My Friend the Talking Elevator of Tokyo

The Hotel Elevator speaks to me.

She is a National Otis lift.

The elevator speaks in a friendly voice

You may come in, I think she says – in Japanese –

But most of her words are a bright blur

Of possible-impossible half-meanings.

Her voice is velvet, just too soft for clarity.

Sometimes I have to restrain myself

From asking other passengers

To stop talking, shuffling their feet

Or rustling their infernal back-to-front newspapers

So I can hear all the words which drop

Like diamonds from the metal lips

Of the Oracle of the Roynet Hotel,

Musashino, Tokyo.

(The Roynet is attached to

A restaurant called Sizzler.)

I write down what I think she might be saying

My Musashino muse:

“Today will not be lucky for you

But the rest of your life will all be sweet potatoes”

And once: “You look so tired today,

Why not lay down and rest your head?”

And once: “Read two chapters of a thriller

Phone home and have a drink.”

Or she makes statements about life

Like: “Clouds are the messages of dead philosophers”

Or “It’s gooder with the Buddha”.

She often says something like:

“You timed it!” as you step on to her carpet,

Then “Meet the Merry Men!”

(As if I’m Robin Hood).

Sometimes I travel up and down for hours

Crouched in one corner listening to her words

This language like a little rocky river

Swerving so coolly through my mind’s hot meadows

Today the lift greets me inaccurately:

“Hello, Jimmy Baker”. (A code name?)

Then she adds, with casual warmth,

“Call me Betty-Betty.”

Her name, at last I have the power of her name.

When I emerge at the seventh floor she says

“Better get out” or maybe “Betty get out”

I am talking back to her

As a man brushes by me on his way into the lift.

I can’t hear what Betty-Betty says to him.

“Betty get out”? “Betty-Betty get out”!

The soul of this silver woman is trapped

In the steel frame of an elevator.

“Don’t worry,” I whisper to the wall, “I’m going to free you.”

That night I return with a set of screwdrivers

I occupy the lift and jam the buttons.

With rubber gloves I unscrew everything unscrewable

But her voice continues saying something about

Being stuck and not to panic about not being stuck

Or not being unstuck.

There is a steel mesh over the aperture

From which her voice floats in faint balloons.

I lever and wrench the mask away.

From the void comes the voice of the prophetess

Very clear and very still:

“I am with you, Adrian,

I am always with you.”

And I am with you, Betty-Betty,

I am always with you.

-- Adrian Mitchell, from All Shook Up