2
They are called cars. The first one I remember was piloted, its operator uniformed identically to the then contemporary, early '60s stewardess. The white gloves. The fitted flannel suit. The military buttons. The raked hat with affixed winged device and contrasting piping edging its many folds. Now elevators are selfservice, and we forget because they are designed to make us forget, that they are vehicles moving through space. The hobbled acceleration of that motion, today, is so damped, disguised. You enter. The doors close. The doors open. And you are somewhere else. It's as if the building rearranged itself outside while you waited in the closed box, or burly work crews struck the lobby like a stage set behind the sliding curtain. Sure, the numbers flash as you pass from floor to floor but that is simple distraction, the only real movement this awkward analog one. My first trip? The first one I remember. I traveled from the ground to the third floor of a small department store. The operator manipulated levers, turned wheels guiding our vehicle. She stopped at the intervening floors, the stool she leaned on springing back up against the wall as she reached across the car to open the first set of double doors. "Going up. Mezzanine. Going up. First floor." The landings were never exact, the floor of the car and the floor of the floor misaligned like a square of sidewalk dislodged by a tree root. She inched the two floors together, the nudge teasing the tension in the cables to sing, covering her operations with recitation of the floor's merchandise, a kind of tour guide. "Watch your step." Later, I waited on the third floor. I was in another world, the world of underwear, husky pants, school shoes, brownie uniforms, belts, handkerchiefs, flatware, china, lunch pails, luggage, and travel alarms. But I lingered at the landing. I watched the cars arrive from below, depart. There were two shafts, the cars' alternating rise and fall, a kind of breathing. A distinct shadow filled the squares of light in the opaque windows of the outer doors. The bell struck flat, the tinny ceremony of arrival. "Watch your step." I made no move for the empty car. "Going down." The doors slid shut. The muffled announcement of the next destination filtered through. I watched the shadow sink, compress into a line at the lip of the floor. Going, then gone.
3
Z is the other axis of travel. When we travel, we think in terms of going north, going south, even thinking of that as going up or down, the three dimensions of our world constantly flattened to the two of our maps. We laugh at the flat earth notion but we operate happily within it. Altitude, the forgotten coordinate of place, escapes us when latitude and longitude will suffice as we roam our vast world and report on our extended movements around it. Even when a journey considers ascent, to climb a mountain, say, there is the usual flat travel to that place. The scramble to the summit is always described as a sprint, the last burst of energy, an afterthought, really, to the sea-level preparations and the establishment of base camps. The destination of "up" is often too foreign, too strange to be considered travel. The mountains we want to climb could be near Kathmandu, on a spine of granite in the middle of Patagonia, but even these ends of the earth can begin to seem familiar in the way the roofs of the world never do. And that strange and final frontier overhead is not even that far away. A handful of miles, the distance of a daily horizontal commute, takes you to the edge of space. A few hundred feet and you are easily on your way out of this earthbound world.
4
A few steps take you around the observation deck of the Lincoln Tower. It is a kind of trench, this little walkway of a few yards circling the building's ultimate structure, the housing for the revolving searchlight topped by the flagpole and its snapping flag. The solid wall is shoulder-high to an adult. Kids would need to be hoisted up to the shoulders of adults to see out over the wall. The tower is nineteen stories, and was once, when it was built in 1930, the tallest building in the state. It was a scale model of the Empire State Building, finished about the same time. Everything appeared quarter-sized. You can't see down. Seeing down is one of the reasons for traveling up. The looking down is a rare perspective. But the construction of the Lincoln Tower's observation deck makes it impossible to look down on the people walking below, the cars inching along the street. Instead, you must look out from the lookout. See the flat horizon, all 360 degrees of it. I used to walk the trench around the top of the Lincoln Tower gazing in all directions. Such venues often label the vantage points with the number of states, counties, miles your vision can collect. There, the sign reads, is Ohio, but it looks all the same. The green carpet of the canopy of trees, the ground fog of haze, the descending blue sky turning white. Is there a hint of the curve of the earth? Today, the Lincoln Tower is hemmed in by newer, taller buildings. The Fort Wayne Bank Building. The gas company's skyscraper. The phone company's microwave tower. The Lincoln Tower management has tilted up the searchlight's angle so the beam won't paint the windows of the offices yards away. You can see people in those adjacent structures, moving between offices, talking on the phone, eating lunch. They ignore the view mostly, or they have grown used to it. When it gets crowded in the sky, it seems as if everyone is floating. The towers are glass, transparent. You can't see the roots of the buildings. Occasionally, someone will be looking out. A man sitting at his desk, wearing a white shirt and tie, will be looking out at you, on the deck below, looking back at him. Even more rarely, several people will be looking at you simultaneously. They are all on different floors, on different parts of their different floors, a tic-tac-toe pattern. You wave, and they all wave back.
5
For a while there, Hyatt Hotels were notorious for hollowing out their buildings' center, creating the atrium lobbies that reached all the way up to the skylit roofs. The guest rooms emptied out onto terraces of balconies, suspended bridges, floating walkways with transparent floors looking down to the lobby levels, the bar there floating on an island in the middle of a pool. Often, trailing plants, bred to thrive on the filtered light and thin air, planted in the crannies and crags of the canyon wall, launched their viney tendrils into space in cascading falls of pale green foliage. The greenery softened the Escher-like angles of the vaulting geometry, aged the scalloped setbacks into ancient hanging gardens, Mayan ruins uncovered in a jungle. The elevators for reaching the upper floors became kinetic sculpture. The architects removed three walls of the elevators' shafts and walled the cars in glass outlined in strings of tiny lights. The effect, from a distance, was of these opalescent limpid creatures inching up and down a matte black aquarium wall or of these dewy drops of light scaling a slender ascending central pier of gliding gilded cables. These hotels were fortresses, blockhouses turned away from the decaying host cities outside. They were designed as refuges, as destinations in and of themselves. They packaged space. That was the most valuable part of the real estate, after all, not the footprint but the air rights. You bought the absence, the hollow, the nothing, the endless up. For this reason, their entryways were hidden, guarded, disguised. From the streets outside the facades of these cored castles were curtain walls of solid red brick, their outer windows, if they had them, were mere slits. The guest, arriving, made his way past the baffles and tunnels of the entry, finally out into these airy atriums. The heart leaped up. Here, at last, was a city of the future, a city under glass. Here, even gravity was revoked. You floated up to your room, a room wedged onto its own tier of drifting clouds.