The Vestibule Problem

The revolving door is the issue.

I’m standing on the plaza outside 1700 Market Street, Philadelphia, a building whose only architectural ambition is to communicate the word fiduciary, and I cannot get inside because of a revolving door. Four glass partitions rotating on a central axis within a cylindrical housing, each compartment roughly three feet deep, and my train is six.¹

I’ve been doing this for a long time. Longer than Philadelphia has existed, longer than glass has existed, longer than the particular arrangement of silicon and oxygen that would eventually become glass had any reason to suspect it would one day be responsible for humiliating me on a Tuesday in November. I have entered tombs and towers and the black holds of slave ships. I have entered the left ventricle of the human heart, which is a space roughly the size of a fist, without snagging. And I cannot enter a Deloitte satellite office.

The cloak is non-negotiable. People misunderstand this. They think it’s aesthetic, a branding choice, something I might swap for a blazer if I wanted to “blend in.” The cloak is what I am in the way that the visible spectrum is what light is to you. The hood, the drape, the train that moves two seconds behind me with a directional independence that implies it is receiving instructions from a different physics than the one governing the rest of the garment² — these are not worn. They are performed, continuously, by the fact of my presence, which is a different thing. You don’t ask a fire to tuck in its flames.

So the train can’t be gathered. Can’t be thrown over one shoulder like a bride navigating a puddle. The image alone. I have watched civilizations rise and incinerate themselves and I have maintained, through all of it, a certain consistency of presentation that I refuse to compromise for a building where eleven hundred people spend fifty hours a week not looking each other in the eye.

Which leaves me here. On the plaza. Watching bodies enter and exit the revolving door with the automated indifference of blood cells through a valve, each one performing a small unconscious negotiation with the glass partition in front of them — a half-step, a shoulder-turn, the momentary surrender of personal space that all revolving doors demand and that no human being has ever thought about for longer than a quarter-second.³

I have been thinking about it for four minutes. That’s a long time for me. Time doesn’t pass for me the way it passes for you, which is something I could explain but won’t because every explanation I’ve ever attempted has come out sounding like what happens when you translate a song into a language that doesn’t have music.

The man I’m here for is named Gerald Kessler. He is on the eleventh floor. He has a corner office, which he earned not through any particular excellence but through the reliable compound interest of showing up every day for twenty-two years with his shirt tucked in, which is, and I don’t say this with contempt, one of the more successful strategies.⁴ His secretary thinks he’s decent. His wife thinks he’s adequate. His daughter, who is nineteen and has recently discovered she’s furious about something she can’t name, thinks he is the wall she has to break through to become a person, which is unfair to Gerald but correct in ways neither of them will figure out in time, because I am here, on the plaza, trying to get inside.

I know everything about Gerald Kessler. I know him the way I’ve known all of them, which is from the end backwards: his death is a shape I can see the way you see a doorway from across a room, and everything he is and has been is the hallway leading to it. He will die at 2:47 PM in the kitchenette on the eleventh floor. An embolism. Quick and unfair and so ordinary that the paramedics, when they arrive, will already be thinking about what they’re having for dinner.⁵ I’m not here to cause it. I don’t cause anything. I’m here to be present for it the way a notary is present for a signature. The universe requires a witness at certain transactions and I am, for this particular one, the universe’s witness.

Gerald is eating a Greek yogurt right now. I know this because I know everything that is about to stop.

I try the accessible entrance.

It’s a single-pane glass door to the left of the revolving assembly, opened by a brushed-steel button the size of a drink coaster. There is a small blue wheelchair symbol on the button which communicates, with the particular gentleness that Americans reserve for acknowledging physical difference, that this door is for people whose bodies don’t fit the default infrastructure. My body doesn’t fit the default infrastructure. I don’t have a body. The distinction seems relevant but also, standing here pressing a wheelchair button with one phalanx of one metacarpal bone, academic.

The door opens. I enter.

The lobby is marble, the cold beige marble of professional buildings that want to say permanence but are communicating dental office. There is a security desk. Behind the security desk is a man named Terrence who has worked here for six years, who is fifty-one, who will live to seventy-eight, and who is at this moment experiencing a low-grade resentment toward the Bluetooth earpiece his supervisor makes him wear because it makes him feel, in his words which he has never said aloud, “like a fake astronaut.”

Terrence looks up.

