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Summary
250. When the Elevator Doors Opened – You Coming?
When the elevator stops, there’s no one there. Will pushes and pushes the L button, saying that another rule of the elevator is that if you push the button, the door will close more quickly. Will is impatient and calls the elevator a “vertical coffin.” Just as the elevator door is about to close, someone puts four fingers in the closing doors. Will’s brother Shawn gets on the elevator, wearing the blood-stained clothes he died in. Everyone is happy to see him. Shawn greets everyone, spinning Dani around to admire her, hugging his father. Shawn looks at Will but doesn’t say anything. Will hugs Shawn but he doesn’t hug him back. Will says he was like a middle drawer of a man.
Will remembers that when he was younger, he used to follow Shawn around making an annoying noise for hours. Shawn would let him but then he wouldn’t speak to him for the rest of the day. Back in the elevator, Will asks Shawn why he’s ignoring him. He doesn’t say anything, and he doesn’t even smile at Will. Will tells Shawn he followed The Rules. He says he didn’t cry, and he didn’t snitch. He said he knows that Riggs killed him and that he’s going to get revenge. He says he’s scared and confused, but he’s following The Rules. He’s filled with questions. He wonders, The Rules are The Rules, right?
Then Will feels tears are coming, and he does what he can to stop them. He tries looking away from Shawn but all he sees are the embers of cigarettes, “like a bunch of L buttons.” When he looks back at Shawn, Shawn is crying, sobbing like when he was a kid, tears pouring from his eyes. Will says that he thought they couldn’t cry, as his own voice is cracking, and a single tear falls down his cheek. Will realizes that Shawn crying doesn’t make him any less of his brother. Then Shawn makes a horrible moaning sound, which Will compares to the grinding, metal-on-metal sound of the elevator. Shawn never says anything to Will. He just makes that painful sound as the elevator stops. Will has a random thought, which is that the sound you hear in your head, that people call ringing, sounds less like a bell and more like a flatline. When the elevator stops, they all just stand there in the thick smoke, quiet. Will sees the glow of five cigarettes. Shawn hadn’t lit one. Will feels the cigarette meant for Shawn in his stomach, burning.
The elevator door opens slowly and the smoke rushes out of the elevator. Buck, Dani, Uncle Mark, Pop, Frick, and Shawn all follow the cloud of smoke out of the elevator until Will is left alone in it. Shawn turns back to Will and finally speaks to him, like a joke he’d been saving. “You coming?” he asks.
Analysis
This section further explores the motif of the elevator, the space between life and death in which Will can learn about the true nature of reality. When he is within the elevator, Will’s fate hangs in the balance. It’s as though what happens in the elevator is happening outside of time, as illustrated by the way time itself is elongated during his journey and by the way he has access to the wisdom and hard lessons of the dead. Will also witnesses a sort of personification of the elevator; when Shawn starts to moan, Will describes it as sounding like the metal innerworkings of the elevator itself. Therefore, Shawn’s expression of grief and regret, told solely through the keening sound he makes after he starts crying, underscores the fact that the elevator is a place that holds both the weight of grief for the dead and the possibility of another way forward for the living. It is in the elevator, the place where life and death touch, that true hope for a different future is born.
This section also explores the symbolism of the smoke as the physical embodiment of intergenerational grief. As Will rides on the elevator, each dead person contributes to the smoke that forms a thick fog in the elevator (except for Shawn, who refrains from smoking). This parallels the way that each person’s death contributed to the fog of grief that enveloped not just individual mourners but the community as a whole. Will struggles to see through the thick blanket of smoke as the elevator descends, emphasizing that the path the community is on is accruing ever more quantities of grief, each generation. In the end, as Will faces the possibility of choosing a different path than his family members and his ancestors before that, the elevator door opens and for the first time, the smoke finally clears. This parallels the way that, due to his journey with the dead, Will is able to see more clearly and some of the disorientation of grief is clearing for him.
This section also explores the possibility that the cycle of violence that has cost so many lives may end with Will because of his journey through the underworld in the elevator. Shawn’s visit is monumental for Will, who has been waiting, on some level, to see him since the elevator ride began. Shawn is the first person to do something different in the elevator, the first person to act in a way that violates The Rules that have gripped them all and cost them all so much. But weeping in front of everyone, and succumbing to his otherworldly moaning, Shawn gives body and voice to a rebellion against the cycle of violence. By breaking The Rules, Shawn gets through to Will in a way the others have not been able to. His actions make it possible for Will to consider another path forward. The first time Shawn speaks to Will, he asks him if he is coming with the dead. This ending is ambiguous, because the reader does not know what Will chooses, and Will himself may not yet know. But because of his brother’s bravery and honesty in death, Will has a chance to end the cycle of violence and save his life and the lives of so many others.
