I live in a one-bedroom condominium in a very upscale neighborhood of a large city. It’s right next to the university that I attend as a graduate student, but it’s too expensive for most of the undergrads, so instead the building is mostly filled with old retirees who’ve been living in the area for decades. It’s quiet and comfy, a perfect fit. I don’t even bother locking my door most of the time. That’s how safe I’ve felt living there…. until last week.
The front desk at the condo building requires a concierge at all times, and when the pandemic hit, they quickly became short-staffed. I happily agreed to fill the position on weekends—since I lived on the third floor anyways, it was a great opportunity to make some easy money while helping people out during a hard time. It was a low-stress job that consisted of little more than fetching people’s packages for them every now and then, and in the meantime, I could spend most of the eight hour shifts studying, reading, or just browsing on my phone or laptop.
I was near the end of last Saturday’s shift when the building’s power abruptly died. All the lights switched off with a sudden click that made me jump. Only the glow of my laptop screen kept me from total darkness, providing a single island of light in the sea of darkness that now engulfed me. The manager had warned me this might happen and prepared me accordingly, explaining that the old building’s wiring was on the fritz and that it could usually be fixed by just resetting the breaker.
Of course, the breaker was located in the sub-basement. I figured I better go ahead and try to get it done before any of the old-timers started calling the desk and asking when the power would be back. So, I stood up, retrieved the building’s master key ring from a box on the wall, turned on my phone’s flashlight, and got moving. As I made my way down the empty hallway towards the stairs, the light of my laptop faded out of view behind me, making me feel like some kind of explorer venturing out into a new world.
My footsteps echoed loudly through the stairwell as I made my way down several flights, well underground by the time I reached the double-doors at the very bottom. A large sign on the doors read “SUB-BASEMENT – STAFF ONLY.” I set my phone down on the floor, using the column of light it provided to fumble through the dozens of keys available to me, suddenly starting to worry that I wouldn’t remember which one was the sub-basement. Luckily, it was marked with a small label. The metal doors groaned as I pushed them apart, the noise combining with the utter darkness beyond to give me the impression of a subterranean behemoth whose maw I was about to enter.
The sub-basement consisted of a wide hallway with a few metal doors on either side, leading to miscellaneous rooms for one purpose or another. One stood ajar to reveal an ancient bathroom that no longer functioned, and I knew a couple more led to storage closets. I shuffled past them quickly, making my way to the large open space that the hall opened into. In here the maintenance staff kept plenty of the larger equipment, in addition to a lot of random junk that had accumulated over the course of decades. I navigated through the assortment of tables and machinery, making my way to a back corner where one last door waited. This one opened to another small room, slightly bigger than a closet, and it contained my target on the back wall—the distinctive switches of the building’s circuit breakers.
As soon as I stepped into the room, my phone died, leaving me helpless in the quiet dark. I fumbled with the treacherous hunk of plastic and glass to no avail. It was just as dead as the rest of the building. I knew it was charged, because I always left it plugged in while I was sitting at the front desk. Stupid thing… at least it waited until my goal was right here, I thought.
Putting my phone into my pocket so I could use both hands, I found the small room’s door frame, then felt my way along the wall, looking for the panel that would deliver me from this darkness. It wasn’t hard to find and soon I had the master breaker switch in my grasp. Breathing a sigh of relief, I pulled it aside, then back to its previous position. Light returned to the world and then some; my vision was blinded by a burst of pure white, causing me to cry out in surprise and stumble back against the wall.
It took a few moments for me to recover from the shock of the flash, the spots slowly receding out of my eyes. Was that some kind of power surge or something? I was studying philosophy, not electrical engineering, so I had no idea. I was getting ready to just write it off and finish my shift when I realized one other thing that was wrong, one which I definitely could not just write off.
As I looked around me, I understood that I was now standing on the ceiling.
