The Escalator
A short story by Michael Thompson, from 113 Crickets, an anthology of Silicon Valley-centric fiction and poetry edited by Tobias Mayer.
The escalator extended from the subterranean level of the indoor shopping mall under a large office building complex in the business district up to street level near the central square. It was a long escalator as escalators go, long and slow and deliberate; it took its time, careful with its passengers.
A woman riding up the escalator one afternoon after lunch was feeling out of sorts, she hadn’t been feeling herself all day and couldn’t make herself eat the modest dinner salad she’d ordered for her meal in a small café in the mall. She’d sat for half an hour, playing with the lettuce and slices of cucumber and tomato, her mind wandering into odd places she’d never strolled before. She was a quiet woman somewhere in her thirties, of medium height and medium build, not bad looking by any means, but nondescript, not the kind of woman who seeks to enhance her appearance with make-up or fancy clothes.
She held an office job of little importance in the office complex overhead, a job she’d held for a span of years, ever since she graduated from college. She answered phones, typed into a computer, generated documents from a printer, corrected them and turned them in to her boss, without remembering any of it from one day to the next, she’d been doing it so long. Her work passed through her like ripples through still water, creating a semblance of activity as she performed it until it was finished and it passed, leaving not a trace.
In college, the girls in her dorm didn’t know what to make of her. She had no interest in boys, never went out on dates, ignored those she met in class when they asked her out. She just wasn’t interested, as if sex was something other people did she’d heard about, but it never occurred to her to try it for herself. At first they speculated that she was gay until a few of the bi girls on the floor tried to caress her and she just stared at them with gentle alarm in her eyes until they withdrew and she went on studying as if nothing had happened. She went right on going to class and getting straight As and ignoring everyone around her, paying all their goings on no mind at all.
She wasn’t unfriendly or standoffish, if you went up to her and asked her a question or sought her opinion about something, she’d give you the expected reply on cue. If someone on the floor needed to borrow a little money to go out, she’d come across and never mention it if they failed to pay her back, but wouldn’t lend to them again until they had. Her roommate liked her well enough, the girl was more than happy to clear out and sleep in the lounge now and then when she needed some privacy with her boyfriend. All in all, she was an even tempered, reliable sort, unengaged socially perhaps, unique certainly, not a person you’d remember or remark upon, sort of a lost-in-the-woodwork kind of girl, if you will.
After college, she returned to the city where she was born and got the office job and found a little studio apartment for herself not far from where she grew up and she continued as before, doing what was expected of her, when it was expected of her. Going to her parent’s house for dinner one night a week, to her sister’s wedding, to her grandparent’s funerals when they passed, she was as predictable as the sun rising in the morning and setting at night, an insurance actuary’s dream, a typical pendulum of behavior in motion, back and forth, back and forth, never deviating, never straying, never showing the slightest propensity for independent thought or motion.
At home she cooked the same small set of meals for herself every night and watched the same TV programs year after year until each show in turn was cancelled and she selected another from what was available at the time and watched the new show faithfully until it too, in turn, was cancelled. She did her laundry in the basement of her building at the same time of the same day every weekend, and her clothes, carefully folded, found their way back into the same places in her closet and her bureau. All of this she did with grace, there was nothing mechanical about her, you would have had to watch everything she did for several days in a row to realize that she did the same exact things in the same exact sequence day after day. No one did. No one cared.
Halfway up the escalator something shifted in her core. She pulled her handbag off her shoulder, turned on the rising stair and threw it down towards the mall, startling those behind her. She tore open her blouse, ripping off the flimsy buttons, revealing her white bra, and yanked the sleeves off her arms and dropped it, then kicked away her loose sandals. The escalator reached the top and she stepped off and turned and re-boarded the escalator going down, passersby stopping to watch her, staring at her strangely, had the woman gone mad?
Going down, she opened her slacks and pulled them down, one leg off, then the other, flipped them over her shoulder, then reached back and unclasped her bra, discarded it, removed her panties in a single tug straight down both legs, stepping out of them quickly, leaving only her socks.
