Up and down

“Wouldn’t it suck if someone farted right now?”

Only five minutes had passed since the elevator stopped functioning and a bad joke was his way of introduction. Before the creaking of structural steel and the zipping of some electrical failure, my first impression of Kacper Niburski was that he was the type of person that blended into the fading, vomit-yellow elevator background behind him. He had a face that was familiar yet distant, similar to others yet entirely different. Biologically, this wasn’t far from a truth: he had a twin and he made a quip that I’m sure he had made a thousand times before that he was the better looking genetic copy at any rate.

He smiled when he said it, a smile that seemed broken, tired, and fake. His glasses were dirty and sat diagonally across his face as if he didn’t know how to wear them. His clothes suffered from a similar nonchalance; sweatpants provided comfort while a plaid shirt was meant as a formality. In a way, he looked like a circus tent impersonating a banquet hall.

Most of what he said was an underlying gag, and each time he finished speaking, he waited for my reaction. As he continued and continued and he spoke and spoke, it began to become automated. Joke. Laugh. Joke again.

But something loomed over the apparent hilarity, some ubiquitous problem that in spite of his tendency for witticisms, his easy mirth, and his stupid smile, kept him caught in the problems of everyday. If only for a moment, while he prattled on about nothing at all – a joke here, a quip there – his quick laughter seemed too quick, his eyes seemed to spell out some misery, and the elevator’s flickering luminescence seemed to turn off for a second too long. But this contradictory first impression soon passed and even though he looked as if he could melt away in a moment, he stood there grinning. I don’t think the grin left him the whole hour.

He even smiled as he said, “I’m convinced that at one point or another we all just found ourselves stuck on some elevator we don’t remember getting on and now we’re all going up and down, waiting for the right floor to get off on.” Maybe he took his own words literally because in a second or two, he was laying down as if at home with his head uncomfortably close to my lap.

He looked happy and sad, and I’m not sure how else to explain it. I don’t think it was feigned happiness or anything like that. I mean, he spoke too much. Not because of want of things to say nor because he had nothing to show for in his head but because in those moments when silence speaks volumes, he wanted to try to dampen the noise. He was inclined to such hackneyed truisms and he told me that everything he said wasn’t meant be taken seriously. When I asked why say anything at all, he said that all of this was just a big cosmic joke. I had no idea what it meant and he didn’t either, he admitted.

He told me his life, or whatever he could remember from it. The caveat was that he didn’t like speaking about himself very much because he wasn’t sure what there was to say. Still, he liked to stay to true to the idea that one should only say what one knows and not much more. He added that he didn’t know much and what he did know wasn’t worth much anyways.

But he tried. He was a brother, a cousin, an uncle, a student, and a family man without a family in that order. He told me that when he wasn’t busy fulfilling those roles, he was an optimistic pessimist, a sinning saint, an apathetic moralist, a lazy opportunist, a friendly foe, a serious comedian, and an ignorant know-it-all. Most days, he was clusterfucked and when he wasn’t, he said he was like the cashier in a grocery store who looked dead-eyed and incalculably sweaty and whose wry, wisp-like, cotton-candy smile hid the fact that she was thinking all the same thoughts about you.

But he wasn’t that person exactly either, he continued. He was the next-morning hangover, the best night of one’s life forgotten, and an empty bed. He was a switchblade if you came too close, a pillow if you came closer. He was the miracle of fire reserved for a cigarette, and he was the cancer afterward. He was this and that and this and that, and he eventually scratched his head and said, “Come to think of it, I’m not exactly sure who I am.” He added that this was the first sign of knowing who he was, but his voiced cracked when he said it, splitting in to two and echoing against the elevator’s walls.

He told me he was modest, but went on to tell me about his chronology: March 20^th he was born, but he doesn’t remember the day well. Evidently it wasn’t worth remembering, he joked. Things happened sometime in between and he found himself celebrating his fourth birthday. From there, blurs. Moments gone, went, never to occur again. Poof, he stretched his hands.

At five he was enrolled in elementary school and made friends. He remembered trips where his parents and him drove long hours to some beach and they laughed and they swam and he got lost and he cried and it rained and he was found and then they went home and he was sure they had fun after it all. He remembered other days too. When his best friend died; when he was told that his brain worked faster than his hand; and that time when he peed his pants in grade five. He shuffled his legs when he said it, ensuring that he wouldn’t commit the same foul now.

Eventually he found himself in high school and he forgot for a while that he didn’t like alcohol or that he regarded general rules or that he thought of himself as something important. He didn’t say much more then, “It goes on, and so did I.”

I wasn’t sure what he meant, but he immediately told me he found himself in University and he felt like he was in elementary school again. He was told that school was always the noblest pursuit, but it took him a while to release that it was filled with mostly crooks, liars, and cheats, where the success of one is praised over the failure of another. “Evidence in the flesh,” he brushed himself off. He said not to worry anymore, though. Now he was on the other end and he told me that this – he stretched his hands in the elevator as if to show me that such a claustrophobic space was not a micrcosm of the cosmos but the actual universe itself – was the life. This wasn’t just breathing. “Everyone breathes,” he explained. “It’s our natural default setting.” Instead this was living one hour with 60 minutes of worth.

“That’s learning.” He nodded to himself.

Twenty minutes had passed. It was a lifetime for Kacper.

He heard my tale and I fail to recount it now. Some of life’s secrets are too much to tell and others are worth dying with. Besides, I don’t like writing about myself that much.

I do not think considerably much of Kacper now, but when I do, I don’t think of him as a ghost or a copy of a copy or anything really. I think of him as he was: loose, at ease with hands in his pocket, camped beside me and smiling to himself then coughing to hide it. I remember his eyes, hinted by yellow, flooded by green, and lingering, neither jealous nor curious, just there staring, moving, dancing, and then stopping on me, looking up and down, studying, caring, wondering, then away, then back again with a grin reappearing on his face only to be lost again as a moment unsure, a stolen few seconds where he was with others but by himself, where he was remembering but forgetting, pondering but knowing. I remember the man who imagined himself a boy and the boy who spoke with an nuanced speech impediment shadowing each of his sentences. I remember the spirits and the angels that circled him, mystics that he conjured and he alone believed in. He wasn’t different than anyone else; we all had our stories. In fact, I’m sure if he were here he’d tell me he was the same as myself and repeat that twin joke he always told.

But for a second – maybe it was in the silver glint of his eye when he looked down or the way he rummaged his hands in his pockets as if searching for something – it seemed as though he thought that this elevator ride meant something, and if it didn’t, he wanted to make it meaningful. It was like he didn’t want to live by accident, and maybe that’s why he incoherently chronicled his life. The events were broken; each fragment torn apart by moments so far away and so distance that he could barely recognize them himself, let alone give me an idea what the hell he was talking about. Yet they were together somehow, better for having being broken, better for failing, for disassembling, for turning one into two then back again.

As we exited the elevator, he offered a hand and said, “You first. I’ve gotten comfy here.” I hesitated. He said, “What if I farted?”