Salt and Static

The storm came in around six, and by seven the lights in the building were doing that thing lights do before they die, a flicker, a buzz, then nothing. I was on the elevator at the time, headed down from the tenth floor with a bag of groceries including eggs, a jar of pickled onions, and coffee I probably didn't need.

I'm Gracie Han, thirty-one, Korean American, Queens-raised, and I live on the tenth floor of a building that used to be offices and got turned into apartments sometime in the nineties. I fix old books for a living, which means I spend most days alone in a room with a humidification chamber and a bone folder, and by evening I want noise, any noise, even the elevator's awful ping. I also bake two nights a week at a place on Delancey, which is the only reason my fridge ever contains butter.

So there I was, holding a paper bag that was already going soft from the rain I'd walked through, when the elevator stopped between nine and eight with a sound like a filing cabinet falling over. The lights went out. Then the emergency lights came on, this dim yellow, and the little fan above my head quit.

I did what anyone does. I pressed the button for eight. Nothing. I pressed the door open button. Nothing. I pressed the call button and got a crackle and then Lou's voice, the super, saying the whole grid was down, Con Ed was on it, could be an hour, could be three.

"An hour," I said, to nobody, because the line had already gone dead.

And then, from behind me, a voice said, "Well. This is cozy."

I turned around. There was a man standing by the panel I had somehow not noticed, which says something about how much attention I pay to other humans. He was tall and white, sunburned across the forehead and nose in a way that looked recent and permanent, maybe thirty-eight or a little under. Wet hair pushed back. A canvas tote at his feet that was also, I noticed, going soft from rain. He was wearing one of those linen shirts that only looks good on people who don't think about their clothes.

"Hi," I said. "Gracie."

"Daphne."

"That's a name?"

"It's French. My mother had ideas." He stuck out a hand, and we shook, which is a weird thing to do in a dead elevator but we did it anyway. His grip was warm and dry despite the weather.

He told me later he was thirty-eight, but that night I just guessed. We stood on opposite sides of the car like two people who'd agreed on a treaty neither had spoken aloud. The emergency light made everything the color of old varnish, which is a thing I notice because of my job. Old varnish. Everything in my life gets described that way lately.

The first ten minutes were fine, actually. He asked if I'd been stuck before. I said once, for twenty minutes, with a man carrying a karaoke machine, and he laughed, a real laugh, too loud for the space. I found out he wrote about food for a living. He'd just moved to the city from somewhere with more sun, Charleston maybe, I think, and he was in the building on a six-month sublet while he figured out his life.

"Which sounds worse than it is," he said. "Figuring out your life at thirty-eight. It's mostly paperwork."

"Mine is mostly glue," I said, and explained that I repair books, old ones, the kind museums own, and he asked a bunch of genuinely good questions, the kind where you can tell the person actually wants the answer and not just a pause before their own next sentence.

Then his tote bag tipped over.

I don't know how it happened. The elevator had shuddered once when the power died, and maybe it was that, or maybe the bag just gave up, the same way mine was giving up. Either way, his groceries went across the floor of the car, and mine went with them, or mine went first, honestly I can't reconstruct the order anymore. What I remember is oranges. A lot of oranges, rolling in slow arcs under the emergency light, and a jar of something pickled that I prayed was sealed, and my eggs, God help me, my eggs.

We both went down on our knees at the same time and cracked heads, not hard, more of a forehead to forehead bonk, and we both sat back and laughed, and then we crawled around gathering things. His stuff was good stuff. Good olive oil, a baguette already going limp, a wedge of something stinky wrapped in paper. He picked up one of my eggs and turned it over.

"RIP," he said, and set it aside with ceremony.

We sorted the groceries into two piles, or sort of one mixed pile that we agreed belonged to two piles, and somewhere in there I stopped keeping my back to the wall. I don't know when that happened either. He sat cross-legged with the baguette across his knees like a guitar and asked me if I loved my work and I said yes in a way that surprised me, because I don't usually say that out loud.

Then he looked up. There's a hatch in the ceiling of these old cabs. This building's elevator is from before the renovation, and somebody at some point put an access panel up top, the kind with a folding handle and a latch, for maintenance. He spotted it because he's tall. I'd have never seen it, I'm five foot four on a good day.

"That opens," he said. "I'm pretty sure that opens."

"And then what, we climb into the shaft?"

"And then we climb into the shaft."

"You're insane."

"I'm optimistic. There's a difference." He was already standing, reaching up, pressing on the panel with his palm. It moved a half inch with a groan. "See? Optimism rewarded."

I think I argued more, but I was already thinking about it, the math of it. The car had stopped between nine and eight, closer to eight. If the hatch opened onto the top of the car, and the door to the eight floor landing was lined up even roughly, a person could get up and out. Two people. The second one would need a boost.

"Okay," I said. "But me first or you first?"

"You first," he said. "I'll lift you. Then you reach down and I'll hand you the groceries, because I am not abandoning a perfectly good wedge of cheese in a dark shaft, and then I'll climb up after."

"That's a lot of steps."

"I do a lot of steps. It's my whole personality."

