Catbox

This had to be the place. The man raised his hand, shifting more of his weight onto the cane. His knee ached from the long walk—the medication ran out days ago.  Fragments of lifeless conversations drifted to his ears from the lobby behind him—“Morning,”… “Nice weather, huh?” …“Any plans this weekend?”...

 For no reason in particular, he punched the elevator call button. Muscle memory, he thought. Or, what was the phrase? Déjà vu? He’d lost count of how many identical elevator lobbies he’d been in over the years.

He had, in fact, been here before—at this exact point in space. By his reckoning, he stood precisely where the doorway of his childhood room used to be. The only variable that had changed—office building notwithstanding—was time. About 80 years, give or take.

He’d spent countless hours in that room. Each knot and scratch on the hardwood floors, the hastily hidden crayon marks on the walls, the faint imprints on the ceiling where he’d once drawn the Big and Little Dippers (much to his father’s chagrin), were woven into his identity. This sterile stainless steel elevator entrance had once been a warm oak door, as familiar as his own reflection. He could almost see the dent where his younger brother had thrown his first baseball one Christmas morning long ago.

Once, when the man was around eight, or maybe nine, his mother gave him a full spool of yarn from her sewing kit. The bedroom became a network, a dense web of green strings. It traced endless paths through the air, from the bedpost to each round dresser drawer handle, from the ceiling fan blades to the light switch and back again – everything was woven together, entangled. Only a small child could he navigate the room at all.

“What is this?” His mother asked suspiciously, as the network threatened to expand into the hallway.

“A bridge!” he’d said, pointing at a pile of tiny green army men, cast aside hours ago.

“A bridge? From where to where?”

He paused. In his mind, there were too many possibilities.

A soft chime jolted the man back to the present. The cold elevator door slid open, and the man hobbled inside. The doors closed behind him with a soft click. Like being shut in a box, he thought.

The transition was so seamless, he didn’t even notice at first. Images began to resolve, memories condensing out of the air itself. The cold metal door began to soften. The polished tile beneath his feet dulled, warming beneath his feet. Familiar scratches and knots crept over the walls, like a drop of ink in water.

The green yarn unwound around him, filling the air, moving through his body. But it didn’t seem like yarn at all. Everywhere, he began to see more strings. They were hard to see, at first, keeping to the edges of his vision. Trails. Connecting everything around him.

They were not still. They flowed, like a gentle breeze moving through long grass. At times they densified, forming shifting images before his eyes, flickering like a campfire. A grassy field, an open pit, a skeletal frame, a faded ceiling, a tall shaft—each merging into each other. A cycle, starting over again. And then it went further. Blurs of people streaming through, their paths crisscrossing and merging. A skeletal frame. A faded ceiling. A tall shaft, dark and empty. He saw a tiny pinprick of light at the top. Then, flames, dust, smoke.

Flames danced and flickered, but he wasn’t just seeing the flames. He was in his old room. The dust. The smoke. The yarn. The frame. The field—it was all there, in the flames. The flames began to fade. The longer he looked, the clearer the image became—a memory condensing into reality.

 * * *

“It’s okay, this happens all the time,” the young man smiled calmly, resting his gear on the pristine lobby tile. He’d learned that, somehow, it reassured people to know they were part of a pattern, a familiar cycle. He tried the elevator door once again.

“Still no luck?” the woman asked nervously.

This was always the most difficult part of his job—prolonging uncertainty. The young man shook his head.

“It’ll be a few minutes before we can get this door open. But we will, I promise.”

“It’s more than that,” she said, “He hasn’t been taking his medicine. He hasn’t been returning my calls or answering his door. And now he leaves the facility and ends up here? Something’s wrong.” He looked at her uncertainly. 

* * *

The old man stepped farther into the room. Matter flowed around him, parting at his passage like stalks of wheat in the farmlands of his childhood. The ground solidified beneath his feet, dissolving back into strings as his lifted his feet with each step. He moved towards his old desk. The strings emanated from it in all directions. They densified into recognizable images towards the center of his vision, and seemed to lose control, or focus, or integrity, or something as they moved away.

He reached towards the desk. It bore imprints of thousands of hours of drawings and writings. Didn’t his father always say not to push down so hard? His eyes moved across the desktop. The desk assumed some semblance of a solid state as he looked on, but as he moved his eyes, the markings changed. The knots moved. It was like his eyes were shaping physical form, carving reality out of uncertainty. Were these the remnants of some alternate past? He couldn’t be sure.

* * *

“Sir? Can you hear me? Try to stay calm. We’re doing everything we can to get you out of there. Sir?” The closed elevator door stared back blankly, stubbornly. No response.

He turned to the woman.

“Does he use a hearing aid?” he asked.

“No, his hearing is fine,” she said, her eyes flickering downward.

“I’m sure he’s okay,” he told her. He hoped it was true. He turned the key again. The door didn’t budge. “Please stand back, ma’am,” he reached for his irons. With a grunt, he wedged them inside the hoistway door and began to pull.

* * *

It was like being unstuck in time. He couldn’t come up with a better way to describe it. He could see everything. He wasn’t in an elevator. He wasn’t in his room. He wasn’t anywhere. And yet, he was everywhere at once.

* * *

“We’re almost through, sir. If you can hear me, please step away from the door!” With an almighty screech of metal on metal, the doors came apart, their spotless stainless steel deeply scarred by the irons.

At last, the box was open.