At the foot of the stairwell is a door. Within its rectangular window a jacketed torso appears, and then a shoulder. As the latch turns, the door swings open. A middle-aged man follows, his hands laden with a number of plastic shopping bags. The walls and ceiling of the stairwell are painted a dull shade of peach. The stairs are all raw concrete.

The man begins to climb. His boots scrape against the grit and dust that has been allowed to accumulate on the stairs. The weight of the bags strains his shoulders, and the plastic handles are digging into the flesh behind his first and second knuckles. A surgical mask covers the lower half of his face, its edges already damp with sweat.

He lives alone in an apartment on the 10th floor. He has lived there for more than two years, and he has never set foot in its elevator. He does not like to be around people, their bodies especially. He can’t stand the way their features contort when they speak, or their odor, or the millions of invisible things that are crawling on and inside them. Even in his own apartment, with the door bolted and the windows shut, he is helplessly aware of the presence of others. He lives in a tower stuffed with bodies, all of them living, breathing, sweating, excreting.

He ventures outside only for the sake of food. He could have his groceries delivered, but then he would have no control over the selection of produce. Worse, it would mean a stranger at his door. Much better to don a mask and make the trip to the nearest market. He goes at night, just before closing, and rarely sees another customer.

He longs to live somewhere unsoiled by the business of life. This impossible space exists in his mind, like a man-sized egg. If he could only penetrate its shell he would be happy, a blob of human yolk, unthinking and unmade.

He isn’t crazy; he knows there is no such place. The real world demands compromise. So he does his shopping at night and takes the stairs rather than the elevator. No matter how heavy the bags, lugging his groceries up the stairs is infinitely better than cramming himself into a metal box alongside another sweating body.

On the landing of the second floor he encounters a dark stain of what might be dog urine. The contents of his stomach announce themselves in a barely-repressed eruption of bile and gas.

Clamping shut his eyes, he forces himself to totter past. It wasn’t always like this. He has never been what other people call normal, but as a child he could look at a cut of meat without the urge to vomit. He has gone to therapy. He understands that he was broken when his father killed himself. It’s only natural, his therapist explained, given what he experienced. Trauma can manifest in all kinds of ways.

Opening the door to his father’s apartment, the stench nearly brought him to his knees. It was as if the air itself had gone rancid. Suddenly, breathing was a shocking, tactile thing, and it was all he could do to work his lungs.

He discovered the body in the living room, minus the top half of its head. A rorschach of black blood was splattered across the wall. His father’s arms hung limply at his sides. On the floor next to his white, hair-flecked feet, lay the rifle.

He could never unsee this, but that wasn’t what broke him. It was the wriggling in the hole where his father’s face had been. The crawling, cream-coloured maggots, gorging themselves on his meat.

“Enough,” he mutters.

It does no good to remember. Concentrating on the weight of the bags and the growing numbness in his fingers, he continues his slow ascent. The third floor is mercifully free of stains. Through the glass partition in the door, the man gazes into a hallway free of movement. Setting down the bags, he permits himself a short rest. With his right hand he massages the knuckles of his left, curling and straightening his fingers. He rotates his shoulders, wincing at the pop and click of his bones in their joints.

From behind there is a sharp bang, as if a door being opened and quickly falling shut.

The man freezes. His ears strain for the sound of coming feet. He has been in this situation before. His best bet is the nearest hallway. From there, he can either wait for the intruder to pass, or (holding his breath) retreat down the hall should they happen to exit on the same floor.

The ringing silence persists for one heartbeat, and then another. Finally it comes: the slap of a shoe on concrete. One floor beneath him, or maybe two, another step is taken. He doesn’t have much time. Scooping up his bags, he moves to the door and presses down on the handle with the tip of his elbow, but the latch refuses to turn. The man frowns, shifting the bags just enough to wrap a palm around the handle. Still the latch doesn’t budge, even as he applies the full force of his weight.

He shakes his head, unable for the moment to process what should already be obvious; somehow, the door is locked.

Bottling his confusion, the man turns from the door and rushes up the next flight of stairs. Once more his hand flashes to the handle, and again the latch catches. Sweat seeping from his pores, the man’s fingers slip the handle and he ploughs shoulder-first into the door. He bites back the urge to scream. There is a sour taste in the back of his throat. The bags in his hands are cruelly heavy.

At his back, the feet continue to clap against the stairs. If he is overtaken here, his only choice will be to press himself against the sweating concrete. He will be helpless, the intruder free to breathe on him. To touch him.

The peach-coloured walls are pitted and ruptured. Here and there, small, spidering cracks have formed. The man pictures the burst capillaries in his father’s cheeks. They always stood out when he drank.

The man’s back is slick with sweat; like a second skin, the fabric of his shirt clings to his chest and the nape of his neck. The surgical mask is a damp cloth against his face. From below comes a burst of laughter, high and melodic. A woman? He imagines her hair, the moist touch of her breath. Stomach heaving, he goes on, two steps at a time, panting now.

He has lost count of the floors. All of the doors are locked. Through glass windows he stares into hallways that may as well belong to another world.

The muscles in his shoulders cry out for relief. His fingers, red and swollen, throb in time with his pulse. His boot catches the lip of the landing. Releasing his grip on the bags, for an instant they hang suspended in air.

Then the bright explosion: tin cans, pre-packaged vegetables, a glass jar shattering on the concrete in a pulpy spray of sauce. Through a soup of tears the man gazes at the red mess.

The woman laughs again. Her feet clap the stairs, one step after another, ruthless and serene. The man cranes his neck to peer down the empty stairs. Why won’t she show herself?

Abandoning the food (tainted now, filthy), he attacks the stairs in a mad scramble. Using the handrails, he propels himself upward. The remaining floors pass in a blur.

The doors begin to look like thumbnail sketches, pinched and warped and impossibly distant. Beneath the man’s boots, the concrete has grown gelatinous. The fleshy ceiling sags low, lined with swelling veins. He is bent almost double now, crawling on hands and knees.

His body is coated in a sticky, searing substance. Stomach acid, he thinks. Ripping the mask from his face, his nostrils fill with the scent of rotting flesh. Maggots crawl in the corners of his eyes. Bit by bit, he is being consumed.

Laughter.

She laughs into her phone. Climbing, the tips of her fingers glide along the handrail. The dust on the stairs and the stains in the corners barely register. She is on her way to the storage room on the building’s top floor.

On one of the landings she discovers a mess of shattered glass and pasta sauce. Someone’s groceries, abandoned in a heap. She clicks her tongue at the thoughtlessness of others.

As she arrives at the top floor, her foot sinks into something soft and mushy. Turning up her heel, she looks with revulsion at the brown smear on the underside of her shoe.

What’s wrong? Her friend asks.

Nothing, the woman says. Just some garbage someone left on the stairs.
​
She scrapes her shoe against the concrete.