Читать книгу The Three of U.S.: A New Life in New York - Peter Godwin - Страница 24

My office is on the sixteenth floor and offers a Hopperesque view across the street and into the offices opposite, where I watch the other hunch-spined workers twisted over their terminals. I like being up high, but I worry about the bank of elevators, which, I have learned, sometimes stop unaccountably between floors.

The first time this happened was between the eighth and ninth floors and I was alone and felt reluctant to press the red alarm in case it triggered a general evacuation and froze the lift altogether.

After waiting about two minutes, I tentatively pressed the button. It gave an unimpressive little buzz.

‘Hello,’ said a bored voice through the intercom.

‘I seem to be stuck,’ I said, trying not to sound panicky.

‘Yeah,’ said the voice, pausing. ‘You are.’

‘Well, can you get it going again?’

‘Yeah, the functions need resetting.’

‘Well, can you sort it out?’

‘Yeah, yeah. Don’t panic’

‘I’m not panicking, I just want to get out.’

‘OK, OK.’

Nothing happened so, assuming it might take some minutes, I started on a muffin and opened the New York Post. I was reading the Page Six gossip column, which is usually in fact on page eight, when my eye slipped to a headline on the opposite page: ‘WOMAN NARROWLY MISSES DROWNING IN ELEVATOR’.

I read on to discover that a woman and her Jack Russell terrier had been trapped in a lift after traipsing down to the basement to do her laundry. Unbeknown to her, workmen in the street outside had accidentally cracked a water main, which started flooding the basement and cutting the power. Eventually the water started creeping into the lift, where she was frantically pressing the alarm button. As the water kept rising she kept screaming, until her husband, worried at her delay, went down to investigate and finally heard her. By now the water was up to her neck. In order to save her dog’s life, as the water rose, she had lifted him onto her head, where he had sat barking madly throughout their ordeal.

I pressed the button again.

‘Yeah?’

‘What’s going on?’

‘I told ya, I’m resetting the functions.’

‘But how long is it going to take?’

‘Another couple of minutes. I told ya, stop panicking, OK?’

Two minutes later the car duly jerked back into life and I ascended to my floor, where there was an exasperated voicemail from the foreign editor wanting to know where I was.