Witness account · 4 min read · Set in Meridian Tower ·
The Tram Bell Inside the Lift
The tower's lift chime plays the tram bell after 03:00, the surveyors could never reproduce it, and his replacement transferred without notice.
- reliability: disputed
- witness: "Yusuf Adem, caretaker"
I kept Meridian Tower nine years, ending last March, and I will answer any question the survey asks me, but I am not going to soften the one thing they could not reproduce, because it happened on my rounds and I am the one still standing by it.
The chime in the main lift: you know it if you have ridden in the tower, a two-stroke ding used everywhere in the city, pleasant, nothing in it. From the wet week in October of my sixth year, between the hours of 03:00 and about 03:33, riding that lift alone played a different second stroke. A tram bell. The deep single-note bell the old trams of the Ninth Ward ran on, the ones taken off before I ever held a mop here. Not near it. It. The same bell, down to the decay of the note, which was long, longer than a chime has any right to be, the way a brass bell rings itself out in open air.
I heard it first at 03:07, coming down from the eighteenth with the floor checks. I stopped the car at fourteen and rode it up and down for a quarter of an hour with the hatch open, testing, and got chimes and only chimes. I got the tram bell again at 03:41 going down — past the half hour by then, which I did not know yet mattered.
The surveyors came because the residents had begun logging it. That part is fair and I agree with the record: eleven residents logged the bell in the first month, three of them naming the Ninth Ward trams they were too young to have ridden. The surveyors were thorough, and their report is correct as far as its instruments went. They metered the chime unit. They swapped the whole striker board with the second lift, which also had to be ruled out, and both cars then behaved by day. They ran the car between 03:00 and 03:33 with three men aboard, with two, with one, and with nobody — riding it empty on loop with the doors held by relay. In nine runs out of nine, empty or full, the chime was a chime. There was never a tram bell while the surveyors' instruments were in the car, and the surveyors wrote, in the phrase that ended it: no anomaly reproducible under observation.
I signed my name under that line, because what it says is true. Not under observation. The bell did not care for observers, and I had ceased to be one. The nights I rode it alone with the mop trolley, the bell came at the second stroke maybe one lift-call in three, never the first night of a wet spell, always the third or fourth, and always over the old tram half-hour, and I came to hear the difference the way you hear your own name: the strike rose through the floor of the car, through the sole plate, not out of the ceiling speaker, and it arrived before my ear expected it, a half-second early every time, the way something punctual arrives when it has been waiting at the stop.
My replacement was transferred in — I will not have it said I was moved out over this; the transfer went through in the ordinary way, a site reshuffle, my signature on it, and no conditions. But I left him my rounds book with one line in it that is mine: the car will show you the bell at the third wet night, and it will never show you the bell while you are asking it to. He wrote back in the handover column, official and polite, that he had ridden the car across ten nights and logged nothing. Ten is close to asking. Close is not asking, and the words have not held: the complaint log at the tower desk has one new entry since March, a resident of the eleventh floor, logged at 03:19, recorded cause: lift chime wrong.
That entry is why I am writing this instead of letting it go. The survey closed. The instrument case is in store. But the log at the tower desk is not under observation, night after night, year after year, and it goes on taking down what the car does to whoever is alone in it, and the line I am adding here is for the record the desk keeps, not the one the surveyors signed:
The bell is punctual, and it was never broken, and it stops for company the old trams never did.