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. . .is the elevator situation in the building.

There are three elevators, and I get the feeling that they’d prefer to settle down and service a building full of clients that don’t go up and down so much — mushroom fields, say — rather than be burdened with a rapidly growing company dispersed across a wide range of floors.

Elevator 1 (as I think of it) is the freight elevator, and closest to the parking garage. It’s usually in service (although often commandeered by maintenance folks). It tends to arrive at floors with a unsettling little lurch, except when it arrives at floors with a disquieting major lurch.

Elevator 3 is closest to the ground floor entrance. It breaks sometimes, but I don’t have a clear sense of its personality.

But I think Elevator 2 has been reading Colson Whitehead’s novel The Intuitionist. It evinces a fundamental, existential dissatisfaction with its elevatorhood. It sometimes refuses to operate for days at a stretch, but I think this is less a function of its tiredness than of the time it takes its slow elevator brain to concoct new mischief. For several months it’s attempted to deliver passengers to the “Clear Error-th” floor, but it really topped itself this past Friday morning.

I arrived to find it flickering impossibly fast from the ground floor to the tenth, as if it were occupying both simultaneously, without passing through the intervening floors. Elevator transit by quantum indeterminancy, if you will.

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