The Cobalt Floor

In the autumn of 2004, I found myself pacing the linoleum corridors of St. Jude’s Medical Center in Wichita, Kansas. My brother, Daniel, was undergoing a risky spinal fusion, and the waiting room felt like a cage. I’d stepped out for a cigarette, needing the cold air and the sting of smoke to ground me, and when I returned to the vast, echoing lobby, I decided to check on his progress in the ICU.

As I made my way toward the bank of elevators, I noticed a volunteer ahead of me. She wore the hospital’s distinctive salmon-colored jacket, and her silver hair was pinned into a neat bun. She moved with the unhurried shuffle of someone who had spent decades in this building, and I quickened my pace, hoping to catch the same elevator as her. But she reached it just as I was still a dozen yards away. The doors slid open, she stepped inside, and as I called out, ‘Hold the elevator, please,’ the doors closed with a soft, final hiss.

I pressed the call button and watched the indicator lights. The car she’d taken climbed to the third floor and stopped, then the fourth, then the fifth, and then the light flickered and vanished, as if the elevator had simply ceased to exist. I frowned, pressing the button again. A different car arrived, and I stepped in, pressing the button for the fifth floor, where the ICU was located. The doors slid shut, and the car began to rise.

But the floor indicator above the doors showed only blank darkness. No numbers. No hum. Just a muffled silence that pressed against my ears. I must have been on the elevator for only twenty seconds, but it felt like an eternity. When the doors opened, I stepped out into a corridor that was not the bright, sanitized ICU I remembered. The walls were a sickly cobalt blue, the lighting dim and flickering, and the air smelled of ozone and old copper. The volunteer stood at the end of the hall, her back to me, her hands clasped in front of her as if in prayer.

‘Excuse me,’ I called, ‘Is this the ICU?’

She didn’t turn. Instead, she raised one arm and pointed to a door on her left, labeled ‘RECOVERY.’ I walked toward her, my footsteps echoing unnaturally, and as I passed her, I saw that her face was smooth, almost mannequin-like, with no wrinkles, no expression, and her eyes were the color of milk. She did not blink.

I opened the door and found myself in a room that was both familiar and wrong. Daniel lay on a bed, but he was younger, maybe twelve years old, and his back was crisscrossed with fresh surgical scars that had not yet healed. He looked at me with a terror that I had never seen in him. ‘You’re not supposed to be here,’ he whispered. ‘She’s been waiting for you.’

I turned to leave, but the volunteer was now blocking the doorway. Her smile stretched too wide, and her voice was a dry rustle. ‘You’ve been here before,’ she said. ‘You just don’t remember. This is where the unfinished business comes. Your son, your brother, they all pass through, but you, you stay.’

I tried to scream, but no sound came. The cobalt walls began to bleed a thick, dark liquid, and the floor beneath my feet became soft and wet. The volunteer pointed to a mirror on the wall, and in it I saw myself, but old, with gray hair and a tired face, wearing the same salmon-colored jacket. I was the volunteer. I had always been the volunteer.

I woke up in the waiting room, my cigarette still burning between my fingers, the ash long gone cold. The clock on the wall showed only five minutes had passed since I’d returned. Daniel’s surgery was successful, and he was discharged a week later. But every time I pass a hospital, I stop and look for the elevator with the dead indicator light. I know that if I step inside, I’ll find the cobalt floor again. And the volunteer will be waiting, wearing my face.