Edward woke up in a white room. Exceptionally bright. He had to keep his eyes shut for almost a minute to get accustomed to that intensity.

He was lying on the floor and he could feel the cold touch of ceramic tiles with his hands. When he finally opened his eyes, he noticed that the whole area was covered with such slabs. There are no doors was his first thought, even before Where the hell am I?

A moment later, he tried to recall his last memories and clearly remembered the car about to flip over on the highway. That van had lost control, and he had to jerk the wheel to avoid the impact with its rear bumper. Unfortunately, by doing so, his car hit the lane divider and jumped midair. The next remembrance was waking up in that very room.

He struggled to get up, then explored the compartment. There were no lights, but the luminescence was barely bearable. There were no windows, and no object was present in any corner. It was just an empty room.

Was that a hospital? It was the only option that made sense, but that was a hell of a room. No bed and machinery? That was very—

One of the walls lit up all of a sudden, showing a picture in its entirety. There was no projector or device, and it made no sound; it just turned on like the coolest TV.

The image was super-defined; it wasn’t anything like he had seen before. His 4K television couldn’t even be compared to that. He could distinctly see every hair that filled most of the screen. It was a red-furred cat sitting on a person’s lap and gently snoring. It looked like the world’s chillest feline.

He instinctively scowled: he hated cats with every cell of his body. Edward always had a repulsion toward those filthy animals that puked around his aunt’s house and pissed against the windows of his basement facing the street. But most of all, he couldn’t stand the way they played with the animals they killed. They didn’t just slay for hunger—it was a game, it was funny.

When he was a teenager, his hatred and anger peaked in violence. He committed some of the most nefarious acts of his life—so wicked that even he felt some remorse, but just for a moment.

When he was bored, he took three or four trash bags from the kitchen and went for a walk in the neighborhood, looking for stray cats in the back alleys. When he found one, he lured it with some food in the bag and waited patiently a few steps away. The plan had never failed. After five or ten minutes, the animal inevitably entered the trap, pushed by hunger, and then the boy quickly grabbed the end of the bag, snaring the poor beast. The plastic film was thick enough to protect his hands from the dreadful claws, and the little hooligan thrashed the black weight against the brick walls and on the asphalt until the painful moans turned into soggy sounds. Then, he just opened a garbage can and let the sack flop to the bottom. After a few months, no stray cat could be seen for a kilometer around his place. That violence faded as he grew older, but the hate didn’t. That cat on the wall was as horrible as the dozens he had taken care of.

He was fantasizing about those years when a hand entered the frame and caressed the feline on the head; the latter purred softly in response.

It wasn’t the sudden sound that scared Edward, but the hand itself: it had the same tattooed hummingbird as his own. His jaw dropped while he was trying to figure out what he was seeing. He would never own a cat in a million years! Nonetheless, the camera angle slowly zoomed out, and his very self appeared on the wall—a bit younger and with longer hair, but that was definitely him.

It took him hours to understand his situation. He kept rejecting the images on the wall and couldn’t focus on the whole circumstance. At a certain point, the Edward on the wall got up and prepared dinner in a kitchen totally different from his, then went out wearing a coat he had never owned.

Mikey was real, though! One of his best friends from his twenties sat next to fake Edward at the pub. Did whoever put him in that room get to Mike? He moved abroad almost ten years ago.

Questions kept filling his mind when he finally had the simplest intuition, even though he didn’t take it seriously: I am dead.

He was locked in a prison with no doors, and another version of himself was… living his own life on a screen. Absurd!

At last, Edward felt exhausted while trying to grasp the meaning of that nonsense situation, and thought that some sleep could help. However, as soon as he lay his back on the cold pavement, the strongest pain he had ever felt struck his head. A hundred needles stung his eyes, forcing him to shut them so tight that his ears started buzzing. He immediately got up, and the torment vanished as quickly as it appeared.

He looked around, his temples pounding, but couldn’t see anything unlike before. His other self was working at a desk in front of a computer— not in his office or any that he knew. A couple of minutes later, when he tried again to recline in a more relaxed position, the stings hit him again in the eyes and in the back of his neck as if someone were crushing his head with boot heels. Again, as soon as he sat, the pain was gone.

