I used to play a game with my brother. We’d stand in the backyard and close our eyes. and on three we’d open our eyes and stare directly at the sun for as long as we could bear it. Eventually we’d close our eyes and laugh until the pain went away. Just thinking about that staring game now makes my eyes hurt, but back then we thought it was hilarious.
We did things like that a lot. Burned our knees on the carpet seeing who could jump off the highest stair. Gave each other pink bellies, slapping our hands against the other person’s bare stomach. We didn’t know any better.
That’s the only way I can describe what happened when I found the elevator. Imagine staring into the sun.
Going back Up would make all the pain go away.
The elevator is gone, and I don’t think I’ll ever get to see the sun again. It’s eyes-closed-forever now. Only darkness.
I can hardly step out in the sun at all anymore, let alone stare at it. Cancer. I think about cancer every time I’m outside. The sun hates us, you know.
I took the job at Vorci-tech because Sadie told me that it made her quite a bit of money and she could work from home whenever she wanted. The money was fine, but all new hires had to work from the small storefront with fifteen full-time employees who packed the place out. Without all the people, it might have been a nice space. Tall boy tables, IKEA couches and chairs, bright green stripes along the back wall that reminded me of the rows of lodgepole pine trees I used to drive past to get to my parent’s house up north. Espresso machine, kombucha on tap–stuff management knows our generation loves to consume but would rather not pay for. But even the most scenic drives are ruined by bumper-to-bumper traffic, and a lounge doesn’t feel all that loungy with three asses crammed into one loveseat.
Jeff put me downstairs. In other circumstances, I might have preferred it down there.
That’s where I found the elevator.
No thought had gone into the basement decor. Boxes stuffed with old promo junk—pens, shirts, and buttons—filled a row of black metal shelves across the back wall. Eight office chairs hid in the corner like pool balls from a game half over. A white mug with a black mustache sat on a folding table against the far wall.
Jeff walked me down the first day. “It’s tedious stuff you’re doing,” he said. “Thought you might like a quieter work space.”
“Thanks,” I said.
“Important,” he assured me, “but very tedious.”
I spent the morning scouring Twitter on my phone for the trending news. Then TikTok. Then Twitter again. I opened my laptop for the first time around 10:30. I read through a backlog of emails from Jeff and the marketing team about their hopes to enhance SEO and streamline user experience. I texted Sadie, listened for her phone to ding from the stairwell, but couldn’t hear anything over the sound of falling feet and garbled voices.
<Lovin my new digs>
I sent her a picture of the cement wall in front of me, then one of the brown ring of old coffee lining the inside of the mustache-mug.
She texted me back. Nothing memorable. I think she thought it was funny. I guess it was.
I came upstairs around lunch time. Sadie was on a Zoom call. I waved to her, and she waved back from outside the camera’s view, but didn’t look up. She has a wave she does where she just uses the middle three fingers of her hand. I’ve always thought it was sweet.
I grabbed my coffee and a bottle of water from the minifridge before heading back downstairs. I found a tennis ball in one of the boxes. I spent the rest of the day pitching that ball against the cinderblock walls. Towards the end of the day, I pitched the tennis ball into the corner and sent it careening underneath a portable pipe and drape system Vorci-tech used to stage corporate events. It hit something, emitting a sound like distant thunder.
I pulled the sheets apart, and there she was.
I’d never actually seen a freight elevator before, except in movies—solid steel doors that open up and down, a gate on the inside that shuts like an accordion. Useful to get a cop down to a mob hideout in the basement of a fish market or something like that, not to get boxes of swag down to the basement of a suburban strip mall.
I opened the door and stepped inside. It had the look of a cell in solitary: flickering yellow light, scuffed pale walls.
I spun around when the doors squealed closed behind me. I tried to open them, but they wouldn’t budge. I hammered at the sheet metal and watched through the little window for someone to come down the stairs, but no one did.
The elevator took me Up for the first time.
There were only two buttons inside—up and down. I swatted at both, but the elevator continued to climb.
