Speaker 1: Wednesday morning started beneath the blinkered hum of lobby fluorescence,
Speaker 1: exactly as it always did. The city's heavy gray summrise
Speaker 1: slanted through the plate glass, and the building's pulse delivery
Speaker 1: carts the aroma of burned espresso. The familiar shuffle behind
Speaker 1: the security desk begun in its practice cadence. My job
Speaker 1: as maintenance super vesemant being half invisible, half indispensable, and
Speaker 1: I led my small team through the ground floor routines
Speaker 1: before traffic thickened and tenants fill the holes. That morning,
Speaker 1: a crew of fiber optic technicians arrived their dark cases.
Speaker 1: Rolling behind one of them a shop faced woman with
Speaker 1: a note bad as which falls they be clearing for
Speaker 1: cable runs. I barely glanced at my printer chiccklists before saying,
Speaker 1: you'll want eighteen nineteen and twenty main rise of closets
Speaker 1: above the service elevator north wind. My body was on
Speaker 1: automatic mapping routs I had followed for decades. We gathered
Speaker 1: around the central elevator station, where I checked each panel
Speaker 1: hall anew as the building had dated some liths lost spring.
Speaker 1: That's when the lead engineer squinted, then asked, almost by accident.
Speaker 1: Hold on you sure about nineteen. She ran her finger
Speaker 1: down the buttons. There was eighteen a silent gap, then
Speaker 1: twenty polished flap side to plastic coal buttons. She checked
Speaker 1: every lift, none had nineteen a passing guard. Tommy caught
Speaker 1: her confusion and grinned some buildings just scaped numbers. Bad
Speaker 1: luck or something, he jerked, settling down his coffee. The
Speaker 1: elevator God's frown on nineteen as much as thirteen, I guess.
Speaker 1: The tex shrug flipped over their building plans and discussed
Speaker 1: worker rounds. It was barely a blip, a routine oddity
Speaker 1: in old buildings. But I stood there blinking at the panel,
Speaker 1: strange heat rising through my scalp because I remembered the
Speaker 1: nineteenth floor, not in the abstract or from stories. My
Speaker 1: own boots had soaked its blue carpet after a pipe
Speaker 1: Boastin's wheat nineteen o six years ago. I had once
Speaker 1: spent an afternoon scraping a tisa from its corridor, staring
Speaker 1: up at the peculiar ancular artwork that made the North
Speaker 1: Foy so distinct, that leaky office in the northwest corner,
Speaker 1: where the ceiling tiles always sagged and dripped. Floor nineteen
Speaker 1: as specific to me as the biting chill of this abasement.
Speaker 1: I told no one, there's a rhythm to work, a
Speaker 1: pride in not being the one to make of us.
Speaker 1: But waves of discomfort washed up against my memory. If
Speaker 1: there's no button? Was I inventing those details? Had I
Speaker 1: simply confused my floor as a different building, a different year.
Speaker 1: Yet as the text filed into the lift, I saw
Speaker 1: in their glance as that moment of uncertainty, the blink,
Speaker 1: the pause. Evidently I wasn't the only one to feel it,
Speaker 1: even if they chose to let the building silence. One
Speaker 1: I crossed a lobby, passing the directory freshly laminated, no
Speaker 1: evident gaps, no awkward skip lines. In the admin office,
Speaker 1: I almost brought up the oddity to the office manager, Shannon, when,
Speaker 1: as if unk you, she caught the beginning of my question,
Speaker 1: something weird about the nineteen floor? She laughed a bit
Speaker 1: too easily, the way people do when Eben legends float
Speaker 1: to the surface. You know, we never had one. Karl
Speaker 1: skips from eighteen to twenty, like every high rise since forever. Right,
Speaker 1: Maybe you're thinking of your old place downtown didn't that
Speaker 1: one have a weird numbering thing? I managed a faint smile,
Speaker 1: letting the moment pass. All afternoon, a simple puzzle followed me,
Speaker 1: nothing outwardly alarming, just the ticklish sense of a rum
Speaker 1: note in a familiar tune. I kept noticing the elevator panel,
Speaker 1: glancing at it whenever I passed, failing to let go
Speaker 1: of a question that the only grew shop of the
Speaker 1: longer every one else dismissed it. Somewhere between idle curiosity
Speaker 1: and personal doubt, I started to wonder what if anything
Speaker 1: was missing, not just from the panel itself, but from
Speaker 1: the shared story of a building. I thought. I knew
Speaker 1: fully at my age, I depend on the world to
Speaker 1: stay mildly unpredictable. The building's oddities are, in some small
Speaker 1: way a comfort. But this wasn't like the time the
Speaker 1: fire alarm system mander Me sounded on all even flours,
Speaker 1: or where a winstorm took out the rooftop gardens traylis overnight.
Speaker 1: What I felt turning this problem over in my head
Speaker 1: was a different breed of discomfort, the quiet conviction that
Speaker 1: the absence was far more peculiar than a missing number
Speaker 1: and a button. It was as if my own memory
Speaker 1: had been quietly edited, and the only evidence left was
Speaker 1: the uneasy echo of my certainty. I ended my day
Speaker 1: in supply bay, reviewing next week's maintenance schedule, but my
Speaker 1: mind hovered above an absent floor and certain whether I
Speaker 1: should be more worried by every one else's in difference
Speaker 1: of my own insistence that something is saidental and specific
Speaker 1: was missing. My routine is built on precision. I'm the
Speaker 1: kind of man who starts his rounds before the city's
Speaker 1: first commuter trained clatters underground, a habit formed in the
Speaker 1: late eighties when unpredictable heating Mendu had spot a failed
Speaker 1: boiler before tenants stomp that complains to the managers. I
Speaker 1: like those empty stretches before sun rise, the low hum
Speaker 1: of equipment, the gritty blue of early morning street lights
Speaker 1: sliding up the marble arby walls. Minha is always there
Speaker 1: by six, perched behind her high concierge desks since nineteen
Speaker 1: seventy four, presiding over deliveries, loss office keys, and weekly
Speaker 1: lunches for the tenant Association. Mina is short, sharp witted,
Speaker 1: and her gray hair is always clipped with something ornate,
Speaker 1: a comb a pin, sometimes a plastic flamingo left over
Speaker 1: from last year's failed tropical week. She can recite the
Speaker 1: birthdays of anyone who is held an office here, and
Speaker 1: according to her, she knows every tenant's dog spas and
Speaker 1: secret holiday snacks. Dash she stepped her cardam and t slowly,
Speaker 1: savoring the role of an official building historian. If I
Speaker 1: ever needed to know where a particular person hid a
Speaker 1: holiday re or how to find the old manual for
Speaker 1: the freight elevator brakes, Mina was my first stop. Roy
Speaker 1: works nights, sometimes leaving notes for me on the whiteboard
Speaker 1: in the break room. Short and precise fan FEU six
Speaker 1: of blue coal fender replaced ree welding. He's been here
Speaker 1: only a few years, less than Meaner, but which she
Speaker 1: trades lightly in rumors for detests speculation. Once, after a
Speaker 1: heated debate about the infamous fifteen to four marble Viasca,
Speaker 1: when marble slabs of three slightly different shades were somehow
Speaker 1: outstalled on the same landing, he only said, with a
Speaker 1: ghost of a grin, he'd ha thought any one would
Speaker 1: Noticepage isn't white. Roar is the memory bank that doesn't
Speaker 1: give out with drolls freely. Then there's Anji, the building manager,
Speaker 1: pragmatic numbers first, famous for two things, tight budgets and
Speaker 1: the ability to recite insurance policy causes by memory. She
Speaker 1: admires efficiency and thinks building character is found only in
Speaker 1: stabilate track readings. She'll indulge Hallwick chatter, specially from me,
Speaker 1: but keep it to a minimum. If the subject veers
Speaker 1: off into speculation or nostalgia. People like Anji keep the
Speaker 1: place from drifting toward chaos. Our building is old enough
Speaker 1: for quarks and young enough not to qualify as a landmark.
