Look down / fiction by Mir-Yashar Seyedbagheri

Look Down

I’m in a glass cage, that alleged elevator. It begins to rise, up the stately train station clock tower. I can’t look down. Even though I promised my sister, sweet Nan that one day I’d do that for her. Of course, one day turned to another. I learned that procrastination has a price.

I won’t look down. I should look down. I’m thirty-six, not twelve.

But I do. I think I can see the ground floor way below. Stucco and brick mingle, along with the old wooden stairs that go to the top, zigzagging left and right, like some kind of Alice in Wonderland maze. I feel dizzy, seeing the expanse of emptiness between the elevator and everything below.

My older sister Nan and I used to traipse up these stairs. Before the elevator. Before the stairs were closed off. Before Nan’s smiles were inverted as she crept into her forties. We crept up here through childhood, and young adulthood. I still think of how Nan clattered up them with confidence. How she loves the history in this century-old edifice. Loved, that is. She loved the ghosts, loved the pigeons in the belfry, loved looking down.

I always tripped. Looked up, took the stairs one at a time.

And every time I couldn’t look down, Nan held me tight. 

“You won’t fall,” she always said. “I won’t let you.” 

 Now, I nearly stumble. I think of how everything seems to be held by the flimsiest of things in this building, the old beams in the ceiling, this flimsy excuse for an elevator, the weights of the huge tower clock that dangle nearby, giant stacks of metal suspended on flimsy cable, reminding me that time is passing. That time has passed. That time has killed. One thing snaps, one soul snaps, and you can’t fully explain what happens, even if there’s a technical explanation.

Then the elevator lurches. It’s a groan. A horrific groan. And it stops. And I’m suspended among brick, stucco, musk, the clockworks to one side, contained within the flimsiest of little wooden platforms. The pendulum swings feet beneath me, a giant salami-shaped device, the normally slow, steady tick now almost ominous. Light and darkness mingle, like some kind of macabre dance.

Shit. 

I should press a button. Any button. I should try to call emergency. But the signals in this tower are weak. Back to the buttons. Just one wrong button could send me down. Or keep me up here in perpetuity. I close my eyes, but something keeps prying them open. Is it Nan? Is she up here?

I have to do better.

I stumble, but still, I imagine one little step ending it all. I picture the glass as it shatters beneath my rather pudgy feet. I imagine the weight of descent, what it means to fly through nothingness. I wonder if it’s fast, or I wonder if it’s a slow-motion thing, like some movie. I wonder if I would scream, and if Nan would feel a kind of shame watching me scream. I wonder if she’d just want me to bear it.

After all, Nan used to joke about seeing if time really could fly. Especially during the later days, the inverted smile days.

Fuck time.

But just then the clock chimes, and I can practically feel the vibrations. They echo, seem to rattle the elevator, and I wonder if this is the thing that will do the trick. 

But it all just fades. The elevator hangs on. I wait. A minute ticks past, and then another. I think I hear a lurch, but it may be something settling in the building, or some 1920s-era ghost hanging out. There’s supposedly some ghost in here. An old singer of the time. I wonder if she and Nan have met. I hope she’s keeping Nan company. I hope she’s making Nan smile in ways that I couldn’t in those later days, no matter how hard I tried. No matter how hard I reached into my arsenal of the darkest jokes.

Another lurch. Or is that just footsteps down below? Perhaps it’s just more people taking in the history, absorbing the building’s majesty, its grace and its blemishes. People not aware of the darkness beneath those blemishes, the things that no restoration can wipe away.

Just then, the elevator groans again, then begins its rise. I imagine Nan smiling. Remember when she said that looking down puts everything into a kind of perspective. I think of her up in that belfry, just looking down, how she smiled, stretched her hands out. Back in the good days, the days of smiles. 

“Everything feels so small below,” she’d said. “Like you’re in control.”

So I look down as the elevator begins to hum its song, the clock ticks on, and pigeons coo from some space above. I look down, not taking my glance off the vastness of air and heights, even as the shadows within begin to give way to a bright expanse of light and openness.

Mir-Yashar Seyedbagheri is a graduate of Colorado State University's MFA fiction program. His work has been published in SmokeLong Quarterly, The Journal of Compressed Creative Arts, Write City Magazine, and Ariel Chart, among others.