The sound did not so much wake me as it presented itself. It was a perfect, unwavering tone, a single, sterile frequency that sliced through the morning’s quiet. My hand, acting on instinct, slapped the space where the alarm clock should have been. Instead of the familiar plastic and the satisfying click of the snooze button, my palm met a smooth, cool, unyielding surface. I opened my eyes. On the nightstand sat a perfect, white cube. It was matte, seamless, and utterly devoid of features. The sound stopped as if it had never been.
I sat up, a slow, creaking motion that felt oddly loud in the sudden silence. The lamp on the nightstand was also a cube. The book I’d been reading, a cube. My glass of water, a cube. A peculiar and unflappable calm settled over me. This was absurd, of course, but it was a methodical, almost elegant absurdity. There was a certain aesthetic commitment to it that I felt I had to respect.
I swung my legs over the side of what I knew to be my bed. The bed, a sprawling collection of memory foam, tangled sheets, and mismatched pillows, was now a single, enormous white cuboid. It was neither soft nor hard, but simply… present. My feet touched the floor, and I looked around. Everything, and I do mean everything, had been replaced. The worn leather armchair in the corner, with its deep impressions molded to the shape of my body over years of idle contemplation, was a cube. The towering, precarious stacks of books and magazines I’d always meant to sort through were now neat, orderly piles of identical white cubes.
I walked to the kitchen, a journey through a minimalist art installation that was once my cluttered life. A noble ambition propelled me: coffee. The coffee maker, a gleaming chrome machine I’d spent a ridiculous sum on, was now a cube. The bag of artisanal beans from some far-flung mountain? A cube. The mug, a chipped ceramic thing a former lover had made, its handle a testament to her charming incompetence with pottery? You guessed it. A cube. I held the mug-cube in my hand. It had the same approximate weight and size as the original, but it was a soulless placeholder. The chip was gone. The memory was gone. It was a perfect object, and therefore, perfectly useless.
This, I thought, is a philosophical problem dressed up as an interior design nightmare. Each object had been stripped of its function, its history, its very identity, and replaced with a pure, platonic form. A form that did nothing but occupy space. I couldn’t make coffee. I couldn’t get dressed, as my closet was now a geometric marvel of stacked, cubical clothes. I couldn’t even brush my teeth. The toothbrush was a small, oblong cube that offered no possibility of dental hygiene.
The irony was not lost on me. For years, I had cultivated a life of carefully chosen things. The vintage watch, the first-edition books, the hand-thrown pottery. I had mistaken my collection for a personality. I had believed the narrative of my possessions constituted the narrative of myself. Now, my narrative was a blank page. A blank cube.
It was in the bathroom that the joke soured. I went to face the man who was experiencing this geometric apocalypse, to see the look of wry amusement I presumed would be in his eyes. But the mirror, that tarnished silver-backed glass that had shown me every bad haircut and every sleepless night, was gone. In its place, mounted to the wall, was a flat, white cube. It reflected nothing. It absorbed the light. I held my hand up to it, and my hand was simply a hand in a room, not a hand in a room and a hand in a mirror. The feedback loop was broken.
For the first time, I felt a tremor of something other than detached curiosity. A cold, smooth-surfaced panic. The objects, I could live without. They were external, arbitrary. But my reflection? That felt like a part of me. It was the objective proof of my existence, the constant, silent witness. Without it, the “I” who was observing all this felt suddenly untethered, a mere consciousness floating in a white, cubic void. Who are you when nothing and no one can show you what you look like?
I slid down the wall and sat on the floor, the cube that was once a bathmat cool beneath me. The silence of the apartment was absolute. There were no humming appliances, no ticking clocks. There was only the low hum of my own blood in my ears. I looked at the room, at this gallery of nothingness. I had lost everything, and in doing so, I had been handed a terrible and profound freedom.
Slowly, an idea began to form. I picked up a small cube—perhaps it was a bar of soap, perhaps a paperweight—and placed it on a larger one that might have been the laundry hamper. I had created a new object. A cube on a cube. It was meaningless, yes, but the arrangement was mine. The intent was mine. I took another and placed it alongside the first. I was building. I was creating a new system, my own arbitrary order out of the absolute order that had been imposed on me.
I looked at my hands, at the intricate map of lines on my palms. They remained. They were not cubes. And with them, I could build. I could stack the emptiness into something new. The world had been wiped clean, leaving only the blank page and the architect of its ruin and its reconstruction. Me. The shape of things had been taken away, but the power to give them shape, I realized, had been mine all along.