Speaker 1: The hand made aluminum directory, signed stamped decades ac sometimes
Speaker 1: get up dates from the sty off with Marco ridd
Speaker 1: and arrows or sticker ovalays on certain floors surviving nineteen seventies.
Speaker 1: Here artwork still stares up from behind glass, faded but
Speaker 1: stubbornly present. Each holiday season, someone on the tenant events
Speaker 1: committee picks a the in Victorian mid century kitch space
Speaker 1: age and decorations sprout overnight, hanging, often crooked for weeks.
Speaker 1: The fifteen fourse marble misapp is still good for a laugh.
Speaker 1: The sub basements pipe seem to echo like no others
Speaker 1: creating harmonics that spook the younger security guards on late shifts.
Speaker 1: Their rooftop garden, much boasted about in lease agreements, is
Speaker 1: frequented only by pigeon families and whoever smoke cigars in
Speaker 1: the shadow of the attract stacks. I've watched new tenants
Speaker 1: in sharp suit or with half open laptops drift into
Speaker 1: the rhythms of these corridors long time as linger in
Speaker 1: the lobby for hours of chess or weekly lunch and learns,
Speaker 1: swapping stories about that winter the heating never worked, or
Speaker 1: Missess Cordles goes cat on seventeen. When old staff retire,
Speaker 1: many return for these lunches, swapping stories, challenging each other's recollections.
Speaker 1: These are my people, shop, irreverent and often stuck in
Speaker 1: the details. I am proud of what I know. Which
Speaker 1: ceiling tiles have been quietly glued back, Which fused boxes
Speaker 1: really a disguised phones, which with the shock cut cross
Speaker 1: base beside the freight elevator lets you by past two
Speaker 1: sets of stairs on a date when your need ache.
Speaker 1: Once I guided a lost city inspected down a corridor
Speaker 1: so rarely used its emergency lights still ran on original
Speaker 1: batteries after a routine maintenance or just before lunch, always
Speaker 1: at the same small table beside the lobby windows. I
Speaker 1: reviewed the previous days checklist to my expectations. Set to
Speaker 1: the usual slowly calls for a new valve, flickering lights,
Speaker 1: meanful to ballast, an ovote, warm offices, just a stock damper.
Speaker 1: I didn't suspect anything out of the ordinary, nota turuly.
Speaker 1: I cataloged systems and schedules and smiled at the orderly
Speaker 1: sense of the building's hundreds of small, manageable problems. I
Speaker 1: had not yet realized that single missing number would be
Speaker 1: what did my sense of certainty that the secret fault
Speaker 1: wouldn't be a broken pipe or a loose tile, but
Speaker 1: something far more quietly persistent, the idea that the building
Speaker 1: itself could hold secret larger than any one person's memory.
Speaker 1: Thursday put me in the supply office, an organized massif
Speaker 1: hardware bins, paper towel palettes, and the faint tang of
Speaker 1: old insulation. My original aim was just to locate some
Speaker 1: replacement filters and check the annual fire inspection record. Instead,
Speaker 1: I found myself entangling a stack of time or maintenance lopbooks.
Speaker 1: Those oversized ledges in which I in my predecessors had
Speaker 1: recorded every job, no matter how triville, for as long
Speaker 1: as they'd worked here. The ledges were lined up along
Speaker 1: the north wall, dusty, with the air labels curling at
Speaker 1: the edges, pulling down the volume marked twenty ten, twenty seventeen.
Speaker 1: I thumb through routine complaints flickering light seventeen O nine,
Speaker 1: a toilet leak fifty O three. I'd expect it monotony,
Speaker 1: until almost absently I landed on a string of entries
Speaker 1: with an old familiar rhythm. Four nineteen omain replaced broken
Speaker 1: valve nineteen o four, sweet water main leak five slash fourteen,
Speaker 1: slash thirteen. The four or nineteen electrical replaced ballasts offered
Speaker 1: nineteen o seven twenty forty notage. The four nineteen tenant
Speaker 1: requests replaced ex at sign nineteen eleven. The handwriting was
Speaker 1: mostly Minor Roy's, meticulous, with the kind of abbreviations only
Speaker 1: a long habited crew could decipher. There was nothing ghostly,
Speaker 1: nothing overtly strange about the notes themselves. They belonged, and
Speaker 1: yet they couldn't because four nineteen per every one else
Speaker 1: did not exist. There it was again, like a misplaced
Speaker 1: brick in a wall. My curiosity kicked into high gear.
Speaker 1: I switched to the current digital directory on the service tablet.
Speaker 1: The suites were four eighteen were listed crisply eighteen o
Speaker 1: one to eighteen fifteen. Then immediate jump to floor twenty
Speaker 1: two thousand one to twenty twenty two, no floor nineteen,
Speaker 1: no nineteen o four, no nineteen o seven, not redacted
Speaker 1: to just skipping past, as if it had never been planned,
Speaker 1: let alone occupied. For a second, I wondered if some
Speaker 1: one had made an umbering mistake, but every had a
Speaker 1: floor fit perfectly. By then, buzzing with impatience, I found
Speaker 1: Roy after his shift. I showed him the logbook and
Speaker 1: pointed out the entries. He shroked, half amused, half bored,
Speaker 1: old paperwork. Car lots gets mixed up here never was
Speaker 1: a nineteen. It's the sort of thing that happens with
Speaker 1: these old joint superstitious owners. Contracted her skipping numbers. If
Speaker 1: you remember ron, that's all next you'll be asking for
Speaker 1: a four thirteen two. But the old logbook's I hesitated.
Speaker 1: He shook his head with restrained irritation. You want a
Speaker 1: real answer, probably some one copied old entries for or
Speaker 1: numbered work carreas without regard to flaws. Paperwork as a
Speaker 1: will of its own, always did let it go. Not satisfied,
Speaker 1: I saw it, Angie. She was deep in a digital
Speaker 1: city permit file, scanning for compliance issues. But she indulged
Speaker 1: my questions. It's not just a missing button, I said.
Speaker 1: There are log entries decades worth, some with my own
Speaker 1: handwriting her. She waved the permit bindery in my direction,
Speaker 1: smiled with patient cheer. Carl, the city records are clear,
Speaker 1: eighteen twenty. That's how it was built. That's what's on
Speaker 1: the drawings, the permits, the official directory. I've filed for
Speaker 1: this place for fourteen years, and those numbers haven't changed.
Speaker 1: If weird in nineteen, the insurance policy would know. Trust me.
Speaker 1: She scrolled through a digital permit scan and turned the
Speaker 1: screen toward me. See all plans jumped straight from eighteen
Speaker 1: to twenty. It was all there in in disputable black
Speaker 1: and white. She looked at me with a mix of
Speaker 1: amusement and sympathy, the kind of look managers give loyal
Speaker 1: aging staff who sometimes see ghost in a copy room.
