Elevated - Short Story

Elevated - Short Story

Feb 10, 2021

“Fuck this. Fuck all this.”

Adwik pressed the button to call the lift repeatedly, visually frustrated. He was not having a good day.

It’s been 8 hours since he left home in the morning, to give his first job interview in months… and in these 8 hours, he lost his wallet, got hit by a garbage truck, broke his phone, got a case of food poisoning, got one of his shoes torn and lost the address of the office he was heading to. Although he did manage to somehow recover the address from his still-sharp memory, when he arrived at the venue, the interviewers were about to close shop, while the candidate queue still didn’t seem to end.

Adwik sat in the queue, patiently, waiting for the queue to reduce, which it did… but not in time. As it struck 6 on the dull wall-clock in the equally dull reception lounge of the office, the interviewers walked out hurriedly without an explanation.

He nervously followed a few fellow candidates, who mustered enough courage to ask the receptionist whether the interviewers were coming back, only to get a curt reply from her, confirming their suspicion, who further informed that the job requirement was now closed.

The reception lounge became empty within a few minutes of the announcement, leaving Adwik on the inappropriately comfortable sofa, along with his day-long list of bad memories. He had only started to run through his mind, hoping to find what really went wrong in this unfortunate day, when the office security gave him an unfriendly nudge, gesturing him to leave.

That’s when, Adwik reluctantly headed towards the lift, hoping for this terrible day to end. But fate had something else in mind.

The lift arrived, finally finishing its previous voyage, audibly exhausted.

Adwik gave a final look at the empty hallway leading to what, even a few minutes ago, was his last hope, and then stepped into the elevator.

The lift started moving, as he pressed the lobby button. Adwik looked at his watch, it was about 6.30pm. By now, the roads would probably have been filled up with rush hour traffic. That meant he would be late in reaching home too. Great, just great.

He pressed the lobby button again, as the lift didn’t seem to be in a mood to reach anywhere. Was it going up, instead of down? He looked at the small screen that displays the direction of the lift… it was blank. The LCD panel must have gone bad.

And then… the lift stopped.

Finally. Adwik took a step out as soon as the door opened… but, where was he? This isn’t the lobby!

He looked carefully. He was in an unconstructed part of the building, with a few partly cemented pillars sticking out of the floor. And it didn’t seem to be anywhere close to the lobby… it was definitely high up in the 30-storey building.

What a horrible elevator system! Why would it bring him here when he clearly pressed the lobby button!

Adwik looked for a sign to understand which floor he was, but there wasn’t any. He shrugged his shoulders in irritation and went back to the lift.

Thankfully, the lift was still there. Adwik stepped inside and firmly pressed the lobby button, firmer than usual.

The lift started moving again. Yes, it was going down this time. Adwik could feel the motion in his body. Oh, what a day!

The lift made a familiar ‘ding’ noise, as it reached its destination.

With a relieved smile, Adwik stepped out of the lift… only to be shocked. He had never seen anything like this… neither could he have imagined a place like this.

He was now standing on a floor, which ended abruptly after a few feet. In fact, the whole area ended all of a sudden within a radius of 100 meters… after which there was nothing.

It wasn’t as if the building wasn’t constructed after that radius, there was literally nothing beyond it. No ground, no ceiling, no object, no living being, no light, no shade… only an infinite black void. As if the universe stopped existing right after those few feet.

Adwik’s heart beat increased as he tried to process this unnatural sight. Was he awake? Was he even alive? He wasn’t sure.

He nervously stepped back and pressed the lift button, which immediately opened its door. He hurriedly stepped inside and reached for the lobby button with his sweaty hand, only to stop as he feared where that would take him this time.

He pressed 1 instead. He could easily walk down a floor. That would be a better decision than using this haunted lift to go directly to the lobby.

But what if… this thing, whatever it was, wasn’t just limited to the lobby?

With nervous anticipation Adwik stared at the display panel, which now showed absurd characters that couldn’t possibly have been included in its original design.

The lift stopped again. Adwik uneasily walked outside, only to find himself in a barely lit huge hallway. Did someone move, a little far ahead? Yes, of course, there was someone there!

A little less frightened, he walked ahead towards the other person, who was at the far end of the huge corridor. The man walked towards him as well.

Adwik waved at him, happily. Oh, finally, someone to talk to, to make sense of all this! The man waved back.

He must be one of those other interview candidates, Adwik thought, as he noticed the man’s clothing, which was very similar to him. There were barely any lights in the corridor, so he couldn’t make out any more details.

“Hello!” Adwik shouted eagerly. Was the corridor too long, or was it his mind messing with him?

