By Monday, the whole city knew about the challenge.
Nobody at Marlowe Fenn had told anyone. But Victor Lusk had told a reporter, and the reporter had told the Port Ellery Ledger, and the Ledger had told everyone. The headline ran across the top of the local section in letters a size too large.
ARCHITECT VOWS TO "FEEL" CITY HALL FLOOR Inspector: "Nobody's ever found it."
There was a photograph of Pruitt beside it, holding his level. He was not smiling. The caption said he had declined to comment, then listed the comment he had declined to make, which was "No comment."
Bryce read it at his desk with both hands over his mouth.
"This is an optics catastrophe," he said at the Monday meeting. He said it to the whole studio, standing at the head of the conference table, in his socks. He had stopped wearing shoes in the conference room. Nobody had mentioned it, and I don't think he had noticed.
"It's a newspaper," said Marisol. "Nobody reads the newspaper."
"My mother read it. She called me at six." Bryce sat down heavily. "She asked whether we were a real firm."
Marisol made a note. I think it was the word mother, filed for later.
Bryce had a plan. He had built it over the weekend, and it had a slide deck.
On presentation day, I would lead the pitch. Gus would attend, in proper shoes, as the "founding vision." Before the slides, Bryce would hand Pruitt a short, gracious letter withdrawing page four. Then we would talk about the building, and the newspaper could write about drains.
"Proper shoes," Gus repeated.
"The partners were very clear. If you take off your shoes in that chamber, it'll be the only photo anyone prints."
Bryce turned to the flat file by the elevator. "You have the loafers. It's an emergency. It's literally the emergency they were bought for."
"They were bought for a wedding."
"Then think of this as a wedding. Between us and the city."
Gus looked at him for a long time. Then he looked down at his work boots, which had acquired a few scuffs in three weeks and looked almost lived-in.
"Fine," he said.
I opened my log. Fourth fine. The first three had been strange. This one just sounded tired.
The civic center was not going well.
We had the bones: a council chamber, a public hall, a records office and a rooftop garden. But every time Gus redrew something in his boots, it got a little worse. Every time I fixed it in software, it got a little blander. By the second week, our civic center looked like a very nice airport.
"It's fine," said Bryce, scrolling through the renderings. Then he heard himself say it and winced.
I didn't log that one. It felt like kicking him.
Marisol, meanwhile, had started labeling things in the studio that did not need labels. The coffee machine now said COFFEE, and the window said WINDOW. When I asked her about it, she said it helped to be sure of something. Then she labeled the label maker.
On the last Monday night, the night before the pitch, I stayed late. I told myself it was to fix the stair core. That was a lie. I stayed because I wanted to try something, and I didn't want anybody to see me try it.
At nine-thirty, after the last intern left, I took off my shoes and socks, put them in O. PIKE, and walked onto the Floor.
The civic center was still taped out, ground level, from the elevator to the windows. In the dark, with only the river lights coming in, it looked like the chalk outline of a very large crime.
I started at the main entrance. I walked through the lobby into the public hall. I tried to do what Gus did, with my head tilted and my hands in my pockets, listening.
I heard the radiator. I heard a barge on the river. I heard my own heartbeat, which seemed embarrassed for me.
I walked the hall again. I walked the permit counter. I stood in the middle of the blue horseshoe and closed my eyes, the way I had seen him do a hundred times.
I waited for the building to say something.
The building said nothing. It was a gym floor with tape on it.
"You're out of compliance," said a voice behind me.
Gus was standing by the elevator in his work boots, holding a paper bag from the bakery downstairs. He had come back for his reading glasses.
He held up the bag. "Also croissants," he said. "They sell them half-price after nine."
I felt my face go hot. "I was just—"
"I know what you were just."
He came onto the Floor, still in his boots, and stood beside me in the council chamber. He gave me a croissant. For a while we ate in silence, inside a building that didn't exist yet.
"I can't hear anything," I said finally. "I've been out here for half an hour. Nothing."
"What were you listening for?"
"I don't know. Whatever you hear."
He nodded slowly, like I'd confirmed a measurement.
"My father laid floors," he said. "Forty-one years, oak mostly, some pine. He was on his knees every working day of his life."
Gus brushed crumbs off his sweater. "He used to say nobody ever looks at a floor. But everybody stands on one."
I had never heard Gus talk about his family. I had not, I realized, ever imagined him having one. I had sort of assumed he had been installed.
"When I got my first site to supervise, I was twenty-four. A little library in a town you've never heard of.
"My father came to see it. He walked in, took one look, and took his shoes off." Gus smiled. "He said, a floor will tell you everything, if you'll shut up long enough."
"Was he right?"
"There was a dip by the circulation desk. Three-eighths of an inch, and nobody could see it.
"Every librarian who worked there for the next thirty years would have had a sore back." He shrugged. "So I took my shoes off too. I never really put them back on."
We stood there a while longer.
"It isn't about the feet, Owen," he said. "People always think it is. It's about attention. Shoes just make it very easy to stop paying it."
"So I should keep trying?"
"You should stop trying so hard. You're not listening for a building. You're listening for me."
He pointed down the public hall. "Walk it like you're the person who has to use it. Someone with a parking ticket. Someone who's angry and has to wait."
So I did. I walked it as a man with a parking ticket, trudging, resentful, patting my pockets for a pen I didn't have.
Somewhere near the permit counter, I felt something. Not in the floor. In me. A small, tired thought, the kind you have in a line at the DMV: why is this so far?
I stopped. I looked back at Gus.
"Write it down," he said.
I wrote it down. It was the first thing the Floor had ever told me, and I wasn't even sure it had. But I wrote it down.
Presentation day.
I got to the studio at six-thirty, two hours early, after maybe four hours of sleep. I wanted to print the boards one more time and practice my opening in an empty room. I came up in the freight elevator, which groaned its usual opinions. I put my shoes on the bench and then remembered the memo and put them back on.
Marisol was already there. She was standing by the flat file with a label maker in her hand. She was not labeling anything. She was just holding it, the way people hold a phone when they've received bad news.
The bottom drawer was open.
"Marisol?" I said.
She didn't turn around. "I came in to dust them," she said. "For today. So they'd look nice."
I came closer and looked into the drawer. There was the faint rectangle in the dust where they had sat for years. There was the label, still perfectly straight: EMERGENCY LOAFERS — DO NOT DISTURB.
For the first time since 2009, the drawer was empty.
Up next: The East Rail
Continue to Part 5 →