An overpriced cocktail on the top floor of a downtown hotel sounded just right the other night, but the place wasn't there. The hotel hadn't gone missing—there it sat, that inevitable concrete block at Sixth Avenue and Madison Street with Renaissance in the name and nothing remotely renaissance about it. For those coming in out of the wretched, rainy dark, though, the lobby was cheering; it smelled encouragingly like hot apple cider. The elevator to the 28th floor did that sort of half-sickening, half-anticipatory thing to the stomach that happens when you think about someone you really like.

At the top, something was amiss. The restaurant and bar that was supposed to be there was called Ristorante Pellini, but the air smelled like chlorine instead of Italian food. Instead of the promising music of forks striking china, stemware ringing against stemware, the only sound was a strange, unending noise of machinery. The noise proved to be the grinding of treadmills; at the end of a hallway, two men in workout togs ran determinedly to nowhere, oblivious to the presence of observers watching through a glass door. The smell was the pool, somewhere beyond the treadmills. It's rumored to have a spectacular view. (The flooring of this mini-gymnasium in the sky is said to be made of the surplus Brazilian cherrywood from Bill Gates's deck—so preposterous, it must be true.) Down another hall, the placard for another door promised "VISIONS"—the hotel sweat lodge? A Christian Science reading room? An optometrist's office? This door had no window, and it was locked.

Past a wall featuring an illuminated shadow box containing nothing, down another hallway full of its own twilight, the abandoned Ristorante Pellini waited. Illumination was provided by the randomly lit windows of the surrounding office towers, a binary code seeming full of portent but impossible to crack. Turning a bank of light switches on and off had no effect. Between two buildings, the Space Needle glowed in the distance.

The tables still wore cloths, looking hopeful and expectant in the dim; the bar, dais-like at the center of the room, was still stocked with glassware but no liquor. The refrigerators were empty, and the soda fountain bar gun emitted only a halfhearted stream. Nearby, a few terrible paintings of calla lilies hung in deserved obscurity. Another hallway, too dark and scary to go far down, had empty cupboards, a map of California, and a blank whiteboard.

Back at the elevators, a security guard debarked and headed toward the deserted space. Perhaps he'd just been watching ghostly figures moving around Ristorante Pellini on a closed-circuit monitor in a small, windowless room 28 floors below. The descent was uneventful. Back in the lobby, another hotel employee helpfully pointed out the hot apple cider available in a silver urn. Ristorante Pellini, it emerged, had closed forever a month before. recommended

bethany@thestranger.com