The Lift Button for a Floor That Wasn't Numbered

Multi-storey car parks are purgatories with a payment machine, and I was tired and looking forward to nothing when I got in the lift on level 2 to go up to level 3 where I'd left my car. The panel had the usual buttons: G, 1, 2, 3, 4. And, that evening, between 2 and 3, an extra one. Blank. No number, no label, just a button where no button is, slightly proud of the panel, faintly warm when I, idiot that I am, pressed it.

The lift sank a half-floor, or rose a half-floor — the motion was ambiguous, a lurch in the wrong axis — and the doors opened on a level of parked cars, dim, low-ceilinged, ordinary, except that every car was mine. Rows of them. The same make, the same colour, the same dent in the same rear door, the same faded parking permit in the same windscreen, the same clutter on the same back seat, receding into the fluorescent haze in both directions. A hundred of my car. More.

I did not step out. I stood in the lift doorway and looked at a car park full of my only car, and one of them — I want to be precise about the detail that sent me back into the lift — had its hazard lights going, slow, patient, blinking, as though I had left it running, as though one of these hundred mes was still here somewhere and had stepped away for just a moment and would be back, and I did not want to be standing there when he was.

I pressed 3. The doors closed on the ranks of my own car. The lift rose an honest half-floor and opened on level 3, on a normal level of other people's cars, and my car — one car, singular — where I had left it, hazards off, cold.

I drove home fast. I've been back to that car park since, because it's the cheap one by the station and I am not made of money, and I take the stairs now, always, even with heavy bags, even on level 4. Because I looked at the lift panel on my way out that night, once, and the blank button was gone, back to G-1-2-3-4 like it had never been there — but I don't trust it not to come back, and I don't ever again want to see a whole floor of my own car with one of them still, patiently, warmly, running.