The flooring sparkled white, his dusty footprints interrupting its reflectiveness. White procumbent fungi paraded the white tub at his elbow, drooping downwards fleshy and flaccid. His ankle ached where a bony trainer had pressed weightily on it while he’d been prostrate in the panic. Bruised, he checked himself but he was okay, rattled nerves mostly, nothing broken. Snapped. Pulverised. Burned. Disintegrated. Annihilated.
The shadow held out a glass of water. “Are you alright?” she said, “You know, physically?”
“I’ll live.” Kattar crudely drank. “Do you know what happened?” His hearing was almost back to normal but for acute tinnitus.
“Yeah, a van caught fire and blew up. Weren’t you there for the explosion? I assumed you’d seen everything as you were right outside just as it went up.”
“I saw the smoke, the chaos. I didn’t hear it though. That’s strange.”
“Maybe the noise blew your eardrums.”
“I thought that, but my hearing is returning now. Why is it still so black out there?”
“I’ve just received instruction not to open the front entranceway. The van was full of a chemical that’s dangerous apparently. I’ve maybe poisoned myself by letting you in here.” She laughed, briefly. “It’s going to take hours for the substance to burn off until it’s safe for anyone to go near. We should move to somewhere else in the building, incase whatever is hazardous in the air is seeping in here somehow. Where’s your area?”
He curled a smile. “Facility staff.” The shadow paused awkwardly. “Yeah, I’m a cleaner for this building,” he said, wiping filth from his dewy brow. She led him up to the bright, white, and shiny reception desk and he leant his shocked torso on it as she moved to the opposite side to take to her chair. The tight black pencil skirt caused her to pivot gracefully into her seat.
“I have to see where I can give you access to with this ID. I have a feeling you may not have permission to come into the building from this way.” She fingered his passcard whilst tapping at a keyboard, the keys flat but programmed to mimic the sound of an early model PC.
“Can’t you make an exception? I mean, this must count as extreme circumstances or something.”
The lobby sat in echoey silence, insulated from the outside. His wrecked ears heard soft frequency, almost imperceptible, harmonic without origin, almost a sing. With the ordeal his hearing had been through he couldn’t be sure if what he was experiencing was an auditory hallucination, or if the beautiful sound he strained to catch was a product of the acoustic properties of the lobby space.
Behind her the white marble walls had been decorated with interlacing carvings, raised from the surface; forms of human hands, beaks of nectar sipping birds, fibonacci ideals in nautilus and snail shell, the repetitive ridges of sea shell casings, giant eyes of undersea creatures, twisted tendrils of ferns and octopi, serrated predatory teeth, pin sharp talons, microbial and cellular symmetries. He spied a name on her, woven onto her jacket breast pocket in golden thread. ‘Petra’ it gleamed, just like the shine from her flaxen hair, fixed in a relaxed and tidy bun on her slightly oversized cranium. “It says I can’t let you in,” she said, scrutinising him.
Kattar’s hand clenched, reminding him that he still held the glasses the elderly man had insisted he take. He yelped and shook his hand and the spectacles dropped to the white floor, smashing their lenses. The shards lay dotted with fine red pinpricks of his blood, golden frame clinking over the white floor and coming to a stop. He’d crushed them unknowingly, hand scratched with crisscrossing imprints from shattered glass, his skin rubbed pink and broken in a few places, bleeding lightly in trails along the lines in his palm.
The shadow rose from behind the white desk, picking up a small white bin. She handed it to Kattar. “Use the tissues in the waiting area,” she said, her eyes directed at the mess, “so you don’t cut yourself and get blood over anything else.”
He dusted the broken fragments into the bin, dampened the tissue with some of the water she’d delivered to him, and scrubbed the tiny blood marks away, already solidified and attached to the smooth rock floor. The golden frames glistened in the stark light. Without their lenses the spectacles took on the condition of an artefact. He lifted and inspected them in view of the shadow, who herself was drawn to focus on the frames. He caught her looking.
“They are pure gold, the type that tests fire without fear,” he said. “See me through the building and you can have them. I only want passage, through some connecting hallway to my backroom full of chemicals and devices for cleaning this place. If I’d’ve come in the back way I’d be allowed access into this part of the tower no problem. I work this floor sometimes, when my rota brings me here, when I can swipe my card over the reader and I get the nod. You can send me the other way, can’t you? Back to my dirty work. Surely you realise I don’t belong out here, in the cleanliness.”
Blue eyes studied the frames as Kattar twiddled the metal, causing star sparkles to dance around on the gold. “Can I try them?” she said.
“Push a button, flick a switch, do what you have to to let me through. That toxic air may be on us right now, I don’t want the poison, not today. Let me through, Petra, and these are yours to try out as long as you like.”
She hung her head and tilted her eyes to the screen. “Go down the corridor that runs behind me, past the elevators—do not use the elevators, understand?—and go left until you reach a staff restricted door. It will be unlocked. After that you’ll have to work out your way for yourself.”
Kattar traced his eyes a final time over the gold frame, shining in his hand, the vision of the elderly man and his cataracts unshakable. She reached out for the spectacles, took them carefully and placed them on her face.
“You should vacate this area too,” Kattar said.
“Yeah, I know. I’m just going to sit here for a while, see if they suit me.” She slumped and sunk into a distant reverie, caressing the frames, running her fingers the length of the gold, poking her digits through the holes where the shattered glass had inhabited.
Kattar grabbed his ID and headed to the corridor into the building, striding a wide entranceway overlooked by white crystal chandeliers, white sconces billowing white candle flames, and white pulsating lights indicating that most of the elevators were travelling to the highest floors of the building. He reached the end of the tightening hallway, and an elevator pinged open, empty. To the left, the brightness intensified, phosphorescent tube lights blended into the fittings, dado rails and coving made of illumination, leading him to a severe door, reinforced and wired, at the end of the corridor.
tri
A stairwell, dank grey, overcast with light from small windows with mottled glass. He recognised the stink as that of moulded concrete, its crenelations holding the residue of a thousand mops, back and forth, up and down, under strip light and broken bulbs, backup generator dullness and floodlight strength midwinter flashlights. His familiar chemicals never freshened here, only masked the decay, smelled old and evolving to decrepit.
The door clicked shut behind him. He tried to open it again—not because he wanted to use it, but to confirm the way of the world. It was locked of course.
The way from here was his domain, these flights his labyrinth for scurrying between floors where his staff elevator didn’t reach, where he’d be forced to leave his trolley behind and lumber his cleaning gear to the area he’d been assigned to cleanse. Downwards led to a shadowy store, populated with materials left over from construction, too awkward to move once the building had encased them, abandoned to rot away, the occasional rat catcher stalking its crumbling foundational pillars. A dead end.