13

On the next calendar Monday, his day off, the week’s liftman felt urged to step outside. The bruising from his recent perceived social blunder in the elevator with the three people was finally yellowing and readying to leave. The days following that event were a matter of biding time until his weekly break from servitude – Monday was sure to be respite and, at least, a momentary breather.

He called for the elevator after speeding past the empty adjacent apartments. He had no wish to stay any longer than need be outside those quiet homes. They were symbols of a lack of humanity. Completely empty. Dead air. The same dead air day-in-day-out. Stale. This was his presumption at least.

The window to his homely box was to be kept religiously open from now on. Aided by the fact it couldn’t shut. In ripping it open it had snuggly fit into the top space and now wouldn’t budge. Dust wasn’t free to settle anymore anyway because it was unwelcome. It was the progenitor of staleness and decadence that had been festering pre-awareness. If it came from outside, sure, it was welcome. Outside dust wasn’t the same. Outside was where life was and an injection of life was always sorely needed, especially now, especially at any moment. He was torn about keeping his front door open indefinitely. It might evoke some life in those lifeless adjacent apartments, using his apartment as a pipeline to spread the window’s air, but that inside dust was never to be let diffuse into his room. Those rooms had no outside inspiration or no new happenings and so they could only refer to themselves. Chasing their own tail and eating themselves up. Entirely dead air.

The stairs he took going downstairs were to be tread cautiously and the elevator was to be avoided, as was the manager, alongside the group of three. In avoiding these people, their potential threat was made real. These were true sources of danger and avoiding them was the natural course of action.

The liftman had these not as explicit thoughts as of then. There was no recognition of them. Just a helping of fear and an obviousness about the plans. His attentiveness was only fledgling. Bumping up against the world. His old way of wondering about wondering was always more of a coating than a standalone feature.

He proceeded to be the fastest man to ever descend a set of stairs. He swung on the stair bannisters around a fully extended arm, and transitioned each footstep without energy loss. In his head he saw himself leaving a trail of dust just as a horse would kick up dirt in its trot. Disgusting.

At the foyer, he was overcome and his pupils dilated. The manager had witnessed him fumble. Soiled himself as the mess he was. Trying to convey the simple message about the tiles being disgusting and instead showing himself to be exactly that. Another dirty picture of himself made itself present in his mind. Instead of just socially missing the mark, he had instead worn his viscera on the outside, a picture of shit. A raised, dead blubbering mass.

A fair person may have just called him awkward and he would have benefited from taking that stance. There was no notion of his own disgust that would ever enable himself becoming not awkward.

There was no manager to be seen, as he was assumedly off doing a task, but he might as well have been around every corner. The liftman headed outside but in his anxious state, the sidewalk outside was not his. It was everyone else’s. They had used it so much more and also known how it had looked a hundred days before, and he was only seeing it in his first few goes. He strolled down the road, at the behest of a whim and urge, with no easily discernible purpose or direction. There was a sprinkling rain that was coating everything in a sparkle. It felt nice. That gentle film sheet was falling down on him and everyone alike.

It transitioned into a heavier, clotted rainfall and people sped up into shelter, chasing the clouds out in the same direction or heading deeper in so as to find their beginning. The pavement was collecting pools in its depressions and the liftman, with his head and eyes upright to embrace the rain, was stepping into them. Rainwater saturated his socks but that was fine. It now matched his shirt, jacket and trousers. The clothes from the first stock model mannequin he had seen when he got the job.

He splodged his feet inside his shoes extra loudly. Curling his toes and sloshing the water. No one could hear it above the hustle and bustle combined with the splattering of rain. He even started to hum. He hummed louder and louder. Tunes he had never heard before but seemed to be a natural progression of the sounds his mouth was making. He hummed so loudly that the face of a finely dressed, wet lady side-eyed him in passing. That was his cue to stop. Why was that the only person to see me? If her then why not everyone else? Why not others? He shouted a singular shout for no particular reason and it was swept up by the loudening situation.

In another three moments, the paths had cleared. The rain was now torrential. The shop covers for the porch seating areas collected packages of rain and discouraged the workers from closing them for fear of drowning. The puddles were sprawled across the paths. Fertile potholes for collecting rain in no man’s land.

A flyer. A red flyer. In the first puddle past the general goods shop was a floating page. It’s half plastic, half paper make up resisted the rain and let it simmer on top of a puddle. In bold, white writing overtop a black, performance lit stage background was the word “CABARET”. Cabaret dancers placed all around it.

He stole the crinkled, electrified page and held his breath. He moved his eyes from the bottom to top four times over. Moving his field of view felt light and unintentional now as if the power of interest had lessened the burden on his eye musculature. He imagined being them, leading the stage, directing the looks, confusing and enticing in consecutive motions. Less clothes and dustless clothes. Dustless sounded nice but needing to have less clothes wasn’t pleasant; only recently had he felt completely naked. He sat on the feeling for a moment. He’d retain his clothes but also his want to not have to wear them.

He tried on cabaret with himself to test its fit. But those in the crowd protested his performance with their eyes, with their gaping mouths and their gasps. It splintered the picture of ease and glory and left space for apprehension. He pictured one of the most outraged audience members in his performance standing up to make an official protest. Before he spoke, the rest of the cabaret crew entered the stage. These long-legged, chin-lifted men and women. Confident and impervious to anything that didn’t allow them to be doing exactly what they were. The protesting person only averse to the face of the confusing, and the liftman’s cabaret performance was confusing only because he himself was confused. Not fully committed like the others were. No one would ever accept his performance with their wallets.

He stuffed the already crumpled flyer into his pocket. More water pooling in his pocket was merely the fee for owning something so potent. The folds and crumples weren’t to be hated, they were crimping of the love and intention a baker applies to that day’s goods. Someone alive had crimped this poster. It was his turn to imbue life. Maybe lead a cabaret.

