The Glass Elephant

It had gotten to the point that if I didn’t get out to explore an abandoned building more often, I began to lose sleep, like a thief with one more safe I had to crack. I suppose I was what someone would call “addicted,” but I would say ‘extreme enthusiast.” Still, if I didn’t get into a building for a week, I started to get restless. Jumpy. Irritable even. God knows what I got out of it.

I can actually trace it back to the moment my obsession began. My mother would have these mood swings that were sudden and brutal. And too often, I was in the path of the hurricane.

I remember talking back to her one night in the kitchen while she was heating up dinner and she just froze. I hadn’t developed a radar yet for when my mom would snap. The sudden stillness. That look. The tone. But especially that lightning-fast pivot from control to eruption.

She was trying to form words, but only indecipherable syllables seeped out. And then she picked up the pot and slung it at me from across the kitchen. I ducked just in time, but there were string beans all over the floor and wall behind me. She had that kind of instant rage.

I lunged out of the room and decided then and there I was going to run away. I did not want to face that kind of storm again.

That night, I packed a small bag of my dearest toys and a couple of PB&J sandwiches and snuck out. I found my way in the dark to a small, abandoned hut, on the far edge of the woods in our neighborhood.

I sat wide-eyed in the corner all night, listening to night sounds, reading the graffiti over and over. I thought my heart would give out. At dawn, I felt as though I had conquered the night. When I got home, the storm continued. But from then on, I loved an abandoned building.

I had no sooner gotten home from sleeping out Friday night on the roof of the old Washington Flour Company in Ellicott City, and I had just uploaded unlabeled pics to Met Voyager for fellow explorers to guess my location and follow, when my phone pinged with a message from Charlie, a friend of mine who lived in a little vintage town just north of the flour company. The last of the movers are gone. Thought you’d want to know.

Every day, to and from his job at the soft serve stand, Charlie passed the old Gundry Sanitarium, a Victorian stone structure with high-pointed spires that had been a mansion before WWI, a place found somewhere between a Poe story and Mary Poppins. It had recently closed its doors for good, and there were rumors that it would be refurbished and converted to apartments. I was salivating to get in there before anyone else, so that night was the night. I was absolutely exhausted, but there was no way I would make it til the next night, let alone the weekend. I had to get some sleep. I knew I would get little that night.

Good eye. Thx, I texted back.

Once it was dark, I parked two streets over from the sanitarium to not draw attention because it was too near a populated area.

There was a deep breeze, strong enough that the nearby branches were shouldering other trees. The sanitarium grounds smelled like autumn, that great scent, the nutmeg of fallen leaves.

I found a cellar window in the back corner that had long been covered over with weedy vines. The glazing between the stones surrounding the window had long deteriorated. I wondered if I could just push the stones through. There was a black iron screen bolted over the window. From my backpack, which was a narrow green Camelback I converted to a tool pouch, I pulled out a screwdriver and tried the screws. No go. I then produced a clamp wrench, squeezed it to the screwdriver’s handle and tightened it, and tried the screws again, pushing down with all my strength, as though loosening stuck lug nuts. Bingo. The first screw gave, and the other corners followed suit.

I army crawled through the window, leaving one hand grabbing the ledge to catch me as I flipped inside. I loved this moment, the initial infiltration. Exiting one world, born into the next. As a child, I dreamed of other lands, hidden lands, portals to other worlds, worlds of discovery and adventure. I guessed this was finding that door at the back of the wardrobe.  My feet hitting the linoleum echoed a smack. There was that familiar smell. That air of emptiness. The swift gathering of dust and humidity from a lack of life who once would have wiped it all away. But there was another smell blending with new must, something unusual. Not a cleanser. Not a room freshener. Faint. A mix of sweet soap…and what? Gasoline?

I picked up my tool pack, pulled out a small flashlight, one of those military lights with the buttons on the end that can alter between dull, medium, and bright. I shined a dull beam around the room. From the cabinets and drawers, it must have been an examination room of some sorts.

I was about to follow my routine of starting at the top and working down; in case time got limited, I was always working towards the exit. I was eager to get an up-close look at the grand center staircase I had seen through the window and take it to the top.

I spun to leave, and I fell back against the paneled wall and shined my light up at a figure standing in the doorway.  My shaking created a strobe across it. I could barely balance the flashlight in my hand. “Who are you!” I spouted. “I’m just looking around!” I was reaching for my pack, hoping to grip a screwdriver. I settled my light on the figure’s face. It was a woman. A small, grey-haired woman.

