Elevator

by Travis Moore

Part 1 appears
in this issue.

conclusion

Clark didn’t know what to do to break the cycle of boredom that had taken over his life. He had a great girl and was in good health, but still he felt this way. He felt like that one train car on the track that wasn’t hauling anything — just along for the long ride as an empty container. He thought about what he could do to make his life better as the coffee was brewing, crackling, percolating down into the clear glass pot like caffeine raindrops.

He thought about how ridiculous his life had become and the petty battles he was involved in lately, like the problem with the neighbor right below him. Although he never met him, he pictured him as an old man; but, come to think of it, it could very well be a bitter old woman. He might never know. His time was being spent in the pursuit of nothing, and this made him mad.

Clark took his steaming mug out to the balcony and sat down in an old chair. He stole a few deep breaths from the cool night air and stared below into the street. He lived on the ninth floor and looking down into the traffic was always a bit surreal.

Rush hour kind of looked like a make-believe scene from this height. They all looked like toy cars. The beeping of the horns was higher pitched, and it strained to reach his window, giving the sound more of a fake feel. An accident didn’t look as serious from up here. A person being hauled off on a stretcher looked like a matchstick being put into a toy ambulance if you squinted your eyes the right way.

Clark soon noticed a family of pigeons that just lined up directly above his head on the power lines. It looked like one of them was trying to free the dead one that had been hanging there for the past month — maybe one of his relatives come back to honor the dead. The others had a whole other thing in mind and looked like they were about to drop an assault. Clark remembered the trash and marched back into the kitchen to face his nemesis.

His face was buried in his shirt. He had the coffee in one hand and the insane aroma of the trash in the other. Clark dragged the bulging bag across the living room, blessing the floor with the foul scent that seeped into every fiber of the thin brown carpet the way a rusty screw digs deep into a fresh piece of wood.

For some reason, he looked back into his apartment as if for the last time, and then closed the door behind him. The tool belt fell off the door and came crashing down, scattering blue and yellow tools everywhere. The tape measure bounced off the floor and looked to be stretching out a three-inch tongue in Clark’s direction. He stopped in the hall for a moment and could have sworn that the tools were trying to take the door off the hinges and come after him.

He pushed the down arrow for the elevator and then just waited there, using his shirt as an asbestos mask. Clark looked around at his surroundings while he waited.

The building was old. The outside was smothered in a pea-green color that inspired depression upon first glance. Inside, the walls were flaking an off-white paint and the ceiling sagged low like bloated tumors: recent water damage that had gone ignored by the owner. The water pipes had been under strain for years and had finally burst throughout the interior of the building. The owner must have tried to plug the leaks with bubble gum, because a new leak popped up in the hallway every day.

A thin sheet of what looked like a miniature golf putting green covered the hard floors. The pool had been drained for some time now. A series of streaks and lawn chairs were all that was left inside it now. A pair of faded swimming trunks that looked to be from the eighties hung next to a broken life preserver like a piece of cardboard. A forgotten pair of goggles sat at the deep end — the last witness to better times.

Each hallway carried smells of far-away lands and foreign foods. The people never talked to each other in this building though. The doors in the long hallways were always closed. When people did occasionally cross paths in the hallway or the elevator it was very tense and awkward at best. This always bothered Clark. It was like nobody came to life until they entered their own apartments, if they ever did come to life. He felt isolated in his own building. It was a very boring building after all. The people relied on the televisions to take them out of this place, and you couldn’t blame them for it.

The old elevator started to emerge from the depths. It moaned and rattled all the way to the top, all the way to the ninth floor. It sounded like a grumpy old man that should have retired years ago but was forced to keep working because he wasn’t eligible for social security yet.

Clark was always fearful in the elevator, the way a person afraid of flying squirms at sudden turbulence. He was always relieved when the old metal box touched down on the first floor. Clark stepped in with his coffee and his trash and pushed the button marked one. A brown paper bag was off to the side and rested on the floor suspiciously.

