Mezzanine

by Nicholson Baker

  All right! Much better! This walking-flexion model (as I styled it to myself, in opposition to the earlier pulling-and-fraying model) accounted for the coincidence of yesterday’s and today’s breakages very well, I thought. I almost never hopped, or lounged in a storefront with one foot crossing one ankle, or otherwise flexed one foot to the exclusion of the other—patterns of use that would have worn one shoelace disproportionately. I had slipped on a curb’s icy wheelchair ramp the year before, and had used a crutch the next day, favoring my left leg for a week after that, but five days of limping was probably insignificant, and anyway, I wasn’t at all sure that I had worn these, my new and best, shoes that week, since I wouldn’t have wanted to get mountain-range salt-stains on the toes.

  Still, I reflected, if it were true that the laces frayed from walking flexion, why did they invariably fray only in contact with the top pair of eyelets on each shoe? I paused in my doorway, looking out at the office, with my hand resting on the concave metal doorknob,1 resisting this further un-welcome puzzlement. I had never heard of a shoelace parting over some middle eyelet. Possibly the stress of walking fell most forcefully on the lace bent around the top eyelets, just as the stress of pulling the laces tight to tie them did. It was conceivable, though scary to imagine, that the pull-fray model and the walk-flex model mingled their coefficients so subtly that human agency would never accurately apportion cause.

  I walked to Tina’s cube, on the outside wall of which was the sign-out board, and moved the green magnetized puck next to my name from IN to OUT, bringing it in line with Dave’s, Sue’s, and Steve’s pucks. I wrote “Lunch” in the space provided for explanation, using a green Magic Marker.

  “Have you signed the poster for Ray?” said Tina, rolling out in her chair. Tina had lots of hair, moussed out impressively around a small smart face; she was probably at her most alert just then, because she was watching the phones for Deanne and Julie, the other secretaries in my department, until they returned from lunch after one. In the more private area of her cube, in the shadow of the shelf under the unused fluorescent light, she had pinned up shots of a stripe-shirted husband, some nephews and nieces, Barbra Streisand, and a multiply xeroxed sentiment in Gothic type that read, “If You Can’t Get Out of It, Get Into It!” I would love sometime to trace the progress of these support-staff sayings through the offices of the city; Deanne had another one pushpinned to a wall of her cube, its capitals in crumbling ruins under the distortion of so many copies of copies; it said, “YOU MEAN YOU WANT ME TO RUSH THE RUSH JOB I’M RUSHING TO RUSH?”

  “What’s happened to old Ray?” I said; Ray being the man responsible for emptying the trash in each office and cubicle and restocking the bathroom supplies, but not for vacuuming, which was done by an outside company. He was about forty-five, proud of his kids, wore plaid shirts—he was always associated for me with the feeling of working late, because I could hear the gradual approach of distant papery crashes and the slinkier sounds of sheet plastic as Ray worked his way down the row toward my office, emptying each wastebasket liner into a gray triangular plastic push-dumpster, and thereby defining that day as truly over for that office, even though you might still be working in it, because anything you now threw out was tomorrow’s trash. Before he draped a new plastic liner in a wastebasket, he left a second, folded one cached in the bottom for the next day, saving himself a few motions on every stop; and he tied a very fast knot in the plastic so that it wouldn’t be pulled in, effectively becoming trash itself, as soon as you discarded something big like a newspaper.

  “He hurt his back last weekend while trying to move a swimming pool,” said Tina.

  I winced in office sympathy. “An above-ground pool, I hope.”

  “A toddler’s pool for his grandniece. He may be out for a while.”

  “That explains why for the last few days, whenever I throw out my coffee cup, I’ve had to lower it through this puffy cushion of plastic. The person who’s been taking Ray’s place doesn’t know how to get rid of the trapped air. I’ve been kind of enjoying the effect, though—a pillow effect.”

