Day 43

Today after theater class I got totally lost. The class is held in Zellerbach hall, which is also a working stage/performance hall. The class meets in a subterranean practice room, which we refer to as Room 7. Everyday, I enter Zellerbach hall through the side stage entrance, show my ID at the security desk, and proceed to descend four flights of concrete stairs into the bunker that is Room 7.

When we met for class today, we found that some of our prop furniture (plywood blocks that we refer to as "acting cubes") was missing, so I was sent on an expedition to purloin replacements from Room 317. Let me begin by saying that whatever crazed phantom designed Zellerbach must surely have had quite the affinity for cement as a construction material. Surely, no sturdier hall has ever been built, for even when I was on the third floor, the dingy, gray hallways always gave me the feeling of being underground. The endless twists and turns through the labyrinth's identical hallways and stairwells left me utterly disoriented inside the concrete beast.

After a final flight of stairs, I made it to the fabled Room 317, a strange parallel universe of Room 7. Then began the business of returning with the borrowed acting cubes. It was a good upper body workout. I had a sweat going by the time I made it back, navigating the narrow, claustrophic hallways and their fireproof steel doors.

At the end of class, I had to return the acting cubes, so to save time I tried to use the freight elevator. It finally arrived and I undid the metal latch that sealed the elevator's gaping steel mouth that opened horizontally down the middle and the big steel plates slid away. I loaded my freight of acting cubes and headed for the third floor. It had a pretty creepy aura inside the elevator, what with the graffiti and the rickety clanging noises and the open-air roof, a glimpse of skylight in the distance.

I made it to the third floor and undid the steel latch. I slid the thick steel plates apart and I found myself immediately confronted with a small, bare space: a fluorescent ceiling lamp and a set of double doors, chained and locked shut.

East of Eden completion: 66%