I worked on the 358th floor, for an internet company that worked on improving translation software. A colleague had invited me to lunch at a new Japanese restaurant on another floor, and I accepted. It had been a long morning of deciphering computer code and Azerbaijani dialects. The elevator had recently incorporated some new mechanism that allowed it to rise and fall at great speed, without making the passenger feel nausea. In fact, I could not tell if we went up or down, I just recall it taking longer than usual.
The only thing I remember about the restaurant is that the waiter wasn’t Japanese, and that somehow detracted from the quality of the food. My colleague talked to me in his quirky accent from who-knows-where, about how he felt he understood his dog better than his wife. (I forget whether he meant this literally.) Halfway through I asked to be excused and went to the bathroom; inside I took an aspirin and leaned over the sink for a few seconds. I suddenly heard a distant rumbling from somewhere above or below me. The next thing I knew the bathroom was rocking back and forth, throwing me around like a rag doll. I hit my head against the sink counter, and that was that.
When I woke up, the restaurant was empty, as was the entire floor. My head was throbbing but I remembered there was a special elevator in case of earthquakes, and I ran to it. The doors refused to open. I spent a while just pressing the button and waiting. Out the window I could see the vast blue sky. I got close and opened it; I felt dizzy just looking down. I looked up and saw blue sky with my building running up it like an endless road that lead to a uncertain distant point obscured by far off clouds. I looked down again, and saw the same thing. My head began to spin.
A funny thing happened when I got to the exit that led to the stairwell: the words that should have said “EXIT” were unrecognizable to me. There were symbols on the large illuminated green sign above the door, but they were symbols I had never seen; they weren’t Greek, or Korean, or Hebrew, but what looked like a strange mix between the three, with Arabic-like accent marks. Upon entering the stairwell, I found myself with the same problem when reading the floor numbers; I could see the figures but my brain couldn’t correlate any significance them. I was still dizzy from the case of vertigo I suffered at the window, and I couldn’t figure out if the arrows under the symbols that should have been numbers pointed up or down.
I chose the stairs that appeared to go downward, but began to second-guess myself when I realized how slow and labored my steps were after a while. With each step, it felt like I was climbing upwards instead of going downwards. After several floors, and the continued feeling of working against gravity instead of with it, I stopped. I began to panic. Each floor was deserted. The numbers on the wall were still meaningless to me, and now I wasn’t sure if I was heading to the lobby or to the roof. Out of desperation, I turned around. At first, I felt better, I felt like I had just gotten confused at first and that now I was on the right track. The first couple of floors were easy. Then I began to lose my breath again, and my legs started burning.
I sat down against wall, facing both stairwells: the one that went up, and the one that went down. My head was still spinning; I took out some coins out of my pocket and threw them at the stairs to see where they would fall. They quickly disappeared down one of the stairwells, but with the spinning I couldn’t decide which one; and the sound of them falling just echoed up and down the entire innumerably floored building. I held my face in my hands. I felt small and pathetic, like a helpless child.
* * *
I don’t how long it’s been since I sat staring at those stairwells. I know I’ve visited around thirty to forty different floors. There’s enough canned food in this place to last me a lifetime, maybe longer. The building will rock back and forth every so often, but it’s a gentle swing like that of a large ship, and it just makes me a little sleepy. As you might have guessed, no one has returned, and my days are torturously lonely. There is no electricity (but strangely there’s still running water) and I am still not able to read. I spend my days roaming the different floors and admiring the architectural design, the décor, the art on the walls, and the different foods. I still get the spins when I look out the window, and I still can’t tell which way is up and which way is down.
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