a sense, become his room. “You’ve been in here for like, months.”
Duncan tries to tell her, it’s not like he’s alone. There are people with him here. There is music. He can do everything from his room.
“Did I tell you my name?” He asks. “I don’t remember it anymore.”
Kelly looks on the outside of the door. It says Duncan, in a bubbly font. He rolls the name around on his tongue. Duncan… it sounds familiar. It feels right.
Kelly has discovered her own name too. It’s Chelly now, because her best friend’s name is Chelsea and she’s decided to define herself by that. Maybe it’s easier to revolve around another person than to forge an identity on your own. Duncan’s too tangled up in the trees and vines to know.
“Can I come into your room?” Chelly asks, and when Duncan says she’s allowed, she sits on the bed, extant.
Duncan tells her everything that hasn’t really happened because none of it is real.
(Nothing is a sculpture; nothing is art. Nothing is everything, and there are children in the glass.) Chelly tells him about her friend and about Math in the Abstract.
She says Math in the Abstract isn’t real, but it has to be real—it isn’t inside Duncan’s room.
They go together to the cookie bar night at Allison’s.
Duncan has at least changed into something nicer, and he’s put on deodorant for the first time since something. (It’s been a while, he’s sure, but his memory is failing.) He feels a bit more like a person, walking down the sidewalk with Chelly at his side, guiding the way to Allison Hall.
On the way, Chelly prepares him for what he might see. It’s dark out, but there are streetlights every few meters along the sidewalk. When Duncan looks up, he can’t even see the stars. He thinks if he did, he would cry. Even the cars and the grass and the buildings are overwhelming. And stars aren’t sculptures; they’re just balls of gas.
The cafeteria at Allison Hall has a couple dozen students milling about. A huge glass bowl of lettuce sits atop a folding table littered with salad toppings and dressings. On another table there are trays and trays of chocolate chip cookies.
Duncan’s legs feel wobbly, though he can’t tell if it’s from nerves or because he hasn’t walked this far in months. Months, it’s been? He can’t remember most of it. He still hears the music when he listens close.
The room is safe. The room is gone. Duncan tries to remember how a normal person holds tongs. On the table, there are small bowls with paper tent labels: cherry tomatoes, cucumbers, pepperoncini, carrots, garbanzo beans, chickpeas.
Duncan stands stock still. A cold bead of sweat runs down the side of his face. “Why are they labeled differently?”
“It’s a sculpture,” Chelly says nervously. “I’m sorry, I didn’t want to freak you out. One of them is a sculpture.”
Duncan looks around. A few people look annoyed at him for holding up the line. It all
looks real, but Duncan has been fooled by that before. He reaches out to Chelly, and his hand touches her arm. The skin squishes in a bit. It’s warm.
“No, I’m real,” Chelly assures him.
Duncan wonders if one day, he’ll be able to tell the difference.
Chelly leads him to a table nearby with a couple of empty chairs. Duncan sits. It doesn’t feel like the bed in his room. He and Chelly have matching foam cups of Mountain Dew.
“You helped me break through being in my room for four months,” he says. “Something that my three closest friends couldn’t do.”
But Chelly just smiles sadly and shakes her head as she lifts a fork to her lips. “Man, I’m sorry they weren’t better friends to you.”
She doesn’t understand. If Duncan concentrates, he can still hear their music. It’s a comforting tune, the kind they play as he lies in a bed of bluebonnets in a clearing of the woods. The door feels so far away then, as day turns to night and streaks of cotton candy pink and blue paint the evening sky. Duncan only gets to see his three friends on a good day.
“Open up your AirPods,” Duncan says. Chelly takes the case out of her pocket and sets it on the table. She flicks the lid open. “Just look at them. Don’t put them in.”
“Why do they need to be here?” She asks. But she doesn’t understand. Is this not Math in the Abstract?
“Hear the music,” Duncan says.
Chelly closes her eyes. She doesn’t need to. Duncan can’t hear her music, but he knows it’s there by the way she nods her head subconsciously to the beat. The music has always been there, even before Duncan stayed so long in his room. And now Chelly hears it too.
