The Thirteenth Floor

Step into the elevator of an older tall building and look at the panel, and you may notice something that ought to be strange and somehow isn’t: the numbers go up to twelve, and then to fourteen. There is no thirteen. The button is simply not there — twelve, then fourteen, as though the number had been quietly deleted from the count. And of course there is a thirteenth floor; the building did not skip a storey; the floor labelled fourteen is the thirteenth floor up from the ground, wearing a false number so that no one has to say the true one. A whole floor of offices or apartments, full of people living and working, all of them on the thirteenth floor, all of them agreeing to call it the fourteenth, because somewhere in the planning of the building someone decided — correctly, commercially — that people would rather not live on a floor with that number, and would pay less to, and might not rent at all.

I find this genuinely one of the most remarkable facts about modern life, and the remarkable part is not the superstition itself but the scale and seriousness of our accommodation of it. This is not a folk belief muttered by an old woman in a shawl. This is builders, architects, developers, hotel chains, and elevator manufacturers — hard-headed commercial people, the least superstitious operators in the economy, men who would never admit to believing anything they couldn’t put on a spreadsheet — quietly, systematically, at real expense, designing the number thirteen out of the built world. Airlines with no row 13. Hotels with no room 13. Streets where the house numbers jump. An entire civilization of concrete and steel and finance, arranged around a number, by people who would all, to a one, deny being afraid of it.

The belief nobody holds

That is the strange shape of this superstition, and what makes it different from knocking wood or crossing fingers: almost no one will claim it. Ask the developer why the building skips thirteen and he will not say because thirteen is unlucky — he will say because buyers prefer it, deflecting the belief onto the market, onto other people, onto the anonymous mass of the superstitious who are always someone else. Ask a hundred people if they believe thirteen is unlucky and most will say no, of course not, ridiculous. And yet the floor gets renumbered, the row gets skipped, the room gets relabeled, because when it comes to actually choosing — actually booking the room, actually buying the flat, actually sitting in the seat — a surprising number of those same people feel a small reluctance they would never defend out loud, and act on it, and the market reads the aggregate of all those unadmitted reluctances and builds accordingly. The belief exists nowhere and operates everywhere. No single person holds it, and the whole system obeys it. It is a superstition that has been socialized, distributed so thin across so many people that no one has to own a whole one, and yet it moves steel.

And this, I think, is the truest thing the thirteenth floor has to teach, which is how belief actually lives in a supposedly rational age: not as conviction, which we have mostly abandoned, but as reluctance, as the small hedge, as the thing we won’t quite do even though we don’t believe we shouldn’t. We have talked ourselves out of the beliefs and kept the behaviours. We do not think thirteen is unlucky. We just would slightly rather not, and the slightly-rather-not, multiplied across millions, is indistinguishable in its effects from a society that fervently believed. The old fear did not disappear when we stopped believing in it. It went underground, into the reluctance, where it doesn’t have to be defended because it never has to be stated.

What the missing number marks

There is a gothic reading of the thirteenth floor, and it is not about the number at all — the choice of thirteen is more or less an accident of old associations, and could as easily have been some other number in some other culture, and is. The gothic reading is about the gap itself: that we build, into our most solid and rational structures, a deliberate absence, a named void, a floor that is there and is called not-there. The elevator panel that reads twelve, fourteen is a small monument to the fact that even now, even in the age of steel and spreadsheets, we cannot quite bring ourselves to count straight through — that we leave a gap for the old fear to live in, a hole in the numbering where the unlucky thing can be safely stored by not being named. It is the same instinct as not saying a wish aloud, as touching wood, as not tempting fate: the sense that to name the dangerous thing is to summon it, and that the safest handling of what we fear is to leave a careful blank where it would go.

I take a strange comfort in the thirteenth floor, honestly, more than unease. Because it is proof, hidden in plain sight in every tall building, that the disenchantment we congratulate ourselves on is not nearly as complete as we pretend — that under the glass and the steel and the confident modern surface, the old reluctances are still there, still shaping the world, still quietly obeyed by people who would swear they’d left all that behind. We are not the rational creatures we claim. We are the creatures who built skyscrapers and then declined to number one of the floors, and rode the elevators up past the gap without comment, all of us, every day, keeping the old blank space open out of a fear not one of us will admit to feeling — which is, when you think about it, almost exactly what our ancestors were doing when they left an offering at a threshold, or refused to speak a name after dark. The shawl is gone. The gesture remains. Twelve, and then fourteen, all the way up.