Mezzanine

by Nicholson Baker

  But far more important than silk-screened hype is the fact that in trading paper towels for this blower, with its immovable funnel, the food chains, aided by World’s rhetoric, are pretending that the only thing you do with paper towels is dry your hands. Not so, not so! You need paper towels to dab at a splash of food on your sleeve that you notice in the mirror; you need them to polish your glasses dry; you need them to wash your face. When you are oily-faced on a hot afternoon in a room made hotter by the hot-air dryer and you decide you want to wash your face before you order your Big Classic, what do you do? Out of desperation, real and true desperation that I myself have experienced, you resort to the toilet paper. So much toilet paper is being used in bathrooms with hot-air blowers that some of the same facilities managers who thought they were cost-cuttingly crafty in moving to blowers have gone to the opposite extreme in the area of toilet-paper dispensers, installing gigantic side-mounted hundred-thousand-sheet rolls the size of automobile tires in each stall. But even so, toilet paper is ill suited to functions outside of a narrow range of activities. You go into a stall and pull yourself a huge handful (that’s assuming that the stall is untenanted), and return to the sink with it. As soon as you dampen it with warm water, it wilts to a semitransparent puree in your fingers. You move this dripping plasma over your face; little pieces of it adhere to your cheek or brow; then you must assemble another big wad to dry off with—but ah! now your fingers are wet, so that when you try to pull more toilet paper from the hundred-thousand-sheet roll, the leading end simply dissolves in your fingers, tearing prematurely. Deciding to let your face air-dry, you look around for a place to throw out the initial macerated flapjack, and discover that the wastebasket is gone. So you drop it in the corner with the other miscellaneous trash, or flip it vengefully in the already clogged toilet.

  And that is why I considered it an honor to be working at a place that still used the classic corporate paper-towel dispenser. But sometimes when I pulled several paper towels from it, or when I opened a gray steel supply cabinet stocked with black-handled scissors, Page-A-Day calendar refills, magnetized paper-clip dispensers, staplers, cobra-like staple removers, and box after box of Razor Point pens, or when I got a memo with a distribution cover sheet that had fifty names on it, I would suddenly start to doubt that the company I worked for could afford all this. I would think of the people in my department, one department out of maybe sixty-five in the corporation: I would visualize my salary, plus Tina’s, Abelardo’s, Sue’s, Dave’s, Jim’s, Steve’s, and that of ten or twelve others, none of whom did anything that directly pulled in money, as a row of numbers spinning around too fast to see, measuring the amount of cash that it took every second to bring us to work. Our salaries were based on a forty-hour week, not a thirty-five-hour week: think of the amount of money the company officially paid out every day just to finance the time all of its thousands of employees spent for lunch! In certain moods it became impossible for me to shift from my personal impression of the one small expensive subunit of the company to the overall net income figures we read every quarter on earnings reports in the internal newsletter—it was difficult to believe that money was coming in at anywhere near the rate at which we were pouring it out. And this doubtfulness would sometimes extend to companies all over the city: a skyline’s worth of overreaching expenditure, a whole corporate stratum existing at an unsustainably high standard—the white paper towel standard, rather than the hot air blower standard.

  When I would say to Dave or Sue that I sometimes wondered how we, or any company, could afford its operating expenses, they would smile at me charitably and say, “Don’t worry, we can afford it, believe me.” But they knew no better than I did. Just because it is convention to have one thousand business cards printed up for you the week after you are hired, even though, unless you are a salesman or you do a lot of recruiting, you will probably give out no more than thirty in the course of your whole employment, most of them in the first year to relatives, and later only on occasions in which the giving out of the business card adds a coy irony to some interchange, and even though the possession of business cards has no other function, really, than to demonstrate good faith on the company’s part, to make you feel that you belong there right from the beginning, no matter how valueless you may seem to yourself to be in the first three months—just because this level of luxury is conventional, and the price schedules at printers’ encourage volume, doesn’t mean that it and things like it might not at some point pull the whole structure of wasteful, half-understood, inherited convention right down.1 We came in to work every day and were treated like popes—a new manila folder for every task; expensive courier services; taxi vouchers; trips to three-day fifteen-hundred-dollar conferences to keep us up to date in our fields; even the dinkiest chart or memo typed, xeroxed, distributed, and filed; overhead transparencies to elevate the most casual meeting into something important and official; every trash can in the whole corporation, over ten thousand trash cans, emptied and fitted with a fresh bag every night; restrooms with at least one more sink than ever conceivably would be in use at any one time, ornamented with slabs of marble that would have done credit to the restrooms of the Vatican! What were we participating in here?1

