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The wall slid up and away. There were at least fifty people having drinks before the conference panel when this entire wall slid up and into the ceiling, doubling the size of the room.
“That’s a thing,” Hubert said to me. “Up it goes. They don’t have things like that where I’m from.” Though I’d known him only a few days, I had quickly learned Hubert was from northern Minnesota, born and raised. There were many things he had not seen.
“I’ll contact maintenance,” said Imir Imir, Ph.D., trying the door. But the knob wouldn’t turn. “OK,” he confirmed, “the knob won’t turn. But someone will come soon. Ours is an exciting panel. Others will come to see it, and when they do, we’ll tell them to hold the door so I can contact maintenance.”
It seemed like a good idea. And we trusted Imir Imir because he was the panel chair. Plus, we had an open bar.
Hubert, who’d been considering the uses of soybeans, resumed. “Bread items, dairy, even meat—and then paint remover, table wax, and car fuel too. Think about it,” he said in a tone that blended wonder with concern, “bean shampoo.”
As Hubert spoke, he drifted into the new space revealed by the sliding wall. Many of us followed, including Imir Imir. He was the panel chair, and while that didn’t mean doodly-squat in the scheme of things, he seemed to feel the weight of the conference upon him, as if he were a conduit between us and larger goings-on. “Is everyone enjoying the conference?” he said, clapping an awkward hand to Hubert’s shoulder.
We told him yes, even though none of us had been to another panel. We even said that this conference promised to be the best one yet and we’d been looking forward to it for a while. And Hubert went on about the pâté—how it was remarkable the way humans had figured out what animal parts could and couldn’t be eaten—and wondered who thought of it first, the Indians maybe.
That’s when the wall started to drop, a little faster than it had gone up. A few people who had meandered over to the new room ducked back into the old. But mostly it caught us off guard, so we waited. “Blast,” Imir Imir said, looking around the new part of the room for a door, but there was none. “Blast.”
“Well, isn’t this a thing?” Hubert said.
“You’ll have to contact maintenance,” Imir Imir shouted into the old part of the room, kneeling so that his voice would project under the wall. Some of the rest of us knelt too. From floor level, we saw people already drifting to the door, but they were having no better luck than before. They started pulling with vigor.
The wall fell into place and locked with two metal clicks.
We listened as the people on the other side of the wall tried to open the door. They called to passersby. A few glasses seemed to drop from the bar, there was a breaking sound, and a woman’s voice saying, “I’ll take care of that.” Then we heard a sound like a giant toilet being flushed on a giant airplane, followed by silence. I went to the wall and knocked on it. “Hello?” I said. “Hel-lo-o?”
More silence.
“Well,” Hubert said, scratching his head.
Much to our credit, no one panicked. I called the men forward—about a dozen of us—and as a mass of men, we tried to lift the wall. It was uniformly smooth, so we applied our palms to its surface and squatted, pushing in and up at the same time. But the wall did not budge.
It was a hard wall, too. We made our feet sore kicking it and broke a few chair legs to boot. Bob Suggs, who had played football at Tennessee, put his right shoulder into it only to feel his left shoulder pop a little away from the collarbone. We could tell the pain shot right through him. He rubbed his shoulder and told us how his high-school coach had once made team members run into the gym’s brick wall to prove their toughness. The toughest players, by which he meant the most zealous, knocked themselves unconscious against the wall. But Bob said he’d never knocked himself out. He was committed to the game, not crazy.
We sat down and nursed our drinks, and someone said that the hotel staff would find us eventually. Trip Goldstein noted that he was checking out the next morning—he had Yankees tickets for that night in New York—and if he did not check out, certainly the hotel would send someone, if only to collect on his bill. Sheila Shipley then said that when she traveled, she always phoned her husband in Portland at eight P.M., Pacific standard time, and he would alert the hotel had she not checked in by nine.
This made us feel a little better, and we all said so. At which point there was an electric buzz behind us and two metal clicks before the opposite wall slid up.
