Through bleary eyes, Luguentz Dort gazed at the hazy silver sky above him. His mind felt at peace, somehow, like a great burden had been lifted from it. His body, however…that was a different story. Why was he so uncomfortable? He rolled to his side, thinking that he had simply wound up lying on a particularly hard part of his mattress, but doing this did not make him any more comfortable.
Luguentz was also feeling a bit bothered by the inexplicably bright light. Why would his hotel room have the lights on, anyway? He opened his eyes wider, half-expecting a teammate to be standing at the foot of his bed, smiling in triumph at having executed some sort of perfect practical joke. But what he saw wasn’t a teammate. He wasn’t even in his room anymore. It was like nothing he had ever seen before.
Sandy-colored marble was underneath him; the unyielding stone explained his bodily discomfort. Far above him was a lightly undulating layer of shimmering gray clouds, illuminated by a golden sun that made the entire sky look like it was made out of liquid gold and silver. Tall cathedral-style windows, set in the stone walls, lent a sense of grandeur to it all.
Luguentz got to his feet, dimly aware that he was completely naked but not minding it too much. There was nobody else around to observe his nudity, anyway. He just needed to figure out where he was and then figure out how to leave.
But as he walked along that stone-walled, silver-skied hall which never seemed to come to an end, he realized that he didn’t actually want to leave. There was a painful memory in his mind, struggling to come to the surface of his consciousness, but the pervasive calmness of this mysterious place was acting as a mental shield, diminishing his negative thoughts while reinforcing the positive ones. A costly mistake at the end of an important game of basketball, that was all he could remember before the memory was quashed again by the strength of his contentedness.
If he was dreaming, he was perfectly fine with never returning to the waking world ever again.
In time he came to an ornate fountain along the wall. A pleasant stream of water burbled into a half-moon-shaped pool whose bottom was a beautiful cobalt-hued mosaic. Luguentz sat at the edge of the pool, cupped some of the water in his hands, and drank. The calming effect of the hall seemed to be magnified as the clear water flowed down his throat. He closed his eyes in bliss.
“An unlikely visitor, but a welcome one,” said an unexpected, but gentle, voice. Luguentz opened his eyes and saw a white-robed man standing near the fountain. “Here is your complementary robe.”
Luguentz took the robe that the man held out to him. When he put it on, he was amazed by the otherworldly softness of the material. But even more amazing was the fact that he had encountered another person. This entire time, he had assumed that the place he was in was inhabited only by him. “What’s going on?” he asked, noting that the question came out harsher than he felt.
“You’re in the Hall of the Thirty Point Scorers.”
“Thirty points? Like in basketball?”
The man laughed airily. The sound intermingled with the splashing of the fountain’s water. “Yes, like in basketball. NBA basketball, to be specific.”
The banished thought was resurfacing in Luguentz’s mind, but he found its presence to not be as disagreeable as he expected. “I cost my team the game,” he said simply.
“To me, scoring thirty points in an NBA game is a more worthy accomplishment than all the playoff victories and championship rings in the world,” said the man. “Think, Luguentz. Would your team have been in any position at all to win the game had you not contributed your thirty points?”
“No. We would have been blown out,” Luguentz replied. His career as a professional basketball player seemed so far away as to be totally meaningless. “Is this real?”
“Very real,” answered the man, rapping his knuckles on the stone ornamentation of the fountain to prove his point. “Where exactly it resides in relation to known mortal locales such as the solar system and the galaxy cluster, I’m not exactly sure. The Overseers haven’t deemed it necessary to bestow that information to me, and I am not in a position to argue with them. Not since the last guy somehow willed dozens of beautiful, yet unauthorized, females into existence through the power of his thought.”
“I won’t do that,” Luguentz promised. At that moment, he desired solitude and calm. Maybe another drink from the fountain’s clear waters. Not the touch of a woman. Never that. “Who are you, anyway?”
“I am Carlos Delfino, appointed Guardian of the Hall. Stay here as long as you wish, Luguentz. The Hall takes care of its own.”
Carlos turned and walked away. Luguentz watched him recede into the distance, then relaxed against the stone wall. He could feel his soul, injured by the various trials of life, being mended. He would never leave.