Elevator to Hell

 
The door opened.  She stepped in.  Got on.  Someone said, “What floor?”   

“It doesn’t matter,” she replied.

Glances were exchanged, shoulders shrugged, eyes rolled.  What did they know.  It was the down elevator wasn’t it.  “This is the down elevator, isn’t it?”  The question was directed to the lady in the black Persian lamb with two perfect pink circles on her cheeks.  Dab, smack.  Dab, smack. 

“I believe so,” said the lady, avoiding eye contact, staring straight ahead, transfixed by the tossle on the hat, oh such a goofy hat, of a man blowing his nose in a large red handkerchief.  

“Good enough,” she said, to the lady in particular and the crowd in general.  It was a rotten day; a rotten day in a rotten week of a rotten year.  Things had been rotten for a long time and she had become complacent with the rottenness of everything.  Someone in the elevator smelled really bad.  Downright rotten in fact.  Facts were hard to come by these days.  She savored the rotten fact of the rotten odor coming from one of the rotten people on the rotten elevator.  She opened her purse, pulled out a little notebook and wrote: “Someone on this elevator stinks.”

This small notebook by Leonardo da Vinci (officially identified as Codex Forster III)

is in the V&A Museum in London.  Photo ©2010 Marion Boddy-Evans.

The V&A Museum in London has five of Leonardo da Vinci's notebooks in its collection. This one, known as Codex Forster III, was used by Leonardo da Vinci between 1490 and 1493, when he was working in Milan for Duke Ludovico Sforza.  It's a small notebook, the kind of size you could easily keep in a coat pocket. It's filled with all sorts of ideas, notes, and sketches, including "sketches of a horse’s legs... drawings of hats and cloths that may have been ideas for costumes at balls, and an account of the anatomy of the human head."¹ While you can't turn the pages of the notebook in the museum, you can page through them  here

It gave her great satisfaction to add another fact to the list of facts she had been compiling over the last several weeks.  It was a puny list, but it was growing.  Soon, hopefully, she would sit down with her fact book and arrange the facts in some kind of order, most likely in the order of greatest to least importance, and when that was done, she would be able to determine, hopefully, where she had been, where she now was, and where in the devil she was going.

To do this, to know these things without facts, was impossible, she was sure of that, but reluctant to call this sureness a fact because it lacked the essential ingredient of a fact.  Actual, indisputable existence is what made a fact a fact, sureness did not measure up, sureness was almost a fact, but not quite.  Sureness could be here today and gone tomorrow; a fact remained a fact day in and day out, could never be anything other than a fact.  This fact however, the fact of a fact, was too elementary to be included in her list of facts.  A fact is a fact is a fact; a fundamental self referential infinitely continual existential replication of itself and all within itself which makes itself what it is.  A fact, like the rose of William Shakespeare and Gertrude Stein, is by any other name, still a fact.  

She knew for sure that sureness wasn’t a fact because for the past five years she had been sure, absolutely sure, that she was on the brink of death, day after day after day, and yet, here she was today, alive on this rotten elevator.  Yes, she was certain that sureness was not a fact, that could be established, but could this bit of information concerning sureness be considered a fact in and of itself and did it deserve a place on the list of facts in her book of facts?  That would require some heavy duty thinking.  Enough is enough, she told herself.  This is not the time and place to ruminate over such matters.  Suddenly though, it struck her, that enough was enough, that enough is enough, that enough will always be enough.  Zing.  Proof of the pudding.   A simple equation that no one could deny: Enough = Enough.  She pulled out her notebook and beneath "Someone on this elevator stinks" she wrote: “Enough is Enough.”  Indisputable, she thought, indisputable.

She was in the left front corner of the elevator, standing with her back against the side wall.  Her right shoulder and arm were almost but not quite touching the elevator button panel, almost but not quite because she made a conscious concentrated effort to plant her feet, keep her balance, stabilize her body and keep it away from the button panel.  This was difficult to do because the elevator was crowded and she was being jostled.  She was slightly dizzy.  She tried not to look directly at the faces of the people in the elevator but it was difficult not to because she wanted to so badly.  Almost directly catty-corner from her, in the right rear corner of the elevator was a shabbily dressed old man with a hole in his throat. 

Strawbridge & Clothier was a major department store chain in the Greater Philadelphia area focused on a middle-class clientele. The firm was founded as a partnership by Justus C. Strawbridge and Isaac H. Clothier on July 1, 1868, and incorporated on February 14, 1922. The firm was operated on Quaker principles of simplicity and community service, control remaining with the founding families, especially the Strawbridges, for four generations.

It was the last locally-controlled, family-owned department store chain in the Philadelphia area. Despite an early and innovative move into suburban branches beginning in 1930 and the development of the popular Clover line of discount stores and "Clover Day" sales, the firm eventually succumbed to changing patterns in retailing and sold its stores to the May Department Store Company of St. Louis, which had previously bought the Wanamaker chain, on July 15, 1996.


To be continued .......