“It’s okay. Calm down,” she said, her hand reaching out. “You scared me just as much. I didn’t mean to startle you. I’m…having a look around, too.”

In those environments, I would not have had the guts to sneak up on someone. She stayed in the doorway, and from across the room said again, very calmly, “I heard you minutes ago.” She wore a floral house dress, plain barn jacket, and green rain boots. Impractical, I thought. Was it raining where she came from?

“Valerie,” she said, but didn’t extend her hand.

I stared for a moment and then finally said, “Nathan. Nate,” I answered, keeping my hands at my side, too, still thinking about the screwdriver in my pack while I tried to settle my breathing.

She was small and lean, but sturdy looking, like someone you read about who works the land. But there was definitely something…unnerving about her, and yet provocative at the same time. She crossed her arms tightly across her body, as though hugging herself, as she entered the room, biting her lip. I caught a whiff of that smell again. Could explain the boots. Maybe she was mowing her lawn.

I figured I was making her nervous, so I tried to put her at ease, which I hoped would put me equally at ease. “Are you in a club or on an app?”

“Sorry?”

“I’m in Met Voyager. Heard of it? Or are you in something else?”

“Um, Met Voyager?”

“Do you upload pics, or just explore for yourself?”

“Oh, uh, no.”

“I get it. Just the pure joy of it,” I said, and she stared at me with a look that seemed to try to understand my whole being on Earth, like one of my teachers when I would say something completely out of left field, but I thought I was right on the money.

“This is where you’d be assessed,” she said, looking around the room, using my light. I noticed she had no flashlight, no nothing, unless she had a phone tucked away in one of her pockets. “They’d bring you down here and run all the tests and diagnosis on you. There’s nothing down here but wood paneling and mildew. What you really want to see is the third floor.”

“Third fl–’ Wow, you’ve really done your research.”

“Let’s call it ‘groundwork,’” she said, throwing up air quotes with her fingers. “I guess I am pretty well versed with this place,” she added, and then she spun towards the door.

“Great,” I said. “I’ve been dying to pore through this house.”

“House,” she laughed, and wedged past me, through the door. I could smell the must up her jacket. And that smell again. Faint, but there.

“C’mon,” she called back. “I’ll fill you to the brim with history.”

I’d never had a partner, but part of doing what I did was to be open to new things, explore new things. She seemed knowledgeable, so I figured a sort of tour guide could be a bonus.

Valerie led the way, no light in front of her.

At the end of a corridor, she said, “Here. There’s a back staircase. This is what the ‘patients’ used,” again throwing up air quotes.

As we ascended the worn wooden staircase, every step whined and echoed hollowly around us. Up one flight, my light caught Valerie stopping on a small landing and thumbed to the door, “Nothing really to see here. This is where they stayed when they just needed a ‘rest,’ she said, adding air quotes.

“I did read that this place did pioneering work for women with nervous disorders.”

“Pioneer – Where in God’s name did you read that!”

“Uh, the internet.”

“What an absolute crock!” and up she stomped out of my light.

“Ohhh-kaaay.”

Valerie stopped a few steps before the top. “Put your light here,” she tapped. And I shined a beam on the kick plate just below the second to the last step. “Does this look loose to you? You have a screwdriver in there,” she turned back and said, pointing to my pack.

I reached in and pulled out the flathead screwdriver. Within seconds, I heard the unsticking of wood from wood. She had the kickplate opened and she reached inside. I caught a glimpse of a piece of paper and the upper corner of a photo with what I could just make out of red ink scratched across a man’s head, which she slid in her jacket pocket. She stared into her other hand, turning a small object over and over in her palm. She then handed me back the screwdriver and a small toy animal.

“Here you go. Keepsake.” And I could see in the beam that the blue of her veins that stood on the back of her hand matched the blue of the glass object she placed in my hand. Her fingers grazing my palm were uncommonly cold. She must have absolutely no body fat, I imagined.

“What’s this?”

“Looks like an elephant, off an old toy carousel. But who’s to say? Careful. C’mon.”

“Wait. How did you know–”

“Did you know that ‘carousel’ is from an Italian word that means ‘little war?’”

“Huh uh.” I shined my light from the horse to the space above the step, and called after, “Is there anything else?”

“Nope.” The floor’s creaking echoed her quickened pace through the narrow doorway and down the hall.

I held a light to the glass elephant. It was small and beautiful. Very delicate. Has to be hand painted, I thought. One leg was posed up as though in a prance but with his head out, like it was being submissive or something, and there was a golden metal rod through its back, there to anchor it to a platform. I couldn’t help but wonder why Valerie would want to give it up. That wasn’t my only question. I suddenly wanted to know if she was married or had kids or had any long connections to any other human beings. But I had a feeling that I wouldn’t be satisfied with any answers she’d have for me. Nonetheless, before I could speak, she had already padded away down the wide hall.

