“A VENDING MACHINE,” I whisper reverently.
I press my palms against the purring machine. It feels like comforting normalcy.
The vending machine is a jarring splash of red and blue in a corridor that’s otherwise as sterile as every other one I’ve wandered. It stands alone, pressed against the wall of a long, empty corridor, plugged into a lonely power outlet. I loiter on the feeling of warm plastic against my fingertips and the machine’s dull mechanical hum that reverberates up my arm.
Willow breaks my reverie: “Two dollars! Robbery! Let’s hold out for a water fountain.”
“Willow....” There’s an unpleasant thought forming, a lump in my throat. “I’m not thirsty.”
“So you can wait.”
“No, that’s not what I mean.” I bite my lip. “When you said I was the ghost, it hit me—I haven’t been thirsty. I haven’t been hungry. At all.”
Willow shakes her head. “A lot of people lose their appetite. You’re not dead, stop sulking. Besides, I was looking for water to wash with anyway, not soda pop.”
“Why would you want to wash—”
Willow interrupts me, flicks a hand at my body. I’m dusted white with drywall. My knees and lower legs are mottled with bruises from the copper slide. My right bicep is red with friction burn. I have a cut across my palm. My knuckles, still tender, are brown with dried blood.
Willow raises an eyebrow. “You look like you lost a fight with the Pillsbury Doughboy,” she says.
“I’m surprised you lingered long enough to snoop through my stuff. I would have crept quietly by.”
“Humanitarian,” Willow says with a mock sigh. “It really eats into my ‘me time.’” She fishes into her pocket and produces a two dollar coin. “All right, I was saving this for the boatman, but I’ll come up with something else. You’re a train wreck, and I’m too ashamed to associate with you in that sorry state.”
Willow slides the coin into the machine and pushes a button. A bottle of water falls into the machine’s tray with a heavy thunk. She unscrews the cap and hands the water to me.
The water is cold. Chalky, white rivulets spill down my skin as I rinse off the drywall dust from my face, my hands, and my neck. I spare a little water to rub down my legs and arms.
“Your hair,” Willow reminds me, “unless that’s you going grey.”
To towel off, I strip off my t-shirt, turn it inside out, and use the cleanest parts of it to rub my hair dry. I can feel Willow appraising me—my bruised body and childhood scars—but she doesn’t say anything, and I don’t volunteer any history.
I smile at her discretion from between damp, curly locks of black hair, and then zip the windbreaker over my bare chest. I stuff the wet t-shirt into a back pocket. Maybe it will dry.
As I turn to leave, Willow snatches up the empty bottle I’d abandoned and brandishes it like a rapier. “You’re nuts,” she says. “This is worth, like, five cents. Thirty-nine more of these and I’ll have made my toonie back.”
“You’re holding out for a bottle depot?” I ask, incredulous at how nonchalantly she treats vending machine-quality miracles.
“Some of us care about the environment,” she sniffs. She brushes past me, and doesn’t turn to see if I follow.
As we walk, I notice small, new changes creep into the corridor. First come pipes, painted the same inoffensive white as the walls. They’re small, pencil-thin, and they drip down from the ceiling to run along the corridor at waist-height. As we walk, these pipes swell, until each is as thick as my wrist.
Looking up, I notice a sprinkler system now jutting through the acoustic ceiling tiles. Then I see a shock of crimson against the white wall ahead of us: my first fire alarm. Soon, these appear periodically through the corridors, and they’re soon joined by small fire extinguishers strapped neatly to the walls.
The building begins to feel more and more familiar. Potted plants appear sporadically, strategically placed to conceal wall sockets and cover embarrassingly empty corners. I spot another vending machine, then another. This maze, brought to you by Pepsi.
Thirty minutes pass. Maybe more. My watch’s minute hand seems to crawl by more slowly than it should.
But even as I grow more comfortable, feeling as if, at long last, Willow has liberated me from the maze, I catch her shoulder-checking.
She’s not looking back at me, she’s looking past me—back the way we came.
She crunches the empty plastic bottle absentmindedly against her leg as she walks. A nervous tic? Her free hand is scrunched up inside her sleeve, fingers clasping the cuff.
“A hot shower,” I muse loudly, when she doesn’t speak. “That’s my first stop.”
Willow turns her head to look at me. She smiles, but her eyes crinkle downward. What is that expression? Concern? Pity?
“What’s on the outside for you?” I ask.
Willow doesn’t answer. She’s ignoring me—or so I think, until her shoulders slump into a shrug. She says nothing else on the subject.
And an uncomfortable silence lingers between us. Our conversation flags and she makes no move to pick it back up. Familiar non-essentials surround us, but she seems more worried now than when the hallways were white and featureless.
So I hum. Willow doesn’t look at me, but the corners of her mouth quirk downwards. Maybe she hates Katy Perry.
I open my mouth, another conversation-starter already on my lips, when I see the light in front of us. Not the humming, white light of fluorescent bulbs—the steel blue of a night sky peeking through a window.
I run past Willow. A laugh rips from my throat. I’m out!
I mean, I’m still in, but I’m out. Out of the endless looping hallways, out of my dull prison, out of that goddamn building—if nothing else.
And I’m on a bridge. It’s suspended fifteen feet above a city street, in the downtown core of a city that reminds me of my home, though it lacks some familiar features. There’s no tower lit up like a glow stick in the distance, and I can’t see the river cutting a dark swath through the city centre, though that could just be my vantage point. Frankly, the city I’m in is less important than the fact that I’ve escaped.
My bridge is encased in glass. I press my forehead against its cool surface and bask in the city sights outside. Moonlight daubs my cheeks, blinks off of the reflective windows of buildings in the distance. A newspaper tumbles down the street, propelled by a breeze I can’t feel. The moon hangs like a lopsided smile overhead.
I don’t hear Willow move to stand at my shoulder, but she sighs at my side after a time. “Let’s keep moving,” she says softly.
“This is the bridge? The one you asked if I’d crossed?”
“One of them. Look behind us.”
I look back, through the glass, at the building we’ve emerged from, and I’m surprised by its mundanity—I expected the Krzywy Domek.
Instead, the building is a three-storey slate-grey brick, squatting on a downtown street corner. Remarkably unremarkable. Ribbon-thin windows, which somehow I managed to avoid altogether while inside of it, do little to detract from the building’s ugliness.
The building on the bridge’s far side is more impressive—an obelisk of reflective glass that stands four times taller. Its surface reflects both the grinning moon and other skyscrapers lit up in the distance.
“Do you know what building that is?” I ask. “What it’s called?”
Willow shakes her head.
“What city are we in?” Willow frowns, but says nothing.
“For a guide,” I say, “you’re not very informative.”
Willow hmphs and says, “Only because you’re still asking all the wrong questions. You’re more concerned with what a place is called instead of, oh I don’t know, ‘why aren’t there any people in the streets?’”
“It’s twenty to something at night.” I tap on my wristwatch. “Not every city has a nightlife. But, sure, why aren’t there any people?”
“There are,” she says. “You just can’t see them yet.”
“Answers like that are why I’m not asking more questions.”
I turn my back on her and I don’t ask her anything else. Willow’s gloom is detracting from our triumph. Instead, I drink in the view, my fingers leaving oily prints across the glass and my breath fogging each pane I stop to ogle through.
Willow tires of the view long before I do. She wanders to the far side of the bridge while I loiter at the window, absorbing the sights. A blue bench beneath a bus stop. A rainbow of cars parked curbside. That old familiar Starbucks mermaid, glowing green across the street.
The blue light deepens as I watch the sleeping city. The moon hides its face behind black clouds. One by one, the stars wink out.