The building, discreet. Its windows, cracked and greasy from years of neglect. Its previous identity, a shell for machinery. It isn’t alone; the city block is shaped by a geometry of defunct factories on the precipice of implosion, or…repurposed to house art.

The building’s acres of real estate will soon be one exhibition piled on top of another. For now, only the 6th floor and 4th floors have been successfully transformed into climate-controlled gallery spaces. The remaining floors, still in the last phases of construction, are open for inquiry.

A buzzer rings. Visitors. L- lobby. The elevator operator guides the industrial-sized cab into place, knowing the freight doors won’t budge unless the cab floor is level with the building floor. She pulls the cord hard. The elevator panels yawn open, one up and one down, revealing visitor bellies, followed by thighs and chests, then heads and toes. They pile in. A spectrum of artists, collectors, gallerists and passers-by have made the trek across town guided by word-of-mouth maps and social media prods.

Conversations string together between floors.

“Shouldn’t we start at the top, on 6? With the paintings, Sam’s show?”

“What about the 4th floor? The video thing, At Full Heart. Is it still closed or what?”

Empty, the 4th floor of the six-story building has been off limits since the exhibit was installed. Four live-stream surveillance cameras, located at the ceiling corners, are directed into the open space providing views of the floor as the sun rises and sets through windows spanning its east and west walls. An increasingly broad online audience pours in from all corners of the world, looking at and listening to the cavernous interior of the anonymous artist’s exhibit known as At Full Heart.

The elevator operator opens the doors on 2. Commercial space available. Warned of wet paint, the visitors exit the elevator cab walking gingerly atop brown paper walkways, snapping pictures and imagining its future.

They traipse back to the waiting elevator. The doors close and they rise slowly past 4.

“I’m a fan! Millionth follower—seriously.”

“Of what?”

“The 4th floor. You know, the one you can’t get into. I think it’s beautiful. Have you seen it at sunset? Marco streamed it on our first date. At first, I thought the columns were sculptures and even the shadows looked so…solid, we just watched the space disappearing bit by bit until the screen went black. Then, yeah, our first kiss, hashtag @FullHeart.”

The elevator operator pulls to a stop on 5, giving the visitors time to see another available floor. One group discusses square-footage. A young couple races across the space crash/laughing into the far wall. Quietly watching them, her hands pressed deep into her pockets, the elevator operator mines her memory of the building’s sub-basements, details her fantasy of a shaft penetrating through layers of dirt/rock—crust; an elevator that can cut through time zones, earth’s mantle, its hot metal core, then flip-out somewhere opposite to where she is now. Where is she?

On 6, the visitors spill out of the elevator and into the Sam Gilliam exhibit where they disappear into folds of his iconic Drape Paintings. The artist’s explosions of color escape, replacing vacant space with cosmic gasses. After a few orbits, they blow back into the waiting elevator cab.

“I didn’t expect it to be so physical.”

“Are you talking about the paintings? Did you notice the cables?”

One of the visitors turns to the elevator operator.

“Hey really, what would it take? To get into the 4th floor? Don’t tell me you haven’t been in?”

Not answering, she holds her breath as they glide back down to the lobby.

“Pop the bubble, I dare you.”

Was that for her? She keeps the taunt in her pocket. End of the day. The visitors stream out, their chatter thinning. Finally, after eight vertical hours, the building is empty.

Hours spent in the dimly lit elevator skew her senses, her vision blurs, sounds echo. She shakes it off and starts the process of closing the building, top down, 6th floor then the 5th. Keys jangling, she locks one door after another. She skips the 4th floor (already locked/always locked) locks 3, 2 and finally lands the elevator—L.

What’s she waiting for? 

The elevator operator had signed a contract; promised not to, would be picked up by surveillance cameras if she tried. Still. It’s not like they’ve got infrareds, not that she would show-up on screen as more than a bunch of blurry grey pixels, no one really sees her anyway, do they?

“What am I waiting for?”

She backs into the elevator cab and directs its passage upward. The key to the heavy steel door on the 4th floor is for Emergency Situations Only. It fits easily into the slot. She opens the door, slides into the forbidden space, fingertips leading the way. The sun had set without her noticing. There is nothing to bump into but winter dark. Her first steps, confident on the solid concrete, soon slow to a hesitant shuffle.

By the time she reaches the center of the space, she’s groping for the ground. The cool of the floor, smooth relief. She lies prone, arms reaching out, slows her breath, buoys her body, a needle at the crosshairs of the building’s compass. North, East, South, West.

All over the world, messages flash across screens.

“Did you see that?”  “¿Viste eso.” “هل رأيت ذلك؟”  “What the….” “An bhfaca tú é sin?”

She swallows, listens to her ears pop, holds her breath. Thirty seconds, a minute. More. She gasps, Loud exhale. Exhale that fills the room. Empties her body. The live-stream video cameras positioned in each corner of the 4th floor gallery pick her up— fuzzy. She feels herself reduced to digital data. The ring of keys falls out of her pocket. Her body is segmented, compressed, encoded, reconstructed, decoded, decompressed, and interpreted.

Her next inhale laps-up the dark, consuming a million online gazes. She bounces off satellites, shifts then flips. She enters bedrooms, living rooms and offices all over the planet, blasts through phones, laptops and desktops on every continent. The earth rotates. The other side of the world shifts. She keeps moving.

Screens are scrutinized. Volumes turned up. Viewers stream comments, compare blurry blips. Followers multiply. @Full ❤ grows. Collectively waiting for

a view.

And in measured seconds the sun’s early rays detect no trace, no breathy shadow lying on the fourth floor of the quiet building. Nothing for the million followers to see, but empty and sunrise.

---

Kirsten Mosher is a visual artist and writer. Her series Automotive Stories occasionally shows up in the Automotive sections of local newspapers. Plea$e Steal Me for 100 Plus Dollar-zz  has recently been published by Lily Poetry Review Books and her story Split-Screen is forthcoming in Exacting Clam. Twitter: @KirstenMosher