Speaker 1: Hello, I'm welcomed stories all the time. The lad you
Speaker 1: are here, Let's get into it. The elevator in Wilmot
Speaker 1: Tower doesn't have an eight floor button panel. Inside, the
Speaker 1: brushed steel cab jumps neatly from seven, two or nine,
Speaker 1: as if nothing could be more ordinary. For years, I'd
Speaker 1: sin sanitized versions of the superstition in buildings north and
Speaker 1: south of the city, Skip the thirteenth, skip the fourth,
Speaker 1: whatever needed to be evaded in difference to Luck. But
Speaker 1: here at thirteen and Wilmot, in his quad modernist block
Speaker 1: with very little to hide, the missingmate struck me not
Speaker 1: as a nod to fate, but as a gap that
Speaker 1: had some elgon unexplained by every one I encountered. My
Speaker 1: first day back in town, still living out of cardboard
Speaker 1: boxes and balancing yesterday's coffee on moving crates, I was
Speaker 1: invited for luncheon a tower by Miriam. She's a friend
Speaker 1: of long standing, the kind of person who files away
Speaker 1: your favorite short stories and still sends real postcards from
Speaker 1: art fares. She chose a Wilmot for its river glimpses,
Speaker 1: its reliable postmen, and the impossible quiet You get eleven
Speaker 1: stories above street level I'd hoped her place held on
Speaker 1: to those homie instructive artifacts, the teacup chip by Nice,
Speaker 1: the old smudge to envelope used as a makeshift bookmark. Instead,
Speaker 1: my mind got snighted by the elevator. Miriam met me
Speaker 1: in the lobby, looping her shawl tighter, tapping the cold
Speaker 1: bottom with the air of someone unlocking a familiar coat.
Speaker 1: As the cab opened, I made a passing joke, no
Speaker 1: eight floor, What are we afraid of? Bad Chinese restaurant lock?
Speaker 1: She raised an eyebrower. That's just how it's always been.
Speaker 1: There was a stitch of something private in her smile,
Speaker 1: as if I had question gravity or the turning of
Speaker 1: gears and a clock. The ride up had that immutable
Speaker 1: frictionless quality you get in well constructed towers, not a
Speaker 1: single jutter or slow draw over the suspect missing floor.
Speaker 1: Those opened to a world of potted ferns, princes of
Speaker 1: lopsided Venetian balconies, and Miriam's voice, leading me to a
Speaker 1: lunch suffused with stories from teaching days in local politics.
Speaker 1: When I left, waving to the dozing door men, my
Speaker 1: thoughts cycled back again and again to that elevator panel.
Speaker 1: Even as I told myself it was nothing but a
Speaker 1: bit of build of superstition. I rehearsed the list of
Speaker 1: odd places where I'd seen four number skip and realized
Speaker 1: that here in a city there were plenty of high
Speaker 1: rises advertising thirteen four penthouses or apartments on seven twelve, fourteen,
Speaker 1: all accounted for. This was different For a practical code
Speaker 1: ban seventies block, it seemed impractical. I let it go
Speaker 1: for a day. But when I set upout arranging my
Speaker 1: new life, searching for familiar certainties in the routines of
Speaker 1: an unfamiliar building, the missing eight returned to me like
Speaker 1: a hook. By temperament and by thirty years of training,
Speaker 1: I am not a person to chase mysteries for their
Speaker 1: own sake. My career was a patchwork of city projects
Speaker 1: and infrastructure restoration bridges, signal boxes, utility studies, blueprints and
Speaker 1: its builts are my novels. And I know the Way's
Speaker 1: code from the nineteen seventy stamped its requirements into every
Speaker 1: multi story residential map, every floor label, every stable marked,
Speaker 1: even the numbering of apartments regulated for ease of fire
Speaker 1: department entry. Wilmott Tower itself is a classic of its
Speaker 1: minor type. Sixteen stories of geometric slabs, shallow set windows,
Speaker 1: brown brick cutting a sharp outline against the sky. Not
Speaker 1: a prestige property, but no slouch cheater built beside the river,
Speaker 1: just as the city was chasing its international style phase.
Speaker 1: It remains a landmark in the sense that betting on
Speaker 1: its location will always win your free round in a
Speaker 1: taxi conversation. The lobbies are muted, a fair blond wood
Speaker 1: tirat so flooring, an offensive seating, and the mail room
Speaker 1: runs on are rythen so predictable you can set your
Speaker 1: watch to it. The seven thirty m shuffle, the launch
Speaker 1: time chatter, the quiet influx of puzzles and periodicals before
Speaker 1: bed in, wilmot routines, anchor everyone. Miriam had lived this
Speaker 1: since the late nineties, inheriting her flat in the Great
Speaker 1: Shuffle after a family moved from across town. She served
Speaker 1: the tenant's council and organized the art and the foy
Speaker 1: product her apartment, magnet for stray books and the neighbors
Speaker 1: wayward shopping carts round her cir called a Lusi held community.
Speaker 1: Retired teachers and finance types of family with trains practicing
Speaker 1: violin scales by the open window. A few students squeezed
Speaker 1: in by circumstance. The doorman gas started every morning with
Speaker 1: the newspaper folded so sharply the creases threatened to last
Speaker 1: the news itself. The maintenance crew sought to mail stacked
Speaker 1: deliveries and discussed metropolitan electoral politics with the kind of
Speaker 1: dead and detachment found only in people who have seen
Speaker 1: a city's pipes and wires in every season. If you
Speaker 1: paid attention, Wilmot was no stranger to quirks. A fourth
Speaker 1: story mural faded to a legible abstraction. A garden club
Speaker 1: at once tried to grow tomatoes in window boxes to
Speaker 1: twenty meters above the street. Some one ingeniously using their
Speaker 1: balcony as a station for feeding stray cats, complete with
Speaker 1: the zip line for free tubs. And yet all of
Speaker 1: these could be easily explained or choked up to resident eccentricity,
Speaker 1: the stories that gathered like sediment in any building old
Speaker 1: enough for a second generation to gossip about the first.
