Fallevator

There's a man, my occasional elevator companion, who is very hard to read, which I enjoy, and who makes outspoken accusations. On St. Patrick's day he accused me of coveting his shamrock pin pocked with green rhinestones. On another occasion as soon as he entered he blew on about math being imaginary. OK, loud and clear, MATH IS IMAGINARY! I'm glad the 9th floor, where I often work, is not imaginary, because it's a long way down.

Somewhere, maybe in Manhattan, there's an elevator that grants wishes. People deny this but the fact is they don't know how it works. You have to know what kinds of wishes to wish on which floors. That quiet hammer ping that announces each floor is very important.

On the lower levels, you make wishes that have REASONS. For instance, you wish for success, wealth and the old standards, meeting Mr. Right, a chick that likes you, getting the promotion or surviving the cut. The 5th floor is for wishing the hangover away but also wishing for protection from fools and tryants. On the 6th floor you make wardrobe wishes, on the 7th, food wishes, and on the 8th wishes having to do with animals (e.g., please let me only see black and white squirrels today.) On the uppermost floor the trick is this, when you wish, you can't know what your wish is, who it's for, who one is wishing it of or what it's effects will be.

It's a very dangerous sort of wishing, one can fall; as the doors truck open, one becomes aware that something has broken, and at first it's horrible and one feels brought low, before the exhilaration of the fall has woven itself into every little break, weaving imperceptibly intricate webs of soft-as-silk iron in the gaps where the reasons wore away.