The Somebodies (6 page)

LET’S BEGIN HERE WITH AN ELEVATOR OPERATOR
. Why an elevator operator? Well, because Fern and Howard (and the miniature pony, now safe again in Fern’s pocket) had fallen through a hatch at the bottom of the envelope that was attached to a hatch at the top of an elevator—a glass elevator—and they landed on the elevator’s floor. On the other side of the glass, on every side and below, was dirt.

It isn’t easy to imagine, I know, falling through hatches in swollen envelopes into glass elevators, but I have complete faith in you, because you have a wildly vivid imagination. (For example, the wildly vivid imagination of Missy in Hoboken; the strong, smart, and
bold perceptions of Chantelle from Girls Inc.; and the mazelike mind of Sister John Elizabeth, principal of Mount Aviat Academy! Stick with me now!)

Fern wondered if the glass elevator could fly. She’d read a book about a boy and a candy factory owner who flew in one such elevator. She would have asked right away, but the elevator operator was frowny and stern and proper.

He didn’t react to Fern and Howard falling through the hatch. He pretended this kind of thing happened all the time, and it did. He was a formal man in a black cap who sat on a little black chair next to the automatic doors. A row of shiny buttons lined his vest, and they were under pressure, these buttons. The buttonholes were stretched so tightly, they puckered. The thread holding each button was exposed and frayed by the strain. The buttons stood out like a row bulging guppy eyes. The buttons were menacing, dangerous, like little pop guns all ready to go off.

The elevator operator simply said, “Floor, please!” in a way that made it seem like he wanted some flooring—tile, linoleum, fake hardwood—and he was going to be demanding about it.

“Floor?” Howard asked Fern. “Please?”

They were standing up now, brushing themselves off. Fern checked on the pony who, luckily, hadn’t gotten
crushed. There was elevator music, something sleepy and tinkling. But it wasn’t very loud, and Fern and Howard could hear the gasps and muffled rantings of Dorathea, the Bone and the Drudgers overhead. Fern and Howard both looked up at the hatch, which had shut itself. Would the others find a way through to the elevator? Would they come after them?

“I think he wants to know what floor we want to go to,” Fern whispered urgently to Howard.

“How do we know what floor?” Howard whispered back. He pointed at the hatch. “We’ve got to get out of here!”

Fern turned to the elevator operator. “We’ve been invited. We’ve come, um, through an invitation.” She squinted at him, fearful that one of his buttons, trembling with pressure, might pop off and put out her eye.

The elevator operator glared at Fern, squinting away as she was. Evidently she wasn’t the first person to fear his buttons.

“I know why you’re doing that with your eyes. You think my buttons are going to blow! You think I’m too fat!” He let his fingers ruffle down the buttons. “Well, they do blow occasionally, but I fix them right up. I fix them right back into place.”

The voices above were growing louder, and clearer, too. She could hear them arguing. Howard’s and Fern’s
names were being tossed around angrily. Howard paced in a small circle,
The Art of Being Anybody
gripped under his arm.

“Where are we?” Howard was saying, looking at the dirt on the other side of the glass panes. “I don’t understand. Are we underneath your bedroom? Are we downstairs? What’s with the dirt? It doesn’t make sense!”

The buttons were still irking Fern, however. She couldn’t help but mutter the obvious questions. “Why do you fix the buttons, sir, if you don’t mind me asking? Why don’t you just get a bigger vest?”

“Code!” the elevator operator barked, rearranging his cap, angrily and for no apparent reason; the cap was just fine. “I’m union! This vest is to code. They don’t come in bigger sizes. There’s a maximum weight, you know! Can’t take up too much weight! We’re not like umpires!” He sighed sadly. “Lucky umpires.”

Just then there was a
bing
, and the doors slid open, revealing an elderly woman with a wire laundry basket on wheels in an apartment hallway.

“What is this?” Howard said, befuddled. He shoved his head out of the elevator and glanced up and down the hall.

“Sorry, Mrs. Hershbaum,” the elevator operator said. “You’ll have to leave the laundry behind. Already
got two riders here, and as you know, I don’t like to take on extra weight!”

