Fifth Floor

She noticed a new button on the elevator panel: fifth floor. Definitely new, because her suite was on the fourth floor, and up until that morning the fourth had been the top.

At that moment, the idea of going down seemed like death and the idea of going up seemed like life. Until then, “life” took place almost exclusively on the fourth floor, which now felt like an anteroom. But to what? Departures? That was still the point, wasn’t it, to leave someday? Or maybe not. Maybe the point was not to leave, exactly, but to be able to stay, indefinitely, with the option to leave at any time.

“Can we…go up?” she asked the attendant, a very young, somewhat hesitant-acting woman who for some reason had been accompanying her all morning, ever since she woke up.

Her brother had been right, the service at this hotel was truly exceptional. But sometimes she found it a bit much.

“You don’t want breakfast?” the attendant asked her. “The dining room will be closing in half an hour.”

“It can wait,” she said. “I want to go up.”

The attendant smiled demurely and pressed the button.

Now that’s class, she found herself thinking, not in those words exactly, but close enough. Not having to push the elevator button yourself.

*

The door opened to a small, covered landing on the roof. She had the momentary impression of stepping out onto or into the sky. On an occasional table against a terra cotta-colored stucco wall next to the elevator sat a pitcher of spa water and a stack of glasses with bubbles entombed in thick, clear plastic.

“I’d like…a glass,” she said to the attendant as she walked out onto the rooftop’s smooth, warm hot-mopped surface. A few lounge chairs and a table or two beneath broad shade umbrellas accentuated the expanse.

“Where is the……?”

“Where is the what, Miss Jean?”

“The polo. The plo. The pool. Where is…the pool?”

“Sorry, miss, there is no pool up here.”

She was no longer paying attention. She couldn’t help but marvel how this planet was made mostly of sky. The bluest. The blest and the blu/est. The tru/est. Last time she checked, the sky had been a dirty gold, a coin tarnished from being handled too often.

She walked to the roof deck’s parapet. From here you could see forever. Or close enough. For what passes for forever. In one direction, a hot hatband of light showed what must be the ocean. In another direction, what is called “the opposite direction,” the tall forms of mountains, purple black, tried to muscle each other aside. In another direction, low hills gradually rose until the sky pushed them back into place. In yet another direction, mountains rose again, lower but also closer. Close enough, she was certain, to watch a bird fly from here to there without losing sight of it.

Maybe more directions remained to consider but the roof was square, so it imposed the idea of four. It seemed unfair, that a roof could do that. She scowled.

Beside her, the attendant was still holding her water glass. “Miss, would you like to sit?”

“A tool. A toe. A tow/el,” she replied.

“A towel?” the attendant asked.

These people, she thought. Too much, sometimes.

“For that,” she said, pointing to the nearest lounge chair.

“Oh, to spread on the chair.”

The attendant spoke into her walkie-talkie. A towel was on its way.

“And not…a back…a tab…a bath towel,” she specified. “A tall towel. Tall. A beach wrap.”

“We’ll see what we can do, miss.”

After the frustration of trying to make it clear that she wanted two slices of cucumber from the spa water to shield her eyes from the sun, she finally let the attendant steady her as she lowered herself onto the lounge chair.

In the red, womblike world of lid-light, her thoughts became clear to her, clearer than they had been in a long time. Maybe ever.

“Live in the light,” she remembered someone telling her once. Who? When? Not worth the trouble to fathom. Not when the free flow of thought could caress one like light.

It is possible to think without words, she realized. This thought felt so delicious she was certain she moaned. True, the thinking was different. Slower, less directional. But in some ways better. Without words, you couldn’t construct narratives. You could avoid the trap of telling yourself, and retelling yourself, the story of your life. Whether it was a sad story or a happy story was no longer your concern. Does a cloud tell the story of its transit across the sky? No, and we are a lot closer to clouds than we think, she thought, more or less, in her wordless state. And if I ever forget, she thought, I will ask the attendant to bring me back up here, so the sky itself can remind me.