Speaker 1: You're probably thinking of that old Ekert tarjaal were this
Speaker 1: Swee's all mixed up? I realized then that I was
Speaker 1: becoming astros, that usters guy, the one with fixations. I
Speaker 1: left the office with polite thanks, shutting the door more
Speaker 1: gently than usual. That evening. In my pocket note bec
Speaker 1: usually reserved for inventory corrections. I began scribbling everything I remembered.
Speaker 1: A floor in nineteen the blue carpet, the bronze bus
Speaker 1: in na Foy they always called window Bay by the northwestair.
Speaker 1: I paired each memory with the question mark. I wasn't frightened.
Speaker 1: I was, if anything, driven by a sharper focus. The
Speaker 1: building and I had lived through deferred maintenance, budget cuts,
Speaker 1: owners with grand plans, and others who disappeared after only
Speaker 1: a season or two, surely a reason. If a memory
Speaker 1: persists despite all this, then maybe the fault isn't a memory,
Speaker 1: but in how its evidence is buried. That resolve would
Speaker 1: become the wedge that prided the mystery wider. Most puzzles
Speaker 1: and maintenance are solved with a flashlight, a wrench, or
Speaker 1: a phone call. The one growing inside my thoughts spilled
Speaker 1: over quietly, almost in a code of small resistances. Next
Speaker 1: day I started searching for fresh evidence in the paper trail.
Speaker 1: The first hint was almost comically mundane. An old maintenance
Speaker 1: receipt from the late nineties founded a fining cabinets missileigne
Speaker 1: drawer a delivery in nineteen ninety eight, signed for a
Speaker 1: four nineteen in Mayram. The receipt had the ancient building logo,
Speaker 1: all blocky geometry and faded maroon. Next, an invoice replaced
Speaker 1: thermostat floor nineteen janitorial closet. Intruders of numbers and tasks
Speaker 1: placed the space in a geography nobody else apparently remembered.
Speaker 1: Even stranger was an evacuation chart unearthed from behind a
Speaker 1: web stack of dusty mot buckets in the north janitorial cupboard.
Speaker 1: The map was yellowed midman as one thousand, nine hundred eighties,
Speaker 1: laminated and curling at the edges. It showed a clean
Speaker 1: stack of schematic boxes G one two all the way
Speaker 1: up to twenty one. There between eighteen and twenty was
Speaker 1: a marked nineteen floor. The suites were labeled in tiny
Speaker 1: print nineteen o one, nineteen o two up to nineteen
Speaker 1: twelve and neat shadowy parallel grum signifying the mailrom the
Speaker 1: Yachtless certainty of the chot sent an old shiver through me,
Speaker 1: setting out to collect living memories of visit attendant on
Speaker 1: either side of the missing floor pair. On the twentieth,
Speaker 1: an elderly attorney named mister Matthews was pausing outside his
Speaker 1: office door, setting a bowler hat on a shelf, as
Speaker 1: if arranging it for a later inspection. I struck up
Speaker 1: our usual morning talk, then added, as smoothly as I
Speaker 1: could ever, get turned around in this building. Find yourself
Speaker 1: somewhere you didn't expect. He laughed, as foggy but shrewd.
Speaker 1: My god. Yes, in the old days, especially early mornings,
Speaker 1: sometimes I get off afore too soon, get lost in
Speaker 1: a maze. There was a corridor, odd art work, bronze heads,
Speaker 1: you know. I always thought they were fancy for an
Speaker 1: office building. I told him I remembered them, and he
Speaker 1: grew a little distant. I was drifting away. Wasn't that
Speaker 1: on eighteen or twenty? No, nineteen may be hard to say.
Speaker 1: They We did so much now it all blurs together,
Speaker 1: doesn't it. Down On the eighteenth, receptionist wholly told me, no,
Speaker 1: I've never had a client on a floor that doesn't exist.
Speaker 1: You'll have better lock ask in the retirees. They remember
Speaker 1: every desmote like it was a prize back and admin.
Speaker 1: I asked Anjie for the arqueaves of his blueprints. Anything predigital,
Speaker 1: she laughed, unlocking the tall file locker. Let me guess.
Speaker 1: Now you need to see the building's baby pictures. She
Speaker 1: gave me a thick folder. Knock yourself out, detective. The
Speaker 1: early blueprints, heavy with notations and pencil and red pen
Speaker 1: gave a seductive clarity, the kind of trust more than
Speaker 1: any digital reproduction. The nineteen sixty seven version nineteen floors
Speaker 1: staggered off as plants, utility closets, janitor's room, may room
Speaker 1: or marked on the nineteen line. Then the nineteen seventy revision,
Speaker 1: same arrangement, Those spaces crowded without a detailer clearly outlined
Speaker 1: blue cop its own in what was marked reception nineteen.
Speaker 1: But then the nineteen eighty eight Schmatic No. Four nineteen
Speaker 1: flours jumped from eighteen to twenty. The physical outline square
Speaker 1: footage structural walls remained steady, but the labels abruptly skipped.
Speaker 1: No reassignment of numbers, just an absence, as if an
Speaker 1: e race name on a rosta I got permission to
Speaker 1: walk the stairwells that afternoon between the eighteenth and twentieth flours.
Speaker 1: The landing should have served as the access point directly
Speaker 1: of eighteen. There was a longer stretch of steps than
Speaker 1: anywhere else, maybe three four steps worth more before you
Speaker 1: hit the fire door to twenty. Examining the wall by
Speaker 1: hand light, I found feinn discoloration, slightly cleaner rectangular sections
Speaker 1: at regular intervals. On every other floor, those blind patches
Speaker 1: featured a brush metal placout four, thirteen, four, sixteen, four
Speaker 1: or eighteen, all mounted by the service corridor. But here
Speaker 1: above eighteen only the screw holes and the watterskin of
Speaker 1: paint placards removed, but their ghosts remained. On a hunch,
Speaker 1: I dug in the keypox, finding two old Masters sets,
Speaker 1: mostly ignored since the ring repair in two thousand five.
Speaker 1: Those worn tags nineteen minutes one and nineteen minutes nine
Speaker 1: and nineteen minutes eleven. Their teeth, cove and patents I
Speaker 1: could recall from the backs of my hands, but now
Speaker 1: checked against doors on both near by floors, the fit
Speaker 1: nowhere at all. I scribbled another new set of memories
Speaker 1: careful in my notebook doing my best to turn recollections
Speaker 1: and sketches. My version of floor nineteen had a blue
Speaker 1: foy to the north, a mural of angular silver shapes
Speaker 1: and gold lines stretching along the east wall, and always
Speaker 1: a faint musty odors, and that a carpet left damp
Speaker 1: too long. During lunch, our retyped coworker Allan joined us.
