I stepped back from the elevator and the 6 on the panel flickered. Not like a light going bad. Like something reconsidering.
It changed to 19. Then to 3. Then to a number I didn’t recognize, something with too many digits, and I was still standing in the hallway with the note in my pocket and my hand against the wall when the doors closed without me.
The hallway went quiet. The fluorescents buzzed at that low pitch from the eleventh floor and the cold was still there and I was alone and the elevator was gone and I’d refused it. I didn’t know if that was the right thing. I didn’t know if the building would send it back.
I tried the stairs.
The stairwell door was where it had been before, heavy and gray with a push bar that echoed when I hit it. I went down. Concrete steps, metal railing, my footsteps bouncing off the walls. I counted landings. Four, five, six. I kept going. The numbers stenciled on the walls stopped at nine and then started again at nine and I passed the same fire extinguisher three times before I admitted what was happening.
I pushed open the door at the next landing and stepped into the same hallway I’d left.
Same fluorescents. Same carpet. Same cold. Gerald’s office at the end of the hall with the light on.
I went back into the stairwell and went up. Twelve landings. Fourteen. My calves burned and my breathing filled the concrete shaft and I pushed open a door and it was the same hallway again. Gerald’s light. The cold. The buzzing.
I let the door close and stood in the stairwell with my hands on my knees and my lungs working and the building all around me, patient and enormous and going nowhere I hadn’t already been.
—-
The elevator came back twenty minutes later. I was sitting on the floor of the hallway with my back against the wall when I heard the ding. Soft. Almost gentle.
The panel was blank this time. No number at all. I stepped in because what else was there. The doors closed and the floor dropped and when they opened again the air was warm.
Not the chemical warmth of heating vents. Something softer. The temperature of a room where people have been sitting for a long time, body heat and coffee and the slow accumulation of hours. It settled on my skin and after the cold of eleven it felt so close to normal that something in my chest loosened before I could stop it.
I walked out into a hallway that looked different from the others. Same fluorescents, same carpet, but there were things on the walls. A framed print of a mountain. A whiteboard with a meeting schedule written in green marker. A cork board with business cards pinned to it and a flyer for a birthday lunch, Thursday at noon, bring a dish.
People lived here. Not worked here. Lived.
A woman at the nearest desk had a photo frame next to her monitor. A mug that said WORLD’S OKAY-EST MOM. A sweater draped over the back of her chair. On four there had been nothing personal anywhere. On eleven the desks had been clean and cold and institutional.
This floor had accumulated. These people had stayed long enough to bring things from home.
The thought sat in my stomach wrong.
Nobody greeted me. Nobody looked up. I walked past desks and people typed and talked on phones and one man ate yogurt with a plastic spoon and none of them registered me at all. Not the focused ignoring of the fourth floor where the woman couldn’t finish my title. Something more casual than that. I was a person walking past and it didn’t concern them.
They saw me fine. They just didn’t care.
A phone was ringing at an empty desk near the window. It had been ringing since I’d stepped off the elevator, steady and insistent, and nobody moved toward it. A sticky note on the monitor said ELAINE in neat handwriting. Spelled right.
I sat down and picked up the phone.
“Hello?”
Static. Not silence. A hiss that sounded almost like breathing, or like a room full of people all exhaling at the same time, and underneath it something rhythmic, a pulse, too slow to be mechanical and too steady to be human. I listened for ten seconds and hung up.
It rang again immediately.
I picked it up. Same static, same buried pulse. I hung up. It rang. I picked up, listened, hung up, and it rang again and I answered it nine more times before I stopped counting and just let my hand do it. Pick up, listen, hang up. Pick up, listen, hang up.
This was the work. Answering phones that connected to nothing.
Between calls I tried dialing out. I punched in my own cell number. The line clicked and hummed and gave me a tone I’d never heard before, not a busy signal, not a disconnection notice. Just a flat sustained note that went on until I put the receiver down.
I tried 911. Same tone.
I tried zero for an operator and the flat tone came back and I held the phone against my ear and listened to it and it didn’t waver and it didn’t end and I set the receiver down carefully because my hands were starting to shake and I needed them to stop.
—-
I found the fire exit during a walk I took to keep myself from screaming.
The red sign glowed at the end of a corridor past the bathrooms. EXIT. I pushed the bar and braced myself for an alarm that didn’t come and walked through into fluorescent light and carpet and another office full of people I’d never seen.
Same framed prints. Same cork boards. Same accumulated evidence of permanence.