Clark did not want to see what was behind the curious bulge in the little brown bag. A series of numbers from one to nine stretched out horizontally in front of him. They were faded from all the years of being smudged by fingertips and thumbs. A dim fluorescent light hung above him. The plastic casing shielding the light was cracked. The two long tubes were exposed organs of light, dimming and failing the way the old elevator was. It was just a matter of time.

The elevator did something weird. Clark stared at the buttons and kept blinking his eyes. He couldn’t believe it. Three more numbers lit up after he pushed the one for the first floor. First, a one lit up, then a nine, then a seven and then another nine.

The elevator suddenly dropped as if its cables had just been cut with giant scissors. The long tubes of light above him shorted out. The light finally died, and Clark’s worst fear had finally come true: the old man had gotten fed up and walked off the job forever. Clark was the one who was going to die in this rusty old people mover. He would be the sacrifice that would raise the bar for the next elevator — his smashed bones would insure that regular checks were kept up on the new machine and all its inner parts.

Clark was plummeting to his demise through the interior of this rotten structure, freefalling through the middle of the building while everyone in their apartments glanced up in curiosity at the sound of the impending doom. The trash hit the ceiling and his coffee splashed into all the buttons. Smoke shot out of them. He bounced off the walls and crashed into the ceiling like a human pinball.

The elevator finally touched down but nowhere near the first floor. The border around the doors was glowing; an intense light was raging on the outside. The trash was gone and the buttons were missing the sticky coffee. The buttons were lit up with a much brighter light now, displaying: 1979.

The elevator’s interior was impressive — shiny wood floors and pearl-like buttons that filled up with tranquil amounts of white light. Cool sheets of liquid metal made up the elevator walls and you could put your hand right through them. The walls expanded if you wanted them to. Clark discovered a switch that could stretch the inside as long as a football field.

The doors opened slowly and Clark struggled to keep his mind intact. He was looking out on a strange sight. It soon became clear to him that he was witnessing his own birth. He saw the glow on his mother’s face.

The doctor and the nurses were there too. He saw himself being handed over to his mother, wrapped up like a screaming sausage in a tight blanket. It was an amazing sight and Clark couldn’t move — he remained frozen until the elevator doors came to a close.

A new set of numbers began to light up and the elevator started to rise.

The elevator moved at a rapid pace but it was a fun ride. The last two buttons changed to an eight and then a four and Clark saw himself on his first day of school in 1984. He peeked out on the scene but never once stepped out of the elevator. He saw how nervous he was on his first day and how he tried to sneak out. His first teacher and friends were all there. A small girl approached him and became his friend instantly. He couldn’t remember who she was.

Then the doors closed but the elevator did not move. Clark eventually pushed the buttons. He realized that they were waiting for him. He discovered that he could peek in on any year of his life that he wanted to. The major events of the year would play out before him for as long as he kept the doors open.

It wasn’t until he moved forward to twenty years in the future that he became seriously scared. He was a lonely old man and he was still in the same condemned building. His tools still hung from the back of the front door. His girlfriend had long since disappeared from his life, and he hadn’t died from the fall in the elevator. In fact, the fall would never take place should he decide to take it back up to the present time and step out.

This ability to move up and down through time was an experience that was never meant to be understood or explained; it just meant that he would have to get off at some point, because the elevator was starting to lose its magical qualities. The buttons were becoming faded again, stained and settling into their old ways. The walls were hardening, the rotten smell of trash was surfacing, and the broken-down moan of the old man was creeping back into the air the way a person clears their throat when they want to be heard.

Clark and his friends were waiting on the first floor for the elevator. They had just gotten out of school and came over to see one of their friends who was sick and hadn’t make it to school that day. The doors popped open and the kids froze with panic. A man walked out of the elevator and then disappeared right in front of them. Well, first he walked through Clark and then he vanished into thin air.

Clark and his friends took off running. They made it to their bikes and scattered off down the street. They were terrified and never spoke of the vanishing man from that point on.

To this day, Clark always takes the stairs and has not stepped into an elevator since.

Open Challenge 302...