We piled in at the bottom. Just an ordinary elevator, in an ordinary city, somewhere in the northwest. Faces you'd never recognize when you got out. Mine included. Going nowhere, just up, all of us just going. There were nine of us in the small moving room. Crowded, but unwilling to acknowledge each others presence. Taking cues from our world, our lives, our culture, we were as nondescript as our portable closet. Until the accident.
Somewhere around the fifth ding, indicating another floor, everything went to pieces. For twenty, maybe thirty seconds there was nothing at all. In that time I am at a loss, I know that's the climax, the moment they'll all want to record when they tell the story, but those are the moments I've lost.
What I do remember is finding my way out of the shock. In the mist, in the grey filth suddenly we weren't so irrelevant to each other. There was debris everywhere, blood, dust, tiny broken pieces of things I didn't even realize were in the elevator. Looking around, seeing before I began to hear, I noticed how much stuff there was. Stuff is the best word I can find. Plastic pieces, shards of glass, buttons from clothing, electrical wires, all the little things you forget about. Then I began to hear, screams of anguish from those silent mannequins who had boarded moments before. No longer we were individuals ignoring each other for all the polite and social reasons, we now felt each others every emotional and physical pain. We came together some time in those few moments I lost. With the dust unsettled still these were my brothers and sisters.
We tried to heal each other, save each other, comfort each other. Together we reached through our broken surroundings trying to communicate with the outside world. What had happened? There were no answers. Only chaos. It wasn't an elevator of nine, it was a train of 500, maybe it was the whole world. Our steel lined hearts had been shattered.