We looked at the wall that had slid down minutes earlier, then at the new room created by the opposite wall sliding up. We remembered the flushing sound. We remembered the silence that had followed. We thought about our attempt to lift the first wall, and I could tell at least a few in the group were glad we’d failed, afraid of what we would have found on the other side. Someone suggested that, instead of a flush, the noise had sounded more like a furnace door being opened. Then someone else said it had sounded like a tornado from a TV disaster show. We considered each other. Several people stood and walked into the new room, followed by clumps of people, until we had all relocated.
The new room had no chairs. “I could use a chair,” Hubert said. He did not go back into the old room to get one.
“This is crazy,” said Adler Brown, who was pushing seventy-five but still had muscles. His right forearm sported a tattoo of a pelican that he’d got in the navy many years earlier. The pelican also had a tattoo, an anchor on its chest with the name Katie printed on a ribbon and tied around the anchor’s stem. There was a fish tail hanging out of the pelican’s mouth, and whenever Adler flexed his forearm, the bird appeared to be swallowing. “Look,” Adler continued, “we have no idea what this wall business is about. And the chairs are only a few feet away. Even if the wall started to close again, we could get back in plenty of time.”
Still no one moved. “Perhaps,” Imir Imir said, checking his watch, “a little discretion.”
“Look,” Adler replied, “I’m no Sam Spade, but it seems to me you should know something about this, Dr. Imir, you being the chair of our panel and all.”
“So it would seem,” Imir Imir agreed. “But the sad truth is that I am substituting for a friend. He mailed me the speaker biographies.” From inside his jacket, Imir Imir produced several folded sheets of paper and flapped them so we could see. “My friend has a blood condition that sometimes causes episodes. He asked me to read the biographies and told me to call maintenance if there were problems.”
“Problems like this?” I wondered.
Imir Imir frowned and checked his watch again. We all checked our watches.
Minutes later the wall slid down, followed by the metal clicks, then the tornado-furnace-flush. We turned and waited until the far wall slid up to reveal yet another room. We walked into it.
There were other things that disturbed us. For instance, it became clear in conversation that none of us was attending the same conference. Bob Suggs had come for new topics in veterinary psychology, and Trip Goldstein had expected changes to the tax code. Adler Brown had thought our panel was part of the boat show, and Sheila Shipley was getting an award for selling cosmetics. George and Hilda Swanson, who did not have name tags, had taken a wrong turn while ushering their granddaughter, Lucinda, to a Wiggles concert. There were all kinds: a stenographers’ union meeting, a recruiting session for postal workers, an infomercial on kitchen knives that could cut through a Buick. Imir Imir, producing a brochure, said the session had been titled “From Monkey to Messiah: Our Evolution Toward Godhead.” Hubert was learning to judge dog shows, while I had expected a lecture on the ethics of pharmaceutical sales.
Another thing that disturbed us was that the rooms were getting smaller. Not by much—so gradually that we barely noticed at first. But after a half-dozen episodes of walls going up and down, a new room after each, we realized that our personal space was shrinking. A quick head count confirmed that there were twenty of us in all. “A nice round figure,” Hubert noted. “Easy to work with. Can you imagine if we’d had nineteen?”
Several people admitted they could not, though mostly to humor Hubert, who seemed unduly taken with any coincidence.
“It’s like being in an elevator,” said Sheila Shipley.
“Too big,” said Adler Brown. “A freight elevator maybe.”
“No Muzak,” said Bob Suggs. He whistled “The Girl from Ipanema” through his teeth.
“Maybe there’s a button,” said Lucinda Swanson. She was four years old and cute as a bug. Her grandfather confirmed she loved nothing more than pushing elevator buttons.
That set us all looking high and low, and running our hands over the walls, and prying up the carpet, and Bob Suggs lifted Lucinda to the ceiling to see if she could find anything but had to let her down because the stucco hurt her fingers.
“A machine without a switch,” said Hubert. “Now that’s a thing.”
“It does seem unlikely,” agreed Imir Imir.
