Chapter 2: Elevator
The apartment door clicked shut, sealing Herc in a tomb of his own making. The silence here was different from the office—thicker, personal, accusing. He leaned back against the cold wood, the events of the day settling onto his shoulders like a physical weight. The empty jacket on the table. Daisy’s forced optimism. Tim’s helpless pity. The text about his dosage.
He could still feel the ghost of the fabric hanging off him.
With a grunt, he pushed himself off the door and shrugged out of the clothes he was wearing, letting them fall into a heap on the floor. In the full-length mirror on the back of the closet door, a stranger glared back. Ribs beginning to ladder his sides. The defined V of his torso softening, blurring. His collarbones, sharp and unfamiliar, protruded above the taut skin of his chest. He turned slightly, seeing the way his shoulder blades now pushed against his back like fledgling wings trying to escape.
Winnow’s syndrome. The name was a sick joke. It didn’t sound like a disease. It sounded like a gentle, natural process. The wind winnowing chaff from grain. That’s what his body was doing: separating the essential from the expendable, only it had gotten it backwards. It was winnowing him. Piece by piece.
A hot, sharp shame flooded his throat. He looked away.
The buzz of the intercom from the building lobby was a jarring intrusion. He ignored it. It buzzed again, insistent. With a curse, he yanked on a pair of gray sweatpants and a worn-out Howard University t-shirt that, he noticed bitterly, was becoming roomier. He stalked to the intercom panel.
“Yeah.”
“Package for 4B!” a cheerful, disembodied voice called. “Big one! Left it by the mailboxes!”
He didn’t answer, just released the button. He needed groceries anyway. The descent would at least serve a purpose.
The elevator in the hallway smelled of lemon disinfectant over stale urine. He got in, pressed ‘L’, and watched the floors tick down. The mirrored walls of the car were a particular cruelty. He kept his eyes on the descending numbers.
At the second floor, the doors shuddered open.
And the space filled.
She was talking to someone in the hallway, her laughter a rich, rolling contralto that seemed to vibrate in the enclosed metal box. “…no, I told him, if the canvas doesn’t speak back, you’re not listening!”
Then she turned, still smiling, and stepped in. She was immense, a magnificent cascade of a woman in a vibrant, paint-splattered duster. She had to be seven feet tall, a symphony of curves and presence. The elevator, which had felt cavernous a second ago, suddenly became a closet.
Herc instinctively took a step back, hitting the mirrored wall.
She was focused on her phone, earbuds in, humming along to a beat he could faintly hear. She moved deeper into the car to make room for someone who wasn’t there, her large, patterned tote bag swinging. It bumped his arm. She didn’t notice. She was a force of nature, oblivious to her own gravitational pull.
He was now effectively pinned in the corner, surrounded by the scent of turpentine, jasmine, and wool. He cleared his throat. “Excuse me.”
Nothing. She was nodding her head, scrolling.
The elevator continued its slow, groaning descent. His floor was next. Panic, stupid and childish, fluttered in his chest. He couldn’t get to the doors. She was a continent blocking his path.
“Hey,” he said, louder.
No reaction. The music from her earbuds was salsa, tinny and rhythmic.
His stop arrived. The bell dinged. The doors began to slide open. He had two seconds. Without thinking, driven by a pure, primal need for escape, he reached out and quickly tickled the side of her calf, just above her bright blue sneaker.
The effect was instantaneous.
She let out a yelp that was half-shriek, half-laugh, and jumped as if electrified. The entire elevator shook on its cables, groaning in protest. She stumbled to the side, crashing into the railing.
“Sorry,” he muttered, already moving, slipping through the opening doors like a shadow.
He heard her pull an earbud out as the doors began to close. Her voice, laced with bewildered amusement, followed him into the lobby. “…the hell? Where’d he come from?”
He didn’t look back.
Minutes later, arms loaded with a box of energy bars and a gallon of water, he faced the elevator again. He could take the stairs. Eight flights. A month ago, it would have been nothing. Now, the thought made his heart skitter unpleasantly. The winnowing. He pressed the button.
The car arrived empty. He got in, relieved.
The doors were a foot from closing when a large, colorful hand shot between them. They bounced back open.
She was there, breathing slightly heavily from the stairs. She smiled, wide and genuine, and stepped in. “We have to stop meeting like this.”
He stared straight ahead.
“You’re the tickler,” she said, not accusatory, but fascinated. She hit the button for the 8th floor. Two above his. “Most people just say ‘excuse me.’ You went for the artistic approach.”
“You couldn’t hear,” he said flatly.
