The elevator stopped and the smell got stronger.
Not morning anymore. Specific morning. October morning, cold and bright, the kind where the air has an edge that catches in your throat and makes your eyes water and the sky is so blue it looks fake.
I could taste it. Leaves and exhaust and wet concrete and the particular nothing-smell of a city before the restaurants open and the buses start running and the people fill in all the gaps.
The doors opened on a lobby.
A real lobby. Marble floors, a security desk, a row of glass doors along the far wall.
Through the glass I could see a street. A real street with parked cars and a sidewalk and a crosswalk and a traffic light turning green for nobody and buildings across the road, normal buildings, brick and glass and fire escapes, and a sky above them that went all the way up.
My legs moved before the rest of me decided. I was walking, then I was walking faster, and the marble was hard and smooth under my shoes and the security desk was empty and the glass doors were ten feet away and then five and then I was pushing one open and the cold hit me.
Real cold. Wind cold.
It found the gap between my collar and my neck and slid in and my whole body responded, every hair, every pore, and I was standing on a sidewalk and my eyes were burning and the sky was above me and it was outside.
It was outside and I was in it and my knees buckled and I caught myself against the door frame and stood there with cold air in my lungs for the first time since Tuesday.
A car passed. Blue sedan, tinted windows, tires hissing on wet pavement. I watched it go and the sound of it faded and another one came and the traffic light changed from green to yellow to red and a pigeon landed on the sidewalk three feet from me and pecked at something and all of it was so ordinary and so real that I pressed my hand against the glass door to make sure I was touching something solid.
I stepped off the curb. My foot hit asphalt. A bus stop sign across the street, a fire hydrant, a newspaper box with today’s date on it except I couldn’t read the date from here and I was walking toward it because if I could read the date I would know this was real, I would know I was out, I would know the building was behind me.
I got halfway across the street.
The sandwich shop was wrong.
It should have been there. The sandwich shop across from the building where I’d parked my car on Tuesday morning, the one with the green awning and the specials board propped against the door. I could see a shop. It had a green awning. It had a sign.
But the letters on the sign didn’t hold still. They rearranged when I wasn’t looking directly at them, sliding between words I almost recognized, and the specials board was blank and the awning was the right green but the wrong texture and my feet stopped on the asphalt because my body knew before my brain did.
I turned around.
The building was behind me. The glass doors, the marble lobby visible through them, the security desk. Everything exactly as I’d left it three seconds ago when I’d walked out.
But I wasn’t looking at the building from outside.
I was looking at it from inside.
The street was gone. The sidewalk, the cars, the pigeon, the bus stop, the cold October air. All of it was gone and I was standing in a lobby, on marble, under fluorescents, and the glass doors in front of me showed a street that was on the other side of them and I was on the wrong side. I’d walked through the doors and across the street and turned around and the turning around had put me back inside.
My hands started shaking. Not the small tremor from the ledger floor or the tightness from my mother’s house.
Shaking.
My whole body understood what had happened before my mind finished processing it and the understanding was physical, violent, a wave that started in my legs and moved up through my stomach and chest and I put both hands flat on the marble floor because I’d folded at the waist without meaning to.
The floor was cold. The marble was real. The fluorescents buzzed above me and the lobby smelled like cleaning solution and new carpet and I knelt there with my palms on the ground and breathed and the air tasted like inside. Like it had always tasted like inside.
—-
I stood up. I walked to the glass doors. Through them I could see the street, the cars, the sky. I pushed the door open and the cold came in and I stepped out and I was in the lobby.
I did it again. Push, cold, step, lobby.
Again. Push, cold, step, lobby.
The fifth time I ran. I sprinted through the doors and across the sidewalk and into the street and my feet hit asphalt and I ran toward the sandwich shop with the wrong sign and I ran past it and down the block and the block ended and I turned the corner and I was in the lobby.
I was breathing hard and my blouse was sticking to my back and my shoes were loud on the marble and the lobby was quiet and patient and empty and I stood there in the middle of it with my hands on my knees and my lungs burning from running through a door that went nowhere.
The security desk was occupied.
A woman sat behind it. She hadn’t been there before. She was young, neat, with a headset in one ear and a clipboard in front of her and she looked up when I straightened and her face was polite and professional and she smiled the way you smile at someone arriving for their first day.
“You must be the new temp,” she said.
The lobby hummed. The fluorescents buzzed. The glass doors behind me showed a street I couldn’t reach and the woman looked at me with eyes that expected me to say my name and sign the clipboard and take the elevator to whatever floor was waiting and start again.
I looked at her face. She was nobody I recognized. She was everybody I recognized. She had the same expression as the woman on four who couldn’t finish my title and the same posture as Patrice and the same tilt of the head as Gerald and the same warmth in her eyes as Sandra and none of those people were her and she was all of those people and she sat there with the clipboard and waited.
“Elaine,” I said, because what else was left.
“Right.” She checked her clipboard. Flipped a page. Flipped it back. “Elena.”
My name, wrong again. My name wrong on the first day of a job I’d already worked. The lobby I’d already walked through, the desk I’d already signed at, the building folding me back into the beginning and zipping it shut.
She slid the clipboard across the counter. The sign-in sheet was blank. No one had signed in before me. No one that day, no one that week, as far back as the page went.
I picked up the pen. The same pen. The same clipboard. The same blank rows waiting for a name nobody would read.
I signed it. My hand didn’t shake. I’d already done this and the doing it again felt less like horror and more like something settling into place, a key turning in a lock that had been waiting for exactly this shape, and the click of it was quiet and final and somewhere above me the elevator dinged.
The woman pointed to her left without looking up. “Fourth floor.”
I walked to the elevator. The doors were open. The light was on. The panel had numbers this time, a full column of them, and 4 was already lit.
I stepped in and the doors closed and the floor dropped and I stood there with the note still in my pocket and Gil’s coffee still on my breath and the thing behind my left shoulder standing where it always stood and the building began again.