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The Desk Clerk

Mark Pearce

    Once when one of my plays was being produced in a small theater in New York, I rented an apartment in an old building in Greenwich Village. The building had a rickety old elevator and a desk clerk in the lobby, like a hotel, where you could leave your key when you went out, and it was put into a slot where your mail was also collected. The desk clerk was a tall, elderly gentleman, who seemed totally in control of his little corner of the world. He gave the impression that he had seen everything, and nothing could ruffle his coat.
    One day I came in from rehearsals and asked him for my key and mail. While we were chatting, I was distracted by the muffled sound of people shouting.
    “What’s that noise?” I said.
    “There are some people trapped in the elevator,” he said, casually.
    He handed me my key and went back to what he had been doing. I stood in silence a moment. There was no one else in the lobby. The only sound was the muffled cries coming from the elevator shaft.
    “How long have they been in there?” I asked.
    He looked at his watch. “About an hour.”
    I don’t like to tell a man how to do his job, but I felt compelled to speak. “Shouldn’t we be doing something?”
    “I already called someone,” he said.
    There didn’t seem to be anything else to say, but it was a little unnerving to just stand there listening to their shouts.
    “Couldn’t we holler up to them? I think they’d feel better if they knew someone knows they’re up there.”
    He stopped what he was doing and looked directly at me for the first time. His face was expressionless. I didn’t know if he was offended by the implication that he had not been doing his job correctly, or if he was simply as indifferent to my words as he was to their shouting.
    After a moment, he went back to his filing.
    I turned and headed for the stairwell. It was a relief when the stairway door closed behind me and I could no longer hear their cries. I suppose I could have called up the elevator shaft on my own initiative. But what could I have said? “We know you’re up there! I don’t think we care!”
    I’m not sure whatever became of them, or how long they were trapped, or what their moods were like when they got out. But I made an interesting discovery about myself. As I stood panting in my doorway after climbing six flights of stairs to my apartment, I realized that in the time it had taken me to ascend, I had morphed into a jaded New Yorker. Because I no longer felt compassion for the people trapped below.
    I resented them for hogging the elevator.

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