Chapter ten
As the door closed behind him,
Fritz had all ready sunk his free thumb into the button marked 'G' for,
presumably, 'Ground floor'. As the elevator descended, its icy light haunting
it with almost a heartwarming blankness and equanimity, Fritz's mind raced,
trying to discern what the most fortuitous and sensible course of action
might be. If he were to pull the tiny
red knob standing apart from the rows of buttons at the base of the control
board, the lift would, theoretically, come to a sudden halt. He would brace
himself for the sudden halt. He could then remain in the comfort of this gently
lit womb and rest until morning. Yet the terror of either the lift plummeting
to the base of the tower or, worse, never opening again, possessed his mind with
such a vicelike grip that he simply stared, madly thirsting, upon the control
board and the red button, heart constricted, as though he were scrambling
within himself with torturous desperation for the courage to pull it.
Finally, the elevator arrived, and,
in defiance of the still gripping frost that had set into his mind, he resolved
himself with a maddening pang to step out onto the Ground Floor. It was only as
the door slid aside that he realised that what he had really wanted to do was
to emerge on the first Floor. Upon second thought, he realised that there was
no elevator door in Jake's red corridor.
What he beheld as the elevator slid
aside, however, was not the red corridor.
He was astonished to find, instead,
another floor of uniform cubicles overcast with a bold but hesitant gray light.
Fritz took a brisk pair of steps
onto the opening corridor, daring not to venture into the nest of cubicles.
He looked to either side of him. A
corridor lit gently not by the moon but by a white street light began at a
window to his right and ended in a window to his left from which a jagged
orange light escaped onto a corner.
I must be on the second floor,
thought Fritz.
He dared not go back to the
staircase. The door behind him had only barely begun to slide shut as he
pounced through its shrinking chasm into the womb-like chamber that felt, to
his incredulous disappointment and disbelief, not at all as comforting as it had
been moments prior. The austere sterility that had attacked him on his floor to
share the cell with him as he turned to face the shutting door and to petition
the control board again. He thought, I
must be inside the Squid's eye, and promptly reproached himself for the
absurd fantasy.
Fritz pressed the 'one' at the
bottom right-side corner of the control board. The control board was six inches
wide and twelve inches (one foot) tall. It was lined with buttons like the coat
of an army general or a particular kind of woman's clothing.
The tempting red knob at its base
evoked a red belt buckle.
The elevator reared, the floor
pressing him from below. For a moment, he was shocked that it would crush him.
When the ceiling abstained from descending upon him, he realised that it was
moving, as well. He was going up.
Panicking, he acted on impulse for
perhaps the third time that night. His thumb fumbled for the middle of the
control board, sinking into the number 'twelve', illumining the soft plastic
like a comforting pearl glowing in an opalescent hue.
The white eye of this illumined
button promptly unnerved Fritz. Why had he done that? Why the Hell had he done
that!?
As the lift carried him, slowing to
a stop, he sought some refuge in this thought: I at least have the nerve to run down the stairs for eleven floors. If
the intruder is unaware of where I am, as long as he is unaware, he is, at
worst, at the top of the staircase. At any rate, he is surely ascending.
Fritz stared down to the elevator
door, focusing on some arbitrary space just diagonal from the control board in
his characteristic angry glare.
What had been the logic of dialing
for the twelfth floor?
He would merely emerge onto another
identical floor. For all that he knew, the door to that staircase was still
locked. At any rate, he would probably not have the nerve to enter into that
staircase again.
Why had I been afraid? Fritz
scrambled for either a reason or forgiveness for his totally irrational
behaviour, clutching at his chest nervously all the while as though to find
bullet holes, yet grabbing at his own shirt with more recrimination than mercy.
I
must have pressed the buttons out of order.
This rational theory, whilst the
only one that could put his fore-brain at ease, did not corroborate the facts
of his memory.
As the recurrent realisation of his
own insanity sent a stream of invisible shivers like a bucket of ice were spilt
down his neck, Fritz's forehead became cooled in wry realisation: The elevator
was descending again. Steadily. Fritz could not believe it. He tried jumping.