I braced myself for the humiliation I’d feel when the doors opened. I hoped Sadie would see me first because she would laugh and then I would laugh and soon we’d all be laughing like friends. Like family. That wouldn’t be so bad.
When the doors opened, there were no people.
Just my chair. The folding table. My laptop, the pipe and drape, the boxes, the tennis ball still resting a few feet from the door.
I had gone up.
I had.
And yet there I was in the same place.
I know now that it wasn’t the same place at all. I wasn’t in my world anymore.
I was Up.
A subtle buzzing settled like a dew on my skin. I breathed it in—no, inhaled it—and that first breath gave me butterflies. Except they weren’t confined to my stomach. They flew everywhere. My feet. My fingers. My elbows. My hair. My eyes. I couldn’t understand how I’d gone up and nowhere at the same time, but the butterflies, the dew, pulled me away from the answer to that question like a dog on a taut leash being pulled away from a dead squirrel.
I walked up to the lobby and found it was actually quite large. This room could comfortably seat thirty people if it had to, maybe forty. I poured myself a coffee, sipped it slowly. It was rich and sweet and earthy. I plunged my nose into the steam, sending the butterflies into a frenzy. I sat down on a couch, aware that at any moment Jeff would see me and banish me back down to the basement, but he never did. An hour passed. I sat on that couch, undisturbed. I sipped until the day was nearly gone and the glow of the setting sun dyed everything a soft pink.
My coffee never got cold.
Sadie found me before she left and asked if I wanted to come over to her place. I said of course I would. Because I loved Sadie. Up there, I somehow loved her even more.
Now I know it wasn’t love, just the butterflies, the dew.
Her apartment was three miles from the office, but when she started to walk, I did too. I hadn’t even considered that my car might get towed or ticketed if I left it parked there. It wouldn’t have mattered if I had.
We were together. We were Up. Nothing else mattered.
We ordered a pizza and ate it curled on opposite ends of her couch, our feet stretched out, our calves mindlessly grazing against each other. She told me things she’d never told me before about her parents, the way they’d write notes to each other and leave them on mirrors and windows and steering wheels. Once, she found a note that simply read “You have a wonderful smile.” Sadie thought that was the most beautiful thing in the world.
I told Sadie that she had a wonderful smile. She said thank you, that I did, too. The butterflies went bananas. I almost said it again right there, just so that I could hear her say it again and feel the butterflies beat their wings against the inside of my chest, but instead I just gazed at her until she laughed and told me I was so weird.
We watched a movie. I can’t tell you what it was about or who was in it, but I loved it.
I fell asleep next to her on her couch.
I opened my eyes to the alarm on my iPhone.
I was back in my own bed.
I couldn’t remember how I’d gotten there. All I remembered was the dream I’d had of Sadie and I on her couch. I remembered how much we’d laughed and smiled. It had to be a dream, because it wasn’t like that with me and Sadie. She never told me things about her parents except that they hated each other and she wished they’d split up. They didn’t write each other notes. They didn’t smile.
Honestly, neither did we.
I did smile as I rubbed my throbbing temples.
Damn if that wasn’t a great dream.
I drove to work that morning in the car that I had certainly, though unknowingly, driven home the night before. I filled a Styrofoam cup with coffee the moment I arrived at the office. I sucked it down, chewing on every last ground in the bottom of the cup despite the nausea from my headache.
I was still trying to fight off what was certainly on the verge of becoming a serious migraine when I saw Sadie sit down on a bar stool near the window. I waved to her. She waved back. Any other day I would have stopped to say hello. I would have tried to steal her attention for as long as I could.
That day, I didn’t.
Dream Sadie was better.
This Sadie looked like someone who’d lived through a tragedy. Looking back, I suppose she had.
Reality is a tragedy. All of it. Every moment.
I watched the window in the elevator from my chair in front of the folding table, but it never lit up.
That evening, I walked Sadie to her car. I told her that it was a nice enough day. Maybe we could leave our cars overnight and walk home. She laughed.
