Emergency Exits

I receive an e.mail from someone named Daniel on Sunday. He wants me to know that four doors, reality evacuation points, appeared by the Brisbane River on Friday. They will disappear on Monday. He helpfully includes the specific locations of the exits, but I neglect to remember the specific locations before Justin and I walk out into the waning afternoon.

We look first for the doors underneath the northern end of the Story Bridge. We find an abandoned building and some old buoys. Justin takes photos. I watch three kids rollerblade by, holding hands. A guy on an orange fixie with orange Deep Vs and orange bartape and maybe even orange socks rides past us, going west. We walk east.

On the floating walkway, nothing appears to be out of the ordinary. There are people running and there are people walking. There are houses and not-houses and boats. The same three kids rollerblade by in the opposite direction, still holding hands.

I say: I don’t see any doors here. I’m sorry I didn’t look carefully at where they’re supposed to be.

Justin says: Maybe the art project was to get everybody out of the house, to go out and do what we’re doing, which is to look for something in particular but also just to look at everything. It’s a nice evening for a walk.

I say: It is a nice evening for a walk.

So we keep walking. We walk further than we’ve walked before, to Merthyr Park. We find some monkey bars and we swing for a while. The sun sets and the moon rises. The frogs start croaking, so loudly and noisily that we try to find them by listening hard. On the dock, there is a large seabird furling and unfurling its wings over and over, silhouetted in the moonlight.

We are hungry. We leave the park and start walking home. The roads are unfamiliar but we navigate with a shared feeling of where, developed and nurtured for the last seven months. Eventually the unfamiliar gives way to the familiar, and it is on a familiar road that we spot it: an unusual door, secured to the railing high above the river. The lights in the door catch and refract the lights of the city. We walk up to it, and Justin reaches for the handle.

He opens the door. He looks through it first, and then holds it open for me so I can look through it.

He shuts the door.

Next to the door, there is a man taking a photograph of the city at night. After the image appears on his LED screen, he steps back from his tripod and addresses us.

He says: Hey. I didn’t know that opened. That’s really great. I’ll have to use it in a photo.