Access Log: B-Stairwell

Frank does a loop every two hours. He has since 1987. He knows floor three belongs to the finance team because of the almonds and the framed half-marathons. He knows floor seventeen is the one with the broken overhead that nobody's filed a ticket for, because he has filed it himself, twice, and left it alone after that. The visitor badge on the reception desk goes back in the drawer. The door is fully closed. He checks.

The building empties fast on Fridays — a wave from the top floors down, the elevator chime going steady between 4:45 and 5:20, then nothing. By six the HVAC is the loudest thing in the tower. By ten, even that settles into something closer to breathing. Frank has worked this shift long enough that he doesn't think of the quiet as empty. He thinks of it as what the building actually sounds like when nobody's performing anything.

There's a sticky note on a desk on eleven that says "Happy Friday!" in pink marker. He's seen it three weeks running. He doesn't take it down. He doesn't know why, exactly — only that whoever wrote it meant it, and the building is better for having it than not.

The bridge is a lap steel line, slow and low, the kind of melody that doesn't resolve so much as it continues. It fits. Frank isn't someone who resolves. He continues. Two floors, log entry, nothing unusual, two more floors. The two-way is quiet all night. Someone, years ago, thanked him for his service in the lobby by the elevator and he didn't know what to do with it then and he doesn't now, only that he wrote it in the margins of the log and got on with the rounds. All clear. All clear.

The song ends with the guitar playing the main figure alone, twelve bars, Frank's voice already gone, the last note held until it disappears into the room. One light on, Floor 24. No one is waiting for it. It stays on anyway.