Elevator 15

“Are you coming tonight?” the voice on the other end of the line asked quietly, straining with the effort to speak. He sounded hopeful. Weak coughing followed immediately after.

Shawn waited for the episode to subside before he answered. “Yeah Dad. I’ll be there. Do you want me to bring you something?”

A moment passed and Shawn knew his father’s hesitation had nothing to do with him considering the offer, the pause was just his way of gathering his strength to speak again. His father never asked for anything during his hospital stays, but Shawn always offered anyway.

“No. I just want to see you.”

***

After reassuring his father he was on his way, Shawn hung up and began searching for a clean pair of jeans and a shirt. He worked from home, remotely accessing customers computers to fix them, so he rarely put on anything more than the sweatpants he rolled out of bed in. Shawn had hoped this would be one of those nights where his father’s medications kicked in early and he fell asleep. No such luck.

He grabbed a cold slice of pizza from the fridge and scarfed it down along with a soda while he brushed his hair and searched for his wallet and keys. His tennis shoes were still by the front door where he had left them after his last trip outside, along with a fairly clean pair of socks. That was what? Two days ago? Five days?

Shawn began to feel guilty as he realized just how long it had been since he last visited his father. He talked to him every day on the phone during his lunch break, but he knew that wasn’t enough. This hospital stay had been longer then the others, which was probably a bad sign.

He grabbed a bag of his father’s favorite chips off the counter and took at deep breath before opening the door and stepping outside. The light was fading. The moon was rising, stars already dotting the sky. A light breeze carried the sweet scent of his neighbor's jasmine shrub.

None of these things helped to calm Shawn’s nerves. He really, really didn’t like leaving the house. Most of the time this wasn’t a problem. Most of the time his father was at home and Shawn spent his days working and taking care of him. Anything they needed could be delivered. Groceries, medication, the supplies to fuel their shared hobby of model building...a few clicks on the computer and these things just showed up at the door.

Shawn didn’t really see the need to go outside most days. He didn’t even go out on the weekends. All his friends were online. As far as he was concerned, internet friends were the best kind. You could turn them on whenever you got lonely and turn them back off whenever you wanted to be alone. If you needed an excuse to leave in the middle of a social activity your internet could just conveniently ‘go out’. Shawn’s friends probably thought he got really bad service in his area.

***

The drive to the hospital was an overwhelming blur. Traffic was heavy with people getting off work and going out to dinner. Shawn turned up the radio to drown out the cars and people outside. He focused on just making it from one stoplight to the next and breathing in the lavender air freshener that dangled from his mirror. No one was going to hit him. He wouldn’t wreck. His car was a safe cocoon from the frantic world outside. Thankfully, the hospital wasn’t far from his house.

He pulled into the parking deck which bounced slightly as each car passed and he ascended each floor looking for a place to park. The sounds in the concrete tower echoed unnervingly, a squeal of tires somewhere below making him jump in his seat. The ceiling was so low, the lanes so narrow, it was like creeping through a rock giant’s veins, the narrow cement windows like the giant’s eyes looking out onto the world from impossibly high up. Shawn had to go nearly to the top to find an open space.

The parking deck elevator was even worse than the drive there. It was hot and stuffy and smelled like vomit and piss. Five other people were crammed in with him and he could feel himself breathing in the air they exhaled. He constantly had to work at pushing the nightmare of the elevator getting stuck out of his head. Finally it reached the bottom floor and he sprinted across the parking deck to the automatic sliding glass doors that opened into the lobby.

He shivered at the sudden change in temperature. The air inside was cold and smelled of disinfectant. There was a line at the desk to get a visitors badge. When it was finally his turn, his heart was racing so fast that he could barely process the questions thrown at him by the receptionist. He managed to give her his name and his father’s name and she spent a few minutes staring at the computer screen and typing before her printer spat out a white square.

“Your father’s been moved to one of the longer stay rooms. Do you know where that ward is?” The receptionist leaned across the desk and patted the visitor sticker onto his chest.

Shawn shook his head mutely. He just wanted to go home. He felt like he couldn’t breathe. He clutched the bag of chips to his chest like it was a life preserver.

The receptionist must have recognized the look of total distress he was giving her and softened her voice. “Just wait right there. I’ll call someone to take you to him, OK?”

***

By the time a security guard arrived to escort Shawn to the correct floor, spoke with the nurses’ station, and left him standing outside his father’s door, another half an hour had passed. Shawn entered to find his dad sound asleep. He looked peaceful despite all the machines he was hooked up to. Shawn sighed, all that stress for nothing, his father wouldn’t even know he had been there. Then he remembered the bag of chips he was still clutching. He placed them on his father’s bedside table and resolved to call him first thing in the morning.

