The Locked Gallery

I'm Colette Zimmer, thirty-two, and I clean a university for a living. Night shift, three buildings, a long list of rooms that look exactly the same. Lance, my boyfriend, is thirty-four and does graphic design from home, which means when I get back at six in the morning he's usually just waking up and asking me what the weirdest thing I found was. Nine times out of ten it's a coffee cup in a strange place. Once it was a single shoe, just one, in the middle of the lecture hall. I think about that shoe more than I should.

We'd been together three years, since I was twenty-nine, and things were fine. Fine is a word I use a lot. Fine apartment, fine dinners, fine plans. I was in a mood that week where fine felt like a coat that didn't fit anymore, and I couldn't have told you why.

So when Lance said, "Let's do something dumb, let's go to Berlin for the weekend," I said yes before he finished the sentence.

We flew out on a Friday. The hotel was small but the shower was good, and I counted that as a win. That evening Lance found a listing for a contemporary art gallery in Mitte that was having some kind of private event, a launch or a closing or whatever, and he said the chances of getting in were basically zero but we could walk past and look. That's the kind of thing he says. We walked past. There was a clipboard by the door and a woman checking names, and somehow, and I still don't know how, Lance talked us in. He said we were friends of the artist. I nodded along like I knew who the artist was.

The gallery had two small exhibition rooms off a central foyer, white walls, a bench in the middle of the foyer, and a coat closet by the entrance. The art was photographs of parking garages. Honestly, some of them were good. There was a folding table with wine and plastic cups, and a crowd of maybe forty people who all dressed like they'd thought hard about their jackets.

We did a lap. Lance read every little card next to every photograph, which is a thing he does, and I hovered near the wine table because the wine was free and I was thirsty. I had two cups. We stood in front of a photo of a stairwell for a while and Lance said something about composition and I said, "Mm," which is what I say when I'm half listening.

Around ten the crowd started thinning. By ten thirty it was us and one guy in a very good coat who kept checking his phone. Then a couple came in late, laughing, a woman with short dark hair and a man with her who looked like he'd been dragged along and was fine with it. They got a cup of wine each and wandered into the second room.

And then, all at once, the lights went to half and the staff, all three of them, came through saying thank you for coming, we're closing, goodnight. We all shuffled toward the door. There was a glass door with a metal frame, and next to it a keypad, and one of the staff typed a code and the door made a clicking sound and opened. We filed out onto the sidewalk.

Except we didn't all make it. The woman with short dark hair had gone back for her coat, which the staff had put in the coat closet. I'd stepped back inside too, because I'd left my scarf on the bench, of all the dumb things, my scarf, which I could have bought a new one of for four euros. The man with her stepped back in to tell her to hurry up. And the door, the automated one with the timer, swung shut behind us and clicked.

The woman tried it. It didn't open. She tried it again, harder, like the door cared about effort.

"Oh, you have got to be kidding me," she said. She had an accent, Australian maybe. "They just left. They actually just left."

I tried the door too, then tried the keypad, which wanted a code I obviously didn't have. The lights were on a timer, it seemed, because the foyer was now lit by one dim strip above the bench. My phone said it was 10:47. The gallery didn't open to the public again until ten the next morning, according to the sign by the door, and there was no emergency number posted anywhere except a cleaning company, which, believe me, I noted.

"Okay," the man said, calm about it. "So we're locked in a gallery. Overnight. In Mitte. Could be worse places."

"Could be worse things to be locked in than art," the woman said, and laughed, and that broke whatever panic was starting in my chest.

Lance was still outside, knocking on the glass, looking like a man at an aquarium. "Colette! Are you stuck? Is it locked?"

"It's locked!" I called through the door. "It locked itself!"

He tried the handle from his side, which did nothing, and then he held his phone up like that would help. "There's literally nobody on the street. This is unreal. Are you okay?"

"I'm okay. I have my scarf," I held the scarf up. He laughed, which made me laugh.

The woman stuck her hand out. "Audrey. Audrey Lowe, I'm thirty-one, and I would like the record to show this was not my fault."

"Tate Briggs," the man said, shaking my hand. "Thirty-three. Single, and her friend, not her boyfriend, before anyone wonders. Also not my fault, though I'll take some blame for encouraging her to go back for the coat."

"Colette," I said. "Thirty-two. This is very much my fault, I came back for a scarf."

