No Thirteenth Floor

The elevator in my building was broken, so I went across the street to use theirs. It was summer, and the birds on the wire were too hot to say anything to each other, they just stared abstractedly into space. The people, too, said nothing, as though any wasted breath would cause them to instantly give in to sunstroke. Young men in suits and women with strollers and groups of girls with bright pink shirts, all silent as they hurtled through this orange-baked desert. Perhaps they had knowledge of their momentum and they simply couldn’t stop it, or perhaps they were just caught up in the grand ride of physics, little human pinballs. Either way, they made for a miserable painting, nothing like Nighthawks but set in broad daylight. People don’t slurp coffee as much as they used to, or if they do it’s to themselves. What all of this had to do with an elevator being out of order, though, I’ve not the faintest. I was standing in their elevator, waiting for the doors to open to a whole world for which I was not prepared.