He just couldn’t relax; it was some kind of torture. He was as furious as he had ever been. He shouted in anger, but there was no one to yell at. He started punching the white tiles until they got stained with his own blood, and eventually he was able to break a little corner of the ceramic, revealing some concrete below.

Euphoric with that strange success, he kept pulling away one tile after another with his fingers, snapping his nails. Using the broken slabs, he tried to dig in the cement, but it was too smooth and firm to break. After what could be hours or days, he had freed a fourth of the wall in front of the big screen. On the latter, in the brief pauses he made, he had observed the other Edward going back and forth from work to his home, where he lived alone with that horrible cat.

Another peculiarity of that huge wall monitor was that no sound could be heard except for the cat’s noises. When the scene was outside the house, nothing could be perceived. But when the young actor—he had to be an actor, that was the only explanation—returned to the apartment, the slightest jump of the animal on the soft paws made Edward jump, scared by the abrupt vibration.

The beast’s meows when the man entered home were just agonizing for him; he pressed his palms to his ears as hard as he could. The purrs it made when going to sleep enraged him, and since he himself was unable to sleep because of that strange persecution, Edward was absolutely livid with everything: that cell, his jailers, his imposed insomnia, the huge screen that would never stop playing another person’s life, and the cat. Especially that fucking cat he was forced to listen to.

Time passed. Probably. He couldn’t tell for sure because he couldn’t even keep his eyelids closed without suffering an ache. He kept destroying the wall, making piles of broken tiles to reach the highest spots, and after what looked like an eternity he had tidied a whole side of the cell. He had cleaned the traces of plaster, and the concrete behind was perfectly even.

Did it make sense to keep on with that strenuous yet ineffective work? He had cried several times, desperate, looking at his bleeding hands with no nails. He was powerless and condemned to stay in there for… ever? It was like a horror movie. Eventually, that ridiculous thought came back and back to his mind, until he was almost certain despite the insanity: he was dead indeed.

As he realized his condition, the slightest crack appeared on the wall he had tidied up, in a far corner. He didn’t notice. As his belief increased, the fractures multiplied and lengthened across the cement.

This must be a trial, he grasped, sitting against one of the walls with still-intact tiles. And a moment later, one of those slabs just fell off spontaneously, a few inches from him. He turned around, puzzled. He hadn’t touched that part of the room. A queer sensation ran through his whole body, a deep rumble like an earthquake. His vision blurred as the whole chamber seemed to shake. Other tiles started falling, crashing on the ground, and the cracks in the concrete grew larger and larger until some chunks of wall fell off.

Edward ran and ducked in a corner, covering his head with his arms, trying to shelter poorly. He could feel debris and shards tumbling over him, and he shut his eyes without fearing the usual pain.

After—seconds? minutes? hours?—he tried to slowly move the rubble over him, but there was nothing! His clothes were clean again! His fingers were still ruined by the scratching, though. The debris was totally gone, the room was empty again, but the walls were made of masonry, a wet stone that made the chamber look a lot like a cave. The huge screen was still there, intact, showing the other Edward sitting on a toilet.

What does this mean?, he almost cried. The images kept going on and on while the room had changed, almost stripping off a layer. If that was a test, what was he supposed to do? If he had had a clock, he would have been amazed by how much time he spent walking up and down while thinking.

Finally, he assumed that the screen was there to be observed. That was the purpose of screens. Then he sat down, back to the center of the wall, in front of the incredibly wide monitor… and watched.

A gasp came out of his mouth when he paid attention to his fingers again: his fingernails had grown out almost completely! He wondered how much time he had spent there, immersed in that man’s life; when he touched his face, he felt a rather long beard, much scruffier than he had ever had.

On the wall, a few major changes had happened in the other’s life: there had been a promotion to a different office, and there was a pretty girl the guy was dating. At first, he just enjoyed watching them fuck, but as the days passed he couldn’t avoid empathizing more and more. It was legible; there was nothing else to do other than watch a huge TV.

After observing that routine week after week, though, Edward felt that in some way that was his own life. Or a version of it.

Overall, he was mostly shocked when he realized he didn’t hate the cat that much anymore. Quite the opposite, he started enjoying her without noticing. He had understood that it was a female because the other Edward brought her to the vet twice in the last few days. Reading lips, he grasped that she was called Zoe.

