The Somebodies Page 6
“Sorry, Mrs. Hershbaum,” the elevator operator said. “You’ll have to leave the laundry behind. Already got two riders here, and as you know, I don’t like to take on extra weight!”
“But I’m going to do my laundry at Melvin’s! How can I leave my laundry behind?”
Melvin’s? Fern knew the name of the place. It was on the foldout map of the city beneath the city. “Are we going to the city beneath the city?” Fern asked.
The elevator operator didn’t answer Fern’s question. He answered a question no one had asked, and that was: Why are you so afraid of taking on extra weight? (Elevator limits are usually two thousand pounds or more, and this elevator really wasn’t close to that, even including Mrs. Hershbaum, a frail wisp of a woman, and her laundry.) “I had a bad elevator accident as a child,” the elevator operator explained. “Too many people. An overload. I survived but was deeply scarred. So—”
“You became an elevator operator,” said Mrs. Hershbaum wearily. “Shoulda gone into something closer to the ground!”
“Where’d she come from?” Howard popped his head back into the elevator and nearly screeched, “Is she underground? Is she in Dorathea’s boardinghouse? Where did this hallway come from?”
“Well, sure, I’d have liked to have been an engineer! Who wouldn’t? But I face my fear of elevators every day,” the elevator operator said. “Sometimes I do get a little afraid, a little jangled nervousness about life, and at those moments, I eat a Twinkie or something, and that makes me feel safe and warm.”
“Faced your fears! Ha! Can’t even take a woman to the Laundromat!”
“I’m not taking you anywhere with that extra load! And that’s final!” the elevator operator barked, and then he lowered his voice. “No can do!” He hit a button on the panel and the door hesitated long enough for Mrs. Hershbaum to show her displeasure with a grimace. The doors slid shut. Mrs. Hershbaum and her basket of laundry on wheels disappeared.
“We’ve come by invitation,” Howard repeated nervously, looking at the dirt all around them. He had never been fond of oddness. “Does that mean anything?”
The elevator operator pulled a clipboard out from under his arm. “Name please!” Again, it seemed like he wanted Fern and Howard to name him instead of telling him their names. But they got the gist this time.
“Fern,” Fern said.
“Howard,” Howard said.
“Mmhm!” he said. He ran his finger down a list, paused, continued, paused, continued.
They could now make out the sound of shoes clipping around overhead. Howard whispered, “Hurry, hurry,” under his breath.
Finally, the elevator operator shouted, “Six-oh-one!”
He pressed one of the unmarked buttons in a huge panel of unmarked buttons. Nothing happened. The music plinked on overhead. Howard and Fern shot each other anxious glances. They could hear Mr. Drudger stomping on the floor somewhere above them, saying, “Let’s go about this logically. They can’t be far away! They disappeared in this area.”
“I wouldn’t fool around there, Mr. Drudger,” Dorathea was warning.
The Bone was calling, “Fern! Howard!”
“It doesn’t make sense,” Howard said, looking up. “How could they be there?”
The footsteps grew louder. Mrs. Drudger’s voice was clear and close. “What’s this, right here, in the spot where that thing shrunk and disappeared? Isn’t it a latch?” There was some clicking. The hatch inside of the elevator jiggled.
The elevator operator wasn’t flustered by the voices or by the latch or by the elevator’s lack of motion. “Are you ready?” he asked.
“Yes, yes!” Fern said. “What are you waiting for?”
“Just go!” Howard said.
“Is this your first time? I’ll need to read a waiver. This isn’t your ordinary elevator,” he warned. “It’s also a descendavator.”
“Of course,” Howard said. “All elevators are also descendavators! Just go!”
The latch was still twisting overhead.
“It’s also a diagonavator, horizontavator, rapidavator, vamoosavator.”
“You made that last one up!” Howard shouted.
“I did not! I’m union! I’m up to code! Do you see this letter here from the elevator inspector?” The letter was framed in glass. “I run a tight ship!”
“Okay!” Howard said. “You run a tight ship! We’re ready! Okay! So run it!”
