And packed down in the bottom of that tube, where nobody ever looks, was a wad of paper towels.
Brown paper towels. The cheap kind out of the dispenser in the second floor restroom. Maybe twenty of them, rolled tight and jammed down into the shaft, packed so hard they had gone stiff as wood.
I did not understand what I was looking at. I remember saying that out loud. I said I don’t understand.
He turned the other half over and showed me the handgrip. Somebody had wrapped it in black electrical tape, round and round, six or seven layers of it, and underneath the tape the plastic grip had split clean through.
Then he showed me the adjustment holes near the bottom.
The spring button was gone. The little metal pin that holds the height in place, the one you press with your thumb, it was not there at all.
In its place somebody had pushed a nail through the hole and bent the end over so it would not slide back out.
A nail. My eleven year old had been walking on a nail.
“The paper’s so it don’t rattle,” he said. “You pack it tight enough, it don’t make a sound. She didn’t want you to hear it.”
The lobby had gone quiet around us. I could hear the automatic doors opening and closing behind me and I could hear my own breathing and nothing else.
