Issue 20

J. Weintraub

They were alone in the elevator, and then he was gone, and she hardly realized what had happened to her as she slid to the floor, her back against the wall, and when it reached the top and shuddered to a halt, she fell forward among the broken bags of groceries. The doors opened and then slid shut, and as she descended alone, she began to think—appropriately enough, but perhaps also stimulated by the memories of the dreams now rising to the surface—of elevators.

Even before they had entered her dreams, she had been an observer, studying elevators not so much because of their utility and purposes—and she was well aware that without their technology, the powerful skyscrapers at the center of the cities she loved would never have been built—but because of the ornamentation architects so frequently lavished on them, and often she would wander into the lobbies of notable buildings to see how the design and even the materials—polychromatic marbles, glazed terracotta tiling, burnished brass and polished chromium—from the great portals at the entryways and street level facades had been incorporated into the interior and concentrated there. At the core, almost always, were the elevator banks, and it was here that the building’s design would often be replicated in miniature, and even embellished; the doors framed with fluted pillars and Corinthian capitals, foliate cornices and incised lintels, frescoed and mosaic-colored pediments, and their surfaces decorated with shields and cartouches, floral wreathes and botanical fretwork, geometric and abstract shapes in copper and varnished wood. Sometimes, animating the heart of the building and breathing life into it were caryatids and gargoyles, mythic creatures and heraldic beasts, pantheons of gods and demigods, and the elongated Arte Moderne nudes, in high and low relief, covered with gilt or incised into the brass, but invariably absorbed into the architecture just as these styles had been absorbed into her own work as in layout after layout she repeated the languages of previous decades as if the ornamentation of Rockefeller Center or Chicago’s Marquette Building had been infused into her own designs.

But now she was inside, stretched out on the floor of the elevator at the heart of her own apartment building, descending in a car as nondescript as a freight elevator, with its olive-gray Formica walls devoid of any decoration other than the license above the operating panel, which she vaguely recalled mandated an occupancy of no more than ten, and now that her cheek was against the floor, she wondered why the management had gone to the expense of decorating it with a simulated Oriental rug within whose pattern—soaked by broken eggs and splattered milk—she could recognize only a few scattered elements.

“Acanthus,” she thought, identifying the object woven into the pattern beneath her eye, and suddenly she pictured the sliding railed screens and elaborate grillwork in those turn-of-the-century buildings in Lower Manhattan where her mother would take her for appointments with dentists and optometrists, and then shafts seemed to shoot upward from the botanical patterns in this ornate rug, growing into cast-iron garlands of palmetto and laurel, vines sprouting anthemion and fleur-de-lis, coiling into waves, scrolls, and trefoils, draped with festoons and tassels. For some reason, she recalled from architectural school a phrase of Louis Sullivan’s: “plastic, mobile and florescent phases culminating in foliates and efflorescence,” but she noticed that these fluid, growing shafts were culminating, rather, in stake-like sheaves of arrows and spears, razor-sharp at the points, and when the elevator seemed to shudder again and jolt to a stop for a moment, she thought she heard chains and cogs clanking and vibrating, and the exuberant wrought-iron filigree now whirled and tightened around her, narrowing into a cage like one of those ancient pneumatic lifts descending by jolts and starts down the center of a spiral staircase in some shabby European hotel.

(Of course, the elevator had neither stopped nor even shuddered in transit, and there were no chains or cogs to rattle, but she had spent a year studying architecture not because of any interest in engineering or mechanics but because of her fascination with architectural detailing, and now as Art Director for a regional travel and leisure monthly, she neither knew nor cared that she was currently moving at a constant speed of 1.6 meters per second in a car suspended not from chains but steel ropes of single tensile wire, equal lay construction, driven with minimal vibration and friction between guide rails of cold-drawn 370 N/mm5 grade steel by an Otis electric traction motor, worm and worm-gear machined in one piece, operating quietly and smoothly at 1500 rpm.)

She tried to escape from the twisting, rattling cage by rising, and the failed effort was enough to release her from the gratings and iron foliage which disappeared and were replaced by images from one recurring dream after another in such rapid succession that they seemed almost to blend together, and even though she was now going down, she thought momentarily that she was rising, since her dreams usually began with an elevator’s ascent and occasionally even carried her laterally through vast structures that expanded over wide stretches of countryside, which she often could see, as if the walls of the passenger car had suddenly become transparent and the horizontal shafts through which she was traveling were enclosed in glass. Near the end of her dreams there would sometimes be a descent, usually on a return journey from somewhere, but never that precipitous and terrifying freefall that abruptly ended the dreams of so many others, for rather than developing into fearful nightmares, these dreams of hers seemed to serve as fissures into other worlds of experience, premonitory and Delphic, and since they often traversed recognizable spaces in recurring sequences, they became for her more like mysteries that had been told many times over, with new elaborations and turns each time, yet each time seemingly drawing closer to an inevitable end.

