After the sun fell down the view was nonexistent. Black mountains, black sky, black clouds, black stars. I was exhausted after the plane and the shuttle and the endless forest service roads giving way to private gravel driveways. All I wanted to do was sleep. But the festivities had already begun and I didn't want anyone narcing to my boss that I had skipped out on the first training. Better to merge with the crowd and slip away once I'd been counted present.
The venue was a handsome alpine lodge, mutilated with modern decor that gave it the feel of a hotel conference room. The facilitators wore slippery yellow robes like raincoats. They smiled like you do when someone takes too long in front of you in line. One shoved a table and folded the area rug back in place with a foot. It had been misaligned. The other listened at the door. It was performative because we could all hear it.
bam bam bam bambambam bam bam bambambam bam bam
I couldn't tell if the heavy wooden element at chest level was a handle or a bar to hold the door shut from the outside. He pulled on it and it opened without a sound.
It took me a second to understand what I was looking at. Bodies packed so tight they couldn't possibly move but moving nonetheless. Thrashing and stomping. Carried forward and being carried in turn. A swirling dark pattern to fill the windowless and almost unlit space. The whirling ant mill implied an eye of the storm at the center but promised annihilation to anyone who tried to swim through the mass and reach it.
There was a little light from somewhere. There must have been or I couldn't see it. There was enough that I recognized someone in the crowd. I remembered her from the ride up, the only person in the van who listened attentively to the concierge's excited lecture. Something about a dolmen beneath the lodge, preserved in its original condition in a high ceilinged chamber beneath the original structure and still enclosed today a century later. She had gone up ahead of me and now she flashed before my gaze. Bruised face slick with drool, bedroom eyes half lidded. She snapped away into the human current and I was back on my uncle's farm. Watching him slam the emergency stop a moment after the farmhand disappeared beneath the grain. Like it could reverse the arc. Bear the man up out of the silo. Un-collapse his lungs.
I turned to yell at the raincoats. To do something. Pull the fire alarm. Call a time out. Like hell was I going in there.
I didn’t see who shoved me.