Altverse

The building came down on Friday. Ari had known this for six weeks, which was how long the mapping contract had run, and had spent those six weeks noting the crack propagation in the load-bearing walls, the foundation drift, the slow lean of the east wing toward the neighboring parking structure. The east wing had been leaning for years. It was still leaning when they decided to stop it.

The basement had a section behind a door that should have been locked and wasn’t, a maintenance corridor that hadn’t been properly maintained since the building’s construction.

The room beyond the unlocked door was not interesting. There was a junction box. A shelf held cleaning supplies dried into their containers sometime in the late nineties. There was a drain that hadn’t seen water since longer than that. Ari catalogued it in the notebook and took three photographs and was nearly done when the other thing became visible.

It was in the corner, on the floor, the way objects sit when they’ve been somewhere long enough to stop being noticed. It was not hidden. There was no reason to hide it because there was no reason to look. Someone with a cleaning assignment had been coming into this room for decades and seeing it and not noting it.

The projector was about the size of a large hardcover book. The material was not quite metal, held like metal but weighed less than it should, and it kept the light differently, as though the light made a decision about it. Around its middle was a ring. The ring had symbols cut into it, forty-three of them, each distinct, the work of something sharper than a standard engraving tool and considerably more patient.

Ari picked it up.

The habit of it: the thing is going to be demolished with the building on Friday and it is the kind of thing that should exist in a record somewhere. The notebook opened to the next blank page. Pen moving: material, dimensions, weight estimate, ring mechanism, symbol count. Forty-three symbols, each one distinct. The ring had the feel of a mechanism meant to turn. There was a small indentation in the body that suggested an indexing point, a symbol positioned to align with it.

Ari turned the ring.

The hallway revised its opinion about perspective.

It was neither quickly nor violently. The tiles on the floor changed their mind about where the far wall was over two or three seconds, the vanishing point shifting sideways, and a door appeared in the wall that had not been there. The dead fluorescent strip above the junction room came on, but it wasn’t fluorescent light anymore, something cooler and more deliberate, the color of something that had decided to be a light.

The air around the door’s edges smelled of rain. It was not rain happening. Rain remembered.

Ari stood in front of the door and kept writing. The door: dimensions, the material (not glass but translucent, frosted in a way that wasn’t sanded or acid-etched), the gap of cold air at its lower edge, the smell. Eleven seconds of writing and then the door was pushed.

Beyond it was outside.

The ground was asphalt but darker than city asphalt, the darkness compositional rather than dirty. The air was the rain-smell larger and everywhere with no rain. The light was afternoon but slightly wrong, the shadows too green, a saturation that was biological rather than atmospheric, as though the light had been filtered through something living before arriving. Across the street: buildings, recognizable as buildings, and in one upper window a light made a slow circuit of the room. It was not carried. It was not projected. Moving the way something alive moved, leaving a faint trail before it faded. Blue-green. Warm.

There were no people in immediate view. Sounds from further away. Voices. A low ambient hum that might have been a city’s infrastructure noise or might have been something else.

Ari stood in the doorway for eleven seconds. The notebook was in hand. Nothing was written in those eleven seconds.

Back through the door. The ring turned back. The hallway was a hallway.

* * *

Ari sat on the floor of the northeast maintenance corridor with the projector in hand and looked at the door that was no longer a door.

The fluorescent strip above was steady. It had been flickering for six weeks and it was steady now and slightly too bright. The notebook was open to the page with the building description and the page was blank except for the mark where the pen had started and stopped. The cleaning supplies on the shelf were dried out in their containers. The junction box made its small electrical sound. These things were facts about the room and Ari noted them as facts about the room.

The thermos was in the bag. Ari took it out and drank cold coffee and the cold coffee was fine.

The projector sat on the floor.

Something had changed in the room and it was not the projector or the fluorescent strip or the cold coffee. Ari could not locate what it was. The notebook was open and the page was blank and writing felt like a thing that happened to other tasks, not this one, not right now.

The building came down tomorrow. The junction box made its sound. The pen was in hand and was not moving.

This lasted about forty minutes, the not-writing, the sitting on the floor of the maintenance corridor with facts arriving as facts and nothing else. At some point the fluorescent strip began flickering again.

Ari put the projector in the bag and left the building.