A few minutes afterwards the woman introduces herself (“Since it looks as if we’re going to have to coexist a while . . .”), the man follows suit and tries to bring a touch of humor by asking if she suffers from claustrophobia. The woman smiles: No, she doesn’t. He doesn’t either (“We must consider ourselves fortunate. If one of us did, it would be horrible for both.”) She’s still smiling, and he thinks her smile seems promising. Obviously, trapped inside the elevator as they are, in between floors, in the few minutes they’ve been stuck there, each has had time to reflect, if only fleetingly, on the so-called urban myths that exist about their situation (two people trapped in an elevator that has come to a halt between two floors), that parallel equally bright ideas about what a man and a woman do on a deserted island, absolutely alone and isolated from the world, though heaven knows for how long. He recognizes that he indeed feels attracted to her, but is she attracted to him?
The woman asks if anything important or urgent brought him to the office block this morning. He says it is relatively important (“Work issues.”) and remarks how strange it is to be trapped in there (for three quarters of an hour by now) and feel that nothing is, in fact, important any more. She too finds it most striking that the urgent matters bringing them to the building can, all of a sudden, cease to be important because of something quite untoward. An hour ago, she continues, her time was all mapped out and she couldn’t have afforded to waste a second. Now, suddenly, she can assume the whole day’s been wasted. At the very least, the morning. Will they take much longer to extricate them? The man dares to say she certainly appeared to be in a rush, because when he stuck his foot in between the sides of the sliding door, he thought she seemed peeved. The woman smiles and admits she can’t stand people who, when elevator doors start to close, poke their foot in, never thinking that, as far as the individuals inside are concerned (who want to go up or down as quickly as possible, and who in fact have already begun the process one way or the other and are totally within their rights), such a gesture seems extremely inconsiderate. The man is about to say that, at least, putting his foot in the door has had one positive outcome: they have met. But fortunately he nips that banality in the bud. She mentions a Woody Allen film in which an elevator plays a central role. Brian de Palma has one too, starring his wife, what was her name? She is so pretty. He says he once read a novel in which an elevator goes through the roof and flies into the sky.
The elevator, she tells him, is the most important means of transport over the last few decades, even though most people don’t think of it as a means of transport. The relationship between elevators and the tall buildings that are being built now provides much food for thought. It’s not so much that buildings have had elevators installed because they have grown taller and taller; on the contrary, they have grown taller and taller because elevators have become increasingly efficient and safe. She removes her high-heeled shoes and arranges them in a neat line in the corner, under the button panel. Every now and then, one of them presses the alarm bell for several minutes. When one is tired, the other takes a turn, but in the end they both get fed up and sit on the floor side by side. (“They’ll get us out of here soon. They can’t leave us here forever.” “Perhaps we’ll end up eating each other like shipwrecked sailors in order to survive.”) The woman thinks it is significant that they are sitting side by side.
For a moment while they are waiting, they lose all notion of time. “Don’t look at your watch,” says one. It is relatively easy for them to count, second by second, to thirty, and do a half-minute. It’s more difficult to count, second by second, to five minutes or half an hour. If they were to count second by second for a few hours, their margin for error would skyrocket.
Later, they fall asleep. They wake up simultaneously (“Did you hear a noise?”) in a half embrace, one head on the other’s shoulder, their eyes so close that, when one whispers an unintelligible sentence, the other opens his or her mouth and says “What?” and one set of lips draws near the other, although, suddenly, they come to a halt (six millimeters from their objective) because, at that very moment, the elevator moves, accelerates quickly, stops (with a final judder), and reaches the ground floor, where the concierge and one of the repair mechanics are waiting (“You both all right?”). The man and woman look at each other. They should say something, arrange to meet . . . But she thinks that, even though he’s staring at her, he’s not in a hurry to suggest any such thing, and he reflects that though she’s staring at him, she heads straight to the fourth elevator, the one furthest away—not interested, he’d say. Now that their situation in the elevator is all over, is everything all over? The man heads out into the street, thinking that he shouldn’t have left without fixing a date, or at least exchanging phone numbers. At the precise moment he hits the sidewalk, he wonders why on earth he is walking out if he was supposed to go to the twelfth floor. He half turns round, opens the door into the building, crosses the lobby, avoiding the mechanic and concierge who are observing another mechanic, high up in the ceiling of the new elevator that has broken down, wielding an enormous torch and checking the traction, brake cables, and the guides. The man runs towards the fourth elevator; it has just begun to close, but he manages to stick his right foot into the small space that’s still there, thus prompting the two sides of door to slide open immediately.
The Power of Words
While they set his table, the man waiting at the restaurant bar talks to himself. As a kid he’d heard it said thousands of times: a man who talks to himself is mad. He is now of the opinion that this isn’t true. He is quite aware that talking to himself doesn’t prevent him from being completely sane. He talks quietly. He whispers sentences, in animated, exciting conversation with another person, or several others, who are all invisible, are all him. He’s doing it now, at the bar, and does it driving his car, and at home, and at the office. He talks to himself even when he’s with somebody else. Sometimes this somebody hears him whispering and thinks he’s said something to him and asks him what he’s just said. He says nothing, because in fact he does say nothing (he doesn’t even know exactly what he says; rather it’s the buzz that interests him, the sonorous effect, the blah-blah-blah, the appearance of a conversation), and whatever he does say he’s not saying to the person who’s trying to talk to him but to this other invisible person (or persons) with whom he is conducting an on-going conversation. He can’t remember when he started talking to himself and would find it difficult to establish the frontier between a before, when he still only talked to other people, and an afterwards. He sometimes thinks that, one way or another, he has always talked to himself; the only thing that has changed is that he’s increasingly casual about the whole business and does it quite spontaneously, unthinkingly, quite unaware, never holding himself back. Depending on how you look at it, he sometimes tells himself, these conversations are simply the continuation of the imaginary conversations he pursued when he was a kid, with that friend of his he invented (whose name he can’t remember, curiously) and with whom he experienced adventures full of palm trees and lianas every night in bed. The conversations he has with these non-existing others are as interesting as the ones he engages in with real people, when he has no choice. What does he talk about when he seems to be addressing his glass? About nothing in particular and about everything under the sun. He might be talking about tennis or philosophies of life. He might be rambling, be aspiring to reach sophisticated levels of argument, or be totally vacuous. This is often the case: he’s been debating with himself a good while and realizes that everything he says to this other person is completely vacuous. Then, rather than shut up, he changes the subject.