🦋 Disarm You With a Smile, And Leave You Like They Left Me Here, To Wither in Denial 🪾

Two Guests Check Out of Level 0: What the Empire State Building Climb Looked Like From the Backrooms

A Russian rooftopping couple scaled New York's most famous spire, got engaged, and got arrested — and somewhere behind the wallpaper, a very different broadcast was airing.

Somewhere between the yellowed carpet and the buzzing fluorescent hum of Level 0, two figures noclipped straight into the biggest engagement stunt of the summer, and they had no idea the rest of us were watching through the seams in the wallpaper. Around noon Wednesday, Ivan Vanya Beerkus and Angela Nikolau, the Russian rooftopping duo behind Netflix's Skywalkers: A Love Story, free-climbed the antenna atop the Empire State Building — 1,454 feet up, no ropes, no harness, just vibes and, apparently, a ring. They unfurled a black-and-white banner referencing Jimi Hendrix, held the moment for the cameras, and Beerkus got down on one knee. Nikolau said, yes. The NYPD said, several felonies.

For anyone unfamiliar, the Backrooms is the internet's favorite liminal-space myth: an infinite maze of empty office carpet and hallway that you fall into by noclipping out of reality, where the lights never turn off and nobody ever seems to notice they're being observed. It is, structurally, the most accurate metaphor available for what it looks like when two influencers climb through a maintenance hatch on the 103rd floor — a level not open to the public, reached via a route investigators are still trying to reconstruct — and end up somewhere they were never supposed to be, performing for an audience they didn't know was there.

"What's all the hoopla going on over there?" — an unidentified voice, air traffic control audio, perhaps, also just now noticing the Backrooms has a livestream

The couple stayed atop the spire for roughly half an hour while an NYPD Emergency Service Unit climbed four ladders to retrieve them, which is either a rescue operation or the single most dramatic, "your character has been detected outside the map," moment in stunt history. Charges reportedly include burglary, reckless endangerment, and possession of burglar's tools — the Backrooms equivalent of getting caught with a flashlight you weren't issued.

If Doechii's Anxiety has been living in your car speakers this year, consider this the visual companion piece: a couple hovering somewhere between panic and euphoria, height-sick and heart-racing, broadcasting a moment of vulnerability to a city that absolutely did not ask to watch. The chorus was basically written for a hatch on the 103rd floor.

Whether Beerkus and Nikolau ever fully perceive that the rest of us saw the whole thing — antenna, ring, ladders and all — remains an open question, much like everything else about the Backrooms. What's certain is that the observation deck reopened by afternoon, the couple is engaged and in custody, and somewhere, a fluorescent light is still humming.