Ups and Downs
A story of elevators and elements
Ella lingered as her fellow commuters stepped out onto the station platform, gathering food wrappers and discarded water bottles. On one seat, she found several crumpled pages from a legal pad. On another was a much battered USB drive. It all went into her ritual pouch.
She stopped on the platform, laid a hand on the train, thanked it for its service. One her way out of the station she stopped at Starbucks so she could pour a small libation in thanks. She needed things to go well today. How you started your day mattered.
Matteo was waiting for in the lobby, relief she didn’t need written large on his face.
“I can’t today,” she said to him.
“It’ll only take a moment. The express elevator to the forties.”
She sighed. Matteo gave her puppy dog eyes. “If you need luck today,” he said, “shouldn’t the building be comfortable?”
She followed him down into the elevator engine room, ran her fingers along its walls, whispered formulas from excel spreadsheets, muttered lines from technical manuals.
“Oil and WD40,” she told Matteo.
It took her five minutes she didn’t really have, muttering to the spirit of the drive machine, settling it back down, drawing sigils with lubricant and offering up crumbs of the blueberry muffin she’d been saving for a morning snack.
“Life saver,” Matteo told her as the elevator hummed back to life.
Up on the thirty-eighth floor, Judy’s attitude was different. “You’re late.”
“Clients won’t be here for twenty,” Ella said, heading for the conference room.
“You’re cutting it fine.”
“Discussing it will only cut it finer.”
But it wasn’t good energy to take into the cleansing. She tried to shed it as she walked there, sorting out what she could from her ritual pouch.
Inside, she burned a few of the pages she’d found on the train that morning, poured more of her Starbucks, offered up a granola bar. She adorned herself in sticky notes and danced sweatily as Muzak played tinnily from her iPhone.
It wasn’t enough. She could feel it. Something was off with the building that the disrupted elevator had only heralded. She tell Judt to postpone the meeting for another day, but it was too late. Judy was already by the elevator bank, welcoming the clients in as Ella pulled the last of the sticky notes from her forehead.
She lingered as long as she could, crumbled Doritos and the other superior snacks beneath the conference table, only leaving as the clients entered. They wrinkled their noses at the smell of burned paper while Judy shot her dark looks.
She didn’t like it, wouldn’t leave it alone. She went hunting for the source of the disturbance as the meeting went on. She went to the stairwell, to the stairs the elevators had not wanted to visit. That was her only clue. She scattered loose staples and paperclips as ascended, watching how they fell.
They veered away from the door into forty-third floor. She paused, searched through her backpack, sorting through baseball caps with various corporate logos, settled on Cisco Security, ventured in.
The floor was quiet, untenanted, cubicles arrayed like the skeleton of some long dead beast, chairs gathered in corners like startled herds covered in plastic sheets. She walked softly, touched walls and support columns.
The conference room near the back drew her. It wasn’t one of the larger ones. There were no windows, no panoramic views. Inside, the atmosphere was immediately stifling, bad energy radiating out through water pipes and electrical cabling. She stepped out quickly, called down to Matteo.
“Did anyone use the forty-third floor recently?”
A pause. “Looks like a consulting firm rented out some space yesterday. Doing some work for OmniPharm up on the fifty-second.”
“Layoffs?”
“Yeah, they told me exactly what they were using it for.” Derision dripped.
But she’d known it as soon as she’d stepped inside that small conference room. A corporate bloodbath. Paychecks torn out of clutching hands. Accusations and recriminations. People hadn’t seen this coming, hadn’t deserved this.
She went back to the conference room, firewalled her spirit with protective icons daubed with whiteout, taped an old cease and desist notice to her chest, clipped privacy protectors to her skirt’s hem.
And in.
Again the toxicity of the place battered at her. She weathered the storm, airpods beating back the static, eyes clenched shut, searching for a clearing of calm she could step into.
A change in pressure. A chime of elevator doors. The smell of fresh printer ink. She opened her eyes.
It stood before her. A suit in shadow. A hulking mass of pinstripes. A resentful accumulation of Brooks Brothers and Hugo Boss.
“You’re hurt,” she said.
“Downsized,” it contradicted.
She offered it the USB drive, some old pizza crust, libations of cheap campaign, a sticky note covered in scribbled email passwords.
“We regret to inform you,” it muttered. “Optimizing departments. Security will walk you to the elevator.”
The elevator.
She retreated out of the corporate dream world, climbed back down to the thirty-eighth floor. Judy was seeing the clients to the elevator, shoulders slumped, the outcome clear.
As the elevator doors closed, Judy slouched away, but the energy lingered. The backwash of that conference room swilling over carpet tiles.
Ella walked to the elevator bank, laid a hand upon its closed doors, felt the resentment thrumming through the building. The people it cared for had been sacrificed yesterday. It wanted vengeance, wanted to punish interlopers.
Security will walk you to the elevator.
“Ok,” she whispered to building. “Take what you need. They gave us nothing.”
A moment. A blast of broken air conditioning. The shriek of a fire alarm. The grind of a jammed printer.
Then: cables slipping free; metal shearing, a distant suggestion of screams. And then, in the moment of freefall, in the silence before the sound of rupturing metal and bodies clambered up the elevator shaft, Ella felt the building sigh as if in relief.
Thank you for reading Something’s a Little Off. If you’re interested in sampling a few other stories, and reading an excerpt of my upcoming novella, why not check out the sampler linked to here?