Rubber Lockdown

The lock clicked shut at 4:47 on a Tuesday afternoon, and I didn't notice for another twenty minutes.

That's the thing about being sealed inside a full rubber suit. You don't hear the mechanism. You feel it, a small vibration against your spine, like someone tapping a tuning fork against your vertebrae. But I was busy watching the pigeons fight over a discarded croissant near the fountain, and by the time I registered the sound, the damage was done.

I tried the zipper first. It ran from my tailbone to the base of my skull, a thick industrial thing with teeth like a crocodile's smile. My fingers, gloved in three millimeters of black latex, couldn't get purchase. They slid off the pull tab like it was greased. Which, technically, it was. My own sweat.

"Okay," I said. My voice came back muffled, trapped in the hood that covered everything but my eyes and mouth. "Okay. That's fine."

It wasn't fine.

The suit was a commission. Custom. A client in Rotterdam wanted a piece for her gallery show, something about "the architecture of confinement," and she'd paid me half up front to wear it for a week and document the experience. Performance art, she called it. I called it rent money.

But the suit wasn't supposed to lock.

I sat down on the edge of the fountain, ignoring the stares of a family of tourists who'd stopped to take photos of the pigeons. Or maybe they were taking photos of me. Hard to tell. In this city, a man in a full rubber suit isn't the strangest thing you'll see before lunch.

My phone was in my bag. My bag was on a bench ten feet away, where I'd set it down to stretch my shoulders. The suit was heavy. Hot. I'd been wearing it for three days straight, sleeping in it, eating through the mouth hole, and my skin had started to feel like something that belonged to someone else.

I stood up. Walked to the bench. Picked up the bag.

The zipper pull was gone.

Not broken. Not snapped off. Gone. The tab that should have been at the top of the zipper, the little metal loop I'd been fumbling with, wasn't there. In its place was a small brass plate, no bigger than a thumbnail, engraved with a single word: SIX.

I stared at it for a long time. The pigeons kept fighting. The tourists kept photographing. Somewhere behind me, a tram rattled past, and the sound of it, the familiar clatter of wheels on tracks, felt impossibly distant.

I don't panic. That's not a boast. It's a fact about my nervous system. I've been in worse situations. I've been handcuffed to a radiator in a hotel in Prague while a man I'd never met explained, very calmly, that he was going to remove my left ear if I didn't tell him where his brother was. I didn't panic then. I told him I didn't know his brother, which was true, and he believed me, which was lucky, and he let me go, which was luckier.

So I didn't panic now. I sat back down on the bench. I opened my bag. My phone was there, charged, three missed calls from my sister. My wallet was there. A half-eaten protein bar. A water bottle. A small notebook and a pen.

I wrote: SIX. WHAT DOES SIX MEAN.

Then I wrote: FIND THE KEY.

I didn't know where the thought came from. It arrived fully formed, the way some thoughts do, as if they'd been waiting in the wings for their cue. The suit was locked. The lock needed a key. The key was somewhere in this city, and there were six places to look.

Six.

I looked at the brass plate again. It was warm. Everything was warm. The suit trapped heat like a greenhouse, and my body had become a small, damp climate of its own. I could feel sweat pooling in the small of my back, trickling down between my shoulder blades, collecting in the creases of my elbows and knees. My feet, encased in attached socks, felt like they were swimming.

The first place.

I thought about the city. My city. I'd lived here for eleven years, long enough to stop calling it "the city" and start calling it home. I knew its streets the way I knew the lines on my own palms. I knew the bakery on the corner of Vondelstraat where the baker's wife always gave me an extra croissant. I knew the bench in the park where the old man fed the ducks every morning at seven. I knew the alley behind the theater where the actors smoked during intermission, their costumes still glittering under their coats.

But I didn't know where a key would be hidden. I didn't know who had locked the suit. I didn't know why.

I stood up again. The family of tourists had moved on. The pigeons had won their battle, and the croissant was now a scattering of crumbs. The sun was starting to sink, painting the sky in shades of orange and pink that would have been beautiful if I hadn't been sweating through a rubber cocoon.

I walked.

I didn't have a destination in mind. That's not true. I had a destination. I just didn't know it yet. My feet carried me south, past the museum, past the row of galleries where my client's show would open in two weeks, past the café where I'd had my first date with a woman who later told me I was "too intense," which I took as a compliment.

I stopped at a crosswalk. Waited for the light. A cyclist whizzed past, close enough that I felt the wind of her passing against my face, the only part of me still exposed to the world.

And then I saw it.

A poster. Taped to a lamppost. Black and white, simple, the kind of thing you'd walk past without a second glance. But I glanced. I looked. I read.

LOST KEY. REWARD. ASK AT THE OUDE KERK.

The Oude Kerk. The old church. Ten minutes from here, maybe fifteen. I'd been there once, years ago, to see an exhibition of modern art that had been installed in the nave. I remembered the way the light fell through the stained glass, the way the stone floor felt cool under my feet, the way the silence pressed against my ears like a physical thing.

I started walking.

The city unfolded around me. Canals, bridges, houseboats bobbing on the water. Tourists on rented bikes, wobbling dangerously close to the edges. Locals walking dogs, carrying groceries, living their lives. None of them looked at me twice. A man in a rubber suit was just another part of the scenery.

But I felt their eyes. Not on my body, but on my situation. They knew. Somehow, they knew. The suit wasn't just a costume anymore. It was a signal. A beacon. A billboard that said: THIS MAN IS LOCKED. THIS MAN IS LOOKING.

I reached the Oude Kerk just as the sun dipped below the rooftops. The church stood at the edge of the red-light district, its ancient tower rising above the neon windows and coffee shops like a stern grandfather watching over wayward children. The doors were open. A sign outside announced an evening concert, something by Bach, the kind of thing that drew tourists and locals alike.

I stepped inside.

The cool air hit me like a wave. My body, overheated and exhausted, drank it in. The nave was dim, lit only by candles and the last light filtering through the windows. A few people sat in the pews, waiting for the concert to begin. A woman in a black dress was adjusting a music stand near the altar.

I walked down the aisle. My footsteps echoed on the stone floor. The suit creaked with every step, a sound I was starting to hate.

At the front of the church, near the altar, there was a small table. On the table was a box. Wooden, old, carved with symbols I didn't recognize. And on top of the box, a note.

I picked it up. Read it.

ONE OF SIX. THE NEXT IS WHERE YOU FIRST LEARNED TO SWIM.

I turned the note over. Nothing on the back. I looked at the box. It was locked. Of course it was.

I stood there for a long moment, holding the note, feeling the weight of the suit, the weight of the city, the weight of whatever was happening to me. The woman in the black dress looked up from her music stand. She smiled at me. Not a friendly smile. Not a welcoming smile. Something else. Something knowing.

"You're early," she said. "The concert doesn't start for an hour."

"I'm not here for the concert," I said.

Her smile widened. "No," she said. "I didn't think you were."