The Last Signature in the Visitor Book

April 30. 11:52 p.m. Night shift. Tomorrow is a holiday, so the building is completely empty: fourteen floors of dark offices and one guard at the front desk. Nobody comes in the night before a holiday, not even the cleaners. I've locked the front door and turned on the alarm. The last entry in the visitor book is from this afternoon: a delivery man who signed in at 5:50 p.m. and signed out at 6:15. The camera above the door still isn't working. Somebody is supposed to fix it next week.

12:40 a.m. Graciela called to say good night. She reminded me, again, about last week. I got up at two in the morning, walked to the kitchen and opened the fridge, and the next day I didn't remember any of it. She says I sleepwalk. I told her what I always tell her: guards don't sleepwalk at work. Guards don't sleep at work at all.

3:24 a.m. I need to write this down exactly. I woke up with my head on the desk. I don't know when I fell asleep, but the last time I looked at the clock, it was 2:58. When I opened my eyes, the visitor book was open in front of me, and there was a new line under the delivery man's name. Time in: 3:10. Floor: 14. Name: no name, just a signature. Who signs a visitor book at ten past three in the morning on a holiday? And why didn't I hear anything?

3:45 a.m. I've checked everything. The front door was still locked, exactly as I had left it. The alarm hadn't gone off. I took the elevator to the fourteenth floor with my flashlight. All the offices were locked and dark. Only one thing was wrong: the door to the stairs was open. I always close it on my rounds. If someone had come in, how did they get past me? And why would they walk down fourteen floors of stairs?

4:20 a.m. I can't stop looking at the signature. The tall first letter. The little circle instead of a dot over the i. The line that goes back under the whole name, like a bridge. I took out my pen and signed the bottom of this page to compare. I didn't have to look twice. It's my signature.

6:02 a.m. Ulises arrived for the day shift. He read the last line in the visitor book, looked at me and asked, "Busy night?" I said no. I'm not going to tell Graciela about this. Not yet. But tonight, before I leave for work, I'm going to ask her one question: when I walk in my sleep, how far do I go?