The Listening Room

“The Listening Room” is the first in a series of stories I wrote for Glass Buffalo magazine.

The title comes from a René Magritte painting depicting an enormous green apple that completely fills a room. I used this title as a jumping-off point to weave an urban myth about a room beneath the river, which summons those who need to speak and listens to their stories.

The Listening Room

There's a room beneath the river.

It's not a big room and it's not a small room. It's just the size of a room that you need when you're there - a room that inhales and exhales and rearranges its walls to match yours. A room that adjusts itself to your dimensions.

Everyone has a different relationship to the physical bodies around theirs - each person has their own peculiar proportions of distance and nearness to keep in balance. For some people, a cupboard is not confined enough. For some people, a stadium is not expansive enough. The room beneath the river understands this, and so its size and its contents change to accommodate whoever is inside and whatever mood they are in.

Nobody knows when the room began, or how it came to be, but as to why it's there, this peculiar room, well, that’s been clear for a long time....

It's very difficult, perhaps impossible, to get into this room if you go looking for it. There is no one door, just as there is no one room.

But if you pay attention, an entrance will find your gaze one day. Your eye will catch on it, and you'll feel the snag in all your fibres. You'll want to get away, though you won't know why. You'll know deep inside that you'll die down there, in that room, and come back up a very different self. That something will have to end so that something new can begin. And you'll run from that death, that beginning, with all your terrified might. But every day, once the room has decided that you're ripe for a visit, that entrance will slip into your periphery and bore itself into your eye. And every time you look away, another hole is torn in you, until one day you're in tatters and there's nothing to do but accept the entrance.

You'll feel it come up to you and stretch out its handle into your fingers. You’ll feel it rotate your wrist, and bend every ligament in your hand. You'll feel its gentle pull inward, and you'll take an involuntary jerking step forward. And after that step, it's got you.

The room will draw you into itself - like a pumping heart drawing a foreign body through a vein - to its core. You'll race along its vessels, through the capillaries under the city's skin, and arrive in the room with a slam of arrested momentum.

I can't tell you what the room will look like for you – not until you've seen it for yourself. But I can tell you what it will make you look like. What it will make you do.

You’ll be amazed by this place because of how it feels in your bones, in your flesh. How the space understands you better than you do yourself, how it contorts itself and enfolds you, convincing your body that it is absolutely safe. In many ways, the room is a womb – a place that fits you perfectly, a home to only you, and only for a short time.

And your body is convinced, even while your mind is racing with questions. Your muscles slowly relax, and all the tension inside of you unwinds and seeps out through your pores. Your lungs loosen, and you breathe in deeper than you ever have before. You sigh and yawn, and all your uneasy heat is released. After a while, you'll notice how you can feel everything – every nerve receptor on your surface and at your core, calmly pulsing, reporting your presence.

But why is the room there? I'm getting to that.

Imagine a person who shares your face, who's full of cracks and slowly eroding day by day. Imagine the panic of inching across splintering ice, hearing that horrifying snapping, knowing the inevitability of collapse. This is what the room sees when it looks at us, when it looks into us. This is how it gets us to accept an entrance: it exploit the cracks in us like ice, freezing and expanding and driving us apart from ourselves. It's only hastening on an inevitable cycle, the bang and crunch, the heating and cooling, the accumulation and wearing away.

Now imagine that there is something in the world that can induce you, seduce you, influence you into speaking truth to how you really feel and who you truly are.

Something that can draw these truths out of you, so quietly and comfortably, with such subtlety and delicacy that you don't feel violated or compelled or judged.

Imagine a place that makes you feel safe, safe enough to speak truth (in whatever form that may take), truth that you never allowed yourself to know existed. Imagine a place that draws out your doubt, and lifts all the filters which gauze your perception, and reveals you to yourself as it hears you speak your truth. This is the room beneath the river. This is why it exists: to hear you, and to make you stop, and speak, and hear yourself.

And so this place came to be known as the Listening Room.

A talented listener is the most perfect mirror in the world. The room listens with more skill than any person.

It speaks with quiet resolution, saying:

I hear you.
You are important.
You are not clone.
You are a vital component of this city.
You are not forgotten.
You are whole.

The Listening Room is drawing people down into itself one by one, and giving them a space to speak truth to themselves. In this way, it's slowly healing the whole city.

I've been in the Listening Room twice. It's called me down there two times.

The first time, I was twenty-six, and I had been working for this non-profit eco-activism group for four years since I graduated from university. I loved my job, and my life was going in the right direction - exactly where I wanted and had planned. But every day I went into work and every day it all felt a little more pointless. We were doing important work, and achieving results, and things were going great. But the fire inside of me was slowly dying, and it was a struggle every single day just to care about anything.

And worst of all, I did not feel like my best self. I knew I could be better. I knew I had been better, more energetic, more passionate, more intelligent. I was collapsing inside, unsure of what mattered to me, unable to imagine any kind of future for myself.

I first noticed an entrance in the light switch beside my desk. I had seen it hundreds of times before, but one day my eye caught on it, and I just stared and stated, and I had no sense of time.

Eventually I noticed how it was pulling at me, and I panicked and ripped myself away. Over the next few days, I saw entrances everywhere: in a spot of rust on a fork, in a loose thread in a carpet, in a pebble embedded in the road. Each one dominated my gaze more strongly than the last, until finally I saw a knot in a tree's knobbly roots and reached out to touch it.

As soon as my skin scratched the surface of the knot, I felt myself pitched forward, and I was drawn down into the Listening Room. I didn't know what was happening. I was frightened. But as soon as I landed in the room, the fear began to dissipate, along with all the years' worth of anxiety and stress I carried.

