The White Room

So I entered suffering. A room with dazzling walls, starched drapes, a bed with the coverlet turned down just so. Shirred bed skirts. The pillowcase crisp, bearing the marks of the iron. A low wrought iron table with a pitcher and its glass of water. Curtain half cinched.

Was anyone else ever here? Not a trace of a prior occupant. No candy wrapper. No smudge on the high-gloss sheen. Yet I marvel at the labor that must have gone into all those preparations: someone lifting the mattress, twice, as you must, and adding the final touches; smoothing away all traces of a final touch, filling the glass precisely, so the camber of water fits like a seal over the rim.

A radio on the nightstand. It lights up, and there’s the very voice in my mind, arguing with itself, trying to convince itself that it suffers. Why so many hypnotic cadences, so many rhetorical flourishes—anaphora, chiasmus, parataxis—such subtle case logic, Rogerian argument, appeals to so many arbiters: God, reason, justice, twilight?

Search from station to station, and the white noise in between. On fm, am, and shortwave, the same rapt monologue. That marshaling of precedent, scientific data, illustrations from the history of medicine, the Upanishads, the Vedas, the sutras and suras, the Sermon on the Mount. But what is 
suffering? Is it true that it requires my consent?

In a shaft of evening, the trillion worlds collide.

The rose in the vase grows whiter in darkness.