He quietly closed the door and began walking back down the hallway. Shawn had always hated hospitals. Nothing good ever happened in them. Well, maybe that wasn’t exactly true. He supposed that the residents of the maternity floor might disagree with him, but he didn’t know anyone there. For people like him at least, being in a hospital only meant one of two things: either you were sick or someone you loved was sick. And for him it was a lot of the latter.

He continued down the hall gagging, his anxiety quickly turning to aggravation. The stagnant air was filled with a horrid concoction of antiseptics, bodily fluids, and overcooked cafeteria food. Mingled among those scents was the floral decay of a week old “get well soon” bouquet, wet towels left to sour in a nearby laundry bin, and a patient who evidently felt that if he used enough cologne he could hide the fact that he hadn’t bathed in days.

Somewhere in a nearby room a child screeched. Shawn ground his teeth and picked up his pace. He could handle the sound of adults in distress, but children were another thing entirely. You would think that in this day and age doctors would have developed less painful ways to treat their patients.

He rounded a corner and this new hallway was a mirror of the last. Distraught machines beeped and hissed incessantly. Pages for stray doctors crackled over the loud speaker along with urgent calls in cryptic codes named after colors. The overly bright, artificial lights and sterile white floor and walls made his eyes water. Shawn wondered how a person was supposed to rest around here, much less get better.

Reaching the end of the hallway, he passed through a set of unmarked double doors, his tennis shoes squeaking on the freshly buffed floors. He stopped short when he realized he still hadn’t seen the nurse’s station, or the elevator he’d been brought up on. He had passed by plenty of signs. Things like “beware of radiation”, but not a single one that pointed to the exit. That was the worst thing about hospitals. Once you got into the heart of the medical labyrinth, you couldn’t find your way out.

Just as his anxiety threatened to take back over, Shawn noticed movement in a dark alcove off to his right. It was a janitor, dressed in bleach spotted hospital scrubs. The worn clothing hung in folds on his thin frame, at least two sizes too big. Once a healthy blue, the material was now faded and heavily pilled on the wear spots. The top, having evidently been washed less frequently then the bottoms, no longer made for a matched set.

The old man wore a grim expression as he focused on his task. His skin was as pasty white and cracked as an old bar of soap. The joints of his stick like arms creaked like ancient tree limbs as he sloshed a mop made of gray, ropy fibers across the floor. The stench from the cocktail of cleaners and filth in the bucket was just awful.

Behind the janitor was an elevator. Careful not to slip on the wet spots, Shawn made a beeline for it. Just a few more minutes and he would be back in his lavender scented car listing to his favorite station on the radio.

“You no take lift.” A gruff voice said in broken English from behind him.

Shawn turned to see the janitor, whose accent he couldn’t place, pointing a yellowed finger nail at him.

“Why not?” He demanded.

“The Number 15 not for you.” The man pointed his crooked finger towards him again, punctuating each of his words with a jab. He gave Shawn a look that all but called him stupid for even asking.

Shawn sighed. This was just his luck. He’d finally found an elevator but it was for employees only. The janitor stuck the dirty mop head back in the bucket, giving it another good sloshing. Unidentifiable debris floated up to the surface along with a waterlogged beetle, legs churning helplessly in the water. Shawn could relate. He needed to get out of here, and fast.

“Does it go to the first floor?” He asked the janitor, whose name tag was caked with filth and unreadable.

“Yes, first floor, second floor, third floor, all floors.” The janitor laughed at his own cleverness. The sound reminded Shawn of a hyena choking on a bucket of rusty nails.

“Then it’s for me.” Shawn said without hesitation. He turned his back on the man to let him know that the conversation was over. Shawn had to stab the cracked casing of the down button three times before it lit up.

As he waited for the number 15 elevator to arrive, he heard the janitor slosh the mop back into the bucket dolly. The wheels squeaked loudly as he shuffled off down the hall.

The doors finally opened and Shawn hurried inside. He pressed the button for the lobby. The doors closed almost immediately and the elevator began its decent. Shawn leaned back against the faux wood paneling and tried to relax as he watched the numbers light up and tick down.

Somewhere between the 5^th and 4^th floor the elevator stopped suddenly and shuddered. Then the lights went out. Every muscle in Shawn’s body tensed. He’d always feared getting stuck in an elevator, but he’d always been able to tell himself it was just a phobia. It wouldn’t really happen. Now it was. The elevator shook violently and Shawn lost his footing. He went down, the back of his head smacking the handrail as he fell.

