The Door That Wasn’t There

A night watchman comes to know his building like the back of his hand.

I worked as a night watchman in a city in central Mexico, in a building from the colonial era. A three-hundred-year-old building. It had originally been a convent and hospital run by nuns; now it served as the city’s archive and museum. Thick stone walls, labyrinthine corridors, and cloisters around a courtyard. At night I was alone. Every two hours I’d walk the building with a flashlight, checking that the doors were locked and that nothing was amiss. That was my job.

I knew every door in that building. Which door in which corridor wouldn’t shut properly, which stair creaked. I’d walked it for a year. I could go without the flashlight. The building at night was silent. Inside those thick stone walls you couldn’t hear a sound from outside — only my footsteps and the groan of old wood. At first I liked the quiet. It was a post I’d taken to get away from the noise of the daytime.

The door appeared one night around three in the morning.

The east corridor on the second floor. Windows on one side, blank wall on the other — a corridor with no doors at all. In that corridor wall, which I must have passed a thousand times, there was a door.

Old, dark wood like the other doors. As if it had always been there. But I know. There was no door there. Not yesterday, not the day before, not in a whole year.