Sure enough, he leapt twice as high as he would have usually.
He repeated this five times. The
elevator was descending.
Fritz's thoughts were as follows:
1. I
pressed the button for the First floor.
2. I
began to ascend.
3. I
pressed the button for the twelfth floor.
4. I
began to worry more.
5. I
began to descend.
All of a sudden, he only craved a
pad and pencil. He was nowhere near the patience to wait for his laptop to
charge.
He needed to write down his thoughts.
How else would he know where the lapse in sequence came in? With painstaking
intellectual tension, he repeated the five-step sequence in his mind.
He
derived no solace, each time, from the logical conclusion. It couldn't be
accurate. How could he even be sure that he was recounting the events properly?
Could he keep track of his own thoughts from event one to event five
consistently? He tried counting the five events on his hand, describing each in
turn. He continued to do this as he pressed buttons at random on his control
board. It was not entirely random. He selected every pair of buttons, beginning
at the top, for twelve consecutive floors, making two uniform rows six buttons
long.
By
the time that he had reached the fifth finger, he was shocked to find that he
had no way of proving that, by the fifth finger, he had not lost track of the
events delineated by the first four fingers and substituted for them in his
mind a more comforting memory.
As
he repeated the counting exercise on his hand, wondering with each passing
attempt how he could possibly be so insane to perform this same act for minutes
on end, the elevator continued its course. Each time, he assured himself that
it was equally, if not moreso, mad to think that he could not spare a few
seconds for a simple calculation. The calculations never yielded any novel
insight, although they were not entirely fruitless; logic puzzles, especially
repetitive ones that challenged his resilience, always calmed him.
Though
his entrails gave him hell, he managed, at least, to salvage a cool head.
Over
the past few minutes, the elevator had changed direction at least ten times. It
would travel for some time upwards and then change its mind and travel twice as
far down. It would continue in an entirely random pattern. Fritz was prepared
to give up and wait for whatever dogged him to find him lying on the floor of
the lift, curled up around his lap top. He would beg that the intruder would
not harm the computer. It was a Computer, after all.
He
wondered where Jake was, and a pang of missing him brought a periodic and
abrupt return to the reality of his painful situation. Fritz knew that he should hope that Jake had, for his
sake, escaped the building. Yet Fritz really wanted more than anything to find
Jake on one of the floors. He dared not open the elevator door even once,
however.
He
was sitting on the cool, dusty floor of the elevator. His left hand was on his
laptop, sitting beside him like a companion. His right hand was growing numb
from the repetitive counting.
For
the second time that night, Fritz von Franz bolted to a standing position. It
all made sense. The control board had been tampered with. All impulse to either
repeat his counting experiment or question his own sanity disappeared. For a
fleeting moment, there was peace in Fritz's life.
Laughing
hysterically, shedding his embarrassment to the wind that had seemed somehow to
enter the elevator chamber, he directed his attention to a second control panel
to the right of the main. It had only two buttons. It looked like an admiral's
pocket. It bore two adornments: Identical, triangular buttons of the same
material as the circular ones, facing opposite directions. 'Up' and 'down'.
“I'll
have to do this manually,” Fritz said aloud as his wits caught up with him and
pushed him like ranks of soldiers from behind, into battle.
Fritz
von Franz was intent upon going in one direction: Down. All that he needed was
for the 'down' button to work.
It
did. He reasoned that he must have been, according to a generous estimate, on
the twentieth floor or somewhere near it.
With
one press of the 'down' button, a light bulb illumined the plastic from behind.
The elevator descended by one floor and then stopped. The light went out. He
pressed it again. The process repeated. Readers
will not be able to fathom his delight.
He continued this labor for fifteen floors, each time moving entirely in
increments of one floor. At one point, he would press the bottom button, but
the elevator would not move.
The
button would be illumined for a flicker of a second and then dissolved again.
He had reached the Ground Floor.
Dm.A.A.
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