“Can I truly blame that for the failings of my life? The failings of all my relationships? The disappointments in my career? Or am I just making excuses, and not taking enough responsibility for my own actions — or inactions?
“My ex-girlfriend Hanna told me something once. It struck me as being a lot of facile psychological bullshit at the time, but who knows? It might be true. When we were fighting a short time before we broke up, she said, ‘You know why you like to jog? Because you only understand running. That’s all you do. Run away. But you don’t know what from… and you don’t know where to.’”
3 had begun climbing the stairs ahead of 2. Ascending behind her, he had taken advantage of this arrangement to watch the movements of her bottom in her white scrub pants. She reached the second floor landing ahead of him, took several steps, and cried out.
“What? What is it?” 2 said, quickening his pace up the remaining cement steps. Was she swatting at a hornet?
3 was batting at the air around her head as she turned in jerky circles, quickly switched to tousling her black hair. “Oh God… check me for a spider! Look at my back, quick!”
“Okay, okay, hold still a second.” He took hold of her shoulders.
“Look in my hair! I felt it in my hair!” She rubbed her hands across her face vigorously. “As soon as I came up here I walked right through a spider web. God — I hate spiders!”
He ran his hands through her hair, then brushed off her shoulders, back, and the outside of her arms. He felt guilty for enjoying this excuse to touch her, in the face of her distress. “I’m not seeing anything… not even webs. Are you sure one of your own hairs didn’t blow across your face?”
“I know the difference.” 3 tilted her head back, and pointed at the ceiling near the area where the staircase continued on up to a third level. “Hey, you see that?”
2 followed her finger. An inky stain had spread across the ceiling. From it, a few attenuated strands dangled like dripping glue. Simultaneously, the two of them dropped their gaze to the floor at their feet. A few similar black splatters. 2 scuffed at one of these with the toe of his sneaker, but the stain here had dried. “Yeah, maybe a few strings of this gummy stuff were hanging down. Roof tar, or something?”
3 felt at her hair again. “Maybe. Let’s go see.”
This time, 2 took the lead up the stairs, toward the third floor.
“And here we are,” 10 said. “5 was right — it does look like something out of a dungeon.”
Ahead of him and 9 was the mouth of a narrow, brick-lined basement hallway, with a curved ceiling that made it appear more like an antiquated sewer tunnel. Even outside the corridor’s entrance, they could see the graffiti that covered the whole of the right-hand wall.
10 observed, “I wonder if this building goes back to the nineteenth cent—”
But his words were sliced away. From beyond the far end of the hallway, they’d heard a single shrill cry. It echoed toward them down the length of the corridor. To that point in his life, 10 had never experienced the sensation that authors so readily described, of the hairs rising on the back of one’s neck. At that moment, he learned that it was an actual phenomenon.
“Oh my God,” 9 moaned, and even as the utterance left her lips, she and 10 saw a figure dart past the end of the brick corridor, from right to left. Just an indistinct silhouette, like a moving smudge, gone in a flicker.
“Fuck,” 10 hissed, angry for being startled again so soon. “Who is that?” he bellowed, his voice also amplified by the tunnel. “Who’s there? Are you okay? You’d better not be playing fucking games!”
“Let’s go,” 9 pleaded, pulling at his arm. “Let’s get out of here!”
“I can’t,” he told her, not taking his eyes off the hallway lest the figure reappear. “It might just be some kids fucking around, but it could be somebody in trouble. A homeless person… or one of our own. Come on.”
“No, please! Don’t you understand?” She tugged at him more insistently. “It isn’t one of us, and it isn’t a homeless person! It was a ghost!”
Just off the third floor landing was a hallway. While sunlight beamed in through one large barred window near the stairwell, the hallway itself was in such darkness that it might go on for miles for all that 2 and 3 could tell. Still, enough sunlight touched the start of the hallway for them to see that its entire right-hand wall was plastered with more of the now familiar black and white graffiti.
“Look,” 3 said, pointing at the floor beyond the threshold. A glossy black puddle had spread from the base of the graffiti-obscured wall. “That’s what it is. The paint was running, and it must have leaked through a crack in the floor.”
2 approached the entrance to the corridor, knelt down and poked at the puddle with a finger. Dry, but tacky. He pulled nearly invisible strands of the material between fingertip and thumb. Turning his gaze to the graffiti itself, he saw a design at eye level, white on a field of black: a sideways figure 8 that appeared like the symbol for infinity.
Up close like this, there was a strange quality to the paint that he couldn’t quite process, and the murkiness of the hallway wasn’t helping. He drew in closer, then closer, until his nose almost touched the wall. The paint had an odd odor, unless that was the wall itself in its state of decay. And then, the paint’s unusual quality became clear to him.
At first he had thought the rough texture of the cinderblocks was what lent the paint a kind of grainy appearance. Now he realized the minutely broken aspect to the painted surfaces had another explanation. What at a distance appeared as solid white areas of paint were actually thousands upon thousands of tiny white numbers. And what appeared as solid areas of black paint were comprised of thousands and thousands of nearly microscopic black numbers. Even the background fields of black and white consisted of the same. But whether in black or white paint, there were only two numbers in varying, indecipherable patterns, and those numbers were 0 and 1.
“Binary numbers,” 2 mumbled to himself. “Like a code.”
As he had indicated to 3, he was a school teacher. He was in fact a math teacher. And so he thought of logic gates and Boolian functions. He thought of ancient binary systems used in Africa for divination, and in Europe for geomancy. He thought, of course, of the use of binary numerals in computers. But he couldn’t understand what the artist was trying to express by utilizing them here.
He sat back on his haunches to view the graffiti mural more as a whole again; as much of it as he could make out in the gloom, at least. Fat, blocky balloon words. Spiky, squiggly gang-like tagging. These symbols, names, initials appeared like spontaneous, quickly-rendered blasts from a spay can. Instead, they were intricately composed of numbers the way a painting by Seurat was composed of dots of color. Pixel-like particles, like the cells of an organic body. Not truly graffiti, then, but an artwork of such obsessive detail that it seemed an impossibility to him. His mind spun its wheels in attempting to assimilate it. He wasn’t an artist; was there a means of creating such an effect more easily than what he was envisioning? Some kind of stencil, or overlay, or…
“What is it?” 3 asked him. “What do you see?”
He didn’t know how to digest it himself, let alone put it into words for another person. And did it really matter, anyway? Why should it seem of such importance? Why should he feel a frost collecting in the core of his bones?
2 rose, and turned to face her. “It’s nothing. I’m sure that’s what you walked through — a couple goopy strands of this paint, that seeped through the floor.” He took her arm. “Come on… let’s get back to camp.”