Unfulfilled Dreams

The illumination within the hollowed out center of the Galleria did not come from electricity but the ambient neon hum of a hundred dormant screens.

Evelyn adjusted the strap to her canvas messenger bag and stepped over the yellow caution tape hanging limply at the entrance. It was 2:30 in the morning and, as the building's night shift custodian for the week before its demolition, Evelyn was the lone person within three square miles, or so said the master log in the manager's office.

She fished the paper list of orders from her pocket but the printed lines had bled together, bleeding into some strange flowing runes.

Evelyn didn't fear her surroundings for the third shift workers learned that beyond the stroke of midnight, buildings with a high foot traffic had a residual electric charge from the constant stream of people leaving behind their hopes, boredom, and desires, which by 2 in the morning, manifested into some very tangible sensations. So when she began walking down the main concourse, the sound of her sneakers sliding over the white terrazzo floor had been the only sound that had been heard in ages by the vaulted skylights overlooking the mall.

She came to a halt at the edge of the central plaza where the large fountain usually dominated the area. Instead there was an elongated basin of dark, mirror still water reflecting some architectural detail not present before: great stone arches and hanging gardens stretching down into infinity.

"You're walking on the seam," said some disembodied voice.

Evelyn turned her head slowly at the sound of the speaker who waited from the edge of the seat of a velvet covered bench. Curled up in a sitting position was a girl of approximately her age, dressed in a loose pair of overlarge, faded denim pants with glowing embroidered constellations that seemed to shift as the girl breathed. In her idle fingers, the stranger toyed with a heavy brass token.

"The seam?" Evelyn questioned. Her gaze travelled over the strange structure being reflected in the basin before her eyes flickered back to the strange girl.

"The place where the building forgets what it was built for," she said, flipping the token into the air and letting it fall back to her palm. "I'm Nora."

"Evelyn. I'm supposed to lock the service gates on three."

Nora smiled but her expression didn't quite reach her eyes. "Midnight is gone Evelyn. The third floor has already become an inaccessible ruin. Look above."

Evelyn craned her neck back, beholding the great upper balconies of the Galleria, where once clothing shops and electronics stores had been, were now broken pillars of pale stone draped in bioluminescent moss. On the level just ahead of her, the escalators no longer carried people up and down but instead sent flickering wraith like images of discarded thoughts into the building's great skylights.

"Is this a fold?" Evelyn questioned.

"A threshold," said the girl with the brass token as she slid off the bench, her boots clicking softly against the stone floor. "When a place is forsaken, it acts as a crossroads for the all the places that might have been built and every pathway that mankind has chosen not to travel."

Nora stretched out a hand in Evelyn's direction, presenting the heavy brass token. Stamped into its flat face was a simple compass rose of looping lines and no cardinal directions.

"If you were to simply find your way back to the building through the loading dock," Nora said softly, "the sun will rise in three hours and you will complete your shift and turn in your keys for the day just as the schedule dictates. If however, you were to cast this little token into the basin, the threshold would remain open."

Evelyn turned her own thoughts back and forth as she eyed the strange token in the stranger's outstretched hand. The mundane reality of her temporal existence as a night shift worker with a series of menial tasks to complete before dawn had an almost surreal detachment from the strange floating gardens and the great stone and ivy structures she was currently witnessing. Everything was light, a brief moment from a long forgotten novel.

"What is beyond the center concourse?" Evelyn finally asked.

"Whatever the path happens to lead to when the map no longer follows it," Nora replied.

Evelyn took the brass token from the stranger, feeling the warmth of her palm against her own. Pulsing against her fingers was a strange rhythm, as if the token's loops had been etched with the same power that fed the neon signs hanging above the mall. She took a step forward until she stood beside the basin. Kneeling on the cool stone floor, she let the token fall into the basin where a ripple of light spread out from it, banishing the mirage of stone gardens in favor of an endless horizon. Rising to her feet, Evelyn removed the set of keys from her belt buckle and placed each of them in turn on the basin's edge before stepping lightly onto the lip of the dark water.

There was no fall as her boots met the solid ground but instead, Evelyn found herself walking on a smooth path of pale river rock that snaked its way along the floating hanging gardens she had just witnessed. The air smelled of ozone and wet moss. Over her shoulder the Galleria did not vanish but hovered overhead as an empty shell of glass with neon signs pulsing slowly against a sky of unfamiliar stars.

"Where are we headed?" asked Evelyn, taking a pace forward and letting the loose river stones guide her path.

"Nowhere you need to be and everywhere you slipped away from," said Nora who walked a few paces ahead, her constellation decorated jacket casting twin blue halos on the path. "Everyone believes themselves to be on a straight path. That should they even miss one small turn, say by choosing not to attend college, they will have fallen off the edge of their own universe but the truth is, the universe doesn't waste anything. Every dream not fulfilled needs to go somewhere."

