Merrylander sat in the middle of the Vestibule, motionless. Around her one hundred and twenty-three Merrylanders puttered about; performing chores and duties with singular determination. A frail Merrylander stood in the farthest corner, organizing the silverware drawer of the eating area. A young Merrylander, fresh and plump with the last remnants of baby fat walked to and fro with a baby in her arms. This baby Merrylander squealed and coughed in a haze of half-awareness.

One hundred and twenty-three Merrylanders; each of a different age. Merrylander, our Merrylander, sat as a stranger among them. In thirty-six days, she reasoned, there would be one-hundred and twenty-four Merrylanders. And in another year, there would be one-hundred and twenty-five; perhaps. How long would she live? she had wondered, forty-one Merrylanders ago.

Of course other questions had been asked by Merrylander long ago. When there were only two Merrylanders, she asked what’s going on here? When younger Merrylanders succeeded older Merrylanders, our Merrylander had wondered to herself just what did that mean? And when our Merrylander had opened her eyes in the Vestibule for the very first time, she had wondered aloud: Where am I? And later: why am I unable to leave?

But as the room filled with her kind, these questions became less and less important. To see her lifeline drawn around her in pulsing, breathing relief brought Merrylander a sort of grim fascination. And so, over time and plurality, Merrylander became an observer on the sidelines of her existence; watching time’s scars emerge and disappear.

*           *           *

Thirty-six days later, Merrylander awoke to find a one hundred and twenty-fourth Merrylander in the Vestibule.

Our Merrylander had taken to sleeping in her chair. It was large and overstuffed and the sort of place a person could just drift in and out of consciousness on a warm sunny summer afternoon. After one hundred and now-twenty four Merrylanders, the first one had seen little point in leaving her comfortable observational perch.

The new Merrylander, the one hundred and twenty fourth Merrylander, sat motionless on the edge the first Merrylander’s bed. To save space, the architect of the Vestibule had recessed the bed into the wall, and so this new Merrylander sat in the overhang’s deep shadows. Only her face, sharply etched by time was visible to the first Merrylander. This new-yet very old Merrylander sat motionless on the bed, watching our Merrylander intently.

Until now the other Merrylanders had ignored the first. They walked around her, moved to avoid her, but never made eye contact nor interacted with her in any meaningful way. This had been fine by the first Merrylander, who had no interest in the others beyond observation. She therefore found this new Merrylander’s interest in her disquieting.

Merrylander stood up, perhaps for the first time in decades, and walked toward the new inhabitant. This new Merrylander seemed to look through her, and it wasn’t until our Merrylander moved to sidestep a scampering Merrylander of age three that our Merrylander realized that the newcomer’s gaze was not fixed on her, but on the chair.

Each Merrylander had a purpose, the first had noticed. Over the years our Merrylander had realized that each new Merrylander that appeared in the Vestibule would engage herself in whatever activity had or would possibly consume that particular Merrylander during that particular moment of Merrylander’s past or future. Seven year old Merrylander did nothing but draw trees with a box of crayons. Eighteen year old Merrylander listened to music and danced. Merrylander age thirty-three spent a good deal of her time sexually gratifying herself. The more matronly Merrylanders of fifty-two through sixty-seven took turns breaking from their individual pursuits to shepherd the younger Merrylanders away from thirty-three. Indeed, most of the older Merrylanders took particular interest in the child Merrylanders; watching them with fondness and occasionally playing games with them.

This new Merrylander, however, didn’t seem to have a purpose or an activity. In fact, although this new Merrylander seemed to be older than any of the other Merrylanders, she took no interest in the activities of the children. If anything, they seemed to depress her.

For the first seven days after her arrival, she spent all of her time studying the chair in the center of the Vestibule. Her attention singularly fixated on it: touching it, prodding it with her time-twisted fingers.

Several weeks of this and our Merrylander had given up trying to understand this new one. She sat in the chair almost out of stubbornness now, and did her best to ignore the newcomer as she hovered about. But as time wore on, this newest Merrylander became more visibly agitated. She seemed to want desperately to sit in the chair. She would point at it, move very very close to it, her hands brushing the armrests.

And so, after three weeks our first Merrylander relented. The newest, yet very very old Merrylander had been particularly anxious that day, nearly frantic. She had spent the entire day cautiously approaching the chair in the same fashion as a cat prepares to jump into a counter top. This so bothered our Merrylander that she sprang from the chair quite rapidly, her nerves twanging with burnt irritation.

The elder Merrylander strode quickly past the first Merrylander and immediately dropped herself into the chair. She reached a bent finger towards an armrest and, much to the first Merrylander’s surprise, flipped open a small panel.

She peered over chair. Inside the armrest was a mass of orange wires and metal coils, all glistening with frost that drifted out of the armrest in lazy swirls of steam. The elderly Merrylander pulled from her pockets several small tools; like those of a watchmaker. The first Merrylander watched her elder counterpart as she worked.

The first Merrylander had no way of telling time; an irony that was not lost on her. She could count days based on when she fell asleep and based on her body’s general rhythms. She counted the years based on the appearance of each new Merrylander, which always seemed to coincide with her count of 365 days. But she could never be any more precise than that. Had her circumstances been otherwise, she would have noted that only three hours and fifty-seven minutes had passed when everything seemed to bleep.

This bleep was followed by a second, more stomach-churning bleep.

Then there was the feeling of one-hundred and twenty-four metal train-cars thundering together at a rail-stop. The Vestibule shook violently now, and the walls began to rotate. Faster and faster, blurring white as they melted away.

One by one the Merrylanders in the room began to fade. Thin wisps of vague colors pulled apart like spun sugar until only the first and the last Merrylanders remained. And the floor around the chair became hot; very hot.

Terror gripped the first Merrylander as her counterparts in time disappeared one by one. She wanted desperately to press her back into a corner and cover her eyes, but all around her the walls flew at great speeds, and the room grew so bright that she wondered if covering her eyes would do anything at all.

Wind from the spinning walls and the shimmering heat whipped at the first Merrylander as she tried to maintain her balance. The elder Merrylander sat, seemingly unaware of what was transpiring around her. Her eyes locked on a small screen that had folded discretely out from the other armrest. As the first Merrylander clawed at the back of the chair for support, she saw herself on the screen as she was right now.

But something was wrong. The picture was moving backwards, faster and faster, like a film played in reverse. Seconds fell away into minutes and then days into years. And when the film finally slowed, dropping back to minutes and then seconds, it displayed an image of such serenity as to throw the current chaos of the Vestibule into stark contrast. On the screen sat Merrylander; our Merrylander. The very first Merrylander. She was alone. She was asleep.

The room spun faster now, fire and light and heat and sound pummeled our Merrylander as she tried desperately to keep her eyes open, to understand what the eldest Merrylander was watching. Her hands dug into the soft fabric of the chair-back and pulled herself close. She was close enough now to see a small numerical display in the lower right-hand corner of the screen. And as the image of the first Merrylander sat sleeping on the screen in the very same chair that the eldest Merrylander currently occupied, our Merrylander watched the number tick down to zero.

The very last thing that the two Merrylanders saw on the screen lasted one tenth of one tenth of a second. On the screen in the armrest of the chair flashed the image of themselves, the eldest seated and the first standing behind her. They were watching themselves on a screen stretching to infinity as the Vestibule spun around them. And the numerical display in the lower right-hand corner ticked forward by one tenth of one tenth of a second.

Merrylander awoke. She found herself in a large, overstuffed chair in the center of a cylindrical metal room. She as alone. And she she wondered, aloud, how she had gotten there.

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