Secret Life
An image floated into his mind: him, at the same desk for another fifty years, his lithe, muscular body, seemingly made for climbing in tunnels, slowly turned to fat and defeat. He leapt off the chair, found some sticky notes and a pen in a desk drawer, then took a big bag of change over to the vending machines and bought as many bottled waters and snacks as he could shove into his pockets.
Standing again beneath the tendril, he hesitated, staring up at it for a long time.
Interlude 3
The smell on the third floor did not come from someone’s rotted lunch, but from an executive vice president who, having lost a spoon behind the lunchroom refrigerator late one night, fell during his efforts to retrieve it, was knocked unconscious, and died without a murmur in that small space, victim of the diet that had allowed him to fit, not found for three weeks, the whole episode distasteful to his wife and four children, not to mention the day janitor who found the body and almost left it there, hopeful that at some later date the white of picked-at bones might be more easily cleaned up.
...Beauty
It was a form of release, an escape, for the janitor-in-training to pull himself up into the air ducts using the vine for support. As soon as he replaced the tile behind him, the young man felt lighter and happier. He almost laughed aloud. In the darkness ahead, the yellow blossoms glowed a friendly phosphorescent yellow, giving him enough light to see by. Like a lithe and clever lizard, he crawled forward, first through one corridor and then the next, always leaving a trail of sticky notes behind him.
The tendrils of the vine brushed against his face. The flowers bumped against his nose. His eyelashes became dusted with pollen. I’m a bee, he thought to himself, not unhappily. I’m a hummingbird. Below his hummingbird self, through minute openings, he could hear the buzz of conversation, the reverberation of people walking just a few feet below him. Something about the secret life he had entered gave him a deep sense of satisfaction.
Hours later, the young man had still not found the source of the vine. With astonishment, as he rested, the water bottles weighing him down, he realized that the vines had taken over every secret part of every floor. It might take a day or more to find the source. He could either turn back now or continue the search until he was successful. It did not seem like a true choice to him.
Minutes passed or days, hours or months—he could not tell. As he gave himself up to the search, he also gave up time. There was only the vine, the blossoms, his need. When hungry, he ate the sweet fruit of the vine, with its lingering aftertaste of regret. When thirsty, he licked moisture off the vines or sucked water from the blossoms. After a while, he could hear the vine—a soft undercurrent of sound, a hum that matched its glow of good health. He would fall asleep entangled in the vines, wake refreshed, and continue on. Below him, at times, he thought he could hear the janitors grumbling among themselves in their own language, and he would laugh silently because now he knew more than even the Head Janitor.
The vines, the floors, the confined labyrinthine ecosystem that had come to life in the air ducts amidst the insulation, had its own rhythms and patterns. At regular intervals, for example, which he somehow equated with morning, a phalanx of mice would stampede down the vine—running right over him, their feet cold and tiny, their speech a deep chittering that he could swear sometimes held hints of human language. At other times, biting flies would assail him. Dragonflies and frogs. Dust and rivulets of water. Once, at the end of a long passageway, an animal with pale eyes stared at him before vanishing into darkness.
He felt himself twisting into the vine itself, so surrounded by leaves and flowers that surely they must sprout from him. At some point, his clothing fell away from him, no longer necessary. He did not pine for the sun or for any other living thing. Once, following a stray tendril of the vine, he burst from darkness into light—the vine having found its way out through a crack in the side of the building—and looked out into blue sky and gulls wheeling over the parking lot, four or five stories up. The light disturbed him. To the new senses he had developed, the light felt wrong. True light could only come from the source of the vine. He dove back into the darkness without regret.