“Sounds wonderful. It’s like ten miles, but, sure, let’s walk.”
She clicked the button on her key fob and unlocked her Subaru with a ka-chunk. I asked her if she wanted to hang out, maybe get a pizza, but she said she wasn’t feeling up for it, so maybe another time.
I went home. I tried to dream—of Sadie, the cup of coffee, the dew—but I couldn’t even get to sleep. I tossed and turned until the sun came up.
I picked up a Monster from the gas station on the way to work the next morning. Drinking it was the first time I thought about cancer. It had only been a passing thought then.
Now, I think about it constantly.
I walked quickly through the office, head down. Jeff still greeted me with a pat on the shoulder before I could disappear into the basement.
“Go get ‘em,” he said, and suddenly I felt the need to shower because you really shouldn’t touch people like that. Not at work.
The dark basement helped soothe my headache, but only a little. I rested my cheek on the cool plastic folding table and closed my eyes.
When I finally picked up my head, the light in the little window was on.
I bolted to the door. I opened it and smelled the lingering scent of butterflies, felt the coolness of that intoxicating dew. The doors closed behind me. I pushed the ‘up’ button, but the elevator was already on its way.
The pulley squealed for thirty, maybe forty-five seconds before coming to a stop. I gripped the handle, but froze.
I wonder what it feels like higher Up, I thought.
I pressed the ‘up’ arrow again. The elevator rose higher.
I rattled the door open and drew in a deep breath. The dew filled my lungs. I started laughing so hard I could hardly keep from falling down. When I pulled myself together I ran out of the basement. The light shone down the staircase in long thin rays. Flecks of dust rested on the white lines of light like music notes on a score. I could have sung those notes. I’m sure of it. If I’d taken the time to slow down, I could have sung every one of them. Instead, I let them dance around me in a whirl as I passed through the light.
I knew everyone’s names the moment I saw them, and they knew mine. I shook and slapped hands as I made my way to a chair by the window overlooking the sidewalk where two puppies were climbing over one another, occasionally catching a paw on the vinyl leash attached to the adults chatting alongside them.
“Sometimes I like to sit here, too.”
I turned and saw Jeff over my left shoulder.
“Sun sets right over there. I watch it ‘til it goes down behind the flower shop.”
He drifted off, and had I not said anything I wondered if he would have sat there for hours, waiting for the sun to fall.
“I was just taking a break,” I said. “I’ll head back down.”
Jeff furrowed his brow.
“Back down where?”
And in that moment, I didn’t know. For the life of me, I couldn’t remember.
To where did I mean to go back down?
Sadie ate lunch with me that day at a sandwich shop around the corner. A few other people from the office joined us. I was halfway through my Reuben when two strangers sat at the table as well. For the next hour or two, we collectively nodded our heads, laughed when someone told a joke, shook hands as we went our own ways, the dew filling all our hearts to the brim.
If there’s anything these days I trust less than the sun, it’s strangers. I can’t enter into a casual conversation with my own mother, let alone a stranger. Just last week she told me that she thinks that there’s a reason you hardly ever see white people begging for money in the streets. “They just don’t seem to have that sort of proclivity.”
“A proclivity,” I said.
“You know what I’m saying. I don’t have a problem giving money to someone who needs it. Honestly, I tend to buy food if I can, but that’s not the point. I just think—well I’m not going to even say it. You really can’t say anything these days.”
And that’s my mother. God knows what kind of shit goes on in my dad’s head, let alone a stranger’s.
Sadie walked with me from the sandwich shop to my car to ride home with me. We lounged on my bed and talked until the sun went down, then long after that, late into the night until she yawned.
“Hold me?” she asked. “Just until I’m asleep? Is that alright?”
I told her it was more than alright.
She rested her head on my shoulder, her fingers on my chest. I listened to her breathing, gently caressed her arm until she fell asleep. I stayed up as long as I could, but eventually the night won. I fell back Down, into a deep sleep.
