Elevator

Elevator

I thought the most important thing in the world was to get to the meeting on time, even though it was starting late in the day. Everyone was walking out of the building as I checked in with reception and they gave me directions to the meeting room. Going through the formalities seems to be expected, although I’d visited the company many times over the last few years and had a pass to get into their offices.

Why the rush? There’s nothing that can’t wait until the next day, but everybody has to be so efficient these days, or maybe appear to be efficient. The Architectural firm I was visiting were on the twentieth floor, so I headed from reception to the nearest elevator. I didn’t know if their reception would be open at this time of day, but I didn’t need to be escorted; I knew my way around.

I caught the doors of one elevator going up, which had let off several people before I reached it. The silver metal clad boxes of the lining to the elevator were the same as every other one in the city. Nobody else was looking to go into the building, so I pressed the button for floor 20 and the doors of the elevator closed, and the motor of the hoist drive kicked into gear to carry me upward.

The layout of the Flitsborough Point structure flashed through my brain. Doubts on the practicality of getting access to construct the foundations was delaying planning approval. A site investigation revealed made ground succeeded by sandy clay on top of rock. Piles were proposed, but the developers had reservations about heavy pile driving equipment being used on a built up site.

Suddenly the drive of the elevator stuttered, with the motor whining and coming to a halt. The lights in the cab started flashing and the alarm button lit up. I paused momentarily wondering if the drive motor was going to restart and after waiting for two minutes, I pressed the “alarm” button. Nothing seemed to happen, although I didn’t know what to expect after pressing it. The uncertainty was unnerving.

A door panel in the cab's wall, next to the operating buttons, had a small inscription of a telephone in the top right-hand corner. I pressed the corner of the door panel and it opened to reveal a small hand phone receiver. Lifting the receiver, I called “hello” hoping that someone would answer.

A voice answered, “This is the maintenance group for “Lift” elevators, how can we help?”

“Hi, I’m in one of your elevators in the Omega building in Flitsborough and it has stopped midway between the tenth and eleventh floors,” I replied.

“We had notice that power lines to that building had been accidentally severed and I think electricity is being supplied by standby generators. Are there any other passengers in the cab with you?”

“No, most people were finishing work when I came into the building. What happens now?” I asked.

“We’ll get a maintenance team over to you. They’ll try to lift you up to the eleventh floor and get you out.”

“Have you any idea how long it will take?”

“No, because we don’t know if the power cut was caused by anything else being damaged, but we’ll keep you informed of their progress.” With that, the line went dead, and I got a dreadful feeling of isolation.

I slid down onto my haunches with my back leaning against the wall of the cab and took out my mobile phone. It was doubtful whether I’d get a signal from inside the elevator, but I had to ring Estelle, who I’d arranged to meet at 8:30PM. We had planned to go to our favourite Italian restaurant and then grab a quiet drink somewhere. I switched on my phone but couldn’t get a signal and then tried to send a text which my phone showed as being delivered.

My mind went blank for a few seconds and then I thought I should ring Mark Delaney, the Architect who had arranged the late meeting. No luck with him either. He should be in the situation I’m in, I thought. It was nobody’s fault, but I did feel more than a little bitter.

I’d been looking forward to seeing Estelle. With working out-of-town in recent months, the quality time we’d been able to spend together seemed to get shorter and shorter. She was a presenter on the local TV network and by gaining in popularity the demands on her were also growing. Soon we wouldn’t have any time for each other, and that worried me.

Looking at my blurred image on the opposite wall of the cab, I realised I was batting above my weight with Estelle. She was drop dead gorgeous, intelligent with a quirky sense of humour. It caught people out sometimes, but to me it was refreshing and made me love her even more.

Yes, love. That was hard for me to admit to myself. I’d always thought of myself as being independent and not needing to rely on anyone else, but the more I saw of Estelle, the more my independence eroded. We’d been seeing each other for eighteen months, and neither of us had spoken about our long-term relationship. We were enjoying ourselves and couldn’t see beyond that for the time being. If one or other of us got a job working somewhere else that prevented our meeting regularly, we would have to decide where we were going and what we wanted from our relationship.