“Hello!” The man shouted back, almost as if his own voice echoed from the end of the hallway.

Something felt off to Adwik… something wasn’t right here. He slowed down, while his heart beat accelerated. The man mimicked his speed.

“Hello, who are you?” Adwik halted, nervously. His momentary happiness to find another soul in this sinister & desolate place had disappeared.

“Hello, who are you?” The man asked in return, stopping where he was.

A shiver ran down Adwik’s body as he started to realize what was happening. Although his brain told him to run back to the lift, with an unsurpassable curiosity, Adwik took a few further steps to see the man up close.

The man came ahead too... and then they both stopped under the only light in the whole hallway, staring at each other, bewildered and speechless.

The man Adwik was looking at, didn’t wear similar clothes, but wore the exact & identical clothes as himself. He had the same torn left shoe, the same grease mark on his shirt crease, the same broken phone on his right hand… and the same shocked face.

The man Adwik was looking at, was he himself. In fact the whole hallway behind the man was the exact replica of what was behind Adwik, leading up to a lift just like his.

Adwik’s senses came rushing back and he ran back to his lift. Although he didn’t bother to turn back, but the sound of the fleeing footsteps was enough for him to guess, that his doppelganger was running back to the other lift as well.

Adwik ran back inside the lift and knelt down to collect his breath. What was happening? What was this place? Why was he the only one trapped in this eerie realm of tattered reality? Nothing was making any sense.

He looked at the floor buttons, a little less frantic than before. It was clear to him now that this lift wouldn’t take him to the lobby, whatever button he pressed, but would rather lead him to some twisted fragmented dimension. But, he had to try.

With shaky hands, Adwik pressed a random button… and murmured God’s name. The lift started, once more, for its next trip.

“Please be an exit, please be an exit…” Adwik murmured as the lift stopped.

But as the doors opened, he realized he had strayed too far from the exit. The place he now saw, wasn’t even in a floor of the building. Rather, it was an open ground… with colourful trees and vines spreading everywhere around the lift, added with sweet chirping of birds who flew around.

Adwik knew he should probably be frightened, that he kept going deeper in this unnatural realm, but this heavenly garden had mesmerized him. He slowly walked inside the beautiful forest, observing its colourful lush.

“Welcome.” A voice broke him out of his trance, and he looked towards the source of it. From inside the forest, walked out a lean elderly man with a familiar face.

“Are you…” Adwik uttered, not knowing how to finish that sentence.

“…You.” The man replied with a smile. “Yes, I am you.”

 “Okay…” Adwik tried to process that sentence.

“But not like the doppelganger who you may have come across in another floor.” Elder Adwik raised a brow.

“You met him too?” Adwik asked. “Who was he? What is this place? And who are you? I mean… I see that you are me, but how?”

“I know you have too many questions, but let’s settle down first.” Elder Adwik gestured towards a tree bark. “Are you hungry?”

Adwik took a bite in a guava that his elder version offered, sitting down on the low tree bark.

“Tastes good, right?” Elder Adwik smiled. “Can you believe this lushly forest was actually a concrete floor?”

“What?” Adwik looked around to see if he missed any such signs.

“Look down here.” Elder Adwik rubbed off a bunch of grass with his feet, which uncovered about a few square inches of the ground… revealing it to be a tainted worn-out version of the floor he had seen in the whole building.

“I don’t understand…” Adwik couldn’t take any more of these riddles.

“I didn’t too… for quite some time. But then again, I AM you…so…” Elder Adwik paused for a second. “This place, this whole dimension that you are experiencing, is made up of pieces of a broken and bent time stream.”

“Oh, that helps! I know all about broken and bent time streams!” Adwik had had it. “It’s my second major actually! I just don’t write it in my CV!”

“Fair enough. I keep forgetting I wasn’t as patient as I am now when I was you.” Elder Adwik smiled again. “Okay, so let’s back up a bit. What do you understand of a time stream? How do you think time flows?”

“What?” Adwik tried to think of what he thought was a stupid question. “Time flows clockwise!”

“You are describing clock’s hands, not time. Well, time flows linearly, from up to down, from past to future, in one direction. You pass a moment and enter the next one, never to see the past moments again, right?”

Adwik nodded.

“So if you imagine time as a river, it’s always moving in one direction, never really coming across it’s previous sections. But what if, due to an unnatural interference, the river bent around and crossed itself at some point? Does that seem possible?”

“I have never seen such a thing, but I guess it’s possible.”

