I stepped into the elevator because the figure stepped back.
It moved when I moved, retreating into the dark the same distance I came forward, and by the time I was inside the doors had closed behind me and the figure was gone. Not gone like it left. Gone like it had never been there and the dark had been empty all along and I’d imagined someone standing in it because I’d wanted there to be someone standing in it.
Because I’d wanted someone to be looking at me.
The elevator hummed. No buttons on the panel. No floor numbers, no emergency call, no inspection certificate in a little frame. Just a smooth metal panel with nothing on it.
It moved. I felt it in my knees, that slight drop when a floor falls away, and then stillness, and then the doors opened on cold.
Not cool. Cold. The air that came through the doors had weight to it and I felt my arms tighten against my sides before I’d decided to step out. A hallway stretched ahead of me, same fluorescents, same carpet, but the light was bluer here and the carpet was darker and the buzzing was at a different pitch, slightly lower, and my body knew before anything else that this was not the fourth floor.
A man was waiting at the end of the hallway. He was already smiling when the doors opened.
“Elaine,” he said. “We’ve been expecting you.”
My name. My actual name. Not Ellen, not Elena, not Elane. The right name in the right mouth and it stopped me in the hallway because I couldn’t remember the last time that had happened. Someone saying my name like they’d been holding it, keeping it ready.
“I’m Gerald. I’ll be your supervisor on this floor.”
He was tall and thin and his smile was warm and his eyes didn’t move when his mouth did. His face did everything a friendly face should do and none of it connected to anything behind it.
“What floor is this?”
“Eleven.”
“I was on four.”
“You were.” He said it the way you’d confirm the weather. Like it was true and also irrelevant. “Let me show you where you’ll be working.”
He walked me to an office at the end of the hall and held the door. Smaller than the one on four, with a long wall of filing cabinets and a desk in the corner and a woman already sitting at the other desk who looked up when I walked in and smiled and said “Hi, Elaine” and went back to her work.
She knew my name too.
Gerald handed me a stack of folders. “These need to be filed alphabetically in the cabinets along the wall. The labels are on the drawers. Take your time.”
“What company is this?”
Same tilt of the head I’d gotten from the woman on four. Same pause. But Gerald recovered faster and his smile didn’t flicker.
“You’ll settle in,” he said, which wasn’t an answer, and left.
I stood there holding the folders and the cold sat on my shoulders and the woman at the other desk typed quietly and the fluorescents buzzed at that lower pitch and I opened the first cabinet because I didn’t know what else to do.
The work was filing. Just filing. Alphabetical, last name first, into labeled drawers. My hands did it while the rest of me tried to understand what had changed between floors. On four nobody had seen me. On eleven everyone knew my name. On four my name had been wrong on every surface. On eleven a man I’d never met had been waiting at the end of a hallway saying it correctly.
I didn’t know which was worse.
I began to file. Anderson, Berwick, Cho, Delaney. The folders were thin and light and held single sheets of paper inside them and I didn’t read what was on the sheets because the work was filing, not reading, and I was good at doing exactly what I was told. I’d been good at that my whole life.
—-
The woman at the other desk was named Patrice. She told me this without my asking, turning in her chair and saying “I’m Patrice, by the way” like we were colleagues and this was our first real day together and she’d been meaning to introduce herself.
“How long have you worked here?”
She thought about it. Not quickly, not the way you answer a simple question, but with genuine effort, her eyes going somewhere else for a moment before coming back.
“A while,” she said.
“What does the company do?”
Same pause. Same eyes going elsewhere. “I file things. That’s what I know about it.”
“Do you ever leave? At the end of the day?”
She looked at me and her face did something complicated that came and went too fast to read. Then she smiled and turned back to her screen.
I kept filing. The cabinets were deep and the drawers were heavy and some of them were already full and some were completely empty and there was no pattern to which was which. I filed a folder labeled PARKMAN, RUTH into a drawer that already held a PARKMAN, RUTH filed by someone else in handwriting that wasn’t mine. Two folders, same name, different sheets inside.
I almost opened them. My fingers were on the tab. But Gerald appeared in the doorway and said “Elaine, how are we settling in?” with that same warm disconnected smile and I let go of the folder and closed the drawer.
“Fine.”
“Good. Let me know if you need anything.” He stood there a beat too long, looking at me, actually looking at me, and then he left.
I went back to my desk to pick up the next stack and when I pulled the drawer open to grab a pen something caught at the back of it. A piece of paper, folded once, wedged between the drawer bottom and the back panel. Old enough that the fold had yellowed.
I pulled it out and unfolded it.
Three words in handwriting that wasn’t mine, pressed hard into the paper like the pen had been shaking or the hand behind it had been desperate or both.
DON’T TAKE FLOOR 6
I read it twice. I turned it over. Nothing on the back. The paper was cheap, the kind that comes out of office printers, and the ink was blue ballpoint and whoever had written it had borne down so hard the letters were almost carved.
I folded it and put it in my pocket.
—-
I filed until my shoulders ached and the cold had seeped into my hands and Gerald came back and said “That’s the day” the same way the woman on four had said it, same phrase, same cadence, like they were reading from the same script.
Patrice turned off her monitor and stood up and walked to the hallway and turned left and I followed her and she went through a door into a stairwell and up and I stood at the bottom and listened to her footsteps fade.
I didn’t follow her. I went back to the hallway and stood where Gerald had been standing when the elevator opened. I stood there for a long time. The hallway was empty and cold and the fluorescents buzzed and I waited.
I thought about the note. Floor 6. A warning written by someone who’d sat at my desk before me, someone whose pen shook, someone who’d hidden it where only the next person would find it. Not taped to the monitor. Not left in the open. Wedged into the back of a drawer where you’d only find it if you were reaching.
I thought about the fourth floor where nobody saw me and the eleventh floor where everybody knew my name and I thought about which of those things felt more like a trap and I couldn’t decide.
The elevator dinged.
I turned and it was there, same as before, doors open, light on. But this time the floor beyond the doors wasn’t dark. I could see the back wall and the metal handrail and the panel where buttons should be.
The panel had one number on it.
Just 6. Nothing else. No other floors, no door-close, no emergency button. A single number glowing soft white in an elevator that had come for me without being called.
I put my hand in my pocket and felt the note and stood there looking at the number and the doors stayed open and the cold pressed against my back and I didn’t move.
The elevator waited.
It was patient.