One hour.
We have been here for an hour.
We are sitting on the floor of the elevator, legs stretched out, our heads sprawled against the wall and our eyes scanning the ceiling with unprecedented intensity. Who knew neon flickered so much?
The hopes of being able to find the phone signal again and maybe call the fire brigade or the police vanished twenty minutes ago when my cell phone died too.
No messages from Miriam or from the surveillance or from anyone who can get us out of here. No jolts or strange noises that can tell us that someone out there is providing.
I'm seriously beginning to convince myself that I'm going to die in here.
The good thing is that I won't die alone. I'm going to die with a more than decent guy who's turning out to be a pretty nice person. Well, as pleasant as a boss can be.
He told me he lived in the West Village. In New York. In a red brick building that overlooked a tree-lined avenue.
I'm not even sure how we got back to talking about New York...
Oh, yes.
I was hyperventilating, after the message to Miriam, and I was in danger of collapsing at any moment and he started telling me about when he was locked in the elevator of his American home for an hour. Vanessa pulled him out.
I think he was going into panic mode too.
Maybe Vanessa is his partner [bar] girlfriend [bar] friend. He never mentioned her again. He also told me that he took a long ride after exiting the elevator. «Because I needed air,» he told me, «and I started running. Only it had just rained and the streets were full of wet leaves. And I had all my sweatpants splashed with mud.»
By then I was back to normal breathing, he breathed a sigh of relief and we both collapsed to the floor.
Who knows if they are still together.
Vanessa and him, I mean.
Because he threw her name there, as if it were a normal presence in his life. Like when talking to Rebecca I mentioned Miriam for the first time. Something like, «Yeah, well, Miriam always tells me.» At that point Rebecca asked me about Miriam, I told her a couple of anecdotes and two days later we were all three drinking in a downtown bar.
I just... I can't do as with Rebecca, can I? I can't ask him who Vanessa is.
«Do you have a degree in communication too?» he asks me suddenly. «So I seemed to understand, even if I have had the opportunity to speak to a few employees so far and to read just a couple of files. Except Mrs. Fabbri, of course, who, as you know, has a degree in marketing.»
Well, I just didn't know Lu had a degree in marketing but... well...
«No... I don't have a degree in communication.» Should I be ashamed of such a thing? «I have a degree in literature, specializing in journalism.» I continue.
«So you wanted to be a journalist since your university days.» He states as if it were a banality. But actually it wasn't. I enjoyed reading. I loved writing. But I really had no idea what to do. The choice of specialization in journalism came later.
«Not exactly.» I murmur.
«It's a passion that came after university then.»
He looks at me with curious eyes, slightly pursed lips and slightly furrowed eyebrows.
«The truth is that in high school I was a real mess with everything to do with numbers.» My amazing and gruelling sleight of hand to get a 7 in trigonometry and physics has become something of an urban legend in my old school. They told me that professor Luciani still tells it to all her students. Which is not exactly flattering.
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A very bad weekend
ChickLitVic lives in Rome and works at a periodical called "Dalla settimana" for which she is a proofreader and writes obituaries. She spends the day fantasizing about the dead she has to write about, dodging her boss and three evil colleagues and sharing h...
