The wash was dry the way it always is, gravel grinding under my boots with that honest crunch that tells you exactly where you stand and how alone you are, and the smell of sun-baked mesquite hung low and sour, sharp enough to cut through the sweat and dust caked on me, grease still black under my fingernails from fixing the Jeep that morning because machines, like people, fail most often when you rely on them.

The door stood in the middle of the wash as if it had lost its way. No wall. No tracks. No explanation. Just a slab of wood on rusted hinges, planted upright among cobbles that hadn’t been disturbed in decades. The desert does not do props. Everything here earns its place or gets erased. This thing had not earned anything.

I walked around it once, then again, boots scraping rock, my shadow crossing its surface and sliding off as if the light itself was uncertain what to do. I could not shake the sense that the universe had miscounted. Not an intrusion, not a miracle. A clerical error. As if reality, like any long-running system, occasionally forgets to clean up after itself.

It occurred to me that this might not be a door but one door, an element in a set too large to visualize. Somewhere, perhaps everywhere, other doors stood in other washes, other deserts, other worlds, all identical, all unnecessary. The thought made my stomach tighten. Not fear. Something colder. The unease you get when a number refuses to resolve.

I examined it the way I’d examine a fault line. The wood was old but not rotten. Sun-checked. Real. The hinges were iron and uselessly heavy, overbuilt for a purpose that had never existed. When I held my hand close to the surface, the heat radiating off it was uneven. Light bent subtly at the edges, not enough to see unless you were looking for it, like the way air warps above hot stone. This wasn’t a trick of exhaustion. I checked twice.

When I opened it, there was no space behind it. Not darkness. Not emptiness. No measurable volume at all. The far side did not recede. It simply failed to be there. My eyes tried to focus and found nothing to focus on. The door did not open into nowhere. It opened onto a boundary condition. A place where the equations stop because the variable is undefined.

Light struck the opening and did not pass through. It didn’t reflect either. It behaved the way sound does at altitude: present, diminished, unwilling. I tossed a pebble through. It did not fall. It did not vanish. It ceased to be describable. I waited for a sound. There was none.

The conclusion, dull and unavoidable, was that the door was not an entrance. It was a remainder. Evidence that the universe, for all its pretensions, is not a closed system. That memory leaks. That structure frays.

I closed the door. It shut cleanly, the latch clicking with mechanical confidence, which I resented. Then I stood there breathing in the heat, smelling the mesquite and my own sweat, listening to the wash settle back into itself. The desert didn’t care. It never does. That’s why I trust it more than most explanations.

I left the door where it was. The land would decide what to do with it. Eventually it always does.