Clicker

"Proceed!" Cried an electronic voice over the intercom.

Looking at the panel in front of me, I began to click the button. Finger down, click! Finger down, click! Finger down, click! At times I shut my eyes, giving them a needed rest from staring into the luminous sheet ahead. But I still clicked.

Using my free hand ( finger down, click! ) I raised the paper cup, filled with water, to my lips. After taking a sip I set it back down on a plate beneath the thin faucet and resumed the work at hand. The intercom began to hum again, preparing to order.

"Stop!" It demanded.

I stopped clicking. The sheet in front of me began to slide left through a long slit. It spanned across the length of my desk and up to the ceiling of my box. Everything across the luminous sheet was blurred; staring through it was like looking at the fogged up sliding door to a stand-up shower. 

 Behind the blurry surface colors moved and shifted. Streaks of amber and rose moved up and down in streaks. I watched the colors shift from left to right, right to left. Once again, up and down. 

The sheet soon stopped sliding. I heard nothing on either side of me. A thin wall divided us up.

"Proceed!"

At that, I heard the clicking of my neighbors. 

I got back to work. Finger down, click! The panel before me was a square, with a circular button welded into the center. It had no color. Only a lifeless gray shape confined within black lines, going up and down at the will of my fingertip. I continued to click. With my free hand, a sip of water.

The clicking to my left stopped across the wall. Silence hung in the air and I couldn’t help but hear it. A sound of scuffling movement followed.

"No. No, no, dear God no!" A woman cried on my left. "It isn't right! I didn't stop, I swear to God, I didn't stop, really I-"

An intense, mechanical whirring began. The sheet before me then trembled viciously, wobbling like plastic, before returning to a motionless state. I heard a wiping sound. I did not react and hurried my clicking. Finger down, click!

Why do people stop?

The sheet began shifting once more, this time to the right. A bloom of colors appeared on the other side, a euphoric blast of sensations. Yellow. Teal. Red. I watched it as my finger continued to work. The clicks on my left side, across the slab wall, started again within seconds, with a different rhythm than before.

"Stop!"

I learned much from the swirling pool of people I have worked with. We did not often speak, but it wasn't needed. Those that spoke a lot distracted us from work.

Everyone clicked differently. Though consistency, it seemed, was not key to success.

The person to my right tapped the same for a record-breaking three days. Click-pause-click, that was the rhythm to my right. The left had just changed. It would take many intervals between stopping and going to learn the new one.

I took another drink of water. I was out. Using the single handle, I pulled until a stream of water trickled from the faucet and into the cup. The sound was different from the clicks. It was an elegant, soothing sound of liquid against paper. The difference is in the beauty, I thought. Or the beauty is in the difference.

Behind me was another smooth wall, featuring a closed, steel door. I didn't look at it often. There was no time to open it, not between commands, but it remained a nice gesture of opportunity for the cubicle to look a little less barren.

"Proceed!"

The sheet began to shift again. It still slid to the right, through the same sliver in which it could freely move side to side.

"Hello?" As delicately as the sound of clicks, I heard someone whisper to my left. "Hello?" My throat struggled to produce a reply. Had I forgotten how to speak?

"Keep clicking," Is what I managed.

"Why?" Came the whisper. I had derived that the voice belonged to a man. I didn't know how to answer, so I didn't. The voice returned. "This doesn't make any sense. Is this what we do?"

"Yes." I kept clicking.

For a moment there was an unspoken agreement that kept us silent. On my end it was warmly embraced; without talking there was no risk, only the safety of nothingness and the clear task at hand. Finger down, click!

But the voice was insistent. "What is your name? When do I stop clicking?"

"Don't. It will tell you."

"What will tell me?"

"Stop!" The intercom interjected.

"That." I drank the last bit of my water. I set it beneath the plate, filled it once more, and took another sip from the rim of the cup.

"What is in the other room?" The man whispered.

I did not answer because I did not know. I always watched the room ahead, beyond the sheet, but it wasn't my place to know what happened on the other end. Just to click. Let the sheet move and admire the colors when they come. Don't intrude on the business of those around me.

I heard movement across that same wall. More movement than what I'd already grown accustomed to in the little time I'd been exposed to it. I leaned over in the stiff chair. My back hurt. I could have really used a stretch, but I hunched over and listened instead. 

The curious voice must have been feeling around his desk. If it was as smooth and plain as mine, he didn't have much to fiddle with. Only the arms of a faucet, the button, and the sheet.

He should never touch the sheet.

"Hey," I said, feeling misplaced by doing so. "What are you doing over there? You're being too loud."

