What I Saw on the 9th Floor

I'm writing this in past tense, because I had the strangest dream recently, but it got me researching the apartment I live in. I've learned it was burned down before I moved back in, and somehow the owner aquired the money and the motivation to put it back together where it stands now. I didn't know that before I settled in my room. But there were things that didn't make sense, I guess.

My old apartment building had a bar on the 9th floor, which I used to visit almost every day till closing. There were lights on the walls and metal rods on the ceiling, and the drinks all tasted cheap -- but you get what you pay for -- and so was I. I think the place should’ve smelled like beer, because I doubt it was ever cleaned, but for the record, it smelled like the color of July and a fingertip with furniture polish. I’ll never forget about the day I first stepped inside. There was smoke from a man smoking, though I couldn’t place where he was sitting – I never tried, and anyway I like the smell of cigarettes, in a way.

And there was a man sitting alone at a round, red table with two chairs. The empty chair in front of him framed his face. His eyes were green and strange. Perfect circles, with eyelashes that mourned and hands that rested on the table like blades of grass.

One hand on top of the other, and eyes that stared down at a glass full to the brim. Silently, he looked at his drink, though I tend to believe he stared more through it then at it – I wonder what he saw down there, perhaps there was something interesting in the room below.

I didn’t say a word to him. No, not ever. I never got close to him at all, but I saw him every day that I came to that bar. He sat on that chair with a coat which was too heavy and a hat on the table. Round eyes dimming, between the heads of the other patrons. He didn’t take a single sip of his drink that first day, and when I was waiting outside the bar after closing, I don’t think I saw him leave.

The next day, he was still at the bar. Among the few other patrons staying quiet in the mid afternoon of the 9th floor, there he was, still seated in the same seat at the same table, with a glass sitting in front of him filled to the brim. I didn’t approach him that day. I felt odd even looking at him, as if I was seen in the periphery. As the talking got louder, I nearly forgot he was there, but soon it was time to leave, and everybody migrated south for the winter, a little like moths, I suppose. And there he still was, sitting in his seat. His coat wrapped around him and he looked unwell. A little like a moth himself, I suppose. A moth, sitting on the wall, for hours. Looking nowhere but feeling everything. No plan, no sense of purpose, but a dizzying sense of contended discontent. An uneasy restfulness, as it waits for eternity to come.

He looked pale as teeth, and his face was an endless hole.

Over the years I have gone to other bars. And as I have, I always expect to see him there, seated at a conspicuous red table with and an empty seat in front of him. I imagine his hands, fingers layered on fingers atop the table, like a clambering fence with a blood red nowhere behind it, overseen by his broken, round eyes. But there is nothing ever there. And I drink until I stop thinking about it.

I don’t see him at the other bars, nor in my dreams does his glass sit filled. Almost every time, once I left the bar on the 9th floor, I would forget about him immediately, moved on at once to other matters. He rarely intrudes my mind, and yet, for a terrible stretch of time, he would always be there, seated in the same seat, with a glass filled to the brim and a coat which threatened to swallow any errant bystander whole, as they just so happened to walk by.

I moved back into the apartment building a few years ago. Everything I saw looked different. Everything was put in different places, and there was no longer a bar on the 9th floor. At least, it wasn’t on the map, but to be honest, I didn’t feel the inclination to check for a few weeks after moving back in. When I eventually found the moment, there was a gym, instead. The bar was no more.

There were no longer accessible staircases in the apartment building. There were stairs, of course. If there ever was a fire, the law requires there be stairs, so passengers don’t get killed in the elevators. There were fire escapes as well, along the sides of the building, but the stairs I remembered were still around. They were rigged to a fire alarm, and not accessible otherwise, so I used the elevator whenever I needed to.

Yet, on the day I decided to check, the elevator ride to the 9th floor felt longer than I remembered it. And when I frequently searched the floor buttons to find the one I wanted to click, it seemed like there were less than I remembered before.

I was beginning to feel curious, and I suppose a little bit suspicious, so I walked to the sidewalk across from the building one day and tried to count the floors by the windows. There were only 10 floors (I remembered 11), though I noticed there was a notable gap between some of the windows. It was between the floors 8 and 9.

Tonight, I am having a very strange dream, in which the apartment truly does set fire. The elevator is not meant to be used and I rush for the stairs. I live up on the top floor, and I run for the stairs down the building. People are running in many directions, migrating, I suppose, and when I make it to the stairs, I run down. But, nobody follows me, and in fact there is no one on the stairs. The building feels warm, and my body tells me to run, so I continue down a flight of stairs. Now I stand on the landing at the 9th floor, and I don’t linger.

I continue down a flight and pause at another landing. There is a door, but there is no sign telling me I am on the 8th floor. A reinforced window, not special from the others, allows me to see the hall beyond the door is dark. A moaning shudder touches me, and the building feels warm still. But slowly I press on the door, and it is not locked.

I step into the dark floor, and I come into the knowledge that I am in the 9th floor I can remember. It is difficult to explain, but the ways the corners are bent, and the direction of the halls, pokes at an ancient nerve, and I had no doubt this was one the floor I lived on.

All the lights were gone, and the floors and walls were covered in ash. Yet I’m speaking in past tense, as I’m dreaming this now. The walls were covered in ash, and the floors were covered as well, and with soot, and there was a distinct smell in the air, punching, pungent, like the color of July and a fingertip with furniture polish. Perhaps I’ve moved past how I feel as I speak, even as I feel it now. As it happens currently. But there I am – there I was, and I turned left at the first fork. Slowly I step through the pitch-black den, until I find the spot where the old bar used to be.

The walls are broken through, and there’s tiles and burnt wood on the floor, and I realize now what it was. Why I was dreaming in the wrong tense. Because I’m standing here, now, and I guess I prefer to experience it all as something else. Something else, a dream, a memory, a nightmare. Just not the present, because in the present I’m standing here now, and there’s the bar in front of me, wood broken and splintered, burnt down to the floor. Metal tables standing, painted black with time and ash. And, in front of me, is a red table, with a glass, filled to the brim, and two chairs, one of which seats a man dressed in a heavy coat, with fingers like grass and eyes like beads, who regards the floor, and doesn’t turn eyes in my direction.