You collect yourself in the car. I never knew what that meant before.

I hate the Star Trek doors. I want to feel the weight of a door when I push on it. A building shouldn’t devour you. I don’t want to go in its maw.

There’s something wrong with everybody. Spectator or actor or stagehand or director — doesn’t matter. Everyone’s a mess. There’s a man in pajamas in a wheelchair on the curb smoking a cigarette. It’s twenty. You could grind him up and make a paste of pure corruption.

VCT. That means vinyl composition tile. Twelve inch squares. Hard. Cold. Everyone stares at it and walks. There’s nothing to see and that’s the point.

After a while it’s over. It’s late. What difference should it make in there what time it is? But we are humans no matter the VCT. The moon is up and the sun is down and the day is over and that’s that.

You go down the long lonesome corridor and stare at the flecks in the floor and there’s nothing and nobody for the last fifty yards. You come up hard at a doorway. There’s a badge and some writing and it doesn’t matter what it says. The room has no people and the television is screwed to the wall in the last place it should be, in the corner at the ceiling, and it yells at no one. Not even me. You stare slackjawed for a moment and the corpse of some hoary joke is hurled at the audience of dead souls in an empty room.

Going down.