The temp agency called on a Tuesday. First callback in eleven weeks.
The woman on the phone called me Ellen. My name is Elaine. I didn’t correct her because I needed the job more than I needed my name and that math has never been complicated for me. She gave me an address downtown and told me to ask for the fourth floor. She hung up before I could ask what the company was called.
I showed up Wednesday morning in a blouse I’d ironed twice. The guard at the security desk didn’t look up when I said my name. He didn’t look up when I said it again. When he finally did, his eyes went through me the way everyone’s eyes go through me, like I was something between him and whatever he actually wanted to see.
He slid a clipboard across the counter and I signed my name on a sheet where every other row was blank. No one had signed in before me. No one that day, no one that week, as far back as the page went.
In the elevator my phone lost signal completely, not a weak connection but nothing at all. A small x where the bars should have been. I stared at it until the doors opened on four and the smell hit me.
New carpet. Chemical and sharp. I could taste it. I followed the buzzing fluorescents down a long hallway to a glass door that said SUITE 412 in adhesive letters with nothing underneath to tell me whose suite it was.
I pushed it open and stood there and nobody looked up.
A woman in a gray blazer finally walked over. Her smile didn’t reach past her mouth.
“You must be the new…” She checked a clipboard. Flipped a page. Flipped it back. “The new temp.”
“Elaine.”
“Right. Elena.”
She showed me a desk with a monitor already on, a stack of paper forms already waiting, and a sticky note on the screen that said ELANE. One letter off. Story of my life.
“Client information,” she said, tapping the stack. “The fields are labeled. You’ll figure it out.”
“What company is this?”
She tilted her head. Not confused. Something else. Like the question had arrived in a shape she couldn’t pick up.
“You’ll figure it out,” she said again, same words, same inflection, and walked away.
I sat down and started typing. The work was mindless. I was good at mindless. The part of my brain that entered data had been running on its own since my first temp job at nineteen, which freed up the rest of me to sit quietly and notice things that had nothing to do with me, which was most things, which was all things.
I was halfway through the stack when I looked up and the window was wrong.
The window behind my monitor should have shown pavement and parked cars and the sandwich shop across the road. I’d walked into this building from that street two hours ago. Instead it showed sky. Nothing but sky, high and open, and the clouds were sliding east when the wind that morning had been pushing west.
My hands stopped on the keyboard. Something in my chest went tight and cold and stayed that way.
I looked back at my screen. Typed the next name. Typed the next address. The window stayed wrong and I let it stay wrong because what else was I going to do. Tell someone? Watch them look through me? So I go back to typing.
A sandwich appeared on my desk at noon without anyone bringing it to me specifically. Turkey and swiss on cold bread. I ate it while the room filled with the sound of keyboards and plastic wrap and nothing else.
I went to the bathroom after and the hallway to get there was short. The hallway coming back wasn’t.
My legs knew before I did. I’d been walking and then I was still walking and the suite door ahead of me wasn’t getting closer the way it should have been. The distance had changed, not a lot, but enough that my body felt it first.
I stopped and looked behind me. The bathroom door was where I’d left it. The suite door was ahead. Everything was where it should be except the space between them had grown while I was on the other side of a door.
I made myself walk and the suite door arrived eventually and I sat down and picked up the next form and typed until my hands were steady again.
—-
At 4:55 the woman in the gray blazer stood up.
“That’s the day,” she said to the room.
Everyone saved their work and turned off monitors and pushed in chairs and I followed them into the hallway where they turned right, toward the elevator, except the hallway ended at a wall. Smooth and blank where the elevator doors had been that morning. No seam. No call button. Just wall.
Everyone else turned left like this was obvious, like this was the way they always went, down a corridor I hadn’t seen before, around a corner, through a door into a stairwell.
I caught the arm of the woman ahead of me.
“Where’s the lobby?”
She looked at my hand on her sleeve and then at my face. Her expression was polite and completely empty.
“Take the elevator,” she said.
“It’s gone.”
She smiled. It was the smile you give a child who’s asked why the sky is blue when you don’t know either and don’t think it matters. Then she went up the stairs and was gone and all of them went up the stairs and a door opened and closed above me and the stairwell went silent.
I went down. Four flights should have been the ground floor. Should have been marble and the front door and the street where my car was parked and the world I’d driven in from.
The door opened on another office. Different carpet, different people, all typing under fluorescents, and a clock on the wall that said 8:15 AM.
I closed the door and went back up and kept going and every floor I tried was the same thing in a different color. Offices and keyboards and people who didn’t look up when I opened the door. I climbed until the backs of my legs burned and my breathing filled the concrete stairwell and I couldn’t tell how many floors I’d passed because the numbers on the doors had stopped making sense.
I went back to four. My desk, my forms, the cursor blinking in a field I’d left half-finished. Patient. Waiting for me to sit back down and keep going.
I sat and my hands were shaking and the fluorescents buzzed and the window behind me still showed too much sky.
Then I heard it. Behind me. Soft and mechanical. An elevator arriving. A polite ding, like a bell at a hotel desk.
I turned around.
The wall at the end of the hallway was gone. In its place, an elevator with its doors open and its light on, but the floor beyond the threshold was dark. Not dim. Dark.
Someone was standing just past where the light reached.
Still. Facing me. I couldn’t see their face or anything about them except that they were there and they weren’t moving and they were looking right at me, which was the thing that scared me most, because nobody looks right at me. Nobody has ever looked right at me.
The elevator dinged again.
The doors stayed open.