“And you?” He looked at Fern.
Fern was staring at the hatch. “Ready!” she said.
The elevator operator calmly recited: “Keep all arms and legs inside of the elevator at all times. No screaming, yelling, or mocking of your elevator operator, who may be pushing his weight.”
It was obvious he’d added this last line himself, but Fern didn’t draw attention to it.
“That’s all fine,” Fern said.
“Yes, yes! We get it!” Howard cried.
The elevator operator smiled, just briefly. “Giddyap now, Charlie Horse!” he said. “Giddyap!”
Just at that moment, the overhead hatch opened. Mrs. Drudger’s bland face appeared in the frame, the pale blue of the bedroom ceiling behind her like she was set against the sky.
“Oh, my!” she said.
And as the elevator (descendavator, diagonavator, horizontavator, rapidavator, vamoosavator) shot down with a violent burst of speed, the elevator operator’s buttons began popping and pinging and ricocheting around. Fern and Howard squatted down and balled up, but they couldn’t help but look back at what they were leaving behind. Four faces had collected there at the hatch: Mrs. Drudger, Mr. Drudger, the Bone and Dorathea—the paralyzed look of their shocked faces floating in an open square that grew smaller and smaller until Fern and Howard couldn’t see them at all.
2
ELEVATORS APLENTY
FERN AND HOWARD WERE ON A REAL BUCKING bronco of an elevator. They careened madly through tunnels, around sharp corners and down chutes. The elevator dipped, spiraled and, once, looped. Fern’s stomach looped right along, and Howard screamed like a wounded goat. They twisted, dawdled, then zipped, looped, zigged and, immediately thereafter, zagged. (There’s a word for that but I’m too excited to think of it right now.)
Fern and Howard would sometimes try to get on their feet and surf, but mostly they were tossed and rolling on the floor, flattened against one pane of glass or another. Howard looked pale—prevomit pale. Fern was breathless and bruised.
The elevator was taking them deeper underground, and because it was glass, they could see everything flying past at great speed. It was shooting around roots and basements and gopher homes and square-bottomed swimming pools and lakes, close enough to the lakes to see the fish on the other side of their glass elevator. Fern didn’t like to look at the fish, though. They reminded her too much of the menacing goldfish in the painting. She hoped she wouldn’t see that fish again.
The elevator operator, his vest held together by one straining button and its suffering thread, never lost his balance. He never so much as bobbled. He sat on his chair, next to the panel of unmarked buttons—only one lit—and wore an expression of abject boredom. He tapped his foot lightly to the plinky music piped in through a speaker.
This was maddening to Howard. He glared at the elevator operator whenever he could, desperate for an explanation. When they hit a straightaway, he caught his breath and asked as many questions as he could fire off: “Where are we? How can this elevator exist in Dorathea’s house and Mrs. Hershbaum’s apartment building and by that lake? Don’t people catch on—regular people? Where’d this elevator come from? Who manufactured it? How long has this elevator been in operation? And why don’t you fall off your stool?”
Fern had only one question to add. It was the one she’d had the first time she saw the glass elevator. “Does this thing fly, by any chance?”
This caught the elevator operator’s attention. He rearranged his black cap, patted it, then fiddled with his one remaining shiny bu
tton. “A History Lesson on the Anybody Elevator System. You have come to the right man!”
In precise detail and with great love and joy and a little nanny-nanny-know-it-all in his tone, he launched into an explanation. It went something like this:
“A ways back, a kid name Artie borrowed Charlie and the Glass Elevator from the library. Though he’d loved Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, this sequel didn’t suit him. Artie thought it was a strange book that seemed like it was really about something else, but if you didn’t know what that something else was, you were in trouble—an inside joke of a book. (May I interrupt to say I assure you that this book is about what it’s about and not something else. So don’t go wasting your time looking.) Artie liked the glass elevator, though, and he decided he was going to shake it out. It took fourteen days. He figured out how it worked, shook it back in very politely, and then designed glass elevators using a bit of hypnosis, transformation, and concentration. A great engineer! One of the best!” You could tell by the way he told the story that Artie was the elevator operator’s hero as a kid. “He convinced Shirley Hurlman of Hurlman and Sisters to manufacture them in a factory in the city beneath the city. Hurlman designed the system of paths, a network that became worldwide: a fleet of hidden, highly disguised and thoroughly hypnotized elevators, trained to take you to the city beneath the city. Engineering,” the elevator operator said dreamily. “If I didn’t have to face my elevator fears day in and day out, I’d take classes.”
