"That sign says this door's unlocked," he said.
"Yes."
"You put that sign up."
"Yes."
He did not say anything else. He took the folded printout out of his pocket and opened it to the first page and held it up in the light, and put on his drugstore glasses, and read aloud, in the voice of a man reading off a clipboard: "One fifty-two. Twenty-one. Access denied." He folded the paper again on its creases, the first fold only, and went down to the next landing.
She went with him. She would think afterward that it was the longest walk of her life, though it took less than half an hour. Twenty. He tried the lever: locked, which was correct, twenty was not a re-entry floor and was not supposed to open, and he read, "One fifty-three. Denied." Nineteen, locked. "One fifty-four. Denied. One fifty-four. Denied." Eighteen. Seventeen, which was a re-entry floor, with the same white sign, and the lever went down a quarter inch and clicked and stopped, and he stood there a long time with his hand on it, and then he read, "One fifty-nine," and went on. Sixteen. "Two-oh-one. Two-oh-two. Two-oh-two." Three times. He said it the way you would say the name of a town you had driven through. Fifteen.
Somewhere between fifteen and fourteen she realized she was breathing hard. It was not the stairs. Going down was not hard, even with her legs the way they were this year. It was something about the air in there, the stillness of it, the way the walls held the sound of her breath and gave it back to her, so that she could hear herself breathing the way you hear your own heartbeat with your ear against a pillow. She thought: he heard this. He heard himself. She thought of the inhaler, the little plastic L of it, the canister you shake by your ear to hear if anything is left inside.
On the landing at fourteen Alvin stopped, and did not try the door, and did not read from the paper. He turned around and sat down heavily on the second stair of the flight that went down to thirteen, with his elbows on his knees and the folded printout in both hands between them, and looked at the door.
After a while Agata sat down too, on the landing, against the wall, because her legs told her to. The concrete was cold through her trousers.
"Four times," he said.