Speaker 1: But in this tower, where every door bore its coatmndated number,
Speaker 1: the elevator's omission gnawed at me. After lunch, I walked
Speaker 1: my dog uppotly philosophical U named Archie, along the clause
Speaker 1: at the building's base. While Archie completed his scientific survey
Speaker 1: of every lamp post, I gazed up and started, almost automatically,
Speaker 1: counting the rows of windows. It was an old habit,
Speaker 1: born of side visits and puntillsts. Fifteen rows above the lobby,
Speaker 1: but sixteen plints, including the penthouse trio above. As Archie
Speaker 1: sniffed his way through the undergrowth, I moved a few paces,
Speaker 1: craning up. The patman seemed slightly off. I started telling again,
Speaker 1: using a pencil stop to keep count, mapping numbers as
Speaker 1: Archie stared at a persistent sparrow. Later, I circled back,
Speaker 1: eyeing the line up of mailboxes in the lobby, Miriam's
Speaker 1: box eleven e. Most floors had four or five labeled
Speaker 1: units through deorby. When I compared the building directory, a
Speaker 1: backup plastic board tapped beside the security desk. It listed
Speaker 1: barely enough apartments to fill fifteen floors, but the apartment
Speaker 1: windows stacked up of me clearly exceeded the directory's tidy
Speaker 1: pairs and trios. The numbers fit if he pretended there
Speaker 1: was an extra floor. I was not, as far as
Speaker 1: I knew, in the business of inventing floors. I waited
Speaker 1: in the lobby for a moment, enough time for a
Speaker 1: young woman carrying two reusable bags in a set of
Speaker 1: ballet flats to stride through the entry. We nodded at
Speaker 1: each other with the polite reserved a mandate of urban hallways.
Speaker 1: Excuse me, I said, do you know why there isn't
Speaker 1: an eight floor on the elevator panel? She paused, looking
Speaker 1: up at the elevator directory as as seeing it for
Speaker 1: the first time, shrugged and smiled. Hat Yeah, I guess
Speaker 1: I never thought about it. Her smile was so effortless,
Speaker 1: so without calculation, that I had no way to tell
Speaker 1: if she ever wondered. Before she pawned the cold button
Speaker 1: and disappeared inside. I caught the doorman between crosswood clues,
Speaker 1: has any one ever lived on the eighth floor? He hesitated,
Speaker 1: flipping his pencil in his hand, just old design staff.
Speaker 1: He finally offered for sly and remote, like he was
Speaker 1: humoring an eccentric uncle. You know, he said vaguely. The
Speaker 1: codes changed so often back then. Besides, people don't much
Speaker 1: care as long as the elevator works. He pocketed his
Speaker 1: pencil and leaned away, eyes fixed on the crosswood squares.
Speaker 1: None of this was especially dramatic, a skipped floor a
Speaker 1: builder's worm, community indifference, but to a mind train on blueprints,
Speaker 1: the practical oddity was obvious. For a building from this era,
Speaker 1: nothing was left to mystery. City inspectors demanded adieu. Floors
Speaker 1: were not hampered, but because insurance, fire CODs and common
Speaker 1: book keeping insisted on a kind of bureaucratic transparency. I'd
Speaker 1: seen buildings fudge from the top down Apentaz that was
Speaker 1: simply another equitable slab with a fanci a label, but
Speaker 1: raising an entire level in a way that left every
Speaker 1: one unconcerned, not something deeper in the logic of the place.
Speaker 1: A few days later, while waiting for Archer to finish
Speaker 1: his pre dust meandering, I found myself once again opposite
Speaker 1: will not ceased facad windows glimming in straight lines, But
Speaker 1: even at a cursory glance, there was something off about
Speaker 1: the math. I tried to trace the rose as if
Speaker 1: reading musical notation ground mezzanine, and then up one two
Speaker 1: for eleven, twelve, thirteen, ending at fifteen sixteen. If you
Speaker 1: counted the mechanical penthouse, but the bands of brick between seven,
Speaker 1: nine and ten. If I squinted, there were more horizontal
Speaker 1: scenes than button numbers. The difference was subtle gaps, too
Speaker 1: slim for full apartments, but too consistent for buried conduits
Speaker 1: or ventilation spaces. I went back inside and took an
Speaker 1: excuse to check Miriam's mail box eleveny. Scrolling through the
Speaker 1: directory again, I ran a finger over the floors fifteen
Speaker 1: in all, no sign of eight, just the jump perfectly neat.
Speaker 1: I checked the mail room, a clean tail forwardnook with
Speaker 1: the hum of low grade air and the chemical perfume
Speaker 1: of new envelopes and parcel tape. Stacks of deliveries waited
Speaker 1: for their claimants. One was marked for a nine, sea,
Speaker 1: another for twelve, A no eight in the pile. But
Speaker 1: as I passed my finger over the metal face of
Speaker 1: the boxes, a faintly warm patch on the brass plate
Speaker 1: between seven and nine caught my eye. The faint remnant
Speaker 1: of a number may be sanded down. I caught a
Speaker 1: woman my own age, new to me, but evidently at
Speaker 1: home in the holes, to ask, does it ever feel
Speaker 1: ought to just skip a floor? With a tilt of
Speaker 1: her head, she said, never noticed. She pointed to her box.
Speaker 1: I just looked for thirteen B and hoped nobody stole
Speaker 1: my gardening catalogs. When I pressed gently, she added, maybe
Speaker 1: it's like a bakery skipping a shelf on the quasspern
Speaker 1: So is there a burned layer to fix? She laughed,
Speaker 1: shook her head, and waved good naturedly. It wasn't defensive,
Speaker 1: just in troubled in a way that left neither agreement
Speaker 1: nor disagreement in the air. If I'd been looking to
Speaker 1: confirm the phenomenon as a quirk, that answer it would suffice.
Speaker 1: But the engineer in meage for proportions, numbers the shape
Speaker 1: of what could fit versus what was labeled as present.
Speaker 1: Most people seemed to belight on the elevator just getting
Speaker 1: them home, But I, with too much time and a
Speaker 1: nosey inclination, kept scratching for the loss for that evening.
Speaker 1: In Miriam's kitchen, as she sliced bread with the halting
Speaker 1: position of some one out of practice, she found my
Speaker 1: questions more amusing than tedious. You always do this, you know,
Speaker 1: she said, hitting the cross like a drumbeat. Get caught
Speaker 1: on the one thing nobody else sees, because usually there
Speaker 1: is a good reason, and sometimes it's even interesting, And
Speaker 1: you really don't remember an eighth floor here, not as
Speaker 1: far as I know. She shrugged, moving brionto plate. He
Speaker 1: was gone by the time I moved in. I suppose
Speaker 1: there must have been one earlier, right, must there? She grinned,
Speaker 1: you're the builder. I let it rest for a moment,
Speaker 1: but when she left to make tea, I wandered to
Speaker 1: her hallway window, Lining up the strip of glass as
Speaker 1: best I could, I counted the rows again, seven, nine, ten, eleven.
