“I really don’t need to go to some secret place.”
I imagined how annoyed Boots would be if he were here, dealing with the whims of Vadis, whose snobberies outperformed mine （she who always had to leave one party for another, she who simply had to find the hidden beach town only to declare it dead upon her arrival）。 He once said, apropos of nothing, “I can’t imagine Vadis using an airport bathroom” and I knew just what he meant.
“Let’s get pizza,” I suggested.
She ignored me, focusing her efforts on composing a rapid-fire text. Before she could finish, I heard a click. The door unlocked.
“Or that,” she said, rolling her eyes.
We entered a musty area that looked as I suspected it would, only worse, and smelled as I suspected it would, only worse. Unidentified particles floated through strips of light. A fire had blown through the roof at some point and the walls were dotted with holes. Some were torn down to the plaster, repaired with yellowing newspaper. Beer bottles, relieved of their labels, congregated in the corners. Cobwebs stretched between the charred beams overhead. Everything seemed wet. Over my shoulder, I caught sight of a few pedestrians on the opposite side of the street, peering at us with the New York–specific envy one has for people who have the authority to enter a place they’ve only seen from the outside.
Then the door banged shut and everything went dark.
Vadis instructed me to watch my step as we swiped the flashlights on our phones. I followed her, stepping where she stepped. One of the beams above us was illuminated by the missing sections in the window, by the afternoon light coming through. On it was carved a string of Hebrew letters and their English translation: “This is the gate of the Lord, the righteous will enter through it.”
“Only the penitent man shall pass,” I mumbled.
We reached the back of the room, where there was a second door with yet another corroded knob. But instead of grabbing for it, Vadis smacked a bright green button in the door frame and slid the entire thing to the left, moving on its tracks like an album in a jukebox.
We were standing in what looked like an antigravity chamber, a hallway no wider than a closet, face-to-face with a steel wall. Vertical seams were stitched together by gleaming silver bolts. The hallway seemed to go on forever in each direction—a function of the mirrors affixed to either end. It was freshly cleaned with something that smelled like citrus.
“You’re a spy,” I said, trying to muster up a list of skills Vadis might have to offer the CIA.
“Is that what you think?”
She entered a five-digit code into a keypad, which blinked for a heartbeat before emitting a harsh beep and turning red. She pushed the buttons more deliberately this time. They made a tune, which Vadis narrated as she pressed: “Is. This. What. You. Want.”
“Ah-ha,” she said, as the keypad chirped in recognition.
“Really, are you a spy?”
“No,” she said, a familiar slyness crossing her face. “But you kind of are.”
She pushed the walls in opposite directions. My eyes squinted as my brain raced to catch up. We were standing in a marble atrium. Light came from a brass-framed skylight above. More light beamed in from the three open floors. It looked as if someone had squared off the interior of the Guggenheim. Above our heads hung two chandeliers that spread out like stalactites, haphazardly dotted with light. Filing cabinets had replaced the pews on what used to be the women’s balcony. In the corner, there was a garden sustained by a honeycomb of solar panels. The panels were frozen waves, as if someone had lifted a sheet and it had never collapsed. Beneath them were ferns and mosses, bamboo, cacti, birds of paradise, a couple cannabis plants. A water fountain gurgled away in the center.
“Garden,” I said, as if having just learned the word.
“I know, right?” she said, laughing.
But the real star of the show was neither the garden nor the chandeliers. It was directly across from us: an elegant lit tle elevator where a dais must have once stood. You could see through to the mechanics of it, to the cables and wheels, as if we were in the interior of a watch. It was hard to tell which gears were essential and which were decorative. The cage inside was brass but the exterior was glass, like a ship in a bottle. A long silk cord extended up from the middle. Then I heard a noise, something behind me that sounded like an industrial espresso machine, that broke the spell.
It was, in fact, an industrial espresso machine.
A gangly splotched-faced kid, maybe twenty, stood, tucked behind a counter near the entrance, wearing a wedge cap and a bowtie. Behind him were stacks of cups and saucers, a jar of straws. He smiled at me, drilling his lips into his cheeks, a little placid, a little psychotic.