The Room of North

The great elephant boss slammed his heavy hand on the table of negotiations in the Room of North. Suddenly, a breeze swept the room causing every skeleton to crumble. Perhaps of their own accord, or simply due to sheer force, everyone nodded their skully heads in agreement. The boss' demands were absolute. Those who could not stand the pressure had to succumb pronto. Falling apart, one bone after another, small echoes distantly repeated shattered the otherwise perfect silence.

 

It was always days like this one. Cold, breezy, unfriendly. Sitting — one next to each other, they were spaced apart so that each of them could tell the reactions of the associate on the opposite side. But not the boss. No one was allowed to see the boss. Crackling hands, sniffing noses, occasionally a cough to remind of the terrible weather outside, everyone was waiting for the boss to begin the negotiations. They kept waiting in a newly afforded silence. And, surely, they must have waited for a long time, but -- luckily for them, they couldn’t tell a moment from an eon.

They were all dead after all.

The matter was pressing. They had to agree on everything and nothing, and the veracity of nothingness in comparison to eternity. The great elephant boss disagreed with himself and this caused a huge controversy at first. But since he was the boss, no one was allowed to disagree with him.

 

Each of the skeletons was allowed one constructive question and one misleading question; but they had to conceal them so that the boss could not tell which is which. This was designed so that all decisions of the boss could be taken in a sort of democracy, although his regime was that of an absolute autocracy.

The first skeleton raised his skeletal finger and while pointing at the ceiling, asked: ‘Is this ceiling facing North or South?’

All skeletons remained silent and confused, until the boss broke the silence with his deep and vociferous voice. Laughing he pointed to the same ceiling and said: ‘It must be North! Since we are in the North Room, the ceiling points North!’

The skeleton, not allowed to answer his own question, moved on to his second question. ‘If one person has only two good choices, and another person has three bad choices, which person would you consider to be more free?’

The boss took some time to respond to this, before admitting that it was a difficult question to answer. Apparently, three is larger than two and he fancied going with that option, since more choices led to more freedom. But the opposite could also very well be true: Fewer options could very well be a beneficial thing towards freedom. Eventually the boss decided to break the skeleton apart, because the question was unanswerable. And the boss absolutely despised questions that no one can answer.

The second skeleton moved to the front, and muttered his first question: ‘If we have two laughing oranges, and one of them is rotten, which one is truly happy?’

The great elephant boss took no time to respond to this. The fresh orange was the happy orange, the other one was simply laughing out of necessity and spite. There is no happiness in rot and decay.

The boss’ answer saddened the skeleton, which was already way past its prime. Its remains were so old that it could no longer remember whether it was a boy, or a girl,  once upon a time. He thought it was a boy, because at nights he could dream of playing hide and seek with the other boys in a distant town. He let a feint sigh. When these bones were on human muscle it must have felt brilliant to move about with such animal energy. Despaired, it went on to ask its second and last question.

‘Considering rot, is rot a bad thing when you take into account that penicillium rot is a product of it?’

The boss, confused and angered by the inappropriate manner of the skeleton, removed one of the ribs and broke it in two. He then pointed his finger towards the last skeleton and reminded that a decision had to be made this very night. This matter could not be delayed any longer, because the end of the world was coming.

The third and last skeleton stepped up and questioned: ‘My friend is my friend and your enemy is your enemy. This is the way of things, this is the way of cosmos. Correct?’

The boss, seeing nothing wrong or mischievous about this question, nodded along, impressed by the immaculate reasoning of the skeleton.

‘If that is so, following the same rule of relativity, this is the Room of North and consequently there is another team holding decisions in a Room of South’, the skeleton said. ‘It is therefore imperative to understand that whatever decisions will be taken here tonight will be local and partial, and might be opposite or even inconsequential to any other party coming to meaningful political decisions elsewhere. Correct?’

The great elephant boss destroyed the last skeleton, not because the question was hard, but because the answer implied further questions or an answer by the skeleton; something which was not allowed.

He then proceeded to bang his elephantine head on the wall, splitting the fake tapestry into two. From the other side, he could see the Mirror of the Universe, the world in which everyone lived. He opened the door and headed south, to reconvene discussions with a new set of skeletons in the Room of South.

This post was originally published as a short piece in early 2008. It was re-edited in August 2011.

This original work by Amadeus In Denial is licensed under a Creative Commons (Attribution Non-Commercial Share-Alike 3.0) License. All work created 2006-2011.

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