Dream vault I. Climbing down

At the end of the corridor there is an emergency exit. It leads directly to the playing field, and eventually we just treat it as the normal exit, instead of going through the entire gym and having to dodge everyone’s ongoing activities. The door is heavy and gray and has a push bar that is supposed to sound an alarm. In all my years there it never sounded once. When lunchtime arrives, most of us run for it, valuing the short 40 minutes we have before the rest of the school day. Forty minutes is enough to eat, almost enough to play, and never enough for both, so we run.

But the stairway beside the exit puzzled me. The gate to it is locked, yet it is so short that I could just jump over it. A lock like that is not for keeping people out. It is for letting someone say that people were kept out. There are no stairs going up, only down, which made no sense, because we were already on the ground floor, and the school, as far as any of us knew, had no basement. I asked a teacher about it once. She said it was for maintenance, with the practiced smoothness of someone who had been asked before.

Of course a simple lock never stopped my curiosity. One lunchtime I let the crowd drain out through the exit, waited for the corridor to go quiet, and jumped the gate.

I went down. The stairs turned once, twice, and ended at a dark room. The room held nothing except a large steel gate that only became visible up close, the riveted kind you see in photos of old dams, too heavy for a school and too clean for a basement. When I pushed the gate open, someone showed up behind me. She was a classmate, third row by the window, though we had never really talked or known each other. I asked why she was here, and she gave the answer I would have given, so I stopped asking. The same curiosity about the stairway had led us both here. She told me I might need a companion for the exploration, and said it like a rule she was quoting from somewhere, which, in a dream, it might have been.

Behind the gate were deeper stairways, leading only down. I counted the steps for a while and gave up somewhere past three hundred. There was light, the flat even kind that comes from nowhere in particular, and the air did not get colder the way basements are supposed to. We were already deeper than our school could possibly go. Can we make it to the end and back in the remaining 30 minutes of lunch? I should have thought about that earlier, because by then the staircase had stopped changing. Every turn was the same turn, every landing the same landing, and walking felt like standing inside a single photograph of a staircase. Should we go back, we both asked at the same time. Neither of us answered.

Not knowing what the time had become, we reached the bottom, a heavy rusted metal door in front of us. We both pushed it open, knowing that this was the only way forward. It was still dark behind the door, but not the dark and metal air that had been suffocating us. It was a refreshing breath made by photosynthesis and by light reflected from the sun to the moon. Somehow, we had landed on the rooftop of the school, puzzled, and we laughed at the same time, as if language had been stripped out of us. Going down the stairs had led us to the rooftop.

Then the entire building started to shake, and the section of rooftop under our feet lifted us upward, a platform now, faster than Taipei 101’s elevators, the ones that make your ears pop. It was as if the rest of the school had disappeared, just us on the platform, rising into a night we had never seen. I looked for the constellations I knew out of habit and found none of them, and there were fireworks from afar, arriving without any sound, the way fireworks do when they are too far away to be for you. We both asked where we were. Before we had a chance to take in the scenery, the platform started to fall. We hit terminal velocity before we could realize it, past the point where falling feels like anything at all, and we vanished on the way down. I never saw her again.