The New Order

by Karen E. Bender

  “Eva,” I said, speaking slowly, “I agree, it is not the most calming sight. But, please, think about the alternative. This makes the most sense—”

  We were sitting in the sanctuary, close to where she had hidden under the pew, waiting to hear news about her husband. Outside, the afternoon sun remained bright, which seemed a peculiar deception.

  “No. It’s going too far,” she said.

  “What is going too far?” I asked.

  “Honey, the real fear is ISIS. ISIS is going to come destroy us. What we need to do, really, is bomb ISIS. Not hire a guard.”

  A door was closing on my heart.

  “Eva,” I said. “Take this seriously. What are you talking about?”

  “Don’t you watch the news?”

  “Which news?”

  “The news I watch says the Nazi thing is overblown. ISIS is what to worry about—”

  “Eva, didn’t you see what happened in Virginia? They were carrying machine guns and yelling horrible things—didn’t you hear this?”

  She would not look at me. We sat in the sanctuary, in the pews, facing the bima. To others, it perhaps looked as though we were there for a simple and reasonable purpose. The light fell through the stained-glass windows onto the carpet. The squares of color lengthened, like roads, along the floor. I’ll be honest; I had always been aware of the exits. But now I watched them with a new, sorrowful alertness. Our bodies made long gray shadows in the bright squares. Our shadows were ageless and identical. I stared at them, trying to figure out what they said about us.

  She shook her head briskly.

  “Nothing is going to happen,” she said. She let out a small sound I could not identify; not quite a sigh. It tried to resemble relief.

  “Why not?”

  She called me when she was waiting to hear about her son. She called me after her husband died. Then, her voice was perfectly flat, like no human voice I had heard before.

  “The son-in-law celebrates Shabbat,” she said. “He would not allow this.”

  “Eva,” I said, “that’s crazy. Who cares if he celebrates Shabbat. For god’s sake, people are arming themselves.”

  “Where did you hear this? I didn’t hear—”

  “Eva, please. Are you kidding?”

  She did not look at me.

  “Stop,” she said, sharply. “Stop.”

  Her eyes were filled with tears.

  “Eva, we’re all scared,” I said.

  Once upon a time, Eva and I liked to sit together Friday nights. We sometimes shared the prayer book. We stood beside each other when the rabbi opened the ark. We were not young people. Sometimes I wondered who would, one day, say the Kaddish for us. Our voices sounded so similar when we murmured the prayers together. Now, as I sat beside her, I was afraid of anything she said.

  The afternoon light fell, a deep gold, on the carpet. If we sat here long enough, the room would darken and our shadows would vanish. Now our shadows looked like monsters as they stretched, longer and longer, in the low light.

  “Please, Eva,” I said. “We need a guard.”

  She removed her glasses, took a Kleenex from her purse, wiped them off. She put them back on.

  “We have our notes, honey,” she said. “Look at our notes. We did our job. We have good suggestions—”

  “It’s not enough,” I said. “It’s not.”

  She blinked, her eyes brown and large. “Don’t worry,” she said. She patted my hand. Her hand was trembling.

  Boom. There was a sound somewhere in the synagogue, a thudding sound. My heart jumped. I looked around; the banging was coming from the front door. Boom. Boom. Boom. Someone was knocking. It was three in the afternoon and no one else was in the building; the sound vibrated through the room. There was another knock, this time louder. The door shook.

  Neither of us moved.

  “Are they expecting a delivery?” asked Eva.

  “I don’t know.”

  “Is it the rabbi?”

  “Wouldn’t he have a key?”

  There was a pause, and then the banging on the door continued. Eva and I sat beside each other in the empty room; she smoothed down her jacket, her fingernails painted a pale pink. She touched the ends of her gray bobbed hair. She moved very slowly, with a deliberate quality that I recognized. Her face held no expression, was blank as a cloud. I stood up halfway in my seat, gripping the front of the pew. We turned our bodies toward the door but did not step toward it. “Hello?” I called softly. “Hello?” A silence, for a moment, then two; we stood, watching. Perhaps it was no one. But then—the pounding began again. A couple sharp knocks, then faster. The door was trembling. I waited to begin to dissolve. What would vanish first, my skin, my arms, my hair? Eva grasped my forearm, and I felt her holding on to me, and I held on to her, and we stood there, we just stood in that empty room as the knocking at the door grew louder and louder.

  The Elevator

  She was riding the elevator to her first job, as an assistant at a music magazine; the world fell away as she rose to the fifteenth floor. She was twenty years old. During the few months she had worked in this office, she had learned how to move names from column A to column B for event invites, make a collated set of Xerox copies, carry a cardboard box full of six different coffee orders. There was something remarkable and sparkling about all of it, the fact that, each morning, she entered the waiting room and did not have to remain there like the others, but was allowed to walk through the doors into the crammed gray hallways. The glaring fluorescent lighting stretched across the ceiling, the glass-windowed offices surrounding the main area like individual aquariums—she loved all of it. Entering the offices was like walking into a stranger’s enormous, beating heart. She went to work each morning hoping the editors might soon trust her with more interesting tasks, for she wanted to show them everything she was capable of, which was endless and vast; however, each day, they asked her, barely looking at her, to do the same dull things. But today she wanted to change the editors’ view of what she could do. She was going to ask for more responsibility. She had practiced this, with her roommate, was thinking about how to set up an interview with the lead singer of the Go-Go’s, if she should just call the musician’s publicist or ask the editor first.