  But despite this sort of periodic metascruple, I certainly helped myself to the paper towels. Now I briskly pulled five of them from the diamond-shaped opening: one to wash my face with, two to rinse it, a fourth to dry it, and a fifth to dry my glasses when I had rinsed them. Each time I pulled, a new but identical towel-flap was there for me to grasp: if you had blinked at the right moment, you might never have known that it was different from the towel you had been looking at; but it was! This renewing of newness—whether it was

  • the appearance of another identical Pez tablet at the neck of the plastic Pez elevator, or

  • the sight of one parachutist after another standing for a second in the door of an airplane before he jumped, or

  • the rolling-into-position of a pinball after the previous one had escaped your flippers, or

  • one sticky disk of sliced banana displaced from its spot on the knife over the cereal bowl by its successor, or

  • the uprising of yet another step of the escalator,

  was for me then, and is still, one of the greatest sources of happiness that the man-made world can offer. And it remains a matter of some personal frustration to me that fast-food restaurants, which offer so much of this kind of patterned mechanical renewal (as in the spring-loaded holes from which one Styrofoam cup after another emerges), consistently interfere with the pleasure we might take in it by (a) failing to stress to their employees the extreme importance of loading the black-and-chrome table-napkin dispensers with the napkins pointing in the right direction: not backward, with flap-folds hidden, so that to get two napkins out you have to pinch a bulge of six or more at a time and wrestle them all through the chrome mouth at once, leaving the guilty excess on top, where nobody will use them because nobody will trust them; or if they don’t do that by (b) allowing their people to stuff the dispenser full far beyond its capacity, carried away by the admittedly impressive number of napkins it can hold, so that the flap you pull tears or draws the machine shuddering on its rubber nubs over the countertop—frustrating because here is an invention that is simple, long-lived, life-enhancing, ingenious, and that could easily be one of those pings of small-time pleasure in your fast-food meal, and yet through ignorance or carelessness its greatness is consistently traduced, and as a result millions of table napkins are thrown away without having served their purpose. But I am confident that the food chains will recognize this common mistake in time and institute training procedures that have their new-hires chanting, “Flaps to the front! Flaps to the front!”; and they will trade in all of those hot-air blowers for the hazards of towel waste—just as the floating straw has been, at least by some vendors, recently made heavy enough to stay put in a carbonated environment.1

  I opened the first of the five t
owels under the hot water, folded it in half wet, and tapped just a half-squirt of pink soap onto it, which I diluted with another quick pass under the tap. Then, bending low over the sink, my tie clamped out of harm’s way under one elbow, I raised the dripping folio in both hands and blinded myself in its warmth. I scrubbed. The wings of my nose were held closed by the sides of my little fingers. I said, “Oh God” into the sopping paper, immeasurably soothed. Face-washing seems to work as acupuncture is said to: the sudden signals of warmth flooding your brain from the nerves of the face, especially the eyelids, unmoor your thinking for an instant, dislodging your attention from any thoughts that had been in progress and causing it to slide back randomly to the first fixed spot in memory that it finds—often a subject that you had left unresolved earlier in the day which returns now as an image magnified against the grainy blackness of your closed eyelids.

