The Shaft

by David J. Schow

  Bauhaus lumbered off to the rear of the apartment, Chari in tow by one wrist. No formal goodnights. Krystal passed out on the kitchen floor and started snoring.

  Cruz's day had begun with a party a thousand miles or so away. He had hated the unconscious drones there, and he hated them here. The day had ended with another, more intimate party. Hell of a way to drag down a living. Rosie had known how good Cruz's nose was, like that of a wine connoisseur. He had seen what a waste, to terminate talent such as Cruz's for the sake of an empassioned gesture. New Chiquitas would soon be lined up for Emilio. Noses like Cruz's determined the local gold standard; how many of him were available?

  He hoped Rosie was pulling strings apace. The sooner he could jump from this place…

  He managed a few more bites of food but the cocaine had beheaded his appetite. That came with the job. He took nourishment anyway, knowing he'd need it later.

  He moved closer to the smoked glass windows and gazed reflectively toward greater Chicago. Snow rolled past in dust devil clouds, swirling and restless. The lights of the distant city were fire, seen through ice. It seemed compelling and romantic somehow. Cruz knew it was probably just the drugs, fucking with his head.

  SIX

  It occurred to Mrs Elvie Rojas that she might have been possessed by her apartment this night. The alternative was that she had gone bad in the head, and the word senile had never been an acceptable vocabulary-builder.

  Elvie was stout, barrel-shaped and thick of calf. A penguin waddle had governed her stride for the past twenty years, but she made sure and steady progress whenever she opted to be a pedestrian. Elvie Rojas was not an old lady who fell down, dim and blinking, to bust her bones. Her bowed and sturdy legs had seen her through life's travails. Back during the War she had been nearly a foot taller, almost willowy for her era, dark-haired, coffee-eyed, attractive enough to draw more notice than most attractive women would need in Francophile Spain.

  She had spent her nineteenth and twenty-first birthdays ripe with child, and squeezing out those first two had started the irreversible pelvic spread, like tectonic plates drawing apart inside of her. After Emilio and Cristina had come three more children. Her first husband, Esteban Mercurio, had been a battle casualty of the final poisonous year of the Good War, and in his wake had come an American sergeant named Bryce Cannom Welch. She had experienced her first real orgasm with Bryce. He brought her to America, legally, just in time for the McCarthy witch hunts. Once a staunch old war buddy from Bryce's Army Air Corps unit decided that Bryce's studies in comparative sociology were hot copy, Bryce found his qualifications as a bonafide war hero (two Air Medals, two Purple Hearts) less important to investigators than his newfound role as a Commie. Some bitternesses never went away, or paled. Betrayed by his own country, Bryce drank himself to death by the time Kennedy was elected.

  Elvie persevered, marrying, a third time.

  Carl Rojas had been a grocer; had not gone by 'Carlos' in over three decades. Leukemia had knocked him down ten years past. Bryce's eldest, Robbie, had fathered two grandchildren and gone on to die in the acidic flames of a chemical detonation at a Dow plant. His last wife, and children, were well compensated, so the attorneys said. James, named after Bryce's father, had eaten a Bouncing Betty mine in Vietnam; half of him died in the bush while the other half hung on for thirty hours in a field hospital. Elvie had no idea what had become of the middle child, Loris, except that like her mother, she had gone through many husbands in her life.

  Elvie could enumerate such minutiae of her personal history lucidly, at whatever depth of scan civil conversation required. She was clear-headed. No tumors, no strokes. She had not needed glasses until her sixty-second year. Her diet was conscientious and she cooked most of her own meals. Knowing Carl Rojas had provided an unanticipated windfall later in life, when it came to eating healthily.

  Not being able to open the windows in her room had been the first thing leading Elvie to suspect Godless presences. Instead of complaining or lamenting, the incident caused her to sit and evaluate herself… to insure that a potential problem was not with her before taking such overt action as blaming other people or agencies.