“Right. So in such a case, if you stand at the intersection, you will see water that is coming fresh off the hills, water that is flowing down through the intersection, water that has already passed the intersection but forced to pass through it again. Heck, you may even see some of the water just trapped out of the river like a separate entity. Makes sense?”

Adwik nodded. It did somewhat make sense.

“Applying that same principle to our time stream, this building, or this thing, whatever it is, is caused by a similar interference in the regular one-directional time stream. And this lift, is the boat that can take you from one part of the stream to other, but never knowing where. So, in some floor, you may see time trapped in a past of this building, when it was not even constructed. Or you may encounter a mirror time, replicating your moment as a reflection. You may even see a moment cut out of the time stream, so it just ends abruptly, ceasing to exist where the moment ends.”

Adwik thought back of the 3 floors he encountered, which now made a little more sense to him.

“This particular floor, is from a future time stream, where this building has so long been abandoned, that a forest grew on it. In terms of why we are the only ones trapped here… well, your guess is as good as mine.”

“Why are you here?” Adwik’s mind was clearer now, as he found the most important question.

“I…” Elder Adwik hesitated for a second. “…I never left.”

“Sorry?” Adwik tried to calculate what it meant for him.

“I am a future version of you, having been trapped here for more than a decade.” Elder Adwik looked around the forest. “I prefer this floor though, it’s very calming.”

“Wait a second, wait a fucking second…” Adwik stood up in shock. “Are you saying I will never be able to leave this building?”

“Do you really want to go back?” Elder Adwik asked in return.

“What? What are you trying to say?”

“What do you have back in the real world, that you are so eager to leave? I mean, I was too once, but it turned out to be nice actually.”

“I have a life, dude!”

“Really? A life? Where you are an under-qualified graduate, barely living on loaned money from your friends, desperately waiting for a job, any job, but always, always, ending up short? A life where the only people who cared for you, your parents, are dead? A life, where your siblings refuse to stick out their necks for you because they have their own fucked-up lives? No one to call your own… even your friends making distance with you to stop lending you money! What’s so charming in your life any way?”

“Hey…” Adwik tried to find the right words. “…you don’t know me, man!”

“I am the only one who does, actually.” Elder Adwik said sternly. “Right now, you are thinking you are just having a bad day. But you have forgotten, that your whole life is just a series of bad days, one after another. Here, there is no bad day, no good day… just endless pieces of trapped time. Here, there is nobody to judge you, demean you, defeat you, fire you… no one!”

“That’s kind of the point, isn’t it? If life was a constant moment of sunshine forever… it wouldn’t mean much, would it? The storms that torment us, are the ones that make us wish for the sunshine! We need them!” Adwik realized that he was speaking to himself, both literally and figuratively.  “We need this mean world to constantly throw shit at us… why else would we look for a happier time? We need these bad days… so that we look forward to these rare but savoured good days!”

“Stay, Adwik!” Elder Adwik said in a melancholy tone. “We are good company to each other!”

“No, what you are, is a warning of what would have been if I took my worst decision ever - giving up on life.” Adwik turned back towards the lift, filled with optimism. “It won’t happen anymore. So, thank you.”

Elder Adwik’s face dropped with sadness, as he sat on the tree bark, alone once again.

“You could…” Adwik stopped right before the lift. “… come with me. We could both escape.”

“That’s very kind of you. I didn’t remember I was that kind then.” Elder Adwik smiled. “But it’s too late for me. I don’t have anything out there. Also, I doubt both of us can leave this place together, as we are but copies of each other, created by a time anomaly. Once we are back in real time, we could cease to exist.”

Adwik nodded, understanding the paradox.

“Well, you could at least help me out to find the exit. You know this place better after all.”

Elder Adwik thought for a second.

“If a river loops back to itself, what do you think will happen to it?”

“Well, it can’t just stop at the loop! There is a constant flow of incoming water that needs to go ahead, which a loop cannot sustain for long.”

“Exactly. The river finds a new direction to stream away. A direction that doesn’t include the loop.”

“How do I find that new direction?”

“I… I don’t know that. But I can say this much… if the river has found a new path, the loop will be soon cut away from it, if not cut already.”

“Oh… you mean…”

“Yeah, you don’t have much time left.”

“Thanks! Time to run!” Adwik hurried back inside the lift and pressed a random button. “Fuck! Fuck! Fuck! Fuck! Fuck!”

He jumped out as soon as the lift stopped at its next destination.

“Oh God, not one of these again!” Adwik rubbed his head, as he found himself in an octagonal hallway, with a lift just like his, at each side of the octagon, and a reflection of him standing right in front of each of those lifts. “Wrong floor, Adwiks! Get back to your lifts.”

