The New Order

by Karen E. Bender

  She looked at him. She didn’t like the way he spoke to her. Push. The button was on the panel beside her. She had already pressed it.

  “I did,” she said, icily. She pushed the button again, and there was a high, wheezing sound, as though some essential circuit had broken. “Look.”

  She saw him step toward the button panel; she quickly stepped back. He leaned forward and pushed it, too.

  “No,” he said. “Dammit. No.”

  She felt protected, somehow, by her age, the idea that she was too old, too wilted now to attack; but perhaps she was just thinking this to comfort herself.

  “They’re fucking going to fire me,” he said. He jabbed the Emergency button again.

  He assumed she was listening. She pushed down the reflexive urge to comfort him, to say anything. He was not the man who had spoken to her those many years ago. But what had been left on her, the residue over all these years, was the idea that he could be.

  This man in the elevator was anxious; she could see that, his glossy, dark hair a little damp around his forehead. His lips were red as if he had been eating a Popsicle, his features brisk, alert as though filled by a gust of wind in the back of his head.

  He pushed the button one more time, and there was the long, hoarse shriek the button made.

  “What a fucked-up building,” he said. He staggered back and leaned against the wall. “Why are you so calm? Don’t you want to get out of here?”

  She couldn’t help it; she almost laughed. She didn’t answer.

  “Don’t you?”

  She stared at him. She could say nothing. She put her palm on the elevator door in case she could feel a vibration, a prelude to the doors opening, when she could jump out.

  He squinted at her, as though the elevator had gone dark. It was painfully bright, actually. There was a chandelier in this elevator; perhaps some perverse person had tried to imagine this metal chamber as a living room. She noticed, for the first time, that the chandelier was broken, two of the dangling crystals chipped. The light from the chandelier glared so strongly she could almost see the shadow of his skull in his face; she wondered if he could see hers as well.

  He sighed, sharply.

  “They’re going to kill me,” he said. “Do you hear me? They. Are. Going. To. Gut. Me.”

  That last sentence made her jump a little; she gripped the ballpoint pen in her purse.

  He slid down so he was sitting on the dusty floor of the elevator and rubbed his hands over his face.

  She watched him. She was taller than he was at this moment. She wondered if she heard sounds of life outside the elevator, or if she was imagining it, the rumble of footsteps, a door slamming, a woman’s laugh. But it felt as though the world had vanished, leaving only this cramped elevator stall, the golden walls gleaming in the relentless bright light from the broken chandelier. She had never quite noticed the golden walls of the elevator, how their grandeur implied some innate failure about the people riding it, how the riders would see, out of the corners of their eyes, blurred, gold reflections of themselves.

  The man was speaking into the palms of his hands. “They said be there at three p.m. on the dot with the photos or don’t come in. Fuckers. I just know Smith planned this. I bet she’s stopped the elevator right now.”

  She stood, silent.

  He released a sharp sigh. “Smith! I see you! You cunning bitch. You can’t do this! I’m watching you right now.”

  He spoke the words directly to the elevator doors. His anger toward Smith seemed like a form of longing. She felt he was waiting for her to ask a question about Smith. It was a hunger she could feel, palpably, in the elevator, and, as a mother, was familiar to her. His own mother had, it seemed, ignored him or belittled him. She stood, sensing that hunger all around her, and, with enormous effort, she did not answer it.

  She was aware of her own hunger, huge, yawning inside her, to get out of here. She needed to get to her meeting. Today they would discuss ways to organize information about the end of the Civil War. The supplementary online material linked to chapters in the textbook, what was the budget and who they would hire to write it? The regular plans, how luxurious they now seemed. The staff was probably talking about her now, wondering where she was. She was ridiculously punctual, never absent or even late. But she was not afraid in the same way he was; well, she was, a little, but she was one of the senior people in the company, which protected her from the consequences of being late. The broken elevator was, after all, not her fault. They would, she assumed, be worried, but someone from maintenance would apologize, she thought. Are you all right? They would ask. I hate getting stuck in elevators. They would think it an inconvenience. They would not think of the others in the elevator with her, the travelers in this small, close space lifting eyes to their particular destination.

  He was afraid, for other reasons, and she sensed his fear, thick in the air. She felt relieved, and fortunate: her fellow employees would, she believed, not punish her for her absence. She was, she thought, not in the same situation that he was in, and understood that she could not reveal this to him.

  “She planned this,” said the man, his voice a little hoarse. “You know? I could see it when she was sitting at her desk just staring into space and pretending to do nothing, but she was. I know it. Thinking about me.”

  She watched him gaze at the elevator doors, staring at whoever was on the other side. What was this Smith doing right now? She imagined a woman in a trim black suit walking quickly down a hallway, holding her coffee carefully away from her. Did this Smith, whoever she was, think of him, or notice him, or even know who he was? She remembered all the times she had thought of the first man in the elevator, and how she wanted to erase him from her mind, and wondered if perhaps that was part of what he had intended, to remain in her mind in that way, to establish this, a presence.

  Her heart was still marching, full, and she was alert. He was still sitting on the floor, his long legs stretched in front of him.