A man looked up from his sandwich and looked back down and I stood in the doorway of what should have been a fire escape and felt the warm stale air on my face and turned around and the door behind me opened back onto the same corridor I’d just left.
I tried three more fire exits. Two opened onto identical offices. One opened onto a supply closet that was deeper than it should have been, shelves receding into a dark that the overhead light couldn’t reach. I closed that one fast.
I went back to my desk and the phone was ringing and I answered it and the static breathed at me and I hung up.
“The fire exits don’t go anywhere.”
I turned around. A man was leaning against the filing cabinet behind my desk with a paper cup of coffee in his hand. He was maybe forty, thin, with hair that needed cutting and a tie that had been loosened so many times the knot had gone permanently crooked. He looked tired the way furniture looks tired. Worn into his shape.
“I tried them all when I first got here,” he said. “Spent a whole day on it. They rotate. Sometimes they open on offices, sometimes storage, once I got a conference room with no chairs. Never outside.”
“Who are you?”
“Gil.” He took a sip of his coffee. “I’m a temp too. Or I was.”
“How long have you been here?”
He looked at his coffee. Looked at the fluorescents. Looked back at me with an expression that had given up on the question a long time ago.
“A while.”
“How long is a while?”
“Long enough that I stopped asking that.” He said it without any weight. No drama, no grief. The way you’d say you stopped ordering a dish at a restaurant because they took it off the menu. Something that was true and didn’t hurt anymore because he’d let it go so completely there was nothing left to feel about it.
“There’s coffee in the break room,” he said. “If you want some.”
I didn’t want coffee. I wanted to grab his shoulders and shake him until the calm cracked and something real came out. I wanted to ask him about the note and Floor 6 and the figure in the dark elevator and the hallway that stretched on four and the cold on eleven and whether any of it meant anything or if the building was just doing things to me because it could.
“How do you leave?” I said.
He looked at me. Really looked. Not through me, not past me, not the polite scan of someone registering a shape and moving on. He looked at me the way you look at something you’ve seen before and feel sorry for.
“You should get some coffee,” he said.
—-
The break room was small and had a counter with a coffee maker and a microwave and a round table with three chairs and blinds drawn over a wide window. Gil poured me a cup without asking how I took it and handed it to me black and it was hot and real and I held it with both hands and the warmth went into my fingers and I stood there and breathed.
“You tried the stairs,” he said. It wasn’t a question.
“They loop.”
“Yeah.”
“And the fire exits.”
“Yeah.”
“And the phones don’t connect to anything outside.”
“There’s nothing to connect to.” He said it simply. He sat down at the table and put his cup on the surface and it left a ring because the table was old and had absorbed a hundred rings before this one.
“What do you mean?”
He looked at the window. The blinds were closed, slats angled down, letting in thin strips of light that fell across the table in pale bars.
“Have you looked out a window since you got here? A real look?”
The window on four had showed sky where there should have been street. I’d let it stay wrong. I’d gone back to typing.
“I saw sky,” I said. “On four. But the view was wrong.”
Gil nodded. He stood up and walked to the window and put his hand on the blinds cord and stood there for a moment and I could see in the set of his shoulders that this was something he’d done before, something he’d shown someone before maybe, and it hadn’t gotten easier.
He pulled the cord.
The blinds opened and the light came in and I looked out and my coffee tilted in my hand and I felt it burn my wrist and I didn’t move.
There was no city. There was no street or parking lot or trees or sky. Through the glass was building. More building. Windows and concrete and corners and floors stacked on floors stretching in every direction as far as I could see.
Up was building, lit windows in columns that climbed until they dissolved into a haze that wasn’t sky. Down was building, the same windows the same concrete dropping away into a depth that had no ground. Left and right, building, extending to a horizon that wasn’t a horizon because a horizon requires something to end and nothing out there ended.
I was looking at the inside of something. A structure so large that the building I was standing in was a room in it. A cell.
My coffee hit the floor. I heard it land and felt the heat across my shoe and I couldn’t look away from the window because what I was seeing had rearranged something fundamental and my brain was still trying to put it back.
“Where are we?” My voice came out flat and thin.
Gil closed the blinds. The pale bars returned and the break room was small again and the coffee maker gurgled and somewhere behind me the phone on my desk started ringing.
“I asked that too,” he said. “For a long time. Then I stopped asking that.”
He picked up a napkin from the counter and handed it to me and I took it and looked down at the coffee spreading across the floor and the ringing kept going, steady and patient, and I stood in the break room of a building that had no outside and held a napkin in a hand that wouldn’t close around it.
The phone rang and rang and rang.