Elevator, Chicago

FEATUREs:

• Floors covered: forty-one
• Down speed: .7 floors per second
• Up speed: .8 floors per second
• Maximum weight: 3,500 pounds
• Screens: two

I have gone out of my way to avoid sharing an elevator with people I know. I’ve paced carpet-softened laps around the office. I’ve gotten trapped in a blue-lit concrete stairwell (emerging, at last, from the ground floor into a trash-drippy alley). I’ve hidden in the bathroom. It’s the small talk that gets me, and also the way we’ll part ways when the doors open, awkwardly adjusting our gaits so we don’t end up walking to the train together.

I stand on the buttons-side of the elevator, always, leaning against the wall, primed by the wobbly train to steady myself, maybe, or maybe I’m just lazy. When people enter, I adjust. I don’t remember anyone ever telling me how and where to stand. But I remember the tension created by a coworker who once stood the wrong way, facing the rest of us, his eye contact eerily constant. And I remember the drunk in the library who was escorted out of the elevator by three cops who told me, under the drooping yellow light, to stay on the opposite side until they’d shoved him out on the ground floor. He smelled like old beer and he swayed and hacked a thick cough. Two officers held him upright, and the third, hand on his gun, watched me watching.

It’s not that we act weird in the elevator—it’s that we try to act normal, like we’re in a regular room. But it’s an uncanny room, with the physical strangeness of regimented standing, the intellectual strangeness of false anonymity, and the social strangeness of conversations sliced in two: before the elevator comes and inside it, or inside the elevator and after the doors open. And then there are the other conversations, the ones already happening, those you’ll never successfully eavesdrop on fully, coming and going. Do you talk over them? Under and around? Do you pretend not to notice the small dog in the woman’s puffy-coated arms, or the business cards clutched in the man’s left hand, a bike helmet in the other?

Most people cope, as we do everywhere else, by turning to our phones. Tweets still flow in most elevators; at this point, there are few places to lose service. The three dots of a correspondent corresponding still linger, pressing possibility. But is it rude, in an elevator with people you know, to spend the vertical commute texting? Nevertheless, we slip into virtual solitude, forget the pulley system, forget the elevator the way we forget the walk to the train or the...