  The space held a peculiar, motionless heat, a dead, quiet airlessness. The elevator hung over a long, dark chute, nineteen floors above the ground. It did not move, but she was aware that they were standing in a fragile metal box, glancing at their golden selves as the elevator was suspended in the stale air.

  He glanced up at her. “Why don’t you say anything?” he asked.

  She was not going to answer. She was going to stand there; her palm made a pale imprint on the gleaming elevator doors.

  He regarded her, his eyebrows lifted. He was, she thought, trying to figure something out. Perhaps he thought she was deaf. Should she pretend she was deaf? Maybe she should pretend she had a disease. Didn’t people do that, sometimes, to dissuade others from approaching them? On the elevator door, her hand was just barely trembling.

  She could sense him wanting her to speak, so that he would not be alone in this elevator. She understood, though she did not share this—he did not want to be alone. It had only been a few minutes, but it seemed the rest of the world had become nothing. Its presence was quiet and unknown. But she liked not speaking. He knew nothing about her. What was he guessing? Whom did she resemble? Did she think she was his mother, his sister, his girlfriend, what? Her own life felt like an exercise in deception. There was the meeting she was about to lead, the glorious and unsettling moment when the staff, assembled around the table, clutching Styrofoam cups of coffee, eyeing the rubbery muffins on a paper plate, waited to hear what she had to say. The theater of the meeting itself, the fact that some people were assigned lesser positions, paid less money, even if they were smarter, or even better at their jobs, the heavy and living silence about this inequality, the fact that they all sat around the conference room, nibbling at the crackers or grapes, pretending that no one was aware of this. The fact that she sat at the head of the table, now, and that she was the one to call a meeting to order, that she tried to turn the direction of the company the way she wanted, that the oth
er employees asked her for direction, even if they perhaps resented what she said. She was the first woman at her company to hold that position and found the view from her place at the table like gazing across a long, troubled sea.

  The man sitting on the floor was looking at her.

  “I’ve seen you,” he said.

  “What?” she asked.

  “I’ve seen you with her. In the hallways. Yep. Sixteenth floor.”

  He examined her with a new shrewdness, a desire to figure something out.

  “I don’t work on the sixteenth floor,” she said.

  “Yes, you do,” he said, sitting up. “You know her. Tell her I’m coming. I’m going to be at work. Tell her not to worry. I’m late because I had to buy the car. It’s not my fault. Sheila said buy the car. I didn’t want the car, I didn’t want more payments, for fuck’s sake, student loans. She wanted to ride in it. So I bought it. I’m not going to be late. Tell her. Come on. You’re best friends, right? Tell her.”

  He was sitting straight up against the elevator, his face wounded with misunderstanding.

  “See, I know,” he said. “She probably texted you a few minutes ago to ask, is he in there, is he in the elevator and you said yes, in fact he is—”

  “I don’t know who you’re talking about,” she said, slowly. “And you’re wrong. I don’t work here.”

  She listened to herself speak.

  “I’m never here,” she said. “I’m never in this building.”

  Her body became still as she said this, for this statement, though false, described something she understood. She sometimes believed that she was not in fact in this building or this elevator or even in this precise body or life. Her actual arms and chest and legs felt almost weightless as she said this, adjusting to this new reality.

  “I’ve seen you,” he said, trying to look her in the eye.

  “It wasn’t me,” she said, her voice louder as she went on, “it was someone else. I’m security. They called me. I’m here—I’m here to make an arrest.”

  He blinked, uncertainty unfurling across his face. She was right about something. He had done something he felt guilty about, whether it was criminal or not. He looked away; everyone is pierced by a form of guilt.

  She wondered where the original man on the elevator was now, after thirty years; perhaps he was in a nursing home. Perhaps he was dead. She imagined him buried, a lawn stretched, a green haze, over him.

  “There was a disturbance. Seventeenth floor,” she said.

  He rubbed his palms slowly along his thighs, as though trying to warm his hands.

  “I didn’t hear anything,” he said.

  “Half an hour ago,” she said. “You didn’t hear it. You weren’t here. Well, we got a call. There was screaming. The secretary called us. There was screaming.”

  This was exactly what had happened. A part of her felt certain of this, even though none of it was true. This new reality presented itself to her as a clear relief. Her face was hot, but she hoped he could not detect anything true about her in the crushingly bright light of the elevator.

  “Don’t you hear them?” she asked.

  “What the hell are you talking about?”

  She laughed, and, that time, it sounded like a human laugh.

  “I hear them,” she said.

  Standing by the elevator, she pressed her cheek to the golden doors. There were sounds, perhaps; running, the precise heaviness of masculine footsteps, the whine of a vacuum. Or nothing.

  “Bullshit. Who do you hear? Who?”

  She was not going to answer him.

  “Sloan, it was Sloan I bet,” he said. “Idiot was under so much stress. I saw him here yesterday, he looked like he was going to have a heart attack. Was it Sloan?” He tapped his fingers against the floor, almost joyful. They made a sound like mice running. He paused.

  She held still, not saying.