“I’m sorry, I have to admit something to you,” Chelly says.
The music stops.
“Your name’s not really Chelly?” Duncan guesses, even though he knows that’s not it.
“Well, yeah, it’s Kelly, but it’s Chelly now,” Chelly says. “But no, I told you that the whole time.”
Of course. Duncan should have known it was too good to be true. It’s all just another sculpture, another day inside his room. There’s no forest, no fields, no babbling stream to guide him. He doesn’t even know where the door could be.
He doesn’t have a friend, not really. There isn’t salad and cookies and Mountain Dew. There isn’t a person out there who thought to check on the boy who didn’t leave his room for four months. He’s all alone, he can’t escape his own mind, and worst of all, nobody cares.
“You’ve been in my head the whole time,” Duncan says.
But Chelly reaches across the table to hold Duncan’s hand. It feels real. “No.”
“Then we’re fine,” Duncan says.
(He means it too. You have to know what’s real or not to really be able to lie.)
“I’m sorry, Duncan.” Chelly gives his hand a squeeze before letting go. “You were my final.”
Duncan doesn’t actually know what she means. He hasn’t been to a class that wasn’t inside his own mind. How can a person be a final? Does that mean the ragged, fucked-up form in the center of the class really is him? Does that make him a sculpture? Are sculptures real? Is Duncan?
All this time Duncan thought he was the only thing in his imaginary world that was real, but what if the room made up him? What if ‘I think, therefore I am’ is just a projection of humanity’s selfish consciousness? What if there’s no way to tell if you’re real or not?
“I’m not a person at all,” Duncan says.
“No, you are real,” Chelly insists. “I just—I thought… I said as my final, I bet I could get you out of your room.”
And she did. And she’s real, and Duncan’s real, and he’s not in his room.
“I just… I feel bad now because I feel like that was…” Chelly looks up, and Duncan forces himself to look her in the eyes. “I really loved sharing Mountain Dew with you.”
But Duncan doesn’t get it. He liked sharing Mountain Dew with her too. She can hear the music. She got him out of his room.
He’s not stupid. Of course he understands that Chelly is doing this for a grade, and of course that hurts. But what could she ever do that he couldn’t easily forgive?
If Chelly can be there to pull him out, maybe Duncan can show her what his room becomes.
“You did a good thing,” Professor Collins tells Chelly. “The reasons might not matter as much as you think.”
“I mean, you didn’t tell me why you were doing it, but it helped me, honestly,” Duncan says.
“And that doesn’t take it all away?” Chelly asks.
“It takes some of it away,” Duncan admits. “But let me ask you this: of everyone in your class, did anyone else try to get me to leave the room?”
Duncan looks around at the people surrounding them in Allison. Everyone in their dorm must have known that there was someone living in 213 who didn’t leave. They all stand around awkwardly. Heartwarming: Local girl saves man in crisis. Tragic: No one else did.
That’s what they’re here for, right? There’s spectacle in destruction. Many mistake that for beauty, but it isn’t. Chelly has made Duncan into his own duality; he is both abstract sculpture math and person. He is real. He lives in a world that sometimes is not. He is a fundamentally frightened person, but he thinks that leaving his room might have been brave.
He’ll have to figure out who he is now. It can’t be the same person who walked into his room on move-in day. He’ll have to talk to people, real people, who already think he’s weird. Duncan doesn’t want to stop being brave. He’s going to throw a goddamn cookie party.
And if Chelly helps, if Chelly comes, if she eats cookies and laughs like she would anywhere else then maybe she really is his friend after all.
(And maybe she needs a little help being brave too.)
“Do you like being called…” Duncan trails off.
Kelly gives him a look. “Not in front of Chelsea, Duncan, this day is already too much.”
“What are you so afraid of?” Duncan asks. He asks, even though he already knows the answer.
Kelly has wrapped her identity so tightly around her friend that she can’t begin to
unravel it, lest the whole thing fall apart. More than Duncan, she is the true abstract sculpture math, molded in the image of her creator. Maybe she too is afraid she isn’t a real person beneath it all. Maybe everyone is their own sculpture, and it’s up to you to become whomever you’d like to be.