Fern said, “You should take classes, if that’s what you want.”
“Don’t be silly,” the elevator operator said. He cleared his throat and went on with his telling. “The really great Anybodies can find the city beneath the city in their own ways,” he explained. “But for the less gifted or those who don’t want to waste their gifts on travel—and most fall into one or the other group—the elevators work best. In New York, for example, there are hidden elevators in various locations.” He named a few: behind a certain bookcase at the Bank Street Bookstore; in the back room of Epstein’s Bar; inside a certain Gap dressing room.
“These elevators will take you straight to a number of places in the city beneath the city: a spot near the concession stand at Bing Chubb’s Ballpark; to the back of Melvin’s Laundromat and Dry Cleaner’s where the pressed shirts draped in plastic ride the carousel; or to the side door next to the jukebox at Jubber’s Pork Rind Juke Joint; or up into the confessional of Blessed Holy Trinity Catholic Church and Bingo Hall.
“Regular people don’t know that we exist, and they stick to that notion. It’s easier than you’d think. The Anybodies philosophy, you see, depends on the idea that the world is in a constant state of change, and one of the things that changes most is a person’s perception of things. Your perception, Howard, was that we were in part of a house. Mrs. Hershbaum’s perception was that we were in her apartment building. Both were right enough.” Here, he smiled as if he’d really made everything crystal clear. “So, you understand.”
“Not at all!” Howard said.
“Humph,” the elevator operator grunted. “Well, we’re getting closer to New York now. Can you understand that?”
“Yes,” Howard said, and then he stared out. They were flying past dirt. “Kinda.” The elevator took a sharp left. Howard and Fern slammed into a wall. “But you didn’t answer my question about why you don’t fall off your stool!”
“I don’t fall off my stool because I’m living in my perception, and in my perception, elevator operators don’t roll around on the floor.”
“What about my question?” Fern asked, trying to inch up the side of one of the glass walls.
“Well, sure it flies! Didn’t you read the book?”
“Oh, no,” Howard moaned. “No, no, no! It isn’t mathematically, statistically…Well, it doesn’t add up!” But even as he said these words, his voice shook with a lack of confidence. He knew that so many things weren’t logical. He’d already dived through an envelope. Fern had a miniature pony in her pocket made out of his teacher’s hair. The book that he was holding was filled with an entire art that was not sensible.
Soon the obstacles became more frequent, and the elevator was having to skinny in, and curve, as if it weren’t made of glass for a moment but of something more flexible. This made Fern and Howard very nervous. The pony shook and pawed in Fern’s pocket. They rode for a while alongside a subway car. Fern and Howard pressed their faces to the glass and waved, but the people on the other side didn’t seem to notice. The ones that were looking in the right direction seemed to be staring only at their own shortsighted reflections in their subway windows, which isn’t unlike New Yorkers. (Also, let’s be honest. If some of those New Yorkers had seen two kids waving from a glass elevator traveling sideways beside their subway car, most of them would be too above-it-all to react. At most, they’d sigh, and say, Oh, that again!)
As they peeled away from the subway, taking a sharp left, the elevator maneuvered, herky-jerky, around all kinds of tubes and pipes made of cement and metal, taking them lower and lower. They even saw the hull of an old ship.
“We’re going deeper underground,” Howard said.
“We’ll be there soon!” the elevator operator barked.
Moments later they popped out of the chute and found themselves in the air. The elevator relied on no ropes, no cables, no pulleys. The elevator operator had been right, after all. The glass elevator could fly.
