Seven Floors of Small Talk. Notes from the Elevator

My building has no elevator that works reliably, which means I have ridden a lot of broken elevators, and I have noticed that people behave in them according to a rulebook nobody ever wrote down and everybody knows. The first rule is about eyes. In an elevator, strangers look anywhere except at each other. At the numbers, at the ceiling, at their own shoes, at the door seam as if it might open a moment sooner under surveillance. The moment the doors open, everyone is released from a contract they never signed. I once timed it. The average person in my building can sustain about four seconds of eye contact in a moving box before retreating to the floor indicator like it is a chess board. The second rule is about the buttons. Pressing a floor that is already lit is forbidden, even though pressing it changes nothing. Someone always presses it anyway, softly, guiltily, and someone else always notices. The button panel is the only property in the elevator, and we all pretend not to own it collectively. The third rule is about the stop. When the elevator halts between floors, which in my building happens monthly, the social order inverts in about ten seconds. The teenager with the headphones becomes the communications officer. The quiet man from the fifth floor, who has never said a word in the lobby, becomes calm itself and starts telling a story about the same elevator in 1998. Status dissolves. Everyone becomes equally stuck, and equality, it turns out, is conversational. I have started to love these seven floor encounters the way you love weather. There is a woman on the third floor who gets in with groceries and narrates her shopping. There is a delivery man who has learned the trick of holding the door-open button with one hand and sliding packages out with his foot, a small choreography he performs without hurry, twice an hour. There is the man who exits on the fourth floor but always says the floor number out loud as the elevator arrives, as if announcing a train station. None of these people know each other's names. All of us could describe each other to a police sketch artist. We know each other by routine, by bag, by floor, by the sound of a specific cough. Sociologists call these weak ties. The elevator is where the ties are weakest and yet the proximity is total, and the combination produces a very particular politeness, a politeness with no friendship in it and no hostility either. Pure coordination. When the elevator works, the ride takes nineteen seconds. Nineteen seconds is too short for a conversation and exactly long enough for one sentence. The best sentence I ever heard in it came from the woman on the second floor, who looked at the rest of us during a small jolt and said, calmly, that the building was just clearing its throat. Everyone laughed. Nineteen seconds. Then the doors opened and we all scattered back into our private floors, carrying the sentence with us like a snack from a shared kitchen.