I’ve been here before.
The scent of metal and dust is unmistakable. I walk toward the familiar stairs that lead up and around the building, the ones I know will curve down again to the main floor in the back. Then there are the same, dank, wet, almost rounded cave-like walls on either side of me as I walk. They remind me of the inside of a subway. Not the areas reserved for the general public, but the underground tunnels I’ve only seen in movies.
It’s eerily quiet, but not disarming. Although I expected that.
I remember more and more about this place as I follow the stairs around. When I reach the bottom step, I squint to see if I can spot the gate at the end of the long breezeway outside the small, stone courtyard. The light is so dim here, like an X-Files episode. And of course I don’t have a flashlight. I didn’t have one before either.
The last time I was here, I recall wondering if the man stationed at the gate was there to keep people out or keep people in, and I wondered why he didn’t stop me from entering. He’d looked directly at me, but it was as if he never even saw me.
It’s a different man at the gate this time, yet, again, he pays me no notice when I pass. He stops others from exiting and entering, but doesn’t even acknowledge me as I go by.
I continue walking past the others toward the back hallway. I know I need to get to the electrical room, and quickly. It’s vitally important. I can’t remember why, exactly, but without a doubt, I know that’s why I am here.
And I know the way. At least, I know the way I got there before, from the ledge at the top of the scaffold, after getting through the small, hidden door next to the skylight – the skylight I never would have even known existed if the door hadn’t been ajar ever so slightly, just enough to let a purple slice of light create a thin line on the metal platform.
I find the ladder next to the scaffolding. It’s a bit rickety looking, but from what I can see it’s the only way up, so I start climbing, trying to make as little noise as possible, hoping nobody hears the creaks and shakes.
“Hey!”
The voice behind me booms and I look down. It surprises me. I don’t remember talking to anyone the last time.
“Don’t go that way.”
I can barely make out a human-ish shape. I take a few more quick steps up the ladder, retreating from the voice.
“No, don’t. It’s not safe,” said the voice attached to the figure making its way toward me.
Flight or fight? Fight or flight?
“At least let me hold the ladder for you while you climb up the rungs of death.”
I chuckle and the figure laughs back at me. I can barely make out his shape, but it is clearly a “him.” The voice, the stance, the build.
Then the rung under my left foot breaks from beneath me.
My right foot slides off the other rung as I try to catch my balance. But my hands can’t grip the sides of the ladder enough to keep myself from falling. Maybe I should have listened.
The metal burns the skin on the inside of my hands until I slip right off the bottom of the ladder.
My feet land on something hard and I fall back, leaning against one side of a hallway. I’m sitting on a grated metal surface and I can see through it all the way to the ground below me. It’s right where I just was, but now I am somehow above it, where I had been trying to go. Whoever was there with me a minute ago is gone now. My hands are cool, soft and injury free, no signs of a metal burn.
Looking up at the hallway, I recognize the wall in front of me where the door should have been.
I stand up and brush my fingers along the wall. I can feel the outline of a door shape, so I know it’s there. It’s so perfectly camouflaged with the wall, I can’t actually see the seams.
I push on it to see if it moves, then try to maneuver it to one side and then the other. Nothing happens. I’d pull it, but there’s no knob. If it can’t be pushed or slid or swung, how do you open a door without a doorknob? Especially one that’s flush against the walls on all sides. Or is it?
Kneeling down, I feel for the bottom of the door. It’s flush with the floor, just as I expected. Then I reach up toward the top of the door and my fingers slide up over the edge. There is a space between the top of the door and the wall above it. I step back for a second to look, and the space is completely hidden. Nothing appears out of place. You’d have to feel it to know it was there.
I reach up again, stretching as far as I can to touch the other side of the door, and just barely, the tips of my ring finger and middle finger feel the other side. I pull with what little force my fingers have and the door cracks open on the left, enough so I can reach in from the side and pull the door toward me.
The skylight through the ceiling is visible now, but faint, just as it was the last time. It lights up the metal platform I’m standing on and the area near me with a purple tint. I can make out the ledge a few feet in front of me, and the opening of the tube slide that leads toward the electrical room.
Grabbing hold of the sides of the slide to lower myself in feet first, I take a deep breath in. The rush is coming. I remember the feel of the air rushing by me almost as fast as I rushed by it, exhilaration and adrenalin energizing me.
