A man’s voice—not Mullich’s—sounded from the open end of the hall, the wall muffling the voice. She heard him say the color of her hair. She heard declaration and failure. She held still and breathed through her nose as softly as she could.
And she waited. Time distended with the darkness. She took her pulse. Mullich. Who was he? When she thought about it, who was he, really? What was he? Who would want to know this building the way he knew it, at the level he knew it? All of its bones and ghosts and reasons for existing, reasons for dying. What was she to him? Someone who should be a relic, could be another relic, a piece of time now sealed in this wall. It was easy to imagine her mummy found, sitting just like this, folded away from the place that had become her life, still inside but away, lost, undiagnosed, untreated, unreleased.
She whispered his name, felt it disappear in the utter darkness.
Lack of vision was beginning to disorient her, making it feel as though the cube were yawing.
A thunk echoed from somewhere above her, up at least another floor. A cable squeaked. She thought to bounce herself in the cube, to push herself up, let fall her weight. This sent her into a drop that had too much momentum at first before gliding into descent. It was happening. For the first time in a very long while, she felt a whole part of something happening, something she was doing—as a person, as a body.
The dumbwaiter crunched and scraped to a halt, ended up cockeyed, with Mendenhall keeled hard against one wall. The time capsule spilled, the marbles crawling around her. She couldn’t slide the panel. Mullich had warned her that she wouldn’t be able to. As he had advised, she spun, braced her back against the wall opposite the panel, and kicked both feet outward. Think through the punch, he had told her. Your feet not at the wall but through the wall. The panel flapped open, and she found herself in a little dead-end hall that mirrored the one she had come from.
It was quite dim down here, the subbasement just above the dead space. No light shone in the hall. The faint glow at the open end appeared spent and singular and without color. She crept out headfirst, hands braced to a grimy floor.
A shadow moved across the feathery end of light. Boots scraped the dusty linoleum. She knew it wasn’t Mullich. He never made noise. He had told her he would not be there. Definitely boots.
Probably one of those guards from the outside. Hospital people, even security, always learned to just wear running shoes.
Mendenhall pressed herself to the wall, into a wedge of pure darkness. Her sound was echoed by his sound, a hiss over the grime. She released a sigh, a near-surrender. A similar response from him startled her, unnerved her. He was frightened—perhaps more than she. She slid quietly along the wall. Let herself appear from the edge. What was the point of hiding? He knew someone—something—was there.
Her form appeared to shock him. He was young, big, almost a twin of the guard from the caf, though softer and somehow reddish.
He gave himself no time to really see her, register her. He turned and hurried into the darkness behind the one light, a bare bulb hanging on a wire. The bulb swung in the wind of his exit. She looked down at herself. The reflector stripes of her tracksuit drew bone lines on her black form, angled and ready. God. He must have thought her the plague. He must have thought he had stumbled upon the source in the depths of this building.
She wished Mullich could have seen it.
Mendenhall returned to the dumbwaiter and peeled away the broken panel. This was the last stop for the little cubicle. Beneath it, according to Mullich, was a narrow shaft for repairs and ventilation.
Mendenhall shouldered herself into the box and pushed with her legs. Again like a punch, he had told her, starting low and following through to the other side. When the dumbwaiter lifted, she was quick to slide her fingers into the opening and pull upward. She used the mason jar to keep the whole thing wedged open.
Tepid air rose from the shaft and sifted around her ankles. She readied herself, emptied her lungs, stretched herself thin, went in feet first, lowered herself with toes pointing, exploring. Above was gray. Below was black. He had told her she would have to just let go, to trust him, his sense of the building. The landing would be okay, he had said.
She opened her hands. The drop was longer than she had anticipated, became a sucking thing. She felt swallowed.
47.
She crashed through the ventilation grill at the very bottom of the shaft, at the base of everything. Her knees buckled and thrust her forward, headfirst, her forearms up just in time. The sheet metal gave, the corroded screws snapping into the darkness, pinging against concrete. She lay fully emerged, shot out, the side of her face against the cool floor, arms boxed around her head.
Mullich had told her it would be safe to use a light down here, that there would be nobody. He had also told her she might want to keep it all dark, to just crouch her way to the opposite wall and then feel for the submarine door.
With raised hands, she tested the ceiling. Metal girders, cold and blistered, grazed her fingertips. As she crept across the darkness, she lost confidence in her direction. Cloth brushed her cheek and neck. She stifled a cry and swung her arm. Something wrapped around it, pulled and cinched her elbow.
“No,” she cried.
She snapped on her penlight, a light she had fired down a thousand throats. She saw the man who had dragged himself to her on his elbows, his dead legs behind him, his eyes pleading, Don’t let me die alone, don’t leave me down here. She saw the patient who had been filed into a half body, planed over the asphalt of a night highway, brought to her. To do what? See the clean side of the brain that still remained, still pulsing and thinking, seeing? Seeing her? His half-mouth grimace failing to lip words to her. Die, she had told him. It’s okay to die. She had held his wrist, regretting her gloves, her formal tone.
Mendenhall untangled herself from the insulation that had coiled around her arm. She flapped its dust from her sleeve and doused the light as soon as she had gained her bearings. She crouched lower, fingering the concrete of the floor. Rolls formed on the surface, everything becoming too smooth, a familiar smoothness, the smoothness of skin. Enry Dozier, his beard, the sad backtilt of his head, exposing his throat for her, dead for her.
She could not make it past all six. She would not.
She dropped to her knees, palmed the floor.
“Not this.”
She reached into one zippered pocket and found a trick passed down from her mentor. A fresh-cut lime often does the trick, he had taught her, snaps you back to the moment, the moment you must be in for your patient to survive, to have a chance. There is so much precedent and history in medicine, so many cases, it’s too easy to fall into the past, to see helpless eyes, hear desperate words.
On extreme days, when she knew she was going in drained, torn open, she would carry a slice of ginger.
The lime cooled her lips, the scent sharp in her throat, her lungs.
Thoughts cleared. She moved through the darkness, stayed low and straight. When she did not reach the wall, found herself again in dark vertigo, she tucked the lime slice between her teeth and cheek, crushed and sucked. She moved forward. Would there be a floor?
Or an abyss? Who crawled behind her? All of them? Or just the last six?
Finally her hands found the wall. You’ll be fine once you palm the cinder block, he’d told her. I’m not like you, she had replied. I don’t find solace in archaeology.
The wall gave way. An impression dropped her forward, and there it was, the submarine door. It stood much shorter than she had anticipated, just above waist-high, more hatch than door. Still blind in the dark, she turned the wheel. The smooth spin calmed her. Mullich had unfrozen it, his words true.