  “No it wasn’t,” he said. He stood up. “It was my girlfriend, she screamed this morning before she got out of bed, I made her scream, I’ll tell you—”

  He was standing beside her. His voice was heavy, as if a boulder were sitting on a piece of paper. His eyelid twitched.

  “Not a scream like that,” she said. “No.”

  He was silent.

  “What? Was someone killing someone?”

  Her cheek twitched; then she forced herself to look up, into his eyes. They were brown. She had expected them somehow to resemble a lizard’s, but actually they looked more like a cat’s, or, actually, like neither. She said, quickly, “There was an attempt. There was a lot of blood. There will be many arrests.”

  Her voice came out louder and flatter than she expected. He lurched back. There were surprising dark shadows blooming under his armpits. He banged on the door another time, and the door thunked so loud she could feel it in her face.

  “That’s not fucking true,” he said, looking at her. “That’s not—”

  “It’s true,” she said. “You don’t know anything.”

  “What the hell do you mean?”

  “I know everything,” she said, softly.

  “You do? So what are they going to do now? In fifteen minutes?”

  She heard something else, the thinness of his voice, as though he had been shouting forever. It seemed as thin as silk.

  “They’re on their way,” she said, firmly. She had no idea, but felt certain she was right. It was, perhaps, what they both wanted to hear. She liked saying it. “They’re on their way. I hear them.”

  She pressed her body against the cold elevator door. She listened, and there were no distinguishable sounds on the other side, nothing that told her anything about life out there, or whether anyone was coming to open the elevator, or working in their respective offices, or was present in the world at all; but there it was, she thought, the sound, a low roar, the almost imperceptible gargantuan power of the machinery of this building, the faint whirr, if not of screaming, of relentless hunger, of something else. The man in the elevator also pushed his shoulder against the door. He was facing her. He was perhaps two feet away. His cheek was pressed, with all of his weight, against the golden door, and his eyes were closed as he tried to listen to the screaming she claimed was on the other side. The broken chandelier above them flickered; it looked like it was about to go out. She was cold. The elevator doors were cold. She imagined, with envy, the day happening outside this building, the sun moving with its heat and brightness through the sky, and the shadows of clouds falling across the buildings, the sky blossoming from blue to yellow to orange to red to a darkness that revealed stars. She was not here, not in this place, not in any enclosure; she was here, with this strange package of herself, wanted to be out there, out there; she wanted to be everywhere in the world; she did not know how to get there. The smell of the man’s orange gum was sickeningly sweet. She watched the man, her fingertips touching the door, waiting for a trembling, a vibration, waiting for sounds to indicate that someone was coming to open the doors and let them out.

  Three Interviews

  Finally, Ms. Gold was called in for job interviews—three of them. There had been silence for about seven weeks, this round, and then representatives from the Human Resources departments called all at once. She said yes immediately to each interview. She was delighted. Yes. Yes. Yes. Each job a reduction in salary and benefits from her previous position. The interviews were all scheduled for one day, and this last week she tried to find a new outfit to wear to them—the shirt or jacket that would convince the employers: Yes. Yes. Yes. Her. She stepped into stores that catered to the young, stores that sold to women twenty years younger than her. She tried to find outfits that would be appropriate for someone her age—she was on the other side of forty-eight—and stood in front of a mirror wearing a navy jacket with red rhinestone buttons on the cuffs. She liked the jacket, but she wasn’t sure about the buttons. She turned around in front of the young salesgirl, who stood wreathed in
a brilliant, kind smile, almost motherly, for which she must have been hired.

  “What do you think about this for a job interview?” Ms. Gold asked, touching the rhinestones.

  “You look terrific!”

  The girl’s voice was too eager to be sincere. Now Ms. Gold would have to ask the next question.

  “I mean,” she said, “is it all right for my age?”

  The girl’s eyebrows twitched, just slightly.

  “Maybe,” said Ms. Gold, reassuringly, for the salesgirl seemed to need rescuing from this question, from her.

  She had been out of work for seventeen months. Before that, she had been, for many years, a senior reporter for a travel industry weekly; then the magazine fired half its staff. Since she walked out of the building, she was in this inchoate state: searching for work. She thought she had learned to calibrate her hope, that wild, muscular dog inside her—she learned to press it down. She thought sometimes that the dog might leap out of her, leave her empty, a husk. Or she tried to learn the precise balance between hope and a clear understanding of her prospects. She was not young. Or that was how others viewed her. She felt young, thirty-five maybe? An age when life still seemed to be an endless road. She wanted to undo whatever had gone wrong to get her to this place, the constant staring at the Internet job boards, the tense smiles when people asked her what she was doing now. The corrosive, luxurious domain of other people’s pity. The employed people’s pity. How much force it took to block that, a poisonous wind; all she needed was an office, a duty, a check. She knew she was a skilled reporter, she knew that. But to reach back and pluck out, like a gray hair, the flaw or action or incident that had led to this situation. And forty-eight, over a year without a job.

  If she purchased this jacket, would the world open up for her or would it shut her out? The beauty and anxiety of each action was that it could lead to everything or nothing. She had not been in love in five years. It was no one’s fault. The world doled out moments of light and then, when it wanted to, withdrew them.