Again, I woke up alone in my bed, an indescribable pain behind my eyes.
When I finally mustered enough strength to stand, I staggered to the kitchen, guzzled three big glasses of water, and slammed 1000mg of acetaminophen. When I finally stepped outside, the sun nearly melted my eyeballs. I managed to drive three blocks with my eyes nearly closed before pulling over and calling Sadie to ask if she could pick me up and drive me the rest of the way.
“You should have been here a half hour ago.”
“I know,” I said. “My head is killing me. I can barely open my eyes.”
“Then stay home. Call in sick. I can’t pick you up right now.”
“When can you?”
“What?”
“If you can’t pick me up now, when can you?”
“Jesus. Just call in. Hell, don’t call in. No one is going to care. I do it all the time.”
“I can’t,” I said. “There’s something there I need.”
She sighed, then I heard her laptop snap shut.
“Where are you?”
Ten minutes later, her car pulled up. She beeped the horn. I waited for a moment, hoping she would come help me stand up. Instead, she opened the window and hollered for me to hurry because she had to be on a call in six minutes. I picked myself up and followed the sound of her voice.
She dropped me off at the front door before parking in the garage across the street. She might have asked if I needed help getting in, but I can’t remember for sure. I stumbled through the crowded office, down the stairs, into the darkened elevator.
I pushed ‘up.’
I waited, but it wouldn’t move. The light wouldn’t turn on.
I pressed the button again, pounded my fists on the door. The sound sent throbbing pain through my head. Still, I pounded until my hands hurt.
“The hell is going on?”
Jeff stared back at me through the little window with his hand on his hips. He might as well have had a whip. The power structure that we have here, man. It’s a real mess. A real disaster.
I opened the elevator door and stepped out.
“Sorry for being late,” I said. “Had a migraine.”
“I’ve never seen someone tear through a room like that because of a migraine.”
I pinched the bridge of my nose. His voice, man. His tone.
“I just needed something.”
He stepped closer, tilted his head.
“You shouldn’t be here if you’re sick.”
“It’s just a migraine.”
“Still,” he said. He spoke like I was a child and he was telling me to try to make potty even if I didn’t feel that special tickle. “You should go home.”
“It’s the light. I just needed to get out of the light. I’ll be fine now. I promise.”
Jeff sighed, shook his head.
“I’ll check on you in a few hours. See how you’re doing.”
He never did.
I watched the door all day. Just sat there and watched and waited.
Eventually I fell asleep. I woke to Sadie shaking me, telling me to get up.
“Time is it?” I muttered.
“Jesus, why the hell are you still here?”
I looked at the elevator. Dark.
“What time is it?”
“It’s 6:30. I had a late meeting, but everyone else left hours ago.”
“I had to take care of a few things.”
“Sure,” she said. “Looks like you had a very productive day.”
She drove me to my car. I drove it home slowly and called Sadie when I got home. She told me to get some rest. I told her I would.
And I tried. I really did.
But I couldn’t.
I couldn’t shake the sense that everything—food, couch cushions, TV shows, red wine, shampoo, toothpaste, bed sheets, pillows, all of it—was better Up. Not just better. Best. Perfect. Ideal. The jokes in my favorite shows scratched at me. I read a book for a while—one I’ve loved in the past—but I couldn’t shake the pictures it painted in my head of hate and violence, pain and suffering.
The dew has a flip side to it. When the buzzing goes away, everything else starts to rot.
But it was always rotten, wasn’t it? Wasn’t it always this way?
I opened the window. The fresh air met my face and all I could think was that there was something toxic in it. The landlord must have used fertilizer on the lawn. God knows what that does to someone’s neurological well-being. I closed the window and watched the sun rising, hoping to feel something other than tired and frightened, but nothing came.
At five-thirty, I finally stepped out into the fertilized air and drove to work.
I waited in my car for an hour until Jeff showed up to unlock the office doors. I watched him through the front windows until he retired to the bathroom for his morning shit, then I went inside, tiptoeing slowly, softly down the stairs into the darkness.