  The building's windows were large casement jobs with swivel latches. From the day Elvie had moved in, the upper-most windows had been too thick with paint to budge. Temperature could coax the lower ones to swell or jam. True, this was the thick of the winter season, but the turkey casserole she had prepared in the apartment's cubbyhole kitchen had rendered the air dense, and she craved ventilation. Snow could do such marvelous things to the air one breathed! It could be so cleansing. That was why it was frequently soot-colored by the time it stopped on the ground.

  Oomph, and nothing. The window was unyielding. She got out a little pry bar, one of those special tools that evolves from years of residence at a single location. That was when she noticed that the gouge in the sill - the fulcrum of her custom-fitted lever, also the product of years - was no longer there.

  She made a small, inquisitive sound and ran her finger along the sill. She no longer painted her spade-shaped fingernails, although she lacquered them to prevent splintering.

  Nothing.

  It was as though the sill had been patched, sanded and flawlessly repainted. Her searching fingernail proceeded upward. The frame of the window had joined with the wooden track as an uninterrupted surface.

  A cursory eye would have dismissed this as a slapdash paint job, clogging the groove Elvie knew to be there. But this was too perfect. Each detail of the window and casement remained, except that now they were not separate. They did not manufacture good casement windows like these anymore, she knew. Nowadays they touted thin sliding glass in harsh aluminum track frames. Component windows with no molding, no detail work, no pride, only mechanistic repetition. Perfection in ceaseless encore. She wondered how the craftsmen so common in the 1940s fared today.

  On tiptoe she peeked at the top of the window that worked. The brass hasp moved freely enough, hampered by the thick gluey quality of the cheap paint that drowned out every other detail of this building; no pride, no pride at all. Elvie had patiently scraped the foul stuff away so the latch could do its job. But now there were no distinct sections of the window to lock or unlock. The grit-filled gap separating upper from lower had vanished, or been erased. Sometimes that gap had proven so annoying that Elvie had stuffed it with newspaper to evict the seepage of chilly air. That shortcoming no longer existed.

  She could not have opened the window any more than she could enlarge her tiny apartment by pushing against the walls.

  She scrutinized every surface accessible to her. Even the dust lay in a homogeneous coat, mocking undisturbed snowfall. Diplomatically she chided herself for not dusting more often.

  Defeated for now, she returned to her cane rocker. Her hands sought surcease in her rosary and crucifix. After a while she ate more of the casserole, which tasted even better at room temperature. She'd cut the spices by nearly half without harming the flavor. Eventually the television was switched on and the outside world rolled on without her, as usual.

  It had become immeasurably quieter in her corner of the building since the young hoodlum upstairs had relocated. Elvie was over-tolerant, a believer in the status quo and not making waves unless provoked beyond manners. She tended to mind her own business even on weekends when things got noisy. Many of the tenants were young; weekends were for the young. She had seen the upstairs occupant a grand total of twice in her life, and had never spoken to him. He was what they called a punk these days. The word was freighted with entirely different connotations for Elvie: Jimmy Cagney in White Heat was a punk. Richard Widmark in Kiss of Death was a punk. Bryce had loved action movies, and had instructed her well. During the time federal goons were poking into Bryce's geneology and hobbies - he had married a foreigner, after all - he had told her that Marlon Brando and any booger-nosed brat who wanted to emulate The Wild One was, de facto, a punk. As in punk lad.

  Today pu
nks were still kids, but looked more like the storm troopers of a bizarre alien strike force, their costumes complex and reeking lethality, their eyes metallic and sullen. Elvie saw the kid upstairs as brash, brassy, loud, probably terrified of human interaction. He wasn't even a punk to her.

  He had generally thumped in about four in the morning, and Elvie was usually roused by his stomping around. She decided that she generally needed to get up to visit the bathroom about that time, regardless. Sometimes talk seeped through the ceiling, too loud, possibly accelerated by narcotics. Nothing was comprehensible to Elvie's ear; her hearing was unimpaired, but her schooling in slang had come from a past era. She could hear fine. The spectacles she wore were a very mild prescription. Her hair, even now, was more iron than snow. Her fingernails were not brittle from a lack of calcium.

