Anita’s Room

Anita awoke to find herself in a dream. She was in a room with no color, only it wasn’t really a room since there were no walls and there was no ceiling and she wasn’t standing on a floor. And it’s not that the room that wasn’t really a room didn’t have any color, but rather it was splattered and rolled and brushed with every color available to the human eye—one layered on top of and between and inside of another, and so forth—so no individual color could be distinguished, thus making the room that wasn’t really a room colorless. Anita was confused.

“Confused?” Other Anita asked.

Anita stared at Other Anita, who had just appeared before her, wrinkles and all. “A little, yeah,” she said. She glanced around the room that wasn’t really a room, noting that there was quite a bit of space here since there were no discernable corners or edges to it that would allow Anita to pinpoint exactly which dimension she was in. This gave the room that wasn’t really a room a quality such that it was both rather claustrophobic and surprisingly roomy.

“I suppose you’re wondering why I’m you and I’m talking as you to you,” Other Anita said.

Anita was curious about quite a few things related to her current predicament, and although Other Anita’s enigmatic existence was not first on her list of queries, she couldn’t help but admit that she was indeed wondering just that. “I am,” Anita said, looking Other Anita up and down. “And while we’re on the subject, why are you naked?”

“You’re naked as well.”

Anita looked down. “So I am. Why don’t I feel cold?”

Other Anita laughed knowingly. “There is no temperature here. Would you like a jacket?”

“Nah, I’m alright,” Anita said. “You sound just like me.”

“Why thank you. What a lovely compliment.”

Anita took a step toward Other Anita, though because there was no floor, this turned out to be more challenging than she had anticipated.

“Try not to use your body to move,” Other Anita said. “It tends not to be very effective here.”

“Alright,” Anita said. After momentarily swinging her limbs to no avail, she decided to propel herself toward Other Anita without using her body.

“Do you have any other questions?” Other Anita asked. “I’m here to help.”

Anita moved around the room that wasn’t really a room, glancing about in all different directions. She mused over the room that wasn’t really a room’s source of light, considering how there was no light in the room that wasn’t really a room even though she could see as if there were light. “I think it’d be helpful to know just where the hell I am.”

Other Anita pursed her lips, debating how best to articulate this. “Well, you’re not exactly anywhere. It’s more complicated than that.”

“Lay it on me.”

Other Anita began to move alongside Anita without using her body. “I hate to use this term since it’s not quite right, but essentially you are—what most people would consider—dead.”

Anita thought about it for a moment and came to the conclusion that, based on everything she didn’t know about death, that this made sense. “So is this my afterlife?”

“To use the term ‘after’ implies some sort of linear causality, so that’s not quite right. In a sense, before you died, you existed in one of the many pre-life phases that most people consider ‘life,’ and now you are actually living–although, I don’t like to describe it that way because it’s not quite right, but I expect you’ll find it more comprehensible if I do use those terms.”

“What happens after this life then?”

Other Anita scoffed. “How should I know?”

Anita stopped moving, realizing there was no real reason to continue to move around the room that wasn’t really a room. “So what happened?”

Other Anita tilted her head slightly. “I’m a bit perplexed as to what you mean.”

“I mean, how did I get here? How’d I die?”

“Oh, they don’t tell me such trivial details. All that matters is you’re here and alive now.”

“I guess so,” Anita grumbled.

Other Anita continued, “Your latest pre-life period—and, I must say, I hate to call it ‘pre-life’ because that isn’t quite right—was full of difficulties and challenging experiences, some good and some bad. But there won’t be any of those in life, so no need to fret about that. Most find life to be much easier comparatively, though most also find it impossible to compare the two.”

“Did you say my ‘latest’ pre-life?” Anita probed. “As in, I’ve had others?”

“Oh indeed!” Other Anita said sighing. “Did you really think your last pre-life was all there was? How charming.”

Anita shut her eyes tight, though even with her eyes closed she could see the room that wasn’t really a room, as well as Other Anita standing and smiling in front of her. She opened them again. “And this is definitely real?” she said, her words jumbling together. “This isn’t just some dream I’m having? I ate a pot brownie on accident once in my thirties, maybe this is an aftereffect of that—”

“It is not what you would call a dream,” Other Anita interjected, “but it’s also not what you would consider real. However, if it makes you feel better, then we can refer to it as reality.”

“Alright, let’s do that then.” Anita suddenly felt as if the vast openness of the room that wasn’t quite a room was suffocating her, but she realized the sensation she was feeling was not new, as she hadn’t been breathing at all during her brief time in life. She relaxed at this discovery.