There it was.
The light.
It beamed through the window like a lighthouse beacon. I almost cried.
I pulled the door up and pounded the ‘up’ button. I looked back, expecting Jeff to be there, looming, but he wasn’t. I was all alone.
Jesus I could have fallen down, broken my neck, killed myself on those dark stairs. Thousands of people die on stairs every year. Look it up.
The thought fell out of my head when the elevator started to rise.
It climbed faster, faster. It didn’t slow for a long time.
It just kept going up, up, up.
When it finally stopped, the doors opened on their own. I felt a rush as the dew washed over me with the force of a firehose, the butterflies gripped me with their little sticky feet and nearly pulled me off the ground, carried me through the ceiling and towards the sun.
The light was still on. What if this was the last time? What if it never came back on again. Maybe if I kept going Up, I wouldn’t have to come down the next morning. Maybe I could leave the Down world for good. Maybe I could stay Up.
I slid the door back down and slapped the button again.
It rose and rose and rose.
When the doors opened, I pulled them closed. The light was still on. I could still go higher.
I climbed until the lights turned off and the elevator stopped for the final time.
This must be the Top, I thought. This must be the very end.
And what a high. The violent butterflies. That heavy dew.
I remember the Top in flashes. I remember greeting the others from the office, waving and shaking hands and laughing at jokes. I don’t remember a single individual, just nameless, faceless, people-shaped blurs.
I remember Sadie in flashes as well. Us walking home. Her laughing and placing her hand on my thigh. Her hair falling down across her bare chest.
Up that high, even Sadie looked blurry.
Don’t wake up.
Even though I wasn’t asleep, I thought it over and over again.
Don’t wake up. Don’t wake up.
It made sense up there.
But eventually, I did.
The last time I saw Sadie, she had come to my apartment to drop off a bottle of sangria. I’d been Down for over a week. Maybe two weeks. Hell, maybe three. Her knock on my front door echoed through my apartment and beat against my temples so hard that I threw up in the wastebasket next to my bed. Eventually, Sadie used her key, which she had the whole time and if she’d thought about it for just a second, she would have remembered and used it and spared me the sour taste of vomit in my mouth.
She kept calling my name louder and louder and louder.
“Jesus,” she said when she saw me. “Oh my God.”
“What?” I asked.
My face was covered with a wet washcloth, but I heard her walk towards me.
“You look—”
“What? What do I look like, Sadie?”
“Like complete shit. Complete and utter shit.”
I felt her hand settle on my shoulder like a cattle prod, and I screamed and slapped it away. I heard the bottle she brought fall to the ground. She told me she was going to take me to a hospital, asked me how long I’ve been lying here like this, when was the last time I got any sun, why the windows were covered in trash bags, could I hear her voice.
I said of course I can hear your voice. Stop screaming.
She knelt down by my bed.
Please don’t touch me, I said.
I won’t, she said. What’s happening to you?
You think I look like shit?
What?
That’s what you said, isn’t it? That I look like shit.
You look like you might—
You want to know what I see when I look at you?
The hell are you—
And I could have said something then about the elevator. How I’d used it to go Up. I could have told her about the dew and the butterflies. How sick I felt after I came Down. I could have told her how frightening everything here was now or what it was like to see the world through the sweet dew on the wings of butterflies.
I could have, but I didn’t.
Instead, I told her that she had the fattest ankles I’ve ever seen.
So she left.
There’s a lot wrong down here, you know? I didn’t see any of it before, but I see it everywhere now. The world around us is nothing but a sandstorm, a constant barrage of whirling glass particles, grating us down like blocks of wood. Each gust peels a piece of us away, leaving us raw. Those layers keep us safe.
But maybe if we lost those layers—if all of us lost them, all at once—we’d all be better off. Maybe we’d fix some things. Maybe then life wouldn’t hurt so bad.
Then again, maybe then everyone would be just as scared as I am to go outside.
The sun hates us, you know.