Snippet

2049 stands next to its sister, razor-sharp corners gleaming like steel, two-dimensional, taller than the eye can see.  The angles of the triangle prevent the supporting walls from  ever being seen.  2049 is always on edge.

 You walk the blue carpeted corridors, ride the brown carpeted elevators, pad across the marble lobby floors and step down onto the escalator.  The women with their meticulous hair and serene, composed faces slide up past you.  Their legs are encased in filmy shadows and pastel colors, their skirts slide silkily around mysterious, soft undergarments.  They leave perfect clouds of scent behind them as they rise up into the sunlight of the lobby.  You wear jeans which fit poorly.  Your hair is long, combed back without imagination and your face is withdrawn; you don't ever look up. You know the mysteries of 2049.  You know the parking lots with their silent waiting automobiles, the purple Excalibur on level D, the Morris Minor convertible on F.  A man in a cart with a bright yellow revolving light drives through the subterranean caves of cars.  His world is one of a concrete sky, carbon monoxide breezes, and tides that ebb and flow according to the inextricable pulls of the working day.

Boo-beep, boo-beep, the electronic ball bounces off the obstacles, knocking them down.  You know the bright, bleak lunch counter, with its single video game.  A man stands in front of the machine, his muscles tense beneath the blue pin stripes. It's more than just the release of litigatory tension, more than the working off of aggression: the man cares about the electronic ball hitting the obstacles, knocking them down.  He cares because here the problems are clear and the goal is obvious.  Here there is simplicity and he can understand what he's doing.  Here he has his priorities straight.

The buttons in the elevator are sensitive to heat; every time you touch one you fear that it will not respond.  You are an alien being without normal body warmth and this will be the way you are discovered.  There is no elevator music.   Just the tall box with the carpeting all over the walls and floors.  Like a rubber room.  Sometimes, when alone, you throw yourself against the brown walls, just to see what it would be like to be insane.

On the eleventh floor there is a bathroom.  You have been in there late at night.  The handicapped stall in the women's room is pale yellow.  You locked the door and sat there, looking at the smooth clean walls, the smooth clean floor, the aluminum bar.  Room for a wheelchair to maneuver.  You imagine a girl coming in there during the day.  A secretary, one of the ones with the creamy legs and smooth blank faces.   She doesn't have to use the special stall, but she comes in there anyway, closes the door, and sits, surrounded by tiles the color of cream pie. Perhaps it is then that she remembers something.  Something from outside, something sad, something that makes her face soften until it melts away.   While she cries between the cold tile walls her noises are muffled by the huge concrete indifference of 2049.