“But I’m going to do my laundry at Melvin’s! How can I leave my laundry behind?”

Melvin’s? Fern knew the name of the place. It was on the foldout map of the city beneath the city. “Are we going to the city beneath the city?” Fern asked.

The elevator operator didn’t answer Fern’s question. He answered a question no one had asked, and that was: Why are you so afraid of taking on extra weight? (Elevator limits are usually two thousand pounds or more, and this elevator really wasn’t close to that, even including Mrs. Hershbaum, a frail wisp of a woman, and her laundry.) “I had a bad elevator accident as a child,” the elevator operator explained. “Too many people. An overload. I survived but was deeply scarred. So—”

“You became an elevator operator,” said Mrs. Hershbaum wearily. “Shoulda gone into something closer to the ground!”

“Where’d she come from?” Howard popped his head back into the elevator and nearly screeched, “Is she underground? Is she in Dorathea’s boardinghouse? Where did this hallway come from?”

“Well, sure, I’d have liked to have been an engineer! Who wouldn’t? But I face my fear of elevators every day,” the elevator operator said. “Sometimes I do get a
little afraid, a little jangled nervousness about life, and at those moments, I eat a Twinkie or something, and that makes me feel safe and warm.”

“Faced your fears! Ha! Can’t even take a woman to the Laundromat!”

“I’m not taking you anywhere with that extra load! And that’s final!” the elevator operator barked, and then he lowered his voice. “No can do!” He hit a button on the panel and the door hesitated long enough for Mrs. Hershbaum to show her displeasure with a grimace. The doors slid shut. Mrs. Hershbaum and her basket of laundry on wheels disappeared.

“We’ve come by invitation,” Howard repeated nervously, looking at the dirt all around them. He had never been fond of oddness. “Does that mean anything?”

The elevator operator pulled a clipboard out from under his arm. “Name please!” Again, it seemed like he wanted Fern and Howard to name him instead of telling him their names. But they got the gist this time.

“Fern,” Fern said.

“Howard,” Howard said.

“Mmhm!” he said. He ran his finger down a list, paused, continued, paused, continued.

They could now make out the sound of shoes clipping around overhead. Howard whispered, “Hurry, hurry,” under his breath.

Finally, the elevator operator shouted, “Six-oh-one!”

He pressed one of the unmarked buttons in a huge panel of unmarked buttons. Nothing happened. The music plinked on overhead. Howard and Fern shot each other anxious glances. They could hear Mr. Drudger stomping on the floor somewhere above them, saying, “Let’s go about this logically. They can’t be far away! They disappeared in this area.”

“I wouldn’t fool around there, Mr. Drudger,” Dorathea was warning.

The Bone was calling, “Fern! Howard!”

“It doesn’t make sense,” Howard said, looking up. “How could they be there?”

The footsteps grew louder. Mrs. Drudger’s voice was clear and close. “What’s this, right here, in the spot where that thing shrunk and disappeared? Isn’t it a latch?” There was some clicking. The hatch inside of the elevator jiggled.

The elevator operator wasn’t flustered by the voices or by the latch or by the elevator’s lack of motion. “Are you ready?” he asked.

“Yes, yes!” Fern said. “What are you waiting for?”

“Just go!” Howard said.

“Is this your first time? I’ll need to read a waiver. This isn’t your ordinary elevator,” he warned. “It’s also a descendavator.”

“Of course,” Howard said. “All elevators are also descendavators! Just go!”

The latch was still twisting overhead.

“It’s also a diagonavator, horizontavator, rapidavator, vamoosavator.”

“You made that last one up!” Howard shouted.

“I did not! I’m union! I’m up to code! Do you see this letter here from the elevator inspector?” The letter was framed in glass. “I run a tight ship!”

“Okay!” Howard said. “You run a tight ship! We’re ready! Okay! So run it!”

“And you?” He looked at Fern.

Fern was staring at the hatch. “Ready!” she said.

The elevator operator calmly recited: “Keep all arms and legs inside of the elevator at all times. No screaming, yelling, or mocking of your elevator operator, who may be pushing his weight.”