The way she moved, comfortably as a blind woman in her own home, I suddenly had the feeling that I wasn’t a visitor in any abandoned building. I was a visitor in her world.

I caught up to her and stood behind her. Should I open it? I wondered. As if sensing I was about to reach for the door, Valerie grasped the knob and twisted. The door swung open, and a gust blew by us entering the room before us, like the room had been vacuum sealed for preservation. I shone my light past Valerie, who was still blocking the doorway. She moved. As I replaced her in the doorway, she dragged her feet into the middle of the room and stood, her palms turned outward and rising, as though she were feeling a delicate electrical impulse. It was a simple room with a window and, I guess, a closet. I had seen countless rooms just like it. I almost turned to check out more rooms, when Valerie finally spoke.

“You think you want to know, but do you really want to know?” I was startled to see Valerie now looking right at me, into me, my light shining up her face from below.

“I don’t know what you mean. Do I want to know?”

She glided to the far corner and reached her hand out, as though she were touching something only she could see. “This was the room. If you ended up in here, it all changed.”

“I still don’t know–”

“The chair was here.”

“What chair? Did you read this somewhere? Why would y–someone even be sent here?”

For reasons unknown to me, Valerie smiled. And in that smile, she looked younger than me. “Then all it would take is your mother’s new husband would just want you out of the way. And you’re admitted here. And people you’d never met in your whole life saw you the way he did. And then they’d find you to be ‘uncooperative.’ And then…the twenty-four-hour-chair.”

Valerie stared at the vacant space. I shined my light at the floor, to where the indented outline of a circle, that I imagined was the pedestal base for this chair she was seeing.

“The tray was here, facing this way. And he’d come in and pump in the Thorazine and wash up there, in the pink room. And he’d look up your gown to see if you shit yourself. Or just to have a look…and a feel. Oh, and they loved the girls, especially the teens…”

I was suddenly on autopilot now, and while she continued on, I looked to the pocket door across the room, with an uncontrollable urge to slide it open. I walked over, as though looking at nothing in particular and slid the door open a crack and dropped in a light beam. It was just a small, plain bathroom. But very pink.

And then my breathing began to tighten because what Valerie was saying was taking hold of my consciousness, like two fists grabbing my shirt collar and yanking me in close.

“After twenty-fours in the chair, you need another day to rest up, locked in your room in a Thorazine crash. The only comfort you get is those fingertips under a door.”

I stared at her. She didn’t acknowledge me but seemed to sense my confusion.

“These doors don’t quite touch the floor,” she continued, her eyes focused to the bottom of the door. “And when you can’t cry anymore, and you’re just sitting there on the side of your bed, rocking your back and forth for as long as you can to move your blood and pass the time, completely void of life, and you would sell your soul for any other existence, even death, than to be here…from under the door would appear fingertips, reaching for any connection. And you reach over and touch your fingertips to hers.” Valerie was now brushing her fingertips together, spinning them in small, circular rhythms, looking then at nothing in particular. “And you sit  there, pressing your fingertips to each other for as long as you could. And something in you refills…just enough…to last another day.”

I stood, stock-still, only daring to blink and breathe.

“And then one day–no fingertips appeared. And they never would again. And that’s when you know. Find a way out.”

I wasn’t sure who Valerie was even talking to now? Me? Herself? The past? Those fingertips? I didn’t know what to say. What she was describing was, well, torture. I was ill equipped. I wish I weren’t. Desperately. What she was describing, I couldn’t even imagine. We were standing in the same room, but we were existing in two completely different spheres. I had absolutely nothing to offer even if I wanted, not even a compassionate ear if I could. I was as valuable to her as the shadows on the wall.

What I did know was something my mother had told me–I remembered my mom saying that when you get that feeling about someone that you just can’t explain, turn around and head in the opposite direction as soon as possible. I don’t know how I didn’t see it at first. I was caught up in trying to keep up with a fellow explorer.

“People say that Dr. Toth died under ‘conspicuous circumstances,’ and again she threw up air quotes. Conspicuous hell! You put somebody in the twenty-four-hour chair that much and do what they did to someone, you’re bound to be put in the forever-chair.”

I looked at Valerie, just trying to really see her in the reduced light, and then I asked, “Is there like a blog you’re on? That’s some serious details.” I knew there was no blog. Only memory. But I wanted her to feel that I was not in any way an intrusion.

