Blue's Elevator - first published in Death of a Scenester, Issue Two - BOYS

Blue's Elevator

I work the elevator in the biggest building in my town. It is 11 stories of early twentieth century design. Beautiful and functional. Warm and forgiving. This is the tale of how I came to feel that every time I arrive to start my working day, it is like walking in to the warm embrace of a favourite aunt. It did not always feel thus.

I had been working here as a doorman, but met some misfortune with a revolving door about three years in to my employment. It has left me unable to stand comfortably for any longer than ten minutes... and certainly unable to carry folks' bags from their cars or be much help full stop. Kindly, the management of the building kept me on at the same rate as a doorman would earn, but I now sit in the elevator on a tall, graceful stool (too graceful for my behind, if you ask me) and ask people 'Which floor today?'. Then I push the gates across, without rising from my perch - like some awkward, lame parrot - I pull the lever to the right position and away we go...

About three or four months back, a nice man from the big city came to do some specialised maintenance work on my office. He told me his name was Bo and allowed me to stay seated atop my stool as he worked, if for nothing other than to have someone to converse with as he went about his business.
He told me that his company had assigned him the task of knowing these old elevators front to back and then around again so they could have some sort of lock down on the market of fixin' them up. I didn't know anything about this lift before Bo came, truth be told, but he schooled me good. Now I feel like a qualified professional after only a couple of meetings with him here in my office.

We talked about how in the early 1900's with the advent of the sky-scraper, architects were akin to gods. Building structures so fine, so high, so strong, they were like titans, creating mountains like Olympus, each story taking us a few meters closer to the big Boss... or bosses, whichever you believe.
So, Bo says, 'Blue...' - Blue's what they call me - 'Blue, I discern that you are a man of some faith', to which I replied 'Bo, I once had beliefs as strong as the foundations of this very building, but I've seen some hard years, with love passing through and crossing over and leaving life cold... I used to believe that love was god and now love is gone, I have a hard time believing much of anything'.

Now Bo, he turns to me from the electrical panel he's been labouring on and says 'Blue, if I could show you how to find that love you talk of again, would you be interested?'. Naturally I am interested, but bitten once if you catch my drift. So I say, 'I am hesitant to believe it can be found, Bo, but seeing as all I have in my diary for today is to be seated here, pushing the goddamn lever whenever you say so and talking to you so long as you are interested in what I have to say... I say, why not?'. I get the feeling that I'm foolishly following my tongue around today. I didn't really know what I was getting myself in to.




So Bo pulls a silver hip flask from the back pocket of his oily coveralls and says 'you'll need a good swig of this first. Maybe a few good swigs'. I look at him funny because I think he knows we are not supposed to drink on the job. I look at him steady, with his silver flask held out to me, like some sort of carrot I'm thinking, 'til I start to get a good feeling about it. The gates are closed. I reach out slowly and take the flask from his fingers, unscrew the cap and put its coolness to my lips. A milky, licorice taste suprises me. I was hoping for whisky, but I'll take it. Its quite sweet, but a lingering medicine taste kicks you once it slides down the gullet.
'O.K.', says Bo. 'Take her to eleven'. I pull the lever all the way around and after the first jolt of gears and chains locking in to place, we ascend to floor eleven.

'Blue. I want to ask you a couple of things before something big happens, if that's alright?'. His words scare me a little. Life has been uneventful lately and anything big happening feels like it would throw me a bit. But that silver flask has loosened up my nerves a little, so I agree.

'Do you believe in heaven?'. I guess so, I say. I like to believe in something pleasant as a reward for putting up with the nasty things life delivers.

'Good. Do you believe in the goodness of people?'. - I suppose I do. But people 'round here are pretty ordinary and keep their heads down, I say. Truth is, Bo is the only person I've held a conversation with for longer 'en five minutes in, I estimate, a year and a half.

'O.K, that'll work. Do you care for other people'? - I tell a little white lie and say yes, certainly. But really I haven't cared for anything or anyone a great deal since my girl up and disappeared on me around five years ago. Bo looks at me as if he knows I lied, but continues on.

'Remember how we talked of these buildings and their architects? How back then, constructing a building like this was sort of like building a ladder to heaven? that thought has been around for many thousands of years and permeates cultures around the globe.