I let go and immediately start falling. I feel like a little kid again. The slide is steep, yet I feel contained and safe, knowing I am being led by it, right to where I need to be, right to the room I have to get to, to find whatever it is I need to find or do whatever it is I need to do. If only I could remember.
Why can’t I remember? How can I know, but not know?
And why is this taking so much longer than the last time? It was a quick trip before. At this speed, I should be there already.
But this time is different somehow. It smells different. Less like metal mixed with sweet, cool wind, and more and more like a Sharpie in a confined space. I cough and choke, then manage to calm myself.
The ride down is starting to get so long that time is beginning to slow down, enough that I am noticing details around me as I fall by them, like the seams of the metal tubing where the pieces come together, and the smeared fingerprints across the once shiny silver from those who have slid down the slide before me. I can almost hear the high-pitched thin shriek that bare skin makes when scraping metal.
Even with only the slight haze of the dimly lit skylight that is so high above me it is only barely visible now, I catch glimpses of graffiti on the inside of the slide as I fall.
Who graffitis the inside of a mostly vertical slide? And how, exactly?
Wait, what did that say?
“Go back!”
What does that mean? How? Why? What am I headed for? I panic for a second, then start to remember.
I think I wrote it. I must have. I did. But not the last time I was here, because the last time, the slide was so much shorter. I must have been here another time too.
How many times have I been here?
Suddenly there is no slide anymore, nothing surrounding me, comforting me or holding me in. But I’m still falling.
I notice the falling starts to feel almost like floating. Am I still going down? With nothing around me, and the skylight way out of sight now, it’s hard to tell which direction I am headed or make out anything existent around me.
I reach out to see if I can feel anything, kick to see if anything is there, and feel nothing.
But my kick does something different. It starts to propel me in the opposite direction, as if I can swim in the air. My arms are able to do the same. Yet I don’t actually need them to keep moving. Whichever direction I start kicking, I continue that way until I forcibly switch directions, swimming, flying. And I’m fast!
At some point in the past, I told my future self to go back, and as impossible as it seemed a few moments ago, maybe I actually can.
I just don’t know how to get there. I’m not even sure which way is up. I feel like I have been changing directions at my own will, but not knowing where I am or what’s around me, it’s possible I’ve still been falling this whole time. I don’t even know how I’m supposed to know.
Assuming I go back, like I told myself to do, do I try to rocket my way back up the slide, or onto the ledge, or down the ladder and back out the gate? How far back am I supposed to go?
And what about the electrical room? It’s important. That hasn’t changed. It’s imperative that I get there. I can’t stop now.
So I spread out my arms and legs, egg beat my feet like I’m treading water until I slow myself down, and then become as pencil-like as I can, lifting my arms above my head, as if I were already falling. Sure enough, I have that familiar dropping sensation again, the wind rushing by me from the bottom of my feet to the top of my head as I attempt to keep up with it, trying not to think of how I might land, if I ever will.
Almost immediately, I think I see some sort of light below me. I’m not entirely sure it is a light, but whatever it is, it’s at least visible, so that’s a huge improvement over where I’ve been. It’s getting larger and larger as I approach it.
The object gets even crisper, and its long, crescent shape becomes clearer through the dark sky. It’s gigantic! And I notice it’s hanging in the middle of nowhere and everywhere, all by itself, touching nothing, doing nothing, not moving. I blink and suddenly it’s above me, still hanging, floating, dangling.
Finally I am able to start deciphering other shapes below. There are hard fixed lines highlighting monochromatic brick and concrete, like buildings without windows in the middle of a city. Definitely buildings, built closely together against distinct streets, with only sparse, sad-looking trees along the sidewalks around them, spindly weeds pushing through the cracks in the pavement.
As simply as if I just took a single step, both my feet are on solid ground again, and I am standing next to an old, drab building with stairs in front of me.
I start to climb them as they lead around the back of the building. There is another building to my left that is so ridiculously close the walls almost look curved, and so close I can reach out and touch it, so I do. Just like the one to my right, the wall is dank and wet. It reminds me of a subway tunnel and it reeks of a volatile mix of dust and metal.
I’ve been here before.