Revolving Door

by T.B. Grennan

Revolving Door

Once there was a fat man with a little mustache who got caught in a revolving door.

He worked in Midtown, at the reception desk of one of those big, postwar office buildings. It was a Tuesday, around eleven, and he had four-and-a-quarter minutes left in his five-minute mid-morning break. He was a smoker; maybe that was why he was in such a hurry.  And because he was a big, broad-shouldered man—though not actually that tall—it was perhaps natural that people would want to get out of his way.

A janitor. Two delivery men holding boxes. A woman with a small, excitable dog. Office workers carrying cups of single-origin coffee and four-dollar pastries. And a traffic cop who seemed to just be passing through, using the long, white marble lobby as a shortcut between blocks.

They all watched as he approached the lobby’s big revolving door, moving at top speed. Or what passed as top speed for him—namely a sort of lurching, breathless jog. His pack of Marlboros out, his thumb on the lighter’s wheel, his long, skinny tie flapping over one shoulder.

Things began to go wrong as soon as the revolving door started to spin, pressed into motion by the back of his outstretched hand. It would have been wiser, of course, to push gently with his palm. But he was in a hurry and didn’t want to relinquish his cigarette for even a moment. The impact against the glass left a dull, ringing pain in his wrist. He ignored it. Pressed on. Sparking the lighter, dedicating the whole of his consciousness to getting the cigarette lit before the revolving door twisted open.

Which is probably how he managed to get the final inch of his tie caught in the door.

The revolving door jammed. The flame reached the tip of his cigarette. Smoke rose skyward. The necktie pulled taut. The man gasped and gurgled as he was yanked suddenly backward, his legs kicking wildly, the side of his head smacking hard against the glass. The cigarette dropped from his hand, spinning as it fell. Then landed in the cuff of his charcoal-gray suit pants.

And began to burn.

The air filled with the chemical stink of singed fabric. But the man barely noticed, too preoccupied trying to extract his necktie from the jaws of the revolving door. The tie, however, wouldn’t move. Which meant that the door couldn’t move. Which meant that when the man’s pant leg burst suddenly into flame, there was nowhere for him to run.

He felt the heat on his ankle. Glanced down. Then hooted with surprise and fear. Kicked his leg wildly, trying to shake the fire out. But succeeded only in fanning the flames. Pulled off his suit jacket, used it to smother his lower leg, patting desperately. And watched the whole jacket ignite. Then, panicking, he rushed off his belt, shimmied down his pants, and kicked away the burning piles of fabric, kicked them as far across the tiny compartment as he could.

He stood there in his boxers and dress shirt, gazing, bewildered, at his burning clothes. Thinking that he could have died. That the next time he bought a suit, he was going to ask if it was made of something fire resistant.

In the lobby, everyone was laughing or pointing or staring open-mouthed. Astonished that the proud, serious man who accepted their packages and announced their fire drills and checked their building-issued IDs each morning was now dancing wildly in a shining glass cylinder. Spinning around. Grimacing. Shucking off his clothes.

A few people noticed that his tie was stuck in the door or wondered to themselves if there was something they should do. At the reception desk, one of his colleagues picked up the phone but found that he had no idea who he should call. A locksmith? The police? Someone from the five o’clock news? And when he glanced back at the revolving door, hoping for some insight, he found that his coworker had vanished within an impenetrable column of ash-gray smoke.

The lobby filled with whispered confusion and murmured concern. A few people got on elevators just so they wouldn’t be there when whatever was going to happen actually happened. The man at reception decided finally that this merited a call to the fire department and picked up the receiver he’d just set down.

Just then, a trembling college intern lifted her arm and pointed. Every head turned. Inside the revolving door, two hands rose through the smoke, palms pressed white against the glass. People held their breath, watching the hands become fists, watching those fists pound desperately on the thick, transparent divide. The sound echoed through the silent lobby. The crowd watched and waited.

That sort of thing isn’t supposed to happen. Millions of people walk through revolving doors every day. Lots of them are wearing ties. If the average person got trapped inside with any regularity, that would probably be the death knell for the whole revolving door industry.

It’s in everyone’s best interest for there to be rules and regulations. Guidelines to keep the doors revolving, to keep passers-through safe as they make their way forward. And there are. Laws mandating effective revolving door installations. State codes governing proper glass-cleaning methods and minimum chamber size requirements. And a voluntary consensus standard from an internationally recognized standards developing organization (SDO) ensuring that revolving doors don’t jam, don’t trap people inside.

Or, at least, that’s what it’s supposed to do.