  It was a slightly shabby elevator, in need of renovation, with the feel of a bathroom from the 1970s, the pink artificial marble-like panels faded, like almost invisible veins. The carpet was the color of a pale sky and always held the bitter odor of cleaning chemicals. The doors closed. She stood, examining the numbers flashing on the strip at the top of the elevator, and was only vaguely aware of a man standing in the elevator with her, and that they were alone.

  The man turned to her and said, “I could rape you.”

  Her thoughts, curving in one direction, stopped. They looked at each other. He smiled, as though this were a joke. An iciness flashed through her. She was new to office buildings, and she didn’t know—was this a joke men in offices made?

  He was of indeterminate age, perhaps forty or fifty. The age at which some men developed a soft, vulnerable chin. His skin was a pinkish shade of pale, as though he never got out in the sun. The low lights in the elevator made him look glazed, made of ceramic.

  She remembered how he looked at her then, rapt, as though this were a discussion they had been having.

  She remembered wanting to ignore this statement and get back to her previous thoughts, but her thinking had been stopped by this. The man moved toward her and she stepped back, and he touched her shoulder in a gesture that appeared strangely paternal, except for the fact that his other hand reached over and squeezed her breast, just for a moment, holding it as though he wanted to test its presence. She felt her body gasp. She understood that, in that moment, anything could happen. The elevator doors opened. He darted out without looking back. The doors closed and she was alone in the elevator now, which slowly took her to the fifteenth floor.

&n
bsp; So many years ago. It happened so quickly. Sometimes she wondered if she had imagined it. But why would she imagine someone saying anything like that? And since that time, when she found herself alone in an elevator with anyone, she got out. She got out even when she was with her children, when they were young, eight, ten, if it was just them and a man she did not know on the elevator. She noticed when people were getting off floors. A hot cloud rose in her, though she appeared calm; she would grab her children’s hands and step out onto the wrong floor while the person inside stood, watching.

  “This isn’t our floor,” one of the children would point out.

  She pretended not to hear and then said, “Oh. Wait a sec.”

  Slowly looking around, waiting for the elevator door to close. Sometimes the man inside would try to be polite and hold the door for her, waiting for her to step back inside, which was not what she wanted.

  “Don’t wait, go ahead,” she’d say, waving her hand.

  She would wait for the doors to close.

  She had ridden many elevators in her life. When she graduated from college, she rode one to the twenty-sixth floor of the publicity firm where she worked as an assistant. When she got married, she worked at a company on the sixteenth floor. When she had her first child, she was still at that company, with that terrible supervisor who promoted the coworker who sat on his lap when he asked her to; she remembered walking by the supervisor’s office and seeing the woman perched on the edge of his leg, and occasionally she heard laughter that sounded like bullets were hitting the wall. Then she left that company and worked on the twenty-sixth floor of another building, a very fast, almost brutally efficient elevator, which never made any sound. It whisked her to the floor where many of the employees seemed to be sleeping even when they were perfectly awake. Somehow, this brought out a more authoritative part of herself, and she listened as she told people what to do, and often they followed her direction. Trying to wield this authoritative voice in other places—in the kitchen, in doctors’ offices, in principals’ offices—trying to press down the words slowly, to sound calm. The way the world came at you. The way hearts gave out, suddenly, the way children had their own plans. The feeling of always wanting to know what to say, to be prepared. That office, on the twenty-sixth floor, was in New York City, a very tall, dark granite building with a view of Broadway facing north from Thirty-Fourth Street, and the lights trailed out, bright necklaces, glittering strands that she wanted to grasp and climb like ropes. So she pulled herself along, year after year.

  The company where she worked for the longest period, ten years, was located on the thirty-seventh floor. She had become the senior editor at a textbook company, overseeing history books for middle grades. She was proud of the way she shaped the textbooks. She could tell the students what about the past was important to remember. Sometimes she thought back on the moment when the man in the elevator had turned and looked at her. She thought about that deliberate, unexpected shaping of the day. What had he gained, for himself, with that action? When she had walked off that elevator, she had, in some automated version of herself, walked to the assigning editor to ask her how to interview the music star. She did not remember what the editor had answered.

  She felt the city, the pounding of steel cranes, construction, the watery swish of cars, vanish as she rose to her places of employment, as she stood in the rising elevator, a sensation, in the soles of her feet, of both lightness and fear. The numbers flashed in elevators all over the nation, in Los Angeles, in San Francisco, in Atlanta and Miami and Houston and New York, the elevators all somehow united in this cause, taking people up and up and up and up to some bruised version of usefulness, or simply the slow shuffle through each day, all of these elevators rising as people stood, eyes gazing at the numbers above the doors, the oddly human sound of inhaled breath as the elevator rushed through the chute, as the employees were lifted to the floors where they worked, to the seats that they claimed, to the windows they gazed through, as the sunlight hit the city, the buildings glinting in the radiance like columns on fire.

