Quality Control

The elevator slides into view. Through the window on the door, rectangular and heavily glazed rectangular window, a dark form is apparent, resolving itself into the form of a man’s back, his hands smoothing his hair. He must be looking at his reflection in the mirror in the back of the elevator. The door opens, metal scraping against marble with a yelp. It’s not a man, it’s a boy, albeit a big one, beefy but docile. His school-uniform necktie is undone and draped down his chest. Behind him in the elevator car is his sister, shorter, pretty in a somewhat bookish way. She is wearing the female counterpart of the boy’s school uniform, although hers is perfectly composed. She steps out after him, keeping her eyes down, although her face has a hint of a smile that remains like a burn in the retina after she breezes past.

On the street, in the gray morning light, doormen in sweatpants and holey T-shirts rub down the cars of their tenants. Taxis putter by intermittently. A soldier drags a decrepit wicked chair, bringing it back to the garbage heap from whence he borrowed at the beginning of his shift. A dog lunges at him, trying to play, but is held back by his leash.

Haze has whited out the sky, making it totally opaque. Maybe there is no life beyond this street, with its pastel-colored high-rise apartment buildings, every tenth one still under slow construction on some desultory schedule, rickety-looking wood scaffolding over the façade or heaps of sand and bricks in the front yard. Two houseflies settle on a window screen. In a balcony, a woman in a white gallabeya sweeps.

 

The sun takes two hours to burn a hole through the haze. In an apartment building, a man sits at a computer, facing the window. Sunlight illuminates the sickly moistness of his tall forehead. He types, with a doomed look about him, his overgrown hair frizzed out like a Davy Crockett hat. Behind him, a fan whirs, its grill turning clockwise to spray the artificial breeze around the room. Then, a crackling noise as a spark flies out of top of the fan. The man doesn’t notice immediately and keeps typing. Then he looks up from the computer and sniffs. Stands up and goes to the fan. The grill continues to carousel, but the white fan blades behind it are motionless and do not respond as he presses all the buttons sequentially, then randomly. The brand name across the top of the grill looks at first like SONY or SANYO, but it’s not; it’s SONYA, because this is a knock-off fan. On the bed, a small dog sleeps with his stomach upturned, his jowls spread out luxuriously, exposing dark pink flesh.

The man licks his dry lips. He walks to the kitchen, opens the freezer, looks in. Reaches for the ice cube tray, which is pink. He does the common motion used to remove ice cubes from their tray -- wringing the tray -- but the tray cracks in two. He’s left with a jagged half of the tray in each hand. A single ice cube falls out of one of the halves and onto the floor. The dog appears and efficiently places his mouth on the ice cube, then picks it up and exits the kitchen.

The man leaves the apartment, the fan clamped under his arm. He opens the elevator, causing a yelping sound of metal scraping the tile. A whirring mechanical sound rises in pitch like a spaceship. The interior of the elevator car is lined with stick-on wallpaper bearing a simulated wood grain pattern, not quite covering up the previous generation of avocado-green simulated-marble wallpaper. The man presses a button in the wall panel and the car proceeds downward. With no interior door, the car faces directly onto the inner shell of the apartment building, so the full cutaway view of the building is visible as the car descends: concrete, metal, door, metal, concrete, etc. Although the fluorescent bulbs flicker so as to induce nausea, the man takes in his reflection in the mirror at the back of the elevator. There is a smear of orange lentil mush on the lower part of his T-shirt, which is light green. The floor of the elevator car is covered by a square Oriental rug flecked with grit.

The elevator stops with a mechanical grunting sound. But the door won’t open. Through the flickering fluorescent light, the man sees that the car is stopped at mid-floor: He looks out at nothing but concrete. An ant skitters across the concrete. The man presses the buttons for various floors to no effect. He looks at the yellow button at the top of the panel bearing an image of an alarm bell. He presses it. A faint and anemic version of a siren emits. The man releases the button and the sound stops. He waits. He holds down the button again. Stops. Waits. He sits down on the Oriental rug. Gazing up, he sees the word “DJ” graffitied in black marker on the ceiling of the car. Then the fluorescent light goes out entirely. In the darkness, the faint wailing sound of the alarm is heard, then it stops.