The standard is known as SQEE 17301, Rotational requirements for modern revolving doors — Safety requirements — Part 6, Reversal Vectors. It was developed nearly forty years ago under the auspices of the Society for Quality Entrances and Exits, a well-regarded SDO operating out of Auburn, California, a bedroom community of Sacramento. And for nearly forty years, there wasn’t a single documented case of someone getting trapped in a revolving door as a result of a wayward tie. Then, just a few years before all of this happened, SQEE decided to revise the standard.

The revision played out the way these things tend to: an update was proposed; comments were solicited; a timeline was approved; official call-for-participation notices were placed in trade magazines like Glass and Gear and The Journal of Revolving Studies; a hotel conference room was booked; experts from all over the country packed their suitcases and explained to their spouses and children that sometimes the needs of revolving doors had to come first; a shuttle bus was run out to the regional airport; people drank instant coffee in their hotel rooms and drip coffee at the continental breakfast; the convener opened the meeting with a joke about revolving doors; in the back, someone laughed; the morning session was unproductive, full of yawns and bleary eyes; lunch was catered by the hotel kitchen; a man from Seattle complained that the vegetarian option contained pork; an observant woman from New Jersey complained, too, though for different reasons; two older men stood in the far corner of the dining room, talking quietly; during the afternoon session, one of the men turned to the other, nodded imperceptibly, and announced that his organization had decided to back a compromise suggested by his friend and esteemed competitor; the other stakeholders gawked and objected and eventually gave in.

The sessions went on like this for a while. Boredom. Inaction. Eating. Compromise. Then something unexpected happened: the meeting’s lone consumer advocate came down with a bad case of food poisoning.

She’d stepped out during the meeting’s lunch break to buy cigarettes at a gas station by her motel. On the way to the register, she’d been tempted by a prepackaged egg salad sandwich that, unsurprisingly, had not been prepared in accordance with the food handling requirements set down in ACSF 107, Sample methods for the safe preparation of assembled edibles in a grocery or convenience store environment. The nausea set in half an hour after eating. Diarrhea followed minutes later, necessitating a pull-over in the highway breakdown lane, a swift shuffle into the nearby woods.

No one at the meeting noticed she wasn’t there. Not for hours.

By the time she returned, a new provision had been added to the draft standard. It allowed the use of three additional types of handles in compliant revolving doors, as well as a new kind of roller that had just come onto the market. The roller was lighter than previous models; cheaper, too. But there was a catch. Reverse the direction it was moving in too quickly and the roller could lock in place, freezing a revolving door mid-revolve. Not every time. Not even every hundredth time. But sometimes.

Fixing it meant calling a highly trained technician and writing a painfully large check. Between these two steps, you could wait hours.

Inside his little triangle of glass, the man struggled with his tie. The knot holding and holding, and then finally pulling apart. Liberated, he fell to his knees. Gasping. Fingers sliding down the smooth wall. Everything was fire-black and scorch-gray. He couldn’t see the lobby; he couldn’t see his own hands. The only sound was a sharp, growing sizzle.

The air burned. His lungs burned.

He curled up in a ball on the hot floor, the air slightly cooler, slightly cleaner. With his face pressed against the glass surface, he could see something—shapes? Maybe people? Feeling death approach with every forced, reluctant breath, the smoke’s deep, thick sting nearly as raw as his chest’s angry want. Everything was darkness and heat, fear and pain. There was nothing he could do.

But wait. Let’s spin things back. Fasten that noose of a tie around his throat. Watch the smoke and ash as it shrinks, as it falls back into the shrinking flames. The pants jump across the compartment into his outstretched hands, the fire dwindling to a gentle tuft of smoke as he pulls the pants back on. Watch him shimmy backward, doing steps no dancer has ever done before, beguiling onlookers with his passion, his energy. The lit cigarette reappears, levitating, rising out of the cuff of his pants and into the space between two fingers. It joins the lighter, extinguishing both flames. The door rolls backward, releasing the tie, opening up to face the lobby. The man sprints in reverse, his eyes ahead, his arms chugging backward. Every completed step a miracle. Watch him hurtle back across the marble floor and behind the reception desk, watch him hop into his waiting chair, the landing effortless.

See him check his watch and greet a visitor and check his watch again. Pen drifting across the sign-in sheet, erasing name after name. He lifts an empty mug to his lips and excretes an entire cup of coffee from the depths of his throat, sip by half-ounce sip. The clock slides backward, catching six a.m. by surprise. The man rises, sauntering through the empty lobby in reverse. Outside, garbage men are covering the sidewalks with refuse and the sun is busy setting in the east.

