Mezzanine by Nicholson Baker

Author:Nicholson Baker
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Grove/Atlantic, Inc.
Published: 1988-08-14T04:00:00+00:00

Chapter Twelve

LESS THAN AN HOUR later, I stood in the pose of George Washington crossing the Potomac, one foot on a higher step, one hand on the handrail, gliding steadily upward on the diagonal between the lobby and my destination. The sound of the escalator’s motor had become indistinct, although I could still feel a faint rhythm of clicks transmitted through the steps, which I assumed were caused as the links of the chain that drew me upward were engaged by the sprockets at either end; and the sounds of the lobby, too, were blurred and assimilated into a universal lobby-sound, as if each unitary tock of a secretary’s heel were a sharp brush-point of pigment touched to a wash-covered watercolor, flaring palely outward. From this height, the height of sociology and statistics, foreshortened employees moved in visible patterns: they were propelled one by one at a fixed speed into the lobby by the revolving door; they coalesced in front of elevators whose arrival dinger had just lit; they renewed the permanent four-person line at the cash machine; occasionally two of them, on intersecting rushed trajectories, would raise their arms in joyful surprise and exchange civilities while sidestepping in a neat clockwise semicircle in order to continue backward on their way, each held for an obligatory moment in the other’s gravitational field and then, by mutual consent, completing their loop-the-loop by turning and hurrying on.

I had not moved my hand from its first grip on the handrail, but because the handrail progressed upward on its track at an imperceptibly slower speed than the steps did (slippage?), my arm was in a different position, my elbow more bent, than when I had begun. I repositioned my hand ahead of me. It was strange to think that because of the difference in speeds, these escalator steps must periodically lap the handrail that accompanied them: since the slippage on my escalator was about a foot per up trip, or two feet per complete cycle, over an estimated complete handrail loop of a hundred feet, the handrail was lapped by the moving stairway every fifty revolutions—like those stock cars with fewer decals that you think are running neck and neck with Foyt or Unser, but are in fact laps and laps off the pace, driven by what kind of men? Sad, disappointed men, you instinctively feel; but maybe novices or fanatics, delighted to be there at all.

That the handrail didn’t progress at exactly the same speed as the steps was an observation I owed to my lately acquired habit of standing still and gliding for the entire ride, rather than walking up the steps. I had switched to gliding only after I had been working at the company for about a year. Before taking the job, I had used escalators relatively infrequently, at airports, malls, certain subway exits, and department stores, and on these occasions I had gradually developed strong beliefs as to the proper way to ride them. Your role was to advance

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