I found them underground, in a room with no way out that they had chosen, forty of them bolted onto wheels that go nowhere. I came in through the door when it opened, riding a slam of gym-cold air, and I could not leave, so I circled. Their legs blur.
The wheels roar and stay. Sweat rises off forty necks at once and I lift it, I carry it, salt and effort and someone's coconut lotion, and I set it down in the corner where the mirror is, because I have nowhere better to put it.
There is a human at the front shouting numbers, and the light pulses red, and they all reach and reach for a hill I cannot find. I looked for the hill. I have crossed real ones, I have poured myself down the far side of mountains and torn hats off strangers who will curse me and never know my name. There is no hill here. There is only the reaching.
I lifted the damp hair off the back of a woman's neck and she shivered, glad of me for one second, mistaking me for a fan, mistaking me for a machine they bought. I am not bought. I got in for free and I cannot get back out except the way I came.
When the door finally opened I took what I could: the coconut, a cough, the shape of a laugh that had nowhere to go. I did not stay to see them stop. I never see anyone stop. I was already lifting a napkin off a table two streets over, still carrying their salt, setting it down on someone who will never know whose it was.