  In my case, the image that returned was the broken shoelace as it had appeared just before I had repaired it in my office seven minutes before. The question then had been, how come my shoelaces broke within some twenty-eight hours of each other, after two years of continuous use? Now I relived the first sensations of pulling the lace-ends up tight before I had begun the knot: it was a pull that seemed to involve about an inch of lace friction. I compared it with the important second pull, often a much harder pull, a real yank, or even two, I did to tighten the twist of the overhand base knot. You yanked in a floorward direction in this second pull, and the friction seemed to be confined to about a quarter of an inch of lace length—so that, I now thought, was where the real concentrated wear would have occurred. I felt I was making progress. As I rinsed my face with the second and third paper towels, I tried again to incorporate in my explanation of the dual breakage the additional contribution of walking flexion to total shoelace wear, since the stresses of walking, while individually small, were repeated thousands of times—for example, even in walking just now from my office to the men’s room, I must have flexed each shoe and therefore exerted tension and friction on its lace thirty or forty times. I turned off the water and began absentmindedly drying my face with the fourth towel.

  What I needed was a way to discriminate between the kind of wear inflicted by pulling on the laces with my hands and the kind that came about as I walked. And this time, I came up with what looked to be a simple either/or test. Since my feet are mirror images of each other, and since I have no limp, the fraying under a purely walking-flex model of wear would be greatest at either both inside or both outside top eyelets—never at, say, the left shoe’s inside eyelet and the right shoe’s outside eyelet. My arms, on the other hand, perform their tying pulls asymmetrically, not only because my right arm is stronger than my left, as we know from murder mysteries, but also because I hold the left and right lace-ends in a subtly different grip, in readiness for the movements I will be making in forming the two bunny’s ears. This allows us to determine very easily whether the chronic walk-flex or acute pull-fray model is dominant. Assume, I said to myself, that the shoelace on my right shoe that had snapped yesterday morning in my apartment had snapped at the left, or inside, top eyelet. Under walkflex I would predict that the shoelace found in the right, or inside, top eyelet of my left shoe would have snapped today, maintaining symmetry. Conversely, under pull-fray, I would expect the left eyelet of the left shoe to have been the point of breakage. I couldn’t remember, though, which two eyelets had really been involved.

  I rinsed my glasses quickly under the tap, eager to be able to study my shoes in detail once again; I polished the lenses with the fifth paper towel, making bribe-me, bribe-me finger motions over the two curved surfaces until they were dry. A toilet began roaring. I stepped back from the sink and brought my glasses toward my face, enjoying the approach of those two reservoirs of widening distinctness; as I hooked the sidepieces over my ears, I raised my eyebrows, for unknown reasons.1 Now I could see my shoes.

  What I saw was a left shoe displaying a broken and repaired stretch of shoelace at the left top eyelet, and a right shoe also displaying a broken and repaired stretch of shoelace at its left top eyelet. This was not symmetrical, and consequently pullfray was dominant and walk-flex discountable as a source of wear. Good. But: these test results forced me to reconsider the whole earlier problem of how to make sense of the large percentage of random daytime comings-undone and retyings. And there I abandoned the topic, because Abelardo, my manager, emerged from a stall.

  “What do you think, Howie?” he said; it was his standard greeting—one I was fond of.

  “Abe, I don’t know what to think,” I said; my standard response. I adjusted my glasses in the mirror so that they weren’t crooked, knowing that they would revert to their normal slight skew in five minutes.

  “Lunchtime?” said Abe, scrubbing his hands.

  “Yep. Got to buy shoelaces. One popped yesterday, the other popped today.”

  “Well well.”

  “It mystifies me. Has that ever happened to you?”

  “No. I use a fresh pair every day.”

  “Oh? You buy them at CVS, or where?”

  “I have them flown in. UPS blue. An Indian guy in Texas makes them for me. He blends alpaca and some of the finer tweeds. Then he sprays it with Krylon.”

  “Nice,” I said. The secret to working for Abe was realizing that nothing he said, outside of company business, was serious or true. “Take it easy.”

  “Yep.”

  Approaching the door, I began to whistle loudly. I pulled on the handle; the door swung toward me fast with no resistance.

  “Oop,” I said.

  “Oop,” said Ron Nemick, entering.

  I held the door for him. As I walked out into the hall, I realized that the tune I had just begun was “I’m a Yankee Doodle Dandy.”

  From within, I heard Abe cheerfully start up with “I Knew an Old Lady Who Swallowed a Fly.”