  “I’ll bet you enjoy the pillow effect,” she said, flirting mechanically. She led me to a poster laid out on the desk of a research assistant who had called in sick.

  “I sign where?”

  “Anywhere. Here’s a pen.”

  I had already half pulled out my shirt-pocket pen, but not wanting to refuse her offer, I hesitated; at the same time, she saw that I already had a pen, and with an “Oh” began to retract hers from the proffering position; meanwhile I had decided to accept hers and had let go of the one in my pocket, not registering until it was too late that she had withdrawn the offer; she, seeing that I was now beginning to reach for her pen, canceled her retraction, but meanwhile I, processing her earlier corrective movement, had gone back to reaching for my own pen—so we went through a little foilwork that was like the mutual bobbings you exchange with an oncoming pedestrian, as both of you lurch to indicate whether you are going to pass to the right or to the left. Finally I took her pen and studied the poster; it depicted, in felt-tip colors, a vase holding five large, loopy outlined flowers. On the vase was the legend, in A+ cursive handwriting, “Ray, missing you, hoping you come back to work soon! From your Co-Workers.” And on the petals of the felt-tip flowers were the neat, nearly identical signatures of many secretaries from the mezzanine, all of them signed at different angles. Intermixed with these were the more varied signatures of a few of the managers and research assistants. I made an exclamation about its beauty: it was beautiful.

  “Julie did the vase, I did the flowers,” said Tina.

  I found an unobtrusive petal of the fourth flower: not too prominent, because I had a feeling that I might have been a little on the cool side to Ray recently—you go through inevitable cycles of office friendliness—and I wanted him to see signatures of people whose sentiments he would be absolutely sure of first. I almost signed, and then luckily I noticed that my boss Abelardo’s tall and horizontally compressed conquistador signature, with lots of overloops and proud flourishes, was located one petal over on the very same flower I had chosen. To sign my name so near his would have been vaguely wrong: it might be construed as the assertion of a special alliance (my signature being closer than Dave’s or Sue’s or Steve’s, who also worked for Abelardo), or it might seem to imply that I was seeking out my boss’s name because I wanted to be near another exempt person’s name, avoiding the secretarial signatures. I had signed enough office farewell and birthday and get-well cards by that time to have developed an unhealthy sensitivity to the nuances of signature placement. I moved over to an antipodal flower’s petal, near Deanne’s name, and signed at what I hoped was an original angle. “Ray will sob with joy when he sees this poster, Tina,” I said.

  “Aren’t you nice,” said Tina. “Lunchtime?”

  “Off to buy shoelaces. One broke yesterday and one broke just now. Doesn’t that seem strangely coincidental to you? I don’t know how to explain it.”

  Tina frowned for a moment and then pointed at me. “You know, it’s interesting you say that, because we have two smoke detectors in our house, all right? We’ve had them since about a year ago. Last week, the battery of one of them wore down, and it started to go, ‘Peep! . . . peep! . . . peep!’ So Russ went out and bought a new battery. And then the very next day, in the morning, I was just on my way out the door, I’ve got my keys in my hand, and suddenly I hear, ‘Peep! . . . peep! . . . peep!’ from the other one. Two days in a row.”

  “That’s very strange.”

  “It is. Especially because one of them goes off more often, because it’s nearer the kitchen and it doesn’t like it when I do any kind of broiling. Chicken roasting—peep, peep!—red alert! But the other one only went off once that I can remember.”

  “So you’re saying it doesn’t matter if they’re used or not.”

  “Yeah, it doesn’t matter. Wait a second.” Her phone had begun ringing; she excused h
erself by raising her hand. Then, in a voice that was suddenly sweet, efficient, platinum-throated, slightly breathy, she said,

  “Good morning,1 Donald Vanci’s office? I’m sorry, Don’s stepped away from his desk. May I take your number and have him get back to you?”