Speaker 1: The scene below the ninth floor was thicker than the others,
Speaker 1: as if something had been shoehorned in long ago. That night,
Speaker 1: curiosity replaced the thread barefun of the exercise. I found
Speaker 1: myself at my kitchen table with a sketch bead, roughing
Speaker 1: out blocky rectangles, jotting the heights as best I could
Speaker 1: from memory and photographs, flipping through abouted City Mapp's volume,
Speaker 1: and finally opening my laptop for the first of what
Speaker 1: would become a gentle obsession. By daylight, the routines of
Speaker 1: Walnut's social life pressed in. Residents gathered in quiet clusters
Speaker 1: on lobby seats discussing the local councils ladies recycling scheme
Speaker 1: are the week's new menu at the Persian Cafe. Thus
Speaker 1: the dorman presided silently except for his daily a pistolary
Speaker 1: feud with city parking enforcement, the maintenance cruise walk drugs
Speaker 1: about the elevator breakdown's end. According to rumor, haunted laundry rooms,
Speaker 1: but no one ever mentioned floor numbering. If I watch
Speaker 1: for differences, the building revealed nothing. Elevator arrived. With the
Speaker 1: shopping of various pensioners from four to seven, the tame
Speaker 1: fees student on route to twelve, the mother with the
Speaker 1: pram who stopped at four, all up and down. Everyone's
Speaker 1: key fit just one floor, every hole we poured itself
Speaker 1: precisely into the expected apartments. Only I found the in
Speaker 1: between land and no one evening. As Archie and I
Speaker 1: looped back from the nearest park espied as service stare,
Speaker 1: a door left ajar on us quint In a whim,
Speaker 1: I padded upward, accounting up to seven one more. But
Speaker 1: between seven and nine there was oddly long landing, no sign,
Speaker 1: no door, just a bash expense broken only by the
Speaker 1: putted where pained directangle were a number of sign plate
Speaker 1: might have been. When I pressed upon against the wall,
Speaker 1: it felt hollow, not studded or solid. The next day,
Speaker 1: when I returned, the door was closed and the hall
Speaker 1: is neat pined jaw betrayed none. At the local coffee
Speaker 1: shop across from the tower, where the window was stream
Speaker 1: morning sun and the air was thick with topman as
Speaker 1: forty radio, I met a lively collection of Wilmot's regulars,
Speaker 1: some gossip, some grumble, one or two reading Greek poetry
Speaker 1: for fun. I begun to admit my small obsession and
Speaker 1: inch my way into the circle by asking about building
Speaker 1: oddities over a stale scone. One resident or retired doctor werecanted.
Speaker 1: Used to be the best snap in the city was
Speaker 1: mid day oneth. The life through the solarium would just
Speaker 1: knock you out. But that was ages ago. Must have
Speaker 1: been the ill roof gard instead. She finished, as if
Speaker 1: catching a factual error that only just nudged her memory.
Speaker 1: Are you certain about the solarium? You mean not the penthouse?
Speaker 1: She twirled her glass's chain. Well, that's what we used
Speaker 1: to say, meet you up in the solarium on ape
Speaker 1: bring your crossword. Maybe I'm thinking of the roof launch.
Speaker 1: I don't know. Old buildings blend together, don't they. We
Speaker 1: shifted to other topics, but her story halm delicate and persistent,
Speaker 1: as if some previous yer lingered behind a clouded pane.
Speaker 1: I now a given up treating the missing floor as
Speaker 1: a trivial oddity. My attention shifted clearly. People used to
Speaker 1: refer to the eighth floor, even if now it was
Speaker 1: missing in every physical and social register. I started almost
Speaker 1: compulsively to catalog building directories tenant less courtesy of the
Speaker 1: city's not quite private property tax portal archive newsletters. It
Speaker 1: might have amounted to nothing of curiosity and error, but
Speaker 1: as I scrolled through records from different years, a confusion
Speaker 1: only multiplied. In some document, Walmot Tower listed sixteen floors,
Speaker 1: with apartments eight to through eighty. In others, the transition
Speaker 1: lapped straight from seven eight to nine eight, as if
Speaker 1: eight had never existed. Blueprints were trickier. The city's digital
Speaker 1: archive was still only patchly scanned, a palantist of pds
Speaker 1: and crosty tiff images, blue lines yellowing with age. I
Speaker 1: found several permits from the nineteen seventies that showed explicit
Speaker 1: flo accounts in eighth level apartments marked distinctly, but then
Speaker 1: after a certain year all mention of they it vanished
Speaker 1: from subsequent plans, as though sliced out and patched over.
Speaker 1: More tactile was the process of measuring. One morning, I
Speaker 1: strode round the building with a tape fun camera in hand,
Speaker 1: counting the rows of windows. One more time. I measured
Speaker 1: the total rise of the brickwork, and tried to back
Speaker 1: calculate the number or floors by both the size of
Speaker 1: the rows and the spacing of the external scenes. By
Speaker 1: results refused to conform. Sometimes the windows lined up perfectly
Speaker 1: with elevator buttons. At others there was a subtle but
Speaker 1: persistent bolt in the alignment around the level where it
Speaker 1: should have nestled, a groove about a meter higher or
Speaker 1: lower than adjacent rows. I called the local historian, a
Speaker 1: brisk woman named Sally, whose devotion to footnotes exceeded even
Speaker 1: my own building quirk. You say, I don't recall Will
Speaker 1: not having major scandals, but you'd be surprised. Wh arkeffs
Speaker 1: cough up. She called back the next week. Odd think
Speaker 1: there are society page clippings in the eighties, referencing bridge
Speaker 1: tournaments and roofed up events on the eight four solarium
Speaker 1: last mentioned, I could find abruptly stops, and after that
Speaker 1: it's all penthouse lounge in nineteen four, viewing community newsletters
Speaker 1: may be a renumbering, maybe just a habit that died unsettled.