My first reaction was to drop to the floor in panic, terrified that I would instantly fall and bash my head. Except the floor was now the ceiling so I found myself eye level with the lightbulb illuminating the room. The mismatch between my sight and the pull of gravity sent a wave of vertigo through me and I thought I might puke. Would the puke go up or down? What the hell was going on?! I squeezed my eyes shut and laid still on the floor-ceiling until I felt the nausea receding.
Okay. I’m going to open my eyes and this will just be a dream, I thought. Hopefully no one would notice that I nodded off on the job. Of course, when I opened my eyes I still found myself looking at a lightbulb across from me, and the concrete floor of the sub-basement was still below—or above?—me. Whatever this was, it was real. I was laying on the ceiling, gravity apparently having reversed itself somehow.
I expected to have some difficulty getting back to my feet, but it felt just as natural as back when gravity went the right way down. My body couldn’t feel any difference, it was my mind that was confused, knowing that this was not the way that things were supposed to be. One thing I immediately noticed was that the reversal seemed to include my clothes. That was a relief, this was weird enough already without having my shirt constantly falling down into my face. That raised the question of whether it applied to everything else in the building too.
A quick glance back into the main area of the sub-basement showed that it did not. All the miscellaneous tools and junk stayed down on the ground where it belonged. It felt surreal walking across the space’s ceiling with the top of my head nearly scraping some of the stuff on the tables. I reached down and picked up a wrench to see what would happen. It weighed the same but gravity definitely still pulled it towards the floor; when I let go it dropped back down to its table with a loud, echoing clang.
Not knowing what else to do, I made my way back out of the sub-basement and up the stairwell, walking quite comfortably along ceilings the whole way. When I got back to the first floor I decided to try hopping off the edge where the ceiling stopped at the landing, and fell up to the next ceiling above the door to the first floor. No problem, just like riding a bike again, I thought.
But I hadn’t thought this through, because now I was standing above the door I needed to go through and the doorknob was out of reach below me. Even standing on tiptoes, it was barely too far away. Luckily I was able to jump down just far enough to wrap my hand around it, leaving me hanging onto the knob while the reverse-gravity tried to pull me back up to the ceiling. I planted my feet along the top of the doorframe, turned the knob, and managed to pull the door open before letting go and landing back on the ceiling a few inches above.
From there it was easy enough to step through, just a big step over the top part of the door frame, but I made a note to be more careful next time I needed to change floors. The lobby appeared exactly as I left it. When I walked over to the front desk and looked down at my laptop’s screen, I could see that it was still open to the Instagram page I’d been browsing when the power went out. I was trying to figure out how I would reach it when I heard a noise behind me. It was the familiar sound of the building’s automated front doors opening.
I turned around, eager to see another human being who might be able to help me, but there was no one there. I stared for a moment at the sunlight pouring in through the open doors, then flinched and turned away as another wave of vertigo ran through me. The implication had just hit me. What would happen if I stepped out of those doors? If I went outside—where there was no ceiling? The feel of a light breeze at my back was too much and I ran for it, sprinting desperately back to the stairs. I didn’t know where I was going, I just had to get away from that gateway to oblivion.
In my panic, I had no time to think about how I could possibly manage going back down to the basement levels, so instead I just ran up, up, along the ceilings of the stairwell, making it up several stories before I finally stopped to breathe. It occurred to me that going back down to the lower floors, now that I’d passed above them, would actually be very difficult from in here. I might be able to pull myself down along the handrails, but that wasn’t a very appealing thought. The elevator would be a lot easier. Besides, I needed to see if I could talk to someone else in the building and figure out what was going on.
The door to the fourth-floor hallway was near to where I’d stopped, so I hopped down and grabbed the doorknob, repeating the technique I’d learned on the first floor to open it and step through. I stepped carefully over light fixtures as I made my way down the long hallway, feeling their heat on my ankles. There was no one in sight. I thought about calling out for help when I heard a door open behind me. Turning around, I saw one of the building’s elderly residents standing in her doorway, staring silently at me.
