Rodney

 I go out for a delicious Italian meal and drinks with a friend. Afterwards she drops me off and I wheel into my building on my knee scooter and yank open the elevator door and slide the heavy gate and roll in and push the button for the fourth floor. Sometimes there's a delay and you have to wait thirty seconds or so until the elevator lurches to life, so I wait thirty seconds or so then press the button again, then a few more times. It's not going anywhere. I punch the wall then close my eyes and take a deep breath and push the button one last time before wheeling back out to the stairwell.

I plop down on the bottom step and sit there a few minutes, then begin to ease my ass up one stair at a time, lugging my scooter after me. It's slow going and I'm soon out of breath and covered in sweat. The scooter bumps and bangs despite the carpet. When I get to the landing, I hear a door open above me and a voice calls down from the third floor. It's Rodney.

Rodney is an extremely short Iranian man who lived for years in England and still retains his British accent. He has severely cropped salt-and-pepper hair and dark eyes which somehow look both sleepy and angry at the same time. His girlfriend is twenty years younger than him. He picked her up in a bar in Eugene, where she was attending college. She gave birth to their first child in the early months of the pandemic. We used to be on friendly terms; I'd even been in their apartment once. Rodney had corned me in the lobby one night, wobbly and slurring that his girlfriend had left him. He implored me to come keep him company, so I accompanied him into his apartment, which was twice the size of mine with about half the amount of furnishings. He poured us each a snifter of treacly sherry and read me a sonnet he'd written to her, then asked me what I thought of it. They got back together soon after.

 

Early on in the pandemic, I ran into Rodney in the courtyard of our building and he pointed to my mask and said, "Oh, so you're buying into all that, are you?" Every time I ran into him after that he would repeat it. "Still doing the mask thing, I see," he would say with a knowing smirk. "How interesting." 

 

I usually try to avoid him, but had already run into him twice today, the second time being at the grocery store, where he was the only one in the building with no mask on, despite the state mandate.

He is, of course, not wearing one now. "I heard someone banging around down there," he says. "Are you alright, mate?" I say that I'm fine, that the elevator's broken. "It's those kids messing around with it again," he growls. "Can I help in any way?" 

 

I tell him I'm sorry for the racket and that I'm fine, that I just have to take it slowly. 

 

"I really wish you would let me help," he says. "I can put on... you know, one of those things, if it'll make you feel better." I tell him I don't really care. 

 

He stands there watching me struggle until I finally say, "Maybe you could just carry this up to the next landing." I feel defeated. He easily carries it the rest of the way up as I grab the banister and hobble behind.  

"Call me if you need anything, mate" he says. "I mean it." I thank him and tell him I will. "You'd better," he says. "I shall be extremely cross if you don't." He slips back into the stairwell and descends to his lovely young wife and beautiful, dark-eyed child. I unlock my door and enter my little home, where the cat is scolding me for being gone so long.