“True. My bad. Lost in the sauce.” She leaned against the wall, studying him. “You’re in 4B. Herc, right? I’m Ro. Roquita. Just moved into 8A.”
He gave a tight nod. The elevator crept upward.
“You’re the business guy,” she continued. “The one who looks like he carries the world on his shoulders. Even from across the lobby, I can see it.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Sure you do. It’s in the hunch. The defeated slope. I paint bodies for a living, Herc. I read them. Yours is shouting a novel.” Her tone was light, observational, not pitying. It was worse.
“Mind your own business,” he said, the words coming out sharper than he intended.
She laughed, that same booming sound that seemed to warm the air. “Honey, in this building, we’re all each other’s business. Mrs. Gunderson on three feeds the stray cats in the boiler room. Mr. Chao on five is building a ship in a bottle, but I think it’s a metaphor. And you,” she said, her eyes softening just a fraction, “you’re disappearing.”
He flinched. The doors opened on his floor. He moved to get out.
Her voice stopped him, softer now. “I have a studio downtown. Lots of big canvases. Heavy stretcher bars. I could use some help muscleing them around sometime. Pays in pizza and questionable life advice.”
He didn’t turn. “Not interested.”
“The offer stands. For the muscle, or the pizza. Or if you just want to stand in a room where the walls are covered in giant, imperfect women and feel normal for a minute.”
He stepped out. The doors began to close. Through the narrowing gap, he saw her not looking at him, but adjusting her tote bag, a small, knowing smile on her face.
Back in his apartment, he leaned against the door again, his heart hammering. It wasn’t from the climb. It was from the exposure. She’d seen it. In one glance, she’d read the entire sorry story—the winnowing, the shame, the slow fade.
He looked at the box of energy bars on his counter. Fuel for a body that was consuming itself. He thought of the new suit he’d have to buy. Two sizes down.
Then, unbidden, he thought of her studio. Walls covered in giant, imperfect women. A place where size wasn’t a deficit, but a fact. A canvas.
He walked to the mirror again. This time, he didn’t look away. He stared at the stranger, at the sharp collarbones and the softening lines, and for the first time, he didn’t just see absence. He saw a shape, changing. Unfamiliar. Terrifying.
But a shape, nonetheless.
But a shape, nonetheless.
The thought wouldn’t leave. It echoed in the sterile quiet of his apartment, a counterpoint to the frantic skitter of his own heartbeat. He paced from the mirror to the kitchen, his feet silent on the cool hardwood. Giant, imperfect women. Pizza. Questionable advice.
It was a pity offer. It had to be. She’d seen a wounded animal in the elevator and thrown out a lifeline made of carbohydrates and condescension. His pride, a brittle, angry thing, flared white-hot. He didn’t need her studio, her paintings, or her diagnosis. He needed his body back. He needed the 46-inch chest and the certainty that came with it.
He slammed a cabinet door. The sharp crack satisfied him for a second.
Then the tremor started in his left hand. It was subtle, a faint, persistent vibration as if a tiny engine was running under his skin. He shoved the hand into his sweatpants pocket. Dr. Shah had called it a benign tremor. A side effect. Nothing to worry about as the medication stabilized. Herc hated the word ‘benign.’ It meant harmless. Nothing about this felt harmless.
He stared out the window at the grid of city lights. The office where Daisy and Tim were probably still working, re-jigging financials, bulletproofing slides. Adapting. Problem-solving. Owning the narrative. He wasn’t there. He was here, hiding, winnowing away in a quiet apartment.
The jacket on the conference room table floated into his mind’s eye. A puddle of navy wool. A symbol of everything he was shedding. He couldn’t stand the sight of it, but he couldn’t stop seeing it.
“Screw it.”
The words were out of his mouth before he could call them back. They weren’t decisive. They were surrender. A capitulation to a curiosity that was stronger, just then, than his shame.
He didn’t change. The Howard shirt and sweatpants were what he had on. Armor was pointless now; she’d already seen the blueprint. He grabbed his keys, their familiar weight a small comfort, and left the apartment.
The hallway air was cooler. He bypassed the elevator, its metal doors a reminder of his cowardly tickle attack, and pushed open the heavy door to the stairwell. Concrete steps, painted gray, receded upward into gloom. Eight flights to her floor. His legs felt like mismatched stilts, disconnected and weak.
He started climbing. The first flight was okay. The second, his breath shortened. By the third, a fine sweat beaded on his temples, and the familiar, unwelcome furnace within him stoked itself. This was his life now: a constant, internal overheating, his body cannibalizing its own fuel.
