Part 5

I’ve got a notebook, now—one of those speckled composition notebooks with flimsy binding and thin, unappealing sheets. I leave it on a little bookshelf just outside the hallway and both Nico and I have taken to bringing it with us, jotting down notes. I didn’t think of it until Nico had already numbered at least two hundred doors, and some of them stubbornly refuse to show back up again, so there are plenty of empty pages with nothing but numbers for a header.

It’s Sunday morning, and so Nico is asleep. I walk down the hallway, peeking in through the doorways that have been left open, examining their signs. They’re not in any real order thanks to the way they move, but the higher-number doors start showing a certain degree of sophistication in Nico’s nomenclature, especially around 150 (“the Feldspar House,” made of genuine feldspars and prone to dangerous overheating). I jot the names down, and major facts—one of the doors apparently leads to a 1920s speakeasy, and another leads to my house, if my house were in New Orleans--which is near enough to be reassuring, but far enough to make it seem stranger, at least by context. I generally stayed in the hallway, and the only people who ever came out to the hallway were other me’s who looked so alike—in clothing, in manner, in time and place. There were variations, mostly on the degree of my success or my failure, but they were still essentially me.

There’s a series of open doors here, and I jot them down quickly on their proper pages:

DOOR 102 – Empty Arizona-ish Desert, strong lightning storms, nasty lizards

DOOR 93 – Starfield, low gravity, falling danger

DOOR 21

I stop. That’s all that’s written, DOOR 21. Nothing in the notebook and nothing on the placard either. The door’s only even a sliver open, with a doorstop keeping it from closing all the way. I slide it open just to make sure there’s nothing else written, which doesn’t make sense, because there’s no mention of gravity or danger or anything. There is, however, a little scrawl along the bottom, giving the year as 2004 in an uncharacteristically mild hand.

I duck into the door and find myself in a pantry. There are shelves of canned food—the big, industrial cans you see in restaurant kitchens. There’s a door at the far end of the pantry, and I crack it slowly, silently. I can hear people talking outside, and I have to sit down, right there on the cold tile floor, because DOOR 21 makes a lot more sense. Through the sliver of door, I can see Esperanza and Big Nico, my sister and my brother. Big Nico’s in a terrible Hawaiian shirt, apron, and chef’s hat. Espie’s long, harpy-hands are wrapped around a blue glass.

"They’re too fucking blue," Espie says. "Pool blue. Chlorine blue. No one’s going to want to drink jackshit out of something that looks like it’s going to give them chlorine poisoning. People don’t like the taste of chlorine, Nico."

Big Nico doesn’t say anything at first, but Espie goes on and raises even more of a fuss and so he finally sits down at the bar, slapping the glass top of the bar with an open palm. "I didn’t want the blue glasses, Espie, he says, they were your idea."

"Well," she says, head bobbing up and down like a buoy, "I’m rethinking this idea. Look at this. Look at this! This is impossibly fucking blue."

Big Nico exhales slowly, takes the glass from Espie, and fills it with water from the tap. He holds it up to the light and examines it for a second, considering it carefully. His back is to me, but I can imagine him doing the same side-frown that I do. His side-frown. The little bit of him I keep with me.

Espie crosses to the door of the restaurant—empty restaurant, strange enough—and leans out. She yells at someone on the street and drags the poor, wide-eyed man in, petting his arm sweetly.

"Would you drink from this glass?" she asks.

He’s not sure what to make of it, and looks over to Big Nico, and now I can’t imagine Nico’s expression, but it’s probably a smile or an exasperated grin. The man finally stammers that it’s very blue and Espie frogmarches him out, practically throws him off the stoop. She slams the door on her way back in.

"I don’t need this, Espie."

"You tell her Big Nico," I whisper.

To my surprise, Esperanza lowers her voice, murmurs something that fades before it gets to me. The way she says it, though, is sad and self-conscious, completely un-Espielike. I remind myself that this isn’t my Espie, and suddenly wonder why the door leads here instead of to another version of my house. I try to lean in to get a better vantage point, try to maneuver one way or the other to get a glimpse of Big Nico’s face. Instead, I end up pulling down a shelf full of tomato paste. The metal thunk of cans against tile is loud enough to make my feet quiver, and they both turn towards the pantry door. I get a single glimpse of Big Nico’s face, the wide, perpetually-red thing that it is, and then I practically cross the length of the pantry in one jump and slam the hallway door behind me, dislodging the doorstopper.