Once I wake up, I gather my things together and return to the pool. Nothing has changed. I take a deep breath. I’m really going to do this. I undress, folding and stacking all of my clothing on top of my shoes to stay dry. I climb up the mound of carpet and down the other side. It’s freezing cold and sucks all the warmth from my body as I submerge deeper and deeper. At the bottom, the water comes up to my chin. The carpet is still in place in this room and squishes between my toes as I carefully walk over to the skeleton. Lower piles of carpet and pad have been stacked all around the perimeter of the room to about two or three feet high. I’m already shivering. I have to do this quickly.

  My hope is that the constantly flowing water long ago cleaned out any leakage and decomposing gooey bits from the body, so that the clothing is free of any fleshy remains. I take a deep breath and bend down, head under the water to collect the shirt, t-shirt, pants, and boots. He was also wearing underwear, which I leave with the body. As I lift each item, I verify that it is free of any remains. When I pick up the socks, I try not to think about what I feel inside. For a moment, I think I’ll throw up, but there’s nothing in my stomach for that to happen. I still have a few dry heaves before I’m able to force the thought of what I’m doing from my mind and get back to business. I turn the socks inside out and a collection of small white bones drifts down into the water. I take the boots as well.

  When I turn around to go back, I notice above the waterline a pen shoved into the wall. I grab this as well, then climb up the dam and back down into the adjacent room. I never anticipated I’d be a grave robber, but when these things dry, they will be enough to keep me warm. If I don’t find food soon, it will get harder and harder for my body to maintain its temperature. I realize that if I don’t find food for longer still, this will have been a waste of time and energy. What’s that saying? Where there’s life, there’s hope.

  I wring out my hair as best I can and do the same with the salvaged items. As I wring out the pants, I discover some items in the pockets and set them aside. I sniff each clothing item as I twist it to see if this exercise was for nothing due to the clothes smelling too bad to use, but I can’t be sure I really smell that anything is off. I think there may be some hint of a bad odor or it may just be psychosomatic from knowing the source of the clothes. Could there be something in the water that affected the decomposition process? It’s weird that there is no mold or mildew in this constantly wet environment. Is there some strange chemical compound in the water? Am I being slowly poisoned? I can’t afford to worry about it. I have nothing else to drink and so far I feel fine. I push off as much water from my body as I can and dress myself.

  The items I retrieved from the pants were a set of keys, a pocketknife, a pocket watch, and a wallet. The wallet has cash weird-looking bills that are all green, some papers that disintegrate when I touch them, a few long-expired credit cards, and a faded driver’s license that expired in 1986. The man’s name was Carl Daniels. He may have been dead forty years or more. I wonder if he is on a missing persons list somewhere. How long did he hold out before he built a place to drown himself? It seems the most likely thing that could have happened. Did running out of ink for his arrows push him over the edge? He could have continued using the knife to mark the arrows. Did he discover a source of food? Maybe he just drowned accidentally, having made this pool to break the monotony of the rooms? No one will ever know.

  The tale has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.

  Tears well up in my eyes. Maybe no one will ever know what happened to me. My parents must have called the police by now. There’s probably an amber alert. My picture is going to be on the wall at Walmart. Is there any way to survive here?

  “No, no, no, stop it!” I yell at myself. I close my eyes and take deep breaths until I calm down. I just need to do the work I can do to improve my situation and remember there is nothing I can do about what is beyond my control. I promise myself that when I get out of here, I’ll find the man’s family and let them know what happened to him.

  I resume my inspection of the items from Carl Daniels. The keys are pretty generic. One has the name “Datsun” on it. There’s a keychain with a Kelly-green football helmet. There’s a picture of an eagle on it. The pocket watch is waterlogged, but it seems to be a wind-up model, so maybe it will work when it dries out. The Swiss Army knife has several blades and other tools. All of the items show some signs of rust and corrosion. The question now is where do I go? I think on it a few moments and then have an idea.

  I put the wallet, knife, keys, and watch back in the pants pockets and wrap them up along with the other items, including the empty pen, in a bundle made from the shirt, then walk back to where I slept. I lay out the clothes and stand up the boots on the carpet roll to keep them out of the damp. I will try a new exploration strategy the won’t put me far from here when I’m ready to sleep and everything will hopefully be dried out by the time I’m done walking for the day.

  The arrows were a dead end and the zigzags were really pointless from the beginning. Maybe I should just go straight? Or maybe I should fully explore the area thoroughly. There could be a buffet full of food three rooms away I never find because I just walk straight past it.

  The pool is such a distinct location from the sameness of all the other rooms that I can use it as a point from which to explore. It will be findable even if I miscalculate somewhere along the way. I go around to the other side of the pool room, and start walking a hundred rooms. I then turn right and right again so that I am returning on a parallel course towards the pool room. One hundred one rooms later one of the walls of the pool room is directly to my right. Keeping the column of rooms beginning here in the center I will look into every room for a hundred rooms in both directions, then advance to the next row for the rest of the day. I’m now just calling the time between sleeping a day. Grouping days into twenty-four hours would just waste my dwindling phone charge and not gain me anything. Time is an illusion a wise man once said or something to that effect. That’s true nowhere more than here. When I’m too tired to go on, I will reassess if this strategy is any better than my previous ones. I start walking my hundred rooms in the other direction.