Last night I called home at 5:45. I’d spent half an hour wrapping up various samples for FedEx pickup, and another ten minutes on a phone call that I thought would be from Lloyd but turned out to be a customer. There was a happy hour at one of the bars at Grand Central, and I promised my pals I would join them for at least one beer. Lloyd sounded distracted and shaken when he picked up the phone. “Did I get you at a bad time?”, I asked.
“Something really horrible happened at work today,” he answered.
In my head I ran through my usual laundry list, the history of horrible things that have happened to us at work. He got fired. He got laid off. He got a warning about his job performance. He got yelled at by some Type-A partner-type. He got into a fight.
“We think that someone was killed in the freight elevator here.”
He told me the story. It was 4:30. Everyone was doing what they do. From the freight elevator came a boom, then another noise that sounded like cable uncoiling. An announcement was broadcast over the P.A. One of the freight elevators was out; police and fire crews were on the way; the passenger elevators are working. Don’t be afraid.
He left work at 5, as usual. The lobby was mobbed, filled with police officers and firefighters. As Lloyd passed one of them he heard “D.O.A.,” but he did not hear the context. The news crews were just starting to arrive when he left the building.
“Go out,” he said when I told him I was on the way home. “I’m all right.”
I went out, shared the news with one of my co-workers whose boyfriend works in another division of Lloyd’s company, had a beer, made pleasant happy hour chitchat with the people at my end of the table. I can’t actually remember much of what I did or said. I have no taste memory of the beer, or the bar snacks; I have only the indigestion with which I was left afterwards.
By 7:30 I was home, talking to Lloyd, watching the news. The freight elevator, on its way down to the loading dock, was at the 19th floor when it, suddenly, violently shot up to the 37th floor, the top of the building. The elevator operator, a 20-year employee of the building management company, was killed. While the freight elevator runs on a different system from the passenger elevators, the accident did knock out power on one of the passenger elevators, trapping the people inside until rescue personnel arrived to get them out.
At 3 a.m., my eyes were still wide open as I thought of the recurrent nightmare of my childhood, the one where I am on an upward elevator that moves faster and faster with no sign of stopping, falling up.
This morning we heard more, combinations of news reports and the information sent via the emergency message line at Lloyd’s company. One of the counterweights on the freight elevator had fallen off, which caused the lift to shoot upward. The building is open. An investigation is underway, involving numerous agencies including OSHA and the New York City Department of Buildings. The passenger elevators have been inspected and are fine. Much of the same was reported on the news, with the additional information that the building company has been cited 10 times for “failing to maintain the people-moving devices in the building, including passenger elevators, freight elevators and escalators.” Of course, this doesn’t mean that said devices haven’t been maintained; it could just be that the Buildings Dept. or OSHA could have paid a visit and asked to see documentation on the inspections, and for whatever reason, documentation couldn’t be produced quickly. It doesn’t mean that the elevators aren’t being inspected. I remind myself of this over and over and over.
Lloyd leaves for work, traveling to the 32nd floor of the building as he does every morning. In my head I hear the line I have heard over and over for nearly three years: Don’t let yourself be afraid. Go to work, do what you do in a normal day. Consider it business as usual. As he kisses me goodbye, I try to squash out the other voice: Don’t go. Don’t go. Don’t go.
Crappola! I’m afraid I’d be screaming out the “Don’t go!” instead of squashing it, but you have better impulse control than I. Was Lloyd worried this morning? Or planning to get there verrrrry early to climb the stairs?