Current Floor:

  Z, Y

  The Dilemma:

  The last thing Andy remembered was going to bed drunk with an opoid-dependant woman named Tracy. Since his wife died, Andy hasn’t had too much joy aside from raising his daughter, Abby, and the occasional night out. The babysitter offered to keep Abby overnight, so Andy thought what the hell, he deserved it. But when Andy woke up the next morning, he found himself on the ground floor of a windowless building with Tracy, who was withdrawaling from opiates, and only Polaroid pictures serving as clues to their escape.

  Previously:

  Andy woke up on floor Z of a mysterious, windowless building. He was wearing different clothes than he went to bed in—a white shirt, jean shorts, and low-top red Chuck Taylors. He found a woman named Tracy and Polaroid pictures with notes on the back. One of the Polaroids in Tracy’s room said she is dependent on benzodiazepines and opiates and her withdrawals may prove fatal, but there is medicine on floor Y. Andy carried Tracy away in search of a way to the next floor.

  Inventory:

  Andy:

  A wicked hangover.

  Shame.

  Nicotine withdrawal.

  The smell’s worse now.

  Tracy:

  Withdrawal from benzodiazepines and opiates.

  Fucking rage.

  This bitch.

  Tracy groaned and puked again as she bounced. We passed more rooms with stickers on their knobs that I did not stop to look at. All doors stood ajar, but I heard no sounds, and hoped not to. I did not want to go into another room where the moon's awful light could stick to my skin again. It was somehow worse than the headache glow of the fluorescents—alive, like a crawling infestation or virus.

  The moon nears. The moon is far away. The Genie's moon neared while the Unicorn's, Tracy's, was far. What was mine? What creature was I? Why had the moon come to me in Tracy’s room?

  Tracy shook, probably seizing. You could fucking die from benzo withdrawal if you didn't come off them right.

  “Shit, put me down,” Tracy said, but her heart wasn't in it. She sounded like half a person, the other half somewhere inside a chemical on Floor Y.

  I passed several pink Z's on the wall. Bottom floor? That gave me a pinched kind of hope, like maybe floor A had an exit. Maybe.

  “But where are the fucking stairs?” I said.

  I passed a room with light that looked too natural and rushed on.

  I turned and turned until I realized that I was going around in one big square, passing the unicorn room again.

  Tracy groaned.

  A door down the hall creaked open. I waited for the diseased crawl of moonlight to spill from the room, but there was only the continued back and forth of the door as if a wind had blown it.

  Tracy's weight was becoming too much and I'd have to put her down soon. I went to the door and realized it was my own original room, a little horse sticker on the doorknob.

  “Fucks sake,” I said. “Fucking moon, fucking place, fucking rooms.” I got all my fucks built up, resolving to face the moon again if I had to, even if it made me insane.

  My room looked almost exactly the same, boxes tossed in a nicotine-fiending frenzy, bloodstain on the carpet under a web of broken glass. I clenched my left hand, suddenly aching with the memory of wound. The only difference in the room was a black rectangle of ascending stairway cut into the wall, a gunshot from the entrance to the room.

  “Tracy, you seeing this?”

  “Ungh.”

  “Right,” I said, and I shifted her to my left shoulder. My right was killing me. I remembered Shelly, how light she'd felt in those last days. Tracy had a similar sick weightlessness, but regardless, hefting any adult body does a number on the joints. With Shelly, those aches had been a blessing, the last blessings before I knew I'd have to put her away, in the ground, and never ache with the burden of her ever again.

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  “Fuck it,” I said, giving the room one last scan for my cigarettes before ascending the steps. There was a pink Y beside the door, and a Polaroid with an elephant next to it. Finding nothing on the back, I let the picture fall to the floor.

  The stairway was dark and when I made it to a landing that curved into another stairway, I tripped and dropped Tracy.

  “Fuckin shit ass motherfucker!”

  “Shit, sorry—“

  “You broke my fuckin ribs!”

  “Where are you?” I said.

  “Right fuckin here.”

  “Where—ow!”

  Pain surged in my shin.

  “Fucking bitch!” I said.

  “The fuck you say? Only one bitch on this stairway, and he a thievin, lyin, dress his bitches up in hipster clothes mother—”

  I picked her up roughly and threw her over my shoulder. “I like you better when you're sick.”

  “Yeah? Well I like you better—“

  “I thought your rib was broken.”

  “Ribs.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Oh fuck,” she said, her voice shaky. She dry heaved. “Put me down, oh put me the fuck down now!”

  I felt a cold tickle across my neck like the point of a needle drawing a thin line. I assumed it was Tracy, but the shivering sensation brought to mind images of my daughter playing alone in a gray room I did not recognize.

  “We have to get to the next level. Just get sick on my shirt.”