Trip Goldstein walked to one corner of the room and tilted his head upward. He was the only one who had kept his drink through the whole affair—a double Harvey Wallbanger—and he now spoke as if chastising an unhelpful maître d’. “Look here,” he said to the ceiling, “this has been a fine joke, but enough is too much. You’re scaring people, and we all have better things to do. So if you would open the door, or raise the wall, or whatever, we would greatly appreciate it.” He paused for dramatic effect. “We wouldn’t need to involve hotel management.”
There was silence for a few seconds, then a small sound, like scratching, and everyone perked up until Diedrich Voss reported from the back of the room that the keys in his pocket had inadvertently scraped a wall. “Verzeihen Sie!” said Diedrich. “My apologies.”
We waited a little longer but did not expect an answer. A few people suggested Trip make his speech to a different corner of the room, just in case, while others griped that he’d made a mistake by bringing hotel management into the mix. “Scared ’em off, I reckon,” said Adler. “More carrot, less whip.”
“A perpetual-motion machine,” Hubert blurted.
“What?” I asked.
“A machine that has no switch. It just goes. Maybe that’s what this is.”
“Just because we cannot see the switch,” said Imir Imir, “does not mean it doesn’t exist.”
But Hubert was rolling. “My father used to have one of those on his desk: the five metal balls that swung back and forth. And you could drop one ball, and another ball would pop up from the other side.” He made a swaying motion with his hands. “One ball up, one ball down. One wall up, one wall down.” He chanted the words several times, pleased with the rhythm.
“But Hubert,” I said, “the balls stop eventually. Maybe your father never let you stay long enough to see, but they do stop.”
He gave me a wounded look, as if disappointed I would lie to him in such a situation, until he saw everyone else nodding, even little Lucinda Swanson. He screwed up his lips, pensive. “Well, that doesn’t make sense,” he said.
As if on cue, the next wall swung up, and we shifted to the new room.
In short order, the freight elevator had shrunk to the size of a regular elevator. We crammed together as if posing for an office photograph, then closer like people near the stage at a rock concert, then as close as we had ever been to anyone. Trip Goldstein said how ironic it was that he had decided not to bring his cell phone to the panel session since he normally carried it everywhere. We shrugged en masse, and several people voiced chagrin at their decision not to carry their phones, while others recalled the poor reception they’d gotten throughout the hotel, and Adler said he’d talk to his oldest boy, who lived in Florida and worked for AT&T.
From one corner, Cynthia Belmont, a beautician trainee, suggested we lift some of the lighter people above our heads to make more room around the floor. But Bob Suggs, our tallest, noted that the ceiling was dropping as well, a fact he had declined to mention earlier to avoid further alarm. Diedrich Voss, who dealt in German antiquities, then told us about his research on the Nazis, about the number of Jews they pressed into cattle cars or gas chambers. He was trying to be hopeful, pointing out that far more people had been pressed into smaller spaces than the one we occupied. “One never knows the body’s capacity,” he remarked, “until pushed to extremity.”
We considered this. After a few uneasy seconds, Diedrich apologized for what he suddenly realized could have seemed a macabre—and perhaps inappropriate—comparison, but other people told him not to worry. They appreciated his optimism, and the occasional miscue was bound to occur when meeting new people or dealing with a different culture.
The wall swung up. We moved into the next room, exhaled, then surged to fit everyone in.
“Not enough,” Adler announced.
We bobbled like a bunch of penguins, pressing our bodies together to fit inside the room.
“Three inches to go,” Adler’s voice came back.
I draped my arms over Sheila Shipley’s shoulders, my hips riding up and forward into hers. She curved my arms closer to her body, beneath her breasts. Around the room, people filled the air with skin. They rubbed, lifted, and squeezed. Wherever it would go.
“No use,” Bob Suggs said at last. His arms were cocked above his head, hands pressed to the ceiling. He seemed relieved to step back into the old portion of the room.
The rest of us pushed closer together then turned to watch Bob. He did a few arm stretches and rolled his neck. “All clear,” Adler confirmed.
There was a rustling at our middle, the word pardon repeated several times, then Imir Imir was at Bob’s side. “I am the panel chair,” Imir Imir said. “I should stay.” We understood him to mean that he would take Bob’s place if Bob wanted, but Bob just smiled like Imir Imir had told him a halfway good joke. Imir Imir did a few stretches too, arms akimbo, hips rotating.