Speaker 1: I probe gently, did you remember the art lady with
Speaker 1: a big modern painting in her waiting room, Missess Hsu
Speaker 1: Alan bristled. I do remember, Miss s Hsu bit intense
Speaker 1: that one artwork everywhere. It made the hole one feel
Speaker 1: like a museum, and her office on well seventeen, No,
Speaker 1: must have been twenty. Wait didn't she call me once
Speaker 1: from nineteen? Maybe it was after the leak. Hell I
Speaker 1: can't separate it any more. He glanced at Mina, who
Speaker 1: just purshed her lips. We had a Missess Hshu. But
Speaker 1: it's all getting muddled. It was somewhere the older people's
Speaker 1: uncertainty was contagious, a kind of memory fog that hovered
Speaker 1: over every conversation that evening. After most people cleared out,
Speaker 1: I stood in the exposed scene where a placard had
Speaker 1: been removed, and stared at the hazy, clean shape, dumb
Speaker 1: evidence for something no one seemed able to settle. The
Speaker 1: physical the recorded and the remembered versions of the building
Speaker 1: refused to collesce, but the evidence was mounted everywhere, like
Speaker 1: a quiet corps of science charts keys the way, the
Speaker 1: very wall scene bent by the force of conflicting histories.
Speaker 1: Rather than feeling closer to a solution, I was walking
Speaker 1: deeper into a labyrinth that had, I was now certain,
Speaker 1: been deliberately constructed. Saturday offered that bless rarity, the building
Speaker 1: almost entirely to myself. No email, no hallway complaints, no
Speaker 1: rush of coffee orders or tenants flagging me down for
Speaker 1: quick fixes. I decided to try an experiment. I took
Speaker 1: the elevator to eighteen, then walked the stowel upwards, Clutching
Speaker 1: a pad of yellow graph paper and a flashlight. I
Speaker 1: counted each step comparing to the number between all the
Speaker 1: lower floors between seventeen and eighteen twelve steps between eighteen
Speaker 1: and twenty sixteen four too many. This was no mistake
Speaker 1: in construction. Either of the stairs themselves were built unevenly,
Speaker 1: or something filled the space up of eighteen below twenty.
Speaker 1: At that point I tried my master key in the
Speaker 1: fire door where nineteen would have landed, but the lock
Speaker 1: refused to tilting jamming not the right fit, even though
Speaker 1: the key itself was stamped nineteen. Stare dejected. I followed
Speaker 1: the wall to the right, feeling foreseam. My fingers found
Speaker 1: a subtle groove, then small and lick corridor pinted an
Speaker 1: institutional beasia, recognized from older floors. Only it was narrower
Speaker 1: than any hallway I had seen elsewhere, windowless, rough, a
Speaker 1: little lower than normal. Five doors faced me, all blank,
Speaker 1: one slightly misaligned, another painted over A well lettering had
Speaker 1: once shown through at my feet A threadbirstcrap of blue
Speaker 1: green carpet patchworked against the baseboats that collar. It had
Speaker 1: haunted my memory since the first time I thought about
Speaker 1: this missing floor. I tested each door. None would open,
Speaker 1: at least not with the keys I had. Some doors
Speaker 1: gave no bance at all. Others felt as if they
Speaker 1: were bolted from within, or perhaps with simply decorative a
Speaker 1: face laid over solid wall. There wasn't total silence above
Speaker 1: the faint hummer power lines. I registered the buzz of
Speaker 1: ancient fluorescent fixtures overhead, the sluggish flicker of a two
Speaker 1: half past its prime. That place felt in her officially abandoned,
Speaker 1: but a little too stubborn to slip away completely. Then
Speaker 1: came the discovery, behind an old fuse box, as I
Speaker 1: was tapping the panel, a calendar, the cheak kind with
Speaker 1: town slogans and photocollage, A slip free from behind. It
Speaker 1: was from April nineteen eighty five, faded yellowed, curling at
Speaker 1: the corners floor, nineteen maintenance week. It read in thick
Speaker 1: blue letters. The notes were cryptic hole RECARPETUUS, finalized storage
Speaker 1: white test wall, alarm mating slash nineteen corridor. That calendar
Speaker 1: was a shock. Some one thirty years ago had seen
Speaker 1: this as an ordinary week, not an anomaly. I carefully
Speaker 1: stasted the calendars page in my pocket. Hours later, back
Speaker 1: at my desk, I realized what this meant. The question
Speaker 1: was and only why aren't the records consistent? Or whose
Speaker 1: memory is wrong? It was now more deeply about the
Speaker 1: stubborness of the built world, of the way a building
Speaker 1: could refuse to forget bits of a ghost, for would
Speaker 1: not surrender easily to paperwork or to management's need for
Speaker 1: a tidy numbering sequence. On my own, I started writing
Speaker 1: a list in my noteook of things that should not exist.
Speaker 1: Too many steps, wall colors in congruent with any existing
Speaker 1: or index, floor door tags that led nowhere, a calendar
Speaker 1: that described the hidden as merely routine. I was walking
Speaker 1: a line between skepticism and wonder. An hour earlier, I
Speaker 1: would have said floor nineteen was simply a slip in
Speaker 1: the records, an art fact of old paperwork. But with
Speaker 1: each physical anomally my understanding shifted. This building, I thought
Speaker 1: kept secrets, not because people forgot, but because physical space
Speaker 1: cannot last and quietly under my plan erasure, I scored
Speaker 1: one final note ghost neur a contradiction made real by
Speaker 1: memory and matter. The building itself can forget what people
Speaker 1: would prefer to erase. The realization gave me a shiverer,
Speaker 1: but not a fear, something else, like an engineer glimpsing
Speaker 1: and impossible equation, or a cartographer turning up a map
Speaker 1: that refuses to match the terrain. Whatever the explanation, I
Speaker 1: was certain of, this curiosity would drag me deeper, one
Speaker 1: stubborn clue at a time. Three days later, the city
Speaker 1: felt washed in the iron light of late autumn, and
Speaker 1: I found myself in a sub basement, shoulders deepened boxes
Speaker 1: marked for disposal. I was looking for our dated blueprints
Speaker 1: of Fool's errand perhaps but something might still be hiding
Speaker 1: in paperwork, overlooked by every move reorganization and dance as
Speaker 1: in the building had endured. That's when I noticed the
Speaker 1: bout of brand filing box wedge beneath a pile of
Speaker 1: lost and found umbrellas faded Markerrie Events Personnel nineteen seventy
Speaker 1: four eighty five. The lid was soft edges dented in,
Speaker 1: but inside was a neat stuck of league of folders, envelopes,
Speaker 1: a few candid photographs curled with age. I became ridiculous
Speaker 1: at finger tips and patient working in the fluorescent twilight,
Speaker 1: carefully sifting one folder produced a slim pile of glossy
Speaker 1: black and white photographs and dated the kind shot at
Speaker 1: company potties, retirements, holiday banquets. A series of group shots
Speaker 1: showed people I half recognized Roy definitely, about half his
Speaker 1: present size and a full head more hair. Mina unmistakable
Speaker 1: poise behind an imposing reception desk labeled a nineteen floor
Speaker 1: cross the back wall was the mural I described to
Speaker 1: myself days ago, sharp edged silver and gold figures brought
Speaker 1: behind a row of office chairs in the coroner store.
Speaker 1: The glass culture I remembered from when I at once
Speaker 1: delivered a repair slip, with Miss s. Hsu beaming beside it,
Speaker 1: holding a bucaev Orugami flowers amid boxes labeled to nineteen archives.