She reached down and pulled off both socks and dropped them, reached the bottom and danced, skipping like a schoolgirl, back onto the up escalator and ran up the stairs, playfully shoving everyone in her path to the side. She reached the top, stepped off and walked quickly and gracefully out through the glass doors and across the sidewalk into the heavy traffic without looking to the left or the right, as if the cars and buses and trucks didn’t exist.
She was magnificent! No man had ever seen her naked—she was perfect, slender yet full, untouched by grasping hands, innocent, a virgin, bursting out into full bloom in a matter of moments. Cars and a bus hit their brakes for her as she appeared like a nymph out of a fairy tale, her long hair flowing free behind her, her breasts proud and true, her thighs rippling slightly as she walked as calmly as if she was crossing her living room to the shower, straight across the street into the square leading a growing procession of curiosity seekers behind her.
She looked up in the air in front of her as she walked as if she was following something that flew before her, an angel perhaps, whatever it was she trusted it and kept walking at exactly the same pace step by step straight towards the fountain in the center of the square. Someone had called the police and sirens rose up as squad cars converged and tourists filmed her with their ubiquitous video cameras, standing to the side out of her path as she continued towards the fountain fifty yards away, easily a hundred people watching her now, some mothers pulling their children away, others just standing and watching her alongside their kids with open admiration: not only was she beautiful, she was free.
She reached the low wall of the fountain, leapt up and balanced on top of it for a moment, cameras flashing all around her, jumped into the shallow water and started singing at the top of her lungs and running and kicking the water up into the bright sunshine, running and kicking and splashing and singing a wild haunting melody unlike anything anyone had ever heard before, high notes flying up in the air like soaring birds reaching for sun as she ran and sang, sang and ran, full of joy, free at last.
Cop cars nosed into the square, through the crowd and pulled up by the fountain. It took half a dozen cops ten minutes to corral her and bring her down as she laughed and sang and dodged and ran in the fountain as the crowd cheered her on. They finally tackled her, getting soaked, their blue uniforms dark with water, and the crowd laughed and applauded wildly. The cops gently hauled her out, cuffed her hands behind her back and drew a blanket across her shoulders as voices rose from the crowd, “Let her go! Let her go!” More cops arrived and stood between her and the crowd. A young woman came forward and gave one of the officers the woman’s purse she’d picked up after the woman threw it down the escalator. The young woman had followed with the rest, secretly envious, wishing she had the nerve to throw off her clothes and show the world what she was made of.
The wild woman kept singing the unearthly ethereal melody even as they led her to a police car, carefully put her inside and took her to the hospital. She never resisted and went along with them, singing all the way. She fell silent when they put her on a locked ward and the door shut and locked behind her and the firm nurses came towards her with their shiny hypodermic needles, but still she didn’t fight, still she smiled, sadly now, as the haze descended and they led her into a padded cell and put her in a bed and tied her down with canvas straps like a lunatic gone berserk, turned off the lights and left her there in the dark with the door locked behind them.
Several tourists had caught her adventure in the square on video and a few posted it to the net, complete with her haunting unforgettable song. By nightfall it was the most watched clip online and copycats started taking their clothes off and jumping into fountains and cavorting wildly all over the world, but never with her natural grace and no one could ever sing her carefree song, it evaded capture like a wood sprite dancing away into the mist. Even the studio musicians who studied it could never unlock the secret of its flowing grace—try as they may, they could never bring it forth on their instruments, it was hers and hers alone.
Excerpt from The City: A Remembrance, copyright © 2010, Michael Thompson
Michael Thompson, a native New Yorker, is a published wordgame designer (Overturn, Coleco, 1989) and a freelance editor, book designer, technical writer and blues musician. The Escalator is the first of his short stories to achieve publication. He is putting the finishing touches on a novel as we speak. You can find The Escalator and works by other innovative fiction writers in 113 Crickets, published by Dymaxicon and edited by Tobias Mayer (@tobiasmayer), author of The People’s Scrum.