  The memory of that moment in the elevator dissipated, buried under the tumult of her life, but it was maintained in her bones, in the structure of her posture, for when she stood in elevators, there was always this subdued alertness.

  One day, when she was in her mid-forties, past the time when she was perceived as a young woman but not quite sliding toward being old, she was in the elevator, heading to a meeting. She was thinking about the fact that she had to check on a statistic about casualties in the Battle of Gettysburg. So she did not notice when the elevator had let out people on the thirtieth floor.

  And then, on the thirty-first floor, the elevator lurched, as though it were a heart beating irregularly, and, with a perverse, cheerful whistle, stopped.

  She put her hand on the elevator wall to steady herself. There was a sound like water rushing outside of the elevator, but there was no water anywhere. She waited.

  The door did not open.

  “What the hell,” he said.

  There was one other person in the elevator.

  He was bent over, his hand rummaging through a briefcase. He was tall, taller than she was, perhaps six feet. She saw the flash of his arm, but not his face. She had not been aware of anyone here. How had she been so absent, just then? She had a meeting to attend, how could she not have been aware? The elevator was about eight by eight feet. She had never really perceived it as a space before. The gleaming bronze panels, the ads framed in glass. Prix fixe at Restaurant Villa Grande on Floor Twenty-Seven. The free six-month membership at the health club on the Concourse. The plea to come and explore Costa Rica. She wanted to step into these ads, out of here, out of the space now sealing her in.

  She wanted to get out of the elevator. She pushed the door.

  The thought crossed her mind that she could kill him. It was an impulse, an idea that rose up from her gut before she could understand it. She was startled by the sudden and savage logic of this thought, how it could rise up so quickly in relation to another person. How certain she was that he would try to attack her. The intensity of this thought embarrassed her, as she understood the tenderness that gave fruition to it, the way she cherished her own life.

  She banged on the elevator door with her left fist and then fumbled through her purse. All she had that approximated a weapon was a ballpoint pen. Her purse revealed some tawdry, ill-conceived faith in human nature. The elevator door made a deep, echoing thud as she hit it, and the doors remained shut.

  “What the hell,” she said.

  She listened to her voice. Did it make her sound powerful? The concept itself seemed a joke.

  She jabbed the Emergency button on the panel but it did nothing.

  She did not want to look too closely at the person beside her. Perhaps if she kept staring at the lights on the elevator, he would stand, frozen, as well.

  She banged on the door again.

  The smell of orange gum and bacon. What was it? The odor of his breath. There was no place for breath to vanish here. He coughed.

  She had not felt fear that first time—there had been no time to feel anything. Now it rushed up, a hot force, her heart turning over and over, her entire being wanting to get out of here, away, to pour through the solidity of these elevator walls. She wanted to hit the doors so hard they broke open. Her fear was embarrassing, and for this to be visible seemed shameful, would reveal her as crazy, and she was not. She was a deliberate, organized person. She had worked hard in her life and she was proud of the textbooks her company created, she was proud of what students learned from them; she had attended her children’s dance performances and purchased school supplies and driven her family from one place to another. The heat charged through her throat, her arms, her face. She did not even know where it was rising from. She pretended to laugh—a hoarse sound, like a scrape—thinking perhaps that would defuse the situation, even though she knew nothing about the man standing
in the elevator with her, could not describe the discussion they were having, silently, in this elevator, without looking at each other. But they were having this discussion, of course, standing here, staring at the elevator doors, which remained, solidly, shut.

  Open, she thought, looking at the doors. Open.

  She would walk out, whole, untouched; the doors would just open and she would walk out.

  Sit down, she told him in her mind. Sit down. Like a child. Perhaps she could convince him. Go. Marry someone. Drive to Utah. Support public schools. Watch TV. Eat popcorn. Go outside and walk. Listen to me.

  What was he saying to her in his mind? She didn’t know. She listened to the wet sound of chewing.

  There was a rustling and he moved and there was a sense of crystal breaking inside her chest as she darted back and he banged on the elevator door.

  “Somebody!” he yelled. “Open up!”

  From the back, he appeared young. Perhaps twenty, twenty-five. He was wearing a navy suit; it did not fit him well; the jacket stretched across his waist and was a little baggy in the shoulders.

  “Jesus,” he said.

  He turned toward her. His expression was not threatening; nor was it comforting. She wanted to place him, quickly, but she could not. He was in a rush. He looked like he had shaved, with purpose, this morning; his face was pinkish, raw. He banged on the door again and the elevator walls shuddered.

  “Come on!” he called.

  He was probably over six feet tall, soft, almost feminine around the waist and hips. He glanced at her, for a moment, as though he were waiting, in a hopeful way, for her to protest his banging, but she wasn’t going to get into that.

  She stood, half on the balls of her feet. They felt light; fear had emptied them.

  “Push the Emergency button,” he said to her.