Speaker 1: I pressed her. Does the city ever reassign floors in
Speaker 1: the wreckers Sometimes, especially if a space is converted. Converting
Speaker 1: a roofed up garden or a party room happens, but
Speaker 1: usually the bones are left, even if the naanes change
Speaker 1: be aught to race it entirely. That evening, as I
Speaker 1: crossed the lobby, I noticed a delivery slip slip behind
Speaker 1: a stack of outdated four lies beside the entry half faded,
Speaker 1: it read eight floor flowers were recipient a Mendel. The
Speaker 1: date put it almost six years ago, the year before
Speaker 1: I had returned to the city. I brought it up
Speaker 1: to Miriam. She shook her head. I don't remember anyone
Speaker 1: named Mendel, do you. Maybe it was a hall bouquet.
Speaker 1: I don't remember ever having deliveries for eight. The floorst's
Speaker 1: receipt was more precise. Wilmot Tower, eighth floor eight D.
Speaker 1: When I called the number listed, the new manager told
Speaker 1: me the shop's records only went back a handful of years.
Speaker 1: We send all the time to Wilmot never turned eighth,
Speaker 1: though you sure that's not for the building next door.
Speaker 1: With each new tangent, my confusion compounded the building book
Speaker 1: swap a rather lively affair for a mostly retired crowd.
Speaker 1: I found myself drawn into a chat with Henry, or
Speaker 1: retired building superintendent from a few streets over. I pressed him,
Speaker 1: nudging the conversation towards Wilmot's floor plan, though that one's
Speaker 1: changed lay out a few times. He mused, move the laundry,
Speaker 1: knock through some storage, maybe even play with floor numbers
Speaker 1: for legal reasons. Owners used to pull stunts to dodge
Speaker 1: tax brackets, but whole floors, that's rare. Did someone say
Speaker 1: there as a pull up? They once, He laughed, pushing
Speaker 1: his by focals up his nose, as if seeing the
Speaker 1: memory for a fog of digits. With every new data point,
Speaker 1: it became clear people referred to the eight floor as
Speaker 1: if it existed. All newsletters referenced to reading contests on eight,
Speaker 1: now replaced by more generic community lounge events in the
Speaker 1: city's records. The eighth the pier disappeared, then returned as
Speaker 1: a sort of ghost sanitation, fading with every subsequent revision.
Speaker 1: The biggest contradiction of all was that no one seemed
Speaker 1: to mind. There was no anxiety, not even the shadow
Speaker 1: of exasperated, a stage of the kind that clings to
Speaker 1: a shuttered bakery or belove londromat. The residents wore the
Speaker 1: missing floor as if it were a natural part of
Speaker 1: life's attrition, like a pop bench lost to a new
Speaker 1: traffic circle or a familiar bus route. Dego for good. Still,
Speaker 1: my old engineers each remained city records, winter accounts, the
Speaker 1: logical floor plans, each acreed only long enough to produce
Speaker 1: a further riddle. What's more, people's stories adjusted themselves, as
Speaker 1: if collectively trained to let go of the eighth. Their
Speaker 1: memories came of PostScript corrections, Oh, that must have been
Speaker 1: the roof lange, or maybe I am thinking of the
Speaker 1: old Penthousel library. No one clung to eate for affection
Speaker 1: or melancholy. The absence was as mild and immutable as
Speaker 1: paint drying. For a time, my forks pivoted from a
Speaker 1: dozen eight four exist ture haw does an entire four
Speaker 1: vanish with no more fustvenamous place. For sure, this became
Speaker 1: the heart of the mystery, not the omission itself, but
Speaker 1: the manner of a razure of past tense continuously were written,
Speaker 1: never properly mourned. I dealved into decades old city archives.
Speaker 1: Success of permits showed the eight floor listed various utilities attributed,
Speaker 1: cleaned or shuffle for a stretch of years. Then after
Speaker 1: a renovation in the late nineties, references to floor eight
Speaker 1: mechanical electrical residence simply ended. Renovation logs that should have
Speaker 1: detailed any major removal or reassignment included bland notes like
Speaker 1: vertical transition, adjustment or reconfigure a lot per code, but
Speaker 1: never said what was moved or deleted. In the earliest
Speaker 1: for a Grass Wilmotower's opening day, captured in a faded
Speaker 1: newsprin clipping fall, the floors are brightly late ripened with
Speaker 1: party bannos. In the more recent shots, the row where
Speaker 1: eight should be always lies in shadow, darker than the
Speaker 1: rest windows, and let even when adjacent floors shine. One afternoon,
Speaker 1: I read my findings allowed to Miriam, hoping that hitherto
Speaker 1: a witness would reat me more in fact than fancy.
Speaker 1: She listened, stirring a cup of lemon tea, and traced
Speaker 1: her thoughts back. There were potlocks on eight, she said slowly.
Speaker 1: I didn't go off in a bit before my time, really,
Speaker 1: but I remember people talking about it. There was a
Speaker 1: woman called Penny maybe used to organize the single ones.
Speaker 1: People called it the midway room, but later that became
Speaker 1: a story room. Then nothing did it happen all at once?
Speaker 1: She shook her head, trying to catch the memory. It's funny.
Speaker 1: I can't really say when the A four stop being common.
Speaker 1: I don't think anyone meant to let it go. It's
Speaker 1: just that after a while people only referred to the
Speaker 1: lunge upstairs or the good nut spot. There wasn't an announcement.
Speaker 1: This fog puzzled me. A whole community failing to register
Speaker 1: the loss of a physical space. Not denial, not nostalgia,
Speaker 1: just a gentle omission, as if the floor had faded
Speaker 1: out of both memory and function. I began to question myself.
Speaker 1: Maybe I was pursuing a roundit whole made of paperwork
Speaker 1: and wishful thinking. My years of taking blueprints annotated by
Speaker 1: crowded urban could had primed me for contradiction. Maybe in
Speaker 1: this case my methods work against cents rather than toward it.
Speaker 1: But I didn't want to be alone in my doubts.
Speaker 1: On a hunch, I reached out to Henry, the former
Speaker 1: building superintendent, again, arranging to meet over weak coffee in
Speaker 1: the Wilmot lobby. He arrived in a stiff windbreaker, shifting
Speaker 1: on his good leg. You ever see floor plans where
Speaker 1: the levels don't match the elevator, I asked quietly. Henry
Speaker 1: smiled with a city man's wisdom. Floors move all the time.
Speaker 1: Oh no's renumber for lucky numbers or to match neighboring blocks.
Speaker 1: Sometimes it's simpler that way, less confusion with deliveries are male.
