49 Seconds in the Box Larry Loebell
Mira waits in the lobby of her building for the elevator, a canvas bag with an All Things Considered logo over her right shoulder. One of her neighbors, Arnie Paul, who has recently moved into the building, steps up beside her. Also waiting is a pair of millennials who live on the third and fourth floors respectively, in condos the owners have rented out. Both have their eyes fixed on their phones, checking messages, texting. The elevator dings. There is a slight pause between the signal that the car has arrived and when the door slides open. Mira and Arnie start to enter the elevator simultaneously, playing “after you Alfonse” for a moment. Then Mira yields and Arnie goes first. The millennials follow her. Arnie notices that Mira does not have her dog with her. It is the first time Arnie has ever seen her without her Labrador snugged up against her leg. Mira shifts the All Things Considered bag from right shoulder to left. The bag holds the leash and collar of the missing dog, Jake. Mira finds her spot, then stares at the floor. Arnie pushes the button for the seventh floor, the floor on which they both live, she at 706, he at 702. At the last minute, a man with a Roto-Rooter uniform enters. He carries a toolbox and a drain snake. He seems to have come from nowhere. He chunks his toolbox onto the floor, pulls a folded up work order out of his shirt pocket, reads it, and stuffs it back in. The door of the elevator glides shut. There is a familiar click as the interior and exterior elevator doors disengage. The Roto-Rooter man reaches over and pushes two. Glancing up, Mira notices that the buttons for three, four, and seven are already pushed, but she has not seen that happen. Arnie has pushed the seven for both of them. As soon as the elevator starts to rise, Mira counts under her breath. She is counting backwards from forty-nine. This is the second time she has counted down today. She is coming from the vet’s office. The vet has cared for Jake for eleven years, ever since he was a puppy. Dr. “Please call me Steve” Saylor, is solicitous and kind. He sits on the linoleum floor during exams and procedures, getting down on the dog’s level, clearly a dog lover. Mira looks at her shoes, hoping her neighbor does not talk to her. She does not particularly like him and does not want to talk to anyone today. Arnie has made it abundantly clear that he was not a dog lover. Despite this, Mira feels sorry for him. Arnie is the caretaker of his dying wife. Mira sometimes hears her moan when she passes their door on the way to her own apartment. The five passengers ride in silence. The whir of the motor and the winding sound of the lift cable fill the car. When Mira’s daughter comes to visit, she always complains about how long it takes for the elevator to make the climb from the ground to the top floor. “That’s five minutes of
my life I’ll never get back,” she says each time to her mother. She has always been prone to exaggeration, though Mira cedes the point about the elevator’s speed. The elevator dings as it stops at the second floor. The door opens. Mira pauses in her countdown. When Mira timed the ride years ago, she pushed start on her wristwatch timer precisely when they started to rise. The trip clocked out at forty-nine seconds. She checked and rechecked it a dozen times. Since then, each time she rides she counts backwards under her breath from forty-nine, finding a kind of meditative purpose in it, her dog at heel, her hand scratching his head. Today, waiting in the vet’s office, with Jake lying at her feet, she made a tally. Four outings together a day, times two trips each time, one down and one up, times three hundred sixty five days a year, equals two thousand nine hundred twenty trips a year, times eleven years equals thirty two thousand, one hundred twenty trips up and down. At forty nine seconds per trip, that’s one million five hundred seventy three thousand, eight hundred eighty seconds, divided by sixty seconds per minute equals twenty six thousand, two hundred thirty one minutes, divided by sixty is four hundred thirty seven hours, divided by twenty-four equals eighteen days. Eighteen days of her life in forty-nine second increments. If that isn’t proof of love, she thinks now, trying to comfort herself, but lets the thought go unfinished. When the doors open on the second floor, the Roto-Rooter man hefts up his toolbox in a two handed, two-step move, like he is doing a clean-and-jerk, and exits. He stands in the elevator foyer, looking down the hall. Then the door closes. He is gone forever, Mira thinks. The elevator restarts. Mira resumes counting. The elevator is a tasteful updating of the original gated freight lift that had been an advertised feature of the building when it opened as a shoe factory in 1916. Restored during the condo conversion the year Mira bought in, it has a marble floor and a new door, but all of the sculpted brass fittings from the original have been preserved. Having made as many trips as she has over the years, she understands her daughter’s pique; sometimes the elevator feels like it is glacially slow. Today is such a day. Because it was the only elevator in a building with fifty-four apartments, there are almost always other riders, and therefore multiple stops. If it stops at every floor it can take as long as two minutes. The car is rated for 2000 pounds, roughly the weight of six people. Thinking of her calculations again, Mira begins to silently weep. On her shoulder, the All Things Considered bag is suddenly unbearably heavy. The elevator dings as it stops at the third floor. Mira pauses in her counting. The door opens. One of the millennial kids gets off. He never looks up from his phone, never says a word to the rest of them or acknowledges them in any way. The door closes. The elevator starts;
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