Paul Travels to Venice Through the Portable Door

Paul Carpenter’s first journey through the J.W. Wells portable door turns an obscure sheet of plastic into a working passage from the office to Venice. The scene’s decisive shift is not simply that Paul reaches another city: he must follow a precise set of instructions, give the door a destination, and trust an object whose operation his body seems to recognize before his conscious memory does.

The object and its instructions

After Sophie Pettingell leaves, Paul pushes back from his chair, tired of spreadsheets, and remembers that the drawer held more than beans. He takes out a small cardboard tube and a plastic sheet. The sheet seems vaguely familiar, though he cannot initially say why; he recalls that Rosie had mentioned instructions, but has not seen them. Unrolling the sheet releases a thin slip of paper whose tiny print becomes legible when he holds it close. Its heading identifies it as the J.W. Wells portable door, with patent numbers dated 15 August 1872 and 23 February 1875. Paul doubts the very idea of such a device and wonders what use a portable door could have.

The instructions describe a practical sequence rather than an incantation. Paul is told to remove the door from its tube, spread it on a flat surface, smooth away wrinkles, and make a careful mental note of the desired arrival. He must lift it by its top corners, press it flat against a wall until it adheres, smooth it again, then turn the handle half a turn to the left and apply even pressure. A weight should hold the opened door ajar; each visit should, if possible, last no more than one hour of observed time. The instructions also specify how to remove and store the door, including keeping it in its container and away from extreme heat or cold. Their clipped, product-manual precision makes the impossible device sound like ordinary equipment, while the warnings hint that its effects depend on careful handling.

Recognition and the threshold

Before acting, Paul experiences the urge to use the sheet as an uncomfortable physical compulsion. He feels jumpy, restless, hungry and overfull at once; his hands shake, and his mouth feels salty and furry. He understands that these sensations will stop as soon as he presses the sheet to a wall. The compulsion is linked to the object’s half-remembered familiarity, like a craving associated with something forbidden. Although he recognizes this as another supernatural intrusion, he stands up and follows the instructions.

On the desktop, the sheet now has two tiny keyholes, each bordered by a baroque escutcheon above and below the doorknob. When Paul presses it to the wall, it sticks as if held by magnets. He smooths small wrinkles and bulges with the back of his hand, brushing in a herringbone pattern. The sheet seems to grow into a full-sized door; its handle becomes polished brass, cold and smooth beneath his fingertip. The transformation makes the instructions’ insistence on flatness and freedom from wrinkles more than cosmetic: the material is changing from a printed sheet into something with the presence and weight of a door.

The manual recommends a suitable object to keep the door open. Paul uses the long stapler, which has appeared on the desk despite having been in reception that morning. He picks it up, turns the handle, and the door opens. At that moment it gains weight, and its frame, lintel, and panel mouldings stand out in relief. What had looked like a sheet now unmistakably functions as a door. The stapler is not incidental office clutter: it becomes the practical support that lets Paul leave the passage open while he crosses it.

Choosing a destination

Beyond the open door Paul sees only darkness and shadows, which might be the computer bay with its lights off and curtains drawn. He is uneasy, but the prospect of the physical symptoms returning makes stopping feel impossible. He checks his watch, which reads 01:09:56, opens the door farther, and wedges the long stapler against it. The instructions require him to form a clear idea of his destination. At first he can think of nowhere he particularly wants to go. His thoughts turn to Sophie and his sense that, in a life where all places seem much the same, she is the one thing that gives a place meaning. Given a choice, he has always fancied seeing Venice, and that is where he directs the door.

This choice makes the journey more than an accidental step into the dark. Paul does not know whether the doorway will lead nowhere or simply into the office’s computer bay, but the instruction to imagine an arrival gives him a way to choose. Venice emerges as a modest, personal preference rather than a calculated destination. The device’s operation therefore joins a prescribed procedure to an act of intention: the door supplies the means, while Paul’s mental picture supplies where he hopes to arrive.

Arrival in Venice

Paul walks through and catches his foot in a coil of rope, narrowly avoiding a fall into a canal. Behind him, set into a crumbling red-brick wall, the door remains slightly ajar with the stapler wedged in it. A theatre poster beside it is in Italian. When he turns, he sees the canal, the rope, and a small motor boat bobbing on the green water. Three Japanese women walk past talking rapidly, followed by a businessman in an expensive-looking suit. A yellow fingerboard on an old building points toward Piazza S Marco. These details establish the destination through ordinary, specific surroundings rather than explanation: the portable threshold has delivered him to Venice, not to the office bay he feared might lie beyond it.

The arrival also answers the bodily crisis that drove Paul to act. He feels better at once: his hands no longer shake, and the salty taste and restless itch are gone. Yet the watch still reads 01:09:56. A clock high on a nearby church shows ten past one. Paul takes the watch’s unchanged reading as evidence that it has stopped; the scene leaves its relation to the journey unexplained. The contrast between the watch and the church clock nevertheless makes time part of the experience, while the manual’s reference to observed time gains a new, unresolved significance. Paul has crossed into another city, but the instrument he carried gives no sign that time has moved forward.