  Smoothly disengaging her pen from my fingers, she located her While You Were Out pad and wrote down a name. Then, repeating product codes and amounts, she began to take a complex message. I wanted slightly to leave, but it would have been brusque to do so. What with Ray’s poster and the roasting chicken, our interchange had passed just barely beyond office civility into the realm of human conversation, and thus had to be terminated conversationally: etiquette required me to wait until her phone duty was done in order to exchange one last sentence with her, unless the message she was taking was clearly going to go on for more than three minutes, in which case Tina, who knew the conventions well, would release me—cued first by some “Gee, I’m taking off now” movement from me (pulling up the pants, checking for my wallet, a joke salute)—with a mouthed “Bye!”

  While I waited, I checked the revolving message carousel for messages, despite the fact that I had been in all morning and would have gotten any calls for me; then, reaching into Tina’s cube, I picked up her heavy chrome date-stamper. It was a self-inking model: at rest, the internal dating element, looped with six belts of rubber, held its current numerology pressed upside down against the moist black roof of the armature. To use it, you set the square base of the machine down on the piece of paper you wished to date and pressed on the wooden knob (a true knob!)—then the internal element, guided by S curves cut out of the gantry-like superstructure, began its graceful rotational descent, uprighting itself just in time for landing like the lunar excursion module, touching the paper for an instant, depositing today’s date, and then springing back up to its bat-repose. When I came in early in the morning, I sometimes watched (through the glass wall of my office) Tina advance the date of the date-stamper: after she had finished her plain donut, and had frisked the crumbs from her fingertips into the piece of plastic wrap that the donut had come in, and had folded the plastic wrap in around the crumbs until it formed a neat whitish pellet, and had thrown the pellet out, she would unlock her desk and remove her stapler, her While You Were Out pad (these tended to disappear if you didn’t hide them), and the date-stamper from her meticulously arranged central drawer, placing any extra packets of sweetener that the deli had thrown in with her coffee into a special partition in the drawer that contained nothing but sweetener packets. And then she would advance the rubber belt of the date-stamper by a single digit, a performance that by now probably began the day for her, as her first office act—just as my turning ahead my Page-A-Day calendar, with its two hoops of metal over which you guided the holes of the postcard-sized page, to the next day (which I always did last thing the night before, because I found it deflating to confront yesterday’s appointments and “to do’s” first thing in the morning) had become the escapement on which my own life ratcheted forward.

  Now I touched the date-stamper’s belts of rubber numbers, which were updated by little metal thumb-wheels; the belts that corresponded to days were entirely black, but the belt that corresponded to the decade was still red-rubber-colored and new, except for the 8, which was sticky with ink. I opened my palm and pressed the date into it.

  “Let me read those figures back to you,” Tina was saying. The interesting thing about having to stand there and wait for her to finish before I left for lunch was that, even though we had been in the middle of a conversation whose interrupted momentum was what was holding me there, the longer I stood, the less likely it became that we would resume where we had left off, not because we had forgotten the thread, but because we had been discussing light, dismissable subjects, and neither of us wanted to be perceived as having paid too close attention to them: we wanted to preserve their status as chance observations that we had happened to make in the midst of a hundred other equally interesting items in our lives we might just as easily have mentioned to each other. And indeed, when Tina finally hung up, she said, changing instantly from her telephone voice, sensing that I wanted to get going, “How is it out there?” She leaned back to look at the square of blue sky and two taut, vibrating pulley-ropes from the window-washer’s gondola visible through her boss’s window.1 “Ooh, it’s gorgeous out,” she said. “I’ve got so many things to do—Julie better be back on time. I’ve got to get a birthday present for my goddaughter, a card for Mother’s Day . . .”

  “Oh man, that’s coming up.”

  “Yep, and I’ve got to get a flea collar for my dog, and what else? There was something else.”

  “A battery for your second smoke alarm.”

  “That’s right! No, actually Russ bought extras. He’s smart, you know?”

