The Third — Summary

The tape measure has a bent hook and reads three-sixteenths long, and Cory Aalbers stopped correcting for it two years ago because her hands correct for it.

The Bellamy is nine floors on Phillips in Sioux Falls, put up in 1971 for a bank, rebuilt inside in 1998 for card processing, empty since. It is not neglected. It is metered and modeled and reports its own temperature and humidity and the state of every riser to a system that has never been inside it. Nine floors of nothing, fully instrumented, is a normal condition for a building in this city. Duane Prill pays her two hundred and forty dollars a month to run the risers and photograph the stain on six. What Cory wants is the ninth floor.

The original drawings exist and are two clicks away, and any system she asks will give her a live load rating for the long room in a fraction of a second and be more accurate than what she is about to do. It will also decline to sign it, because nobody surveyed the 1998 rebuild, and it says so plainly, in the same words, every time. So she brings up six bags of sand, stacks them at midspan, pulls a mason’s line, and reads the gap before and after. She guesses low and chalks 84 on the door.

The number is not a permit. It is a promise about a floor.

The rule is that a floor is one night in one building, made once, in the room, and nothing recorded. Outside the room everything is: Phillips Avenue captured from four directions, occupancy sensing on the empty floors of the Kirby across the street, everyone arriving from somewhere that logged them leaving. In between there are about four hours that nothing holds. There is no technical way to do this and Cory has never pretended there is. There is a bin inside the stairwell door, and everyone puts everything in it, and everyone can see who did not.

At two she witnesses Ivo Bardhi strike his own line from the third book with a ruler, because a ruler is required, ninety seconds, nobody speaking. He recorded a floor in June from the sightline she papered that morning. He did not lose a night. He lost three lines, and the third is in Fargo.

At eight forty she is on the landing with a clicker, holding the door open six inches with her boot, count at seventy-eight, outside it.

At half past midnight she wipes the chalk off with the heel of her hand and the door at eye level is a gray fog of every number she has ever written there. Thursday is the Kirby, where the joists are worse and the number will be smaller.