Bellboys and ringtones in the lobby carry your clarinet to bed. Deskclerks and soda jerks stand tall as wall in the lobby to assign you a number and guest cred. Elevator curfew in the lobby - they take the floors and they open to you doors. See all the people in the lobby. Some have their hair and some are shaved of heads.
“Message for Cyclops,” said a bellboy, and Cyclops raised his hand like a schoolboy. A slip of paper slides into his Cyclops hand. He must read it to understand.
In his hand of lobby is a note. The note is rocking in the lobby boat. It is all tied up in paper like a clue in a scissors caper. Cyclops see his/her name on it, like a memory of a house, and when the paper opens up, he drinks its words like a cup.
“Cyclops,” says the paper, says the note, says the flapping in the elevator breeze, “the party is on the 40th floor, and if you are late, you are never late.”
Cyclops doesn’t know whether to keep or throw. He wonders if he should crumple or save note for archives. He just puts it in his pocket, where the laundry can eventually do the dirty work.
There are numbers to take you high, there are numbers to take you low, and that is how the elevator works. I think you know. There are buttons to press for arrow up and buttons for arrow down, and the ascension and declension can take your mouth from a grin to a frown. Your stomach stays in one place as your feet learn elevation, and if the light comes on for you, you reach your destination.
Cyclops had fingers that surgery war kept on his hands and his fingers reached for the buttons. He could see there was a button for thirty-seven and another for forty-one but of forty there was nuttins. He could go up to thirty-nine, he could go so much further, but getting to forty was hard to take, it was kind of a burther.
He gets into one ella and out of another, but none that he gets in has a button for floor number forty, not a single one of the two or three that he can try by waiting.
The bellboys and ring-girls have some good advice, so you must reward them with a coin. “Not every elevator may be capable of taking you where you’re goin.” That’s what they tell Cyclops, whether he asks them or not, and it’s really something that he already knows from recent experience.
If you are a Cyclops, you must travel the elevators up and down. You must get off one and get on another and find the one that is that has the button for the floor that he is looking and searching for.
Get off at third floor, get off at fifth, tenth is no good or twenty-two and sixteenth isn’t thith. It is only travel thru travel and error and trial of shut and open doors that the floor with the elevator he needs it is there on number four. That was the floor, number four. That was the floor with the elevator door, a new elevator, golder than the rest, and colder once inside it.
Floor number four takes the elevator door has the elevator floor with the four and the zero. Get in the room, push the button and go zoom, for the button you were huntin is the one that turned maroon.
Cyclops found that one elevator. It has the button for forty to push. He is the only one, the rider insider. It takes him up, the elevator does that, it takes him up, a tall pull slider. He goes up there followed by his stomach, and if it’s not too much to ask it follows shortly after.
But where is his house, in this land of up and down? Where is his living room and the glowing TV that he can hunt the channels and track the light and up put the fight to find the great star and wonder, Dingy Bahsome?
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