“Here it is,” the elevator operator announced. His remaining button was tense and quivering on his belly. “The city beneath the city.”
“Oh, look,” Howard said. “Just look!”
“I told you,” Fern said, in awe of it all. “I told you!”
The city stretched out below them as they hovered and then plummeted toward it. The thick roots of New York City were exposed, and the city beneath the city grew around pipes and ductwork and abandoned chutes. Because of being underground, the city had to manufacture the sun. Everything glittered with artificial light—lanterns and neon signs and overhead lights like those in stadiums.
Hands pressed to the glass, Fern and Howard stood at the elevator’s glass wall and stared out. They flew over Bing Chubb’s Ballpark, where there was a late inning and a cheering crowd, and then up the courthouse row. Carved angels roosted around the church steeple. They circled the mosque, golden and shining, just once. There were other glass elevators too, bustling along, carrying Anybody families and business people, and occasionally a large glass elevator of heavy cargo—once, watermelons. Fern ran from one side of the elevator to the other.
“What are you looking for?” Howard asked.
“The castle.” Fern lowered her voice so the elevator operator couldn’t hear. “It’s got to be here.”
“What castle?”
“I’m royalty now, Howard, remember? The castle is, well, it belongs to the family. We should live there, Howard. We should live in the castle.”
“We should? Me too?”
“Yes, sure. Beats military academy.”
The elevator took a sharp right. They toppled in one direction and then righted themselves.
“Is that it?” Howard said, one finger pressed to the glass.
That’s when Fern saw it. The castle. It was tall with many towers and a black grill gate with gold tips and surrounded by green shrubbery in a fancy design, the wide lawn with its grassy mound, a fishpond, and a gazebo, white and nearly glowing. There was the tall spire that Fern remembered so clearly from the book, and just as in the picture, the spire’s tip was wedged into the dirty underside of Manhattan. But it was grander to see it in person, the way it sprawled and gleamed.
“Yes,” Fern said. It was so grand that Fern imagined that the Blue Queen didn’t need any other motive for her eleven-day reign other than just wanting to live in such a place. “Wouldn’t you like to call that home?” Fern asked.
“Wow,” Howard said.
Even the pony got to see it and let out an awed neigh.
Fern gazed at the castle. Its spire was barely visible in a small patch of fog. Fern wanted to tour the grounds, go inside, see if there was a throne, and if there was, maybe even sit on it. But then she caught herself. The Blue Queen was here, most likely, somewhere in this city, thinking her dark thoughts, hatching her evil plans, maybe eyeing the castle herself. Fern felt heat run through her body—a feeling of strength and pride. This was her destiny, her royal fate. She could feel the rightness of it all.
The elevator dropped into a square hole on a street corner, as if it were being sucked down. The pipes grew larger and louder. The chute around them became more dense and rocky. “I don’t like this,” Howard said.
“Me neither,” Fern said.
Just when she thought they couldn’t possibly go any deeper, they zipped back up again. The chute was dark, so they couldn’t see where they were.
“Whoa, Charlie Horse!” the elevator operator called out. The elevator started to screech and shiver. Fern thought she smelled a fine whiff of something burning. Brakes? she wondered. The elevator slowed down, began stuttering. The elevator operator’s final button snapped loose and ricocheted, pinging against all the walls, and then with a high-pitched whine, the elevator ground to a stop.
Fern and Howard and the miniature pony were dazed. From overhead, the elevator speaker plinked out a warped, warbling, exhausted song. And the shiny gold button rolled to a stop in the middle of the floor.
But when Fern and Howard looked up to see if it was now safe to stand, the elevator operator had a new row of polished buttons, highly pressurized, glinting down his vest.
3
THE BED BENEATH THE BED
THE ELEVATOR WAS WET WITH CONDENSATION from the effort of the trip, and so the elevator operator slipped off his stool and began wiping down the moist walls with a small towel he’d pulled from his trouser pocket. “Good old Charlie Horse. We survived another one,” he said. He looked nervous. “What’s next? Where will we be off to this time?”