By 2018 he had been visiting the Cathedral as many times a week as he could for three years. It was thanks to him that its narthex had been fashioned with a mat with which he could wipe the soot of the sidewalk, subway and street off his shoes – though they always ended up lonely on the secondhand shoe rack he had bought two years ago either way – and thanks to him that the pews had, from the front row back, been furnished with a motley array of salvaged cushions (more than anything for the sake of completeness — no congregation would ever take advantage of them all). He had put a significant investment into the altar had over the years become overgrown with papercrafts in sundry colors, a display of flowers cut, bent and folded from two dimensions into three which had grown naturally from a single beginner effort planted on some bygone whim: a cluster of torn notebook pages worked into a rough flower vaguely resembling a lotus.
He didn't know why he couldn't simply move everything he owned to the Cathedral and live there — there was enough room on the altar alone to fit everything he owned, and often as he surveyed the great hall with its soaring arched ceiling and grand windows of uncharacteristically translucent one-tone glass he imagined well-stocked bookshelves, his bed and easy chair in the center of the elevated platform in the center of the nave, a makeshift workshop upon the altar, perhaps even a camp stove stationed in a distant corner out of sight… but the allure of that notion faded when he returned home to find everything in his flat undisturbed as he had left it, and even though it was outweighed with time by the desire to make the Cathedral entirely his own he felt in those detumescent moments a profound shame the root of which he was never quite able to grasp.
But the Cathedral was his. He had found it one day on the long walk back to his home nestled between two buildings where for years before there had only been an alley, hidden behind a deceptively simple façade of plain concrete; one that, despite its narrowness, seemed to force the two comparatively massive structures flanking it further apart than he remembered them being. On that day he had out of curiosity tried the heavy metal door, found it open, and found beyond the humble narthex a room of impossible breadth and dizzying size whose ceilings, seemingly scraping Heaven, were held aloft by stone columns nearly as thick as the alley on which he should have, if not for this dream-construct, been walking. When he found the next day that it hadn't moved or disappeared (and therefore had been no dream) he laid claim to it. For three years, nobody challenged his claim. The Cathedral was his.
As such, he treated his time in the Cathedral with reverence. Not a moment was wasted idle. He busied himself with study or craft or cleaning, pausing in the midst of whatever he was doing every few minutes to look about like an artist refreshing his memory before returning to a sketch. He had so memorized every inch of the Cathedral's interior that even the smallest irregularity — a pencil dropped on the floor, a paper flower displaced from the altar, an errant trick of the light — would literally startle him.
When one day he saw to his left beside the altar a small metal rod protruding from the wall, he screamed.
It seemed that he had teleported from his seat to the protrusion, and as if in a trance he reached out to examine it. There was nothing to suggest that it was riveted on; though it resembled a doorknob there was no trace of a door. Perhaps he himself had left it there one day, not thinking anything of it at the time. Perhaps it was merely a trick of the light, or perhaps it had been there all along and he had simply never noticed it before. He reached out and found to his horror that it was an object that his fingers could feel and wrap around. His fear mounted as, when he pushed it downward, it turned like a knob.
He turned the knob again. It remained there; it remained functional. His world narrowed, his breath quickened; the room around him seemed peripheral to the cold metal object in his hand. He barely noticed as the door was pushed open and fell shut behind him and only came back to his senses when he realized that he had stepped into near-complete darkness. When his eyes had adjusted to the change, he saw before him a sterile hallway. Its floor was covered in reflective tiles and dim light fixtures dotted its ceiling, but its walls were made of seamless white plastic; as he peered ahead, he realized that he could not see its end. He felt in his intuition a nagging sense of wrongness, a rising protest. He huffed and made his way briskly onward, looking only ahead. It was only the smoothness of the wall and the reflection cast upon it had caused the hallway to appear endless; after only a few minutes he found himself at a sharp right turn. In a few feet, he turned right again; after walking a distance that should have led him back into the Cathedral, the hallway took another right. He had stopped keeping track of how many times he had turned when at length he reached a dead end: a wall from which protruded a railing made from the same seamless white material.
Once again following his intuition, he pulled the bar; nothing happened. When he pushed it, the wall swung open to reveal another hallway perpendicular to the one in which he stood. To his left it continued with no end in sight, but to his right was a wall interrupted by a tall rectangular outline in which a door stood askew. He heard the rush of traffic and felt warm air waft through the crack. His eyelid twitched.
He pushed the door the rest of the way outward and found himself on a balcony, small enough to seem domestic, with a floor of rough invasive plastic grass in a sickening green. Beyond it and far below, he saw the urban sprawl beyond the southern edge of his city; buildings crawling close to the ground and vanishing towards faraway mountains. Resting on the coarse turf was an arrangement of variegated plastic pots of every possible size inhabited by juvenile plants, leaves still spattered with fat beads of water – and half-encircled by them at the far edge of the balcony an Asian man just past middle age stood, still slightly hunched, only now beginning to turn away from the stubby honeysuckle bush he had been watering to survey the intruder.
They stood for a few moments and stared at each other before the gardener, seemingly lowering his guard, set down his watering can and nodded.
"What's all this?" The vigor with which he gestured at his surroundings surprised him, but his visible scorn was no mistake.
The gardener blinked. "My balcony," he replied. He seemed uncertain.
