Fritz’s thumb was cemented in the ‘Up’ button for several seconds.
The lift rose by one increment. A sweating rage permeated him as every fiber in his lungs seemed to scream for him to scream at the elevator control board.
With every passing floor, Fritz furiously sank his right thumb into the ‘Up’ button, unyielding until the absurdly glaring light behind it shut its eye. He would resume this for countless floors.
He knew not how he would escape the man. Fritz’s mind raced. If he were to make some sign that he was on the twentieth floor and then immediately sprint into the cloistered solace of the elevator, he could then run across the fifteenth floor, sprint down the staircase, and escape onto the first floor.
He had lost count all ready of which floor he was on. With a gripping terror, he allowed the door to slide aside.
There stood the man, interrupting two blocks of cubicles like a dot between two bars in Morse Code. A glaring sapphire washed over and past him like an Ocean. It was like seeing a lunar eclipse.
Fritz screamed again and kept screaming until the doors were firmly closed. The man took only three steps towards him, and then broke into a sporadic berserk. Fritz’s heart seized.
Fritz kept pressing the triangle as though every moment that it was illumined spared him a year in a boiling pot. All the while, the button that rested beneath it, pointing in the opposite direction, remained unillumined. He felt as though it were an absurd temptation. Moving down would serve only to submerge him in an infernal abyss.
He counted something like ten or eleven floors, and he allowed his nerves to yield to his desperate cunning.
The doors slide aside.
It was as though he had rewound an unreal episode which he had experienced on the prior floor. The man was approaching him briskly on a floor identical to the prior floor in everything but the light. Fritz saw him emerge like a bat from a cave.
The doors closed again. Fritz would not waver again. He kept pressing the button until it failed, as its twin had several eternities prior, to come alight.
The doors slide aside.
The man was sprinting at him again.
Fritz jumped out from the elevator, smashing the left side of his body against the left wall of the cell and seguing immediately into a sprint down the corridor.
The doors of cubicles sped past him.
He darted then towards that haunting corner where the black window looked upon the infernal door.
Fritz grabbed at the door with a nervous agony. He felt as though the terrifying stranger had already pounced upon him. He was being drowned in a swimming pool of whiskey. He was staring up at the underside of the top bunk. Hearing his brother's screams, his own were stifled by the weight of lion's paws sinking into his ribs, rupturing them in clumsy defiance of their uniform solidarity, and the innerds unraveling in gushes of surrender to the biological whims and needs of the oppressing predator.
These were the contents of his subjective mind. The objective was secondary. The door would not yield to him. He stared at it incredulously, pushing. He tried his shoulder. With each shove, the door doubled his effort. He pushed, each time, with a magnitude of effort that must have been to a greater exponential power than the previous attempt. Each such effort, in turn, amplified his incredulity to constantly stand double to his threshhold of exertion.
The man appeared at the end of the corridor. He was no longer running. Was he tempting Fritz? Was he teasing him? Fritz screamed as though to blow apart the windows of his aquarium. The whiskey spilled away from him in a flood that ushered in a flood of blue descending upon him from the tiles of the ceiling. He was in the hold aboard the burning ship. The lights glared down upon him like the impersonal, methodical eyes of researchers observing a paramecium lying in a petri dish under a stark white microscope. The eyes had the same degree of affect and empathy towards him that the paramecium could be presumed to have towards its observers. Fritz wanted, with a sudden urge that seemed to have originated at the moment that he first saw his hand, like a tiny rose, approaching the doorknob, to toss himself through the window, unnerved that this one fourth wall of his holding chamber had remained mercilessly, maliciously solid and unshattered as this predator, like a shark whose every tooth was surely a piranha, swam towards him with torturous hesitation.