Well, two years ago or so when I was working on a lift quite similar to this one right here', he looks around with a gentleness in his eyes and softly touches the metal and wood panelling of the elevator as if it's his favourite pet, 'and I had a bit of an accident... or at least it started off like an accident'. He bends slowly down 'til he is crouching next to his tool bag. He takes out a hammer and a wrench, the adjustable kind.

'I am going to take you on a brief but, I hope, life-altering, mind-altering journey. It will only take a minute of your time, but I believe you will benefit from it. Have another couple of swigs, would you'? he motions toward the flask that I am still holding and begins to labour away on something inside that panel of his.




You probably think I'm crazy, but I just go along with what this man is saying. A calm comes over me that makes what he is saying seem perfectly normal. I've been a pretty good citizen in my life. I drink, sure, but I've never touched a drug other than what the doctor has prescribed. I've read things, though, that should make me concerned when someone says they are about to do something mind-altering. But Bo seems like a man that can be trusted. We've talked long and hard about some things in the couple of days he's been here and I feel okay about the guy.

- A swirling sensation comes over me. Like I've gone fast over a dip in the road, my stomach falls inside me and I realise that I know what is bringing on that feeling. The lift is falling down the elevator shaft. Bo is still crouched with his back to me at his panel and I say 'what the fuck are you doing, man?', before I see black velvet stretching before me, dotted with stars. I have a tingling feeling under me and realise I am floating. I've been unhinged, I'm thinking. That man has drugged me and I can no longer see anything like the familiar surrounds of my old elevator. I close my eyes hard and open them twice, three and on the fourth time I am seated on top of my building, on my stool. The only way I know it's my building is I can see the cinema complex and ice cream shop signs that are nearby it, small as dollhouse miniatures, way way below me.

Bo is standing in-front but to the right of me. He says to look up. There is a blue ball of flame, kinda like electricity, sparking, burning and pulsing. I can't feel my legs. LET GO says Bo, and I realise I am clutching my stool seat. As soon as I do as he says, I float free from the top of the building. It feels just like being in water. I see myself as a kid swimming in the river in my home town and I feel the free feeling of jumping from a rope in to the water. The sky flashes blue and pink and green like I've stared at the sun too long.
LOOK UP, I hear Bo's voice say again, but can't see him any more.
I look up and see my sweetheart's face, shining and smiling like how I remember it when we were happy together. I open my mouth to say 'Honey... I love you, why did you go?...' but all that comes out is an 'oooooh'. Her face is still there, blushing pink and then paling. I will never grow tired of that face. I miss her still. I realise how bitter I had become.

BO, I think I say, but really know I'm just thinking it. Bo, I can see it. I can feel it. I think I started to cry, not something I would freely admit to previously, but my heart had shifted in my chest. Like a transplant almost. Something cold and hard that was present in me without my knowing it, had melted away in a ball of light and colour.

I don't remember the rest, or coming to, but it was like nothing had changed physically. Almost as though I was sucked back in to my body, mid-conversation with the elevator man. I remembered nothing until a couple of days later I got home and started to make some coffee and saw the blue flame of my gas cooker. Then it all came reeling back to me.

That's my story. Each time I go to work now I look up at that building before I go in, to my stool in my office, and remember being so high up looking down. I don't know how I got up there. And Bo was never to be seen again. But he remains in phrases I repeat daily now. LOOK UP, LET GO... and in the flask I keep in my back pocket.

Upendage

I watched the city wake up this morning.
Shaking its legs like a new born calf;
A little wobbly/
A little cold/
A little wet.

And the sun glinted coolly and
glanced off the corners of
glassy buildings that
splinter and refract that
same cold light which
caught my eyes just now.

In retrospect it feels like the whole thing
was an elaborate alarm system,
A smoke signal made of crystal dust,
telling me to steel myself
for bad news.

What is the cost of one eye?
10 years of life?
Would a hand then be
15 years?
A section of skin - 2 years?
A breast, a ball, an ankle ...
Where is the divine catalogue
to name for me the price?
I am a patron in this disposable,
buyable world and I demand
to speak to the manager ... n o w .

