A clearly marked exit
On Sunday I went up to the mall to see some movies. I saw The Informant! and Inglourious Basterds, which were both pretty good.
I managed to avoid the mistake I made last time, which was to try to exit through the labeled exit instead of through the entrance. Through the hall past all the actual theaters are the double doors for emergency or high-traffic exit. I was there to see Moon last time, which was also pretty good, and which I also saw by myself. When I left, I decided to use the exit instead of the entrance I came in through.
Beyond the doors was a room that was under construction. The walls were unfinished board, and I saw some incomplete wire sticking out and other general signs of construction-ness. The doors were a clearly labeled exit, though, and there was another doorway with a clearly lit "Exit" sign above it... leading into a dark alcove. This was the point at which leaving became an educational adventure: it was a clearly marked exit, so I decided to keep going.
Through the little dark hall and the door was the top floor of a multi-story room with a big metal staircase, a red steel scaffold filling the whole room with broad, steep stairs. There were exits on each floor on both sides of the room, so entwined with the one staircase was another identical staircase, serving the opposite sides of each floor as the stairs wend down to street level. The previous time I'd been there, to see that new Indiana Jones movie with folks from work, we had gone down a similar stairway—so I didn't think a lot of it, other than noting again the weirdness of it not being a real stairway like in every other building I recall being in. I like to be quiet in quiet places, so I started carefully down.
A couple floors down is when I saw the homeless guy lying on a bed of newspaper on one of the landings. I forget if he actually noticed me, but I fled back up the stairs as quietly as I could. As I said, it was essentially a big steel scaffold, so as much as I wanted to be quiet, I doubt I did it that well. As noisy as I might have been, though, I didn't want to barge past this guy trying to rest on a Sunday afternoon—he'd obviously made himself at home, and I wouldn't want someone barging through my home just because it was a clearly marked exit—so I tried some of the doors. I found that (not without reason, I suppose) they were locked, only opening out into the stairway. Even the door at the top I came through was locked.
At some point the thought might have occurred to call mall security or someone for assistance, but either I'd let my phone battery run down or I couldn't get any signal in this enclosed stairway. Eventually I decided I'd try going down the other, entwined staircase. Since these were not really part of the internal architecture of the building, the two staircases weren't actually joined in any way. To switch stairs, I had to go halfway down one of the stories, to where the stairs' mutual downward crossing met, and flip over the rails. It was especially scary given the fully utilitarian incline of the stairs; while there wasn't enough room to fall between the rails, falling down the opposite staircase would still be more of a fall than a roll. Taken carefully, though, it was fine.
I checked a couple of the doors on the other side, but while the top one had more of an alcove than the other doors, it was still locked. I started down on the other side, and though there was a moment of panic when I found more newspaper strewn on a landing, apparently only the one guy was there. I made it to the ground floor where the door to the mall's side street let me right out.
So Moon was pretty good, but I wasn't able to give it the reflection I might otherwise have.
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