People in elevators are anxious. This is partly because people in elevators are going somewhere, and the elevators are not that somewhere. But it is also because people in elevators are often alone in these elevators with strangers. Alone with strangers sounds like an oxymoron, but everyone knows that it isn’t. When Rhea gets into an elevator alone and the elevator descends one floor and a man enters the elevator, Rhea does not feel less alone. Her aloneness takes on a different shape: alone with a stranger. That stranger, John, was alone waiting for an elevator before he entered the elevator. The aloneness of waiting for an elevator alone has a different shape than the aloneness of being inside an elevator alone. But John does not experience that particular change in shape now because Rhea is already in the elevator when it opens for him.
Rhea would, in any other circumstance, avoid being inside a closed box with a man she does not know. She would prefer this man were not in this box with her now. In this small space, his bulk feels territorial. She pictures a pineapple—its imposing heft. She can sense the movement of the man’s attention, which seems to tell her something about the movement of his thoughts. His mind is another box she does not wish to be inside of. But this is the way of public transportation, of which an elevator is an example. An elevator is a people mover, like a bus or a plane or a train. To be moved, people must enter containers with other people. They must consent to being contained. If people refuse to enter containers with other people, strangers, they are limited in where they may go. This is true even of people who own their own method of transportation.
John owns a Toyota Sequoia. Well, he doesn’t own it exactly; he’s still making payments. But John does not own this building and so does not own this elevator. And even if he did own this building, he couldn’t exactly avoid being alone in this elevator with strangers. Elevators are exceptional like that. John did not get to choose whether this woman, Rhea, could be in this elevator with him. He wonders about this now. People alone in elevators with strangers are also keenly aware of the movement of their own attention. If John had had a choice, would he have invited this woman into this elevator? The answer, he decides, depends on the context, as it always does. If she had been in a crowd of women from which to choose, he might not have chosen her of all those women to be inside this elevator with him. But then again, depending on the women in that crowd, maybe he would have.
People alone in elevators with strangers may stare at the elevator’s buttons. They may pin their attention to what the elevator communicates about their progress up or down. That’s what Rhea does now. She watches the elevator count down the floors they pass. The elevator passes these floors slowly. The elevator is not in a hurry. The passing of floors, the opening and closing to let people in and out is the somewhere-everywhere for the elevator. An elevator is a container that opens and closes, fills and empties.
People in elevators are also containers that may open and close. Rhea and John are both closed, but that could change at any moment. If the elevator were to get stuck between floors, as elevators often do in television shows, Rhea and John would open. Consider that: If the elevator cannot open, the people inside it will open. Because when people in an elevator become trapped in that elevator—that is to say, when their time in that elevator is no longer brief, no longer certain or predictable—then even if they are strangers, even if they have not previously spoken to one another or looked at one another, they will acknowledge each other now. People who become trapped in an elevator together are no longer alone.
When the elevator lurches slightly, Rhea and John consider this. They consider how quickly everything could change. If not the elevator getting stuck between floors, then a fire. If not a fire, then an earthquake. If not an earthquake, then a gunman. If not a gunman, then an asteroid. If not an asteroid, then another pandemic. If not another pandemic, then a zombie apocalypse. If not a zombie apocalypse, then the end of everything.
They consider the transformative power of such events.
They long to be transformed.
When the elevator’s doors open onto the ground floor just as they are supposed to, Rhea and John glance quickly at one another the way that people in elevators tend to do when elevator doors open on the ground floor, to confirm who will step out of the elevator first. Then, one after the other, first Rhea, then John steps out and back into their lives. They forget how they longed, for a moment, for something terrible.
~
Michelle Ross’s latest story collection, Don’t Take This the Wrong Way, which she cowrote with Kim Magowan, is just out from EastOver Press. Ross is the author of three other story collections: There’s So Much They Haven’t Told You, Shapeshifting, and They Kept Running. Her work is included in Best Small Fictions, Best Microfiction, and the Norton anthology, Flash Fiction America. It’s received special mention in the Pushcart Prize anthology. She is an Editor at 100 Word Story.