He might go back inside to dry off but just the same he could blink away the rain and be fine. His clothing was completely holding rain so what difference was it to have more water? It was he who was flooding the street. He ripped the corner off a poster next to a closed market stand and realised that everyone had deserted the streets, entered into shops, were under cover or were filling railway stations. Some saw him, others didn’t. The poster was of a gleeful family sitting on their new sofa set. One month’s wage for a matching item set. A two-seater sofa and matching armchairs. That day the family had sat on the production set with the edge of the comfy curated scene bordered by wirings, pipings, stands, corrugated flimsy metal walling. All ready to be dismantled at a moment’s notice. But what ultimately showed were those smiles. Facial expressions so bright and compensated for. It could live next to his glorious cabaret.

The next find was an anti-drug pamphlet, “Live in this world. Live with us” which was plastered over an unachievable yellow sun. Underneath, and overlapping, were the backs of three heads superimposed over the bottom portion of the sun. A sun so close and large that somehow hadn’t scorched life from earth.

Within the anti-drug agency, to “Live with us” was to find the governmentally subsidised building with their governmentally agnostic white lighting and its accompanying damp scent. It was easy enough to take a route underneath a hidden arch, through an alley, to the other end of the courtyard and past three spots that spoke injection, to find an inconspicuous door you had to ring for. Then, a winding set of stairs and a stare from an occasionally berated and therefore stern service-worker behind a clear panel. Those making it through deserving of sobriety. None of these facts would ever be known or relevant to him and so the whole enterprise was a fellowship and a hand pulling people up when they didn’t have to.

He harvested the interesting portions of two more posters, helped himself to two more pamphlets and attempted to unscrew a street sign. “Belsnorth Rd.” had smuggled “north” into it and “north” felt upward. He struggled to break loose one of the four rusted nuts and, when an orange bevelled edge split open his thumb, he learned to leave the sign alone. His pockets were full anyway and it wasn’t needed. He let his blood carry away the bacteria.

He sourced a homeware shop four roads down by walking randomly. In it, he purchased six frames and a small easel. The most visibly pleasing frame was for the cabaret poster where he could store, not contain but instead facilitate, that most excited and risky state of life displayed on the front. He could feel it. It was still electric to the touch. The other five frames were nothing special beside how they got to hold his other items. The easel was for the street sign. The one that he would have in time.

He wished to show his papers and scraps to the shop attendant. A burly, disinterested man who looked over the top portion of half-moon glasses. He thought against it to avoid spreading the vitality across two individuals and lessen his portion – happy for it to remain strictly his to spit fire into his nerves and sensorily lead him to life.

The way back to the St. Germaine was fast and forgettable. It was of note to him that the gold trimmings that covered the St. Germaine were particularly beautiful. They were fit for this moment right now, they were placed exactly correctly.

He dragged his wet self through the foyer and pooled water by the elevator entrance before ringing the bell. On this side of the operation now and, for the first time, wearing the shoes of the customer. He didn’t expect them to be this wet. Down came the elevator and a perky liftman opened the fence. The fence diamonds squeaked and the week’s liftman giggled. He entered. Words came before the corresponding bodily actions and he spoke. A smile eventually caught up.

“The cabaret, no?”

It was a disconnected, middle thought but he was trying to share the idea at the stage he was experiencing it at. If through his words, into the ears of Monday’s liftman, he could transfer the same picture of cabaret, then this man was of a good enough sort. He didn’t seem like the type of man to steal the energy from what he wanted to say. He knew that the shop clerk would.

Monday’s liftman, understanding nothing, but grabbing at the opportunity for achievement, took the lead. He postured like the cabaret dancers he himself had seen. It was a perfect picture of a lead performer, bent-arms contorted overhead an oblique body, a pointed raised forefoot and a questioning but imploring facial expression paired with all his grinned teeth. His hands were folded at the wrist and seductively orbited the joint. Chance would have it that he was the perfect man to perform something so odd and out of place without having it feel that way.

“Now, you!”

The week’s liftman, with only slight hesitation, replicated. In a forced, diluted, and less alive posture, he became a dirty mirror image of Monday’s liftman. It was everything for him at that moment. He belly-laughed, looking upward with his face overexposed under the yellow lighting. He held the posture for a few seconds too long in all his infatuation. The man who drove the elevator up was the one man who would not call this into question with as little as a judgemental gaze. There was no world where he would disgrace and humble another person, especially for an action so trivial and harmless; only awkward. Good natured and awkward. This was to be an isolated incident where the week’s liftman got away with his uncanniness, but it could be a teaching moment too, that the next time he went for something similar it should be two seconds shorter, behind a fine line that was crucially important.

To try and do this, Monday’s liftman placed a palm on the other’s shoulder as they reached the sixth. He wet his hand; having not noticed how soaked his companion really was. He was also infatuated but for his own reasons. The hand was to show guidance, to tell the other to relax their body and where the proper time to stop was, those crucial two seconds, not in humiliation but only to cement the good mood he had uncovered. Also to show him how future iterations of this should go if he wished to repeat something similar. Like he was reigning in the child who wished to tell a joke for the third time because the adults laugh on the first. In humanity and not strangulation, he was his father.

His partner, the week’s liftman, fell into the engagement with the world he had experienced before when his foot was trampled. His border, connected to the world. Presentness. Physical touch dissolving his sense of self.

Monday fed from the interaction for all of that day until it was bone and gristle. Every moment after was a bonus for he already had shown perfection to the awkward. Couldn’t fuck it up now. Making note of the sixth floor’s quiet, eerie air where his companion exited, he took an earned, expanding, breath.

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