The narrator sees that the story has slipped out of his hands, or so it seems to him. From the beginning it pulled in its own direction; everything in it was determined ahead of time. He has run out of strength and hope; he has a desire to fall asleep with his head resting against the wall, nothing more. Instead of which he will become a messenger. He thrusts into his pocket a plan penciled on the back of an unused form. Apparently up there, on the next floor, it’s possible to get a better night’s sleep in a vacant camp bed with real sheets. In the meantime the orderly is sounding the floor and gazing at the doctor. Neither of them expects the floor beams to hold out much longer. A team of welders must be found immediately to cut open the hull of the sunken gunboat. Underneath there is nothing else, no foundations, only a bottomless chasm; and if the thin floor gives away, battered mattresses and hospital screens will go flying in disarray into the chasm of these lower heavens, and with them surgical instruments, used bandages, and slop buckets splashing their contents about in the mad rush. The map consists of a sketched fragment of the labyrinth of hallways, with an arrow indicating the place where the addressee of the message, dressed in blue overalls, should be sought. A second arrow shows the location of the promised camp bed. The outer door of the freight elevator closes behind the narrator. In the wan light of a dusty bulb any button can be selected — naturally it has no significance whatever. The narrator recognizes the cracked pane of the inner door. Now the elevator moves upwards, and along with it the sentence in which it appeared for the first time, and the last one in which it was rediscovered by chance.
To the question of why it does not stop at the next floor, where the narrator might run across the welders capable of averting a disaster, the answer should be that all floors are of equal worth. It is known that from the very beginning the elevator did not stop at every one. Nobody here could see beyond what is visible; the narrator is subject to the same limitation. It doesn’t seem as if the stops of the freight elevator are governed by someone’s will. They are decided rather by the tangle of wires tumbling out of an instrument panel, arbitrary electrical impulses that follow various paths in their own particular order. In this way the Warsaw Uprising does not break out and is not suppressed, and there do not appear drunken officers of the Soviet secret police hammering their fists on the table. There are no cheering crowds with red banners, nor mass songs, nor tanks driving out onto sleeping streets in a snowbound winter. Selecting a floor, the elevator regulates the movement of adverbial phrases, while they in turn trim the story lines short; restricting time and place, they dwell on manner and pass over cause in silence. They reduce the plot to a minimum. But it is not they who are the essence of the invisible structure, just as it is not the ropes strung over the abyss, nor the ocean currents, nor the precipitous lines of the graphs of market reports in the Financial Times. Its core and foundation may turn out to be the predicates of sentences, which as a rule are unfeeling and, like judicial sentences, irreversible. No one knows where they come from; the narrator does not know either. They become visible only when they are firmly fixed in tenses; they take the space of the sentences into their possession. And when they pass on, a void is left behind.
The elevator stops with an unimaginable clatter at the train station. At the end of the platform, far in the distance, there can even be seen the colorful splash of a poster with a couple kissing on a steep rooftop; the image can barely be made out in the foreshortened perspective. The rails rumble; it is the train, traveling in a circle so that the madman with the starting pistol can continue to bully the old man in the red dressing gown and humiliate the hobo, all in the presence of the girl with the provocative makeup. Beyond the door of the elevator there open up expanses of possibilities that will never be fully explored. But the narrator is not curious about them. He guesses that he ought not to leave the elevator as it stops at successive floors. At most, at the next one he’ll block the door with his foot, lean out and, holding up a cigarette lighter — a commemorative gift, though not for him, and never mind who it was from — he will see a perished gas mask abandoned by the door. Things will return to their places: the shoddily plastered walls, the low ceilings, the dust-covered floors with puddles here and there over which droplets of rusty water hang from joints in the piping — if one falls, another will immediately take its place. Straining one’s ears, one might hear the tower of cans crashing down in the house with the garden. Many floors above, the dingy landing remains in place, seemingly inaccessible; yet the elevator in fact stops there too, opposite the familiar door marked with a half-effaced figure of a man, as if in a dream. The external world puts up no more resistance. If the unexpectedly happy ending does not arouse the narrator’s suspicions it is only because he is collapsing from exhaustion. But he is already on the landing; he discards the map scribbled on the back of the form, and the elevator takes it away, back into the depths of the dark shaft. The narrator isn’t even sure if at this exact moment the lower floors still exist. On the upper floors this can never be known for certain. And if the lower floors have already caved in, that means the remaining floors are now the last, in the grip of fever and commotion. But in a place where leather sofas exude the cool tranquility of affluence, it can be believed to the very end that the upper floors will never become the lower ones. The narrator, too, wishes to believe this. He looks for his keys. Where have they gone? Were they left down below, along with his jacket? He has them. They’re not lost — he’s found them in the pocket of his pants. He doesn’t know if he should first open the room with the balcony or the door to the bathroom. He opens the room. He immediately becomes aware of a sizeable dark object on the bed. A little evening light falls on the object from the balcony window; it looks like an instrument case. The figure seated in the armchair the narrator notices only after a moment. So someone must have been waiting for him to come back, for goodness knows how many hours, till finally he fell asleep. His hunched back can be seen. A hand hanging over the arm of the chair is almost touching the floor. The hand is black.
It’s John Maybe, a hardened alcoholic. He has not known happiness in life, that much is evident. He’s burdened by his wasted talent, by the torments of loneliness, and by the indis-position he has suffered in the mornings for many years, and which aspirin no longer alleviates. He is wearing an overcoat bought from a thief at a flea market; the sleeves are too short. The narrator recognizes the coat. He even knows that the lining has gray stripes and that the marble is no longer in the pocket. John Maybe would no doubt like the narrator to change something in his past; he believes that the story has not treated him fairly and that he deserves at least one more chance. He believes that a minor revision will not cause any trouble. All that needs to be done is to cancel the departure of a certain train, for example on the pretext of the strained political situation. Every word of his is predictable, even the rancorous tone that accompanies the presumed beginning of his speech; at its end, which there is no need to cite, it would turn to bitter sarcasm. The narrator withdraws quietly so as not to wake the intruder. He should now inform the front desk that some stranger has broken into his room from the balcony, and no more. He could go down there right away — he’ll just quickly unlock with a grating sound the door marked with the faded figure of a man. The bathroom, undoubtedly as dilapidated as the landing, would spare no one the sight of its antiquated white tiles and cracked urinal, but the light bulb has burned out. Sure, the narrator uses the urinal; did he even deny it? He couldn’t have. He’s entered many bathrooms since he left his room in the permanent residents’ wing this morning: the one on the first floor of the house with the garden and the one in the back room of the bar. He was in a handsome bathroom with a window and a china tub. And even in the hell of the field hospital located on the lowest floor of the hotel he went behind a screen where there was a stinking bucket. Would it not be easier to live without a constantly refilling bladder, without that painful discomfort, ridiculous in its repetitiveness, and familiar to the point of tedium to all the characters? The urinal, then. The narrator finds his way in the dark without difficulty, but his fly gets stuck. His wounded arm is of no use now. But the other has managed somehow to unfasten the button, and all would be well were it not for the darkness, were it not for the vague anxiety that exudes from it, intensifying from one moment to the next. The narrator knows the rules and at this point could already predict that he will never return to the room with the balcony. He ought to come to terms with the loss of his comfortable bed, together with his pajamas, which — this much is certain — will fall into the hands of the black trumpeter. With one hand it’s harder to fasten one’s pants than to unfasten them. The narrator struggles for a long time with the loop of the button. Hurry up, we’re on in a minute, someone whispers in his ear, planting an oversized bowler hat on his head.