By the time my father came upon the tree, Hiwatt had left for the Vornados’ party and Turk was passed out on the sofa.
To my father, the tree was a deliberate act of sabotage. He thought: This is exactly how it begins. This is step one.
Having banged on Turk’s service door long enough to stir Hastings Sebenlist from his burrow a second time, my father relented. He and his bag of burned fish went back into our apartment and out the front door, intent on the little tray of notecards by the elevators. A dozen blue Bics were in a leather dice cup on the table opposite the elevators, and he fell into one of the antique armchairs to compose a complaint, which, according to custom, he would slide under the perpetrator’s door.
He wanted to keep it simple, but he couldn’t find the right tone. Very disappointing had a colonial tang to it, an air of self-pity and saccharine innocence in the face of a crumbling social order, like some sop with a pince-nez watching his Rhodesian manor burn while the natives sharpened their spears behind him, and Unsurprising wasn’t much better, only more American in its sarcastic attempt to stave off the expression of any real feeling. Same for Shocker.
The fish reeked.
Fuckface made an appearance, but this was Turk, after all, no need to turn on a flamethrower, and the word looked silly just lying there on the notecard like a cat lounging in a doorway, anyway. He shifted into full drafting mode, filling cards front and back like a middle school toilet stall, until the stinking bag at his feet and the slowly dawning recognition of the absurdity of the project combined to produce Have a Nice Day, which he underlined twice and propped up against the flower vase behind the stack of cards.
He’d only been stalling for time. Now he stood before the elevator call button, his moment of reckoning. He examined the doors, above them the fleur-de-lis in its radiant garden of numbers, and he considered the blizzard, the potential for a power outage. Under perfect conditions, he was, at best, a wary passenger. Under current conditions, he was scared stiff. It hardly mattered that he was intimately familiar with this particular elevator, assembled in Toledo, Ohio, a Haughton Elevonics updated with Schindler parts, as he always paid to accompany the inspectors on their twice-yearly look-sees, the most recent of which had taken place on September 17, 1977, with Andrzej Kaczynski of the New York Department of Buildings, who’d had some stories to tell about the days of occupation, though my father hadn’t volunteered any particulars about his time in Poland except to say that he’d seen some of the countryside, and who my father trusted as much as he trusted any of the inspectors, which is to say zero. He had a special flashlight for the job, a Kel-Lite 5 cell, known to the NYPD as the persuader, and while the inspector did his cursory scan of the hoistway and pit, my father lit up the shackle ties and the rail blocks, the pulleys and ropes, squinting through the distance as though trying to decipher graffiti high on the wall of a paleolithic cave. He of course had the paranoiac’s keen eye for signs of wear and tear on the steel cables, which the inspectors disconcertingly referred to as rope, and which at the Apelles was eight-strand, superior in tensile strength to the perfectly acceptable six-strand—or so you would think. Oh god, the lectures he could deliver on von Mises stress and friction coefficients on drive and deflector sheaves, the immense pressures that could cause the rope strands to score the channel, which would in turn abrade the individual wires, causing deeper scoring, more abrasion, until the strands unfurled one by one, edging toward the inevitable catastrophic failure. So, ultimately, did you want lithe, low-coefficient six- or burly eight-strand? Well, there was a lecture for that, too. He understood in equal detail the safety features of modern elevators, the emergency brakes that made it impossible for a car to careen unheeded to the floor of the shaft, yet that knowledge did nothing to assuage his fears. He believed in extraordinary coincidences. A probabilistic number could be assigned to the likelihood that a pulley would fail at exactly the same time the safety features would fail. The probability might be small, but it existed, and its existence alone was enough to give him the raging palps. He not only believed in extraordinary coincidences, he expected them to be catastrophic. Not only would the engine fall off the jet, it could coincide with the failure of the other three engines under whose power the plane could easily have gotten home. And once you were thinking that way, why not expect the simultaneous failure of the wings, the avionics, the fuel lines? What was stopping the plane from turning into a ball of flame halfway through an otherwise uneventful flight?
That’s how my father walked through the world, waiting for the subterranean steam pipes beneath his feet to rupture at exactly the same time an air conditioner slipped loose from its mooring twenty stories up. Every time he ventured out of the apartment he was confronted by new ways to die. An elevator was a coffin on wires.
Sometimes, under the right circumstances (proper lighting, endorphin levels, barometric pressure, etc.), he could overpower his fears, but that night the storm was one variable too many.
Stage one had been the Christmas tree. An innocuous domestic abnormality, but one that funneled him into: stage two, in which he is forced to take the elevator, where he is trapped when the storm conspires to engage: stage three, power loss. And
