Free Talking Heads by John Domini

level, an otherwise blank corridor, stood the doors to the workshop. Here the heat was worst. The inmates worked stamping license plates, and the fumes of paint and molten metal made Kit’s eyes water. But the windows showed him nothing. Scarred and dented plexiglass, portholes on fog.
    Okay, my basement boys and girls—how can you tell a tourist? C’mon, punks—how do you know a poser when you see one? I mean, you and me, we belong down in those dungeons. When we feel those club walls tremble with the bass guitar, we know what they’re saying, we read it easy as a blind man reads Braille. Right! We wouldn’t even be reading this kind of newspaper, this proud alternative press, if we didn’t belong down there.
    But a tourist, a fly-by, a fake—how can you tell one when you see one?
    *
    Aw, Viddich. Stay with it. Below “D” level, Kit and the others entered an enclosed spiral stairwell. For the first time he got between the two inspectors. There, almost between one ringing step and the next, it was January again. January and nighttime: down here they left the lights out. Kit’s eyes were still adjusting when the four of them stopped.
    â€œWow.” The inspector who spoke was so close that Kit could feel the man shiver. “You can’t even use forced air?”
    â€œSomebody had the bright idea of using the workshop ovens as the furnace.” The guard tapped his baton across the downstairs door to find the lockbox. “Right now the overhead pipes are so bad we can’t get any circulation.”
    â€œAh, Charley …” The inspector’s voice had changed. “Overhead pipes?”
    â€œCharley,” the other inspector said, “we never heard about no overhead pipes.”
    This guy too sounded off-key, forced. Kit wondered about the stairwell’s echo, and when the door opened, the group hustled through faster than necessary. Was there something worth knowing about overhead pipes? Kit tried to make a note in the dark, but a new dampness made his lungs catch. The smell was a thousand miles out of place, the skunk-cabbage chill of his uncles’ creekbed. When the fluorescents came on overhead, coffee pulsed under his scalp.
    â€œWhat is this?” he said. “What are you so scared of?”
    The inspectors had slipped past him. As he blinked and focussed, Kit could see they had no time for him anyway. The room looked wrecked, uninhabitable. Down here the cells weren’t lined up in rows like on the upper levels, and the doors didn’t have openings. Instead the place was arranged like a suite of offices around a vacant, phlegmy lounge. The offices were bolted top and bottom, and the floor had no rug. Standing water stretched across the room, maybe a yard shy of wall to wall. It was green with institutional paint.
    On the unrippled surface of the pool, the lights’ reflection—the fluorescent strip, the tin crosshatching—suggested the ribbed back of a crocodile. One of the inspectors knelt beside the pool and, another surprise, he could dip his finger only to the second knuckle. But then, Kit reminded himself, Junior Rebes couldn’t have tested the depth. Chances were that Junior hadn’t even seen how far the green scuzz rose up the walls. Over the frame round the exit, flakes of paint lifted off the steel like lichen. The smell was fungous and rust trailed in stripes down from the bolts.
    The only sounds were the movements of the inspectors and a rhythmic babble from inside one of the cells. A chant, punctuated by handclaps.
    Kit went back to his pad: “?overhead pipes?” Then, okay, six cell doors on the floor plan. One, two, three, four, five and six. Doors not quite tall enough for him to enter without bending, with sliding panels at nipple height. Plus a seventh: shorter still and without a food slot, placed so its ceiling must be sawed off by the spiral stairs. God, was that the closet? The