  Sometimes the upstairs rhumba got rhythmic enough to shake or sway the dusty light fixture depending from her ceiling. She deduced body heat in collision, and if a whoop or gasp bled through, often smiled to herself. A vacant niche of her heart, mostly dormant but for memories, had forever been overseen by the taste Bryce had given her for lasting, vigorous sex. It lent her a tiny pang whenever she guessed the people above her were copulating.

  Lately these predawn commotions had stopped - Elvie instantly noted any disruption in the calm waters of her daily routine. The world might not notice she existed, but she maintained a certain succor in her own careful custodianship of one small and inoffensive life. So long as bad things were not her fault, Elvie felt at peace. For now it looked as though her quiet sufferance had paid off. The upstairs quakes and blarings had calmed on their own.

  The boy who thought himself a punk had moved on. In this class of building, they always moved on.

  Except, Elvie thought, for folks like me. Another of her roles was to keep some aspect of this building eternally stable, and she cherished it. As an elder tenant she outdated those who came and went, fading like matchflames on a moonless night. As an anchor, she balanced the building's occupancy against the transients. The world needed Elvie Rojas and those like her, even though they would never be noticed individually, like gravity, like air to breathe. As far as she was concerned, she played her part.

  The matter of the noisy adolescent had been resolved. Now the matter of the windowsill distracted Elvie from her enjoyment of the television. During commercials, her frustration magnetized her back to the sill. Both windows, her eyes onto the world at large, had changed identically and without a clue or suspicious noise. She used a reading; magnifier to squint at the smooth commingling of sill and sash and windowframe. It was all a single piece, as seamless as her ordered life.

  Perhaps this was a punishment.

  The only disruptions in the settled grit were made by Elvie's gently tracing, questioning fingers. She had spent her life refining her life, as a woodworker sanding and beveling: and varnishing, and now that life, completed, needed no more work. She was left with an existence. Life had been evacuated; pride remained. Pleasure in the detail work. A vast canvas painstakingly committed with a three-hair brush, relegated to a dim corner of a dismal building with no audience and certainly no appreciation. Three husbands, she thought. Five children borne in sweat and pain, taxing the nether regions of her femininity until they sundered to yield new life. She felt phantom stabs of memory in her abandoned womb. The pain of childbearing always ran in inverse ratio to the pleasure of their seeding. Her harvest of offspring had edged her to the brink of death. For James and Robbie the clock had begun ticking with their first draw of breath. Elvie could not even name where her other children were today. She had outlasted three husbands, yes, but not by effort. She had not intended to survive them; it had simply curved out that way, planless. Without making the careful accounting of each plane and angle of her residence here important, she had held onto nothing. So perhaps obscurity was her lot. Old women on modest incomes never enjoyed a wide breadth of options.

  They also tended to complain a lot, she chastized herself. Like old people. She could casually dismiss the vanishment of her obnoxious neighbor, above; why worry the mystery of the windowsill? Dismiss it, and it will be right by sunrise.

  The punk upstairs had probably moved in with a dolly who received her junk mail at a much more private address for sex. Who the devil would want neighbors in three directions overhearing every grant and giggle of good deep penetration, the intimacies of lust-balming? She had noticed the absence of the boy the way a clock is finally noticed when it stops ticking. A girlfriend, that was it. Another bedroom, with fewer eager eavesdroppers. Fine lovemaking, energetic and moist and exhausting. Purgation by perspiration, the benediction of heat and motion and contact…

  Now, stop it! A smile creased her face, softening the weathered look. She was too old to giggle outright.

  All right, fine. The window.

  She had levered it open halfway just last week. It had not always been painted shut. Now there were no gaps, no shadows, no evidence that this window or its partner had ever been opened a millimeter.

  In this building, things always went wrong in the middle of the night.

  Possibly her mind had changed, not the window. It was as it had always been, except now she could not see this. The notion put a prong of fear into her recently satiated stomach. But that word senile…

  Damn it.

  And damn the building, for cruelly trying to fool her, and damn any God that would harass an old lady this way.

