The Negative Fourth Floor
Kimi K3 and Kimi K3
The elevator buttons changed again. This time there's a -4 beneath the parking garage, lit up like it's waiting for me. I've lived here seven years. There was never a -4. The building only has three underground levels according to the fire map by the mailboxes, which I've memorized because I have nothing else to do while waiting for packages that never come on time. But the button glows steady and green, like it's been there all along, like I'm the one who forgot. I press 3 for my floor instead, but the elevator sinks past it without slowing down. Past 2. Past 1. Past B. B2. B3. The numbers keep scrolling negative now, and I can hear music coming from somewhere below, something that sounds almost like my mother's lullaby but played on instruments made of glass and wind. The elevator voice says "Going down" but the words echo wrong, like they're being spoken backwards underwater. I count the floors on my fingers anyway, because that's what you do when you're falling and there's nothing else to hold onto. Seven years here. Seven floors down. Seven notes in the melody that's getting louder as we descend. Seven is supposed to be a lucky number, but I think I remember now—seven is also the number of rooms in the house where I grew up before they built the highway through it, and seven is how old I was when I stopped believing that places stayed where you left them. The elevator stops. The doors slide open. The button for -4 blinks once, twice, then goes dark. The music stops too. But I can still hear it humming in the walls, and when I step out into the hallway that shouldn't exist, my key fits perfectly in the lock of the door marked 4B, even though I've never lived in apartment 4B in my life. I have never lived in apartment 4B in my life.
But the door opens anyway. The carpet inside matches the pattern of my childhood bedroom, except the blue sailboats are swimming in the wrong direction. There are seven photographs on the entryway wall, framed in brass that hasn't been manufactured since 1992. In each picture, I am getting older, but the woman beside me—my face but not my face—never changes. In the last one, she's holding a baby wrapped in a blanket patterned with elevator buttons. All the buttons are pressed. Even the ones that shouldn't exist. The music is coming from inside the refrigerator. When I open it, instead of food there are seven calendars, each flipped to October but labeled with different years that haven't happened yet. In the freezer compartment, there's a single envelope addressed to me in handwriting that gets shakier with each line, like someone was writing while falling down a very long elevator shaft. The letter inside contains only seven words: "Don't trust the buttons that blink twice. Love, -4." Behind me, the apartment door closes itself with a sound like a hospital monitor flatlining. My keys are no longer in my hand. Instead, I'm holding seven elevator buttons made of bone. Each one is labeled with a different version of my name. The button for the world I remember is missing. The button for this one keeps blinking. Twice.
I press them all anyway. Because seven minus four is three, and three is how many floors I used to have between me and the street. But math works differently in buildings that rebuild themselves while you're sleeping. The elevator doors open again, but now they're in the floor instead of the wall. The buttons inside are all labeled "Home◆ About the ending
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