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conclusion.
    Mice,
Jay muses ruefully.
Whose genetic makeup is surprisingly like ours.
    At the first intersection he veers right into a slightly bigger, and filthier, ducting, curtained with sheets of lint and cobwebs, praying that this one may lead somewhere promising, but having no confidence that it does.
    Hands and knees, now, faster, he keeps crawling. The squeak and thrum of his knees and skin. Somewhere far behind him there is the sound of the bathroom door burst open and he hears Public saying: “How lame is this?” And then: “He is not helping himself here.” And, shouting, louder, presumably with his head up in the vent: “Jay?” bent and amplified by unforgiving air duct acoustics. “Goddamn it.”
    Doe is also talking, but not to Public, and not behind him, but below him. On a walkie-talkie or cell phone. Coordinating hiscontainment from the room or hallway across which the ducting is taking him.
    But now there’s no light at all. His eyes try to adjust, he can feel them straining to see anything. Jay is moving as fast as he can, oblivious to any obstruction in front of him, throwing out one hand after another so that at least he’ll touch it before he crashes into a dead end, arriving abruptly at an intersection of three different, smaller ducts, each snaking off into its own dark oblivion. Each too small, as he touches the sharp edges of the openings and makes the quick calculation, for him to continue.
    He hears movement and footsteps below him. Doe and Public, strolling, taking their time. He imagines them listening for him: eyes tilted up to the ceiling tiles of a big empty ward. He holds his breath.
    “See, a woman would never do this,” Doe is saying.
    “What—escape from safety?”
    Their voices keep moving under and away from him.
    “No. It’s this: a man crawls back down the umbilical, expecting the womb . . .”
    Jay’s eyes track fits of spark and color that first he thinks are some kind of entoptical floater, but when he moves his head they reflect hard off the galvanized steel and betray a vertical shaft directly above him, with vents leaking daylight in dreamy stripes.
Maybe,
he thinks carelessly.
Hope is for suckers,
Nietzsche responds—well, more or less. Jay contorts to a standing position as quietly as he can, and starts to wriggle upward in the vertical shaft, pressing his elbows and his knees against the opposing planes of steel, like a rock climber in a chimney. The ducting groans and shudders on its mounts.
    “. . . but a woman, a woman confronted with this cold, dark, narrow passageway to God only knows where . . .”
    Doe and Public, walking back.
    “How’s that divorce going?” Public ribs.
    A burst of static from a walkie-talkie, high above; a huge grille has been pulled and the purplish-pale and square-haired head of a uniformed cop appears, leaning half inside, with a flashlight, sending an optimistic flutter of beams down the sides of the air shaft, but never quite reaching Jay.
    “. . . a woman sees it for what it is. She knows it’s hopeless, because it’s exactly like her last four relationships. Dark, narrow, and humiliating dead ends.”
    Public laughs.
    The flashlight retreats and the cop disappears and Jay is left slipping, groaning, his greasy sweat-streaked skin burning as he tries to hold himself up with only the friction of his limbs against the sheet metal. He’s about ten feet up; falling down is not an option. He has those queasy gym-class butterflies he’d get rope-climbing when he was finally able to go all the way to touch the ceiling. But a frantic twist and shimmy brings him up to the next junction, where he can find purchase on the horizontal shaft there and slowly pull himself to relative safety. But now what? This duct is smaller than the lower ones, and he can only wiggle forward, on his belly, arms flippering to propel him, his lower legs barely clearing the angle of the up shaft. Thump thump thump-thump thump-thump. He