Her face was set in stone, bearing no expression, but somehow her eyes conveyed a sense of malice, a deep hatred. I got the profound sense of trespassing somewhere that I shouldn’t have. All around me, the doors of the hallway began to open, the residents pouring out into the hall. None of them said a word. All carried that same face, devoid of emotion, and focused like a laser on me. I decided, far too late, to try and get the hell out of there. I barely made it three steps before an old man reached up and grabbed me by the hair.
I screamed in pain as he pulled me down off the ceiling, his grip like iron. More wrinkled hands took hold all over my body as the residents crowded in around me with a singular purpose. I beat and kicked desperately, feeling my blows land against flesh, but it didn’t seem to make any difference. None of them so much as flinched. My screams and flails turned to desperate pleas, begging them to let me go, not to hurt me.
Then I realized that they weren’t actually hurting me. I was now held by so many pairs of vise-like hands that I could barely move at all, but other than the intense pressure of their grip, they didn’t harm me. The light fixtures on the ceiling passed by overhead as I came to realize that they were carrying me down the hall. I only had a moment to wonder where we were going before a familiar sound answered that question for me: The chime of the elevator arriving.
“Where are you taking me?” I asked them, my voice weak and trembling.
Nothing. The few whose faces I could see no longer looked at me, instead looking straight ahead as they crowded into the elevator, still holding my body between them all. I made a few more pathetic, useless attempts to resist before accepting my fate… whatever it was going to be. I could still feel the reverse-gravity pulling me up towards the roof of the elevator, although the firm grips of the residents held it easily at bay, for now. The elevator dinged for each floor that it went up… one… two… three… four. The building only had eight floors. That meant they had taken me to the top floor, and now they were carrying me out of the elevator.
I heard more doors opening around us as the small crowd carried me down the eighth-floor hallway, many of them banging loudly. Suddenly overcome with anxiety, I tried asking again where they were taking me. I didn’t know what was going on, but I knew that I was in danger, that I needed to fight or take flight. Yet I could do neither, powerless as I was dragged into the stairwell. As soon as we started going up the stairs, I realized what was going to happen. I screamed, I begged, I strained and struggled frantically, my stomach rising into my throat and tears pouring down my face.
Then the door to the roof opened. They threw me out and I was falling. Falling up into the sky, into the endless abyss, my world shifted instantly into nothing but an empty blue in all directions. I screamed in horror, but I couldn’t hear my own voice. All I heard was the deafening roar of the wind all around me. My stomach flipped over and over, my head swam, and still I continued falling. There was no earth to catch me. The only mercy was that I finally lost consciousness.
I woke up in a hospital bed with both my legs shattered beyond repair. The doctors were very careful around me, too careful, guarded with their words. Still, by listening when they thought I was asleep, I was able to learn how they found me. I’d been found on the roof of my condo building in this state, as if I’d been dropped there from an extreme height. I heard the phrase “lucky to be alive” more than once. I don’t know if I agree.
At least gravity works properly again. I guess I finally fell out of that upside-down world and back into my own. I’ll never walk again, but I think I might prefer it that way. The wheelchair gives me comfort. It’s an anchor to the earth, something to grip and to hold on to. The condo building’s manager told me to take as much time off as I needed, but I begged for the concierge job back, as soon as possible. I don’t like being under the open sky anymore, so having a job where I don’t have to leave my building is very important to me now. Thank goodness for the pandemic normalizing work-from-home; that’s going to keep my career options open.
I also asked the manager about that power outage, the one that took me to that other place. That was maybe the strangest thing of all. According to him, there had never been a power outage. The power hadn’t gone out like that in months. He said I hadn’t even been scheduled to work that day. It was the person who was working the front desk that day who called 911 after they noticed my body on the roof’s security cam. So as I sit here at the front desk, I wonder what I would do if it ever happened again. It would be a lot harder to reach the breakers in this chair, and even if I could, would I dare to flip that switch again?
I think I might need to start looking for a new place to live.