“I know this all must be a bit startling,” Other Anita began, “and I know you’ve never been the type to muse over such frivolous matters as what occurs after—what we may refer to as—your ‘death,’ but I’m sure it must be a pleasant revelation to know that nothing from your pre-life matters at all in life.”

Anita scrunched her face and considered this for a moment. The room that wasn’t really a room suddenly felt more spacious. “I suppose you’re right.” She let out a deep breath without breathing. “It doesn’t seem like there’s much to do here though.”

“Well, you can choose to do—or be, for that matter—anything you would like here. Life is an autonomous experience, so it’s quite up to you.”

Anita raised her eyebrows. “And there are no limitations to what I can choose?”

“None that I can think of.”

“Now that’s interesting,” Anita said smiling. She decided to make her nose smaller and her breasts larger, so she did. Her nose shrank and the tip became more pronounced and symmetrical, and her breasts grew in circumference and situated themselves higher on her chest. She also decided to have her skin be smoother, her eyes bluer, her stomach slimmer, her legs more muscular, her toenails less impacted, her earlobes more attached, her belly button less of an outie and more of an innie, her hairline closer to the ground and her buttocks farther, and in terms of the cyst on her underarm she’d been procrastinating getting taken care of, she decided to just remove it completely. She marveled at her body and felt that she looked beautiful. “Do you want to change your body too?”

Other Anita shrugged her shoulders. “I’m good for now.”

“Oh no, Mom’ll be so upset I never responded to her email about Christmas. Also that I’ve died.”

Other Anita chuckled. “It’s cute you still care about those in pre-life. Most people don’t.”

“So when everyone else dies,” Anita hesitated, “as in my family and—I guess not my friends, but all the others: will they live here too?”

“Of course! But not exactly,” Other Anita said, grimacing. “The people—and I know I’ve used this term an awful lot already, but, I must say, I hate to say ‘people’ because that’s not precisely what we call them here—”

“What do you call them then?”

“Oh, we don’t really have a word for them, as you’ll learn soon enough. But anyway, those ‘people’ will not be joining you in life. Life is a solitary experience.”

“Oh,” Anita muttered, furrowing her brow. “But then, where do—or, how do they, well—”

“The others will enter life—their own separate and wholly unique lives—when they are ready to transition,” Other Anita said, smiling the way you smile when you want to reassure a child that their concerns are simultaneously valid and unnecessary.

“I see.” Anita weighed each of her breasts in her hands. She then decided she wanted a heaping pile of her aunt’s signature mac and cheese, the recipe for which she knew by heart, even though she wasn’t exactly hungry, but she wasn’t quite full either. So the mac and cheese appeared before her, hovering as if it were floating in midair but grounded as if it were on an invisible table. But it wasn’t quite right. Its texture was different, goopier and soggier than she remembered, and the color was different too—it was much paler than the golden yellow she remembered it being as a child. And yet, perhaps this was right. Had the color always been this pale, as a result of her aunt using more parmesan than cheddar in her recipe? And most notably, Anita thought, why were the…. Hmm. The curved, tube-shaped substances that mixed with the cheese—what was the word for them?

“Those are what you would call ‘noodles,’” Other Anita told her, “although that’s not quite right because—”

“Why couldn’t I remember?”

“It’s to be expected. Your memory of your pre-life experience will begin to fade slowly as you grow accustomed to life. In fact, the process has already begun, which is why you don’t remember your solo trip to Paris after college.”

“I went to Paris?”

“Exactly.” Other Anita shrugged her shoulders and glanced downwards. “I personally think it’d be much more convenient if you didn’t have to carry over any memories from your pre-life, but I don’t make the rules.”

“Oh yeah, that’d be nice,” Anita said. She decided to consume the mac and cheese even if it wasn’t quite the same as she remembered, so she consumed the mac and cheese without tasting or eating it.

Other Anita clasped her hands together. “Well, I must get going—it seems that many others are going to die and be ready for life soon. This will be our last encounter, so do you have any last questions?”

Anita pondered for a moment. “Just two: is there a God, and can I have sex with you? I’m just curious about the second one.”

“As I said before,” Other Anita said smiling, “life is an autonomous experience, so you may decide whether or not you’d like a God. And as for your second question: I’d advise against it, but I’d be lying if I said it weren’t possible.”

“Alright, well that’s good to know.”

Other Anita smiled brightly. “Goodbye, Anita. I do hope you find life to be a worthwhile endeavor.” Other Anita left the room.

“So long,” Anita said without using her mouth.

