In the building where I work the elevator is still not working. I walk past it and try to ignore the “Out of Order” sign hanging in front of the black doors. In the morning when the sun is still trying to climb above the buildings and the first floor is still dark and shadowy, the elevator doors seem to be a hole, a dark tunnel, you can almost feel the void.
This was before OSHA; worker safety was haphazard and occasional. There are scars scratched into what we call reality, you can’t always see them, but sometimes you can hear them.
For a long time, the area around the building was known as the warehouse district. It was filled with small companies, good jobs, affordable housing. People lived and raised families, it wasn’t paradise, but it was a community. The warehouses moved out to more sweeping, long, low buildings on the outer fringes of the city. Manufacturing moved, often overseas, technology took shoes and car-seat covers and moved them into bright new buildings, filled with modern equipment. Economy of scale, profits, shareholders, there was no place for the old ways, old places. Most of the jobs were gone and life became difficult for the old neighborhood.
Jobs were scarce and people grew desperate, unable to keep up the simple, small houses, things deteriorated, it was a painful, ugly transformation. Many of the buildings were demolished. Our building stood, a lonely sentinel against the terrible march of progress.
It sat vacant for years, people without homes drifted through. There are few things so sad as the plight of those without housing. They are refugees in their own country. Unfortunate diaspora in the place they grew up. While they stayed in the building their own individual miseries and fears, the overpowering sense of hopelessness soaked into the hardwood floors, wrapped around the wooden columns and beams. There are times you can sense the tears; they are almost audible.
At some point the company bought the building, it was renovated, updated, filled with electricity and gas furnaces, fluorescent lights, high speed internet access (admittedly, that came a little later), and a rock-solid security system. People without homes are forced to be adaptable, they moved out and they moved on.
I stop and look at the elevator doors every morning. It’s like looking into the abyss. I see things, the past and future, and don’t know how much of it is true, and how much of it is my imagination, driven by the dread of another day.
Things are different, I get to the 4th floor and I’m still short of breath, but I’m not drenched in sweat. My knees are starting to adjust to all the climbs and descents but my back aches, a constant, dull pain radiating from above my left hip up and down until I’m not really sure where the pain is. Keep picking them up and putting them down. That’s the only way you’re ever going to get anywhere.
Change is the only thing you can count on. It comes and it covers the decay, it never cures anything. It only makes things different. Change has the rhythm of a sine wave, oscillating at equal distances above and below zero. Sometimes things are good, and sometimes things aren’t. It just depends on where you land on the wave.
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