The Black Rooms

The Black Rooms

by Akiko Amora

Nobody told me there were nineteen rooms. I found out the hard way.

Room 1.

Long black fabric rectangles hang from the ceiling. Heavy black carpet on the floor. The room has decided something and it is not asking for your input.

Room 2.

Squares on the walls. Piles of squares on the floor. I am already thinking about whoever had to fold all of this.

Room 3.

Narrow. Wood floor, which is a choice. A massive scrunched blob of black velvet fills most of the floor. Torn scraps hang from above. The velvet is not apologizing for anything.

Room 4.

Glossy black floor. You see yourself. You weren't ready. Small shapes on the walls, neat and even, which after room 3 feels almost aggressive.

Room 5.

The sculptures are large — smooth, heavy, rounded at the base and reaching upward, each one slightly wrong in a way that is hard to name. They fill the space without crowding it, which takes confidence.

Room 6.

Same sculptures, smaller, rougher, on platforms. The platforms are doing a lot of work.

Room 7.

Tall and narrow, wider at the base, glossy with vertical lines running the length of them. They are doing something. You're not sure what.

Room 8.

Back to the large ones but the room is smaller so they've won.

Room 9.

Black walls, white floor. The switch is disorienting in a way that feels deliberate and slightly rude, which I mean as a compliment.

Room 10.

Glossy black fringe hanging from the ceiling. Black velvet scrunched in the distance. A glossy black rectangle on the floor that you briefly consider is a portal. It might be.

Room 11.

Everything black. Walls, ceiling, floor, objects. Two white rectangles exist. I looked at them for so long a stranger asked if I was okay.

Here is what happens: you look back at the eleven rooms you just walked through and every piece of black fabric that looked a little dusty, a little cheap, a little like it came from a warehouse — it doesn't anymore. The gold didn't change the black. It just told you what the black actually was.

I found this extremely annoying. I mean that as the highest possible compliment.

Room 13.

Large room. White walls and ceiling. Dead center: a very large gold cubical assemblage. It is not subtle. It doesn't need to be.

Room 14.

A pendulum hangs from the ceiling — orb at the end, swinging toward a shape on the floor that is almost a circle, one edge absorbed into the wall as if the wall claimed it. All gold. It is not moving. You wait anyway.

Room 15.

An irregular gold grid covers the walls and ceiling. Light seems to be coming through it from somewhere that doesn't exist. In the center: a simple gold cube. The simplicity of the cube after the grid is either funny or devastating. Possibly both.

Room 16.

Smaller versions of the rounded reaching forms from room 5, now gold, sit on the floor framing a large black orb. The orb rests in a sheet of curved gold. All of it is mounted on the wall. The black orb in all that gold looks less like an absence now and more like a decision.

Room 17.

Two very large gold curved shapes. One on the wall. One on a black pedestal. Another pedestal: empty. The empty pedestal is the best thing in the room.

Room 18.

Large room, mostly white, a black stripe running just under the ceiling like a waterline. Black cubes throughout. At the back: a black rectangle with a gold cube suspended inside it. On the floor: gold. The entire floor is gold. You have been walking on black for a long time and now you are here and you don't want to move because the floor feels like it belongs to something and you are not that something.

Room 19.

Very small. All black — floor, walls, ceiling. In the center: a gold orb. Lines inset in the floor radiate outward from beneath it, like the floor cracked when it arrived, or like it's been there so long the floor gave way around it. Strategic lights hit the orb.

I stood there for a while.

Nineteen rooms and nobody told me.

I think that was correct.

I think if someone had told me I would have counted wrong.