Theodore hit the sack sore that night. Lying there in the darkness, an overwhelming drowsiness he hadn’t experienced in over seven years overtook him as he felt himself fading away with dissipating thoughts. There was a time, he recollected, when he didn’t know how the world worked. He didn't know how to love or what the word even meant. All there were were people who placed importance on materialistic and superficial things. They told him to become great one day according to their standards. They implicitly or explicitly told him you should get into a top tier university, become wealthy, earn the highest grades in your class, and more, all for the wrong reasons. It wore him down. He didn’t know why at the time. He only felt monstrous, inhuman, wishing for the destruction of others for the pain they have caused him. It filled him with endless holes.

All he knew was that he felt very lucky back then, meeting a very special student back when he taught at Gillette High School. If only that student was still here today.

Theodore sat crisscrossed in the white room as usual. The individual walked in.

Both smiling, Theodore and the individual did their secret handshake. Slap, slap, pound, clap, L, checkmark. Absolutely thrilled by their success, the individual waved their hands with plentiful pizzazz. A ten-story marble pagoda dazzling in neon resurrected from the ground up. Beneath, a rock garden exhibited circular flows, the periphery accessorized by trimmed bushes and Japanese maple.

“How about now?” the individual asked.

“It’s too colorful.”

The individual rolled their eyes. They gestured and waved to their surroundings as if saying, “Hello? The whole room is white. Don’t you like it when there’s some color?”

“You asked if I like it,” Theodore stated.

The individual jumped topics. “Yesterday, I got second in my dance competition.”

“Paris?”

“I had to wake up at 7 am and didn’t get back home until 3 in the morning.”

Theodore blinked in astonishment.

“Yep. But it was worth it.”

“How much sleep did you get?”

“I don’t know yet.”

“You don’t know yet?”

“You wanna see me dance?”

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“Oh. Okay.”

With even more pizzazz than what Theodore thought possible, pizzazzing so much pizzazz that left him pizzazzless, the white room morphed into two parts. Theodore found himself in the dark audience while the individual now stood on a bright stage in a crimson tutu. Kitri’s variation sounded throughout the auditorium. The performance was underway.

Theodore gaped in awe, unable to holistically comprehend the immense physicality behind the elegance that unfolded before him. The spinny things and bendy things were by far the most eye-catching. In each and every maneuver hid a purpose that naturally flowed to the next. Theodore looked on, wonderstruck.

When the three-minute-long interpretation ended, Theodore had summoned a whole crowd to fill in the empty rows in the audience. Thus, together, he and the rest got up from their seats, roaring with applause as the individual bowed in gratitude. Changing back into street clothes, the individual bounded down the stage. “Bravo!” the whole crowd praised in unison like one gigantic organism. Both Theodore and the individual stared at each other in perplexity. In the crowd were hundreds of Theodores, all of their attention focused on the individual. It turns out that creating people in this dream world, or in the white room, whatever you prefer to call it, is extremely mentally demanding compared to spawning inanimate objects, especially on a larger scale. So instead of creating a unique person to fill in each of the hundreds of seats, Theodore auto filled it with doppelgangers of himself by accident.

“Sorry,” they all apologized simultaneously before each Theodore vanished one by one, until only the original Theodore remained.

“Anyway, back to my building,” the individual happily concluded. The theater reverted into the white room. The pagoda resurrected from the ground up once more. The rock garden traced out smooth flows in the gravel. And the Japanese maple trees matured in merely a matter of seconds.

Theodore patiently observed as the individual tried new ideas, implementing some while discarding others. Occasionally, they would ask Theodore for his opinion, to which he would respond with unreserved honesty.

“Do you think the orchard looks nice?” the individual would ask.

“The gazebo looks cramped with all the orange trees surrounding it. Why don’t you put it in the grassy field over there?” Theodore would propose.

The individual continued polishing and refining. By the time the individual had added an additional river, an open grassfield, an orchard with a gazebo, a koi pond, and a few walkways to navigate between each of these attractions, the sun had fully risen.

Theodore shot upright, sitting on his bed, grinning from ear to ear. Over the last few days, the dreams in the white room were something he now looked forward to every night. Undergoing a weeklong endeavor of bringing an outdoor zen space into fruition, they had delved into many other subjects over the period. One day they spent some time playing with balloons, altering their voices into annoying, high-pitched squeals with helium before setting up an experiment to calculate the amount of static charge one could generate through rubbing surfaces on other objects such as a dry wool rag. Another day Theodore showed the individual how to make their own sandwich (not some homemade PB&Js but ones you’d actually purchase at a sandwich shop). Providing a plethora of ingredients, the two were left to their own creative devices. Not surprisingly, Theodore woke up hungry that morning, performing exceptionally well at work that day, the artisanal craft of sandwich-making lucidly imprinted in his mind, each step methodically and clearly laid out upon customer orders.

He had stopped questioning the nature of these dreams altogether. Where did they come from? Why did they happen? None of it mattered. He just felt happy.

Theodore rubbed his crusty eyes as he heard a melodic jingle chiming from his phone. He almost forgot. It was a reminder: Onsite interview at Gillette High School today! Don’t be late you bum.