“No one has to go,” Sheila said, suddenly alarmed.
“That’s right,” continued Trip Goldstein, a bit calmer. “Look here, we can make room. Perhaps if we empty our pockets . . .”
But Bob didn’t budge. “It’ll be fine,” he said. “When the wall comes down, we’ll beat as loudly as we can on our side, so you’ll hear us and know things are fine.”
“We’ll contact maintenance first thing,” Imir Imir agreed. As the wall started to descend, he shoved his hands into his pockets, searching, but all he found were several pages of folded paper. He bunched these together in one hand and handed the sheaf to Adler. “The speaker biographies,” he said.
Beneath the wall, we could see his feet drifting toward Bob. We could hear them talking to each other after the wall clicked shut. “Well, that’s some thing,” Hubert said, obviously impressed. Then came the giant flush, which seemed to go on a few seconds longer this time. We waited. Those closest to the wall rapped it with their knuckles then turned their hands sideways to pound it with their fists.
I could feel Sheila exhale. “It’s not fine,” she said, so quietly I wondered if I had only imagined the words in her breathing.
The opposite wall slid up. We walked into the new room.
George and Hilda Swanson went next. They held hands and waved to Lucinda—who cried into Sheila Shipley’s thigh—and told her they would see her soon. We played along, waving as if they were going on a Caribbean cruise. And Trip Goldstein knelt to say that we would take care of her, meaning Lucinda, then looked at us meaningfully. We all looked at Lucinda meaningfully as the wall locked into place.
Two cycles later, Adler Brown stayed behind. He removed his shoes and laid them in the groove where the wall would come down. “Maybe they’ll gum up the works,” he said.
At which point we all took off our shoes to pile them next to Adler’s. Sheila was talking to no one in particular—“We should have gone back for chairs. Why didn’t we go back?”—and looked like she might really break down. But then Lucinda touched her arm, and she seemed to remember herself.
Adler ignored the scene. He told a story about a man who caught his arm in a cable winch fourteen miles out to sea and had to cut it off with a bait knife, just below the elbow, so he could bring in his boat one-handed. He set his jaw and folded his arms so that the pelican on his forearm also looked like it was setting its jaw. Trip Goldstein, who had become our unofficial spokesman, smiled apologetically when he admitted that he wasn’t quite sure what the story meant. Adler shrugged. “Everybody runs a tab somewhere,” he said.
When the wall descended, the shoes didn’t even slow it down.
Adler’s departure left us with no more volunteers. We agreed that we needed a plan. When the next wall slid up, we formed a circle and passed Sheila’s wedding band around while Lucinda, her eyes closed, called time. Whenever Lucinda said “now,” the person holding the ring was added to the list of people to remain behind, until a lineup had been established, with everyone agreeing that Lucinda would go last.
The fact that we had decided things fairly helped us accept the situation. When Trip’s turn came, he shrugged and said it wasn’t the Yankees’ year anyway. Sheila wrung her hands but smiled when she noted that the hotel used to be much nicer. Diedrich Voss talked until the wall came down, explaining his calculations regarding the hotel’s length—his conviction that it was somehow an illusion, that we would surely emerge safely on the other side.
This last idea took hold of me and Hubert toward the end. “It could be a psychology experiment,” Hubert said. “Maybe run by the government.”
“It’s inhumane,” I said, “just to see how this torture will affect people.”
By then there were only the two of us—and Lucinda, of course. We looked at her meaningfully, then at each other. Hubert said, “And a child, no less.”
“It’s amazing what people will do,” I agreed.
Like that, our decision was made. We left Lucinda in the old portion of the room. What was amazing was how well she bore up. She did not cry a bit when Hubert and I hunched into the next room, nor show the slightest doubt when we explained that her grandparents would come for her soon. “Here’s the thing,” Hubert said. “You’ll be safe now.” And she seemed to believe it. We seemed to believe it, too. Even after the wall descended, Hubert continued to smile, lips parted, teeth bright with saliva, as if he were remembering something too nice to have actually happened.