"Nothing.” 

“Be quieter.” 

“Proceed!” Blared the intercom.

On my right side the clicks began like clockwork. Click-pause-click. Mine followed suit. But to my left, I heard an awkward episode of clicks at random intervals, nothing at all like I had heard before. Uncoordinated. Lazy.

"What if we stop?" Said the voice.

"Why?"

Then there was no clicking to my left. A hanging silence, a kind I had grown uncomfortably familiar with. I listened closely. The whirring would come, I knew it would. A mighty tremble would thunder across the sheet, even louder than before. A wiping noise like window cleaners working while dangling beside a skyscraper.

It did not surprise me when it happened. The whirring. I heard no struggle. Only the whirring, muffled by the material barrier. And then as if at the end of a wave, the sheet wobbled and cowered.

Only this time it was shaken so viciously that the corner folded in on itself before it came back to a stop. I looked at the unfurled corner as I clicked. Finger down, click!

Something was glimmering out of the gap between the luminous sheet and whatever was behind it. A light, the colors I had been admiring prior. They danced, they shimmered, they sparkled. It was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen; the complexity and the change and the oddity. I continued to click, but I felt myself drawn to that light. I tried to peek around the curved sheet at the source, but it was just out of reach.

"Stop!" Demanded the electric voice over the intercom.

Never was I happier to do so.

With my hands free, I pinched the loosened edge of the sheet and slightly pulled, just enough to glimpse at what was hidden. I adjusted my head to peep at the now open space, to gaze into the one thing I wished more than anything to understand.

Then the colors were gone. Absent, and indifferent, as if they had never been there. I exhaled sharply. Was it because I touched the sheet? Was it the skin on my hands?

I peeled the luminous sheet back further. With nervous glances behind my shoulder, I realized the risk in what I was doing. Where was the whirring? Nothing came. The silence was lingering too long. I poured a cup of water to distract myself. It did not work.

So I peeled more. The sheet bent easily, freeing an entire corner of the wall. I inched my head to the right, peeping in. I saw something dull. Using my fingers, I reached into the small gap I had made, touching something soft.

I pried at the material until tufts of it were coming loose with my hands. I heard sounds. A small bit of light spilled through the hole I had made. I dug harder, more desperately.

Then a chunk came loose and a beacon of light spilled into the room. It hurt my eyes and caused my head to ache. But as soon as the initial pain faded, I looked through anyways.

I had to squint to see. I saw grass. Flowers. A road, stretching a decent ways away. Streetlights were posted along the road, reaching high into the sky and not yet switched on. I heard cars driving by, shifting between gears and coughing up clouds of black smoke from the rears. A woman was walking her dog down the sidewalk; she wore a chunky set of blue headphones, similar to the color of the sky. Wind moved through the trees, making them sway. Sunlight poured from above, beating down onto the entire scene with a blinding glow.

"Proceed!"

I could barely hear the intercom hum over the sound of my own breathing. I attempted to speak, but my mouth had gone numb. There was nothing to say. So many colors, lights. I watched the grass shiver. I stuck my hand through the hole and felt gentle wind sailing over my fingers.

Then came the whirring. It was deafening, causing me to flinch backwards and jerk my hand back inside. The light faded from the gap I had made, a slamming sound forcing me back into the grayness. A slamming sound followed as the light disappeared completely. A firm grip clasped around my shoulders, causing me to squirm and panic.

"Stop!" Said the intercom, during the madness.

"No!" Was all I managed to scream before my mouth was covered. I heard the wiping noise as the luminous sheet was mechanically flattened once more, back into the seamless barricade of fog it once was. Everything, so beautiful were the things that I had seen, was then gone. Something soft was cast over my eyes, plunging me into darkness. I was shoved forward. The whirring continued.

It grew louder still. Deafening.

It cracked my skull.

I was seated in a chair.

Before me was a flat table, gray and smooth, with nothing on it but a small, elevated platform. Inside this square platform was a button, circular and bulging, waiting to be pressed.

My head hurt. I was thirsty, and the sheet before me was puzzling to look into. That must be why my head hurt. Pulling the lever, I poured water into a paper cup and drank from it once it had filled.

I looked elsewhere in the box. An intercom was stood on my left side, next to the button. To my right was the faucet I had just used to get a drink, and ahead was a maze of swirling colors that my eyes struggled to follow: teal, yellow, and red. Others moved between the mess, up and down, like strokes of a paintbrush.

"Proceed!" Cried an electric voice over the intercom.

Looking at the panel in front of me, I began to click the button. Finger down, click! Finger down, click! Finger down, click!