Anita quickly came to the realization that she did indeed have many more questions, though many were unimportant and some were downright silly. She wondered how she died, even though she knew she shouldn’t wonder about such inconsequential elements of her pre-life. She must have died relatively young since both her parents—though they were now in their seventies—were still pre-alive, and no one close to her had died yet besides both sets of her grandparents and her only childhood friend Charlie, who hanged himself in high school. But that was ages ago, she could only assume, since the linearity of time was beginning to deteriorate in her mind. She wondered if she committed suicide and, if so, how she went about doing it—though she was never the type to dislike her pre-life so much that she would willingly end it. However, she could faintly recall falling asleep on her sofa bed in front of the television, and while she was unsure if this was her final memory or not, she decided it would just be easier to assume she died peacefully in her sleep (although part of her secretly hoped she was murdered).

The expansiveness of the room was proving to be more daunting than she had previously noted, so she decided to habituate herself in a recreation of a mansion she once saw on a French reality television program. The foyer, however, was different; the mahogany railings around the staircase had a hue to them that didn’t belong to any particular color on the spectrum she had grown accustomed to in her latest pre-life, as if an electrical current ran through the wood and caused it to dimly glow, and the base of the chandelier was not at all smooth like she thought she remembered it but was instead jagged and fractured as if its glass components had been deconstructed and hastily put back together. She decided to own the finest clothes made of the finest linens and fabrics she could recall, the most lavish of gems and diamonds she could conjure in her dwindling memory, and the most delectable merlots and chocolates she ever recalled tasting. She wondered if Other Anita would also enjoy wearing all her luxurious clothes, marveling at her luxurious jewels, and consuming her luxurious delicacies. Anita assumed she most likely wouldn’t.

There were certain things she had always wanted to see so she saw them. There were certain things she had always dreamed of tasting so she tasted them, certain smells she had always wanted to smell so she smelled them, certain sounds she had always wanted to hear so she heard them, and certain things she had never thought possible to feel that she felt. Anita decided she wanted to know all of Shakespeare’s works by heart, so she did, and then she wanted to know everything about the English Renaissance, so she did that too. (She enjoyed knowing about all the great artists of the period, though she was still unsure exactly what qualified them as greats since the definition of greatness tends to vary greatly, so she decided to know why they were great.) Although she spent every day there in her most recent pre-life, the New York Public Library proved to have too many books for her to ever have time to read, so she decided to know all the words of every book she could recall filing. She decided that because she had so many other interests she could remember from her pre-life, it would just be easier if she knew everything there was to know, so she did that next, and once she knew everything she realized that some things she was better off not knowing.

Anita decided to masturbate with her new masterfully composed body in her new master bedroom, though she grew tired of bringing herself to orgasm alone after the first couple hundred times, so she decided to have what she remembered of Johnny Depp make love to her, though she grew quite bored with her reconstruction of Johnny (as well as the other celebrities about whom she could remember having sexual fantasies) after the first few thousand times; she then realized she became rather bored of having sexual organs so she decided to rid herself of them, and after liberating herself of the burden of sexuality she realized she was growing quite uninterested with having a body, so she rid herself of that too only to come to the conclusion that it was quite impractical to possess a fine mansion with fine clothes and jewels and wines and chocolates without having a body to accompany them, so she disposed of all of those as well.

Part of her felt guilty for still being so consumed with her pre-life and not living her life to its fullest potential, though her memory was fading at an increasingly exponential rate, which actually worked to help her adjust better to the incredible possibilities life had to offer. One after another each of her worries associated with her pre-life dissolved like canoes floating downstream and eventually absorbing into the horizon. Her anxieties over how she’d pay her last year’s rent, which nursing home she’d place her mother in, who would now care for Duke, whether or not it was too late to have children, how it would feel to fall in love with someone, and what kind of an impression she would leave on the world all grew fainter and fainter until they no longer plagued her, and then her memory of the existence of her Long Island studio apartment, her Boston Terrier, her friend Charlie, her mother, her father, and all her former aspirations disappeared into the horizon as well.

Anita ultimately grew tired of thinking in words or images because she didn’t have much to think about anyway—consciousness itself was beginning to grow tiresome, as it faded away much in the manner the details of a dream do when one wakes up, which was useful since it seemed more and more to matter less and less. She began to lose the ability to recall what sadness felt like, and then she forgot about fear or happiness or surprise or disgust. The room that wasn’t really a room became less foreign to her, and she grew comfortable occupying all of its space, none of its space, or occasionally just some of its space.

The final thing she remembered was what it once felt like to be alone, and once she forgot that she had nothing left to remember. Finally free from all that had connected her to what came before her death, she began to live.

Michael Savio is an undergraduate student at the University of Southern California pursuing a degree in Narrative Studies. He is also a standup comedian and ice cream enthusiast who muses over the futility of life in his spare time. You can follow him on Twitter.