"Yours?"
There was no reply.
"Three years, I've been here. Three years. And you?"
"Three, yes. I have been here three years." The gardener gestured at the saplings around him. "Growing for three years."
"Then why haven't I seen you? Where are you coming in from?"
"Ah — Stenton and Durard."
He didn't recognize those streets, though it would've made little difference if he had. He remained tense, brow furrowed in bemusement. He thought for a moment of pushing the old man over the balcony's railing, or of pulling him into the doorway and slamming the great plastic door shut on his neck; he thought of taking the pots one by one and throwing them onto the street below, of uprooting the mat of disgusting ersatz grass. He did not see the man before him, not truly — all he could think of now was the Cathedral, his Cathedral, and the tiny metal blemish in the wall which had uncovered this whole disaster, and his cursed implacable curiosity.
He left the gardener mid-sentence and scrabbled at the smooth plastic of the door in search of a handle before pushing it further outward and starting, back hunched, down the hallway.
The door remained in the wall beside the altar — it was no dream. The Cathedral began in his mind to mock him. Even in the midst of folding flowers to distract himself from the Asian man and his plants he started at the sight of his own hair in the corner of his eye, expecting every unforeseen noise to herald the door swinging open and a whole cadre of interlopers flooding in and making themselves comfortable, filling every corner of the nave and sleeping on the pews and taking his flowerbed apart. When he entered the narthex he imagined the shoerack overflowing with filthy shoes laid haphazardly over each other — which led to a half-remembered glimpse of the Asian man's own shoes, encrusted with potting soil and mud and the three years of soot that had undoubtedly accumulated on every bastard inch of the fake grass's surface area. He saw that man more in his mind's eye than he had in reality, but he came to detest him more than he had ever hated or loved anyone he had known.
But despite all this, he began to visit the Cathedral more often than usual. He called off work and spent entire days feverishly making paper bloom, cutting and taping strips of newsprint into chains to be draped around the pillars, and, when he tired of flowers, folding with the focus of an artist paper airplanes to be thrown at the walls and forgotten. He even began to sleep in the Cathedral — but he always dreamed of the Asian man, and of thick green leaves sporting a wretched waxy sheen growing from tangled vines constricting and grasping and tearing.
On a frosty morning five weeks after his encounter with the gardener, he rented the cheapest truck he could find and dismantled all of the furniture he owned that could be dismantled, dragging it into the truck all by himself. The doorway of the Cathedral proved to be too narrow for his desk, so he left it on the curb; the same went for his two favorite chairs and his oldest bookshelf. He spent the rest of the day silently reassembling everything he had taken apart at the spots where he had once dreamed of placing them when he had thought himself to be the Cathedral's sole steward, taking the time to arrange his books and trinkets in the same way as he had in his flat — save for those which had been on the sacrificed bookshelf, which were simply placed behind the screen on the altar. When this was done, he stood in the center of the nave and surveyed his work before realizing he had forgotten to buy a camp stove.
It was late at night when he returned with the stove, a spare can of butane, a saucepan, a can opener, and enough food to last him three days. He had walked for blocks with the bag of cans on his shoulder, and as he placed the haul in the corner he had in his imagination reserved for it he found that his left arm was pale and tingling. He read the poorly-translated instructions that had come with the stove and loaded it with butane, then emptied a weighty can of collard greens into the saucepan and swirled it until the sludge began to bubble. When it steamed and began to look palatable, he found that in his haste he had forgotten to pack any utensils; he placed the saucepan on the floor and, for the first time in five weeks, took account of his surroundings in that innocent way he had before the intrusion of the doorknob.
His eyes passed over the altar, now fully overgrown with his flowers; he admired the six mighty columns and the multiple lengths of paper chains that were now wrapped around them; he mused at the windows, darkened by the night but still somehow admitting the same amount of light; but when his eyes migrated upward to the arches his chest caved and his skin rippled with terrified gooseflesh. The intersecting apices of each arch had began to bud.
Transfixed, he backed into the stove, not noticing that his shoe had caught alight on its still-burning flame until the fire climbed up his right pant leg. He yelped and batted at the flames but, noticing motion on the ceiling, immediately turned his attention back upward — and as the floor around his feet ignited and the cans of butane exploded and sent tiny fragments of shrapnel into his back the buds sank and fattened and began to unfurl. The conflagration spread as if the Cathedral itself had been constructed out of paper, climbing the walls and covering meters of ground and pouncing on the paper flowers on the altar, and as he finally came to his senses and leaped for the door the buds had fully bloomed into a row of extravagant chandeliers taller and wider than Christmas trees whose crystals mockingly refracted the roaring wreck below.
By the time he had managed to extinguish the fire engulfing his clothing, the cuts and burns covering his body had begun to sting. He stood with a grimace, then looked over his shoulder to find an empty alleyway.
He leaned against the window of the bus, letting his head bounce against the glass, and closed his eyes. Behind him two friends spoke in a language he recognized but couldn't understand, a tongue reminiscent in its guttural consonants and warm, soft vowels of some foreign vine-like script. Their tone rose and fell, they laughed; their dialect, a hatchling pidgin, rolled over loanwords and borrowed interjections like a river over stones. And though through these cracks he could divine the vague shape of their discussion, its meaning would always elude him.