He laced his fingers into a stirrup against his thigh, which I declined, and instead he just put his hands at my waist and lifted, and I'll be honest, that part I remember exactly. His hands were flat and steady, one on each side, no fumbling, and he took most of my weight for maybe four seconds, and I got the latch and swung the panel open and hauled myself up onto the roof of the car, into the shaft, which smelled like dust and machine oil and old rainwater.

"Got it?" he called up.

"Got it."

I lay flat on my stomach and reached both arms down through the hole, and he passed up the totes one at a time, and then the baguette, and then, for reasons that made no sense, he handed up one of the surviving oranges before anything else, and our fingers overlapped on it for a second too long. Not a grab. Just, his hand under mine on the orange, and the orange between us, and neither of us letting go right away.

"Sorry," he said, though there was nothing to be sorry for.

"Don't be," I said, and took the orange.

Then his head and shoulders came up through the hatch and he braced his arms and swung himself out beside me, breathing hard, sunburned and grinning in the dim shaft light that came from some source I never did identify. He sat on the roof of the elevator like it was a park bench, hair full of dust.

"So," he said. "Daphne. Again. Since we're apparently doing this properly now."

"Gracie. Again."

And below us, the car shuddered, and the fan started turning, and then stopped again, and both our phones started buzzing at once with the same grid alert.

The car settling on its cables killed any plan of going down through the hatch. So we went up. The ninth floor landing was maybe four feet above the roof of the car, and the doors there were closed but the shaft side had that little access keyhole the fire department uses, and Daphne had a multitool on his belt, because of course he did, a man who writes about cheese for a living carries a multitool. He got the interlock to give on the third try and we shoved the doors apart and hauled ourselves and our groceries onto nine, into a stairwell that smelled like floor wax.

The doors to nine itself were locked. The stairwell was the only thing open, because the power was out and the stairwell doors never lock from the inside. So we went up one flight to ten. My floor. My door was right there, and his was somewhere on eight, and let me say that I thought about this for about two seconds before I did the rude thing.

"My apartment's right here," I said. "You could, I don't know. There's a stairwell. Eight is down."

"There is a stairwell," he agreed. "It's very dark and I'm sure it's full of character."

I stood there with my keys in my hand. Lou had said an hour or three. The storm was still going outside somewhere, this low grinding sound through the building. And here was this sunburned man holding a baguette.

"You could come in for a minute," I said. "Until the lights come back. Then you go down one flight and stop haunting me."

"Deal," he said, too fast, and I realized he'd been waiting for me to say it, which annoyed me and also didn't.

We got the door open in the dark. I know my apartment by hand, every piece of furniture, so I got us in without breaking anything, and he followed my voice like a large polite animal. I found candles. I have a lot of candles because I'm the kind of person who has a lot of candles, and I lit three on the kitchen table and the place turned into a seventeenth-century portrait of itself.

He put both our grocery piles on the counter without being asked, sorted, mine on the left, his on the right, the cheese centered like a disputed territory. I put water on. I have a gas stove, thank God, so tea was possible, and tea felt like the correct response to having climbed out of an elevator shaft.

"I realize I've told you my whole deal," he said while the water heated, "and you've told me yours, except the part where I ask why a book doctor is buying eggs at seven at night."

"Because I bake two nights a week at a place on Delancey and I go through eggs like water."

"You bake." He said it like I'd confessed to a felony. "What do you bake?"

"Bread, mostly. Sourdough. Whatever they need." I turned away to deal with the mugs. "It's not interesting."

"Everything about that is interesting. You spend your days keeping six-hundred-year-old books from falling apart and your nights making bread."

"Someone has to keep things from falling apart." I heard myself say it and winced. He didn't laugh. He was quiet a second, and then he said, "That's a bigger sentence than it sounds like," and I handed him his tea so I didn't have to answer.

We sat at the table with the candles. The storm had come up around six and killed the lights by seven and now it was pushing eight and getting worse, the wind changing from that steady push to these hard individual shoves at the windows. He drank his tea and looked around at my apartment, which is full of books in various states of surgery, and I watched him not ask about any of it, which took discipline, because he struck me like someone who asks about everything.

"I should say," he said, to his mug, "since we're doing things properly, as established in the shaft. I'm recently separated. Divorce signed, just waiting on the court to stamp it, not bitter, mostly. The sublet on eight is six months and I took it because I needed somewhere that wasn't the house in Charleston, where everything smells like her decisions."

I hadn't asked. But he offered it flat, no fishing, and I appreciated that. "How recent?" I asked.

"Paperwork eight months ago. Moving out, six. So, fresh enough that people get a look on their face when I say it. You've got the look."

"I don't have a look."

"You have a small polite look. It's fine. It's my look too, when other people say it." He turned his mug a quarter turn on the table. "The short version is we wanted different sizes of life. She wanted a big one. I wanted a quiet one with good cheese. Nobody cheated, nobody screamed. It just took us nine years to notice."

I drank my tea. Nine years, I thought, and here he was in a dark kitchen in a city that rains, telling it with the same flatness as a weather report. "I've never been married," I said, because fair was fair. "I've never wanted the size of life that requires it."

"See, we'd get along," he said. "In a narrow sense."

The power flickered then, the clock on my stove