He stopped on the fifth-floor landing, hands on his knees, lungs burning. The ship-bottle builder, Mr. Chao, lived here. Herc listened but heard only the hum of the building. He felt monstrously alone. This was a mistake. A spectacular, self-destructive mistake.
He almost turned back.
Then he saw it, scrawled in faint chalk on the gray wall: a small, perfect drawing of a dandelion clock, its seeds blowing away. It was delicate, beautiful, utterly out of place. Ro’s work. It had to be. A reminder that something could be beautiful in its dissipation.
He straightened up. He kept climbing.
The door to the eighth floor was heavy. He emerged into a carpeted hallway identical to his own, but it felt different. The air smelled vaguely of incense and oil paint. Music, something with a Cuban rhythm, drifted from behind the door of 8A. He stood before it, the tremor in his hand returning. He made a fist.
He knocked. Once. Hard.
The music stopped. Footsteps, heavy and sure, approached. The door swung open.
Ro stood there, holding a thick paintbrush smeared with vermilion red. She wore overalls over a turmeric-yellow shirt. She looked at him, at his sweaty brow and his casual clothes, and her expression shifted from surprise to a deep, knowing warmth. No pity. Just recognition.
“You came,” she said, as if she’d been expecting him, just later.
“You offered pizza,” he managed, his voice rough from the climb. “I’m here for the pizza.”
She smiled, a brilliant, genuine thing that crinkled the corners of her eyes. “The pizza is a lie. I have empanadas.” She stepped back, sweeping the brush in a wide, welcoming arc. “The questionable advice, however, is fully stocked. Come in. Mind the yellow. It’s wet.”
He crossed the threshold. The apartment was not an apartment. It was a cavern of creation. Canvases taller than him leaned against every wall, depicting bold, majestic figures in shades of charcoal, cerulean, and earthy brown. Drop cloths speckled with a thousand colors covered the floors. The space hummed with a chaotic, vibrant energy, the absolute opposite of his own sterile, diminishing world.
He stood just inside the door, suddenly unsure of what to do with his hands, his body, his self.
Ro wiped her brush on a rag, watching him. “So,” she said, her voice soft amidst the visual noise. “You climb eight flights to avoid the elevator you already paid for. That’s a statement.” She gestured to a small, clear spot on a paint-splattered sofa. “Sit. Before you fall over. You look like you just fought the stairs and the stairs won.”
He didn’t sit. He walked slowly towards the nearest canvas. It depicted a woman seen from behind, her shoulders a landscape of rolling, powerful curves, her head tilted up to a sky smeared with gold leaf. She was monumental. Unapologetic.
“You paint big,” he said, the observation leaving him before he could filter it.
“I paint truth,” Ro corrected gently, coming to stand beside him. She didn’t look at the painting; she looked at him looking at it. “Size is just the container it comes in. Sometimes the truth is big. Sometimes it’s small. Sometimes,” she said, her gaze landing on him, “it’s changing shape right in front of you.”
He finally turned to face her. The defensive words, the sarcasm, the anger—they all dried up in his throat. In this room, surrounded by these testaments to a different kind of strength, his usual armor was just clutter.
“It’s called Winnow’s syndrome,” he said. The words felt strange, foreign, releasing them into this colorful, accepting air. He hadn’t said it to anyone but Tim and Daisy. “My body is… consuming itself. I’m getting smaller. Weaker. Every day.”
He expected a gasp. A look of horror. He got a slow, thoughtful nod.
“I thought that was you, but I was not sure” she said “ we have the same doctor and the same disease “ Herc’s face scrunched up and he said “What!” She tells him about her Coming here because their doctor is the best specialist in this region. She tells her story of being short all her life. She was 5’3” and in a relationship with who she thought was the love of her life. They preparing to get married and talked of children then she was diagnosed and 4 months later she was 6’5”and her fiancée’s tune changes. He left her and called her a monster and I was gonna continue growing into an even bigger freak! She said I did continue growing now at 7’2” and growing while you shrink.
She held out the charcoal to him. Her fingers were stained with a rainbow of pigments.“The muscle offer’s real, by the way. The stretcher bars are in the back. But first,” she said, her eyes holding his, “you eat an empanada. You don’t have to talk. You can just sit in a room that doesn’t expect you to be anything but what you are right nowHe looked from her earnest face to the charcoal nub in her hand. It was an offering more profound than pizza. It was an invitation to redraw his own lines.
He took it. The charcoal was cool and smooth against his still-trembling fingers.
“Okay,” he said.
And for the first time in weeks, it wasn't a surrender. It was a choice.