***

Shawn didn’t know how long he was out for, but when he came to, his legs were sprawled on the floor, his head and neck at an awkward angle against the side wall. The doors were opened and Shawn found himself blinking in the bright morning sunlight.

It should have been night time, he couldn’t possibly have been out for that long. He pulled himself up stiffly using the handrail. He noticed there was a spot of blood on it from where his head had hit. Shawn peered out the door and realized that this was most definitely not the lobby.

Confused, disoriented, and fighting off one hell of a headache, he stepped out onto the hospital floor. The entire place had been abandoned. Doors were open and hanging off their hinges. Parts of walls were missing. The windows in the empty patient rooms were broken. Sunlight streamed in accompanying a warm summer breeze. The once sterile floor was covered in patches of dirt and moss, small plants and vines grew along the edges of the walls and up them. Sky blue eyes peeked out at him from under a collection of overturned chairs. A rodent three times the size of a normal rat darted out of the nest. It chattered its displeasure at him and then burrowed into a moldy pile of mattresses. Its fur was an odd dusky blue.

Shawn eyeballed the mattresses and, keeping his distance, sidestepped into one of the old patient rooms. A flurry of purple plumed birds with stupidly long tail feathers startled and flew out the window. Large nests full of peach colored eggs with red spots balanced on the old lighting fixtures and filled the crumbling cabinets.

Shawn gazed out over a landscape that he didn’t recognize. In the distance a thick canopy of trees lined the horizon. The hospital complex was five times the size it should have been, the buildings all in the same state of severe neglect. It was like all of the people had just vanished and nature had taken over. A herd of animals that looked like a cross between a dog and a deer, wandered several stories below through a maze of rusted car husks, picking at patches of yellow grass growing between chunks of asphalt.

Where was he? Was this a parallel universe? How in the hell was he going to get back? All he had wanted was to get out of the hospital and now all he wanted was to find a way back.

The hairs on Shawn’s neck stood on end as he heard a low growl behind him. It thrummed in his chest and sent his heart racing. He turned slowly and found an enormous cat prowling into the room. It resembled a tiger in size and stripes, but instead of black and orange it was black and green. The same shade as the moss that its enormous, clawed paws silently padded across. Two sharp ivory tusks protruded from its mouth. Its eyes glowed a bright orange.

The cat moved slowly, circling him, sizing him up. As it circled it moved away from the door and Shawn, who’s mind and body could lock up from being asked paper or plastic at the grocery store, suddenly decided that this very real threat was something he could totally deal with. He backed out of the room and headed toward the elevator, the cat stalking him the whole way.

Shawn peeked over his shoulder and saw he was just feet away from the safety of the elevator. A small part of his brain noted that it was labeled “number 51”, not 15, but the blood on the handrail inside clearly marked it as the vehicle that had brought him here. Maybe it could take him back. He backed into it and punched the lobby button.

That was when the cat decided to pounce. Its heavy paws landed on his shoulders, its weight pinning him to the floor. He could feel its breath on his face, the bright orange glow of its eyes filled his entire field of vision. Shawn squeezed his eyes shut. His last thoughts were of his dad. Who would visit him now?

***

Shawn opened his eyes to a blinding white light. No tiger loomed over him, just a doctor in a lab coat, and beyond him the open elevator doors revealed a totally normal hallway. His head was throbbing, the pen light the doctor wielded sending knives into his skull.

“Well you certainly were lucky I decided to take my dinner break early. Double lucky, I’d say. Fall and hit your head and just happen to have a neurologist trip over you!”, the doctor chuckled.

Shawn opened his mouth to tell him about the tiger and the parallel universe and then thought better of it. He glanced back at the handrail, noting the blood there. “Am I OK?”

The doctor helped him to his feet. “You’re fine. Just might have a bit of a lump for a few days. Got to watch those wet floors and I’d suggest not taking the freight elevator next time, it tends to be a bit rough when it re-balances itself.”

The doctor stepped out and motioned for Shawn to follow. “Are you coming tonight? Or you going to hang out in there until morning?”

Shawn noticed employees in the hallway staring at him.

***

The next day Shawn logged out of work early. He took an empty cardboard box out of the closet and began carefully packing up the model airplane his father had been working on before he’d left for the hospital. This time he wasn’t going to wait for his call. He wasn’t going to ask him if he could bring him something. He was just going to show up and surprise him. He’d survived a trip on elevator 51, he felt confident he could survive a few more trips on elevator 15.