He started to appreciate the way the cat stroked her back on the man’s leg while purring when she was hungry, or how she reached for the bed at night, cuddling between the new couple’s legs when they slept together. He started feeling nauseated when thinking what he had done to all those felines—it looked like a past life.

He was observing Zoe sleeping on the bed next to the man; she rose her head abruptly, looking at the bedroom door as if she heard something. But was she looking at the entrance… or at him? The direction was almost the same, but Edward felt a shiver passing through his back—could she feel him?

He made to get up, and his hand leaned on something squishy. He lowered his eyes and saw a chunk of grey fur springing up from the floor. He immediately jumped back, but he stumbled on something else equally soft: as he glanced around the room, all the walls except the screen were covered with a horrific fusion of animal legs, skins, ears, and God knows what else. Some looked fresher, but others were rotting, and the air suddenly became beyond sickening.

Edward, confused and scared, couldn’t move in any direction without stomping a blood-stained piece of some animal. He started panicking, trying to reach a corner of the room. When he turned around, he saw a dog’s head popping out from the spot where he had been sitting moments before. The once-clean pavement now was covered with a red-yellowish pus. Where did it come from?

No way he could look at those things on the walls—they were even on the ceiling! Standing in the center of the room, he tried to focus with all his soul on what was happening on the screen. It was hard, especially not to move or touch those dismembered limbs, but eventually he got used to the smell and began again to observe. And empathize.

Zoe was ill! Edward had sensed something because of the several trips to the vet. Now, both the other Edward and his girlfriend had brought her again to the clinic but came home alone. It had to be something serious.

He was very troubled about the little fellow’s condition, but to him his feelings were totally normal. The old torturer of felines had never existed.

Since the camera—if it could be named like that—followed his other self, he was clueless about Zoe’s health. He surprised himself counting the minutes when the guy went to work. Every day he hoped that he went to get the pet back, and when the man received a phone call the anxiety became overwhelming. He couldn’t hear anything other than sounds made by the cat, so he tried to catch any info in every possible way: a note sketched, reading lips, studying the facial expressions.

One afternoon—on the screen, at least—the other Edward was at home minding housework. The prisoner Edward, instead, was keeping himself busy trying to guess which animal parts were the ones he was looking at. It was sickening, but he had to keep his mind occupied.

A faint noise, almost a squeak, caught his attention. At first, he thought it was a lump of fur coming off the wall, but they didn’t make any sound. He turned towards the TV, and his eyes widened: the guy’s girlfriend was holding the pet carrier, and Zoe was inside!

She was very startled, her breath so heavy. She had been away for several days; it must have been a shock for her. The other Edward hugged the girl and immediately grabbed the carrier. He put it in the kitchen, next to the bowl of water, and opened the door. That poor thing was almost shaking! She ducked in the back of the transporter, scared, and Edward would have given his life to give her a hug.

Eventually, with much calm, the owner held his hand at a proper distance and let the cat sniff it in her own time. After a while, Zoe calmed down and let out a tender purr while stroking her little muzzle against his fingers.

Edward could feel tears along his cheeks and the long beard, and uttered a huge sigh of relief. After a few moments, he kissed the points of his fingers and gently patted the cat’s forehead.

He was so immersed observing that beautiful family reunited that he didn’t notice the obvious changes in his cell. A single noise, a clack, caught his attention; it did not come from the screen. He turned to his right, and the first thing he saw was a rectangular hole in the wall—a door! It was black, the darkest black he had seen, a huge contrast with the whiteness of the panels. Slightly confused, he looked around and didn’t immediately realize that all that gory stuff was gone—now the walls were just white, the purest white ever, except for the door.

He approached it and noticed that it wasn’t black; it was gaping open. Outside, there was Nothing. He could not see or sense anything. Was he free? Were they… letting him go? Wha—

He turned around, and his heart skipped a beat. The screen was off. It was white as the other walls of the room, extremely bright and without visible tiles as before. Now the chamber looked like an open, infinite space.

He made a couple of steps towards the center of the room he was accustomed to, but then he felt something unnatural for that place: an air current. It was running towards the door, an invitation to exit.

His heartbeat accelerated. Was that a trap? Maybe he was condemned to fall into Nothing for eternity.

However, a single thought calmed him down: Zoe, and the love he had grown for her. He had understood. He had learned the lesson. He approached the door and stepped outside without fear. For another round.