The Nightmare Box

The Nightmare Box

A wooden box. Sitting on three tall legs. A tripod. The box is painted gloss black, each seam fitted with complicated moldings, ridges and grooves, making it look as heavy as a bank vault. On each side of the box are brass handles, you have to hold them both to complete a circuit. You press your left eye to the brass peephole in the front and you look inside. If you were to look right now you wouldn’t see anything other than your own eye reflected back at you. You hear a sound like a clock ticking, slow as the drip from a leaky faucet… tick… tick… tick… some kind of random interval timer. Steady and forever as a heartbeat. It could last a month, a year, a day, an hour. When it stops ticking, you put your eye to the peephole and press a button on the side of the box. You hold the handles and you wait. The button triggers a flash of light inside. A single pulse of light. A little brass nameplate on the top of the box reads “The Nightmare Box”.

What you see then, I don’t know, I’ve never looked. The box came from an antique shop in my hometown. The shop is now closed. Where it came from before then I don't know. The box is kind of a legend. The story goes in the antique shop the box sat ticking on a shelf for nearly a decade. The owners grandson who was working in the shop for the summer found it, not ticking. When he put the box on the shop counter it was silent… ready and waiting. He took the handles. He pressed the button and looked inside. The antiques dealer found him, dust smeared around his left eye. Blinking. His eyes focused on nothing. He just sat in a pile of dust and cigarette butts he’d swept up on the floor. The grandson, he never went back to college. After that he sat in the street outside the shop. Twenty years old and he sits on the curb all day, rain or shine. That kid, by now he should be a lawyer, but you can go visit him in some fleabag motel. Public housing, on social security for a complete mental depression. “Just a case of total crackup” the locals say. You go visit this kid, and he sits on his bed all day, cockroaches crawling in and out of his clothes, his head circled with houseflies, staring off into nothing. You ask him anything and the kid only laughs.

 Another morning, the antiques dealer comes in to open his shop, the box has stopped ticking. The Nightmare Box sits there, waiting for him to look. All day he keeps the door locked and the 'closed' sign up. He watches the box not tick out of the corner of his eye while he spends his day cleaning and polishing and scrubbing his shop. The box waits. He changes into a clean shirt, combs his hair, calls his wife and tells her not to hold dinner for him. He says he loves her. The next day, the police find him. His shop in perfect order. They find him in the bathroom. He hung himself with an orange extension cord. The box sits on the shop counter. Ticking.

Whatever you see inside the box, in that flash of light, it drains the life out of you, rips the will from your body and tosses it in the gutter. What you see, it’s the intuitive, emotional, instinctual side of you, the right-brain part, that has to witness it. Plus, only one person can look each time. What you suffer, you suffer it alone. What happens inside the Nightmare Box, it only happens to you. There’s no one you can share it with. There’s no room for someone else. At least, that’s what I think.

I was the one who found the last person who looked inside the box. He was sitting on the floor just staring at his hands. When I asked him to explain to me what he saw, he said “This isn’t what happened, but this is how it felt.” One weekend he had to go to a company picnic for his job. A job he hated. As a joke, instead of food, he brought a wicker crate full of trained doves. He kept the doves under a tablecloth all morning, keeping them shaded and cool and quiet. To everyone, this was just another picnic basket. When he opened the crate, as this white chaos, this storm exploded up from the center of the picnic, some people screamed. People fell back into the grass. They covered their faces with their open hands. Food and wine fell. It was the moment after, when people saw it wouldn’t hurt them. When people saw this was safe. It was the most lovely thing they’d ever seen. They fell back, too amazed to even smile. For the countless hours of that one long moment, they forgot everything important and watched the cloud of white wings twist up into the blue sky. “That,” he says “is what’s inside the Nightmare Box.” It’s something that goes beyond life-after-death. What’s in the box is proof that what we call life isn’t. Our world is a dream. Infinitely fake. A nightmare. One look and your life, your preening and struggle and worry, it’s all pointless. All your problems and love affairs. They’re an illusion. “What you see inside the box,” he says “is a glimpse of the real reality.”

I've never looked into the box, partly because I was afraid of what I would see inside, partly because of what i've seen of what has become of the people who have looked inside, partly because... ignorance is bliss. The box now sits in my basement, some nights when I’m lying in bed, when the house is still and quiet. I can hear the ticking. A constant, gentle, dependable lullaby. Guiding me to sleep. Tonight the house is silent. Almost too silent. Different somehow. I sit up in bed, my heart in my throat. I don’t hear the ticking anymore…