Speaker 1: At first I wondered if I'd misread the desk sign,
Speaker 1: but every image re enforced the context, and office space
Speaker 1: ends with people, none of them acting like tenants of
Speaker 1: a ghost or standing corridor thumbing for more shots. A
Speaker 1: birthday kick held up by someone I remembered from the
Speaker 1: retired crew, raucous laught to bend around a potted plant,
Speaker 1: and always the blue green carpet underfoot. There was a
Speaker 1: younger version of me, awkward at the edge of a
Speaker 1: group head, darker hands, already marked for years of carrying toolboxes.
Speaker 1: I pulled out a slim envelope, inside which was a
Speaker 1: single tape memo Notice four nineteen scheduled for asbestos testing.
Speaker 1: Do not enter after six slash fourteen slash eighty five
Speaker 1: ventilation hutown nineteen hundred hours of contact be Rosamum facilities.
Speaker 1: It was affixed with the ancient logo precisely forwarded. I
Speaker 1: brought the envelope upstairs, and that morning waited for Mina
Speaker 1: to settle with her tea before I showed her the
Speaker 1: photo of her own image from the old reception desk.
Speaker 1: She stared at it for a moment too long. That's me,
Speaker 1: she said, puzzled, but amused. I remember the desk, that fauna,
Speaker 1: and look my flamingo pin. Odd though I never worked
Speaker 1: on a nineteenth floor, wasn't that desk in seventeen? Or
Speaker 1: maybe when they moved things up it became twenty. I
Speaker 1: nudged the conversation, suggesting it must have been when the
Speaker 1: office sweet expansion happened. There were so many changes, she mused,
Speaker 1: we move people all over the place. Where did ye
Speaker 1: say you've found this? I told her, a box in
Speaker 1: the basement, buried beneath you, as of junk. She looked
Speaker 1: at the picture again, thoughtful, then glanced out at the lobby,
Speaker 1: almost as if searching for verification in the pattern of
Speaker 1: tenants stepping into their mourning. That class sculpture, I do
Speaker 1: remember that, she said, or one like it somewhere funny
Speaker 1: how things blend together. A sense of validation swept over me,
Speaker 1: But so did something stranger. These records, untouched and plainly
Speaker 1: marked in document, so easily misremembered even by those who
Speaker 1: lived them. By evening I had built a small collection photographs, memos, blueprints,
Speaker 1: office keys, that torn calendar page. Each piece alone was
Speaker 1: not conclusive, but together they forced a new possibility. The
Speaker 1: building and its history were laid, sometimes contradicting, never quite aligning,
Speaker 1: even within the memories of those who served it best.
Speaker 1: That night, as were in taps softly against the glass doors,
Speaker 1: I wrote in my private journal, I am not chasing
Speaker 1: a ghost. I am assembling the artifacts of something The
Speaker 1: building itself cannot fully erase. These contradictions run deeper than
Speaker 1: any one person, and now I can't stop myself from
Speaker 1: asking why. I woke the next morning as if I'd
Speaker 1: slept beneath a stack of stone. Memory weighed heavier than fatigue,
Speaker 1: and every surface in my apartment felt more solid, more assertive,
Speaker 1: leader than usual. Images from that battered box spun in
Speaker 1: my mind on a strange loop. Mina's half recognition, Roy's
Speaker 1: line face crossed decades my own younger self, half posed
Speaker 1: by Mural, I could describe as intimately as the wallpaper
Speaker 1: in my childhood home. The contradiction wasn't soft any more,
Speaker 1: had become tactile. The city's rattle outside suggested ordinary things,
Speaker 1: garbage trucks, a bus ingent, scaffold inclining loose, but the
Speaker 1: building pulled at mean visibly, the way missleiinnedlover hums even
Speaker 1: when untouched. The first thing I saw when I entered
Speaker 1: the lobby was the elevator. That panel, so perfectly self effacing,
Speaker 1: seemed not merely to bear omission, but to flaund it.
Speaker 1: I let my hand linger too long over the cold button,
Speaker 1: earning a glance from Mina, already pouring tea with the
Speaker 1: gentle authority that came from having seen the building for
Speaker 1: bad weather and wears bored meetings. Her eyes fell briefly
Speaker 1: to the batted envelope poking from my pocket, and, perhaps
Speaker 1: because routine required it, she smiled and asked if I
Speaker 1: wanted a biscuit or just coffee. I gave her a
Speaker 1: smile in return, but something in the air fell altered,
Speaker 1: perhaps just for me, perhaps for both of us, though
Speaker 1: I since she'd be stubborn enough to ignore what she
Speaker 1: could not reconcile. Rather than go straight to my rounds,
Speaker 1: I made for Anchie's office, the folder of fertos and
Speaker 1: memos in my arm. She was hammering out and vers
Speaker 1: numbers on her desktop, a trace of stress at her draw.
Speaker 1: I waited until she glanced up. You remember for nineteen,
Speaker 1: I asked. It was less a question, more in offering
Speaker 1: an invitation or a dear. She gave me that same
Speaker 1: measured look, polite but weary. He and those ghost stories. Car.
Speaker 1: I hope you're not expecting me to budget for repairs
Speaker 1: on a floor that doesn't exist. I didn't smile as time. Instead,
Speaker 1: I opened the folder before her and laid out the photographs.
Speaker 1: There was mina unmistakable in front of her old desk.
Speaker 1: There was the mural, the glass sculpture, the birthday cake
Speaker 1: with Roy grinning and younger by two decades. Ange leaned in,
Speaker 1: eyebrows drawn. She picked up the memo about Best's testing
Speaker 1: and ran a laconic finger tip over the date, then
Speaker 1: the nineteenth tight so routinely into an official building memo.
Speaker 1: Her lips breast, Where did you get these sub basement
Speaker 1: buried under junk, I replied, keeping my voice steady. She
Speaker 1: sat back chair creaking, and shook her head slowly. Look,
Speaker 1: if you want office gossip, there's always rumors. Every one
Speaker 1: loves a mystery. But you know as well as I do, permits, insurance,
Speaker 1: everything official. We don't have never had a nineteen All
Speaker 1: the documents, I pointed to the memo, except some we
Speaker 1: apparently did. She looked at me, perhaps thinking I dopted them.
Speaker 1: But there was a flicker of honest confusion, the brief
Speaker 1: flit of some one finding sand in a well swept room.
Speaker 1: Maybe it was annex. Maybe numbering just got weird during renovations,
Speaker 1: She said, almost softly. This building's gone through hands so
Speaker 1: many times. Maybe someone tried to fix an error and
Speaker 1: just made a different one. Would the city records help
Speaker 1: us resolve this? If there's any explanation, it has to
Speaker 1: be there as well. Harymouth called, in that familiar I'd
Speaker 1: rather not do this way, but she shrugged. You're set
Speaker 1: on making more work from me? Ha, All right, full
Speaker 1: request form, I'll sign it. Maybe you'll find you go
Speaker 1: some microfilm. There was statients there, but also dare if
Speaker 1: I could stand the bureaucracy, I was welcome to all
Speaker 1: the contradiction. I could eat in her own way. Angie
Speaker 1: wasn't threatened by strayfacks, just tired of their tendency to
Speaker 1: breed more paperwork. City halts as six blocks away, its
Speaker 1: brick face pop with generations of renovations. Their archives always
Speaker 1: smell like old toner and resignation. I filed the forms,
Speaker 1: leaned through two layers of board clerks, and awaited it
Speaker 1: cut loaded with folders from the guts of property management.
