The Risk Pool

“B.”
    The doors opened again on a long, dark room with a low ceiling and glistening walls. A row of tall metal garbage cans lined the far wall, and in the largest of these I deposited my plastic bag full of hair and nail-polished tissues. When the elevator doors closed, I was left in total darkness and when I got back to the elevator I discovered I could not locate the button that would reopen them. I ran my hands up and down the adjacent walls, trying not to panic, but feeling fear rise in my throat anyway. It was terribly quiet there in the dark and when the big furnace clanged on a few feet away, I nearly cried out.
    There was no use banging on the doors, because my father was four floors up and, besides, I was nearly as frightened of needing to be rescued as of being trapped in the dark. After a while he would begin to wonder what had become of me and investigate. The elevator doors would open and the light from inside wouldclearly illuminate the button I could not find in the dark. It would be in plain sight, right where it should be, right where any dummy but me could find it.
    I knew it had to there, but I could not locate the button. I ran my fingers up and down the doors and walls, like a blind man reading Braille, but all they encountered was smooth, damp brick and steel. I went over the whole area around the doors several times, cursing inwardly, then finally crying tears of exasperation. Find it, dummy, I said aloud. It’s
right
here. It has to be.
    Finally, I decided on another tack. Feeling further along the wall, I started searching for a light switch, telling myself there had to be one in a basement with no windows. What I found instead, about ten feet from the elevator, was a wooden door that opened on a stairwell with a handrail, just barely visible. A faint light was coming from somewhere above, so I started slowly up the narrow stair, using the handrail as a guide. At the top there was a landing, then a right turn, then another flight. At the top of the stairs my heart plummeted when I saw that the passage ended at a single door, beneath which was a slender ribbon of light. Surely, it would be locked.
    But when I tried the knob, the door creaked inward and I found myself on the threshold of Klein’s Department Store, ground floor. Aisle upon symmetrical aisle stretched before me. The store was unlit except for the sunlight streaming in the long showcase windows a few feet away. In the nearest stood the boy mannequin wearing my clothes, his arms still extended outward, as if to embrace passersby on the street. From behind, he appeared awkward, paralytic, as if he were about to pitch forward through the glass. I let the door swing shut, the darkness suddenly welcome.
    There in the dark stairwell I remembered the conversation I’d had with my father in the convertible on the way home from The Lookout. We had left Tree and Alice inside, and I’d asked my father about something that had been puzzling me. “What will he
do
with them?” I said, referring to the roll of admission tickets Tree had said would disappear from the guard shack at the end of the season.
    “Keep them,” my father explained. “Then next summer when it gets good and busy, he’ll bring in eight or ten a day. People expect a ticket when they pay, so he’ll give them one. Not from the new season’s roll. They’re numbered. The boss counts how many are given out every day. The money for those goes right inthe drawer where it’s supposed to. The money from the old tickets will go into Tree’s pocket.”
    He let me think about it for a while. “Well?” he said.
    “It’s dishonest,” I said finally.
    “Uh huh,” he admitted. “And?”
    When I didn’t know what he meant by the question, he clarified it. “So what?”
    I made my way back down the stairs to the basement and emerged from the stairwell just as the elevator doors opened. My father was framed by the interior light, his black finger on the button that held the door open. “Well?” he said. “You decide to stay down here?”
    He was grinning, and I saw there
was
no button outside the elevator. The wall was as blank and featureless as it had felt in the dark. For reasons beyond my comprehension, the elevator could not be summoned from below.
    I got in.
    “What’s the matter?” my father said.
    “Nothing,” I said angrily.
    The elevator strained upward.
    “You wanted me to leave you down there in the dark, is that it?”
    “Yes,” I said