— In memory of Jeremy Mullins, on whose dream this story is based.
            
            
            The glass doors slid open as I approached.  I stepped through.  Glass stretched high into the haze above, broken into random geometry by the criss-crossing steel beams that held the whole crystalline tower erect.  Light shone down in streaks like spotlights, cutting gashes in the shadows on the white marble floor.  The air was still, or empty of dust, so what currents there were remained invisible.  There was a mechanical hum.  Not the air conditioner, but the elevator, descending slowly down a glass tube, dangling from spider-silk cables. 

            I nodded to the young man at the front desk who was chatting away with his girlfriend on the phone.  He didn’t seem to care that I was there.  I walked to the elevator, feeling empty and alone, wishing the man at the desk had stopped me.

            I looked down, below the level of the floor, to where the glass tube disappeared into the foundation.  Great gears churned away, giant pulleys eating up lengths of cord (up close, no longer like spider-silk, but thick, the width of a man’s arm), spitting it back out.  Above me, the elevator slid up and down the tube, pausing at random floors, though nobody got on or off.  It seemed like the only people in the building were me and the man at the desk.  He spoke tersely to his girlfriend.  They were fighting, but at least he wasn’t alone.

            Footsteps.  Someone was coming towards the elevator.  Everything was glass, there was nowhere to hide.  I saw a potted plant, and ducked behind the pot, peeking through the fronds splayed in front of me, providing the same protection as a child’s fingers playing peek-a-boo.  I was sure I would be seen.  I wouldn’t be alone.

            I saw a figure walking, distorted through multiple panes of glass.  She rounded the corner.  She became clear.  She was a security guard, dressed in the white shirt and black pants of the rent-a-cop.  She carried a black gun in a black holster on her hip that she would never fire.  She glanced casually around the lobby.  She didn’t have to look hard because everything was glass.  Everything was visible.  Light then shadow then light rolled across her dark face as she walked through the streaks of filtered sunlight stabbing down from distant windows.  She didn’t see me.  I was too conspicuous maybe.  Maybe, the plant was larger than I thought, or myself smaller.  She walked away.

            I scooted tentatively to the elevator, looking back over my shoulder to make sure I was alone.  The man at the desk spoke lovingly to his girlfriend, calling her by cute nicknames, like Pumpkin, Sweetie, Honey.  Below, the gears were still turning, the pulley slurping up cable like spaghetti, regurgitating it.  The elevator rose high enough to where I couldn’t see it anymore, and the deadweight on the other end of the cable dipped down to floor level.  It hung there for a moment while far away the elevator doors opened and closed, and then the deadweight rose and I would never see it again.

            I heard footsteps again.  The same pattern as before, heels gliding across the waxed marble with barely a shuffle, the gentle tap of the toe.  I jumped back behind the plant, parting the frond with my fingers, like I was holding hands with it, like I wasn’t alone.  The security guard rounded the corner.  I heard the man at the desk say, “I love you,” and hang up the phone.  The security guard paused.

            “How’s it going?” she said, to the man at the desk, not me.

            “Pretty good,” the man replied.

            She smiled.  I couldn’t see her smile, but I could feel it.  She had the type of smile you could sense, like it lit up the room more than the shafts of light that fell on lonely sections of the white marble floor.

            She turned and looked around the lobby.  She saw me.  I wasn’t very well hidden, after all.  I thought about running away, bursting through the glass doors, sprinting down the street, into a building made of brick where nobody could look through the wall and see me curled up in the corner shaking from fear and adrenaline.  But I just stood up, timidly like a little child, embarrassed at my lack of conviction, awaiting my fate.

            
            She walked over, but did not smile.  The radiance of her happiness was echoed in reverse by the singularity of her professional dourness.  The room grew dark.  It may have just been a cloud, but the timing was too perfect, and there is no coincidence.  The elevator goes up and down at the whim of the cable, at the call of the gears.

            
            She looked me up and down.  “What are you doing here?”

            
            “I’m not going to blow anything up,” I said.

            
            “No, you’d probably need a bomb for that.”

            
            She walked past me, looked down into the elevator shaft, and smiled.  The cloud was whisked away on a current of air I couldn’t see, and the fingers of light reached down again from above, but this time they landed in different positions.  The sun had run across the sky.

            
            The security guard took my hand gently in hers.

            
            “Come with me,” she said.  He skin was soft with just a bit of sweat, so that it wasn’t clammy but felt like something alive.  I wasn’t alone for a moment, but she released my hand as we passed through double doors into a room enclosed in dark tinted glass.  A bit of her sweat still clung to my skin. Lights came on automatically as we entered, and I saw rows of empty cubicles, computer screens dark and lifeless.

            
            I followed her down an aisle to the back of the room, where a large flatscreen television hung on the wall.  It was dark like the computer monitors, but the security guard punched in a code on a keypad in the wall, and it flickered on.

            
            The monitor displayed a familiar scene from an unfamiliar angle.  I didn’t recognize it at first, until I saw myself enter the room through tall glass doors.  This was the security video from the lobby.

            
            In the video, there was someone walking beside me.  She was a tall, slender redheaded woman.  She touched my shoulder and laughed as if I had made a joke.  She looked up, obviously in awe of the glass sprawling in this unusual direction.  I looked up too, and my lips moved, but the security video had no sound.  I was talking to her.  She replied.  I was not alone.

            
            In the room of dark glass, the security guard stood on one side of me.  I looked to the other, and there was the woman, like she always had been, her red hair cropped above the shoulders, in a loose bob across her forehead.  She smiled as I looked at her, with the I’ve-seen-you-naked smile reserved for lovers.

            
            In the video, the woman and I walked to the glass tube of the elevator, and together we looked down at the gears and the pulleys.  We talked about the cable and how it was like life, talking in the innocent philosophy of the in-love, not concerned with anything so grandiose as meaning, since meaning had already presented itself to us in each other.  And though the truths we found were not universal, they were enough. 

            Music began playing.  Softly, the volume of elevator music.  It was like the score to a movie, accompanying our actions on the screen.

            
            We saw ourselves hide behind the potted plant, both of us sporting mischievous grins, like children pulling a prank.  We snickered as the security guard passed right by us.  We went back to the elevator.  We watched the gears.  Footsteps.  We hid again, only to be discovered.  The security guard confronted us, led us away, out of the frame of the camera.  The television shut itself off.  Dark and silent.  When I looked over, the security guard was gone, returned to the shuffle-step of her rounds.

            
            I took the redheaded woman’s hand in mine, and we walked back through the cubicles, out of the room of tinted glass, back into the lobby.  We went to the elevator, and I pressed the up button.  The elevator descended slowly, like a bride walking down the aisle.  There was a ding, a beautiful wind chime sound, though the air hung still inside the glass tower.  There was nothing to move the chimes.  The door slid open.  I got on and I was alone.

            
            I rode the elevator up and up and up.