wiring man
by John Colt

“Please do not feed the Wiring Man.”

That’s actually what the email said. Nothing else, nothing more, just a direct order from the boss. I’m not sure how he had found out that we had been feeding the Wiring Man, but I assume it was some loose lips somewhere. Some offhand discussion in the bathroom or lunchroom or somebody trying to have a whispered conversation over the phone. Anyway, he had found out we were doing it and he was mad.

You can’t blame him for being mad though. I mean, he had already spent so much time and energy making sure that the Wiring Man couldn’t get any more food from the snack room. He had emptied the refrigerators himself and told everyone to stop leaving things in them overnight. It had been an all out attempt to starve the Wiring Man out of the ceiling and it probably would’ve worked had it not been for a few of us who had been leaving bags of Cheetos by the air conditioning vents. I’m not sure why we left that particular brand of snack food, especially considering it was the Wiring Man’s only food and probably not the healthiest thing we could’ve left. But it seemed like the right thing. One summer, when I worked at camp, I kept a pet mouse in my mattress all summer by simply feeding him Cheetos a few times a day. Something about the situation with the Wiring Man felt the same way and so Cheetos it was. He didn’t seem to complain much. Every morning we found the bags empty exactly where they had been left full the previous night.

When I left the office and went home, I would daydream about the Wiring Man’s life and what it must be like to live up in the ceiling. The office I worked in wasn’t all that big so I didn’t imagine that it was an endless world like the one below the ceiling. But still, it seemed like it might be nice to be up there, in the semi-dark. Warm. Alone. He probably watched us all working away at our desks and smiled, knowing that as long as he stayed up there he’d never have to work again. And maybe he had one of those little black and white televisions so he could watch the news or the sports or his favorite sitcoms. I imagined the Wiring Man lived quite a content little life up above the white ceiling tiles.

“How does he go to the bathroom do you think?”

That was the latest question flying around the office email system. This was also why the boss wanted the Wiring Man out. Ever since he’d gone up there we’d all been fascinated by it. And our interest only grew with time. It took us a few days to realize that his ladder had been sitting underneath the same hole in the ceiling for quite some time and that none of the wiring work was being completed. All the new offices had new desks and new computers and new phones, but none of the cables that were supposed to be there were there. They were still hiding somewhere up in the ceiling and in the walls. That’s when I remembered it.

“I saw his feet going up into the ceiling as I was leaving on Friday. I just assumed he was working late.”

My message zapped through the network, pinging and dinging and popping up at everyone’s screen. Nobody else could remember seeing him after that day. He had been up in the ceiling for five days already at that point. It’s been 43 days now. I know because somebody started a tally on the wipe board in the snack room. There’s no heading for it, but everyone knows what those little hash marks represent.

On day twenty-seven the boss called the police and the fire department. He hadn’t believed us when we said that the Wiring Man had been living in the ceiling. On the morning of day twenty-seven though he heard a shuffling above his head and a tiny trail of plaster drifted down. He immediately called the police and the fire department. They came and brought ladders of their own and flashlights and megaphones and even a few dogs that barked and barked like mad. We were afraid that they would release the dogs up into the ceiling to go after the Wiring Man, but they apparently just brought them to bark and bark.

A fireman crawled up into the ceiling using the Wiring Man’s ladder. He crawled around clumsily, making obvious depressions in the tiles, so we could track his movements. He bumped his head a few times and sneezed and almost came crashing down through. He didn’t move with the same grace that the Wiring Man had. After an hour or so the chief called him back down and told the boss that they had more important things to do than go on a wild goose chase. The boss tried to protest but then one of the cops said that didn’t he think it was possible that the Wiring Man had left on his own and maybe we were all just a bit paranoid. We all agreed that this was a distinct possibility.

The boss called the company that the Wiring Man worked for and after a long discussion got his home phone number. He called and talked to the Wiring Man’s wife who said that her husband hadn’t been home in almost a month and she was so worried. The boss explained the situation as he saw it and she hung up the phone and drove in to the office. She brought her children who all looked very bored. She stood at one of the vents and screamed the Wiring Man’s name over and over. When her voice got tired she made the children yell and beg their father to come out. He didn’t come out.

“I need to see you in my office, immediately.”

That’s what the boss’s email to me said. I left my desk and nervously walked the length of the hall to his office. Everything in there was big and bright and clean, unlike my disheveled little cube. He told me that they think they’ve found where the Wiring Man has been living and he wants me to check it out. When I asked why me he said it was because he knew I was the one leaving the Cheetos out for him. I didn’t argue.

He took me down to the first floor where the elevator inspector was waiting. He had pried the hatch in the roof of the elevator open, the one that the heroes are always escaping from in movies, and had a small step ladder and a flashlight. He said I had to crawl up through the hatch and check things out. There was a horrible smell coming from the hatch and I thought I could now at least tell everyone where the Wiring Man had been going to the bathroom.

I grabbed the edges of the hatch and pulled myself up just enough to sit on the top of the elevator. The inspector handed me the flashlight and the boss gave me a pair of plastic gloves. I flipped on the light and immediately realized that yes, this was where the Wiring Man had gone to the bathroom. I shined the light all over the top of the elevator and the walls but didn’t see anything else. I shined it up the middle of the shaft. Way up near the top, up by what I figured was the fourth floor, I could see some movement. I screamed hello, hoping that if I acted friendly the Wiring Man wouldn’t hurt me for invading his secret world.

I waited, silently. The boss asked what was going on and I shushed him and watched as the movement continued. He asked me if I saw something and I said yes. He asked me what I saw and I said I don’t know. He poked his head up through the hatch. I pointed the light at it and told him to look there. He asked what that was and again I said I didn’t know.

He told the inspector to push three and make the elevator go up. Standing in the shaft the movement and noise of the elevator was jarring; much louder and more violent than when you are standing in the car, listening to the music from the speaker.

We rose slowly, the flashlight beam spreading as we neared the roof. The movement was rhythmic, like a metronome, back and forth and back and forth. As we passed the second floor I could make out the bottoms of boots. At the third I could see the bottoms of his legs and his hands slowly coming out of the shadows.

The boss yelled stop and the emergency bell rang as the elevator screeched to a halt. I could almost reach up and touch the tread on the boots now, but I didn’t. I didn’t want to touch any of it. I cringed in fact, cringed back away from what I saw. The boss swore quietly to himself.

“The Wiring Man is dead.”

The boss didn’t know any other way to say it. As the weeks passed and everyone tried to make sense of what had happened, I tried to stop thinking about the Wiring Man. Everywhere I went they were whispering about how he had died, why he had died, who had eaten all those Cheetos since the coroner had said he must’ve died weeks before we’d found him. None of it made sense. But none of them had been there when the inspector had gone to call the police and the boss had dropped back down into the elevator to get away from the sights and the smells. None of them had shined the light up the length of his body and onto his face, blue and gagged from lack of oxygen, wrapped round with the cables and wires of his trade. None of them had looked into his eyes and seen, for just a moment, the look of panic and fear, the flash of pain, and then the calm of surrender. His face was horrible and calm and beautiful. In the lines around his eyes and mouth, somewhere in the marks, I could read the words of his escape.