I stood waiting for the elevator, but the light inside the button was burned out so I had no idea when it would arrive, or even if it had been summoned.
Not one to waste good thinking time, I imagined that the entire universe - its mystery, its hydrogen, its soupy backwater of organic material, various alien spacecraft, the black holes that held the whole thing together - had stopped in unison, locked in a strange synchrony with an elevator, in a grimy building at the end of a one-way street, on a random Friday in downtown Sandusky, Ohio.
I fumbled in my toolbox to see if I could replace the light and get the elevator, and the universe, moving again, but it occurred to me that nobody carries around a supply of replacement elevator button lights, and that ‘nobody’ included me.
I had been dispatched to pick the lock of the maintenance office on the third floor, in order to free the handyman trapped inside. As I stared blankly at an unmoving floor indicator, I couldn’t help but think that the poor bastard’s next project would probably have been to fix that fucking button. At the moment, I failed to sense the strong irony because, as Friday night would have it, I had attained a more-than-adequate level of insobriety.
The dispatch text I had received interrupted a particularly austere bottle of pinot, along with a related mystery. The bottle’s label announced that it was a 1974 vintage DeLoach, but any sommelier worth his salt knows that the DeLoach vineyard didn’t exist until 1975, and of course they wouldn’t uncork their first bottle of fruity, aromatic goodness until at least 10 years later.
In hindsight, that should have been a clue that the universe and all of its previously-moving parts had become frayed and glitchy.
As I stood there waiting for something that would never come, a fitting metaphor for the entirety of my life up until that day, I suddenly felt thirsty, and not just a little. I was about 67 percent intoxicated, so through wine goggles it felt like a thirst tailor-made for a busy-but-never-precocious sauvignon blanc, probably from the Marlborough region of New Zealand.
But it was much stronger than that, and while I stood there pondering the cause of my sudden dehydration, I noticed that my reflection in the elevator door looked different. Like, ten years older somehow.
Also, where had everyone gone?
I snapped back to the here-and-now, and noticed the elevator door was standing open. I stepped in, not questioning its suddenly-regained functionality, my thirst, my reflection, and that feeling about the universe.
Oh, and the wine label.
I crossed my fingers and pressed a button. That poor bastard on the third floor wasn’t going to rescue himself.