And so, as I ascend the shallow stairs,
with a refreshed sting of awakeness,
I smile and curse alternately
as my foot hits each step
and bleed anger
into the ground
through my soles.

smile
curse
smile
curse
smile
curse
smile

full sirkel

I hop up on my mountain and cry "two years, two years, two years!"
My mountain slides at the top because of the sand. Like the dormant Tarawera.
I slip in to the crater and bellow from the bottom "two years, two years, two years!"
It erupts from my lungs and resounds in my ears.

My ghost canoe, Big Shadow, is you.

Want to grow wings, want to moulder with these boulders, become serene.
This time, this space, this gap, this hollow, is a bruise,
A trace of what was good and evil with us.
A huge fuss and a scene
An act and I was caught in the spotlight of the moon
With only myself in an empty street to deal with.
I remember the peace after that. And the years of rebuilding my city,
Collecting important remnants and sewing them together with a crude blanket stitch
To cover me when I dream.

The rest is ash. I burned it all. And the garbage man took it all away.
But years to heal.

Two years, two years, two years, and my heart is softened again, less wary. The gates opened
and the people came in. I wasn't as pretty as I used to be. My landscape is scarred
with basalt and obsidian, but new growth breathes new life in to me.

But my ghost canoe, Big Shadow, is you. Still and forever. An echo of caution calls out across the waters. Your arrival is tangible. Ominous. Thick and ever present in my mind.

Two years two years twoyears. It means nothing.

Opaque - first published in Death of a Scenester, Issue One - COVERS 2010

Opaque tea and a cold kiss of the apple and I breathe in the wet air at the outdoor setting. White-painted cast iron, looking delicate and antique, but drags like a dead beast across the ground when you try to shift it. Shit. Ashes on my feet. Silent and grey like a disintegrated feather. I smudge it away with my other foot and wipe both feet, both sides, awkwardly on the dewy grass.

You’ve been missing for four and a half days. Approximately 108 hours. I imagine you, lying in a creek, bloated and drained of all human colour. I imagine you, haemorrhaging in a gutter in a ghost town somewhere, where no one hears your calls. I imagine you, flying from a cliff above the sea with sorrowful thoughts, your last, sorry to the end. I imagined the worst and immediately, as soon as I went to bed alone.

Down the gully creek
On black blood platelets
Black rings down the drainpipe
To the black walnut grove

I open that book and take a look with a quiet query in the secret chambers in my heart, a soft, skipping arrhythmia as I forget to breathe… looking for a sign of something, I do not know what. I turn pages sticky with old glue, looking for that clue, but frustrated with blankness I put it aside. It is crumbling now too, that book. Like the ashes. I feel deadened. Numb. Heavy. Translucent.

I stare dumbly at the flecks of leaf floating on the surface before I imbibe. It’s a warmth that bleeds down the throat. Do you feel me wondering? I am full of questions for you. They are pecking at me like Hitchcockian birds, frightening me and making me crazy. My head is composing a letter to you, years down the track, when you’re still gone. I imagine the worst. Begging you to come back… willing it. But curious about the life beyond it. Beyond disaster. Before disaster even. I am despairing at my own curiosity with this, always. It stares me in the face every day and I fight it. A ghastly, haunted reflection.

All at the same time I am lonely for your company, lusting myself into a knot for your body, breaking myself in to pieces with hopeless anger at your disappearance. So hotly blinding a contrast my hate and love for you in this horrible moment. Disparate. Desparate to see you. Why is the golden time gone? Things slip away like a ship to the bottom of the sea. I imagine heaven as scuba diving to the wreckage, to forever recall, reimagine the past happinesses, though they are now covered with coral and silt, with fishes moving quickly through it all like busy waiters in a big Paris café. Joy abounds and we float in the ocean, surveying all that pretty wreckage below.





I blacken my finger tips with apple ash before I pluck that green granny from the table and bring it to my lips for another go round. Numb it. Blunt it out. Soften the edges and dream it away. Fight through the panic when it rises and just go… run to that place that you’ll never get to, even when sleep comes. Did my darkness frighten you? Oh god… more questions. Squash it down now.

Down the gully creek
On black blood platelets
Black rings down the drainpipe
To the black walnut grove

Dark skies make the earth look greener
And broken boughs
Stretch down to woo us
Weeping, cold tears dripping
In to age old knots

Rainwater rushes like a wall towards me
Clay falls like towers, like a city earthquaked
Hoist myself in a supplejack swing,
Trembling, sing this song to bring you home