Who are you if you are in fact no one, yet still someone?

“P is for what?” The man asked as he entered the room through the door marked, “P,” followed by some smeared, smudged ink.

And it was. . . another classroom. Unlike, say, the last one, the one he’d just left, this room, this one was clean. Possibly bleached levels of cleanliness, even.

There was a whiteboard at the front. It stretched from one end of the front wall all the way to the other.

A short ways back from the whiteboard was a shell of a podium, all cheap wood and flimsy metal.

And then, in front of that, there was three rows of desk, three desks to a row.

At the back, more lockers, more clean.

And then, ah, the windows. They were flaking, oily, rotting, and oh, yeah–cockroaches. That. The man stepped forward to the window, looked at the cockroaches, and then, out. Nothing. The class or whatever they used to build this stuff, it was entirely opaque.

The man smiled, despite himself. A game, at last. Ah. So what, what was this P thing. Maybe it wasn’t actually the name of the class at all. The man sat down where wall and lockers met, slouched, and tried to puzzle it out. It wasn’t like he was in a hurry. Right?

The windows. As far as the man carried, everything else was just as important as the windows. 1. He was in some sort of demented school. 2. They, whoever ran this place, they really didn’t want him out. So, ignore it all, focus on the windows. What are they saying?

He studied the things he’d written down. He looked back up at the whiteboard, and frowned. He’d almost expected that something would show up there, but, no.

On a hunch, the man gathered himself and rose up. He picked up a marker–red this time–and scrawled the symbols from the blackboard. And then, Something Happened.

He really couldn’t say. Was it a tremor in the floor, or perhaps a buzz in the air, tension on his arm hair. What was it? Everything and nothing?

He opened the door and walked out into the hallway.

Okay.

That was new.

This hallway previous, there’d been a mess of people but all so just. . . vague, maybe. They really didn’t register, not to the man. Now? An electric thrill ran up his spine.

He was free.

He slumped. Free from what and where to go?

Alas.