Speaker 1: But I tried to removing a floor. That's messy business,
Speaker 1: specially for the codes. Besides, it's not like the plumbing
Speaker 1: just vanishes. You hear about it whenever something leaks. He
Speaker 1: sit thinking we did sometimes compress space, lose a few
Speaker 1: inches in the hall. I'd bulk to a mechanical chase,
Speaker 1: I remember, will not maintenance shaft changes, a bit of repainting,
Speaker 1: but nothing a bake. I don't remember codes ever giving
Speaker 1: up a whole level. Did you ever hear a residence
Speaker 1: talk about an eight floor? Hem re chewed it over
Speaker 1: the memory somewhere between skepticism and possibility. Maybe there was
Speaker 1: a fuss over the back staircase being blocked cheers ago.
Speaker 1: Now someone claim they had a locker on eight. We
Speaker 1: checked but didn't find much. Walls were typed stronger than expected.
Speaker 1: Most people figured it was developer gained, But now I
Speaker 1: doubt even the Nighai knows what happened. His account layered
Speaker 1: one more contradiction. If the deletion of the eighth floor
Speaker 1: was merely a developer's roose, why did it leave behind
Speaker 1: physical traces, old blueprints and so much memory fragments in conversation.
Speaker 1: If it was more than a nugget of administration, why
Speaker 1: hadn't the absence ever caused a crisis? The mystery became
Speaker 1: less about hidden room and more about how and why
Speaker 1: whole space is real, remembered or lost could be gently
Speaker 1: a made. I broadened the search. Walmot's long serving stuff
Speaker 1: filled what time they could spare with worker unds and
Speaker 1: Quickhema dinned up. The morning cleaner laughed at my questions
Speaker 1: about odd spaces. We used to keep old pink cans
Speaker 1: and holiday decorations and cupboards marked with blue date, but
Speaker 1: they took all that out in a revamp. The key
Speaker 1: never matched and the new doors never fit quite right.
Speaker 1: There was one near seven that opened into a word
Speaker 1: shallow closet now, which just sealed off. I pressed her.
Speaker 1: Could it have led on to the old eighth floor?
Speaker 1: She paused, considering all I know is sometimes people called
Speaker 1: at the inte in closet Somewhere You lose a mop
Speaker 1: for two months, then find it again, still damp, she shrugged.
Speaker 1: But it doesn't open any more of the handle's pain
Speaker 1: to tight. I stopped Gus, the daytime doorman, as he
Speaker 1: restoped his crosswood pencils. If there was ever a package,
Speaker 1: miss Siliver to the eighth, what would you do? He smiled,
Speaker 1: invoking professional pride. I check against a master list, and
Speaker 1: if there's no aid, it gets sent back. But there
Speaker 1: used to be a Mendel lady maybe seven years back,
Speaker 1: got a lot of mail. I think she passed or
Speaker 1: moved out when things got shuffling. Haven't seen mail for
Speaker 1: eight since then. The mail room attendant, Nancy let me
Speaker 1: thumb through two years of package locks, and there under
Speaker 1: archived entries was scattered marks for eight d and aded
Speaker 1: each cost over in red redirected to the residence office,
Speaker 1: or marked return to sender. Two of the names matched
Speaker 1: or other residents. The rest never reply. My efforts seemed
Speaker 1: to circle closer to a center, but always the patten's blurred.
Speaker 1: Mid revelation, the intern dawn callers who filled evening shifts
Speaker 1: turned up to have an engineering pass himself, having helped
Speaker 1: retrofit the tower as a carpenter before moving to death jobs.
Speaker 1: We talked sitting in the security office with the grainy
Speaker 1: glow for TV news. They had us compressed two floors
Speaker 1: along the service rise during that renovation. Carlos told me
Speaker 1: it squinting at the memories. We'd frame out petitions with
Speaker 1: double thick drywall, maybe for a track rerouting or code
Speaker 1: up grades. They didn't train us to ask questions. Never
Speaker 1: sore for fully removed, but afterward they were doors there,
Speaker 1: didn't go anywhere. What did compressing mean day to day?
Speaker 1: He shrugged. He make the whole shorter thick in a
Speaker 1: wall move event, not a magic trick, just less of everything.
Speaker 1: His eyes drifted away, perhaps unwilling to reanimate half remembered instructions.
Speaker 1: The guy running the project, mac Gregor. He was detail obsessed,
Speaker 1: wanted everything clean, no odd numbers, nothing to remind the
Speaker 1: city why they flagged a floor. We just dyed as told.
Speaker 1: That week I found an entry in the city's property
Speaker 1: tax sensus for Wilmot Tower. Oddly, spiking gas and electric
Speaker 1: charges showed up for a three year ban in the
Speaker 1: late nineties, higher than could be explained by normal occupancy,
Speaker 1: matching almost exactly a period before eight disappeared from all records.
Speaker 1: It was as if utilities had once served a larger footprint,
Speaker 1: then quietly he shrank as paperwork was corrected. At a
Speaker 1: public library, one of the city's glories high oldest survivors,
Speaker 1: I chatted up a volunteer archivist working her wavery and
Speaker 1: ungainy donation of building newsletters and residence photos. She led
Speaker 1: meet her cardboard box scrolls Wilmot seventy zeros inside photocopied pages,
Speaker 1: offered a timeline of casual events, weekly poetry readings in
Speaker 1: the solarium on eight Saturday night bridge games in eight Lange,
Speaker 1: Then suddenly, by the start of the next year's newsletters.
Speaker 1: All such gatherings had moved the stairs or to penthouse Lange,
Speaker 1: and never again was the eight floor referenced. No editorial
Speaker 1: or explanation justified the shift. It was as though the
Speaker 1: designation had evaporated. A final test, I called the property
Speaker 1: management office, offering a plausible fiction of visiting cousin, arriving
Speaker 1: with the mistress package. Where do I send mail for eighty?
Speaker 1: The facility's manager paused a long time, typing, that's not possible.
Speaker 1: Are you sure you got the right building will not
Speaker 1: only runs up to fifteen? I thanked her and hung up.