  “Smart guy,” I said, tapping my temple as she had. “Tell me one thing—where would I get shoelaces?”

  “CVS, maybe? There’s a shoe repair place over by Delicato’s—no, that’s closed. CVS would definitely have them, I think.”

  “All righty!” I put down the date-stamper in its correct position on her desktop. “Bye.”

  “Did you sign out?”

  I said I had.

  She wagged her finger at me. “I have to watch you every minute. Have a nice lunch!”2

  I stepped away toward the men’s room, and the lunch hour beyond.

  Chapter Five

  IT ISN’T RIGHT to say, “When I was little, I used to love x,” if you still love x now. I admit that part of my pleasure in riding the escalator came from the links with childhood memory that the experience sustained. Other people remember liking boats, cars, trains, or planes when they were children—and I liked them too—but I was more interested in systems of local transport: airport luggage-handling systems (those overlapping new moons of hard rubber that allowed the moving track to turn a corner, neatly drawing its freight of compressed clothing with it; and the fringe of rubber strips that marked the transition between the bright inside world of baggage claim and the outside world of low-clearance vehicles and men in blue outfits); supermarket checkout conveyor belts, turned on and off like sewing machines by a foot pedal, with a seam like a zipper that kept reappearing; and supermarket roller coasters made of rows of vertical rollers arranged in a U curve over which the gray plastic numbered containers that held your bagged and paid-for groceries would slide out a flapped gateway to the outside; milk-bottling machines we saw on field trips that hurried the queueing bottles on curved tracks with rubber-edged side-rollers toward the machine that socked milk into them and clamped them with a paper cap; marble chutes; Olympic luge and bobsled tracks; the hanger-management systems at the dry cleaner’s—sinuous circuits of rustling plastics (NOT A TOY! NOT A TOY! NOT A TOY!) and dimly visible clothing that looped from the customer counter way back to the pressing machines in the rear of the store, fanning sideways as they slalomed around old men at antique sewing machines who were making sense of the heap of random pairs of pants pinned with little notes; laundry lines that cranked clothes out over empty space and cranked them back in when the laundry was dry; the barbecue-chicken display at Wool-worth’s that rotated whole orange-golden chickens on pivoting skewers; and the rotating Timex watch displays, each watch box open like a clam; the cylindrical roller-cookers on which hot dogs slowly turned in the opposite direction to the rollers, blistering; gears that (as my father explained it) in their greased intersection modified forces and sent them on their way. The escalator shared qualities with all of these systems, with one difference: it was the only one I could get on and ride.

  So my pleasure in riding the escalator that afternoon was partly a pleasure of indistinct memories and associations—and not only memories of my father’s (and my own) world of mechanical enthusiasms, but memories also of my mother taking my sister and me to department stores and teaching us to approach the escalator with care. She warned me not to jam a wad of molar-textured pink
gum into the gap between one curved riser and the grooved stair below it—I wanted to because I wanted to see the gum crushed with the dwarfing force of a large, steady machine, the way garbage trucks forced paper cartons to crumple into each other. She would lift my sister up as we stepped onto the escalator, pinning the noisy form of the shopping bag to herself with her elbow, and set her down on a higher stair. I couldn’t comfortably hold the rubber handrail, and sensibly wasn’t allowed to steady myself with the high step ahead of me. As we drew close to the next floor, I could see a green glow coming from under the crenellated slit where the escalator steps disappeared; and as soon as I stepped off, onto oddly immobile linoleum and then a tundra of carpeting, the soft sounds reached me from some department I knew nothing about, like the “Miss” department: clickings of hangers with metal hooks and plastic armatures, hangers that were not heavily loaded with men’s anechoic wool suits but rather were shouldering light, knitted burdens in tight schoolgirl circles around a cardboard CLEARANCE sign, accompanied by the melodious signal of the “Miss” telephone, dinging in slow sets of fours, one ding every second.