  “Put me down!”

  I ignored her, tried shifting her so her stomach wasn't rubbing against my shoulder, then took the stairs two at a time until we got to the next level.

  Same story there, boxes filled with Polaroids ransacked on stained gray carpet lit with flashing fluorescents. But the smell was much worse, like the unscrubbable putrid that our old cat Miles had left behind in the guest room when he’d finally kicked, smiling with curds of rotten milk weighing down his whiskers. Shelly called him her Milksop, Milksop Miles because as soon as you put down your glass his tongue was in it. Abby called him Milky. I’d still smell it months, even years later, walking through the hall. Just a hint, but enough to tickle and send a path of spikes down my spine because just after he died, the following week, the doctor found the cancer scouring the surface of every lymph node in my wife’s body. I called him Smiley Miles in my mind after that, because in the back of my mind, his death, and that stink that wouldn’t wash or bleach or Lysol away, had somehow crept into Shelly and guzzled her life away. Smiley Miles. Smelly Shelly. Dead Shelly. Angry Andy and motherless Abby.

  Next to the stairway's threshold was the letter Z with an elephant Polaroid tucked between letter and wall.

  I lay a squirming, protesting Tracy down on a clear patch of floor and picked up Polaroids, shuffling through them, though I found none like those on floor Z. These had, like, numbers, computer language.

  My eyes flicked up to the corner of the room. No moon. Not yet.

  “You wanna stay here or come with me?” I said.

  “Don't want you carrying me, shit. Broke my ribs.”

  “Fine. I'll be back.”

  But then I remembered something. I turned to the door with the letter Z and the elephant Polaroid next to it. In my room, the stairway had appeared. Had the room changed? Or just the wall?

  It was crazy, I know, but if the room had shifted, it could again, couldn’t it? And take Tracy with it.

  “On second thought, you're coming with me.”

  She held up a hand as I approached. “I'll fuckin walk.”

  She spit, clutching her side as she stood. I moved to help her, but she ignored the effort, then nodded without looking at me, eyebrows raised.

  Out in the hall, the other doors were locked, but there were windows on them, the blurry kind that make shadows of whatever is on the other side.

  There were pictures on every knob. More animals, some I didn't recognize. This hall, however, did not wrap around in an endless loop, thankfully, and we reached what looked like a nurse's station where tired women might hand out meds to eager patients of a psych ward or rehab. There were no nurses, of course.

  Tracy went rigid, arching her back like a fractious toddler until I dropped her. Her eyes filled with light and she vaulted the counter, tearing open drawers and cabinets with metallic slides and bangs. She rattled an orange bottle, popped off the top and tossed three blue pills in her mouth, swallowed dry with what looked like some difficulty, then fingered out one more of the pills and placed it on the counter. She crushed it slowly under the pill bottle, using her fingernail to scratch off what powder clung to the bottom, plugging one nose hole while she snorted the blue hump with the other. Her head came up hard and she sniffed violently a few times before she resumed her search.

  “Fuck it then,” she said as she unpopped the top of another bottle, this one holding red pills. She popped three in her mouth but did not swallow, instead spitting the goopy red mess of them back into a fold of shirt that she then used to rub the coating off completely. She looked around on the desk, found a piece of paper with some information about the subjects on the front, folded the three now-white pills into it, then hammered at them with the bottom of the pill bottle.

  The snorting of these brought a deep breath of relief, and a slackening of Tracy's shoulders as she stood and held one nostril.

  “Jees and fuckin Mary,” Tracy said, and she laughed as she let her hands make fists at the small of her back. “Goddamn.”

  “Better?”

  “Shit yeah,” she said. “You got pockets? There's more.”

  I helped her get the other bottles, Xanax, Amytal, Tenuate, and two of morphine. I was happy to take a Tenuate, and Tracy took one too.

  I pointed at her. “You don't need to sit down after that?”

  “No, I feel fucking fine. Now where the fuck did you date rape me to? Clothes are a weird touch. You know kinks and shit are extra.”

  “Extra?” I said, then realized what she meant. I chuckled darkly. “Uh, I didn’t hire. You wanted it.”

  “You was drunk. And you not bad lookin, but I've had enough of that shit in my life that I don't exactly seek it out recreationally.”

  My eyes went wide.

  “Just hit you, huh. Just like that.”

  “You didn't tell me I was paying for … for that! We were just—”

  “Partying? Maybe to you,” she said, sniffing and looking around.

  “I've never hired a fucking whore! I could have gotten it somewhere else.”

  “Looks like you did. And looks like you wanted it. Anyway, let's get the fuck outta here.”

  “Yeah, I'm not sure it's easy as that. We're on level Z. Last level was Y.”

  I did not tell her about the moon.

  “So we find the stairs,” she said.