Speaker 1: But the building's own delivery logs, which I'd photographed earlier,
Speaker 1: confirmed several entries for eight floor as late as a
Speaker 1: decade ago. The contradiction was now no longer simply practical
Speaker 1: missing flows or develop a sleight of hand, but deeply social,
Speaker 1: even psychological. Wilmot House its floor not only existed, but
Speaker 1: was erased both in structure and in community record without
Speaker 1: ever causing a rioster. The evidence, fragmentary, elusive, suggested an
Speaker 1: abrupt but an remarked omission, the collective gentle crossing out residents, staff,
Speaker 1: and even the building's muscle memory seemed to have adjusted seamlessly,
Speaker 1: protecting the omission with the indifference that comes of shared
Speaker 1: well settled innesia. I pressed the folder of copper delivery
Speaker 1: locks closed, laid both hands on its batted top, and
Speaker 1: sat in a hush that fills a late afternoon library
Speaker 1: when the light leans gold through high glass. So much
Speaker 1: questioning window counts, recollections, strange compressions, and casual shrugs had
Speaker 1: brought me not to head and chamber or scandal, but
Speaker 1: to this, an absence so subtly made, so quietly accepted
Speaker 1: that it sotened into community rhythm. Yet my curiosity, instead
Speaker 1: of having settled, stretched into a new dimension. If an
Speaker 1: entire four could be removed, not hastily nor with trauma,
Speaker 1: but as if this solvent into the normal curve of days,
Speaker 1: what actually makes a place present? And if this could
Speaker 1: happen here among decent and attentive neighbors, what else slips
Speaker 1: cast in the smoothing over of daily communal life. I
Speaker 1: needed to look directly, physically, not just in paperwork, for
Speaker 1: the place where eight should be, the clues in the
Speaker 1: building's skin, the hush around certain landings, the reminiscences of
Speaker 1: rooms and light all pointed towards something that persisted at
Speaker 1: the edge of perception. Neither mif nor open secret, but
Speaker 1: an emptiness centrically made. Instead of chasing more memories, I
Speaker 1: returned to Wilmot Tower's practicalities, its elevator shafts, service stairs,
Speaker 1: and stubborn walls. I decided to appeal to John, the
Speaker 1: head of maintenance, A tall man with expressive eyebrows and
Speaker 1: the calm of someone whose day is usually a tangle
Speaker 1: of radiator valves and gently irate calls about laundry machines.
Speaker 1: I caught him on a Wednesday, clipboard in hand, halfway
Speaker 1: through the monthly elevator safety check. A rist straightforwardness, John,
Speaker 1: I need to ask a strange favor. Can I come
Speaker 1: along for the maintenance round? I won't touch anything. I
Speaker 1: want to see how the floors aligne from inside a shaft.
Speaker 1: His eyebrow gave a polite lurch. Officially, I shouldn't liability
Speaker 1: in all, but if he keep well back, sure. The
Speaker 1: elevator company guy mostly talks about lubrication and voltage. What's
Speaker 1: the curiosity the counting floors, I said, with a conspirative smile.
Speaker 1: Something doesn't line up in the plans, and I just
Speaker 1: want to understand or let go. Maybe he studied me,
Speaker 1: shrugged better questions than most I get. Let's see if
Speaker 1: you spot what I never bothered to. We rode the
Speaker 1: elevator car with the external key switch flights unfold, the
Speaker 1: shaft crawling by behind a little mesh window at knee
Speaker 1: height beside the control panel. You can watch through here,
Speaker 1: John said, gesturing at the tiny rectangle. Count the clinks.
Speaker 1: We started at lobby, and with each floor I marked
Speaker 1: a soft click in the elevator's guide rails, a regular clack,
Speaker 1: subtle but audible with each passing threshold seven click. Then
Speaker 1: as we rose there was a strange pause. The elevator
Speaker 1: moved the distance of a normal floor, but the button
Speaker 1: sequence inside skipped directly from seven two nine. The car
Speaker 1: didn't slow or seem to hesitate, but through the mesh
Speaker 1: I caught the passing of a supporting beam, a flush
Speaker 1: of something painted so let him is matched in the
Speaker 1: wall structure. The passage took no longer than any other.
Speaker 1: Did you hear that? I asked? Extra beam? John said.
Speaker 1: They thickened the shaft there after, renovations structural he clearly
Speaker 1: had never cared to probe further feels longer that segment.
Speaker 1: He gave a measured look. Maybe can't say elevator logic's
Speaker 1: elevator logic? You know you trust the stops. We finished
Speaker 1: the wrist in steady silence. At the roof, John reset
Speaker 1: the keishitch, then turned to me, So did you see
Speaker 1: your missing floor? I shook my head. It wasn't quite seen.
Speaker 1: That mattered. It was the feeling, the scent of the
Speaker 1: elevator silently passing by a space that had been measured
Speaker 1: out of existence, but which, in some dimension of habit
Speaker 1: or memory, stubbornly clung on. I thank John. There made
Speaker 1: my way to the service stairwell, clipward under my arm archie,
Speaker 1: grumbling at being excluded from excitement. The stair between seven
Speaker 1: and nine was always slightly longer, half landing painted with
Speaker 1: mural of a patchwork, and on this afternoon, the impulse
Speaker 1: sies me to dry. Knocking on the wall at the midpoint,
Speaker 1: my knuckles landed on plasterboard, not the satisfying deep ring
Speaker 1: of solid block like the rest. I moved sideways, kneeling,
Speaker 1: and its ound a distinctly hollow and engineer pocket deep
Speaker 1: enough potentially for the space of a corridor. I tapped
Speaker 1: along and felt the faintest flex in a patch near
Speaker 1: the baseboard, as if something hears of paint layers perhaps
Speaker 1: must seem the staff door that was now thoroughly sealed.
Speaker 1: The old lock, still visible under a rim of newer paint,
Speaker 1: had been filled with brass potty. This was the place where,
Speaker 1: perhaps decades ago, a service corridor or utility closet had
Speaker 1: connected backward into the vanished realm. That night, mind running,
Speaker 1: I borrowed and infrared thermometer from my old toob like
Speaker 1: a fanciful experiment, no doubt, but I wanted to test
Speaker 1: if the missing floor left any thermal trace. In the
Speaker 1: thin hours, after all sound but the buzz of the
Speaker 1: lobby's night light. I stood in the courtyard outside and
Speaker 1: named the beam up at the windows. The ambient summer
Speaker 1: heat warmed the first stories, then did slightly as the
Speaker 1: shadow of the upper apartments cut the exposure. But between
Speaker 1: seven and nine, a thin band just two windows wide
Speaker 1: registered a few degrees warmer than seam right. I made notes,
Speaker 1: even as I reminded myself that in the city's patchwork
Speaker 1: of ancient radiators and tired insulation. Such anomalies were more
Speaker 1: common than true alignment sel. The sense that the man
Speaker 1: missing floor survived in more than memory or paperwork, some
Speaker 1: physical trace, some ghostly warm, some hush in the for
Speaker 1: four of the stairs persisted. I felt to run to
Speaker 1: one final effort to leave a note for the eight floor,
Speaker 1: not because I expected a response, but to find the
Speaker 1: limits of shared pretense. The elevator cars have a slim
Speaker 1: access panel, often left unlocked for changing bulbs and performing
Speaker 1: minor tasks into its recess. On a folded scrap, I
Speaker 1: wrote for a resident of the eighth floor, or whoever
Speaker 1: remembers I'm looking for your story, Please contact me s
Speaker 1: days past. I returned on the third morning to check
Speaker 1: the scrap was gone. I asked the dorman, the evening cleaner,
Speaker 1: even Miriam if she had noticed a stray note. No
Speaker 1: one had seen anything unusual. The only reply, if it
Speaker 1: could be called, that, was an empty envelope tucked in
Speaker 1: my own mail books that afternoon, addressed simply curiosity. No
Speaker 1: return address, no handwriting to match against old column inches,
Speaker 1: not even a cryptic drawing, just silence, returned neatly politely.
