For the Machines

Doors closing. Going up. First floor, residential and quietly religious. Second floor, haberdashery and implication. Sorry, we don’t know each other – my name is Sylvia. Third floor, gardening supplies and six million empty coats. It was my fourth acting gig in thirty-seven months. Greasy little studio with the walls sweating grief. Outstanding place to fail quietly, but I went full Stella Adler anyway. Fourth floor, nowhere you want to be in this weather. And then the sound-dampening curtain drawn down, the microphone lowering with its shining wire. Fifth floor, dramatic props and business fictions. Did you ever want to be the voice of an elevator? I thought about that – I thought about being the ghost inside this system until the cables fray or the fuse boards blow. Sixth floor, a hellish landscape inspired by Bosch and various socks. A half-day’s wages for ten floors declaimed through speaker mesh in a seventies mixed-use building close to a grumbling airport. Red velvet bed dressing decaying in timeshare flats. Corners no one could get the dirt off. Mid-level speciality outlets fearing creeping death under the boots of franchised giants. Seventh floor, a void where 800 seraphs hum spirals. Here we are, though, you and I rising through the airy shaft: a human voice vibrating behind a metal grate and a levitating pilgrim. Yesterday, a couple touching each other under the clothes – raw gasps, rolling shoulders around the cold-steel interior plate. Later, shop clerks in heraldic polo shirts tapped their sneakers, impatient for freedom beyond the ground floor. Many alone, like you, but I went with them. Do you know what I said to them? I said – Eighth floor, Southern Hazelnut Exporters and Clown Shoe Merchants’ Association, Maximillian Flog & Lamplight Sisters Private Investigations, and Central Administration Office of The Reformed Temple of Neo-Dagon. That’s the point, really, to speak to anyone who’ll come to hear. It’s art, you know? Somewhere in a little Freudian niche between the belly and the top of the pelvis, I’m that sort of person. Now I’m around you, and you’re coming to know me. Ninth floor, infinite grasslands where Ibis fly over with ribbons in their sabre beaks. These are our last few seconds together; the circle is closing. Tenth floor, beyond are the stairs to the roof. Beyond the stairs is the sky.