Chapter 4 – #Rule 4

After Pete rescued me from being crushed by the elevator, we became close. He eventually started to refer to me as his protégé, and I felt like that was an apt word for our semi-professional friendship. Most of the lessons I learned were from him, and they saved my life on more than one occasion.

When he was visiting me in the hospital after I broke both my ankles falling down the elevator shaft, he regaled me with tales from his own experiences of elevator repair hell. Back in the seventies, safety regulations were even more lax, so he had quite a few brushes with death.

It was my third night in the trauma unit and I had had one of several surgical procedures earlier that day. They put a series of pins and small steel rods into my legs. I had broken my distal tibia and fibula, the doctors told me. And had I ended up with what they referred to as “compound fractures” where the bones break completely and stab through the skin. I had four of those fractures, two on each side. It looked pretty gnarly before I finally got fixed up.

I had come out of the haze of anesthesia and Pete decided he would tell me a story to try to cheer me up. His thinking was it might brighten my day to hear about his own experience that had been debatably even worse than mine. It didn’t help, in fact, just made me have more intense and terrifying opioid-fueled nightmares. But it was a nice thought.

“Okay, kid, I’ll tell you a good tip to remember while you’re out there. If you’re ever stuck in an elevator, stay put.” He looked at me and winked, with a little grin on his face.

“That’s it?” I asked, still groggy from the medication. “How come?”

“Is this a good enough reason for you?” he asked, lifting up his pant leg, to reveal a wooden fake leg.

“Whoa. What the hell happened to it?”

“Well, back when I was younger – about your age – I got stuck inside a box in an old mental hospital on the weekend. There was nobody around and the security guards were new, I guess, and didn’t know what they were doing, so they just silenced the emergency call button, thinking it was malfunctioning. Thinking that the whole elevator was on the fritz. They didn’t realize I was stuck inside.

“I tried calling for help but nobody answered. I screamed and screamed for hours and then ended up in there all night, then the next day, then another night. By Sunday I was losing my mind. I was thirsty, starving, afraid nobody was going to come for me. So I tried to pry open the doors.

“I managed to get them open and saw I was just below the basement. The box had stalled on the way up and I realized I could pull myself up then get down on my belly and crawl out of there. But I was worried because I knew this was dangerous. If the box decided to move at exactly that moment I could easily die, be severed right in half. That happens more often than you could possibly imagine.

“I decided to take the risk. I had been stuck in there for so long I was terrified I would die there. Thinking back I should have just stayed put, but try telling that to a young man in his twenties who has his life ahead of him and thinks he’s invincible. I told myself that box wasn’t going to move at exactly that moment. There was no chance of it. But I was wrong.

“Just then, as it happened, another guy from my company had been sent over to check on the elevator. Whatever he did, it got things moving again, just as my midsection was crossing the threshold to the other side.

“I had only an instant to react, and I did. I pulled out my waist and my right leg as quick as I could, reflexively, since I was terrified of that happening, it didn’t take much effort on my part. But my other leg wasn’t as lucky, as you see here.

“Holy shit.”

“Yeah, holy shit is right. The elevator ceiling came down on it and it didn’t just break, it pulled me in. I felt myself being sucked into the elevator as it went down, taking me with it.

“I dug my nails into the linoleum floor and howled in pain until it finally ripped my leg clean off, pulled it out like a drumstick from a turkey dinner,” he clicked his tongue and mimed this.

“I ended up on the same floor we’re on right now, in a hospital bed that looked a bit like the one you’re sitting in right now. At least you’ll get to keep your legs.”

A frowning nurse walked in wearing a set of colourless green scrubs and carrying a small plastic cup full of pills and a needle in her hands. She set these items down on my bedside table wordlessly and pumped some liquid hand sanitizer on her hands from a nearby dispenser.

“Visiting hours are over now,” she said to Pete. Her eyes were cold and compassionless.

“Sure.” He got up to leave. He gathered his coat and something fell out onto the bed. I didn’t notice it at first, and didn’t realize it had happened until after he left.

The nurse gave me my pills and a blood thinner injection that left an irritating bee-sting feeling that didn’t go away for several hours. Once she was gone I noticed the object sitting on the bed beside me. It was a small golden pin, with the initials S.U.E.R.M. on it.

At first I thought it said sperm and giggled a little bit, but then realized I was still just crazy high from the epidural and my last dose of IV morphine. I read it again and tried to figure out what it meant. I would need to ask Pete about it later, I thought.

Then the nurse came back in.

“Oh, by the way, I forgot – your family called – your dog just died.”

She walked away without another word and that was the last I saw of her for the rest of the night, despite my terrible pain and ringing the call bell for hours on end. I was told the next morning the system had gone out and they had been doing hourly rounds but I hadn’t seen anyone.

The rest of the stay in that place wasn’t much better, but I won’t bore you with the details of my hospital-acquired infections and eventual dependence on opioids that resulted from my time there. And from my botched surgeries there.

This fucking city, I’ll tell you. Even the hospital is a shithole.

For the rest of my time in that place, though, I stared at that pin. I couldn’t help but wonder what those initials meant. I finally got my walking papers after weeks of physio and OT. It took me a lot longer than that to even begin to feel normal again.

I asked Pete about the pin after my discharge and he reluctantly told me another tip. About a society that meets only twice a year. I was astounded at what he told me. I listened and nodded hesitantly when he asked if I was interested in perhaps joining.

He described something that I would only later believe to be true once I had seen it with my own eyes.

The Society of Untainted Elevator Repairmen. The last line of defense between hell and earth.