The Portal

            The giant chesspiece of a lamppost marks the gateway, the only spot in the city where the twin dimensions press up against each other like sticky fingerprints on a waterglass. You’d hardly guess you’re achieving interdimensional trans-carnation as you pass through the doorway. The latch clicks shut as any ordinary door clicks shut. You notice the light first of all. Rather, I should say I noticed the light above all. I’ve yet to meet someone else who succeeded in crossing the worlds. The light-mutation, the optic warp, hit me as the door clicked shut. It was a bloodred glare, like a rainy afternoon aurora borealis. It was the coming-true of countless dreams I’ve had in which colors rippled out before me like rainbow shook foil but no matter how hard I tried I could not focus my view, could not open my eyelids wide enough to see clearly.

But a dream moment later—both snap-quick and lifetime lasting—this visual disorientation passed and I stood in the high-definition new world. Everything was sharp, so sharp I felt the air cutting across my pores. This new world reminds me of a coffeeshop, a bar, a music club? Some kind of public place empty of all people, that I can tell. Wooden café chairs sit in a row, their smooth curved backs facing attentively toward a stage, as if waiting for a string quartet to open a set. Music plays incessantly here, music I know but don’t recognize, and I can’t find its source anywhere.

There is one table, right by the door, and on this table a newspaper lies, its wings flayed open like a spine-broken bird. I can’t read the newspaper. Its words are quantum particles, moving and changing the moment you lay eyes on them. It’s alarming. I feel like I’ve wandered into the negative of a photograph. I think I can still see the real world outside these panes of doubled glass. But it’s gloomy and spectral. Things can be seen through other things, like a movie scene fading from son to flashback father. I think I want to leave. I want to go back out there where lines are scrubbed away by raindrops dissolved in air. But somewhere in my mind, I know that I can never really leave this place, that real things will always be two-thirds transparent. I am afraid that if I click that door shut behind me it will be the last click I ever hear.