The Doorman

“All maps have their martyrs -- their half-sacrifices, stillborn heroes who suffer themselves a lifetime of unrest only to add another wrinkle to the edge of the latest atlas. These unsatisfied explorers believe that they are extending the light of the known world, when they are really just embellishing the edge of some uncrossable nothingness. How many men have lost their minds, or driven themselves to ruin seeking no more than the blank space that buzzes behind their thoughts? These are the truly deranged, for they would eagerly shatter their skulls against a door for one whiff of the exotic air on the other side of it.

"Any room or house is no different, once you evacuate the world from its interior, there's always someone willing to shed their blood upon its doorsteps. Indeed during the course of my tenure as doorman this sturdy cut of oak has been saturated forty times over, no longer resembling a door, but a blood clot. And so wrought it is with that metallic stench, that the many contributing their paint to this laughable mural have begun to believe it made out of impenetrable iron. But even this doesn't stop them from asking for admission. Nor are people so familiar with the intricacies of their anatomy, that they know the purpose of a clot; to the breathless world on the other side of the door they are no better than bacteria, or a superfluous sperm cell.

"Still, they continue to come, droves of them, and my duty gets no easier: as long as you arrive, I remain, as long as there persists your maniac desire to commit horrendous acts of self-immolation before the door just to say 'I was there,' I am here, as long as there remains in your brain some compulsion to contribute more pigment to an ever darkening door, I am here.

"All you interminable inhabitants of the world, all you who leave your humble lives of gentle decay to come here, for God knows what," now wept the doorman, "why? All you mundane explorers who would risk all you hold dear for this insatiable morsel, why? Why when you approach a door do you immediately seek a passage? What grand reprieve awaits you behind that lifeless piece of wood, what new world devoid of unrest beyond that mouth coagulated shut? What are you all after, after all, after what, after all?"