It was obvious he’d added this last line himself, but Fern didn’t draw attention to it.

“That’s all fine,” Fern said.

“Yes, yes! We get it!” Howard cried.

The elevator operator smiled, just briefly. “Giddyap now, Charlie Horse!” he said. “Giddyap!”

Just at that moment, the overhead hatch opened. Mrs. Drudger’s bland face appeared in the frame, the pale blue of the bedroom ceiling behind her like she was
set against the sky.

“Oh, my!” she said.

And as the elevator (descendavator, diagonavator, horizontavator, rapidavator, vamoosavator) shot down with a violent burst of speed, the elevator operator’s buttons began popping and pinging and ricocheting around. Fern and Howard squatted down and balled up, but they couldn’t help but look back at what they were leaving behind. Four faces had collected there at the hatch: Mrs. Drudger, Mr. Drudger, the Bone and Dorathea—the paralyzed look of their shocked faces floating in an open square that grew smaller and smaller until Fern and Howard couldn’t see them at all.

FERN AND HOWARD WERE ON A REAL BUCKING
bronco of an elevator. They careened madly through tunnels, around sharp corners and down chutes. The elevator dipped, spiraled and, once, looped. Fern’s stomach looped right along, and Howard screamed like a wounded goat. They twisted, dawdled, then zipped, looped, zigged and, immediately thereafter, zagged. (There’s a word for that but I’m too excited to think of it right now.)

Fern and Howard would sometimes try to get on their feet and surf, but mostly they were tossed and rolling on the floor, flattened against one pane of glass or another. Howard looked pale—prevomit pale. Fern was breathless and bruised.

The elevator was taking them deeper underground, and because it was glass, they could see everything flying past at great speed. It was shooting around roots and basements and gopher homes and square-bottomed swimming pools and lakes, close enough to the lakes to see the fish on the other side of their glass elevator. Fern didn’t like to look at the fish, though. They reminded her too much of the menacing goldfish in the painting. She hoped she wouldn’t see that fish again.

The elevator operator, his vest held together by one straining button and its suffering thread, never lost his balance. He never so much as bobbled. He sat on his chair, next to the panel of unmarked buttons—only one lit—and wore an expression of abject boredom. He tapped his foot lightly to the plinky music piped in through a speaker.

This was maddening to Howard. He glared at the elevator operator whenever he could, desperate for an explanation. When they hit a straightaway, he caught his breath and asked as many questions as he could fire off: “Where are we? How can this elevator exist in Dorathea’s house and Mrs. Hershbaum’s apartment building and by that lake? Don’t people catch on—regular people? Where’d this elevator come from? Who manufactured it? How long has this elevator been in operation? And why don’t you fall off your stool?”

Fern had only one question to add. It was the one she’d had the first time she saw the glass elevator. “Does this thing fly, by any chance?”

This caught the elevator operator’s attention. He rearranged his black cap, patted it, then fiddled with his one remaining shiny button. “A History Lesson on the Anybody Elevator System. You have come to the right man!”

In precise detail and with great love and joy and a little nanny-nanny-know-it-all in his tone, he launched into an explanation. It went something like this:

“A ways back, a kid name Artie borrowed
Charlie and the Glass Elevator
from the library. Though he’d loved
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory
, this sequel didn’t suit him. Artie thought it was a strange book that seemed like it was really about something else, but if you didn’t know what that something else was, you were in trouble—an inside joke of a book. (May I interrupt to say I assure you that this book is about what it’s about and not something else. So don’t go wasting your time looking.) Artie liked the glass elevator, though, and he decided he was going to shake it out. It took fourteen days. He figured out how it worked, shook it back in very politely, and then designed glass elevators using a bit of hypnosis, transformation, and concentration. A great engineer! One of the best!” You could tell
by the way he told the story that Artie was the elevator operator’s hero as a kid. “He convinced Shirley Hurlman of Hurlman and Sisters to manufacture them in a factory in the city beneath the city. Hurlman designed the system of paths, a network that became worldwide: a fleet of hidden, highly disguised and thoroughly hypnotized elevators, trained to take you to the city beneath the city. Engineering,” the elevator operator said dreamily. “If I didn’t have to face my elevator fears day in and day out, I’d take classes.”

