Double Flee A

Since I got a night job, quite different from the one I do now, at this hospital several years go, I've always thought of the elevator as emblematic of uncertainty.

Early on, during long nights wandering through the darkened corridors of this empty complex of buildings, I'd see the elevators do strange things. Once I hit the button and four out of the six in that bank opened at the same time. Of course there was no one around to see that, and the weird paranoia that selects late-night amateurs sent shivers up my back. Other times the elevator would go up even though it said it was going down, or vice versa, or would start moving with the door open. Not too much, but six or eight inches. Enough to scare you pretty good. To use the words I told the nurses back then when I was working on their machines: everything a machine does, it can do at the wrong time.

At one point, with too much caffeine in my veins, I even began to make up a song about elevators. The gist of it was that when that door opens, you don't know who's going to be there, and when you're about to step off, you aren't going to know where you are. When that door opens wide, what's on the other side, whose elevator are you, it went, and so on.

I was just on elevator number eleven going from floor eight (where the lunch is) to three, (where the tea is -- orange pekoe, tell me your sweet lies), and I remembered that it was in that very elevator that I met my wife for the first time. The memory of that event, which I haven't forcefully remembered enough to wear the substance of the memory out yet --you know how that goes-- made me smile.

To close on a somewhat unsatisfactory note: that we met in a metal box, the most uninteresting thing you can ride and still call it a ride, with no features to distinguish it from any other elevator, I don't see as having any particular metaphorical value.

posted by dale @ 12:45 PM