This wasn’t working out. Adwik leaned back on one of the elevator walls and tried to think. Something else needed to be done.

His phone was broken, so trying to call was out of the question. What if he raised the alarm in the lift?

Yes, that’s it! If he was in a boat that went round and round in an abandoned loopy stream, however he paddled, the boat wouldn’t reach anywhere! He needed someone outside to throw him a rope to swim out!

He quickly pressed the alarm button on the lift, multiple times.

“Who is it playing with the alarm at this time?” A rude disinterested voice spoke out of the small speaker in the lift.

“Oh thank God! Hey, man… help me! I am stuck in this lift and I need to get to the lobby!”

“That’s easy. Just press the lobby button, genius!”

“Don’t you think I tried that already?” Adwik snapped. “I am telling you I am stuck!”

“Stuck? I can see you are in the 11th floor, buddy! Go prank someone else!”

“I am not in the 11th floor! That’s what I am trying to say… your system is showing wrong! It’s faulty!”

“Get off the line, mister! This line is for emergencies!”

“IT IS AN EMERGENCY! You…” Adwik paused as the lift started moving. “… oh hey, thanks!”

“What? Are you still on the line?”

“Just wanted to thank you man, for calling the lift down.”

“I won’t fall for your pranks, smart ass!”

‘Wait, you didn’t call my lift down?”

“No, I didn’t. Now stop playing with this line or I will send securities after you!”

“Then who did?” Adwik released the speaker button and looked eagerly at the lift display panel. The panel was still showing erratic signs… but all of a sudden, it changed to the number 4.

“Oh, finally!” Adwik murmured, as the number reduced gradually, stopping at 1.

The door opened and Adwik almost leapt out of it… only to be stopped by someone. A girl.

She looked at her with surprise, and then opened her mouth to say something… but stopped midway, as if in a trance.

Adwik felt it too… as if the universe had thrown him on a twisted detour, only to drop him in the road he needed to be on… the road that would fix everything.

“I… I am sorry.” Adwik spoke to break their trance.

“It’s no problem.” The girl replied with an awkward smile, realizing what she was doing a second earlier.

“You are here for an interview too?” Adwik glanced at a board that mentioned of a walk-in interview being conducted. He was finally in the real world.

“I was.” She said with a sad smile. “But no luck. They closed it.”

“Same here.”

“You were here too?” She brushed her side locks back and tugged them behind her ears. “I… I didn’t see you.”

“Oh, no… I was in the 15th floor. Some other random company.” Adwik straightened his shirt to be as presentable as he could.

“Tell me about it.” She giggled.

“Yeah…” Adwik scratched his head in awkwardness.

“Well… ummm…” The girl tried to find the next words. “Nice to meet you…”

“Adwik. My name is Adwik.” He quickly reached his hand out. “And you are…”

“Kashvi.” She smiled cheerfully, reciprocating the handshake.

“Okay, great!” Adwik tried to think what else he could say.

“Okay.” Kashvi smiled awkwardly. “Well, I… uhhh… see you then.”

“Yup, see you!” Adwik cursed himself. Was this going to be over?

Kashvi pressed the lift button again to open the door and took a step inside.

Oh shit! What if Kashvi got stuck in the loopy time stream too? No, no, no, no, no….

“DON’T TAKE THAT LIFT!” Adwik almost shouted.

“What?” Kashvi took her step back, a little startled.

“I mean… why… take the lift!” Adwik tried to cover up his anxiety. “It’s just one floor down. We could take the stairs.”

“Oh!” Kashvi looked at him, trying to read his intention.

“I mean, we could have a chat, compare notes on upcoming openings and stuff… a fellow jobseeker to another.” Adwik used his last arrow.

“Sure!” Kashvi gave her million-dollar smile again. “I would like that.”

“Maybe we could do it over a coffee! There’s a café right opposite this building.” Adwik felt confident, as if the sun was shining on him again.

“Right.” Kashvi smiled mischievously. “A friendly chat over coffee… just a fellow jobseeker to another. Purely professional.”

“Well, yeah.” Adwik blushed as he knew he was caught.

“Okay, Mr. Adwik.” She said seriously, and then ended up in giggles. “Lead the way.”

“This way, Miss Kashvi.” Adwik headed towards the exit stair door.

As they walked down the stairs and exited the building, Adwik looked at the familiar hustle-bustle of the world around… the lights of the rapidly zooming cars, the sound of busy footsteps of people walking swiftly on the footpath, the eager shouts of hawkers for a last purchase as they readied to close their shop…

…and he smiled. The day wasn’t looking as bad anymore.

In fact, it was a pretty good day!

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