Picture a room. This could be any room at all—since a room is essentially nothing more than a volume of space—so, let us give this one beige-white walls with fluorescent overhead lights that flicker and dim, and a table with a chair in the room's center. The table suggests something more, so on it place a TV, a CCTV specifically, not unlike those typically used for video surveillance. Now, imagine a man sitting at the table. Perhaps he works here and it’s his job to monitor this CCTV, maybe for security purposes, though we do not yet know for sure. For now, give him dark hair with patches of gray and a couple days’ worth of stubble. He’s leaning back with one arm on the table, watching the CCTV as he smokes a cigarette.

What he sees on the screen is nothing out of the ordinary. The camera, wherever it is, overlooks a lobby with an empty lounge chair next to a potted palm placed against the wall. We do not know what color this chair is because the CCTV only displays in a grayish monotone, but we can assume the palm is green. To the right of the chair and the palm is a vending machine containing various snacks and a slot for coffee, and to the right of the machine is blank wall space.

The man in the room continues smoking his cigarette while he watches the screen, observing the lobby as he lazily exhales, pushing smoke from the side of his mouth which then disperses slowly into the full volume of the room, becoming imperceptible just as he inhales and exhales again, breathing out more smoke. For now, let's allow the man’s thoughts in this moment to be his own. Perhaps he’s considering the trajectory of his life and the events that led him here, or maybe he’s simply thinking about what he’ll do after his shift ends, although those two things are not entirely unrelated.

Whatever his thoughts are, as he sits here thinking them a woman walks into the lobby wearing a uniform and pushing a dolly of boxes toward the vending machine. This doesn't seem to alarm the man, so we can assume it's not an unusual occurrence. Though, it should be noted that we are entirely in control of what is, and is not, an unusual occurrence for the man in this scenario. His total existence is subject to our whim. Remember that.

On the screen, the woman approaches the vending machine with her dolly. She’s efficient with her movements, even though the boxes are large and stacked nearly as tall as she is. She pulls a set of keys from her belt and unlocks the machine door, swinging it open, which causes the man watching to consider the concept of a door. This door, in particular, is a barrier that separates a person from his or her selection, a thin divide between choice and consequence. When is it crossed, the man wonders. Is it when the selection falls into the bin, or when one reaches through the slot to grab it? Is it when the choice is first made, when it’s punched into the key code, or is it when the person is born? He isn’t sure. 

As she stocks the machine, the woman on the screen sets one of the boxes precariously on top of another. Though her movements are smooth and practiced, the man watching can’t help but imagine her elbow glancing off the edge of the box and sending it to the floor, scattering its contents. He watches her intently, his mind fixated on this image, and she is almost finished stocking when her elbow glances off the edge of the box, sending it to the floor and scattering its contents.

The man flinches from the screen, ash falling from his cigarette. Has he caused this series of events? He simply thought them; is he now responsible? He can’t possibly be, a thought is nothing more than a thought, it can’t materially change things.

He looks back at the screen, where the woman is kneeling to pick up the spilled box, and then another thought occurs to him, a more complex one. The woman stops suddenly, her movement frozen in time as if someone has pressed a nonexistent pause button on the CCTV, then the man imagines her moving again, and she resumes picking up the spill.

The man in the room, sitting at the table, watching the CCTV, is both horrified and fascinated by the realization that he is in control of the events on the screen. What could be the purpose of such a scenario, or even its mechanism? Surely there must be some meaning to this phenomenon, but what it could be the man does not know, and as he ponders this impossibility, a door appears in the blank wall space next to the vending machine.

The door is black, so dark that it fades in and out of visibility in the CCTV’s grainy feed, and at first the woman doesn't seem to notice it; she simply continues her work, nearly finished stocking the machine now. But as the man watching the screen concentrates his thought—trying harder to understand the events currently unfolding before him—the woman sets down the box she’s holding and looks at the door. When the man thinks harder, she steps toward it, her movement no longer the smooth efficiency of earlier, but ragged, propelled forward by the man’s attempt to interpret meaning.

He leans closer to the screen now, taking another drag on his cigarette as his heart beats faster, sensing some kind of culmination in his thought as the woman approaches the door. He watches closely when she opens it, the doorway revealing a hole in the wall so black that for an instant he thinks the hole is in the screen itself. This distracts him, briefly pausing the woman who is now standing just in front of the open doorway, just on this side of the threshold, like the tip of a pen not quite touching the paper.

Of course (the man now considering this metaphor we’ve given him) when writing, there is a moment when the pen is both touching the paper and not touching it, an infinitesimal space where the tip of the pen has not yet left the surface of the paper but is no longer in contact with it. Can such a moment be conceived, the man wonders, not noticing that the woman is now taking a step toward the doorway on her own. His eyes widen as the concept forms in his mind, an image of space so small and yet so large that it is everywhere at once, the vast meaning of the universe compressed so densely that it expands into everything his mind has ever known and just before he is able to fully grasp this totality, the woman crosses the plane of the doorway and explodes into a cloud of dust.

It’s vaguely woman-shaped, this cloud of a disintegrated person, before it dissipates across the screen until there’s nothing left, and the man fully recoils, dropping his cigarette in a fit of nausea over what he has wrought. He stares at the CCTV—which now displays only the empty lobby, the chair and palm, the black doorway next to the partially stocked vending machine, the boxes still stacked precariously on the dolly—and decides that he wants no more part of this scenario, abruptly switching the thing off. But when he does so, the image on the screen remains.

He stands, following the electrical cord to the wall and yanking it out of its socket, but he still hears the buzz of the CCTV and knows its screen continues to display the lobby with the looming doorway.

The man panics. He looks around for a way out, and his muscles tense when he realizes there is none; he is trapped inside a room with no door. How could that be, he wonders. How did he arrive here? From where did he come? We will remember that this is, of course, where we placed him when we began this exercise, before which the man did not exist, but he is only now beginning to understand.

His chest tightens as the panic spreads, and he swallows hard, steadying himself against the wall before making his way back to the center of the room. He stops aside the table, looking down at the CCTV, not wanting to see what he fears it now displays, but our thought compels him, and as he turns the screen toward him he sees it—the dark, looming doorway is no longer black and impenetrable, but now opens into a room with beige walls in which a man is standing beside a table, looking down at a CCTV screen that displays an empty lobby with a vending machine next to a doorway that’s opening into a room in which a man who is looking down at a CCTV suddenly turns to look at the man watching the man on the screen in the room with the CCTV displaying the lobby with the doorway to the man in the room, and they dissolve, screaming as they melt into a pile of particles that spark and flicker before fizzling into nothing.

And then it’s done. Just as abruptly as he appeared, the man is gone, and there is no longer anyone in the room to see what the CCTV might be displaying now. Whatever is on its screen, we can only guess at. A cigarette smolders on the floor, aside from which there is no sound or movement in the room—only us, the dispassionate observers.