Night Film(161)

I spent the next few hours searching for another way out, pounding the other panels in the other hexagons, trying to find the walls that would take me up to the top—to that ladder.

But no matter how hard I pounded, nothing gave way.

I couldn’t help but suspect in my brutish demolition, my fury, I’d inadvertently destroyed the correct way out of here, the only way, and all I could do now was wait for the inevitable.

Time became a milky liquid I let myself float on, drifting away from this box on its lazy current, back and forth.

Then I realized I was lying on my right side, gazing through the hole I’d made in that very first coffin. A sudden sound of fluttering caught my attention, waking me from a dream.

The moth.

I’d forgotten about it. I was overwhelmed with relief at the simple sight, the understanding that I wasn’t alone. It was crawling on the ceiling, but fell off, and then calmly righting itself, took off again for one of the walls. I leaned in, gently brushed it into my hand. Working its antennae, it began walking around, exploring the boundaries of its new cage, which was, of course, the palm of my hand.

So I would die in here. I’d leave my little life.

I’d barely worn it out. Life had been a suit I’d only put on for special occasions. Most of the time I kept it in the back of my closet, forgetting it was there. We were meant to die when it was barely stitched anymore, when the elbows and knees were stained with grass and mud, shoulder pads uneven from people hugging you all the time, downpours and blistering sun, the fabric faded, buttons gone.

Sam came into my head.

She came the way she always did, padding over to me with her brown bare feet and her wise face, staring down at me, wrinkling her nose. What would she think when Cynthia told her I’d disappeared? I’d become a mystery she’d have to give life to. I’d become a hero, a world explorer who’d gone missing searching for buried treasure on the high seas, more courageous than I’d ever been in real life. Or no—I’d be a cavern in her heart she’d brick up and wallpaper over, hang paintings in front of and potted plants, so no one would ever know that dank and hollow passage was even there.

I could hear Beckman, as if he were suddenly here, staring dubiously at the walls enclosing me before downing the vodka in the shot glass in his hand. Did I not warn you, McGrath, that to capture Cordova was to try and trap shadows in a jar? You wanted the truth. Here it is. It’s boxes inside of boxes. What made you so certain you could ever figure him out? That his questions even had answers?

But what had Beckman shouted, when he’d caught me drunkenly trying to pick the lock on that hexagon box? “Traitor!” “Philistine!” And yet, before he’d slammed the door in my face, he’d said something else.

“You couldn’t even see where it opened.”

It was a hint that I wasn’t seeing all of it, not the full picture, that I was blind to something, that the way out wasn’t the way out.

I had it wrong.

I noticed the moth had managed to fly even with its injured wing. It was crawling again across the ceiling of that first box. I stuck my head inside, watching it move in circles, and then, working its antennae and legs, it paused, then slipped through a hole in the wood, vanishing from sight.

I reached out, running my hands across the ceiling, feeling where the moth had disappeared, an opening the size of a grain of rice. Tracing my fingers along it, I could feel something else, an indentation. I fumbled through my own clothing, which felt strangely foreign and detached from me, as if I were riffling through the pockets of another man, a man who was passed out or dead. I groped, hoping to find some type of tool to use, yet the only hard object I could find was some type of pendant around my neck.

It was the Saint Benedict necklace Nora had given me. I yanked it from my neck and, wedging the metal into the crack, inched it along the trench. After I’d gone all the way around it, I could see it was some type of circular door. I managed to lift up the wood a few centimeters, enough to wedge my fingers underneath. The door, a circular panel, came loose in my hands, falling away.

I was staring into a black pipe entirely devoid of light, nothing visible at the end. I reached out, running my hands along the smooth metal sides, accidentally grazing that moth.

It fell out onto my cheek.

I rolled over, collecting the insect into my hand, and then, making sure it was all right, tucked it in the inside pocket of my coat, where I hoped it’d remain safe and alive. Then I wedged myself up inside the pipe. It was tight, horrifyingly so, like being trapped in an old air vent. There were no rungs to climb, nothing to grab hold of. All I could do was inch blindly up into the thing by pressing against the sides as hard as I could, bracing myself with the soles of my boots. Within a few yards I encountered a wall.

I pressed against it. It opened easily and I shoved it back, blinking in the bright light.

The metal ladder was directly over my head, bolted to the ceiling.

I pulled myself out onto the top of the wooden hexagon, staring around me. This box I was standing on was a perfect replica of the box back at Beckman’s. Light was flooding in through narrow windows in the ceiling, though there were no trees visible and no sky, only white light. I couldn’t tell if it was artificial light or from the sun.

I took another step. Suddenly there was a jolt and a sharp snap.

I reached up, tightening my grip on the ladder’s rung just as the entire hexagon box swung out from under my feet, dangling for a moment by a piece of thread before breaking loose. And then the entire box was plunging, a spinning black box tumbling out of the sky. There was a sucking noise and then an explosion as the boxes shattered on the ground below.