Fern said, “You should take classes, if that’s what you want.”

“Don’t be silly,” the elevator operator said. He cleared his throat and went on with his telling. “The really great Anybodies can find the city beneath the city in their own ways,” he explained. “But for the less gifted or those who don’t want to waste their gifts on travel—and most fall into one or the other group—the elevators work best. In New York, for example, there are hidden elevators in various locations.” He named a few: behind a certain bookcase at the Bank Street Bookstore; in the back room of Epstein’s Bar; inside a certain Gap dressing room.

“These elevators will take you straight to a number of places in the city beneath the city: a spot near the concession stand at Bing Chubb’s Ballpark; to the back of Melvin’s Laundromat and Dry Cleaner’s where the
pressed shirts draped in plastic ride the carousel; or to the side door next to the jukebox at Jubber’s Pork Rind Juke Joint; or up into the confessional of Blessed Holy Trinity Catholic Church and Bingo Hall.

“Regular people don’t know that we exist, and they stick to that notion. It’s easier than you’d think. The Anybodies philosophy, you see, depends on the idea that the world is in a constant state of change, and one of the things that changes most is a person’s perception of things. Your perception, Howard, was that we were in part of a house. Mrs. Hershbaum’s perception was that we were in her apartment building. Both were right enough.” Here, he smiled as if he’d really made everything crystal clear. “So, you understand.”

“Not at all!” Howard said.

“Humph,” the elevator operator grunted. “Well, we’re getting closer to New York now. Can you understand that?”

“Yes,” Howard said, and then he stared out. They were flying past dirt. “Kinda.” The elevator took a sharp left. Howard and Fern slammed into a wall. “But you didn’t answer my question about why you don’t fall off your stool!”

“I don’t fall off my stool because I’m living in my perception, and in my perception, elevator operators don’t roll around on the floor.”

“What about my question?” Fern asked, trying to inch up the side of one of the glass walls.

“Well, sure it flies! Didn’t you read the book?”

“Oh, no,” Howard moaned. “No, no, no! It isn’t mathematically, statistically…Well, it doesn’t add up!” But even as he said these words, his voice shook with a lack of confidence. He knew that so many things weren’t logical. He’d already dived through an envelope. Fern had a miniature pony in her pocket made out of his teacher’s hair. The book that he was holding was filled with an entire art that was not sensible.

Soon the obstacles became more frequent, and the elevator was having to skinny in, and curve, as if it weren’t made of glass for a moment but of something more flexible. This made Fern and Howard very nervous. The pony shook and pawed in Fern’s pocket. They rode for a while alongside a subway car. Fern and Howard pressed their faces to the glass and waved, but the people on the other side didn’t seem to notice. The ones that were looking in the right direction seemed to be staring only at their own shortsighted reflections in their subway windows, which isn’t unlike New Yorkers. (Also, let’s be honest. If some of those New Yorkers had seen two kids waving from a glass elevator traveling sideways beside their subway car, most of them would be too
above-it-all to react. At most, they’d sigh, and say,
Oh, that again!
)

As they peeled away from the subway, taking a sharp left, the elevator maneuvered, herky-jerky, around all kinds of tubes and pipes made of cement and metal, taking them lower and lower. They even saw the hull of an old ship.

“We’re going deeper underground,” Howard said.

“We’ll be there soon!” the elevator operator barked.

Moments later they popped out of the chute and found themselves in the air. The elevator relied on no ropes, no cables, no pulleys. The elevator operator had been right, after all. The glass elevator could fly.

“Here it is,” the elevator operator announced. His remaining button was tense and quivering on his belly. “The city beneath the city.”

“Oh, look,” Howard said. “Just look!”

“I told you,” Fern said, in awe of it all. “I told you!”

The city stretched out below them as they hovered and then plummeted toward it. The thick roots of New York City were exposed, and the city beneath the city grew around pipes and ductwork and abandoned chutes. Because of being underground, the city had to manufacture the sun. Everything glittered with artificial light—lanterns and neon signs and overhead lights like those in stadiums.