Eleven Floors

I have worked night security at the Pemberton Hotel for fourteen months, and in that time exactly nothing has happened, and I want to be clear that I considered that a good thing. A night guard who has stories is a night guard who isn't doing the job. The job is to be bored. The job is for the building to be exactly as boring at six in the morning as it was at ten the night before. The Pemberton has been shut for renovation for two years. It is a grand old place, eleven floors, the kind of hotel that had a doorman once and a ballroom and brass everything. The developers bought it, gutted the lower floors, ran out of money, and now it sits in that frozen state that half-renovated buildings sit in — plastic sheeting, bare wiring, the lobby a maze of scaffold. My job is to walk it. Every two hours, top to bottom, all eleven floors, punch the little checkpoint stations with my key fob so the company knows I really walked it, and then sit in the lobby and not fall asleep. The lower floors are stripped. Floors one through eight are concrete and dust and the developers' abandoned ambition. But floors nine, ten, and eleven were never touched. They ran out of money before they got up there. So those three floors are still hotel — carpet, wallpaper, room numbers on the doors, the whole thing just sealed up and waiting, like a layer cake where the bottom got eaten and the top is still iced. I'll tell you the thing about the eleventh floor, and then I'll tell you what's been happening, and you can decide for yourself, because I genuinely have not decided for myself yet. The eleventh floor still has its room service trolleys. Half a dozen of them, the tall ones with the white cloths and the warming domes, parked along the corridor where the staff left them the day the hotel closed. Two years ago. And on my walk-throughs, those trolleys move. Not while I'm watching. I want to be honest about exactly what I have and haven't seen, because if I exaggerate this you'll stop trusting me and trust is the only thing I've got. I have never seen a trolley move. What happens is that I walk the eleventh-floor corridor at, say, midnight, and a trolley is parked outside room 1114. And I walk it again at two, and the same trolley is outside 1109. A little further down. Always toward the same end of the corridor. Always toward room 1108. For months I told myself the floor was on a slope, or there was a draft, or the building settling, all the things you tell yourself. A trolley on wheels, a long corridor, two years of small movements. It almost works as an explanation. It almost works right up until three nights ago. Three nights ago I came up to the eleventh floor on my two a.m. walk and there was a trolley parked directly outside room 1108, at the very end of the corridor, pushed right up against the door. And on the trolley, under the warming dome — I lifted it, I don't know why I lifted it — there was a plate of food. Hot food. Steam on the underside of the dome. A covered plate of hot food, in a hotel that has had no kitchen, no power to the kitchen, and no staff, for two years. I put the dome back down. I did not punch the eleventh-floor checkpoint that night and I told the company the fob was faulty. Last night the trolley was outside 1108 again with a fresh plate, and the old plate was gone, and the door of room 1108 — which I have walked past two hundred times, which has always been shut — the door of room 1108 was open about two inches, and there was no light behind it, and from inside, very quietly, I heard the sound of cutlery on a plate. Somebody is staying in room 1108 of the Pemberton Hotel. Somebody has been staying there, I think, for a long time, longer than two years, longer than the renovation, maybe longer than me. And somebody, or something, on that eleventh floor still knows their job, still pushes the trolley down the corridor every night, still brings the hot plate to the door — and I have started to understand that the reason nothing ever happened in my fourteen months at the Pemberton is that the building already had a night staff, and they were doing their job, exactly as quietly and exactly as faithfully as I was trying to do mine. And tonight I have to walk the eleventh floor again at midnight. And I keep thinking about how a hotel always, always has a room for one more guest.