I have a clipboard. I want to start with the clipboard because it is the most real thing I can describe right now, and I need to start with something real. It is a standard-issue red hardboard clipboard, the kind facilities management orders in bulk from the Staples business account, and it has my name written in black marker on the back: T. Greer, Fire Safety Warden, Floors 4–7. The paper on the clip is the drill accountability sheet. It has columns for floor number, employee name, time of sweep, and confirmation of exit. I have been filling out this sheet, or trying to, for what feels like several hours. The floor number column is the problem.
The drill was scheduled for 7:45 p.m., after the building had cleared. Routine. Quarterly. I have done this drill in this building — a twelve-story mid-rise in the business district, the kind of place where the lobby smells like recycled air and the elevator buttons are all slightly sticky — for six consecutive years. My job is to walk my assigned floors, confirm that no one has stayed behind, and radio confirmation to the building safety coordinator, whose name is Phil, who waits in the parking garage with a clipboard of his own and a radio that has never once given us any trouble.
Photo: Phil, via blog.nobledesktop.com
I started on four. That much is clear in my memory. The floor was empty, the way floors are empty after hours — that specific quality of vacancy that office buildings have when the people are gone and the machines are still humming, the printers cooling, the monitors dark but not off, the whole floor suspended in a kind of held breath. I called clear, made my notation, and took the stairwell up to five.
The stairwell deposited me on six.
I know that sounds like a simple miscounting error. I thought so too. I went back down one flight and pushed through the door expecting four. The floor I entered was not four. The carpet pattern was the same — that gray-and-blue geometric tile pattern that every floor in this building shares — but the configuration of the workstations was wrong. Not dramatically wrong. Just slightly, in the way that a word looks wrong after you've stared at it too long. I went back to the stairwell. The landing number painted on the cinder block wall said 5. I had come down one flight from a landing that had also said 5.
I radioed Phil. Phil confirmed that the drill was proceeding normally on his end, that the lobby was clear, that the other wardens were checking in on schedule. His voice was slightly flat on the radio, the way voices get when the battery is low, though I had replaced the battery that morning. I told him I was having some trouble with stairwell orientation. He said, "Copy that, just keep moving up." I said I might be going up when I thought I was going down. There was a pause. He said, "Copy," again, which was not an answer to what I had said.
I kept moving up.
The emergency exit signs are the thing I want to describe most carefully, because they are the thing I keep returning to when I try to understand what is happening. Emergency exit signs are, by code, supposed to point toward the nearest exit. They are not supposed to disagree with each other. On the floor I reached after two more flights — a floor whose landing number I did not look at, because I had decided for the moment that the landing numbers were not helping me — three exit signs were visible from the stairwell door. One pointed left. One pointed right. One pointed at the floor. I stood and looked at them for what was probably thirty seconds, which felt longer. Then I looked up, because looking at the floor-pointing sign had made me think about what might be above me, and I saw that the fluorescent panel directly overhead was flickering in a pattern that was almost rhythmic. Not quite. Almost.
My colleagues are on this floor. That is the other thing. I have now encountered, on three separate floors, people from my accountability sheet — colleagues whose names I had already logged as confirmed-exited. Donna from Accounts Payable, who I cleared from the fifth floor, or the floor I thought was five, was standing at a workstation two floors later with her back to me, doing something with papers on a desk. I called her name. She did not turn around. I noted her on the sheet in the confirmed-exited column because I did not know what other column to put her in, and I moved on. Marcus from IT was in the break room on a subsequent floor, facing the microwave, which was running. He turned when I came in. He looked at me the way you look at someone you recognize from a context you can't quite place. He did not say anything. I said, "Marcus, you're supposed to be in the parking garage." He looked at the microwave. I left.
I have not been radioing Phil. I made this decision on the floor with the disagreeing signs, and I have not fully examined the decision, but here is what I can say about it: Phil's voice on the radio has been getting flatter with each check-in. The last time I keyed the radio, the voice that said "Copy" did not sound like it was coming from the parking garage. It sounded like it was coming from somewhere above me. I am not going to test this again.
The floor I am on now — I am writing this on the back of the accountability sheet, in the margin, using the pen I keep clipped to the top of the clipboard — has a number. It is written in the same painted stencil as every other landing in this building. I looked at it when I came through the stairwell door. The number is not possible. It is not possible in a building with twelve floors. It is not possible in a building with any number of floors I have ever been told about or can account for.
The carpet is the same gray-and-blue geometric tile. The fluorescent lights are steady here — steadier than they have been on any floor below this one. The air smells like the building always smells, that recycled-air lobby smell, except slightly warmer. Slightly closer.
I can hear, from somewhere further into the floor — past the workstations, past the break room whose door is propped open with a chair — a sound that I initially mistook for a printer cycling through a job. It is not a printer. It is rhythmic in the way the flickering light was rhythmic — almost, but not quite. It is aware, I think, of the direction I came from. I think it has been aware of me for several floors.
The drill accountability sheet says I have cleared Floors 4, 5, 5, 6, 5, 8, 11, and now this one. I have written the number down in the margin. I have drawn a box around it. I have decided not to radio down.
I am going to stay where the lights are steady. I am going to keep writing. The sound from the back of the floor has not gotten louder. I am choosing to find this encouraging.
