The 17th Floor

3:30 p.m. Downtown
The street is chilly, and occasionally a bluster of pedestrians come by and pass. I look at the Heyburn building. A call back to the illustrious days of art-deco and neo-modernism. Now, it's just a shell, decaying, dimly lit. I enter the lobby, pushing past the smudged glass of the rotating doors. It's at once inviting and diminishing, like an old dog that you've known for years but is on its last legs. The foyer is brief: a dry wall fountain, a deserted cafe, a small convenience store.
I've been to this building many times, yet it's still interesting each time I come back. I move up and left, past an old man that keeps watch over the cameras. He gives me a nod and I catch a knowing twinkle in his eye. On the lefternmost part of the lobby are the elevators. There's five of them. One doesn't work and is forever out of order, another is for the service crew, and then there are three for everyone else. I always take the second one from the right. An ancient computer monitor, installed flush in an indent in the wall in between the elevators, runs a custom program that displays small squares moving up and down, numbers lining the side. It takes me a moment to realize the CRT display is showing the elevators move about. I press the up button, and the elevator door pings. It crawls open, and I step inside.
The woven metal texture of the ceiling and faded red of the bronze trimmed walls feels very much like the rest of the building: aged, proud, fading. There are two sets of buttons, oddly, 17 floors on each, each set on either side of the motorized doors. I press 13. I think, instead of fully renovating the elevator they simply installed a new set of buttons to keep up with the standard. The light above the doors moves from left to right, illuminating the numerical icons, tracking my ascent. The elevator moves quickly for such an ancient contraption, and I reach the thirteenth floor in under 30 seconds. The doors open.
The thirteenth floor follows the structure of the rest of them, where it's a horizontal hallway that hosts the elevators, and then, moving down, the hallway turns left and stretches down, lined with old wooden doors and their faded plaques, if they're still there, label each office. Each floor has a very distinct yet similar atmosphere; one floor may feel like a seventies hospital corridor, another an old hotel, yet another floor feeling like a faded office. It's as if each floor is an alternate version of itself, all quite alike yet subtly different.
I walk down the hall, passing the elevators, I turn left, and watch the beige CCTV camera watch me. After a moment of mutual exchange I continue down the dimly lit hallway. Each door is identical, lacquered wood, with a dusty white shade over the wired glass. I pass a church. I, surprised, stop walking and double back. 'Louisville Christian Church' the plaque reads; mass times are Saturdays, 10:30 a.m. Now why would they have a church, high up in a desolate office building, a service, in the least likely of places? Most of the other businesses are either not open or simply empty. Each floor feels so lonely and quiet that it's odd to think that this building was once the economic center of the city. Times have changed.
I decide today I'll be heading to the top floor. The seventeenth, the topmost floor. I've never been.
When the doors open to the top floor, I'm greeted with a smell of old dust, undisturbed dust. It's quiet, silent in a faraway sense. The hall is doorless save for the staircase on the left (which I'd found to be unusually cramped and poorly lit for a building of such size, on another trip). I walk down the hall, and stop by the directory, a brown corrugated board and plastic lettering; standard affair on every floor. This time, only one business is listed: Louisville Chemical. This strikes me as odd. Chemicals? Seated next to the barebones directory is a large set of locked doors, though they're lacquered and bronzed too, like the rest of the doors in the building. The classic four color diamond on the left door indicates the chemicals within. A very large CCTV camera, watches over this corner of silence.
What could they possibly be storing up here? At the top of an old office building? I'm not sure.
I decide that it's time to go back. I've gotten what I wanted. I press the down arrow. The elevator seems to move slower, clicking through each level. I exit into the lobby, and the man watching the cameras looks at me and smiles with his eyes, again, the exact same way he has the first time and every time I pass through. I give him a slight nod. I decide to take a look at the convenience store on the side. I push open the glass door, and a thirty-something man pays no attention from behind the counter. The prices are as expected: a little too high to be considered a good deal but low enough to still be easily purchased. These sorts of places live on the edge of things, they exist on impulse and happenchance, thrown to the wayside not because they're unwanted but because they're needed there. I find it a little odd for such a grandiose, though faded, thing like the Heyburn to be hosting a little convenience store. But it makes sense. The two have both been cast as a shell, to mellow out and fade with the years. I leave without buying anything, and the sun I a bit lower. My watch reads 3:52. Time to head back. So much can happen in so little, and nobody thinks about it. I button the top button of my light jacket, the fall breeze nipping at my outline, my shadow cast across the cement.