Speaker 1: Original bill poemits blueprints and renovation records slid over the counter,
Speaker 1: one after another, stamped and crossed out by hands. Decade gone.
Speaker 1: There it was again, nineteen sixty eight, construction blueprint signatures
Speaker 1: from three long ago engineers, and unmistakable the clean udily
Speaker 1: column floor nineteen with its rectangle of tenant suites, janitor
Speaker 1: closet exit, stare mail slot, a leaf through sheet after sheet,
Speaker 1: watching as the floor was marked, crosshatchedin, read at its
Speaker 1: for later zoning, always sitting peacefully between eighteen and twenty,
Speaker 1: but this year stapped nineteen seventy four, nineteen seventy seven,
Speaker 1: early nineteen eighty four, nineteen persisted, then abruptly around nineteen
Speaker 1: eighty five. Each builder's note or legal map jumped as
Speaker 1: if the world had blinked eighteen direct twenty. No explanation,
Speaker 1: just the parallel universe of erased plans. New tenant filled
Speaker 1: the twentieth with square footage that somehow still accounted for
Speaker 1: the dimensions of a building Toller by just enough rows
Speaker 1: of windows to suggest something as hiding. The clerk, somewhere
Speaker 1: in her fifties, caught me mumbling to myself as I
Speaker 1: compared sheet after sheet, trying to settle a bet. She asps,
Speaker 1: offering the sort of small people keep for harm. This eccentrics,
Speaker 1: I replied, simply looking for something that isn't there and
Speaker 1: maybe never was. On the walk back, the city itself
Speaker 1: seemed to breathe a little different. Every high rise window
Speaker 1: story with lays I'd never guess on a whim. I
Speaker 1: checked the outside of out building as I approached nineteen
Speaker 1: neat rows of windows. If he counted carefully, when extra
Speaker 1: compared to the directory list, I traced them again, lips.
Speaker 1: Moving inside, I found Mean at the desk arranging a
Speaker 1: stack of tenant mail. She looked thoughtfully at the morning
Speaker 1: light stretching through glass. I showed her a copper blueprint
Speaker 1: with the old nineteen floor outlined in the red. She
Speaker 1: peered at it, then at the photo of her behind
Speaker 1: the reception desk, and for a long moment didn't speak,
Speaker 1: just tapped a finger lightly across the numbered squares. It's odd,
Speaker 1: you know, she finally said, a hush in her usually
Speaker 1: bright tone. We all think our jobs are above routines
Speaker 1: and lists and forms, But sometimes I think the building
Speaker 1: wants to remember itself, even if we can't. Her words
Speaker 1: went in answer, but an echo, like the ones that
Speaker 1: seemed to gather in the unmapped corridors. That afternoon, I
Speaker 1: paid a visit up to the twentieth and eighteen floors
Speaker 1: with a new mission, not to trust just memory, but
Speaker 1: to follow it, test it, press for contradiction, straight from
Speaker 1: the source. Miss Sestam, who was kept to law office
Speaker 1: on the twentieth since nineteen seventy two, perched by her
Speaker 1: window sorting invisses. Do you ever remember in nineteen four
Speaker 1: Here I asked Keffl to stay casual, as if it
Speaker 1: were an item on a trivic card. She's quinted, then
Speaker 1: placed her glasses aside. Though there was a day must
Speaker 1: have been nineteen eighty three or eighty four. When I
Speaker 1: thought I was coming in early and ended up well
Speaker 1: a floor i'd never seen artwork strange as a gallery
Speaker 1: felt colder for years. I figured it was a dream.
Speaker 1: Could ye ever find it again? She shook her head.
Speaker 1: It evaporated. Later I realized the directory when straight from
Speaker 1: eighteen to twenty. He know how the mind works, shifts
Speaker 1: the details, blends them. If they told me there was nineteen,
Speaker 1: I'd have sworn I'd always known. I thanked her, and
Speaker 1: I know we mentioned the mural out with a squiggles
Speaker 1: gold or silver, she asks, nose wrinkling. I thought that
Speaker 1: was on seventeen. Then she laughed. Maybe in the end
Speaker 1: we all invent the walls around us, just to make
Speaker 1: the days fit together on eighteen. The younger tenants waved
Speaker 1: off the question or made jokes about missing levels in
Speaker 1: old elevator gains. For them, the discrepancy was a novelty,
Speaker 1: a story to tell. Nothing more. That evening, I gold Roll,
Speaker 1: inviting him to coffee in the most the empty break
Speaker 1: room during one of his early shifts. He sipped his
Speaker 1: cup and I me tersely posture straight as a bench beam,
Speaker 1: you still on this, huh. I've gone as far as
Speaker 1: city records, found blueprints, photos, all saying nineteen existed. Then
Speaker 1: suddenly no one admits it. He shook his head, poured
Speaker 1: another packet of sugar into his cup. Call. There's always
Speaker 1: things people rather forget about buildings. Maybe it was an
Speaker 1: insurance mess, a business bat, some old suit with a grudge.
Speaker 1: Maybe they had to lock a fore for good reason,
Speaker 1: health scare, dodgy coat. Then new contracts come, number shuffle
Speaker 1: and the narrative gets patched, so nobody worries about it.
Speaker 1: Buildings are stubborn. You know that you can't rip out
Speaker 1: every bolt, so you paint it or name it, and
Speaker 1: hope nobody notices. He looked genuinely sad, which surprised me.
Speaker 1: Sometimes I think the stories matterm all than the walls.
Speaker 1: I was quiet for a moment. You ever remember working
Speaker 1: there on a sweet mark nineteen, he snorted. Hell, I
Speaker 1: remember working everywhere. I remember when the Grand four was linnoleum,
Speaker 1: and this war did never take on footprints. What I
Speaker 1: recall isn't what matters. What the paper says, what Angie says,
Speaker 1: that's the job. You patch, you move on. Maybe roysaw
Speaker 1: through me, or maybe we were just old enough to
Speaker 1: know that most questions that lived the askers invigorated by
Speaker 1: the mounting pile of contradictions in the blurry overlap between
Speaker 1: physical and remembered evidence. I talked Enji into signing off
Speaker 1: on a wider public records search, building inspection reports, property
Speaker 1: tax filings, and just as she handed me the forms,
Speaker 1: she said, if you solve this, I expect you to
Speaker 1: put the whole story to rest, Karl, no more scavenger hunts.
Speaker 1: I promised her nothing, but I meant I needed to know.
Speaker 1: City permit files tell one thing clearly. Building stone change overnight,
Speaker 1: but sometimes decisions made in our morning meeting ripple cost decades.
Speaker 1: I sifted survey photos from Arkevel's city boxes, black and
Speaker 1: white shots every five years, always taken in spring by
Speaker 1: an inspector with a sense of geometry. On one early image,
Speaker 1: windows stacked in tidy lines, nineteen clear rose between street
Speaker 1: and roof, although now officially there were only eighteen and
Speaker 1: a roof deck. The tax files were harder, tot a coat.
Speaker 1: Tenant lists postmans one thousand, nine hundred eighty five were
Speaker 1: numbered offices so smoothly that missing four nineteen became impossible
Speaker 1: to spot on their su read deeply. Nineteen twelve became
Speaker 1: twenty ten, nineteen o six became eighteen twelve, and so on.
Speaker 1: It was not so much a rasure as a careful inversion,
Speaker 1: take a number away, re shape a corridor. Memory followers.