“Blog,” she repeated, not so much as an affirmation, but sort of trying the word out. What would it feel like to speak it?

My light showed back to where Valerie stood, yet my eyes were on the door. I definitely had that feeling that I think my mother was trying to warn me about. I felt that there was no way our parting that night could end cordially.

“Don’t squeeze so hard!” She was back in real time, talking at me now.

“What?” I could see she was staring down at my left hand. I still had the glass elephant closed in my palm.

“Don’t squeeze so hard. You’ll snap it. It was already old when it got here. The trick is to keep something so delicate from breaking. If it snaps, it’ll never be whole again.” And she mimicked closing her palm. “Gentle.”

I nodded and slid the elephant in the pouch pocket of my hoodie. She shifted back to where the chair once stood, seeing what wasn’t there, and continued, “But that’s not in a man’s nature, is it? To be gentle.”

My eyes were looking where she was looking.

“IS IT! NATHAN!” Valerie yelled.

Whoa! What?

I broke out of my brief reverie, looking into Valerie’s eyes, who had already found mine, her breathing beginning to heave. I recognized what she was about to become. She was no  longer the woman I had met downstairs, arms across her chest, keeping herself protected and intact, like sheltering prey. She was squared up to me now from across the room. Her head was lowered but her blue-grey eyes were locked in on mine. Her stringy grey hair revealing only as far as her cheekbones, which looked like they could cut stone. Her hands were tight fists at her side.  My breathing raced now to match hers.  I was in the path of her brewing storm, whose depths I couldn’t possibly fathom. What I did understand, was my mother’s alarm, ringing out in my head.

No hesitation.

I flashed my light straight in her eyes and clicked the button on the butt of it two times to shine a military grade bright beam straight into her eyes, and she drew up her arms to block it, crying out,
Aaahhh! I pushed off with one foot, and darted out of the room, just pulling the door closed behind me. I heard her boots scrape into motion, and she pounded the door, the bashing thud in hot pursuit of me, as I bounced off the far wall and cut down the hall.

By the time I hit thick carpeted stairs in the grand center staircase, romping down two and three at a time, my tool pouch slapping my back with each impact. Valerie was following, roaring, high pitched, “NATHAAAAAAN!”

At the bottom of the staircase, I tripped over a couple of large plastic canisters, kicking one heavy one aside, but catching my balance on the doorway of a foyer. There was that lawn mower smell again. Gas!

The foyer was open. Again, from behind me, coming down the stairs, “NAATHAAAAAAN!” I slid to the front door. Locked! But Thank God! It was an old bronze single-cylinder deadbolt. I’d seen a hundred of them.

I skipped down three steps and leapt over the rest, hitting the ground with a force that shook my ribs. Darting across the side lawn, I stumbled again, and my pack bounced up into the back of my head. I launched back into a run, rubbing my head as I sprinted.

At the street, I slowed down, believing in the moment that would help to not gain me any unwanted attention. And for the first time allowed myself the luxury of looking back over my  shoulder. No one. I dodged up the avenue and found my car and drove home, my eyes locked on the rearview mirror.

It wasn’t until the first hint of dawn that I was finally able to sleep out of sheer exhaustion, that face and the ear-splitting shrill of my own name dogged me in a loop all night. I had taken no pictures. Which I was glad about. It would’ve been like trespassing. When I finally regained consciousness, it was to the rhythm of my phone pinging notifications. It was Charlie. Did U go last nite? U heard? Gundry–GONE!!!! Burned down. U there?

What?! I did go. Talk later. And NO–I didn’t do it!

I fell back on my bed and stared at the ceiling until I slept again. Later, I tried to explain the night and Valerie to Charlie. I wasn’t making much sense, that much I knew. I just couldn’t put Valerie into words. Wherever she was, I hoped she found some peace. It had dawned on me just how little of the sanitarium I actually saw. I had resigned to take a break from exploring abandoned buildings for a while. But no sooner that I had made that declaration to myself, my phone pinged a notification from Met Explorer. I tapped the screen; it read my face; and it took me to a new pop-up contest–By sunrise, post the most interesting piece of architecture you can find in an abandoned building.

I laughed, and I found myself staring back up at the ceiling again. I breathed in deep, stood up, and walked over to my tool pack stashed in the corner of my bedroom. About to leave, I saw on my nightstand the glass elephant, lying there on its side. I knelt to the floor, turned the blue glass over in my hand, and balanced it on its feet. I slung the pack over my shoulder and closed the door behind me.