I rested my elbows on my knees and put one hand under my chin to support my head. God, this was a drag. How long would I be trapped in this damn elevator? My phone beeped to advise me I’d got a message. I looked at my texts and saw Mark had sent me a message. He had only just got out of the building. Lucky sod. He complained about having to walk 20 flights to the ground floor and said he’d let me know the date and time of the rearranged meeting!

Feeling bored, I stretched out my legs and took out my tablet to look over correspondence for the project. There was nothing else to do, and I thought it might help the time pass more quickly. The next time I looked at my watch, it was eight o’clock. I felt the power cut had locked me in the cab much longer than two hours.

The reading was making me feel drowsy, so I played a game on my phone, which was every bit as interesting as the project correspondence. The battery on the phone dropped to 10 percent, and I stopped in case I needed it for messages later. The time continued to tick over slowly until the phone in the cab rang. “This is the maintenance company for the elevator your stuck in. Are you alright?”

“Yeah, I’m OK,” I replied.

“I’ve got some bad news, I’m afraid. The power won’t be re-established for at least another two hours, and we need the standby generator for the building over at the medical centre. You’re the only person in this building, which means the medical centre gets preference, so you’ll be sitting in the dark for a couple of hours.”

“Will I still be able to use this phone if I have to?”

“Well, no. Everything is going to go dead. You’ll just have to wait until the maintenance crew gets to you. Don’t worry, we won’t forget you. OK buddy, I’ll see you later.” With that the phone went dead, followed by the lights in the cab. That feeling of isolation I had earlier was magnified in the pitch black of the cab. There wasn’t the faintest light source in the cab, and I couldn’t even see my hand in front of my face.

This was going to make the time to rescue seem a lot longer. There was nothing I could do about it, so there was no point in complaining. I just had to keep myself occupied for a few hours. I got onto my feet and started stretching, bending forward to touch my toes and backward to arch my spine. How can you exercise in an elevator, I thought, particularly in the dark? Give it up.

I slid back down on my haunches, resigned to spending a few hours in the dark. It must be like this in the womb, but instead of relying on a warm cavern filled with amniotic fluid, I’m stuck in a metal box. On the positive side I do have a little more room, but I may kick against the walls of my cell before the night is over.

Thinking back to my young, formative years, I remember being alone in my bedroom and looking up to a small window letting light into the room. The window, surrounded with black shadow, not as dark as inside the cab, gave an atmosphere separating me from the outside world. I often looked up towards the window and saw it as the portal to a world of adventure. In reality, my Mum would drag me out of bed to have my breakfast, but I always looked back to the window before leaving the bedroom.

I climbed up to look out the window. But that made it ordinary, devoid of the fascination it had in the dark. It had been a long, long time since I thought of that window, and all the dreams I had that centred on climbing through it into a fantasy world. The times during my childhood were bleak, and imagination was the greatest weapon a child could use to prevent depression. It meant that many people thought I was strange, but that was a small price to pay.

The darkness seemed to close in, even though there was no discernible change. I thought about people forced to spend days, months, even years in cells that were pitch black and wondered how it must have affected their minds. A sense of proportion about the difficulties of life can be a fragile thing. Isolation leads to the imagination taking tangents to the unreal or imaginary. Minor issues grow bigger, and simple words spoken in passing adopt a different meaning. I had to stop letting my mind wander and be selective with my thoughts.

I began thinking about the music I liked and how it had developed from the popular songs of the day to classical masterpieces. That’s not to say that popular songs can’t be masterpieces because many are. Since starting to learn how to play an acoustic guitar, I got more out of listening to music, any music, by unconsciously moving some part of my body to the beats of the bars. Timing is everything.

My mind meandered, and I began thinking about the shapes my left hand had to make on the neck of the guitar to play certain tunes. I began with “Cavatina” which someone had put lyrics to, and I ended up singing it! Luckily, I was by myself in the cab, otherwise it could have been painful to the ears of a fellow passenger. The sound of the words seems small and lonely in the cab, and it turned my mind to the insignificance of our existence. Clinging to a rock that’s a minute particle in the universe. Stop, I’m getting too introspective.

At that moment the phone rang, and the lights came on in the cab. Thank God, I thought. In another couple of hours my mind could have taken me anywhere because I would not sleep on the floor of the cab. I was told to sit tight and they would take the elevator to floor eleven and I would have to walk down to reception. A walk would do me good after hours of being crouched in the elevator.