It was a choice. The charcoal felt like a live wire in his hand, an instrument for a truth he wasn't ready to draw.
Ro didn’t press. She just turned and walked towards the kitchenette, her movements causing the floorboards to creak a comfortable complaint. “Beef or chicken? I’m a purist. No raisins. That’s prison food.”
Herc stood rooted, his eyes tracking her. The magnitude of their shared diagnosis was a dizzying whirlpool in his mind. The same doctor. The same disease. Moving in opposite directions on the same terrible spectrum. His shrink, her growth. His loss, her… what? Was it gain? She called herself a freak.
Ro rummaged in a small oven, the warm, savory scent of baked dough cut through the tang of paint.
Herc tried to assemble a sentence. Nothing cohesive formed. “He left you?” was what finally emerged, rough and quiet.
“Like his pants were on fire.” She pulled out a baking sheet with two golden, flaky empanadas. “Said he couldn’t be seen with a monster. His word, not mine. It took me a year to stop hearing that word every time I passed a mirror.” She set the sheet on a tile counter and looked at him. “Took me two to realize he was the small one. Not me.”
She picked up an empanada and walked back over, holding it out to him. The distance closed again. He accepted the food automatically, the heat seeping into his palm.
Then she leaned past him to grab a canvas rag from a stool, her presence suddenly filling his immediate world. She was standing so close. His line of sight, from his diminished height, was leveled directly at the middle of her. He tried to keep calm, to breathe normally, but all he could see was the soft curve of her belly under the yellow cotton shirt and the impressive, undeniable swell of her chest. She was a mountain range of a woman. Solid. Present. Occupying space in a way he was literally forgetting how to do.
Herc took all of that in and tried to keep calm while she was standing so close to him. As he looked up at her, all he could see was a little bit of belly and her huge boobs. It was neither a leer nor an attraction. It was a physical fact, a mapping of the new geography between them. His face was level with her sternum. A hot flush of humiliation climbed his neck.
She straightened up, rag in hand, and seemed to read the temperature in the room. Her expression softened. Not with pity, but with a shared understanding of awkward physics.
“Perspective’s a funny thing,” she said, her voice quieter. She didn’t step back. “From down there, I must look like a skyscraper. From up here, you look like a man holding a very hot empanada who’s about to get third-degree burns on his pride if he doesn’t take a bite.”
He blinked. The spell broke. He looked down at the empanada and took a hurried bite. Flakes showered his shirt. The filling was perfect, spiced and savory.
“Good?” she asked.
He nodded, chewing. “Yeah.”
“Told you.” She finally gave him space, retreating to lean against her worktable. “So. You shrink. I expand. Our bodies are having a conversation without our permission. The question is, are we going to just listen, or are we going to talk back?”
Herc swallowed. The food was a grounding anchor. “How do you talk back to this?”
“You change the language.” She gestured around the studio with her empanada. “My ex called it monstrous. So I painted monsters. Beautiful, glorious, powerful ones. I reclaimed the word until it lost its teeth on me.” She took a bite, thoughtful. “What’s your word?”
The word surfaced instantly, poisoned and sharp. “Frail,” he whispered. It echoed in the silent conference room of his memory.
“Frail,” Ro repeated, testing its weight. “Okay. That’s a sneaky one. Wears a suit. So, we put frailty in a suit. We paint it. We give it a name and a chair at the table. We stop pretending it’s not in the room.”
Herc thought of Tim and Daisy’s glances, their careful, tailored solutions. They were trying to hide the frailty, to suit it up and make it presentable for Pinnacle Capital. Ro was telling him to invite it to the damn meeting.
“It’ll sink the pitch,” he said, the businessman in him surfacing through the panic.
“Or it’ll be the only honest thing in the room.” She shrugged. “But that’s next week’s problem. Today’s problem is that you’re holding charcoal and you haven’t made a mark. And my stretcher bars won’t move themselves.”
She pushed off the table and motioned for him to follow her to a cluttered corner stacked with large, raw wooden frames. “Muscle first. Then, if you want, we redraw some lines.”
He set the empanada down, wiped his hands on his sweatpants, and approached the bars. They were heavy, solid pine. He braced himself, expecting his new weakness to betray him. He gripped one end.
Ro took the other. “On three. One, two—”
They lifted. The weight was significant, but distributed. It was manageable. For the first time in weeks, he was using his body for a simple, declarative task. To lift. To carry. To help. The strain felt good. It felt genuine.
As they shuffled the bar towards a fresh canvas, Herc’s mind was quiet. No pity, no panic, just the uncomplicated burn in his shoulders and the solid reality of the wood in his hands.