Speaker 1: My last practical effort was to cross check resident move
Speaker 1: in dates with the years the eight four had last
Speaker 1: appeared in documents. In the thick city reco, I found
Speaker 1: a handful of families who moved in during the season
Speaker 1: when the floor vanished, not all at once, but in
Speaker 1: a slow trickle. Their account, when gently prodded over to
Speaker 1: you or in the warm spell of lobbisan, produced only
Speaker 1: blind recollections. The tour escaped to floor, but the apartment
Speaker 1: was perfect, or they explained. It is an efficiency easier
Speaker 1: to keep the number simple, no resistance or murmur of loss,
Speaker 1: just smiles, a little bemusement, social ease, smoothest poor concrete.
Speaker 1: In pursuit of a cause, I knew that something more
Speaker 1: deliberate must have transpired. I pressed my search at city Hall,
Speaker 1: asking after records from the building's last major renovation. Fully
Speaker 1: expected only more in complete of sanitized answers. Instead, I
Speaker 1: was allowed to leave through a forgotten file roar thick
Speaker 1: with dust and a half peeled label reading walmotth House
Speaker 1: Lash nineteen nineties, two thousand slash permits. There at the
Speaker 1: back I discovered a decade's old chief of blueprints stamped
Speaker 1: and insured in blue, with annotations in the neat block
Speaker 1: letter as a some mid level city planner. Floor by
Speaker 1: floor the classic progression lobby one, two onward and then
Speaker 1: crossing out. The original document listed eight residential showing four
Speaker 1: units in a solary mark m munal use in a
Speaker 1: sharp hand. A later revision cut a line through the
Speaker 1: entire floor, replacing it with a faint penciled note. Omach
Speaker 1: per design change carries sequence to fifteen below signatures for
Speaker 1: city inspection and site management, the date matching the spike
Speaker 1: in utility consumption. I tracked no reason, just per design
Speaker 1: change as scanned for anything more budget notes, staff memmo's
Speaker 1: hinting at a scandal or a short gut instead bland formalities,
Speaker 1: space consolidated new ceiling height to match per code than
Speaker 1: ANDO variants required as planned. It was less a surgical
Speaker 1: excision than an erasure by pencil, gentle and unremarked. I
Speaker 1: tracked the name of the planner who'd signed the change,
Speaker 1: El Callahan. After some determined wrangling among municipal directories and
Speaker 1: some look at an Engineering Society dinner email list, I
Speaker 1: located him, now retired in Gardening, England. Callahan agreed to meet,
Speaker 1: Curious as anyone to recall a decade old project. We
Speaker 1: sat on the shaded porch of his small clapwood bungalow,
Speaker 1: overlooking a patch of backyard where hosts ran a Mark
Speaker 1: Wilmot tower. He asked, luring himself into a creaking lawn chair.
Speaker 1: That was a long time ago. What's the intrigue? I explained,
Speaker 1: the discrepancy, the missing floor, the seamless acceptance, the arc
Speaker 1: hevil traces, the suddenness of the paperwork amendment. He frowned,
Speaker 1: pulling at his ear lob as he thought. We did
Speaker 1: a fair bit of chopping and moving around. Then midmanus nineties,
Speaker 1: budgets changed. But that's owed. Yes, removing a floor physically,
Speaker 1: that's not trivial. My memory is imprecise, But I recall
Speaker 1: the site manager, pushing for a new vertical sequence, said
Speaker 1: to eight had chronic leaks, may be structurally awkward. There
Speaker 1: was a feeling somehow that skipping the number made sense,
Speaker 1: like we'd avoid future trouble by just omitting it. He
Speaker 1: trailed off, gazed at the garden for a long moment.
Speaker 1: The strange thing is, I don't remember any one protesting.
Speaker 1: We met sign found the drawings send the order residence too.
Speaker 1: There was some confusion, maybe a few weeks of people
Speaker 1: correcting their mail, then nothing. It settled, he regarded me,
Speaker 1: half apologetic. We made so many small accommodations in those years.
Speaker 1: Some of them stick, and you remember every detail. Some dissolve,
Speaker 1: I always assumed, while most residents liked things, utilized confusion,
Speaker 1: fewer complaints, but it was all come, no drama, just
Speaker 1: as if the number had never belonged. Were you ever
Speaker 1: given a reason? He shook his head officially, No, Maybe
Speaker 1: convenience superstition. Legally, as I told myself, something about utility
Speaker 1: exis needing to be freed up. But in truth it
Speaker 1: just felt easier to leave it out, like filling across
Speaker 1: wood with the blank square and moving on. His account
Speaker 1: resonated less as bureaucratic negligence and more as some shared
Speaker 1: almost instinctive leadinger. I left the afternoon, spinning by fragments
Speaker 1: of sunlight and faint bird calls, with a new understanding.
Speaker 1: Sometimes community management and time collesce not to race with force,
Speaker 1: but to collectively and willingly forget what does not fit.
Speaker 1: I wanted to confirm beyond paperwork, beyond second hand tales
Speaker 1: that those who lived through the change felt it or
Speaker 1: had found at the edge of absence a meaning. Back
Speaker 1: at Wilmot arranged a small gathering at Miriam's apartment, inviting Henry,
Speaker 1: the retired superintendent, and Sally, the local historian, to join,
Speaker 1: along with two of the building's longest standing residents, Ruth
Speaker 1: and Leo. As we talked over black tea and supermarket
Speaker 1: short bread, Sally offered up her findings. The newsle to
Speaker 1: stop mentioning the eight floor midmnutes one thousand, nine hundred nineties.