I knew he had questions. “It was for the best,” I said before he could ask them. The next wall slid up. Our bodies moved forward together.
We made it through the next few rooms as a team. The geometry was simpler for a couple. Technically Hubert should have stayed behind. He had come before me in the lineup. But he pointed out that our decision to leave Lucinda had nullified all previous arrangements. “Done and done,” he said. And I saw his point.
I was speaking into Hubert’s crotch, and he was speaking into mine. It was the only possible arrangement, fetal positioned, our legs splayed to fit the other’s head between our knees. My neck ached, and my right ankle had popped when I tried to twist it further into a corner to make way for Hubert. He apologized for his big head. Every one of his birthdays, he said, his mother called to remind him how hard it had been to push that big head into the world.
I had known Hubert, unlike the other panel attendees, for several days. We had met on a plane from Chicago where I had been flying standby. “You’re my wife,” he’d said as I sat down, going on to explain that his wife, booked to travel with him, had decided to stay home at the last minute. They raised Dandie Dinmont terriers and were worried about a pregnant bitch that was a week overdue. Minutes later, he showed me a picture of the woman, short and vaguely Germanic, with a small white dog tucked under each arm. I told him about my girlfriend. “No picture,” I said almost apologetically, “but she’s tan and she inline skates.”
With my nose grazing Hubert’s inseam, I wondered why I had not questioned his presence at the panel originally. We were nothing alike. The hours he’d spent on the plane describing the mechanics of Dandie Dinmont husbandry should have confirmed we were not at the hotel for the same conference. My own stupidity began to appall me. I could not shake the idea that I was somehow responsible for the predicament I was in.
“Not much longer,” Hubert muttered, trying to stretch his cramped thigh. He let his hips fall back to the floor. “Here’s the thing,” he continued. “I have a wife. And I have these dogs, and there are a lot of them, and they’re like kids to me. And I know they’re not really kids, but Ilse and I plan on kids someday.” He paused. “I know we don’t roller skate, but you see where I’m headed.”
“She inline skates,” I replied. “It’s different.”
I had no idea why I made the distinction just then, but it was the only answer I was going to give, and it was not the one he wanted. He was right: the slate had been wiped clean. And all I could think was how I would never trade my tan, skating girlfriend—this woman who drank too much at parties and talked too loudly about other people in the room, who treated melanoma like a beauty mark—I would never trade this woman for all of the husky, spaetzle-eating, dog-breeding, child-brooding, loyal-to-a-fault women from Pennsylvania to Wyoming. As if it were a matter of principle.
I hated Hubert. I did not know if I had come to hate him right then or if I had always hated him. But hate him I did. I hated his uninspired happiness. I hated his soybeans and his perpetual-motion machines. My mind conjured an image of several stocky boys—various ages, big heads—running through a field toward a lake, their feet churning the long grass, and behind them a whole fleet of Dandie Dinmont terriers, heads like oversize cotton balls rising and receding with each leap. And I hated them.
Once the wall swung up, Hubert would have the leverage. His head was closer to the new room, his feet already planted against the opposite wall. But he was cramping, and I realized that if I worked quickly I could swing my knees over his shoulders to block his progress and then, with a hard shove, curl my body backward into the open space. It was a long shot. If successful, I would have to fend off Hubert until the wall came down. And even with the wall coming down he might try to pull some part of me back to his side. If he could not be saved, he would at least have the satisfaction of watching the wall crush whatever part of me it could.
But what choice did I have? The metal clicked twice. A sheet of air slid across the floor as the gap widened. Hubert mumbled something, but I could not hear him over the rising wall, a noise like the abrading of two equally dull objects. I wondered why I hadn’t paid attention to it before. For an instant of calm, my mind tried to process that noise. I wanted to name it—some word that sounded like the sound itself, as diffuse as it was clear. Not that the right word would come to me. I knew in an instant it wouldn’t come. Even if I had a hundred more rooms, I found myself thinking as the air changed direction, streaking down my body and away, just before we pushed through.
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