Speaker 1: Quick math with square footage totals for each prison floor
Speaker 1: left too much space between levels, as if some one
Speaker 1: had squeezed two floors into a single sum. Returning to
Speaker 1: the building, I decided to try for older at tenants
Speaker 1: of tracking down every name I could recall from lunch
Speaker 1: and learn lists, retirement party programs faded, Christmas cards many
Speaker 1: were gone, Some answered with uncertain warmth. Memories faded as
Speaker 1: the photographs. A few had sharp memories, but not always
Speaker 1: of the same things. Long time ago, there was some
Speaker 1: legal snag, said Desmond, who'd run the building cafe from
Speaker 1: nineteen seventy one to nineteen eighty nine, staring sugar into
Speaker 1: his tea as we sat by the lobby windows code issues,
Speaker 1: maybe asbestos or a busted watermaine. I heard a rumor
Speaker 1: that they did it for taxes, make the building look smaller.
Speaker 1: Dodge's owning cap one day, a new directories went up,
Speaker 1: and everyone just accepted at eighteen twenty done. Others had
Speaker 1: a gentler take. I think some people just didn't like
Speaker 1: the number. Bad luck. Real estate is superstitious business, easier
Speaker 1: to skip ahead, sed Linda, a bookkeeper whose office set
Speaker 1: cross for menas old desk for decades. Mister Rayes, once
Speaker 1: the buildings supervisor greeted me in the garden of his
Speaker 1: retirement home, a bust of stubborn sun shocked optimism. The
Speaker 1: nineteenth was nothing special when I worked here, mostly storage,
Speaker 1: A couple of odd ball suites. I remember the leaky
Speaker 1: fixed They emptied it overnight, changed to sign edge, moved
Speaker 1: the filing cabinets, made everyone pretend it never happened. No
Speaker 1: big narrative, just administrative efficiency. But the spaces are still
Speaker 1: up there a press feeling absurd. He shrugged structures, stubborn call.
Speaker 1: Maybe they left a half empty. Maybe it's behind walls
Speaker 1: the building keep secrets because we prefer it that way.
Speaker 1: Bit by bit the evidence formed a theory, rough but plausible.
Speaker 1: FLOORA nineteen was never destroyed. It was edited, a disguise
Speaker 1: in paperwork, merged out of the story, but left structurally
Speaker 1: to rot or quietly repurposed and often slice of architecture.
Speaker 1: Some called it accident, some suggested the liberate conspiracy. But
Speaker 1: none could supply motive as cleanly as a clean jump
Speaker 1: on the blueprint. Back at the building, I heard rumors
Speaker 1: from Mina those intrepid talk him on the tenants. Everyone
Speaker 1: thinks you are going to find money stuffed in the walls.
Speaker 1: She sounded amused, but in her pause I heard a
Speaker 1: flicker of something more, a wish not to dig further, perhaps,
Speaker 1: or the sense that some stories set best when I'm
Speaker 1: told unable to resist, I organized an afternoon and any
Speaker 1: reunion of sorts, Mina, Roy, Allen, Linda, anyone who'd worked
Speaker 1: a cross decades. We come indeed the break room and
Speaker 1: passed around the blueprints, photos and printed names. The room buzzed,
Speaker 1: half convivial, half frustrated. I remember poker games. Was that
Speaker 1: on the unfinished flour, Alan mused, scratching his chin. No,
Speaker 1: that was the twentieth I used to sleep off night
Speaker 1: shift in the executive lounge with a green couch. That
Speaker 1: was twenty No, it had to be, Roy retorted stubbornly.
Speaker 1: I lost my delivery cut once in a nineteen, or
Speaker 1: was it just a weird storage closet. Mina's face pensioned
Speaker 1: out mister Abrahms now nearly idiots brightly for had keupults
Speaker 1: after directories that sure enough listed half a dozen offices
Speaker 1: under nineteen ten hour tries. Skepticism competed with nostalgia. One
Speaker 1: joke that the whole thing came down to cheap paint
Speaker 1: and absent minded architects. Another accused for more owners of
Speaker 1: creating paperwork errors just to keep us from finding out
Speaker 1: about the asbestos lawsuits. I heard it was all fire
Speaker 1: code couldn't update the eggs of stays, so they just
Speaker 1: revoked the floor's existence. Someone muttered dryly. I batted the
Speaker 1: idea of making a map the four nineteen we each remembered.
Speaker 1: We pulled out napkins and folders, sketching what we were
Speaker 1: called hallway blue, mural snack alcove officers. No one agreed
Speaker 1: about storage closets that maybe were janitorial rooms, maybe were
Speaker 1: conference rooms. Not one that match another. The only common
Speaker 1: threads are mural, an alcove, a corridor band. Everyone claimed
Speaker 1: not to recognize. When pressed, it felt less like solving
Speaker 1: a crime than like listening to a room remember a dream. Differently,
Speaker 1: each person's detail sheeped by years of reinforcement or absence.
Speaker 1: Some laughed, some seemed to reflect quietly, but all regarded
Speaker 1: the blueprints in front of them as if to coding hieroglyphs.
Speaker 1: The spontaneous contest who claimed which four had which detail
Speaker 1: broke down into chuckles and quiet SIPs of coffee. I
Speaker 1: realized then that for many there was no anxiety and
Speaker 1: a puzzle, just a shrug. For me, the feeling was different,
Speaker 1: more urgency, more need to test the mystery's physical bonds.
Speaker 1: Late that night, after the cleaning stash shouts faded and
Speaker 1: the rest of the world had gone home, I returned
Speaker 1: to the stairwell, flashed in hand, old keys heavy in
Speaker 1: my pocket, stomach nodded by an dissipation and some indefinable hope.
Speaker 1: I counted steps, heart thudding, each scuffer echoing louder in
Speaker 1: the hush of mechanical silence. This time A pressed harder
Speaker 1: on the narrow scene beside the main landing between eighteen
Speaker 1: and twenty click, the door yielded. The key had bit
Speaker 1: hort at this time, catching on something old but not rusted.
Speaker 1: Shut inside. The air was stale, tinged with coffee dregs
Speaker 1: in the dry minno scent of old plaster. I let
Speaker 1: the door click softly close behind me, and for the
Speaker 1: first time felt fully disconnected from the floors above and
Speaker 1: below a Peculith threshold, as if having enter someone else's
Speaker 1: memory instead of a physical room. The corridor, as narrow
Speaker 1: and plain as before, was longer in the dark. My
Speaker 1: footsteps had a sibilant, oddly hollow echo. The ekus dicks
Speaker 1: off two metallic not quite right. The walls held in
Speaker 1: institutional beige, two shades darker than stand it elsewhere, and
Speaker 1: the ceiling dip just slightly compared to the moll largely
Speaker 1: restored uper floors. The carvet was patchep blue green, still
Speaker 1: visible in places worn almost bare. I ran my hand
Speaker 1: along the wall, half expecting it to pass through shadow.
Speaker 1: Five doors each resisted every key but three hand name
Speaker 1: plates the screw spin flat, nineteen o two, nineteen o seven,
Speaker 1: nineteen eleven. Only the nineteen o seven door had a
Speaker 1: keyhole clear enough to be it through. I crouched, pressed
Speaker 1: my eye close, squinting past the dust blackness, then the
Speaker 1: faint shadow of a cubicle partition. A broken death lamp
Speaker 1: collapsed on its side. I caught the edge of a
Speaker 1: file cabinet pasted with curling outdated safety first stickers. It
Speaker 1: felt not haunted, but left behind, as if all cents
Speaker 1: of time had settled in piles just out of sight.
