Getting Stuck in an Elevator in Athens

The Elevator

After it happened, we had a new point of reference for terrible things. It became our shared refrain: “Well, at least it’s not as bad as getting trapped in an elevator.”

The elevator was located in a quiet, three-story apartment in the Athenian neighborhood of Kerameikos. We were visiting for the week, and booked an Airbnb. The building itself was old, but not run down, a heavy concrete block, typical of most apartment buildings in Athens. It’s the thickness of the concrete block apartments that actually makes the Athenian population density bearable: the walls block out the city noise, making it feel like you’re all alone. You don’t even hear the neighbors’ doors opening, or people walking up and down the stairs.

When we first arrived, our host, a wiry journalist who rented out his place to keep afloat during the economic crisis, politely put us in the elevator and ran up the four flights of stairs to meet us at the top. I didn’t like it from the moment I saw it. It was little more than a wood-paneled, American-sized refrigerator, with mechanical press-buttons last manufactured in the 1970s. It was one of those elevators where the front of the cabin was actually open, so you can see the inside of the shaft passing as you ride up and down. It rode up ploddingly, like a grumbling beast of burden.

I’ve never much liked elevators, especially small ones, and I generally force myself to take the stairs to incorporate more ambient exercise into my life. But the real reason is that elevators make me nervous. Being locked in a box is terrifying, and that’s exactly what an elevator is once you strip away the habit of it. There’s this moment I always find myself holding my breath between when the elevator lines up with the floor and when the bell rings to announce our arrival. It’s the silence in that moment before the bell goes off and the doors open that they still might not.

On the day it happened, I had just returned from a few hours of window shopping in Monastiraki and Syntagma Square, fending off aggressive salesmen trying to tempt passersby into their shops with sales and shade. By the time I arrived back at the apartment, I was worn out and dazed from the sun.

I plodded up the stairs to our apartment on the fourth floor, where I met Dominik and our Greek colleague. “Want to get some lunch?” they asked.

We put on our shoes, leaving behind everything but a few coins for a sandwich. We’re just going to the bakery on the corner. We’ll be right back.

Dominik got into the elevator to ride down first. I followed, thinking about my knee, still twitching from a long and hot run the day before. Going down the stairs is harder on the knees than going up. After a split-second of hesitation, our colleague stepped in, too. It was a tight fit, and everyone kept their eyes averted up or down—the unwritten rule of riding in a packed elevator. Dominik pressed the button and it jolted slowly down.

“I wonder what the weight limit on this is?” Dominik said absently.

Our Greek colleague looked at the sign posted on the mirror behind my head. I tilted my head to the side so he could read it. I had seen it, too, but had stopped reading after the first line, as it was all in Greek.

If I had continued reading down to the last line on the sign, I would have recognized the number 150 amidst the collection of foreign Greek characters. That can only mean one thing: 150 kilograms, our colleague confirmed. Just over 300 pounds.

Room for two European adults. Not three. But anyway, we were already on the ground floor.

Then the bell didn’t ring. Dominik pushed on the door to open it, but it didn’t move. I didn’t breathe.

He pushed again. It didn’t budge.

We overloaded the elevator, he said, reporting the news, completely detached from it, as if it were a distant fact that had no bearing on him.

Wait, what? I asked. It’s not possible. Try again.

He pushed against the door, but nothing moved.

(And so began the worst 15 minutes of my life. It was only later, weeks after autopsying each moment, looking for the source of my lingering unease, that I began to understand what had happened in there. In 15 minutes, I would advance through nearly all stages of the cycle of grief. First comes denial. Here we go.)

No, this isn’t happening. Elevators don’t break. People don’t get trapped in elevators. You’re just not pushing hard enough. This is the butt of a joke: two guys and a girl walk into an elevator. But they never actually get stuck in there, right? Well, if I have to be trapped in an elevator with any of my colleagues, at least it is my husband, and our colleague, who is a decent and noble human being. People worth being trapped in an elevator with. But people don’t get trapped in elevators. Come on, just push the door harder. It’s probably just a bit stuck.

He keeps pushing on the door, throwing his considerable strength into it. Each time, the door rebuffs us.

My thoughts are runny. I can’t get a hold on them.