"Is it a good scarf?" Audrey asked.

I looked at it. It was gray. "It's a scarf."

Audrey's friend Tate knocked on the glass and got Lance's attention and mouthed something and pointed at his phone. Lance held up a thumb. Then Lance stepped back from the door and I heard him call, "I'm going to walk around the block. There has to be a way in, there's always a way in."

There was not, it turned out, a way in. He came back ten minutes later and reported that the whole street front was glass and steel and that the back was a solid wall shared with a bakery. He did find one thing, though, a service door in the alley that someone on staff had left unlocked. He came in through the hallway behind the exhibition rooms, and it clicked shut behind him and turned out to want a key card from the inside too. He walked out of that hallway carrying the half-empty bottle of wine from the folding table plus four plastic cups.

"I committed a small crime," he announced. "Or a small rescue. Opinions differ."

"That's not a crime, that's damages," Tate said. "You can pay them tomorrow."

"Put it on my tab," Audrey said.

So that's how the four of us ended up sitting on the floor of a gallery foyer at eleven at night, me and Lance on one side of the bench, Audrey and Tate on the other, passing around a bottle of wine that had definitely been opened earlier by someone else, out of cups that said the gallery's name on them in a nice font.

Lance told them how we'd gotten in, the friends-of-the-artist thing, and Audrey said, "We didn't even do that, we just walked in behind a group. Nobody checked. This whole gallery's security is a joke and we are the punchline."

Tate told a story about getting locked on a rooftop in Lisbon for a whole afternoon, which made our situation sound small, and Audrey argued with him about the details while I wrapped my scarf around my neck out of spite and Lance poured with a steady hand, better than I would have.

Somewhere in there Audrey asked what we all did and I said janitor and she said, "Oh, brilliant, you're the most qualified person here then," and I laughed harder than the joke deserved, because it had been a long week of fine.

"Okay, so," Audrey said, refilling her cup. "We're here until morning. Nobody's coming. What do people actually do when they're locked in a gallery overnight? Because I vote we don't just look at parking garages."

"I've seen the parking garages," Tate said. "I'm good."

I looked at Lance and he looked at me, and I had the feeling, for the first time in a while, that something was about to happen that I couldn't put on a list.

We passed the bottle around a couple more times and talked about nothing much. Tate asked what Berlin was like for tourists, Lance said we'd only been here since this afternoon and mostly used the good shower at the hotel, and Audrey said she'd been in town a week and had mostly used her own terrible hostel shower, so nobody was winning that conversation.

Then Audrey turned to me and pointed her cup at me.

"You've been quiet for a while. What's going on in your head?"

"Nothing interesting," I said.

"Bet it's not. You laugh at things before you say them, that's a sign of a head full of stuff."

I looked at my cup. The wine was cheap and I liked it. It was a work night back home, meaning I'd have been pushing a mop through a lecture hall by now, which I wasn't, which felt huge in a dumb way.

"I was just thinking I'm kind of boring," I said. "I clean three buildings at night. I go home at six in the morning. Lance is usually just waking up. We eat breakfast together and then I sleep half the day. My life is entirely that shape. I've done the same shape for years."

"That's not boring, that's a schedule," Lance said. "You're not boring."

"He's contractually obligated to say that," I told Audrey, and she laughed.

"No, but really," Audrey said, leaning forward. "When's the last time you did something completely unplanned? Something you didn't think through first?"

I thought about it honestly, which was a mistake, because the honest answer was embarrassing.

"I once found a single shoe in the middle of a lecture hall," I said. "I thought about it for a week. Where's the other shoe. That's my level of excitement."

"That's not it, that's just a shoe." Audrey sat cross-legged and put her cup down on the floor. "Okay. Challenge. One spontaneous thing, tonight, right now, no thinking. Anything. I'll do one too."

"Like what?"

"Anything. Kiss a stranger. Dance to no music. I don't know. Point is you don't plan it."

"There's no stakes," Lance said. "It's just for fun, right? Nobody owes anybody anything after?"

"Zero stakes," Audrey said. "No tab, no dare-if-you-chicken. Just doing a thing because the night's weird and we're locked in."

Tate said, "Last time she said that we ended up eating dinner at a gas station. It was a good dinner, fair warning."

And here's the part I keep coming back to, the part I didn't plan, which was the