Usually she had been waiting in the lobby or first floor of an apartment building or a department store or a large institutional complex—government offices or a hospital ward—or a dormitory or a parking garage, and since others had preceded her and she had been waiting for some time, she entered the elevator without hesitation and sometimes with impatience, but always casually, with some degree of curiosity and without fear, although once inside she had no idea where she would be going or, in fact, that she wanted to go anywhere at all.

Sometimes the doors opened onto the upper regions of a department store with aisle upon aisle of merchandise stretched out before her—cookware and cosmetics and fabrics of every color and texture, stacked in great piles reaching to the ceiling—and each aisle often spiraled into a maze, sometimes leading her to the center of a mall overlooking a precipitous atrium that circled, level after level, up into the shadows or so deeply down that she could see nothing more than a profound darkness beneath her. Sometimes she would complete several circuits around the atrium—one direction leading up, the other down—until she encountered another elevator bank, which often carried her into subterranean corridors, past steaming boilers and engine rooms onto a subway platform where she would enter crowded trains, eventually exiting some distance away, into urban zones of dark warehouse lofts and loading platforms and dim sputtering lights, vaguely reminiscent of the old West Side on the banks of the Hudson or Fulton Market at night, leaving her with little confidence that she would find a bus or a cab that would bring her any closer to her destination or back from where she had come or somewhere close to home now that night was falling.

Or rather than into a subway tunnel, she would descend into a cavernous train station—Grand Central or Union, but larger—where she would arrive just in time to catch her overnight connection, whose destination she thought she knew but never for certain; or into an airport with long, sinuous galleries of souvenir shops and food courts and newsstands, all rarely leading to her gate but sometimes out onto the tarmac itself, where she would run to board her plane; or even back down into the lower level of the parking garage, where she would search for her car among countless aisles of other cars, to continue her journey onward.

Or sometimes the elevators would open onto a hospital waiting room where none of the doctors or nurses would acknowledge her presence, or onto the upper floor of a high-rise college dormitory, where her fellow students, sitting in the landing, playing bridge, were no more aware of her existence than were the doctors and nurses, and there she would wander the circular hallways going from one door to the next in search of her room. Or after a long sideways traversal, the elevator would stop in the attic of one of those monstrous sprawling structures, where she would walk up to the roof overlooking river valleys and waterfalls and mountain ranges and other panoramas that she found calming, although she was often troubled by her inability to find her way back to the elevators and to the salons and reception halls inside with their pink marble colonnades, crystalline chandeliers, ormolu moldings, gilded Cupids and satyrs, inlaid and lacquered tables and buffets crowded with porcelain figurines and vases filled with roses, tulips, and white chrysanthemums. Or was it instead the nave of a baroque chapel with altars, rather than tables, surrounded not by classical demigods but angels and saints, shimmering in the light dyed by the stained glass?

The last time she’d entered an elevator in a dream—and this was the dream that now lingered the longest—it lifted her into an enclosed tubular corridor that encircled an atrium, like the ones at the center of the malls, although not nearly as wide, but narrow enough for her to see into the corridors across from her through the elongated portholes that extended the length of every level, and through the glass she could clearly see the faces of others who, like her, were pressing forward, all in the same direction, and like her, all wearing such similar gray tunics and pants that they appeared to be in uniform, and although she recognized many of them as they circled across from her, none seemed to hear her when she called out their names, and by the time she called again, they were gone.

The last fragment of the dream faded, and she saw only the acanthus leaf woven into the rug just beneath her eye, and then that, too, disappeared, gradually obscured by the blood seeping around her cheek and into the rug beneath her, and when she looked up, she saw that the wrought-iron grating had grown around her again, although this time it was bare of wreaths and scrolls and foliated ironwork, consisting only of a few bars, sparse and wavering, but still topped by the sheaves of sharpened spears and arrows she had seen so many years before on a grill fronting an elevator bank somewhere in Lower Manhattan, and just as she was losing consciousness, the doors slid open, and she suspected that they were opening for her not onto the lobby of her apartment building, but onto a place that would be as enigmatic and unanticipated yet as much of a familiar mystery as any she had experienced before in her dreams.