I feel myself reaching out, pressing my palms to the walls—I don’t know whether to steady myself or push my way out. This is a nightmare. Is this really happening? It can’t be. I’m frantic. My hands go numb, vibrating with terror. I’m lightheaded, dissociated from the panic response.

Dominik looks down to examine the doorframe, his shoulder now having taken a dozen or so blows from the door. The elevator cabin is sagging several inches below the bottom of the doorframe. “So, we’ve definitely overloaded it. The door won’t open because the cabin doesn’t line up with the doorframe.”

Apparently people do get stuck in elevators. Us.

(Denial was over quickly, and I marched on to anger.)

“Does anyone have a phone with them?” I hear my voice say. I hadn’t thought to bring my cell phone with me. The pockets on my shorts are tiny. Women’s pants aren’t designed for carrying phones. We were just stepping out for a minute.

Dominik shakes his head, and I feel a new layer of sweaty anger coat the sweat from the heat already dripping down my back.

It is so hot. He’s gone and forgotten his phone. It’s because he hates filling up his pockets with essential stuff like phones or wallets. But that’s his job: men’s clothing has bigger pockets than women’s! Why should it be my responsibility!

Our colleague pulls out his phone, and I feel my rage pull back from its ruthless march toward Dominik. After some discussions about who to call (our Airbnb host? But we don’t have his phone number here. We can get it if we have Internet, though. Our colleague’s wife? But she doesn’t have a key. The police? But they’ll have to break down the door, and that will be a to-do. Is that really going to be necessary?), he flips on the phone and finds it has neither Internet nor telephone reception. He keeps swiping at the phone, his finger moving increasingly frantically, like a passerby trying to rouse an unconscious person on the street not knowing if time has already run out.

He says, almost disbelievingly, “I don’t have reception.”

I look down at the useless device in his hands. It’s a Windows phone. Who has a Windows phone!? It’s not an iPhone. If he just had a damn iPhone, it would probably work—the reception is always better on iPhones—and at worst we would just have to wait a bit until his wife could come and get us and we could just forget this whole thing ever happened. Why the hell do people buy Windows phones anyways? They’re total junk! I hate Microsoft!

My anger jumped from person to person and thing to thing like a flea: our colleague should have read the sign in the elevator (he’s Greek, after all!), Dominik should have brought his phone (he has an iPhone), the Airbnb host should have warned us about this crappy elevator, Samsung should make better phones, ladies first, right, so why didn’t one of them do the gentlemanly thing, which would have been to take the stairs…I should never have come on this trip. I don’t even need to be here. I’m not supposed to be here. If I had just stayed out shopping today, I should have bought us a snack on my way home, then we never would’ve had to leave the apartment in the first place…

(Next, anger merged into bargaining—us planning how we would break out of the elevator.)

Dominik interrupts my internal monologue of furious blame-laying, asking, “Does anyone have an idea? It’s getting hot in here.”

We brainstormed some ideas: maybe I could hold myself up jimmied between the back wall of the elevator and the door to take my weight off of it. Maybe the elevator would bounce back up without the extra weight. This didn’t work. Maybe there’s a way to push out the ceiling of the cabin and get into the shaft somehow. Nope, it’s sealed. Maybe Dominik and our colleague should both throw themselves at the door. That doesn’t work either. We could shout for someone to hear us—maybe the noise will travel up through the shaft and the neighbors will hear. We try this too, and no one comes.

“What about the emergency buzzer? It might alert the police. Or someone.” Yeah, and then they might have to break down the door from the outside. Embarrassing. Expensive. It would be a whole thing. But maybe we’re getting to that point? It’s hot. Our colleague nods, and I think I do too.

Dominik presses the red emergency button in the elevator over and over again. Each mechanical buzz is swallowed up in the empty hall.

It’s not connected to an outside line.

There’s no one listening. Here or anywhere else.

Nothing’s working.

We really are in trouble.

(With the possibilities for escape looking increasingly dire, bargaining was no longer viable, and depression set in. The miserable regret of being in that situation. The sour beginning of true realization that we were trapped.)

Dominik says quietly, clinically: “We have to try to get this window out. It’s going to get very hot in here.”

He’s right. We’re going to drown. In heat.

The “window” is a thin, narrow panel of what looks like thick glass on the stubborn elevator door. “If we can break out the glass, we can get some fresh air here in.”

