Eleven Floors, One Lost Morning

My apartment building's lift takes about forty seconds from the eleventh floor to the lobby. I got in at 8:55 on a Thursday, dressed for the office, holding a travel cup of coffee too hot to sip.

The doors closed, the floor numbers began their countdown, and somewhere around six the lights did a slow blink — dip, recover — which they never do. The car did not stop. The numbers kept walking down at their usual pace: five, four, three, lobby.

The lobby was wrong. The light through the glass front was steep and yellow, afternoon light. The concierge who works mornings was gone; the evening man, Stefan, was at the desk, and he greeted me with 'Feeling better?' — a strange thing to say to someone he should not have seen yet that day.

My phone came out of airplane mode — I never put it in airplane mode — to 14:12 and a landslide: forty-one messages, nine missed calls, a calendar in ruins. My office had phoned the concierge desk at eleven; Stefan's morning colleague had, per the logbook, rung my flat, gotten nothing, and noted 'resident seen entering lift 8:55, did not exit — must have missed him.'

Did not exit. The lobby camera, which the building manager reviewed with me because I was pale enough to be humoured, shows the lift doors opening at 8:56 — on an empty car. They open again at 14:11 and there I am, stepping out with my coffee.

The coffee. I keep telling people about the coffee and watching them decide I am unwell. It was still too hot to sip. Five hours and sixteen minutes in a steel box, or nowhere at all, and my drink had aged forty seconds.

I take the stairs now. Eleven floors, twice a day. My doctor says the exercise is doing me good, and we leave it at that.