A Climb Up the Stairs
You arrive later than you had intended. Traffic was slow and you made the ill-advised decision to stop at that bodega way over in the Greek district. You didn’t even wind up getting anything because your favorite chocolate soda was out of stock.
Still, later than you had intended winds up being earlier than you need to be there. Parking, miraculously, is rather easy – a street cleaning sign indicates that, had you arrived a minute earlier, you might have been ticketed for parking on that side of the street. Perhaps your dalliance with the bodega was not such a bad idea after all.
Perhaps this is fate.
You need a job. It has been quite a while since you were last employed, and you are, frankly, shocked that this employer is interested in seeing you, but you are elated at the possibility of such a job. It’s your dream job. It’s exactly what you want to do.
So you pop a nopalito-flavored skittle into your mouth and walk through the door. You are dressed in your best suit and you feel a little uncomfortable, as you rarely wear such formal attire. Your shoes are far from worn in.
The security guard stands at attention in her dress uniform, her chest covered with medals commemorating heroic deeds in the Service of the Guard. You note, quite impressed, that she has the Surveillance Star – the eight-pointed medallion earned for extraordinary service in the field of closed-circuit television screening.
Somewhat intimidated, you return her salute, and she stands at ease. You walk over to the elevator – one of those old-fashioned ones with a door you have to physically slide open or closed. Inside, there’s a stool for the operator to sit on, but there is no one in there, so you open the gate yourself.
You sit on the stool – after all, why would it be there if not for sitting? – and peruse the controls. There are buttons and a lever. The floor buttons are labeled 1, 2, 3, 4, 7, 13, 14, B, Ø, that upside-down lower-case e that you think is called a schwa, and finally “Zenith.”
You look up the room number on your phone. It’s room 204 on the bananath floor. You figure that it might be what “B” stands for, or at any rate might be near that, allowing you to walk up or down to it from there, so you push the button.
Nothing happens. You press it again, but you get nothing. You try the lever – the old style lever that simply takes you up or down. Beyond having no effect, it simply doesn’t budge. (Perhaps it would have an effect if it could budge, but it doesn’t budge, so it has no effect.)
You step out of the elevator and ask the security guard if the elevator isn’t working.
“Oh, is it not working?”
You clarify that you were asking whether it was working or not.
“It was working this morning.”
You indicate that it does not seem to be working now.
“I guess it’s not working. The stairs are through that door,” she says, pointing around a corner that you had not noticed when you first walked in.
You still have plenty of time before your interview. You thank the security guard and walk into the stairwell. It’s one of those echoy, windowless spaces that has a kind of stale taste in the air – as if the smell of the paint on the walls and the handrails, despite having been applied years ago, had had nowhere to go.
You begin to climb, hoping that floor banana isn’t all that far up.
After ascending four flights of stairs, you’re struck by how the change in altitude has affected the climate. The trees in the lower part of the stairwell were primarily tropical, but now that you’re significantly higher up, you are flanked by maples and birches.
As you make your way up another flight, a light snow begins to fall, though it is too warm for the snow to do anything but melt as it touches the stairs. Despite the fact that it is July, you catch a whiff of that wintery fireplace smell on the air. An American flag someone has not yet taken down after the 4th ripples in the chilly breeze.
You really should have dressed more warmly for this. If only the elevator were working!
At midday, you stop for a quick meal in a cozy looking diner on the twenty-flood floor. It looks almost exactly like the diner form Nighthawks, until you remember that it is, in fact, the diner that Edward Hopper based his painting on. This is a historic building, which is one of the reasons you’re so excited to work here.
You check your watch. There’s still plenty of time.
Your meal is simple – a Sloppy Joe with Codfish Cream (this being a classy establishment, they use the original, vegan recipe for the Codfish Cream.)You wash the whole thing down with a Sprite that is preposterously large. Borrowing a scarf from the host, you step out of the diner and continue your ascent up the stairs.
You reflect on how wise it was to renew your gym membership, as you would be far more out of breath climbing these stairs if you had not. You reach the affluent floor and decide to take a step outside of the stairwell – to explore the building, as you’ll probably reach the bananath floor in only an hour or so.
You walk out into a little observation lounge where caterers wander through the crowd, passing out cocktails and hors d’oeuvres. You’re still quite full from the Sloppy Joe and the Skittle earlier, so you simply have yourself a Scotch and Soda and gaze out over the cityscape that must be thirty, even forty feet below you.
The party here is in honor of Armadillo Steve, who just won some prestigious acting award – unfortunately not the Oscar, but oh well. You shake his hand and congratulate him.
“Good luck on the interview,” he says. “Or as we actors say, break a leg!”
Oh yes, you respond, you know. All too well.
The two of you down a shot of cognac and then you give your regards before climbing up to your interview.
The final push up the last set of stairs is arduous, an epic struggle that involves the defeat of several Guardian Beasts and one rather ambivalent Lich, but as you wipe the grimy ichor from your sword, you and the Lich share a laugh.
“Give ‘em hell,” says the undead sorcerer.
You smile and indicate that you’ll certainly give it a shot.
“Fake it ‘til you make it,” he tells you.
With a puzzled smile, you nod and open the door to the bananath floor. There is a sofa that sits next to the receptionist’s desk. The receptionist takes your name and smiles. She lets your potential future employer know you’re here.
Of course, she won’t be able to see you for at least fifteen minutes. But that’s ok. You meant to get here early.
-Szolo