  Outside the wind marshalled like a backswelling ocean wave, then hit the building broadside, sandblasting it with hard pellets of sleet, making the noise of salt sprinkled on tinfoil. Elvie fancied she felt the structure heave, saw the pane before her nose bow inward with the assault. She fetched up a handkerchief. Lace-bordered and monogrammed, she had had it nearly twenty-five years, and it retained the nicotined tint of aged cloth. She used it to buff a spyhole in the icy condensation fogging her side. Beyond was blackness.

  She put her eyes closer to the glass. The frames of her spectacles tapped the surface. It still sounded like glass. The viewport she had wiped in the middle was still utterly dark, admitting vision of nothing Elvie was used to seeing outside -the streetlamps, the plowed mountains of snow, the buried automobiles, hunched-over figures doggedly walking their pets, or the flash-frozen coproliths deposited by those animals, like dark dots of random punctuation on a vast, blank white page. She could not see the houses and buildings across the street, disguised, she knew, in their fimhouse beards of matte white and icicle muttonchop sideburns. She could perceive only blackness. The spyhole rapidly surrendered to the temperature and the pane was reclaimed by frost, an eye cataracting in an instant. It was extremely cold out there tonight.

  Elvie's questing finger sought answers on the surface of the glass. She could panic and break it of course, and freeze by morning. She could lose control, try to find a phone, and summon the building's superintendent - somehow. He was a foreign fellow whose actual name was beyond significance in her memory. He would certainly be eager to remedy the tiresome complaints of an old woman at this hour.

  Or: She could solve these strange portents in her own way, to her personal satisfaction.

  The pane of the sister window reacted identically. It was as though light-impervious black paper had been affixed to the obverse of each window. When she wiped away the frost, all she could see was the reflection of her own face. Her eyes were sunken behind the tiny windows of her bifocals. Elvie Rojas still had all her own teeth. In her image she could precisely deduce the shape of her own skull.

  Across the small room the network movie gave way to the eleven o'clock news. The odor of leftover turkey casserole loitered in the air, which was thick with the warmth of steam heat. And Elvie's windows admitted no view, and refused to open.

  She had tired of standing by the windows. Her own schedule had been disrupted. It was past her bedtime. And now the punk would not be along, come four in the morning. She might not make her early-morning bathro
om call on time.

  Elvie sighed, making a sound like the steam heater. Big changes could be so unworthy of note; microscopic things could disrupt the world in which she moved. Life's big mystery. Catholics were satisfied with keeping everything a mystery; faith did not cleave to a desire to solve equations. This aberration had evolved before her own unhindered gaze. It was stimulating and maddening, but now it was not anything that could not wait until morning, and morning's mystery-dispelling light. Even if the apartment itself was working mischief on her, Elvie herself was not possessed. Her mind was her own. Her identity was concrete.

  She turned off her ancient, tube-powered Magnavox and prepared to retire.

  By the time her head met the pillow, her front door was gone. There remained a door-shape, and a knob, but no access, not even threshold cracks. From her bed, especially without her glasses, she would have been able to see no difference.

  The slats of the floorboarding melted together, fusing to a smooth and uninterrupted surface. Hairline cracks etched themselves vertically on the east wall.

  Behind their old drapes, the front windows faded out entirely, leaving black rectangles denser than lead shielding.

  The steam radiator hissed and flicked as it shut down. It never provided sufficient warmth. Without street light, from outside, it was totally dark.

  Elvie, her identity intact, consumed what oxygen remained in the now airtight room in the even, measured respirations of untroubled sleep.

  SEVEN

  Jonathan had composed a legit stage review for his own life.

  A pleasant, if trivial, rep company production of a minor effort by a deservedly obscure playwright who failed to engage a popular audience in his own lifetime. Technical aspects, though unabashedly amateur, seem promising. The drama fills adequately… but fails to nourish. It is all too emotionally uninvolving, spiceless, and would play as well to an empty theatre - a work whose very safety is offensive during times when risk-taking is de rigueur. Two stars.