The path split into dozens of branching trails as Evelyn and Nora walked forward among the glowing pale stone structures that had manifested since arriving at the threshold. A floating library of blank, humming books hovered nearby and the air was filled with the sound of a phantom orchestra playing an impossibly heart wrenching melody that Evelyn somehow knew was never recorded.

"This is the architecture of intent," Nora said as she paused in front of a massive arch of flowing silver thread. "Everywhere you haven't finished going gets built right here. Every choice you decide not to make becomes a new branching path. Isn't it lovely?" She gestured at the sky where a mass of unfamiliar stars bled into the horizon.

Evelyn's eyes traveled the glowing gardens but her gaze kept lingering on the pale stone bench where a ghostly figure sat with a translucent typewriter, etching down thoughts that evaporated into the air with every peck of the phantom keys. A prickle of uneasiness ran up her spine.

"If these are all the things we decided not to do," said Evelyn quietly, "then doesn't it mean that none of it is real?"

Nora paused her spinning the brass token and turned to face Evelyn, her expression suddenly serious. "It's as real as you choose it to be. You never have to concern yourself with the alarm clock ringing in the morning or paying rent or anything else that you might fall off the edge of because once you're inside the threshold, those choices have already been made for you. Every path is open because you never make one."

Evelyn looked at her own hands. The paper list of her duties as she had last seen it in her pocket had vanished but her fingers felt oddly light. Taking in the pale stone and endless looping trails ahead, she recalled the harsh reality of her existence. She thought of the long bus rides and sore muscles from mopping the terrazzo floor of the Galleria or the terror running through her veins at the thought of what she would do when the mall was finally demolished next week. When she had been cleaning those floors the clean tiles had been real. When she earned her meager payment from the job it had bought her real food.

"If I stay here," she said looking at Nora square in the eye, "I'm like the mall. I'm an abandoned ruin."

Nora only smiled with bittersweet amusement. "People come to the threshold places because they can't make a choice. When you make a choice, you lose every other possible path because if you choose to be a writer you lose the chance to be a painter but what this place lets you do is nothing." She raised her empty left hand palm outward. "You can spend your life inside without ever having to finish anything."

Evelyn stared out the edge of the pale stone terrace, watching the looping trails of the threshold wind together hundreds of feet below. They glittered and twinkled but connected back to themselves in great, looping patterns without ever a destination in sight.

"I don't want to be a monument," Evelyn said finally. "I want to make something happen, even if I fail."

Nora nodded, as if she'd expected that answer. She reached out her hand with the opposite palm held open out for her arrival. "Then you need to go back before the light comes up. Once the sun breaks over the horizon, the threshold will close."

"How do I get back?" asked Evelyn, peering over the edge to the great labyrinth ahead.

"You don't need a map," said Nora whose voice was beginning to echo strangely in the air as the sky above had begun to shimmer violently. "You just need to choose to go home."

Evelyn closed her eyes. She conjured up the image of the difficult yet real world of the Galleria. The familiar canvas strap of the bag she wore over her shoulder, the worn sneakers on her feet, and the ring of keys she had laid down by the basins edge all became solid in her mind. She embraced the fear of next week, the unease about her future but most importantly, the wish that she would live a life meaningful to herself.

With a silent resolve, Evelyn opened her eyelids and stepped forward into the dark.

Evelyn gasped, her eyes snapping open. She was kneeling on the cool terrazzo floor of the central plaza only to realize that the sky no longer glowed with an iridescent teal hue but instead the dark blue of a 5:00 in the morning suburban sky was filtering through the great glass skylights. The smell of the air had changed as well, no longer the metallic scent of ozone and old book pages but industrial floor wax and rain.

Evelyn pushed herself to her feet and took her steps forward until she found herself beside the ledge of the fountain. Upon the edge rested her ring of keys, glinting with their usual cold sheen.

She picked the set of keys up, suddenly feeling the grounding familiarity of weight before withdrawing her hand from the basin area. Removing a second paper list from the inside of her messenger bag, Evelyn found the edges no longer bled together in strange arcane runes but were neat and printed.

Evelyn walked the central concourse toward the loading dock. Her path was unimpeded, the halls leading directly to the exit. When she stepped out into the brisk morning, the horizon was painted with the first thin bands of gold and orange light breaking over the darkened skyline. On the road ahead was the bus she would take to her next day's work. She didn't know what she would do the following Tuesday or where she would work but as she turned her head to glance at the glowing path again, Evelyn smiled. The map was blank but the stakes were real and she was ready to forge her own trail