Speaker 1: Before then it was all contests, quiet practice. So layin
Speaker 1: famous for unbeautable after noonlight. Then no more, just references
Speaker 1: to the roof, lunge or main lounge. It happened without announcement. Ruth,
Speaker 1: in her late eaties, shook her head more in wonder
Speaker 1: than skepticism. We all loved the reading rooms on all afternoon,
Speaker 1: paperbacks left in every corner. Then I suppose there were
Speaker 1: leaks repairs, but I don't recall when it ended. Someone
Speaker 1: started calling at the half way stop and the name faded.
Speaker 1: Our Bridge Clubs simply moved up a floor and stopped
Speaker 1: speaking the old number. Leo, who had moved, and during
Speaker 1: the consolidation, stroked his mustus thoughtfully. All I remember was
Speaker 1: some nonsense in the elevator for a few weeks, postings
Speaker 1: about number corrections and reminders to update address books. Then
Speaker 1: it was as if floor it had never been. I
Speaker 1: never met any one who missed it. Even now, when
Speaker 1: I think back, it feels hazy, a comfortable place I
Speaker 1: no longer place in the building. Henry Wade in people
Speaker 1: forget fast the moment something's called a fire risk and
Speaker 1: maintenance hassle. Everyone is happy to shift. He think he'd
Speaker 1: notice a floor missing, But what people really notice is
Speaker 1: whether Sumon's replace the carpet or restopped the lounge. So
Speaker 1: a few things vanish neatly. You see Miriam listened, smiling
Speaker 1: at the way the conversationswell, from sunlit memory to confusion.
Speaker 1: We built new customs, new routes, baked instead of red,
Speaker 1: sang in kitchens instead of the lounge. On eight. Maybe
Speaker 1: the flows more prison in how we adjusted, not in
Speaker 1: what we lost. I realize, listening to this mistake of recollection,
Speaker 1: that the vanished for's meaning was not secretly sinister or
Speaker 1: even bureaucratically arbitrary. It was sustained, constructed by a surprisingly
Speaker 1: peaceful communal adjustment, gently fortelling itself. Each time the story
Speaker 1: threatened to linger, the newsletters and photographs I gathered shored it.
Speaker 1: In the final edition, before the erasure, a photograph of
Speaker 1: residents gathered in the solarium, lights streaming across jumbled arm
Speaker 1: chairs and scattered tea cups, an image almost hyperreal with
Speaker 1: ordinary affection. Then, from the following year forward, the same
Speaker 1: group appeared on the roof garden instead, different plants and
Speaker 1: new horizon line, but the same smiles. The same acts
Speaker 1: resumed elsewhere. It was as if the community, faced with
Speaker 1: some mix of necessity and opportunity, meant the loss not
Speaker 1: with silence, but with practice and contented adaptation. In this
Speaker 1: I saw something ineffatly human. The erasure of eight had
Speaker 1: not left the wind or fostered ghosts. Instead, it had
Speaker 1: proven how practice people are in shaping themselves to fit
Speaker 1: the world's new scenes. The aching part was not that
Speaker 1: a space had been lost, but how quietly communities were
Speaker 1: right memory in the name of ease, progress or tidings,
Speaker 1: softened so well that the absence itself becomes invisible, unremarkable,
Speaker 1: perfectly normalized. As dusk fell, we left Miriam's whole way
Speaker 1: and congregated by the service stare, each of us testing
Speaker 1: the wall for old seams, listening for hollow notes that
Speaker 1: I could just a little off from the expected solidity.
Speaker 1: Nothing called out, Nothing but the precision of habit, the
Speaker 1: residual warmth of remembered light. I lingered after the group dispersed,
Speaker 1: standing alone on the landing, fingers pressed slightly where the
Speaker 1: wall ran longer than reason dictated. No private message came,
Speaker 1: no ripple u from hidden air between the flaws. What
Speaker 1: endured instead was a complex piece. Not ignorance or suppression,
Speaker 1: but a gentle choreography, a ballet of unspoken agreement that
Speaker 1: certain absences would be honored not by mourning, but by
Speaker 1: embroidering new routines. Warven, the gap quietly integrated, ARCHI naged
Speaker 1: my knee. I turned from the wall, unlocked the stair door,
Speaker 1: and stepped into Wilmot's corridor. The hum of an evening radio,
Speaker 1: the sound of elevation to door, sliding, laughter from two
Speaker 1: floors above, sense of frying onions drifting downward, everything intensely,
Speaker 1: persuasively normal. On my way out, I paused in the
Speaker 1: court oud have followed once more, the outline of the throw
Speaker 1: of windows, just visible in the fading light, sunlike limod
Speaker 1: against the glass band that, for all anyone now admitted
Speaker 1: was no one's view, no one's home, a feature's gallery
Speaker 1: of reflection. I'd understood then that the most remarkable absences
Speaker 1: are not thus fiercely covered up or richly grieved. They
Speaker 1: are the ones a community so smoothly patches that daily
Speaker 1: life continues, friction as a disappearance, distributed so well non
Speaker 1: custom memory and practicality, that no individual ever needs to rebel.
Speaker 1: Wilmot Tower's eight floor had been subtracted, not by fear
Speaker 1: but by consensus, and so became a perfect non entity,
Speaker 1: neither a secret nor scandal, but subtle proof of the
Speaker 1: flexible fiction by which any place, any life is mapped.
Speaker 1: Standing below that lost layer, I could almost picture gathering
Speaker 1: a bridge game lovers by the solarium's pain, a song
Speaker 1: drifting out into gaps where some once pulled, not gone precisely,
Speaker 1: and not haunting, but beings somehow. What makes a community
Speaker 1: itself capable of forgetting gently stitching new patterns where memory
Speaker 1: hadn't read it? I ganced up one last time as
Speaker 1: Archie hooked toward the park. The glasst that had caught
Speaker 1: this on halo in the empty band for a final instant,
Speaker 1: and before heading home, I wondered, quietly, without hope of answer,
Speaker 1: what other places, what other churished absences have passed so
Speaker 1: calmly from communal life, not with pain nor upoor, but
Speaker 1: with the satisfying click of a door closing and the
Speaker 1: unremarkable joy of moving on. And that is the end.
Speaker 1: Thank you for listening, and I will see you in
Speaker 1: the next one.