In regards to the living quarters, now known as #JanitorJail, I shall write an accord. Permit this clarification, if you would. The Chalkbox does not exist within a prison. This would assume that he was undergoing a punishment. Also, it is not truly a room. This would assume it has a true architecture. It is not a place, not one that can be meaningfully described as being inside of, rather, you are removed from everywhere else. The door opens into a volume of open, precise, stillness. This stillness encapsulates absence of sound in its pristine silence. This refined existence allows silence to enter, and consider its options, before dying. There is no ticking of clocks, nor dripping of pipes. There is no draft coming from under the entry. The manor does not settle its old bones in the soft green dirt beneath itself. No distant member of the Felt can be heard committing a fresh, mathematically predictable atrocity in the hallway. There is no sense of approach, or sense of leaving. Nothing leaves. Especially not the inhabitant. Within the chamber, time does not pass in the common vulgar state we all so casually experience entropy. It dares not race nor crawl, nor cycle into itself with a wink of allusion to Groundhog Day. It declines to participate. The occupant within is granted duration without progression. Experience ad nauseum without rescue. A sequence of thoughts with no external confirmation that the aforementioned thought is still a useful habit. You may sit in the center, and count to a googol of googols. Not a second will have passed. You may attempt to sleep, and discover that rest was never measured by hours, and wake with the impossible certainty that you have not moved one millisecond closer to release. You may scream, but the chamber will not echo. There will be no reverberation. Even your audible suffering is not acknowledged. The only reassurance that you are still even alive is the certainty within your brain that this is not any sense of afterlife any reality would permit to exist. A prisoner may hate a locked door. A penitent may pray before one. A fool may batter it with his fists. But a man who has no visible door must eventually confront the possibility that the concept of exit was merely something he brought with him, like lint in a pocket. There are no clocks in the chamber because a clock would be an act of companionship. Its hands would move, or fail to move, and in either case provide a thesis. Even a broken clock has the courtesy to be wrong in a consistent way. This place offers no such intellectual charity. There is only the occupant. His breath. His thoughts. The gradual discovery that his thoughts are, perhaps, the worst comfort he could have been provided. He will emerge in what may seem to him to be a moment. A blink. A courtesy interval of nonexistent time spent away. The time required for one of the Felt to misplace the key they are still holding. Of course, the Handmaid has the key now. I know where it rests. I suspect, in her act of aggressive macro-management, she will wait until the key rusts from her passive existence. To him, it will likely be an eternity. Centuries of privacy allotted to him, and folded neatly into the crevice he was permitted to live within. He will not have aged a day in any measurable sense. Physical deterioration would require time, which is not permitted in the room. This is of course, at his own request as he holds great disdain for clockwork mechanisms. When he returns, should he return, he may be faster. He may be quieter. He may be more diligent with a mop. He may also have learned the precise shape of every regret he has ever postponed, alphabetized by the voice that first spoke it. In any case, the Handmaid’s warning was accurate in its essentials. Do not open the door. Interruption would be the first kindness he has endured in epochs. I would not allow my staff to show such softness.
@aspiringPessimist Hey! Look, your faux beau is getting an employee spotlight.
SEE. EVERYBODY STOP YAPPING. HE’S FINE. HE’S DOING HIS TRAINING MONTAGE. IT’S ONLY #MAIDJAIL. YOU CAN’T EVEN DIE IN THERE. IT’S BASICALLY DISNEYLAND BEFORUS.
How absolutely terrible of a fate. Boohoo.