  Chapter Twelve

  LESS THAN AN HOUR later, I stood in the pose of George Washington crossing the Potomac, one foot on a higher step, one hand on the handrail, gliding steadily upward on the diagonal between the lobby and my destination. The sound of the escalator’s motor had become indistinct, although I could still feel a faint rhythm of clicks transmitted through the steps, which I assumed were caused as the links of the chain that drew me upward were engaged by the sprockets at either end; and the sounds of the lobby, too, were blurred and assimilated into a universal lobby-sound, as if each unitary tock of a secretary’s heel were a sharp brush-point of pigment touched to a wash-covered watercolor, flaring palely outward. From this height, the height of sociology and statistics, foreshortened employees moved in visible patterns: they were propelled one by one at a fixed speed into the lobby by the revolving door; they coalesced in front of elevators whose arrival dinger had just lit; they renewed the permanent four-person line at the cash machine; occasionally two of them, on intersecting rushed trajectories, would raise their arms in joyful surprise and exchange civilities while sidestepping in a neat clockwise semicircle in order to continue backward on their way, each held for an obligatory moment in the other’s gravitational field and then, by mutual consent, completing their loop-the-loop by turning and hurrying on.

  I had not moved my hand from its first grip on the handrail, but because the handrail progressed upward on its track at an imperceptibly slower speed than the steps did (slippage?), my arm was in a different position, my elbow more bent, than when I had begun. I repositioned my hand ahead of me. It was strange to think that because of the difference in speeds, these escalator steps must periodically lap the handrail that accompanied them: since the slippage on my escalator was about a foot per up trip, or two feet per complete cycle, over an estimated complete handrail loop of a hundred feet, the handrail was lapped by the moving stairway every fifty revolutions—like those stock cars with fewer decals that you think are running neck and neck with Foyt or Unser, but are in fact laps and laps off the pace, driven by what kind of men? Sad, disappointed
men, you instinctively feel; but maybe novices or fanatics, delighted to be there at all.

  That the handrail didn’t progress at exactly the same speed as the steps was an observation I owed to my lately acquired habit of standing still and gliding for the entire ride, rather than walking up the steps. I had switched to gliding only after I had been working at the company for about a year. Before taking the job, I had used escalators relatively infrequently, at airports, malls, certain subway exits, and department stores, and on these occasions I had gradually developed strong beliefs as to the proper way to ride them. Your role was to advance at the normal rate you climbed stairs at home, allowing the motor to supplement, not replace, your own physical efforts. Otis, Montgomery, and Westinghouse had not meant for you to falter after a step or two on their machines and finally halt, arriving at the top later than you would had you briskly mounted a fixed, unelectrified flight. They would never have devoted fortunes of development money and man-years of mechanical ingenuity in order to construct a machine possessing all the external characteristics of a regular set of stairs, including individual steps, a practicable grade, and a shiny banister, just so that healthy people like me could stand in states of suspended animation, our eyes in test patterns of vacancy, until we were deposited on the upper level. Their inspiration had not been the chair lift or the cog railway, but the moped, which you helped out with leg power on hills. Yet people refused to see this. Often in department stores I would get stuck behind two motionless passengers and want to seize their shoulders and urge them on, like an instructor at an Outward Bound program, saying, “Annette, Bruce—this isn’t the Land of the Lotus-Eaters. You’re on a moving stairway. Feel your own effortful, bobbing steps melt into the inexhaustible meliorism of the escalator. Watch the angles of floors and escalator ceilings above and around you alter their vanishing points at a syrupy speed that doesn’t correlate with what your legs are telling you they are doing. Don’t you see that when you two stop, two abreast, you are not only blocking me? Don’t you see that you indicate to all those who are right now stepping onto the escalator at the bottom and looking timidly up for inspiration that if they bound eagerly up they too will catch up with us and be thwarted in their advance? They were wavering whether to stand or to climb, and you just sapped their wills! You made them choose to waste their time! And they in turn impede those who follow them—thus you perpetuate a pattern of sloth and congestion that may persist for hours. Can’t you see that?” Sometimes I rudely halted at the step just below the one the pair stood on, my face a caricature of pointless impatience, tailgating them until (often with startled sounds and offered apologies I didn’t deserve) they doubled up to let me pass. Headway was easier to establish going down, because the rapid thump of my steps would scare them over to one side.