“Are we going to suffocate?” I ask. I don’t think we will, but I feel so wretched that I have to get it out, even if it means burdening the others with my misery. I’m aware there is only so much room in this claustrophobic space for thoughts like these, especially once uttered, and I’ve already taken up maybe more than my fair share. But I need someone to show authority, to grab the unfairness of this all by the horns.

“No,” Dominik replies. “There’s enough air circulation in the cracks between the door.” He turns his attention back to the glass window panel. “I can’t just punch it, but I might be able to kick it out. And then I could stick my arm out into the hall—maybe the phone will be able to pick up a signal if we can get it out of this shaft.”

“Yeah, but what if you cut yourself and we are trapped here with you bleeding in the elevator? That could get serious,” I found myself saying, darkly imagining him dying here of blood loss. There has to be another way. “Does anyone have something we can use to open these screws?” our colleague asks. It looks like the screws are holding the glass panel in place.

We look through our pockets. Nothing suitable. The euro coins are too thick. I look down at my hands. My engagement ring. It’s thin, and platinum is a strong metal. I take it off and give it to Dominik. He puts it into the groove and tries to turn the ancient screw, but doesn’t manage to get it more than half a rotation.

He hands it back to me wordlessly. I slide it on, the outer band now coarse with scratches.

Out of ideas, we stand there silently.

I think about a horrifying story I’d seen in the news last year during the height of the refugee migration across Europe. A truck packed with over 50 refugees bound for Germany had been abandoned by the driver on the road in Austria. Locked inside, the people suffered horrifically in the heat before they all died. They had to be identified by dental records. It was one of those stories that hung gloomily over me for a long time.

I feel myself sliding toward despair. Is this happening to us, too? Are we going to be one of those stories?

I never imagined that my life was going to end in a hot elevator, dying standing up next to my husband and coworker. And not just because of the sauna-hot heat. There’s no room to move, or sit down. Torturers sometimes put people in cages that are too narrow for them to sit as a form of torture. This will be torture.

Meanwhile, I noticed Dominik eyeing something in the space between the cabin and the door. Apparently, he hadn’t given up looking for a way out yet and began pushing the bottom left-hand corner of the door, sweating and straining as he put all he had into pushing the steel door. (He would later explain that he was looking for the mechanism that locks the door and saw a bolt in the top right-hand corner. Normally, it would unlock when the cabin lines up with the floor, releasing the bolt. Being an engineer, he hypothesized that if he pushed the bottom side of the door in, it might leverage the top and pop it out of place from the bolt keeping it locked. Turns out he was right, because)

The next thing I knew, the door burst open. I must have trampled them as I catapulted out of the back, and burst out of the door. I stood in the street, blinded by the light, shaking, astonished and still terrified. What I had very nearly accepted was going to be a long haul, at best, was over.

Dominik and our colleague joined me on the stoop. Our colleague wiped his brow, and Dominik just smiled and gave me a hug. “See, didn’t you know I was going to get us out of there? Piece of cake,” he smiled and gave me a kiss.

I looked at him, astonished. Hadn’t we both just experienced the same thing? “Weren’t you terrified? We could’ve died in there!” I shouted, dumbfounded. He just shook his head, smiling a bit, “No…we weren’t gonna die in there. I knew we would get out. Let’s go get lunch.”

Just like that, we got lunch and went back to the apartment. This time, though, everyone took the stairs.

The real end to our elevator story took place in the hours after we busted out.

I had a nagging feeling that we had just escaped something terrible, and I couldn’t shake what seemed to me a near-death experience. And I just couldn’t understand why Dominik and our colleague weren’t as rattled as I was.

Later that evening after they had finished working, our colleague left to go home, and Dominik and I decided to take a walk. We happened upon a promising-looking farm-to-table restaurant, and there was a free spot outside, so we sat down and ordered a feast in the glow of the sunset. There we were, in this wonderful city, with the cool evening breeze and two glasses of wine, talking about everything other than what had happened earlier.

The waiter soon brought us the mains. We both picked up our forks, smiling at each other, anticipating the first bite of what looked like it was going to be a fantastic meal. As I took my first bite, I saw Dominik freeze. He put his fork down and it clattered noisily on the plate. Stricken, he looked up at me, conceding: “We could still be in there right now.”

July 2016.