Benjamin Hale - The Evolution of Bruno Littlemore

“I’m almost closed,” said the man, glancing disinterestedly at us and then at his watch. “Fifteen minutes.”

“No matter,” said Leon. “We are not here for keys.”

“Then what do you want?”

The man had a bald, liver-spotted head and wraparound glasses that looked about two inches thick.

There was a basketball game on the TV. Staticky reception made it appear to be snowing on the court. I noticed a cord running from the bottom of the neon tube twisted into the likeness of a key and down to an electrical outlet above the floor molding.

Leon threw out his arms in an invitation to embrace, and roared: “My dearest uncle!”

“Hm?” said the old man behind the counter.

“It’s me, your grand-nephew! It’s Leon!”

“Eh?”

“Leon Smoler!”

The man looked blankly at him from beneath his visor. His skin was translucent and he looked like he weighed little more than a child. The man rose from his stool and walked up to the counter so slowly it was as if the air were made of glue. He was humpbacked with age and not much taller than me.

“I’m Yvonne’s son,” Leon helped him.

“Ah,” said the man. The gears were turning in his head as quickly as the hour hand of a clock — but they were turning.

“ Ah! ” he finally said. His mouth had three teeth in it and his tongue was as black and dry as an old boot. “Leon!”

The old man opened the trapdoor of the counter and baby-stepped out to be hugged by Leon, who had a difficult job of hugging him with sufficient heartiness without crushing him like a baby bird in a fist.

“How’s your mother, kiddo?”

“Safely interred, thank you. She hasn’t budged in fourteen years.”

“Atta girl. It’s been too long, Leonard! You oughtta visit more often.”

After several agonizingly long moments of preliminary introductions, catching up, and other such social niceties, Leon revealed the ulterior motive for our call. The old man — whose name, despite it being the name of his business, was not “Mr. Locksmith,” but was actually Samuel B. Siegel — was the owner and had been the sole operator of this locksmith’s shop for more than forty years after inheriting it from his father (Leon’s great-grandfather). He was surprised that Leon knew about the vast space below his shop, which was accessible only by an elevator in the back of the store. I was also surprised. Mr. Locksmith — as he shall here on out be called, because I prefer the moniker to his real name — looked at his watch, then locked the storefront, unplugged the neon key in the window and took us into the back room in shaky, puttering steps. He made a series of smooching noises, and the fat soft black-and-white cat stretched herself, got up from her bed beneath the neon key, and followed us.

To the right of the work area and counter there was a short narrow hallway lit by a single bare low-wattage lightbulb in the middle of the ceiling. A door on the right opened into a small bathroom that doubled as a storage place for cleaning supplies. There was a shallow porcelain dish on the floor with a mop in it and a yellow plastic sign, folded up against the wall, saying, CAUTION, WET FLOOR, and below that, CUIDADO, PISO MOJADO: between the languages, a man was falling. The back rooms smelled like oil, smoke, and cleaning fluids. Then the hallway bent left, a bend sinister, and we bent sinister with it. A calendar was tacked to a corkboard on the wall, the bottom half a grid of dates with notes scrawled in the squares, the top half featuring a photograph of a sand-speckled naked woman lying on a tropical beach in mildly pornographic repose. The hallway ended in an old-fashioned elevator, the kind with a grate of brass latticework that accordions open and shut. Everything in it, the panel with the buttons, the walls, the ceiling, was fancy, decorated with loops and filigrees of bent metal and carved wood, because it was built in a time when elevators were still special, when there was still enough amazement in them for people to want to ornament them — only this one was old and in a state of creaky disrepair, covered in stains and rust and dust, the brass discolored and the wood chipped and scratched and worn down. Mr. Locksmith was using it as a storage closet. He rolled back the brass accordion grating of the elevator door with a clatter and shriek of old and poorly lubricated metal parts grinding together, and started removing buckets and brooms with shuddering, sapling-thin arms. Leon inspected his cuticles and sighed in irritation as his great-uncle fastidiously removed the things in the elevator.

“I just use this old elevator for storage,” he said. “I never go down below anymore. Place gives me the jeebies. I never needed that room anyway.”

When he had cleared out the elevator we all squeezed inside, including the fat-footed cat. The elevator lurched and bounced when Leon stepped onto the platform. Mr. Locksmith looked at Leon, and looked a bit worried.

“How much you weigh, kiddo?” he asked. “Tell me honestly.”

“One hundred and seventy,” said Leon.

The man looked at him in confusion, then shrugged and pushed the button.

“Kilograms!” Leon whispered to me.

The elevator jolted into movement, and the cables began to chatter, squeal, grumble, and moan as the ancient machinery was put to rare use.

“Don’t make ’em like they used to,” said Mr. Locksmith in the dark.

“Well,” said Leon, “this is clearly a contraption that was built prior to the total hideous decline of modern aesthetic philosophy.”

“Uh-huh,” said Mr. Locksmith.

We watched the line of the floor rise up and up until it was out of sight, and everything was dark, and in the dark we listened to our own breathing and to the machinery clattering and moaning above and below us. We sank down and down in the dark. As we sank Mr. Locksmith lit a cigarette with a match that momentarily underlit his face, threw a green shadow from his plastic visor onto the ceiling behind him, and filled the small metal box with a burst of phosphor. He dropped the match on the floor and it was dark again.

“I come down here only once a year or so,” he said. “Maybe less. It was supposed to be a subway station back when they first built it, about a hundred years ago. They redirected the lines before they ever connected them to the station. So they just walled it in, good night. Bricked over the tunnels and everything. There used to be stairs to it around the block. That’s gone. This elevator’s the only way to get in or out of it now. I thought I was the only one who knew about it anymore.”

“Mkgnao!” said the cat. It was pawing my pant leg with its freakish feet.

We hit the bottom of the elevator shaft with a decisive clunk, and the machinery went quiet. Leon’s great-uncle rolled back the shrieking brass grate, and we stepped out into a dark room, which we could tell was enormous from the echo before we saw it. The locksmith groped along the wall to the right of the elevator and found an old-fashioned electric switch with a metal cable running from the bottom of it and a handle that clacked up and down. He pushed the handle up with a squeak and clunk, and three lights slowly came alive in metal lamps that hung down almost to head level from long cords in the ceiling.

The effect of the room’s enormity was compounded by its almost total emptiness, with vaulted ceilings maybe thirty, forty feet high, supported by thick square columns whose capitals were cluttered with more turn-of-the-century ornamentation. Cornice moldings skirted the perimeters of the room. There were two levels — a big square main room and above that a balustrade running around its perimeter, big arching windows looking out onto brick walls and nailed-up sheets of particleboard. Huge round archways were set in the walls below the balcony, but the arches had been bricked in and painted over. The room smelled stiflingly of dust, mildew and chalk, and everything in it — walls, ceiling, floor — was whitewashed: it had been painted over, coat after coat until all the cherubs and lion’s heads had become vague, sort of soft and gloopy-looking. I coughed from the swirling dust that we kicked up as we walked into the room. Near the elevator door there were some boxes and tools and old paint cans, but other than that the room was empty.