When I first saw the Listening Room, it was square with pink walls and a window with a view of the sea. The ceiling was white; the floor was untreated wood planks. It felt like a bedroom in a house I had just moved in to, waiting to be filled with all my things.

In the centre of the room was a rickety wickerwork table, and on it sat a green apple. This apple had the exact opposite effect on me as the many entrances; the air around it seemed oily and slippery, and when I tried to fix my eyes to its surface, my gaze glanced off of it. But I was not preoccupied by the apple for Iong. The room stood silently around me; I could hear the faint crash of waves on the shore.

In the comfort of the Listening Room, the layers and layers of locks inside of me began to loosen and come undone. I felt the spreading apart inside me, and my truth emerged in a series of images, some familiar, some long-forgotten. My truth streamed through me, coursed through my body, and I felt it touch every part of me. I felt the cracks in me being brought back together, the wrinkles smoothed out, everything reintegrated in a totally new but familiar way.

As the room listened to me, and pushed me on with smart questions and challenges, and comforted me with soothing images, I noticed that the green apple was growing larger and larger. I understood intuitively that this was the receptacle, this was the receiver of my truth, and the extractor of the listlessness, the fatigue, the darkness that always comes with it. The apple pulled them both out of me - my unacknowledged truth, and the hungry negative energy that resuIted from my ignorance - and swallowed them into itself. It unwrapped me with the gentlest touch, then revealed me to myself in the most loving way.

I don't have a clear memory of leaving the Listening Room, but obviously I was sent back up into the city when it had finished with me. After that, I devoted my life to an obsession with the place. Not many people seem to remember it as clearly as I do. I consulted geological surveys of the river valley, and made quiet inquiries about the place in the city archives, but nobody had ever heard of a room beneath the river - let alone one with a view of the sea.

I asked a few close friends about it, when they seemed to have been healed as I was healed by the room. But no one among them could remember. So after five years of this hobby, which increasingly consumed my time and attention, I became downcast. I began to doubt the room's existence and my own sanity, and fell into a deeper depression than ever. I threw away my job; I drove away my friends. My delusions had ruined me, had turned me into a crackpot mystic.

I saw the Listening Room only one more time then, at this lowest point. I threw myself off the tallest bridge, into the shallow river. The waters parted to swallow me down into the room whose existence I cursed and mourned. This time the walls were stone, and the floor was painted brown, and the window with the view of the sea was open wide. The apple grew again, and drew out my truth, and sent me back up above the river, choking out cold water onto the freezing bank. And so I knew that this place was real, and I also knew why everyone must forget their time in its embrace.

Other versions of the room, of which I have been told by people who soon forget it, are more exciting than mine. A long, rectangular space with no walls but water - walls falling constantly down in smooth-as-glass sheets. A room with an arched glass ceiling, through which thick soupy sunlight pours, warming the marble floor. A round room with silk curtains for walls, like a tent. The most peculiar incarnation of the Listening Room was made entirely out of vitrified jam and was totally spherical. All of them contained, at their centres, a green apple, sitting on a table.

Which leads me to speculate: as the one unchanging feature of this place, maybe this apple is itself the Listening Room, and all that surrounds it are only apparatuses of comfort for the crumbling people it brings into itself. But there seems little point in drawing this distinction....

I've rambled. I am an old man now, with nothing but stories to my name. The story of the Listening Room is the most interesting that I have to tell. I think that it's a story everyone knows, deep down. No matter how scared you are, you crave that entrance, that listening.

Yoga. Crystal healing. Bioenergy practice. Holding a pet. Going for a run. Comfort eating. Whatever rituals you need. To me, they all point to the same place. They're all aspects of the same thing. They're all doors to the same room. People trying to heal themselves, to hold their pieces together, to keep from falling apart entirely.

I have one more story to tell, and as the price of my story, you can tell me if you remember it for yourself.

One day, our city was threatened by poisoned thoughts. It was a March day, and the dark and the cold had been gnawing on the spirit of the people for long months. On that day something fell apart in one of them, and then another, and another. Dark thoughts rippled through the people, ripping them apart inside, collapsing them. Unable to save each of them in turn, the Listening Room inverted itself, and wrapped itself around the entire city. Streets, buildings, everything was surrounded by the room when the city was threatened. Nobody was fully aware of this, but for three minutes and twenty-six seconds, the room enveloped them. And they felt it.

The Listening Room broke open, and its apple rose up above the river. And all the green apples in the city started to rise too, floating out of grocery stores and kitchens and delivery vans, as they swelled with the negative thoughts of the people, who spoke truth to themselves and trembled. The apples bobbed through the air and joined together into one, making a fwoop when they touched and melded.

This great apple, now swollen to tremendous size and heavy with the doubts and faults of all the people, floated there a moment, then burst apart as the room completed its healing and retreated beneath the river.

Later, many people questioned the surprising phenomenon of a green-apple rain, and the consequent debris. But, so far as I can tell, not a person among them could remember it.

It seems that everyone forgets the Listening Room, eventually. This is part of its strategy, part of its healing. It doesn't want to be exposed, or thanked, or remembered. It only wants to bury itself deep inside of us, down beneath the shallows of our normal thoughts, leave a version of itself there for when we need it. It wants to ingest the truths, absorb the stories of everyone it meets and heals. It doesn't want its story in our lives to be told. But we must always tell the story, again and again, to let all our people, all our city, know what we owe to the room beneath the river.