This is always the moment. People see me and something happens behind their eyes, a recognition that is not recognition, because they’ve never seen me before but some part of them, some pre-linguistic, pre-mammalian sediment, knows what I am instantly and completely, and the rest of the brain spends the next two to three seconds constructing an alternative explanation.⁶

“Can I help you?”

He sees a tall person in a dark coat. That’s what his brain has settled on. Tall person, dark coat, possibly a tech executive or a European.

“Eleventh floor,” I say.

“Do you have an appointment?”

I have an appointment with every person who has ever drawn breath, Terrence. I have seven billion open appointments. I am the only entity in the cosmos that is never early and never late and you are asking me if I have an appointment as though I might be here to sell copier toner.

“Yes,” I say.

He prints me a visitor badge. It says VISITOR in red letters and has today’s date and a barcode that won’t scan because the adhesive backing makes contact with my cloak and immediately becomes metaphysically non-specific.⁷ I stick it to where my chest would be. It hovers.

“Elevators are to your left.”

“Thank you, Terrence.”

He doesn’t remember telling me his name. He didn’t.

The elevator is a different problem.

Not the box itself. A box is a simple topology. The Sumerian kings were buried in boxes and I attended every one. The issue is the doors, which close on a timer, and my train, which does not observe timers, which does not observe anything except its own delayed-consensus model of where I recently was, and which is at this moment still completing its transit through the lobby two and a half seconds behind the rest of me.

The stairs are theoretically an option. I considered them. Eleven floors. The train on stairs sounds like a large, slow animal being dragged through a library. Every landing would require a pause for it to collect itself, to re-establish its drape, and anyone entering the stairwell during this process would see what would appear to be a very tall person in a dark coat standing motionless on a landing while six feet of black fabric arranged itself into a shape it found acceptable, which is a scene that communicates not death but divorce, and I have a professional obligation to avoid ambiguity.

I step in. A woman named Dana steps in beside me holding a Sweetgreen salad. She will live to ninety-one and die in a bed surrounded by people who love her, which is statistically unusual and which I am, in my capacity, appreciative of.⁸ The doors begin to close. My train is not inside the elevator. My train is approaching the elevator with the unhurried confidence of a cat that has been called and is deciding whether to acknowledge this.

The doors meet the fabric. The doors do not know what to do with the fabric. The fabric is not a solid in any sense that the door’s pressure sensor was engineered to detect, but it is also not nothing, and the doors attempt a kind of mechanical stutter, opening two inches, closing, opening, closing, like a mouth trying to finish a word it doesn’t know. Dana glances at the doors with the mild, unfocused concern of someone who has been mildly inconvenienced in an elevator before and survived. My train, at its own pace, crosses the threshold. The doors close.

The train pools on the floor around me. Six feet four inches of metaphysical textile in a space designed for eight human bodies or one stretcher, and I’m standing in it like a man who has stepped into a dark pond and is deciding whether to comment. Dana’s shoe is on the edge of it. She doesn’t notice. Her shoe is touching the substrate of nonexistence and she’s reading the calorie count on her salad and I am experiencing something that I refuse to call embarrassment because I predate the emotion by four billion years but which I will concede is structurally similar.

The elevator plays a soft, contextless jazz that sounds like what would happen if you asked a saxophone to describe the color of compromise.

I notice all of them.

That’s the thing no one considers. The volume. Five billion years of multicellular death on this planet alone and I have been the notary at each one. Every cell that has performed its last division, every organism that has converted from a system into a collection of materials. I was there when the last thylacine panted out its final breath on a concrete floor in Hobart in 1936 and I was there when the first bacterium that could technically be called alive became the first bacterium that could technically be called not, and both of those events had the same weight, the same bureaucratic requirement that something in the universe formally acknowledge the transition, and I was that something both times, and every time in between, and I’m tired in a way that the word tired was not built to hold.

Gerald Kessler is not a bad man. I want to be clear about this because people, when they imagine me having opinions about the deceased, assume I’m either indifferent or judgmental, and both assumptions misunderstand the nature of the information I’m working with. I have seen billions. Billions. And what I’ve learned from seeing billions is that the categories you people use, good and bad, kind and cruel, are horoscopes. They describe nothing. Gerald Kessler once drove forty minutes in a rainstorm to pick up his daughter from a party where she felt unsafe. Gerald Kessler also, in 1997, said something to a junior associate that made her quit the profession. These are not contradictions. They are not even in tension. They are simply what happens when you give a nervous system seventy years and a changing context. I have watched pharaohs and dishwashers and every single one of them was, at the resolution I operate at, a weather system: not evil, not good, just turbulent for a while, then collapsing into stillness.