An institutional-looking clock high on a wall somewhere shows 3:20 p.m.

In the darkness the man recollects the dream he had the night before.  A dinner party in a tidy, upper-middle-class apartment on the top floor of a hotel.  He enters and sees guests sitting on a white L-shaped sofa set.  Their eyes rebound off him as if they are mortified. He coughs, offers apologies, and sits down at the table, which is covered with a white tablecloth. The hostess is somewhat nervously finishing up the arrangements under the gaze of the guests. She sets a coffee mug near the center of the table. The man absentmindedly lifts it to his lips and gets a faceful of nuts: It’s a snack bowl meant for the group, not a coffee for him. Embarrassed under the gaze of the guests, he reacts by mocking his own error. “You know me. Stupid me. I’ll drink anything that’s in front of me!” Clowning, he feigns lifting the flower vase to his lips. Or rather, feigns too enthusiastically, and, in jerking the vase, spills it. A wave of slightly gray water runs over the white tablecloth and starts trickling onto the floor. The man realizes that his last chance is to handle this situation competently.  Otherwise he will have to flee the party a hunted man. He runs from the dining room to the kitchen looking for a rag to stop the spill from spreading, pushing open the door to the laundry area. On a heap on the washing machine, he spies a swath of denim.  He grabs it and tears off a portion, then realizes it was a perfectly good dress. The hostess approaches the laundry room. He throws the ripped cloth back toward the rest of the dress. He spots a paper towel roll near the sink, tears off about 30 sheets, and runs back to the dining room to throw the mass on the rug where the water has already nearly finished its migration. He begins grinding the paper towel into the floor, the dirt on his shoe mixing with the water.

One of the guests, a young woman, starts freaking out. She wrings her hands and pulls at her hair. “I should be working!” she says. “Everything’s falling to pieces at work. I’ve gotta get back there. I shouldn’t be here. I’ve gotta go to work!” The man sees her distress as the perfect opportunity to seal his persona in the party as a fix-it-man, and thus finalize his social redemption, so he abandons the mopping-up and grabs the woman by the shoulders and begins trying to reassure her.

There’s a sharp rapping on the door. It’s a policeman with a mustache, and in a scolding tone he orders everyone to get out because there has been a terrorist bomb threat, and the building is being evacuated. Something flies by the window: It’s someone who just jumped from the top of the hotel. Another jumper thuds morbidly into the parking lot on the side of the building. In a panic, the partygoers flee.

The elevators are disabled, so people spill randomly down the stairs and fire escapes in a maze, running across floors to reach the next length of stairs, bursting through the rooms in the hotel portion of the building, unexceptional three-and-half-star suites that are dimly lit in late ’70s dark browns and pine greens. The people find they cannot resist lingering in these hotel suites, which, in the emergency, have suddenly become complimentary. How often, after all, does one get the opportunity to enjoy a free hotel room? They sit on the beds to test their softness. They fidget with the cellophane sheets wrapped around the fruit baskets, and they peek into the mini-bars, glass bottles clinking in the door tray. Soon they’re sitting around with friends “making the most” out of the crisis, relaxing, chatting. The man scoots across one floor and peers into a room where three business-dress-clad early-thirtysomethings are gathered around the open door mini-fridge, one woman sipping from a purloined drink bottle and sitting in a hard plastic chair, her blouse unbuttoned to the sternum, tossing back her long curly brown hair as she laughs at a comment from a smirking man in tight suit pants standing in front of her, while a mousy woman stands to the side of them.

The reverie ends as the fluorescent light in the elevator flickers on.  The man pushes the alarm again and within the hour the super has pried open the elevator shaft door and hand-cranked the elevator down to the next floor.  The man emerges and continues, carrying the fan like a baby.

--November 2002