Back out in the hallway, she felt the weight of the entire building above her, as dense and impenetrable as the core of the planet. It pressed down on her, deflating her: just a pair of frightened, bloodshot eyes roving amid the remains of a skin-colored balloon.
Maintain your focus.
Locate 041-74-3400.
“Okay okay okay okay okay okay okay okay,” she muttered.
His name a synonym for file.
Correction: his name a synonym for life, that’s what she’d meant.
Her mind unsteady.
Her gut unsteady, that’s what she meant.
Then the footsteps. Not the tap-tap-tap-tap-tap of bureaucrat shoes. These were sneaker footsteps. Sneaky footsteps. The footsteps of someone wearing a sweatshirt.
Merciful: a door bearing a picture of a woman in a triangular dress.
* * *
The slipping figure on the yellow CAUTION! WET FLOOR sign in the restroom looked like someone preparing for sex or for birth, its androgynous legs flung open with abandon; abandon, the untamable urge, she was kneeling, clinging, heaving herself into a toilet, the tornado whirling her apart, molecules and despair.
The seven minutes she spent trying to pull herself back together passed in hazy, slow-motion desperation. Each minute potentially fatal for him. She cooled her cheek on the toilet seat as she shrank before all the different weapons that could be used against her—the ever-growing headache, the overwhelming pattern of the tile.
“There, there, child,” someone said, the voice far huskier than Trishiffany’s.
“Trishiffany?” she begged.
Something new had started to happen inside her, waves moving in a different direction. She swirled herself around, diarrhea, swirled herself back down, vomit. She held on to the toilet like it was Joseph, there was something so wrong with her, she was going to die, she could smell the animal stink of it, the shame. But it wasn’t her file she’d found, was it, and she remembered about the beast, how beasts make their mothers do all sorts of repulsive things early on, and there was a flicker of joy, and she became less scared, and the cloak embraced her back.
By the time she was done in the stall, the nice stranger had fled. Had there been a nice stranger?
When she emerged again into the relentless hallway, it wasn’t easy to walk straight, but the complete emptiness of her gut provided a certain courage, the kind of courage that enabled her not to care about the smell emanating from her mouth as she walked from door to door, jerking madly on every knob, knocking hard like the police when the knob didn’t give.
But no one ever came to open any door, and she kept going and going until at long last a doorknob responded to her touch, and she entered a small office with sickly pinkish walls, and said the name of the dark-haired man sitting at the desk beside a stack of gray files.