Forty signs of rain - Kim Stanley Robinson [100]
Then it stopped, and a woman’s voice said, “Hello?”
“Hi? Hey listen, we’re in the elevator at the Bethesda Metro stop, and it’s stuck.”
“Okay. Bethesda did you say? Did you try pushing the CLOSE DOOR button then the UP button?”
“No.” Frank pushed these buttons. “I am now, but…nothing. It feels pretty stuck.”
“Try the DOWN button too, after the CLOSE DOOR.”
“Okay.” He tried it.
“Do you know how far up you are?”
“We must be near the top.” He glanced at the woman, and she nodded.
“Any smoke?”
“No!”
“Okay. There’s people on the way. Just sit tight and stay cool. Are you crowded in there?”
“No, there’s just two of us.”
“That’s okay then. They said they’ll be about half an hour to an hour, depending on traffic and the problem with the elevator. They’ll call you on your phone when they get there.”
“Okay. Thanks.”
“No problem. Pick up again if something changes. I’ll be watching.”
“I will. Thanks again.”
The woman had already hung up. Frank did also.
They stood there.
“Well,” Frank said, gesturing at the phone.
“I could hear,” the woman said. She looked around at the floor. “I guess I’ll sit down while we wait. My feet are tired.”
“Good idea.”
They sat down next to each other, backs to the back wall of the elevator.
“Tired feet?”
“Yeah. I went running today at lunch, and it was mostly on sidewalks.”
“You’re a runner?”
“No, not really. That’s why my feet hurt. I ride with a cycling club, and we’re doing a triathlon, so I’m trying to add some running and swimming. I could just do the cycling leg of a team, but I’m seeing if I can get ready to do the whole thing.”
“What are the distances?”
“A mile swim, twenty mile bike, ten k run.”
“Ouch.”
“It’s not so bad.”
They sat in silence.
“So are you going to be late for something here?”
“No,” Frank said. “Well, it depends, but it’s just a kind of party.”
“Too bad to miss that.”
“Maybe. It’s a work thing. There was a lunchtime lecture today, and now the organizer is having a thing for the speakers.”
“What did they talk about?”
He smiled. “A Buddhist approach to science, actually. They were the Buddhists.”
“And you were the scientists.”
“Yes.”
“That must have been interesting.”
“Well, yes. It was. It’s given me a lot to think about. More than I thought it would. I don’t exactly know what to say to them tonight though.”
“Hmm.” She appeared to consider it. “Sometimes I think about cycling as a kind of meditation. Lots of times I kind of blank out, and when I come to a lot of miles have passed.”
“That must be nice.”
“Your science isn’t psychology, is it?”
“Microbiology.”
“Good. Sorry. Anyway, I like it, yeah. I don’t think I could do it by trying for it, though. It just happens, usually late in a ride. Maybe it’s low blood sugar. Not enough energy to think.”
“Could be,” Frank said. “Thinking does burn some sugars.”
“There you go.”
They sat there burning sugars.
“So what about you, are you going to be late for something?”
“I was going to go for a ride, actually. My legs would be less sore tomorrow if I did. But after this, who knows what I’ll feel like…maybe I still will. If we get out of here pretty soon.”
“We’ll see about that.”
“Yeah.”
The trapped air was stifling. They sat there sweating. There was some quality to it, some combination of comfort and tension, their bodies simply breathing together, resting, almost touching, ever so slightly incandescent to each other…it was nice. Two animals resting side by side, one male one female. A lot of talk goes on below the radar. And indeed somehow it had come to pass that as they relaxed their legs had drifted outward and met each other, so that now they were just very slightly touching, at the outsides of the knees, kind of resting against each other in a carefully natural way, her leg bare (her skirt had fallen down into her lap) and his covered by light cotton pants. Touching. Now the talk under the radar was filling Frank’s whole bandwidth, and though he continued his part of the conversation, he could not have immediately said what they were talking about.
“So you must ride quite a lot?