Gerald finishes his yogurt. He drops the container into the recycling bin, though it belongs in the trash because he didn’t rinse it, and this tiny misallocation will not be the thing I remember about him. I will remember that when he was nine he found a dog with a broken leg in a drainage ditch and sat with it for three hours in the rain because he didn’t want it to be alone. He has forgotten this. His brain filed it under childhood, which is where humans store the versions of themselves they can’t use anymore. I have a better filing system.

He walks toward the kitchenette. The fluorescent light in the ceiling is flickering at a frequency that suggests the ballast is failing, and it casts Gerald’s face in a stutter of warm and cool that makes him look, for a fraction of a second at each oscillation, like a much younger man. He fills a glass of water from the cooler. He drinks half of it.

I’m in the kitchenette now. I got here the way I get everywhere once I’m inside a building, which is to say I was in the elevator and then I was here, and the space between those two facts is not a distance I crossed but a formality I declined to observe.

2:46 PM.

Gerald puts the glass down. He has a thought about his daughter. Not a complex thought, just her face, the way it looked last Thursday when she was arguing with him about something neither of them will remember, and even in the argument there was a version of her face that was also the face she had at four years old, and Gerald noticed this at the time and felt something that almost made him stop arguing but didn’t.

2:47 PM.

I do what I do. I don’t describe this part. Not because it’s sacred, though it is, and not because you wouldn’t understand, though you wouldn’t. I don’t describe it because it is the one thing in the universe that is exactly what it appears to be, and language is only useful for things that aren’t.

I take the elevator back down. Dana from Sweetgreen is gone. The jazz is the same. Terrence nods at me on the way out without really seeing me, his brain already rewriting the last twenty minutes into a shape that doesn’t include what just walked through his lobby.

I exit through the accessible door because the revolving door is, as established, hostile architecture.

Outside, Philadelphia is doing what it does. Cars. Cold. Someone has dropped a soft pretzel on the sidewalk and pigeons are conducting a small, intense negotiation over it.⁹ The sky is the color of email. I have nowhere to be and everywhere to be and approximately nine hundred more appointments before midnight in this time zone alone, and I stand on the plaza for a moment longer than I need to because Gerald Kessler sat with a dog in a ditch when he was nine and I think someone other than me should know about it.

No one will. That’s the other part of what I do. I carry the parts that don’t survive.

The revolving door turns and turns.

¹ Six feet, four inches. I had it measured in 1887 by a tailor in Prague who subsequently died of a stroke, which was unrelated but for which I remain, perhaps irrationally, apologetic.

² The train operates on what I can only describe as a delayed consensus model. It agrees to follow me but reserves the right to interpret “follow” loosely.

³ Theophilus Van Kannel patented the revolving door in 1888. He invented it, reportedly, because he despised the social obligation of holding doors open for women. This is either apocryphal or the most quietly furious act of engineering in history. Either way it has, 136 years later, created the only piece of civilian architecture capable of inconveniencing Death, which Van Kannel would probably find satisfying.

⁴ I’ve seen this strategy work more often than genius. Genius burns out, flames up, exits early. The tucked-in-shirt people inherit the earth. This observation is not in any scripture but should be.

⁵ Pad Thai. Terrence will later feel guilty about this, the pad Thai thought, for approximately a week. He shouldn’t. I’ve seen the last thoughts of the dying and they are almost never profound. They are grocery lists and song fragments and the feeling of a specific carpet under bare feet at age six. The brain does not compose its finale. It shuffles.

⁶ The rationalizations are, across cultures and centuries, remarkably consistent. Tall person, dark coat. Large bird, peripheral vision. Shadow, bad lighting. The human brain will accept any explanation that is not the correct one, which is a survival mechanism so effective that I sometimes suspect it was designed specifically to keep me out of conversations.

⁷ Adhesive, in my experience, is one of the more philosophically confused materials. It wants to bond two surfaces and I am, at a molecular level, not a surface. The badge exists in a state of aspirational attachment. It’s doing its best.

⁸ I shouldn’t play favorites but I do. The ones who die surrounded by people who actually know them, not the performative deathbed crowd but the real ones, the ones who know how they take their coffee and which knee is the bad one — those deaths have a quality I can only describe as architectural. They hold weight. They have load-bearing walls.

⁹ The pigeons will be fine. I don’t do pigeons. Pigeons are handled by a colleague I have never met and whose workload I do not envy.