Speaker 1: Near the corridor's end, A paper called up from under
Speaker 1: the lot fire door spring floor maintenance nineteen The date
Speaker 1: was faded out incomprehensible, but in blue marker. Someone had
Speaker 1: circled Cheikapa for water damage Sweet nineteen o six. My
Speaker 1: own handwriting, I realized a lancing shock of familiarity, memory
Speaker 1: made tangible. I drew out one of the color photos
Speaker 1: from years ago, the one with the mural and the
Speaker 1: slant of light, and tried to match it to the
Speaker 1: wall across from me. I found the feigned outline of
Speaker 1: paint beneath grime, a curve of gold tracing where the
Speaker 1: old artists brush had wandered. Even here, the physical world
Speaker 1: hadn't truly erased itself. It just waited for the right
Speaker 1: persistence to reveal its persistence. I did not lingle on,
Speaker 1: not out of fear, but a strange sense of reverence.
Speaker 1: The presence of the floor, closed off from reason and
Speaker 1: habit demand of quiet. My presence here was an intrusion,
Speaker 1: not just in space, but in the ritual of forgetting
Speaker 1: that people and organizations perform when the prison cannot bear
Speaker 1: the strange weight of the unaccounted past. Leaving I paused
Speaker 1: in the stairwell, the echo of my movement hollow, distinct,
Speaker 1: treveled oddly, different densities of wall, hidden cavities, or perhaps
Speaker 1: memory was now collaborating with material, making sound behave and
Speaker 1: weighed no blueprint atrac My working certainty, so adamant at
Speaker 1: the start, now softened, less about the clean facts of bottom,
Speaker 1: label or code, more about the way buildings and people
Speaker 1: blow each other's stories to fit what's needed. Their vanished
Speaker 1: floor was not gone, but neither was it truly alive.
Speaker 1: It was in every sense both in neither, the architecture
Speaker 1: of persistent contradiction, holding just enough detail and confusion to
Speaker 1: survive every attempt at erasure. When I made it back down,
Speaker 1: dawn was near, and clouds pressol across the skyline, interrupted
Speaker 1: only by the thin spines of cranes and the blinking
Speaker 1: of office lights. Kicking into life. I pocketed the maintenance
Speaker 1: slip evidenced both mundane and quietly electrifying. In the days
Speaker 1: that followed, the puzzle hover just below the surface of everything.
Speaker 1: My rounds were sharper, more attuned to anomalies, but less troubled.
Speaker 1: I stopped looking for more examples. I had enough now.
Speaker 1: The question was motive meaning astro as quiastrous? Kid the
Speaker 1: floor been edited? Why had it persisted? What did it
Speaker 1: serve for the building, the people who maintained it, the
Speaker 1: tenants who both remembered and forgot. I gathered Angie a
Speaker 1: Miner to go through my findings in the Edmond office,
Speaker 1: with city permits, faded photos, slips, and nat kinnapps. Assembled
Speaker 1: in a spread, I shared what I knew in the
Speaker 1: mid eighties, something of renovation code, superstition, maybe all at
Speaker 1: once made. Someone decided to remove the nineteen floor from
Speaker 1: official records. The physical space was left, perhaps because destruction
Speaker 1: would be expensive, perhaps because the timing wasn't right. Instead
Speaker 1: to change the directory's swap suite numbers, remove buttons replaced
Speaker 1: plack outs. The rest depended on paperwork. Get everyone to
Speaker 1: ignore what's inconvenient, fill the gap in language, if not
Speaker 1: in fact, over a year's memory unfolded the gap, People drifted,
Speaker 1: and the floor became less real, though it remained completely
Speaker 1: present to anyone persistent or unlucky or curious enough. Why,
Speaker 1: Angie asked, pragmatic as always paperwork is easy than dry wall,
Speaker 1: I replied, superstition, legal liability, convenience none mutually exclusive. Maybe
Speaker 1: they just wanted the problem to go away, so they
Speaker 1: pushed it down a layer. Buildings become palempsis when the
Speaker 1: economics of erasure meet the stubbornness of structure. She looked
Speaker 1: at the forthos closed her eyes. So be it if
Speaker 1: the insurance people ask we skipped to twenty mina, ever
Speaker 1: more pensive, studied her own younger face in the picture.
Speaker 1: I suppose there's something to be said for stories that
Speaker 1: refused to go. There was a pause as we all
Speaker 1: considered the truth, or at least the convergence of enough
Speaker 1: truth to put things to rest. Roy went old, just grunted.
Speaker 1: You went further than most would, Karl. Just remember everything
Speaker 1: leaves a trace, and not all of them want to
Speaker 1: be dusted off. There was no mass revelation, no sudden
Speaker 1: restoration of missing memories among the tenants, no huntful lost
Speaker 1: treasures among the walls. The practicalities the day to day
Speaker 1: continued in exactly the same rhythm as before, a tapestry
Speaker 1: of distraction and routine. Yet something in the air was clarified,
Speaker 1: as though the building itself had been witness in the
Speaker 1: fullness of its denial. Almost midnight a week later, as
Speaker 1: sat by a small window in a seldom used stairwell,
Speaker 1: city lights suspended behind glass, the bulk of the wall
Speaker 1: blow busy and a troubled. The collection of items before me,
Speaker 1: maintenance said photo keys felt like artifacts of an unexplain civilization,
Speaker 1: staring up at me with equal pot's accusation and reassurance.
Speaker 1: My earliest years in this building slid in and out
Speaker 1: of focus. The sound of the leaky pipes, the subtle
Speaker 1: chill of the north foy faces remembered differently by everyone.
Speaker 1: What struck me wasn't how slippery memory was, but how
Speaker 1: comfortable contradiction became when enough people stopped caring to press
Speaker 1: on it. It's not closure, kind of ongoing electrified curiosity
Speaker 1: and acceptance that places are always more layer than we expect,
Speaker 1: and that every attempt to finish a story only multiplies
Speaker 1: it as it recombines with others half remembered versions, that
Speaker 1: secret corridor, the odd step, the residue of nineteen that
Speaker 1: refuses to go away. Those are not malfunctions, but reminders
Speaker 1: that reality is laid, blurred, and more beautiful for it.
Speaker 1: Weeks later, on my way to replace a lock on
Speaker 1: the twentieth floor, I pause near the stair well, faded
Speaker 1: photo of floor nineteen tucked into my chill back below.
Speaker 1: A thousand people moved through their morning, never suspecting the
Speaker 1: suspended liminality one level beneath them. A question lingered in
Speaker 1: the half lit air. How many other lost floors are there,
Speaker 1: not only in buildings, but in memory, in history, lay
Speaker 1: just out of sight and out of sync with the
Speaker 1: stories we like to tell. I slipped the photo safe
Speaker 1: into my wallet content carry the evidence, not as proof
Speaker 1: but as possibility. If a place can half exist inside
Speaker 1: matter outside mapping, then so I suppose can everything we
Speaker 1: choose to remember or forget or hold in the trembling
Speaker 1: balance between. And that is the end. Thank you for listening,
Speaker 1: and I will see you in the next one.