But Duncan’s not a philosopher; he’s just a guy who spent too much time in his room.
(It’s not fair to Chelsea, either, Duncan thinks. To be so wholly responsible for another person, that you become, in a sense, their mental state. She has a power she never asked for that she cannot easily be rid of. He will not tell Kelly this yet because he doesn’t think she’s ready to hear it. And if Kelly really is his friend, he wants to do it right.)
“You know, you make that first friend, and it’s like a lifeline, and you just…” Kelly trails off.
“You feel like you can never leave your room?” Duncan asks, and the whole class gasps.
Duncan cringes into himself. There’s a terrified, horrible part of him that wishes he was back in his room.
Kelly goes to talk to Chelsea, and Duncan sheepishly finds Professor Collins.
“I guess I’ve probably failed all my classes this semester…” He trails off. There’s no easy way to talk about your very public mental break, not with the whole class watching. “I guess I shouldn’t bother you with this. I’m supposed to talk to my advisor?”
Professor Collins smiles softly. “Did you know someone stole all the books from my office? I haven’t been putting in grades at all.”
“So… there’s still a chance for me to pass?” Duncan asks.
“Constructing an entire false reality is the quite the feat of Math in the Abstract, young man,” Professor Collins says.
“Really?”
“Sure. Haven’t you ever heard of imaginary numbers?”
Duncan never imagined any numbers when he was in his room, but he lets it be. People are made uncomfortable by pain, and that’s why they try to justify it somehow. Arts and sciences are not created by suffering. But Duncan taught Kelly to hear the music, and maybe that was his final, so secret even the professor doesn’t know about it.
It’s comforting to know that when things get overwhelming, Duncan can still hear his three friends play.
They play something strange as he walks with Kelly back to their dorm. It sounds like floating through space. Kelly is close enough that Duncan could touch her if he needed to. It feels good that he doesn’t.
But there is one thing he needs.
“Hey,” he says awkwardly. “I don’t know if I can—but you don’t have to—um, if you know anyone…”
Kelly stops where she’s standing and looks into Duncan’s eyes. “Duncan, what’s wrong?”
“I’m scared to go back to my room,” he admits.
“You know I’ll come get you,” she says, and of course he does. “Are you still afraid that I’m not real? Or that you’re not real?”
Duncan nods.
“You can stay in my room tonight,” Kelly says. “But you know, you’ll have to go back to your room sometime.”
“I know,” Duncan replies. “I just really don’t want to forget tonight.”
Duncan lays on the floor. Kelly is apologetic, but he doesn’t mind. She doesn’t understand what he means when he says it’s more comfortable than the rock. He focuses ahead on the soft glow of the TV, some show he’s never seen playing too quietly to hear. The fan above them swirls.
They stay up late into the night planning their cookie party. Kelly has all these ideas about the kinds of cookies they’ll make and the people they’ll invite and the music they’ll play. Duncan wonders if she’s ever told these opinions to Chelsea.
There is no church, no classroom, no field, no trees. When Duncan turns over, he sees Kelly clutching a pillow to her chest like it’s a lifeline.
Duncan is barely awake when she whispers, “I’m sorry for everything.”
And as he drifts off to sleep, he says, “But you got me out of my room.”
Duncan almost cries when he wakes up and realizes everything is real. There’s a desk across the room littered with textbooks. There’s a TV, now turned off. The ceiling fan still swirls above.
Kelly stands above him wearing a smile and a floral-patterned dress. The curtains are slightly parted, letting beams of early-morning sunlight stream through.
“I think I want to change my major,” she says.
Duncan takes her hand and rises to his feet. What does one wear to a cookie party? Should he get a floral-patterned dress?
“What to?” he asks.
“I don’t know,” Kelly says. “I’m just tired of Math in the Abstract. I want to try something real.”
Duncan doesn’t tell Kelly that he thinks Math in the Abstract might be the most real thing yet.