Fiction flashquake |
More people lived in this one building than had lived in the entire town of my youth, and though I had been here three years now, I still didn't know a single person by name. Of course I saw other tenants in the elevator, gave them pet names after their floor number or their perfume or their similarity to a movie star, but that was as far as it went. Even when I occasionally fantasized a new neighbor who knocked on my door to ask for a cup of sugar and then spent the night, the face was never more than a composite of people I had known. I never saw tenants outside the elevator, never saw them on the street, in a shop, near the publishing firm where I worked. We met and separated in the elevator. No matter how many people rode together--an intimate two or a crowded ten--words were rarely spoken. Personal business was just that, and inside the elevator, the outside world of weather and weekends didn't exist. Then this evening, everything changed. As the elevator crossed from the seventh to the eighth floor, the woman sharing my ride staggered and then caught herself. "I'm sorry," she said. "My father is dying." I didn't know what to say. Nothing seemed appropriate. Her words had made us intimate, and I was at a loss at how to put things right. Remembering my grandmother's death when I was six, I had a sudden urge to hand the woman a casserole. The instructions "Reheat at 350 for twenty minutes" would give me something suitable to fill the silence. Perhaps the fact that she was a stranger prompted me to ask, "Have you known him long?" "My father?" She laughed, and then covered her mouth with both hands, her eyes wide. I froze. Had I really said that? Before I could think of a way to recover from my blunder, the elevator stopped, the doors opened, and she was gone without so much as a glance. What must she have thought? The elevator continued its upwards path, dragging me along despite my sinking feeling. Words were my life. When had I become incapable of simple human intercourse? Yes please. No thank you. The salad, just dry. I'll have it by Tuesday. When's the meeting? Plain tuna on rye. Did you see last night's show? Did you hear the bad news? Did you ever imagine that the Princess would die? "My father is dying." The sentence was rather straightforward: no dangling participle, ambiguous pronoun, or split infinitive. What did it mean that I couldn't fashion a response to a simple declarative sentence? When the elevator again stopped and the doors opened, I busied myself with my fingernails until I realized that such behavior was the root of my problem. Taking a deep breath, I turned to the man with the beige umbrella. "Her father is dying." Ignoring the lack of an antecedent, he touched my shoulder and together we cried. |
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