He screamed again. Strangely, he could not hear his own voice, and neither did his nervous system register any of the impulses or sensations – any of either pleasure or pain – that would serve to indicate that he was, in fact, underwater. His scream was layered with a fleshy plea, as though he were petitioning some non-existent God for advice as whether to sprint down the corridor to his left, one horrifyingly identical to every other corridor he had seen this night that must have spanned several eternities or to jettison himself with a moment's orgasmic tension in his calves through that yonic window into the cool chasm behind, falling to the end of all pain and terror, to be found by meth addicts like vultures and to be buried respectfully.
When his own scream failed to fall upon his own ears, a rage that he could not feel crammed into his forebrain. His attention sought one final refuge in the hind-brain, where his intuition, like a blaring desk lamp whose serene, informed and equanimous amber glow penetrated the sterility of the white lamps overlooking him like fleets of Nazi jets from an unperturbed, black corner of his psyche, made an absurd joke of them.
It told him to jump. Just jump backwards. He tried. His knees folded. Within one moment, he was on his knees, as though about to prostrate himself before this approaching stranger. Within the moment, the lights swam over him and enveloped him like the comforting arms of a wave. He would run no further.
Fritz had one flashback. His father came home. He was a man with a perpetually angry demeanour. Fritz had two sisters.
Fritz had two friends over. The older of these two was a recent friend. He was the author of this book. Fritz felt himself enlivened by the strange, ornate thought patterns of this young man, who had made the acquaintance of Fritz's group by virtue of volunteering to act as a mentor for his high school Video game club.
The author had the perpetually unsatisfied demeanour of a Thoreauesque outdoorsman with what, at that original moment, Fritz had identified simply as 'a hippy vibe'. The author always seemed desperate in pursuit of some Cause, some unattainable horizon, and Fritz could not deny – and nor could he spare his friend any wry, sarcastic disapproval at the thought of this – that at times his friend's ambitions just seemed too much to involve Fritz himself, threatening to push him out of his comfort zone in pursuit of some self-righteous and surely, at heart, though his friend would never admit it, selfish pursuit.
The nerve of him. Fritz would hear his own thoughts as though listening to a recording on the kind of tiny cassette player-recorder that Fritz had once owned and held, for some time, routinely in either of his pockets. It had usually been the left, because the right-side pocket had been so frequently leased to his wallet.
I put Ubuntu on his computer. I spent hours at his house doing this, and that was NOTHING compared to the hours, which probably added up, honestly, to several days, I wasted trying to start a business with him. He would miss meetings ('One meeting', said Phoenix, as though he had heard Fritz's musings and were making a composed and voluntary effort to defend himself. He always had difficulty with criticism, not because he was too self-assured but because he took everything either too personally or too seriously, if not both.) to take random trips, ('once to retrieve my bass guitar from Vista, California, which is not one of the safest places to be after a certain hour,' he defended.) sometimes for entire weeks ('I left for three days,' corrected Phoenix, with a grimace whose anger seemed somewhat overblown but strangely more pardonable than it was unmerited. 'It was the only window of more than three days that I happened to come by in the midst of my work schedule, and it may have been my only opportunity to see either of my friends up there that entire year.').
'Wait'. Now Fritz was talking out loud. 'You said that it had only been three days. Now, you admit that it had actually been a space of more than three days. Is that correct?'
'No,' Phoenix negated with both fortitude and reproach, but more fortitude. Briefly but palpably, Fritz felt a sense of admiration for how calm and collected Phoenix's voice seemed, like a light peering through the shutters of their disagreement, as though it constantly emanated from a distant sunlight of which this stonerish fellow was only a mouthpiece. 'I actually left very early on the first of the four days and returned late on the fourth day, but the journey both ways occupied a substantial portion of time, and I was only in the Bay Area for two and a half days at most.'
If only he did not have such a high opinion of himself, thought Fritz, and he was surprised to find that he had said it aloud.
'Woah, man,' and here appeared Phoenix the man and not the symbol. 'There's nothing wrong with having a mirror.'
Dm.A.A.
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