Watch him jog backward down the subway steps and emerge in a distant, working class neighborhood, the sky overhead dark and growing darker. He strolls up the block in reverse until he reaches an apartment. Yanking the front door open, then turning around to back through it. Watch him pad backward up the carpeted stairs and saunter into a small side room. Watch him take a step back, then another and another. Until he’s at the center of the darkened room, slowly untying his long, thin tie as his infant daughter sleeps quietly in the crib below. He lifts the last burning inch of his cigarette from an ashtray, then sucks a lungful of smoke from the air.

She’ll stand over him like that one day. Years from now. Half a country away. Holding a pen, not a cigarette. He will be older, grayer, balder. In pale green hospital clothes, beneath baby blue cotton sheets. Two TVs high on the wall—one showing soccer, the other game shows.

Standing there, her eyes pained and bleary from all the late nights and tiny type. Looking at a clipboard. Reading the same few words over and over. LEFT SIDE. LATE STAGE. NECROTIC.

He’ll be breathing fitfully. The machine doing the work, setting the rhythm. His daughter will sit on the edge of the bed. Take his hand. Feel his heart beat. Watch his chest move. And pray.

Outside the office building, there was a small pedestrian plaza. Smaller than a basketball court, smaller than three dumpsters placed side by side. When the weather was nice, people would stand out there smoking. When the weather was bad, they’d do the same.

From eleven a.m. to four p.m., a food cart operated there, selling sandwiches and styrofoam trays piled high with rice and grilled meat. Its proprietor was a thin, serious man—he had a mustache, too. In his homeland, he’d been a playwright, though not a particularly successful one. Here, his cart was famed for its white sauce, which he made fresh each morning on an efficiency hotplate in an apartment across the river.

Two weeks earlier, he’d been in the heart of the lunch rush when something strange happened. A woman in an unfamiliar uniform approached, her hair teased to enormous heights. She was a city fire inspector; his cart lacked a mandatory extinguisher and a physical barrier between his napkin pile and its burner.

In his plays, the proprietor had always celebrated the lone hero who knew when to take decisive action. Accordingly, he hesitated not at all before handing his spatula over to the fire inspector, leaving her to oversee an in-progress combo meal while he stalked off to a hardware store to pick up the necessary supplies.

The fire inspector overcooked the mixed vegetables and fined him three days’ profits. She also accepted his invitation to dinner. And though the bulk of their date was spent discussing fire safety and its importance, she had also taken the opportunity to compliment the proprietor on his mustache, saying that she rather liked the way it curled up at the ends. He smiled and told her that he used mustache wax and passed along the name of the brand. She cautioned that his preferred wax was highly flammable. He promised to always carry a tiny, mustache-sized fire extinguisher with him, just in case. She laughed.

And so it was that when the proprietor caught sight of the black smoke filling the revolving door, fire safety was already very much on his mind. He thought, as he often did, what one of his protagonists would do in a situation such as this, then reached down and pulled a cinder block from beneath the far side of his cart. It had been placed there to keep the cart from toppling over—and topple over it did as the proprietor raced across the plaza with his new fire extinguisher tucked beneath his arm, the cinderblock held tight against his chest.

He shouted at the crowd of gawkers just outside and they scattered. Reassembling a few steps away, just in time to watch as he hurled the cinderblock through the revolving door.

The glass exploded. Smoke rushed out in thick, black peaks, racing skyward. The proprietor lifted the fire extinguisher, spraying and spraying until the smoldering pants vanished beneath a thick layer of bulging white foam. He stepped through the jagged opening and dragged the other man out by his shoulders, struggling the whole way. Setting him down outside, the man’s bare legs leaving black smears on the plaza bricks. The proprietor cleared his air passages. Placed hands on his chest. Pressed down.

And as the other man coughed and spat and came to life, his eyes suddenly wide, his barrel chest jerking, his mustache contorting along with his mouth, you watched silently from the other side of the plaza. Seated there on a chipped metal bench. Smoking a cigarette of your very own.

   

   

Author T.B. Grennan was born in Vermont, lives in Brooklyn, and once read the entirety of Shirley Hazzard’s The Transit of Venus while stuck on a delayed plane. His writing has appeared in The Indiana Review, The Seventh Wave, TIMBER, and “Spaces We Have Known,” an anthology of LGBTQ+ fiction, among other publications. He received a 2021 New York City Artists Corps Grant and served as artist in residence at Georgia’s Newnan Art Rez in June 2023.

Artist Ana Prundaru was born in Romania and presently lives in Switzerland. Alongside her legal career, she writes and illustrates for publications like Fugue, the Pinch, Third Coast and New England Review.