—
THE ELECTRICS IN THE MASTER bedroom may have been successfully reset but down on the lower floor the locked door’s panel still glows green.
Maria explains that the door should be locked. The two tilt their heads in unison as they consider the problem.
“So, it was locked. And it just unlocked itself?” he asks.
Maria nods.
“And you want it locked again?” he says, aware something strange is going on here but also that he is not yet able to grasp its extent.
“Yes, if you can that would be good,” she answers simply.
The man raises his eyes to meet hers. “Why do you need it locked? What’s in there?”
Maria gives a noncommittal shrug. “Nothing.”
“There’s nothing in there? Then why do you need—”
Patience wearing thin, Maria leans past the diminutive man, and presses her palm to the lock panel.
The hydraulic door slides smoothly open to reveal the empty room.
The two stare in.
“Empty, see?” she comments.
“What’s that?” the little man asks.
“A green button,” Maria replies.
“What does it do?”
“I don’t know,” she answers. Then with absolutely no intention of entering the room herself she asks, “Do you think we should press it?”
The man turns to Maria, studying her face: her beautiful, feminine features, her thin frame, her soft immaculate uniform—and he finds whatever reassurance he was looking for there. He looks down at the room’s threshold and after a moment’s hesitation steps across it into the wide-open space of the white room.
Once inside, he looks up, taking in the size of it. He spreads his arms like Christ the Redeemer and spins surprisingly unselfconsciously then lets out a chuckle. “It’s big. Big room. Must have cost a fortune to dig out of the cliff rock. Is it a gallery?” He points to the pulsing green button. “Rich-guy art?”
Maria lets out a grunt of appreciation at the logic. It hadn’t occurred to her that this could just be a piece of ludicrous overpriced contemporary art. And now that he is in the room, even he takes on a relevance, a specificity that perhaps he did not necessarily possess before. Living art. Everything he does is somehow brought into focus by the clarity of the room, so that when he suddenly pulls up short it is almost as if he has shouted back across the space to her. She stares at his unmoving back—he is transfixed by something on the wall surrounding the green button. He walks over and leans in to take a closer look.
“What’s wrong?” Maria asks.
“It’s weird,” he calls back. “There’s no access panel for the button.” He turns back to her, his face suddenly a little ashen.
“Oh, okay. What does that mean?”
He gives a strange shake of the head. “Well, we’re underground here. This whole basement level is carved out of the rock. They dug down. The walls should back directly onto more bedrock, so it follows that all the building’s electrics should be accessible from inside the house. I mean, you can’t get outside the building down here. But this button doesn’t have an internal access panel. There has to be a way to get to the wiring—” He breaks off, touching the smooth white walls in broad, wide strokes either side of the button.
He steps back from the button, suddenly a little fearful.
“If there’s no access to the wiring in this room then that means there is access on the other side,” he says, carefully, pointing beyond the wall.
“So what you’re saying is there’s more house? Beyond this room?”
“Yeah.” The man swallows and nods. “Must be.”
Maria thinks she follows the man’s line of thought and why it might surprise or even concern him. The proportions of this room alone are enough to pose the questions: who would build a room like this and why?
